Both the officer and NCO were referring to ambushes mounted by special forces, usually on the basis of foreknowledge supplied by the intelligence services and involving a small, highly trained cadre of soldiers. They – and soldiers generally – would accept that walking up to a known IRA member in the street and gunning him or her down in cold blood is unacceptable.
Senior Army officers understand the culture of the soldier who wants to open fire immediately if he sees a suspected terrorist during an operation, and the pressures which may lead him to do so in error when he is lying in wait in a lonely field late at night. But they also appreciate the need to control the use of force and to avoid publicly embarrassing ministers. ‘At the end of the day,’ says one officer who held a senior position at Lisburn, ‘what it is all really about is public relations.’ Manipulating the perception of the nationalist community about whether or not the security forces act within the law is one of the keys to the republican movement’s effort to maintain its support. In this context, the Army in Northern Ireland has not just been concerned to put the best frame on potentially embarrassing incidents, but has also attempted at various times deliberately to mislead journalists.
During the 1970s the Army’s Information Policy Unit was responsible for disseminating disinformation about the IRA and loyalist paramilitary groups. The unit was also involved in printing fake leaflets and posters intended to discredit these organizations. It is not illegal to lie to the press, something which senior Army and RUC officers have at various times pointed out in private conversations.
Colin Wallace, the civil servant who served in the Army’s Information Policy Unit, later made allegations about Army press officers co-operating with MI5 to spread smear stories about leading politicians, including those connected to terrorist groups in Ulster, as well as members of the Labour government of the day who had become unpopular with senior security forces officers. In January 1990 the government set up an independent legal inquiry under the Queen’s Counsel David Calcutt into allegations that Wallace had been dismissed from his job unfairly as part of a cover-up. Calcutt found that Wallace had been unjustly dismissed, recommending compensation, and went beyond the inquiry’s terms of reference in revealing that the information officer’s appeal against his dismissal to a civil service board had been rejected following representations to the board from officials of the Ministry of Defence.
Despite the Calcutt verdict, Whitehall rejects claims that Wallace was framed for a killing of which he was found guilty and convicted of manslaughter in 1981. The issue of just who was smeared by Lisburn’s ‘black propaganda’ unit in the 1970s remains more complex. The government continues to reject Wallace’s allegation that intelligence officers in Ulster conspired to smear Harold Wilson, the Prime Minister of the day. But it admits that such activities were carried out against people associated with extremist politics in Ulster.
In the parliamentary answer which announced the setting-up of the Calcutt inquiry, Archie Hamilton, minister for the armed forces, said: ‘It has not, since the mid 1970s, been the policy to disseminate disinformation in Northern Ireland in ways designed to denigrate individuals and/or organizations for propaganda purposes.’
By referring to policy from the mid 1970s, this statement, constructed in meticulous civil service fashion, implies that the kind of information-gathering which Wallace says was being undertaken by MI5 for use against loyalist extremists suspected of sexual abuse at the Kincora boys’ home could indeed have been going on in the early 1970s, although Whitehall will not confirm it. It also leaves open the possibility of disinformation for purposes other than that of denigrating ‘individuals and/or organizations for propaganda purposes’. Two days later during a debate on the Wallace affair, Tom King, the Secretary of State for Defence and previously for Northern Ireland, was happy to specify such other purposes. He told the Commons that disinformation was still being used in Ulster ‘where it is necessary to protect lives and for sound and absolutely honourable security reasons’.
Although the circulation of versions of events which were known to be false, as after the Ballysillan shooting, was to become routine after operations by police and Army undercover units, disinformation activities of the kind carried out by Colin Wallace certainly did become rarer, if they did not end altogether, during the late 1970s and early 1980s. This resulted partly from the growing role of the police in directing public relations strategy. Whereas Army commanders in the early 1970s had regarded information as a legitimate weapon, particularly in trying to stir up factional rivalries within paramilitary groups, the philosophy at Knock was different.
The shift in the Army towards a more sincere and thoroughgoing acceptance of Police Primacy in the early 1980s was to be accompanied by the emergence of a closer accord on public relations. It was decided that the best way to proceed was to get the conflict out of the headlines. Attempts to plant disinformation about politicians and the general security situation were reduced in the belief that no publicity was good publicity.
PART TWO: 1979–1982
8A Change of Mood
In late 1978 the Army reviewed its policy on the deployment of SAS troops and ended, for the time being at least, the use of these highly trained troops for mounting ambushes. This followed intensified scrutiny of and gathering unease about the conduct of SAS soldiers in undercover operations, on the part both of the public and of the RUC. From 1976 to 1978 the SAS had killed ten people. Seven of them were IRA members, but three were mere bystanders. Even some of those at Lisburn and Knock who believed that the SAS could legitimately administer an unofficial brand of capital punishment found the Regiment’s propensity for ‘miscarriages of justice’ unpalatable.
One
