Although members of the surveillance unit are, therefore, the professional peers of the SAS they have received a small fraction of the press and political interest. This is largely due to the fact that the unit was from the outset hidden beneath an extraordinary web of cover names and secrecy. In the Army it became known during the 1970s as the Reconnaissance Force, RF, and during the 1980s as 14 Intelligence Company, the latter having originated as a cover name and become customary.
It was set up between late 1973 and early 1974 following the Army’s realization, in Lord Carver’s words, ‘That it should rely less on Special Branch and do more to obtain its own intelligence’. He added, ‘For some time various surveillance operations by soldiers in plain clothes had been in train, initiated by Frank Kitson when he commanded the [39] Brigade in Belfast, some of them exploiting ex-members or supporters of the IRA.’
Brigadier Kitson’s special unit was called the Mobile Reconnaissance Force (MRF). Kitson himself was a veteran of the counter-insurgency campaigns in Kenya, Malaya, Oman and Cyprus. In Kenya he had been involved with ‘counter-gangs’, British-led groups of former Mau Mau rebels who confronted their former comrades when they found them in the bush.
On his appointment in 1970 to command 39 Brigade in Belfast, Kitson had received the approval of his superiors to set up the MRF. He recruited ‘turned’ IRA members, nicknamed the ‘Freds’, who were sent to live in a British Army married quarters at Palace Barracks in Holywood, east Belfast. The undercover unit started out as a handful of soldiers under the command of a captain who operated only in Brigadier Kitson’s area of responsibility and were known by the nickname of the ‘Bomb Squad’. The name Mobile Reconnaissance Force was only given several weeks after the soldiers had begun to operate.
MRF operations were, to start with at least, basic. Soldiers in plain clothes and unmarked cars would sit in places where they expected the IRA to plant bombs. Sometimes they were there on intelligence tips; at others it was no more than somebody’s hunch that the bombers might turn up. The unit recruited many soldiers of Irish origin who would be able to pass for locals. MRF soldiers would cruise Belfast’s Falls or Whiterock Roads accompanied by ‘Freds’, who would point out characters or places of interest.
Within months of its establishment, the MRF’s operations became more unusual. The unit became involved in several operations involving highly complex cover activities, the aim of which was to allow the Army to penetrate the republican heartlands, where the presence of strangers on intelligence-gathering missions is usually noticed quickly. In one operation the Army started its own massage parlour; in another women soldiers posed as door-to-door sellers of cosmetics. But the MRF’s most celebrated operation involved setting up the Four Square Laundry.
Four Square was intended not just to allow disguised MRF members to carry out reconnaissance trips in laundry vans but also, it was hoped, to allow them to inspect the dirty linen of suspected terrorists for traces of explosive. However, the operation was compromised when one of the Freds was turned by the IRA and told the Provos all about various MRF operations, including this one. A van carrying two MRF soldiers, one of them a woman, was ambushed by the IRA as it made its way through the Twinbrooks estate. The male soldier was killed but the female soldier escaped. The Fred who provided the information was said by a later account to have been killed by the IRA.
In another incident Sergeant Clive Williams, who was serving with the MRF, was charged with attempted murder after he had opened fire from an unmarked car on two men at a bus station in Belfast – a third man was also wounded by a stray shot. He claimed the men had been armed and was subsequently acquitted by the court. But during the court case Sergeant Williams revealed many details about the MRF including that it comprised about forty men, how they were trained and how patrols were carried out. By late 1973, a little more than two years after it had been set up, the operation had been thoroughly compromised, with the Irish newspaper Hibernia running a lengthy exposé headlined ‘Belfast’s Dept. of Dirty Tricks’. Much of the reporting about the unit was unclear, and most accounts were mistaken about what ‘MRF’ actually stood for, but the exposure both of the Force and its activities, and of the founding role of the commander of 39 Brigade, with his pedigree of colonial wars, were important propaganda gifts to the Army’s foes.
The republican movement fixed on Brigadier Kitson, elevating him to one of its central hate figures. The Brigadier was unusual among the officers known to republicans in that in 1970 he had published a book, Low Intensity Operations, which had declared publicly what he believed the lessons of Britain’s counter-insurgency campaigns had been. The Brigadier seemed to have provided a blueprint for the security state which nationalists saw emerging around them. That many other officers were trying to apply experiences gained elsewhere to the unique environment of Northern Ireland was something largely ignored because their writings took the form of classified internal army papers.
Even today, in the view of some officers, Sinn Fein continues to overestimate the importance of Kitson in its propaganda. But Kitson’s name, and the existence of the MRF unit, were among the few facts which journalists and republican propagandists could latch on to in seeking to explain the strange events which they saw around them.
One intelligence officer describes the MRF’s operations as ‘a series of cock-ups’. The idea of using the Freds, Belfast’s ‘counter-gangs’, may in hindsight have been foolish. It ignored the nature of the nationalist community – notably its ability to win back the loyalty of IRA men who had changed sides. An officer who was involved with the MRF justifies its use of the Freds on the
