Following the reorganization of the IRA into cells during the late 1970s the security forces stepped up their efforts to recruit informers. In 1980 this prompted the IRA to set up its own Security Department, tasked with hunting out the moles. The IRA Army Council was well aware that there was a growing war-weariness among nationalists and boosted political work by Sinn Fein to maintain the power base. At the same time, they realized coercive measures were needed to prevent people moving from weariness to betrayal.
Killing touts – ‘nutting’ them in IRA slang – had been going on for years. The first had been slain in 1971. However, from the late 1970s onwards the number increased. During 1979 to 1981 the IRA killed eight people for informing, seven of them members of its own units. This was more than the number of Provisionals killed by the police and Army (five) during the same period. In the ten years from 1978 to 1987 at least twenty-four informers or alleged informers were killed by the Provisionals – almost the same number of republican activists as were killed in Northern Ireland by the SAS during this period.
According to a number of journalists who have written about the subject, several of the murders followed the discovery by the IRA of an informer named Peter Valente, a volunteer and organizer of protests in support of the H-Block inmates. Valente told his SB handler that the IRA had an agent inside the RUC. Accounts of the policeman’s motives differ: some say he was selling the information for profit; others that he had taken an extraordinary personal decision to cultivate his own IRA informers as a means of convincing his superiors that he was suitable for acceptance into the SB.
The guilty police officer was arrested in October 1980. Valente and his handler came to the fatal conclusion that he could remain within the IRA. However, following a raid on a house in west Belfast, which police had, on a tip-off from Valente, believed was going to be used in a terrorist attack, the IRA set to work to find the source of the leak. They put the few people who had known of the operation under surveillance, and Valente was followed to a meeting with his handler. After interrogation Valente is said to have revealed the identity of others and four killings were reportedly connected with the IRA’s discovery that Valente was an informer. Maurice Gilvary, a member of the Ardoyne IRA – believed by some to have provided the tip-off which led to the SAS ambush in June 1978 at the Ballysillan postal depot – was killed in January 1981. Eugene Simmons, an IRA quartermaster, was shot dead in the same month in south Armagh. Paddy Trainor, another Belfast Brigade member, was killed in February 1981; and Vincent Robinson was killed in June of that year.
However, key facts about the IRA’s discovery of this block of informers remain unclear. Just how Valente knew the identity of the informers remains unclear, although it is thought that the treacherous RUC man may have given him the information. But how had the RUC man known who they were, given that the identity of informers is probably the most closely guarded secret in Ulster?
More importantly, why was there a gap of around a year between the supposed discovery that Valente was an informer and his own killing in November 1981? Perhaps he had been led to believe that his life would be spared if he delivered others: Gilvary, Simmons, Trainor and Robinson were all killed before Valente himself.
The discovery of several touts within the IRA and of the corrupt police officer were shameful enough to their respective organizations. It may be that the idea of linking separate events with Valente was part of a security forces disinformation ploy designed to obscure other errors on their part. The period in which the deaths took place coincided with the failed attempt by some middle-ranking Special Branch officers to gain control of Army agents.
This case is not the only one to have involved recruitment of agents within the security forces by the IRA. Some people close to the republican movement claim that there have been other instances where senior RUC men have provided information in return for promises from the IRA not to harm them. It is impossible to verify these claims but it is apparent that some police and prison officers have been threatened by the IRA and have sometimes agreed to allow the Provisionals special favours. Early in 1990 a prison officer was convicted of providing information to the IRA which was used to murder one of his colleagues. Although the Provisionals have succeeded in penetrating the RUC on occasions, the evidence suggests that the security forces have far more agents in the republican camp than the other way round.
Senior Provisionals were aware that killing informers might lose them support in the nationalist community and carrots were tried as well as sticks. In January 1982, for example, the IRA announced an amnesty by which informers were given a fortnight to turn themselves in. Articles appeared regularly in republican newspapers in an attempt to demonstrate that the organization was capable of forgiveness. A typical example in 1985 was headlined ‘Never Too Late’. It related how an unnamed man from the New Lodge had been working as an informer for the Army for several years. ‘When picked up he was usually taken to a number of “safe” houses or carparks in Holywood, Lisburn and Ballykinlar,’ the article said. Eventually the anonymous informer had been unable to stand the strain of his double existence.
