But in practice, the generals were violating such principles by building up the Army’s own rival intelligence operation. In his memoirs (published in 1989), Lord Carver, Chief of the General Staff in the mid 1970s, stressed that the RUC’s Special Branch had lost the will to carry out rigorous interrogation, and highlighted the problem of gaining convictions. He wrote:
The Army’s frustration in both these fields led to gradual and increasing pressure that it should rely less on Special Branch and do more to obtain its own intelligence, a tendency which I was initially reluctant to accept, all experience in colonial fields having been against this and in favour of total integration of police and military intelligence. However, the inefficiency of the RUC Special Branch, its reluctance to burn its fingers again, and the suspicion, more than once proved, that some of its members had close links with Protestant extremists, led me finally to the conclusion that there was no alternative.
As a result of this decision, the Army set up a new élite surveillance unit, which would become known as 14 Intelligence Company, and increased the resources committed to intelligence-gathering. But the new policy exacerbated rivalries with the RUC. Although many constables and soldiers on the ground continued to co-operate, by 1977 the situation in the corridors of Lisburn and Knock had grown more difficult.
A senior officer who was party to the rivalries remembers that the most difficult area was the sharing of informer intelligence: ‘There was an element of “if you tell them everything we haven’t got a position have we?” In the intelligence business knowledge is power.’ Another officer who served at Lisburn says, ‘Fighting the Provisional IRA was about number nine on my list of problems every morning.’
The consequences of compulsive secrecy and non-co-operation could be seen at all levels of the security effort. Peter Morton, the Commanding Officer of the 3rd Battalion of the Parachute Regiment, recalled in his later book, Emergency Tour, a typical incident during a tour of south Armagh in 1976 when soldiers received information from a member of the public:
I should have known better, but I agreed to let them search seven occupied houses which they did at 06.35. In terms of organization it was a miracle. But the result was to find two shotguns and to incur the wrath of HSB [the local Head of Special Branch], because we had not cleared the searches with him. One will never know, but in all probability at least one of the houses searched belonged to one of his contacts.
Accidental arrests of informers, the failure to inform other security organizations of movements of key IRA figures, and the compromising of one another’s sources became routine. A senior officer who served at HQNI concedes, ‘I have no doubt that the Special Branch regarded the Army, and its attempts to gather information, as cowboy.’
A member of a Whitehall team subsequently sent to Ulster to conduct a review of intelligence-gathering activities is blunt about the situation in the late 1970s: ‘I was surprised and shocked at what we found. We came across some phenomenal cock-ups. Many of the problems surrounded the use of highly sensitive human source material. There was over-confidentiality and secretiveness in the management of the work.’ People died as a result of these errors, he says, but declines to give specific examples. However, he does reveal, ‘Information had been available, there had been foreknowledge of bombs, for example, which people had never been told about.’
In the mid 1970s an intelligence official had been sent to Stormont to act as Director and Co-ordinator of Intelligence (DCI). But the holder of the post could not compel recalcitrant Special Branch or Army intelligence operators to work more closely. Caught between feuding organizations the DCI was effectively impotent. An intelligence officer recalls, ‘The situation deteriorated and it became obvious that the DCI couldn’t perform the tasks which were set him.’
The mismanagement of intelligence and improved expertise of the IRA combined to blunt the activities of the security forces. The seizure of weapons caches are a good indicator of the quality of intelligence management since they most often result from tip-offs. Statistics show how things were going wrong for the security forces. In 1974, 465 rifles were found; in 1976, 275 and in 1978, 188. The amount of explosives seized dropped from 53,214lb in 1974 to 7966lb in 1978. It was not that there were fewer informers, but rather that the information being given by them was not being shared properly and the IRA was becoming more expert at hiding its munitions.
At the Ministry of Defence in London events were being viewed with increasing alarm by Brigadier James Glover, a wiry, ambitious infantry officer who headed the intelligence section of the General Staff. Some time after taking up the post in 1977, Glover prepared a highly classified paper, Future Organisation of Military Intelligence in Northern Ireland, setting out the way ahead. It stressed the need for more effective central control of intelligence, with the DCI wielding greater authority, and for setting up an effective system for sharing intelligence lower down the chain of command. His suggestions, combined with changes which were taking place in the RUC under Kenneth Newman, were to do much to reduce friction and improve the effectiveness of intelligence-gathering and dissemination.
Brigadier Glover had grasped the crucial fact that the IRA itself had developed into a highly sophisticated organization and had adopted a new strategy. It was clear, too, that the old anti-terrorist tactics would have to change. Senior officers in the Army, RUC and MI5 would come to the conclusion that improved co-operation among the information-gatherers and stepped-up covert operations were vital in order to counter
