Major General Glover, in his reorganization of military intelligence in Northern Ireland, stopped battalions running their own agents and transferred this responsibility to brigades, the next level up in the chain of command. Each of the three brigade headquarters had what was called, rather coyly, the Research Office, which consisted of full-time agent-runners. This arrangement did not last long, however, and in 1980 Glover established a centralized human source handling group known as the Field Research Unit (FRU) at HQNI, Lisburn. The FRU joined 14 Intelligence Company and the SAS in forming the trinity of Army undercover operations units in Ulster. It has remained more secret than either of these organizations and this book is the first to discuss its role.
Like the surveillance unit and SAS, the FRU took recruits from various branches of the armed forces and trained them for tours in Northern Ireland. But its Commanding Officer and several other key figures were drawn from the ‘green slime’, so that the FRU has remained more closely under the direction of the Intelligence Corps than 14 Intelligence Company or SAS. The FRU, like MI5’s agent-runners, had only limited access to people in holding cells, and thus needed to use greater ingenuity when deciding how to make the first approach to potential agents.
Despite this initiative, SB men often saw the Army’s agent operations as a waste of effort. A senior police officer says, ‘80 per cent of the valuable intelligence sources belonged to the RUC.’ An Army man says this charge is ‘balls’ – a measure of the passion which the issue still arouses. Other soldiers considered many of the SB’s agent-runners to be time-servers and that the Army was carrying out more imaginative agent recruitment efforts.
Maurice Oldfield, in his role as Security Co-ordinator, was soon drawn into these rivalries. Oldfield had found the pace of work difficult to handle. He was more suited to analyzing papers at Stormont House than constantly climbing in and out of helicopters to visit remote bases. And, more importantly, by early 1980 he was beginning to succumb to stomach cancer.
The Army argued that it was important to maintain its own human sources because, as one officer puts it, ‘Many Catholics feel much happier talking to a Brit than to a policeman.’ There was another related but more basic reason for the Army’s position. Informer intelligence was so important that Lisburn was reluctant to trust the SB with it all. The misgivings of some officers, that the SB had in its ranks too many Protestant ‘hard men’, meant that the generals did not want to be completely dependent on Knock for their information of what was going on in the IRA.
MI5 took the same attitude. It maintained its agent-running unit partly because it saw dangers in allowing the SB a monopoly of human source intelligence, according to an important figure at Stormont during this period. Oldfield apparently agreed with the Army and MI5 on this, realizing the dangers of putting too much power in the hands of the SB.
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Early in 1980, shortly after it had become clear that he was seriously ill, Oldfield’s positive vetting security clearance was withdrawn. This step – remarkable considering he had been involved in some of Britain’s most sensitive covert operations during the previous forty years – was taken because he had not declared his homosexuality during positive vetting interviews at various times in his career.
He returned to England, terminally ill, to face a series of interviews with senior MI5 officers. They had been ordered to find out if Oldfield’s homosexuality had been exploited by any foreign power. In March 1981 at the age of sixty-five, he died of cancer. At about the same time Oldfield’s replacement as Security Co-ordinator, Sir Francis Brooks Richards, completed the studies ordered by Whitehall. Sir Francis returned to London and the Planning Staff dispersed. The reports completed by the Security Co-ordinators and their staffs were circulated to senior civil servants and ministers. Although Maurice Oldfield’s mission had begun with much publicity as a government attempt to address problems in the security edifice following the Warrenpoint ‘spectacular’, its effect was, in the end, largely to endorse the status quo. The reports backed the Police Primacy policy and the centralization of intelligence, but preserved the diverse information-gathering activities of the Army, RUC and MI5.
Six years later, the reasons for Oldfield’s removal became public in a newspaper article which suggested that his Special Branch guards in London had alerted their superiors to the fact that the chief of the Secret Intelligence Service was having casual sex with young men. An article by the Northern Irish journalist Chris Ryder in the Sunday Times said Oldfield had been removed from Ulster after an incident in which he had approached a man in the toilets in a pub not far from Stormont.
Mrs Thatcher made a public statement confirming that he had ‘confessed’ his homosexuality and had, as a result, been removed from his position as Security Co-ordinator. Many in SIS and at Stormont considered the Prime Minister’s behaviour to be a betrayal of a man who had forsaken the short-lived pleasures of his retirement in order to serve her. They
