Preface
On the morning of Sunday 9 May 1987 I awoke to hear the news that British soldiers had killed eight members of the Irish Republican Army in the village of Loughgall in Armagh the day before. I assumed at first that the IRA men had simply been unlucky. I regretted their deaths but, like many other people who had become tired of the long saga of IRA killings, I assumed that the Army operation was necessary. It was only when I learnt more about the incident – in particular, that a motorist passing through Loughgall had also been shot dead by soldiers – that I became curious about this kind of action against the IRA. I realized that my own background and the contacts I had built up over many years could direct me towards avenues of investigation not open to other journalists. The story which I pieced together is one of a hidden contest between a covert élite within the security forces and the republican movement, its mortal enemy. Loughgall was the most spectacular manifestation of this contest.
For most of us the conflict in Northern Ireland is represented by a few strong visual images – running soldiers, marching bands, sectarian graffiti, hooded figures at gravesides – but these are the symbolic, outward signs of the conflict. The real struggle, which accounts for so much loss of life, takes place in an unseen arena. In recent years most of the IRA members who have been shot were not killed by uniformed soldiers or policemen, but either by one of the special units of the security forces which act on intelligence (most famously the SAS), or by the IRA itself, in an attempt to flush out informers from within its own ranks. Many of the arrests of active terrorists are also the result of undercover work.
This is the first published account of the Northern Ireland conflict in which SAS men, intelligence officers and senior decision-makers frankly describe their attitudes – to the risks of their work in Ulster; to the death of IRA members; to the use of deception to protect intelligence sources; and to the moral dilemmas surrounding the exploitation of that information. The readiness of the security establishment to deceive journalists, and more importantly the courts, is one reason why I feel this story should be investigated. What justifies the deception of the institutions which these forces aim to defend? How far can the end be said to justify the means? Perhaps the attitude of soldiers and police officers does no more than reflect society generally, for many people seem to applaud the elimination of republican terrorists and are less than curious about the moral tightrope that must be walked to make such actions possible. Yet I came to believe that it is the very inability of security chiefs, politicians and the media to acknowledge and question the less savoury aspects of such operations that makes Ulster’s undercover conflict a vital area for journalistic inquiry.
There is a view that such a book should not be written, for security reasons, until peace comes to Ireland. I reject this. The British government has been fighting the IRA for many years – between twenty-three and eighty, depending on your definition of events – and the end of the Troubles is nowhere in sight. Meanwhile, many Catholics’ perception of the British state as unjust and murderous is an important factor in the IRA’s continued support. If a democracy is to be able to check terrorism, the forces engaged in that struggle must parade their adherence to the law at all times. In the eyes of organizations such as Amnesty International and of the courts in other countries which have refused to extradite to the UK suspected Northern Ireland terrorists, the British authorities have clearly not succeeded in this aim. That failure results almost entirely from the desire to protect intelligence sources and to retain the ability to exploit information in covert operations. Yet such activities prevent the government from gaining greater support in the Catholic estates of Northern Ireland and tarnish Britain’s reputation abroad. In this context, the potential trade-off between the long-term benefits of openness and the short-term, operational advantages of secrecy justifies investigations like mine and warrants wider public debate.
This book covers the period 1976–87, but I am not suggesting that covert operations were unknown before 1976 or that they have ceased since 1987. I chose this period because in 1976 whole units of SAS men were committed to Northern Ireland. The substantial transfer of resources to undercover operations which followed has received little attention until now (no doubt because undercover units are excluded from the published order of battle of the Army and RUC, and because in some cases their parent organizations do not admit to their existence).
There were also significant changes in the way security chiefs used the intelligence at their disposal during this
