The Provisionals also soon made attempts to intercept their opponents’ communications. The small tactical radios of soldiers on the street were easily listened to. Attics or spare rooms were kitted out by the IRA as eavesdropping posts. Those who ran them quickly learned how to interpret the basic code words used by soldiers and police in an attempt to disguise their actions. It did not take long, for example, to establish that a soldier mentioning ‘Felix’ on the radio was talking about a bomb disposal officer or that ‘Sunray’ referred to a unit commander. This kind of information could be valuable in setting up ‘come on’ ambushes where the IRA would stage an incident and attack those who responded to it. Simple direction-finding equipment could also be used to trace the location of the transmissions.
However, intelligence gathered by listening to the communications of foot patrols remained fairly basic. The IRA realized that it would gain far more important information if it were able to break into the higher-level communications used by senior commanders. In 1979, as part of a major police intelligence operation code-named HAWK, the RUC raided a house near Belfast which had been converted into a bomb factory and sophisticated listening post. The police deduced that the Provisionals had succeeded in tapping in to the landlines which carried the phone conversations of senior officers. During the same year, sympathizers in England had succeeded in stealing from a mailbag the so-called Glover Report on future terrorist trends in Northern Ireland. The loss of this secret document was a profound embarrassment to Whitehall.
The tapping of their communications led the Army to devise a new, more secure system. One, code-named BRINTON, which was deployed in the early 1980s, was intended to provide encrypted telephone and data lines between various headquarters. However, doubts were raised recently about BRINTON. In late 1989 someone with extensive contacts in the republican movement alleged to me that the IRA had succeeded in breaking into this high-level network. During the same month, the Ministry of Defence contracts bulletin, a publication circulated to defence contractors, contained an invitation to tender for an extension to project BRINTON – possibly a recognition that the system needed enhancement.
By the late 1970s, in tandem with the new cellular structure, more effort was put into giving formal training to IRA volunteers, often at camps in Donegal and other remote areas of the Republic. They became more expert at sidestepping advances in crime detection. This ‘forensic awareness’, as the police call it, included several new measures: the use of balaclavas was increased to prevent identification from photographic surveillance; it became standard practice to use rubber gloves when handling weapons, keeping prints off guns and oil and powder from the hands; and boiler suits or other garments were put on top of normal clothing to prevent them picking up traces of explosive. These clothes, balaclavas and gloves were hidden away from IRA members’ homes, often with the weapons themselves. Volunteers bathed soon after handling explosives so that no traces could be found on their hair or skin. The IRA’s inventiveness prompted many counter-measures from the security forces which sought, also through technology and improved forensic practice, to gain more convictions.
Another area where technology was used to combat the IRA was in the checking of car number plates. In 1974 the security forces introduced the first computerized vehicle number plate system, code-named Operation VENGEFUL. This project was developed by the Army, the main-frame computer being based at Lisburn. And it had been the Royal Military Police in Londonderry, not the RUC, which had made the first attempts to link vehicle checkpoints to the agencies holding records so that instant checks could be made, vengeful terminals, many of them at checkpoints on the border with the South, could be used to obtain information on a car in about thirty seconds.
The IRA soon realized its vulnerability to such a system, but it too developed counter-measures. IRA operatives toured the streets of prosperous areas, whose inhabitants would be listed in VENGEFUL as being of no interest, and took the precise details of cars. They would then find a similar model, change its number plates and ensure that it was identical to the first, even down to stickers in the window. In this way a soldier or police officer checking the number by computer would assume the car belonged to a respectable suburbanite. However, the use of ‘ringers’, as the IRA called them, involved the organization in a great deal of extra effort and was not possible in many cases. But equally it took the Army some time to discover the most effective way to use the computer – at first a great deal of time was wasted in checking vehicles belonging to the bulk of the population, uninvolved in terrorism. In 1977 the VENGEFUL computer was modified to deal mainly with suspect vehicles.
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During the 1970s most Army and RUC records were held on index cards at headquarters from local through to national level. These cards listed suspects, houses and firearms, often in considerable detail. Soldiers arriving to search a house would know the location of the furniture within it and other details – like whether the building had a cellar or a blocked chimney. This data had been compiled on house cards from previous raids and sometimes by the simple expedient of looking through the window. Security forces could obtain other information about a house from the Post Office or from the Northern Ireland Housing Executive.
Inevitably, the houses of people innocent of terrorism were sometimes subjected to such scrutiny. The searches were deeply unpopular and were criticized by some Labour MPs in London, who felt that Ulster was turning into a ‘Big Brother’ society in which ordinary people were subject to an unacceptable level of surveillance by the security forces. As a result of this, in 1976 Harold Wilson announced the setting-up of a personal records computer. Compiling this kind of information causes
