E4A set higher standards than Bronze Section. It allowed the SB to conduct many more surveillance operations than before. A senior security forces officer says, ‘E4A were much more professional than Bronze, who got something of a cowboy reputation.’ In its early years E4A tended to be used more in inner-city areas and 14 Intelligence Company in the countryside, although by the 1980s the units were apparently regarded as largely interchangeable.
Chief Constable Newman used the creation of another undercover squad to try and bypass a long-running source of tension with the Army. The Chief Constable was keen for the police to have a presence in border areas, particularly in south Armagh. He proposed that the Special Patrol Group should send uniformed units into the area. The Army, however, still maintained that it was too dangerous, and urged that soldiers deployed by helicopter should undertake the patrols instead. But they had other reasons for sticking to this position – as one Army officer puts it, ‘They were well-meaning but amateur. They were to a man Protestants, and the place they wanted to go and sort out was [Catholic] south Armagh.’
Eventually, in 1979, Chief Constable Newman set up the Bessbrook Support Unit (BSU), an undercover outfit numbering twenty-eight. Details of the BSU’s operations were later published by the Irish Times. The unit was commanded by an inspector and had three squads each led by a sergeant. The BSU operated very much on military lines. Members wore camouflage outfits and set up long-term covert observation posts. Several, apparently all ex-members of the British Army, were deployed as an OP team with one of the other squads waiting nearby as a QRF.
As the number of RUC special units grew to match the Army’s expanding undercover operation, training in observation and surveillance techniques was given to an increasing number of men. Between 1975 and 1980 the number of Army soldiers available for specialist surveillance duties trebled to about 300. At the same time the RUC developed its own units, adding perhaps another 100 to the total. The result, according to a senior officer who served at Lisburn was that, ‘We began to pick up an immense amount of information through visual sightings.’
By mid 1978 an IRA suspect might have been under observation by men or women from one of 14 Company’s three detachments, one of the four SAS troops in Northern Ireland, or the seven Army Close Observation Platoons, the Special Patrol Group’s Bronze Section, or one of several squads from E4A. Although each of these units had its place in formal police and Army command structures, their use often depended on a complex market driven by the personalities of various security chiefs. There were dozens of people who could request the use of specialist surveillance units, ranging from an Army brigade commander, to the Commander Land Forces, to a police division commander or a local head of Special Branch. The attitude of these people differed for quite arbitrary and individual reasons: one SB member might be a great believer in 14 Company but another might veto its use because of an unhappy experience on a previous operation.
Although the Army helped train Bronze Section and E4A, during their early years there were few joint operations. The command arrangements were complex. The Special Branch initiated most surveillance operations because it had the most informers – people whose tip-offs were most likely to lead to close observation of a particular individual. Having E4A helped the SB a great deal, but the unit was clearly too small to allow all leads to be followed. So the SB often asked for help from Army units. They were most often used at the discretion of the CLF and his three subordinate brigade commanders and, despite the fact that the Army understood the quality of SB’s sources, could not always be spared. The Army had no desire to compromise the activities of its special units since Lieutenant General Creasey, the General Officer Commanding, believed the police were not ready to undertake many of the more ‘muscular’ aspects of counter-terrorism. The RUC contained very few officers with experience of covert operations, and the familiar fears remained that the organization harboured loyalist extremists.
While some security chiefs insisted there was no problem, others understood that the confused arrangements over the use of surveillance units, while explicable because of the speed with which such squads had proliferated, could not be allowed to continue. Help was on its way from two of the key protagonists. Kenneth Newman was overcoming rivalry and poor co-ordination between the RUC’s CID and SB by the creation of Regional Crime and Intelligence Units – a system with obvious potential for involving Army operations as well. At the same time, Brigadier James Glover, the General Staff intelligence officer in London who had proposed improved intelligence-sharing procedures, understood that the Army’s interest in maintaining control over its surveillance units would have to be sacrificed in the cause of improved co-ordination. But while these two men struggled to make new systems for undercover operations work, they remained constrained –
