In another important change of strategy, the IRA Army Council decided in 1979 to carry the fight to British targets on the Continent, where the security establishments were still temptingly disorganized and unco-ordinated. In March 1979 the IRA killed the British ambassador to the Netherlands. A simultaneous attack aimed at a senior British diplomat in Belgium went wrong, claiming the life of a businessman. Shortly after, a bomb attack was made on a British Army mess in West Germany, but there were no casualties.
During 1980 several more attacks were directed at British military installations in Germany. A British Army colonel was shot dead. Then several shots were fired at a group of military police. In another attack a British officer out jogging was fired on, but survived. These events naturally triggered counter-moves by British and West German intelligence, but as in Northern Ireland a few years before, the lack of clear lines of control and responsibility was a recipe for rivalry and unscrupulous behaviour.
In 1980, SIS, under the direction of the Cabinet Office Joint intelligence staff, started an operation code-named SCREAM to establish agents in expatriate Irish communities in various parts of the world. It was an ‘offensive penetration operation’, meaning that those agents taking part were meant to involve themselves actively in republican movements in the countries concerned. It is known that one SCREAM agent arrived in Düsseldorf late in 1981.
At the same time, the Army Intelligence Corps started its own activities in Germany. Neither organization knew what the other was up to. The Int Corps attempted to recruit agents in the Irish expatriate community in Germany, which numbered more than 100,000, on the assumption that IRA cells would need support from these people. Unfortunately, the British Army omitted to tell the West German government about these operations – a breach of the understanding between Western nations that they will not carry out intelligence operations on one another’s territory without seeking permission to do so.
To confuse matters further, there was yet another player seeking to influence events. The Security Service, the domestic counter-intelligence and counter-subversion organization, also had a presence in West Germany – its Security Liaison Office in Cologne – a relic of the period of British occupation after the Second World War. And sitting organizationally between MI5 and the Army Int Corps was yet another body, the British Services Security Organization (BSSO) which originated from the days when Germany was the world’s foremost spy battleground. BSSO has headquarters at Rheindalen in the same camp as the commanders in chief of the British Army of the Rhine and Royal Air Force in Germany. It is meant to uncover plots by Warsaw Pact intelligence services or German fifth columnists to subvert British service personnel. BSSO is part of the Ministry of Defence and its members are classified as civil servants within that department, although their relationship with the Security Service is close.
BSSO and MI5 discovered the Army operations and realized that it could cause offence to the Bonn government. Despite MI5’s reputation in some quarters as the most ruthless and ‘cowboy’ of Britain’s intelligence organizations, its chiefs realized that the whole matter would have to be put on a legal footing with Bonn, whatever the difficulty in admitting what had been going on.
Just as MI5 had in the mid 1970s used the threat of Irish terrorism in Britain to gain an operational foothold in Ulster, squeezing out its rival MI6, so now it was presented with an opportunity to extend its role on the Continent. Although SIS enjoyed close ties with Bonn’s foreign intelligence service, the Bundesnachrichten Dienst (BND), this agency was forbidden by the West German constitution to adopt any role in internal affairs. SIS was therefore forced to approach the equivalent of MI5, the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (BfV) or State Office for the Protection of the Constitution, for intelligence on Irish terrorist activity. As the BfV had already developed much closer ties with the Security Service, the IRA continental campaign of 1979 to 1980 came as something of a gift to MI5 in pursuing its traditional competition with the Secret Intelligence Service. Having vanquished SIS in Ireland, MI5 was now ready to position itself as the central force by bringing together the various agencies hunting the IRA in Europe.
In the United States the constitutional position also favoured MI5 since the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) – SIS’s counterpart – is constrained from carrying out operations against the Irish-American communities in the United States which support the Provisionals. This task falls to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) which is organizationally closer to MI5. Liaison with the FBI is sufficiently important for the Security Service to maintain a liaison office at the British embassy in Washington. Despite MI5’s involvement in Germany and the US, SIS remained responsible for operations in many other countries. And, in an attempt – at least at an official level – to co-ordinate their efforts and pool information, the agencies had founded a group of experts called the Irish Joint Section.
A new operation, code-named WARD, was set up in 1981. It took the informers recruited by the Army and placed them under a Control Group of bureaucrats, including representatives of Army intelligence in West Germany, the BSSO and the Irish Joint Section. In belated deference to the West Germans, it was stressed that they were not running ‘agents’ but ‘listening posts’, people who could give the British early warning of a forthcoming IRA campaign. The BfV were to be kept fully informed of any good intelligence coming from the informers.
The introduction of WARD, however, was not enough to stop unconstitutional behaviour by Army intelligence. In June 1982 member of 28 Intelligence Section, an Army unit, were discovered by the West Germans mounting surveillance on an Irish expatriates’ political meeting in Düsseldorf. It
