At some point after 1984, the IRA succeeded in obtaining several documents relating to these operations, papers which included the identity of several informers recruited under operation WARD. They were published and this account is based on them. When it resumed its attacks in West Germany in March 1987, the IRA was therefore able to steer clear of the informer network. Members of its ASUs in the later campaign were to avoid Irish expatriates in general, dealing mainly with West Germans.
The loss of these sensitive papers represented a shocking breach of security. While there have been instances of documents and photographs relating to suspects having been lost in Ulster, this was of a different magnitude. The papers relating to WARD and SCREAM represent the only written insight into the anti-IRA activities of agencies like MI5, SIS and BSSO ever published. Their content is more likely to leave the reader believing in the stereotype of Britain’s intelligence officers as factional bureaucrats who cloak their failures in a heavy mantle of secrecy, rather than as acute architects of perfect conspiracies.
All the effort of establishing an agent control system acceptable to the Bonn authorities and various British organizations would have been worthwhile if terrorists were apprehended as a result. But of the total of sixteen people recruited as agents under WARD, the secret BSSO papers said, ‘Only two can be said to be active in the sense of reporting anything at all.’ The remainder provided nothing or proved an embarrassment to their handlers.
Two of the agents were arrested by the West German authorities for working illegally. One was dropped after he was caught lying to his handler. Another two fell under the suspicion of the Irish expatriate community and were excluded from the group. After several years of effort, BSSO concluded, ‘Operation WARD has not so far produced any worthwhile intelligence.’
The people responsible for the killings of the British ambassador, the businessman and the Army officer were never caught. In fairness to the intelligence operators, IRA continental operations then stopped for several years. This, of course, provides the most important indication as to why, even if better organized, WARD would have produced little.
In 1989, following the publication of the secret BSSO documents, a leak inquiry was launched at the organization’s headquarters in Rheindalen. The initial suspicion was that a German civilian employee might have obtained the papers and given them to republican sympathizers. The best efforts of BSSO, Army intelligence and MI5 failed to prove this hypothesis, according to someone involved with the inquiry. That person also told me that by late 1991, at the time of writing, British intelligence still did not know how the IRA had obtained the sensitive documents.
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Early in the 1980s the IRA hatched a number of sophisticated plans to obtain weapons from the United States. The collaboration between the various agencies involved in frustrating these activities was of a more impressive nature.
The IRA had become increasingly preoccupied with the idea of shooting down British helicopters. Republican propaganda likes to emphasize that the IRA is able to strike anywhere and that nobody in the Army is safe, but in practice helicopters were being used to move soldiers around freely, particularly in the border area, often allowing them to forsake their vulnerable vehicles.
In the early 1980s the IRA developed a plan to design and produce its own anti-aircraft rockets in America. Developing an anti-aircraft missile is a multi-million pound undertaking, and even though the IRA intended to cut the costs, it would still take years of effort. The project showed the degree to which highly qualified sympathizers were prepared to get involved with republican terrorism. Richard Johnson, an American electronics engineer working with top-level security clearance at a defence contractor, was one of them. Another US citizen involved was also qualified as an electronic engineer.
Two Republic of Ireland nationals were also in on the project: Martin Quigley lived in America; Peter Maguire in the Republic where he worked as a systems engineer for Aer Lingus. Quigley and Maguire provided the know-how in explosives and detonator design and the team designed a rocket which was to be fired from a six-foot tube and would be radio command-guided on to its target. They even test-launched a prototype.
But from 1982 onwards the FBI was aware of their plan and put the group under surveillance. They kept track of them for seven years. The operation only ended in the summer of 1989 when Johnson entered his garage to find FBI officers wiring his car for sound. By then, however, the authorities had accumulated a wealth of information on the conspirators: Martin Quigley was sentenced in 1990 for eight years; and Peter Maguire was indicted, but remains at large, believed to be in the Irish Republic.
In 1983 John Crawley, a former US Marine who had been living in Ireland and had become close to the Provisionals, was sent back to his native country to buy arms for them. The IRA may have hoped that an all-American boy would not arouse the suspicions of arms dealers in the way that an Irish person might. Crawley linked up with arms dealers and pro-IRA groups of expatriate Irish in Boston. He arranged for a shipment of weapons to be sent on a freighter called Valhalla.
Crawley’s shipment, estimated to have cost £1.5 million, included ninety rifles – mostly Armalites, sixty machine-guns, pistols, hand grenades and 71,000 rounds of ammunition. The FBI had become aware of the plan and notified SIS, and an elaborate combined operation evolved to thwart delivery of the consignment.
On 23 September 1984 Valhalla left America. It was tracked across the Atlantic by RAF
