The widespread recruitment of informers has not prevented a great many acts of violence. Clearly many IRA ASUs remain free of informers. Nevertheless, the security forces have on occasion known so much about IRA operations that they have rendered them a farce. Those operations which have been allowed to proceed so as to keep suspicion from the informer have been rendered harmless – for example, by the substitution of dud bomb components or the emptying of police stations prior to their bombing. With few informers prepared to enter the witness box it is hard to see what alternative the security forces have but to let a great many of these penetrated IRA units carry on their compromised operations.
Although the culture of the republican estates is generally merciless towards those who become ‘touts’, it is probable that the IRA’s attempts to flush out informers slowly erode its cadre of determined supporters. Young volunteers joining the IRA in the 1980s were almost as likely to die at the hands of their own comrades through accusations of informing as they were to be killed by SAS. Doubtless the IRA has committed ‘miscarriages of justice’. One intelligence officer told me that he had read a republican account of the killing of somebody described as a self-confessed informer, a person whom ‘we had never heard of’. Even the killing of real informers is likely to damage the organization’s standing in the eyes of the informer’s immediate relatives; in an organization where family involvement is so important, such consequences cannot be overlooked.
The effects of the informer war are profound: the level of violence is reduced; the republican community is rendered increasingly paranoid and must eliminate a proportion of its own membership in an attempt to retain its integrity. Those in the intelligence organizations who run agents are aware that their efforts are the key to the containment of terrorist violence. But there are also some risks inherent in this vital work.
It is evident that many principles of informer handling considered standard by the British police forces are not accepted in Northern Ireland. Allowing attacks to go ahead to keep suspicion from a source, and dealing with people who are themselves continuously involved in terrorist crime, are two important areas of difference. Where the lives of sources are at stake, intelligence work will inevitably require tight security and this makes effective scrutiny of such operations problematic. But when intelligence officers abuse their position – most famously the Special Branch and MI5 officers found by the Stalker and Sampson inquiries to have conspired to pervert the course of justice over the 1982 Armagh shootings – security considerations have in practice made it impossible to convict them. Inevitably, this freedom from sanction also heightens the sense of injustice felt by nationalists.
It is apparent, and none of those involved in covert operations whom I interviewed ever denied it, that attempts to protect intelligence sources and techniques have frequently resulted in the deception of the courts in Northern Ireland. It is also apparent that deception has been used to allow soldiers or police officers who have acted mistakenly to escape criminal charges. The powers of courts, in particular those dealing with inquests, have been modified in such a way as to make it extremely unlikely that they will ever uncover dishonesty on the part of the security forces.
John Stalker suggested in his book that the best means of protecting intelligence sources was to say very little about them rather than to lie. This eminently sensible view is not shared by many of those at the heart of covert operations, who would argue that such niceties are an expensive luxury in a ‘war’. Yet so long as the government uses criminal law against terrorists, rather than calling them prisoners of war, this argument must be resisted.
As undercover operations developed in Northern Ireland, so the government’s sense of what kind of force would be considered reasonable and necessary by the majority of the public altered. Statements by Army or police officers that the three IRA men killed at Ballysillan in 1978 were armed, or that the gun picked up by John Boyle in the Dunloy graveyard in the same year was loaded, were quickly proved to be false. In both cases I am confident that lies were knowingly disseminated by these agencies in an attempt to make shooting of unarmed men at Ballysillan and of a teenager uninvolved in terrorism at Dunloy appear more reasonable. As one incident has followed another, and the ability of lawyers to examine them in the courts has been drastically reduced, the authorities have felt progressively less need to justify their actions by deliberate disinformation.
In the Loughgall ambush of 1987, the Strabane shootings of 1985, the Drumnakilly incident (in which three IRA men were killed by the SAS) in 1988, and the Coagh shootings in 1991, there has been no official suggestion that the SAS ever challenged the terrorists – inviting them to give themselves up – before opening fire. Whether or not challenges were in fact issued in previous incidents (for example, at Coalisland in 1983 or at Gransha hospital in 1984), as the authorities claimed, is a matter for speculation. The significant point is that either the Army no longer feels it necessary to issue a challenge as often as it used to, or it no longer feels it has to pretend that its soldiers have done so. It is easy to conclude that the reduction of scrutiny has changed the organization’s attitude to the use of lethal force by special forces units.
As ordinary soldiers or police officers have been moved further and
