While he was on remand in Brixton jail, a light-hearted story appeared in the diary of the Guardian, suggesting that the authorities had gone to great lengths to keep Bettaney apart from an IRA suspect in the same wing. However, during the preparation of this book I was told by an intelligence officer that the Security Service believed Bettaney had actually succeeded in giving the IRA information in prison. He added that MI5 had assumed that the names and addresses of senior officers, including those involved in anti-IRA work, had been compromised, and that the people concerned had taken increased security precautions, some moving house. The alarm at MI5 had followed the discovery that Bettaney had indeed been able to associate with IRA prisoners or suspects. At the time of going to press, neither Bettaney nor his solicitor had chosen to comment on letters sent them by me setting out this extraordinary allegation.
A period of profound turbulence followed Bettaney’s sentencing and the security commission investigation which came after it. MI5 followed numerous other British institutions in receiving what one Whitehall insider calls a ‘hand-bagging’ from Mrs Thatcher. John Jones, Director General of the Security Service, was replaced by Anthony Duff. Whereas Jones was a career MI5 officer, Duff was a diplomat whom Mrs Thatcher had used to run the Joint Intelligence Committee, the intelligence steering group which is part of the Cabinet Office. Several other senior MI5 officers were forced into retirement, including the director of the branch which should have discovered Bettaney’s problems during its vetting interviews.
The service was reorganized under Duff, followed by another shake-up since his departure in 1987. The principle result of these changes, from the point of view of the Northern Ireland conflict, was a substantial increase, by the late 1980s, in the importance attached within MI5 to combating terrorism.
During Bettaney’s time at Stormont, F5 – the London-based section of the service which gathers intelligence on Irish terrorism – was simply a part of F Branch, MI5’s counter-subversion empire. In the mid 1980s the media paid considerable attention to F Branch, and in particular to its definition of ‘subversive’ – wide enough to encompass organizations like the National Council for Civil Liberties.
By the late 1980s counter-terrorism had been given its own branch which combined the activities of the old F5, F3 – which investigated other (mainly Middle Eastern) terrorist threats – and some sections of C Branch which was responsible for the security of MI5 and other sensitive government installations. The director of counter-terrorism was elevated to sit on MI5’s ‘board’ – a position of equal importance to that given, for example, to the director of counter-espionage.
Northern Ireland remained a separate operation, with the DCI also accorded the director-level privilege of sitting on MI5’s board. The job of DCI and director of counter-terrorism were considered to be of the same rank; and late in the 1980s the director of counter-terrorism was even transferred to Stormont to become the DCI.
The emergence of a powerful counter-terrorism branch in the Security Service and indeed of a considerable reduction in its counter-subversion staff were products of the post-Bettaney rethink and of the Service’s desire to redefine itself as tensions between East and West ebbed, following Mikhail Gorbachev’s assumption of power in 1985. In the process the Service was to interest itself in areas of counter-terrorism which, in the early 1980s, had been the province of the Metropolitan Police Special Branch and of various other intelligence and counter-intelligence bureaucracies in Europe, as we shall see in chapter thirteen.
11Human Sources
The importance of the informer to the security establishment, which had been growing since the outset of the Troubles, reached its zenith in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It has never been in the interests either of the British government or the IRA to publicize the degree to which the republican heartlands are penetrated by informers. The security forces wish to protect individual sources and keep from the public eye the fact that the informer campaign requires unenviable moral judgements on the part of those in charge of intelligence. For the Provisionals the issue highlights the degree to which many people, even in the most deprived Catholic areas, despise them to the point of being willing to betray them.
Some security chiefs saw the entire campaign to isolate the IRA from the community in terms of the contest for informers. ‘The crucial line to be crossed’, says a senior Army officer, ‘is one where a passive acceptance in the Catholic community moves to a readiness to betray.’ The intelligence given ranges from a general call on the security forces confidential phoneline to readiness by comparatively senior IRA personnel to turn on their colleagues.
But the campaign to extract information from the republican heartlands sometimes flounders because of the strength of informers’ ties within the community. Very few informers are prepared to stand up in court, and thus identify themselves. Declaring oneself as a ‘tout’ invites assassination by the IRA and ensures the enmity of almost everybody one has grown up with and known. It also brings scorn and anger on the heads of relatives.
An informer’s handler must make difficult judgements about how the information is exploited, not the least of which is the duty to protect the source’s life. The IRA knows that the number of people aware of any forthcoming operation is limited. A decision may
