The credibility of the supergrass system received a further blow in October 1983 with the appearance at a hastily called press conference in west Belfast of the IRA member and supposed supergrass Robert Lean. He had given the slip to detectives at Palace Barracks, where he was staying pending the trial of twenty-eight people being held on his evidence. Lean said at his press conference that he had no real evidence against any of them, rather that, ‘The RUC did all the writing, read it over to me and I signed it.’ He said the detectives had been particularly keen for him to implicate Gerry Adams. Lean denied that he had been a member of the IRA and said he had decided to retract his statements as soon as he had made them. Some intelligence officers were left with the suspicion that Lean had been part of a deliberate IRA plot to undermine the supergrass cases.
During the years which followed a series of appeals by people who had been convicted on the word of informers was to lead to the end of the supergrass system. Successful appeals were launched: by those convicted on the evidence of Bennett, the UVF member; by eighteen of those convicted solely on Black’s word (in other words, where there was no other corroborative evidence); by eight of those named by the Derry Brigade informer Quigley; by two of those fingered by McGrady; and twenty-five people named by Harry Kirkpatrick, an INLA supergrass.
Of the sixty-five people convicted in this way who appealed, all but one were released. And of the 120 people convicted on the evidence of the ten principal supergrasses, sixty-seven were released after subsequent appeal. (Sixty-five were convicted solely on informer evidence; other evidence had been offered in the other two cases.) The appeal judges had in several cases found supergrasses to have been liars who implicated other people simply to get off serious crimes themselves. McGrady, for instance, had admitted to three murders, Bennett to one. Kirkpatrick, meanwhile, had perjured himself during the trial. The judges in these appeal cases effectively ruled out any further sentencing based only on the word of an informer.
Despite the success of these appeals many in the security forces were convinced that the majority of those released were guilty and only regretted the expenditure of informers on inconclusive court cases. Not long after the members of the Belfast Brigade implicated by Black had been released on appeal, an Army intelligence officer told me that the number of incidents in their part of the city had gone up – in his view, as a result.
Although the world of the informer had been largely discredited in the courts, it nevertheless remained the world which continued to provide the security forces with the bulk of their operational intelligence – information on which they were sometimes required to make life and death decisions.
The supergrass system had brought alarm to many republican enclaves. But the reaction to the arrests among ordinary residents varied. One Army officer recalls a humorous response in north Belfast to a painted republican graffiti which warned ‘Remember Chris Black’. Somebody had added, ‘I hope to God he doesn’t remember me.’
15Reasonable Force
Early in the 1980s the Army rethought the deployment and operations of its SAS contingent in Ulster following the shift in early 1979 from ambushing terrorists to observing them for long periods in the hope that evidence could be gained which would lead to their prosecution and conviction. This rethink was led by Army commanders who considered the arrangements which had developed since the expansion of SAS operations outside south Armagh to be unsatisfactory in several ways. First, the deployment of one troop in each of the three brigade areas, with the Squadron’s fourth troop as a central reserve, was an inflexible one. Lisburn wanted the ability to switch the entire SAS contingent from one place to another with the minimum of delay.
The SAS Regiment was also finding practical problems sustaining squadron tours in Northern Ireland. Each tour normally lasted between four and six months, with a period of preparatory training before and a period of leave afterwards. With four operational squadrons, this meant that SAS soldiers rarely had a sustained period away from Ulster. It also involved the Regiment in a constant turnover of personnel, resulting in few soldiers getting to know the complex situation in Northern Ireland really well.
This disruption, in Army jargon a lack of ‘continuity’, did not affect the surveillance operators of 14 Intelligence Company to the same degree. They were based in Northern Ireland for longer tours – usually for a minimum of one year. Detachments of the surveillance unit contained some soldiers on their second or third tours with years of experience of that type of covert warfare in that particular place. The SAS, on the other hand, needed to keep its soldiers proficient in a wide variety of skills from the jungles of Brunei to the Arctic fjords. There was also a feeling at Lisburn that the SAS should be drawn organizationally closer to 14 Intelligence Company.
As a result of these priorities a new structure was created to act as the executive arm of Army intelligence in Ulster. Major General Glover, who had been so influential in the development of other aspects of intelligence co-operation in Ulster, was the architect of the change. The plans do not seem to have been put into effect until late 1980 and early 1981, by which time Major General Glover had been succeeded as CLF by Major General Charles Huxtable.
The new operative group took the cover name Intelligence and Security Group (Northern Ireland) which, confusingly, had already been in use for some time by 14 Intelligence Company alone. It was more
