In 1982 a case came to the courts which highlighted the close ties between an informer and his handler. Anthony O’Doherty and his one-time SB handler Charles McCormick were charged with carrying out a series of crimes, including the murder of a police officer and a bank robbery. As a detective sergeant, McCormick had been O’Doherty’s contact during the early 1970s. O’Doherty had gone on the run after coming under suspicion within the IRA. He relied on the detective sergeant, who felt a bond of loyalty to his ex-agent, for protection and help. O’Doherty was to claim in court that McCormick had joined him in the series of crimes.
The judge in the case cast doubt on some of O’Doherty’s allegations, warning of the dangers of accepting uncorroborated statements which implicated the former police officer. Nevertheless, McCormick was found guilty of robbing a bank, hijacking cars and of firearms offences. He was sentenced to twenty years but was released after a successful appeal in 1984. O’Doherty himself came out the following year, leading many to speculate whether further unknown deals had been done with the authorities.
British police forces are bound by Home Office guidelines on the use of informers, but the RUC is not – another measure of the degree to which it does not operate under the same rules as its British counterparts. The guidelines say the police should not let a serious crime go ahead if an informer has told them about it, that they should not mislead a court to protect an informer, and rules out the granting of blanket immunity to an informer. All of these principles have been breached in Northern Ireland. RUC officers regard this as a necessity in the fight against terrorism but many outsiders are critical of some of these practices.
The confident tone adopted by many Army and RUC officers when discussing the actions of individual terrorist suspects is often founded on little more than the half-truths, self-interested speculation and pub gossip provided by low-grade informers. This may be the product of a syndrome well known in intelligence work whereby the agent’s handler paints an overly optimistic picture of the reliability of his source in order to enhance his own position. Running a high-grade source can, after all, make the career of an SB or MI5 officer. In other cases well placed informers may allow them to assemble considerable genuine information about the activities of individuals.
Particular efforts are made to recruit quartermasters – the IRA’s weapons supply experts. These people can pinpoint arms caches which can then be watched, allowing the intelligence specialists to learn the identity of cell members. Since weapons must be issued before an attack, the quartermaster may play a critical role in giving the SB or the Army foreknowledge of a terrorist attack.
Eugene Simmons, whose body was only found four years after his murder in 1981, was believed to have been a quartermaster whose information on the location of dumps of bomb-making materials led to the arrest of several Provisionals. Frank Hegarty, forty-five years old, who was killed by the IRA in 1986, worked in the Deny Brigade quartermaster’s department. Hegarty’s knowledge of large supply dumps in the Republic marked him out for handling by MI5 as a ‘national asset’. On the night before the Gardai were due to raid a dump containing dozens of rifles, Hegarty was taken into protective custody. He went to a Ministry of Defence-owned safe house in Sittingbourne in Kent. He was visited there by his girlfriend, and told her that his minders were MI5 men. After one month in hiding he could not bear being away any longer. He returned home, pleading his innocence of any treachery, a ploy which failed to save his life. The IRA interrogated him, saying he admitted to having worked as an informer for seven years.
Sinn Fein made plain what lessons others should draw from the Hegarty case. In an interview with Peter Taylor of BBC TV’s Panorama, Martin McGuinness, the Deny republican leader and one-time Chief of Staff of the IRA Army Council, said that if republican activists ‘go over to the other side then they more than anyone else are totally aware what the penalty for doing that is’. ‘Death?’ asked Taylor. ‘Death, certainly,’ McGuinness replied.
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By the late 1970s attempts to gain more information and to process it more efficiently through the TCG joint operations centres were yielding results. One area where this was evident was in arms finds. Most finds are normally the result of the SB passing informer information to the Army, which then conducts the search. A battalion intelligence officer says, ‘We get Special Branch information that a house is worth searching. They don’t really tell us why, but they give us a few hints as to what we might find.’
Finds of explosives and guns fell steadily from 1974 to 1978. However, in 1979 – although the number of houses searched was cut to one-third as many as in 1978 – the amount of explosives found was almost the same. The cut in searches was ordered by Kenneth Newman, who understood that better intelligence could help the security forces in their relations with the nationalist community, which bitterly resents house searches.
Although important progress had been made in intelligence collaboration, one major issue remained unresolved between the SB and the Army. With the advent of Police Primacy, during the years 1977 to 1980, the RUC tried to reduce Army agent-running to the minimum, hoping that it could take over the Army’s sources. In fact, it does not appear that Assistant Chief Constable Slevin, HSB, endorsed the argument for closing down the Army’s entire agent-running operation, but rather that this was the prevailing view held at the middle levels of command within the SB.
Predictably, their moves were strongly resisted by the Army. Partly as a result of RUC pressure, Major General James Glover – both in his role as CLF and in his previous intelligence post in London –
