The task of fitting these devices was entrusted to specially selected officers and NCOs belonging to the Weapons Intelligence Unit (WIU), a joint Army/RUC outfit which pooled all information on ballistics and arms finds. Within each brigade headquarters there is a Weapons Intelligence Section and it was often these officers who were summoned to fit the devices to weapons, an act known in the secret argot of covert operations as ‘jarking’.
The heyday of this type of covert operation was to extend from the late 1970s to the early 1980s. On numerous occasions experts succeeded in jarking IRA weapons. In several cases there were spectacular successes resulting in the arrest of IRA members who planned to use the weapons. For years these results were achieved for comparatively little risk.
A well-planned operation to bug IRA weaponry required several preconditions, the most important of which was the ability to gain access to the guns without the IRA becoming aware of it. In some cases caches were discovered in remote areas. Under these circumstances weapons could sometimes be removed to be worked on under laboratory conditions while the cache was kept under surveillance. In other cases the guns were hidden in built-up areas, sometimes even inside people’s houses.
On occasions the SAS and 14 Company were used on ‘covert search’ missions, sometimes gaining access to a republican household while its occupants were not at home. On these missions they were able to plant listening devices of various types, including those used inside weapons. At other times people acting as agents of the security forces allowed soldiers and police access to weapons stored in their houses.
Another requirement for a successful jarking operation was that the IRA should plan to make some use of the weapons in which devices had been planted while they were still working. This factor was clearly beyond the control of the security forces. Monitoring listening and tracking devices required a base close to the site of the cache. The small transmitters used inevitably had a limited range. The bases used for such operations ranged from a local police station to an unoccupied house. In the case of a barn bugged in Armagh in 1982, where events central to the subsequent investigations of John Stalker took place, the devices were monitored from a specially placed portable cabin nearby.
Ultimately, it was inevitable that the IRA would discover that its weapons were being jarked, no matter how clever the experts were at disguising their work. It appears that the first time an IRA member noticed that a gun had been tampered with was late in 1983 or early in 1984. The discovery led to the death of James ‘Jas’ Young, an IRA member and police informer.
Young had been recruited as an agent following a car accident in August 1981. The police apparently threatened to return Young to jail to serve the remaining four years of an eight-year sentence for terrorist offences given to him in 1976. Young agreed to help the police as a means of keeping his liberty, and was active in the County Down IRA. In the first days of January 1984, he allowed his Special Branch handlers access to a sub-machine-gun which he was moving to Belfast. After this Young’s career as an informer came to an abrupt halt. The IRA appear to have discovered the presence of an electronic device in the gun soon after it was dropped off and Young was abducted and subjected to interrogation.
Under the questioning of his former colleagues in the Provisionals, Young apparently admitted to his activities as an informer. The IRA say he confessed to providing advance warning of several bomb attacks as well as revealing the presence of stores of weapons and explosives. He was shot once through the head and his body left on a roadside near Crossmaglen in south Armagh. Young himself had reportedly not been told that the weapon he handed over to his IRA colleagues had been bugged. The exact reason for the Provisionals’ curiosity about the weapon remains obscure even today.
In the wake of the Young incident, the Provisionals began to examine their weapons much more carefully. After years of success, jarking became a mixed blessing for the intelligence operators, because it provided the IRA with a method of uncovering informers. Despite the threat to agents which continued use of jarking represented, the Army, SB and MI5 carried on doctoring weapons. The experts at the government laboratories which developed the bugs put greater ingenuity into disguising them. The units which placed them also tried to improve their procedures to lessen the chances of discovery.
Jarking was not a perfect system. Placing a transmitter in a weapon brought an opportunity to monitor IRA members for a short time. Like other types of bugging device, the ones used in jarking weapons were powered by batteries with a limited life. And although WIU experts would take large numbers of polaroid photos of a cache before touching anything so that they could ensure that everything was left as they found it, they suspected that in some cases the IRA had become aware that a cache had been compromised and the weapons were never recovered.
Another possibility open to the WIU was to sabotage bomb-making materials found in the caches. Peter Wright, in his book Spycatcher, says that MI5 studied the possibility
