It was crucial for the success of anti-terrorist operations for these two departments to work together. A CID interrogator, for example, might believe a suspected member of the IRA was ready to work as an informer for the SB. In practice there were frequent problems with the relationship. A senior RUC officer recalls, ‘There had been a slavish adherence to the need-to-know principle. The Special Branch was passing minimal information to the CID.’
Following an internal reorganization by Kenneth Newman, the two police departments presented a united front, though their relationship with Army intelligence remained poor. The Army ran its own informers or ‘touts’ in Ulster’s slang. Ordinary officers who had no experience of Northern Ireland could find themselves running an agent while on a four-month tour. The life of that agent sometimes depended on the competence of those ordinary officers.
In addition to the intelligence activities of ordinary units, the Army had some specialist units. Lisburn was also headquarters for 12 Intelligence and Security Company, a part of the Intelligence Corps formed in Ulster in 1972, which grew to number more than 200. The Company was divided into sections servicing Lisburn and the brigade headquarters. Although initially it engaged in some agent-running, its members were involved largely in paper-pushing: preparing reports for senior officers and keeping card indexes of suspects.
From 1972 the Army also had the Special Military Intelligence Unit (Northern Ireland) – (SMIU NI) – an organization of about fifty officers and NCOs who were meant to act as go-betweens for Army chiefs and the RUC Special Branch at various levels of command. They were involved in most of the exchanges of sensitive intelligence between the Army and the RUC and were to be particularly affected by the growing competition between the two organizations.
Among the officers to have served at SMIU in the mid 1970s was Captain Fred Holroyd, an officer in the Royal Corps of Transport who sought an attachment to Army Intelligence in Northern Ireland. In a series of press interviews and in his book, War Without Honour, he was subsequently to detail the rivalry between various intelligence organizations and the incompetence of some of his fellow operators. Others who served in similar posts confirm Captain Holroyd’s allegations about battles between the different intelligence-gathering organizations. Investigations by Duncan Campbell, a journalist working for the New Statesman magazine and the Irish Independent newspaper, corroborated other aspects of Holroyd’s story. However, controversy surrounds some of Holroyd’s more serious allegations, which will be examined in chapter five.
In addition to Army and police information-gathering organizations, the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS or MI6) and Security Service (MI5) were also active. Both organizations attempted to recruit agents and were more concerned with the political dimension of the unrest than were the Army or police. Although SIS had played a prominent role during the early days of the Troubles, its influence had been shaken by allegations in 1972 that it had encouraged two agents, Kenneth and Keith Littlejohn, to rob banks in the Republic of Ireland. The Irish Government asked for the two men to be extradited from Britain following the discovery of their fingerprints after a bank robbery in Dublin in 1972. Kenneth Littlejohn, a former member of the Parachute Regiment who had turned to robbery, subsequently alleged that SIS had intended to use his gang to discredit the IRA through robberies and to assassinate its members. Maurice Oldfield, at that time the second highest ranking officer in MI6, is reported to have called staff to a meeting at the organization’s headquarters in London to deny the allegations. Although the Service may have dismissed some of the Littlejohn allegations, it was clear that the brothers had been agents of the British government – the Attorney General having insisted that the hearing on their extradition to Ireland be held in secret for reasons of national security. The Littlejohns were subsequently sent to the Republic where they received heavy sentences for the Dublin bank robbery.
At the same time as the Littlejohns’ extradition was happening, John Wyman, a man believed to have been an SIS officer, was arrested in Dublin. He was detained, along with a sergeant in the Gardai Special Branch who had provided him with sensitive intelligence documents. Wyman was released early in 1973 after serving a three-month sentence on remand. The Littlejohn and Wyman cases were said to have convinced Oldfield, who became chief of SIS in 1973, that his organization should not sully its hands with the business of fighting the IRA in the United Kingdom, and to have prompted him to begin scaling down its activities.
The succession of MI5 from MI6 as the leading agency in the anti-republican secret intelligence effort was accompanied by much rivalry and ill-feeling. Both organizations maintained liaison offices at Lisburn and Knock. By the late 1970s SIS had lost most of its agent network in Ireland and, although SIS maintained its liaison office at Stormont and its station in the British embassy in Dublin, MI5 had assumed a greater role.
The Army was well aware of the principles which should have governed the running of the intelligence establishment. Its manual, Counter-Revolutionary Operations,
