During the mid 1970s, while the Security Service was ‘empire-building’, there was a period of rivalry between MI5 and MI6, and between MI5 and the RUC SB and Army intelligence-gathering organizations too. By the late 1970s SIS liaison officers had been displaced from Lisburn and Knock and most of its agents taken over by MI5 or the SB, although SIS retained a vestigial presence with an office at Stormont.
The Security Service’s expansion, particularly of its agent-running operations, was bound to cause friction. As MI5 had little presence at first in Northern Ireland most of its informers could only be acquired by relieving other organizations of them. Most agents were recruited during questioning by the RUC or the Army – MI5 simply could not get this kind of access to large numbers of people from republican areas.
Security Service agents became known as ‘national assets’ – a phrase which was meant to reflect their importance to national security, as opposed to the local anti-terrorist effort. According to intelligence officers who have served in Ulster, MI5 is in theory concerned with trying to recruit and observe people involved only with the IRA campaign outside Ulster. In practice, it has muscled in and tried to run any good agent it can find.
The Service’s relationship with the RUC SB is apparently different to that between MI5 and the SB contingents of other police forces in the United Kingdom. In some parts of the country SB are still regarded by MI5 as little more than errand boys, carrying out arrests and serving warrants on MI5’s behalf. The Security Service used to be technically unable to carry out such routine activities since it was barely supposed to exist in any legal or constitutional sense. In 1989, however, the government passed legislation – the Security Service Act – which regularized its position. But in Northern Ireland MI5 remains too dependent on the SB, in terms of exploiting its extensive informer network, to treat it with the same disdain.
MI5’s activities in Northern Ireland are run by the Director and Co-ordinator of Intelligence (DCI) at Stormont. The DCI’s duties include the overall direction of intelligence policy in Ulster as well as the supervision of an MI5 force numbering sixty to seventy. Although Army and RUC intelligence officers do not consider themselves subordinate to the DCI, there are several elements of the intelligence effort under the DCI’s direct control. MI5 has a Security Liaison Office at HQNI, Lisburn and another at RUC headquarters, Knock. It also possesses one unit for running agents and one for technical surveillance specialists. The DCI is supported by a group of officers at Stormont sometimes referred to as ‘The Department’.
Those who have worked alongside MI5 in Northern Ireland say that their people come from a variety of backgrounds. Some are Ulstermen and women who have been recruited either direct from the populace or from the ranks of the RUC. Others have come from a more conventional intelligence service background, joining the agency after completing a university degree. And some have served in the British Army. The Security Service’s personnel divide into ‘officers’ – who make up about one in five of its numbers – and ‘support staff’.
Because of its highly secretive nature, and its role in combating subversion (often broadly defined), MI5 is regarded with deep suspicion by many with liberal convictions who question the range of its activities and consider them a threat to civil liberties. However, many in the Army and RUC who have had contact with MI5 during this period are not in awe of it. One person says of the MI5 officers who ran ‘national assets’ in the late 1970s, ‘Some of them were laughable.’
Despite the scepticism of their colleagues in rival intelligence-gathering organizations, the Security Service gradually improved the running of its Ulster operation. Many high-flying officers were sent to Northern Ireland where the value of the work was readily apparent. ‘Ireland, like the operations against Eastern Bloc diplomats in London, was considered worthwhile,’ says one former intelligence officer, adding, ‘Everybody understood the reason for doing it.’ Among those who served there in the late 1970s was Patrick Walker who, in 1989, became Director General of the Security Service.
Although the DCI’s authority was enhanced during the intelligence reforms of the late 1970s and early 1980s, the holder of this office still had no powers to compel the RUC SB or Army to do things they did not want to do. The DCI therefore had to derive power through the exercise of great tact and persuasiveness in the running of high-level intelligence committees at Stormont. On the other hand, the relationship between the resident MI5 chief and the secretary of state was critical. Several ministers were to use the DCI as a personal adviser on intelligence matters from the state of terrorist groups to the areas where the security forces needed to make a greater effort.
The Security Service Act, passed in 1989, made the DCI responsible to the secretary of state for Northern Ireland rather than to the Home Office, as is most of MI5. In practice, MI5 officers tend to communicate frequently with their colleagues in London.
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From 1977 to 1980 an MI5 officer called Michael Bettaney worked at Stormont. Bettaney suffered a personal collapse which in turn brought profound changes in the Security Service. Bettaney spent much of his time in Northern Ireland running agents. He later told MI5 colleagues in London that he had had a number of close escapes in Ulster. Once, he said, he had narrowly avoided being caught in a bomb blast. On another occasion he claimed to have hidden in one part of a house as paramilitaries broke the kneecaps of someone suspected of informing in another. I have been unable to confirm whether these incidents actually took place.
What is known is that Bettaney began drinking heavily while at Stormont and that he converted to Catholicism during the same period. At the same time he underwent a change of political heart – the right-wing
