RUC, ARMY, MI5 & AGS

OFFICER 1

I have always been on the border, I was in Lisnaskea which controlled South East Fermanagh around into the Clogher Valley in Tyrone; then I was in Londonderry that covered a fairly tough border with Donegal and PIRA from Lifford [Co Donegal] crossing into Strabane [NI], and the South Tyrone and Western Armagh borders with the Republic. I have had a lot to do with cross border activities and I have met many good and efficient Garda officers. Some have been of the same mind as me ‘Stop the IRA by whatever lawful means we can’, but there were others who didn’t. I went to meetings regularly in Phoenix Park [Garda HQ Dublin] with senior officers from the Garda, and, the RUC represented by the Deputy Chief Constable and others for talks on cross border security co- operation. We eventually had to go by small plane as it was too dangerous a task to travel by road.

There was a particular Garda from Monaghan, and when Lord Caledon’s home, or castle, just beside Caledon village (Co Armagh) had been attacked the evidence was so clear that the gun was fired from a vantage point in the South: it was a big heavy weapon and some bullets hit the house and broke some windows – but no one was hurt. I went to the next meeting afterwards, obviously it came up as a subject and Garda from Monaghan said at the meeting ‘We believe, and our intelligence indicates that the IRA men carried the weapon over into the North to carry out the attack then carried it back again afterwards.’ Says I ‘Come on! that is so remote a chance when they could sit on a hill in Monaghan rattle away at the place, why would they take the risk of coming over the border to carry out the attack?’ You have to forgive him he was trying to look after himself.

In terms of the Garda as a whole I wouldn’t say that they had the same view as us. They were so much like the old RUC, who in the early days had the Unionist Minister for Home Affairs as its boss, they were under their Minister down in Dublin, and, as we all know a lot of their politicians didn’t frown on the IRA as long as they didn’t infringe on their patch in the South, or, it wasn’t seen to affect their patch; we all know it did affect their patch. Back in the old Unionist days, you had a Minister of Home Affairs in government at Stormont he was the ‘boss’ that the Inspector General [later known as Chief Constable after 1970] had to report too. The Unionists were in the Orange Orders around the country and if an Orangeman was disputing something [to do with policing] in his particular area he could ring the Minister who moved, as far as I know in one or two cases, police officers away because they weren’t doing what the Orangeman wanted. The same thing happened in the South too.

The IRA operatives used the South as a safe haven, and immediately after an attack, to get away from the heat. I wouldn’t say the Garda as an institution was partial, a lot of their men were genuine enough, I give myself enough credit to know when a person is absolutely genuine with me and trying his best and is not telling me a story. But I wouldn’t put them all in that category; some of them were devious and deceitful enough to make a story look good for their own reasons. Some of them certainly had an element of support within their thinking for the task of putting the ‘Brits out of the North’ and get an All Ireland, some certainly had that political view in the back of their minds for some of them, yes.

Generally, I got on very well with the British Army, I had one bad unit and it wasn’t their fault, they were brought in to give emergency support - it was the Paras. Of course, we know the Paras from

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The Falklands and such places, they go into the frontline immediately because they are so tough and trained for that. Our boys, my company of Paras arrived to look after Coalisland and outlying areas without having had any pre-training on what their task was and how to behave towards the public. They operated badly to the extent I called the Colonel in several times, I didn’t like doing it to him because he was an equal, I always regarded them as an equal, but the RUC were in charge of the area. I gave him a telling off, a ticking off on a ‘one to one’, not in public, after I started receiving complaints from the community, I told him, ‘you are going to have to stop your men doing this. We appreciate your support, you are saving some policemen’s lives, and I thank you for that, but you cannot antagonise the public to such an extent that we lose public support, that we have no public relations after you leave, we will be seen in the same boat as you.’

Decision making on the foot of intelligence and intelligence was vague, it was really difficult, but you did it so often it was also second nature. We would put in some Vehicle Check Points (VCP) and we were well supported by the military at the time too. We would ask them to do a VCP in one place and we would do a VCP on another road to see what was picked up or see what the reaction was from the ‘enemy’; you just your changed tactics according to any new information and even put a ‘dummy’ policeman in a car and park it somewhere.

Generally, I got on very well with the military to such an extent they invited me over to The Trooping of the Colour and other events in London. Most of the military commanders accepted their role was to support the police but that Para Colonel had difficulty with it, in fact he was taken away, not because I reported him or did anything against him but because his own Brigadier thought things were going a bit awry under his command.

OFFICER 2

No Comment made

OFFICER 3

I always thought the co-operation between the RUC and Garda was 100% very good.

OFFICER 4

[The Unionist government used the police to stop civil rights marches back in 1968-69 even in Nationalist towns] It would have made little or no difference had they walked across [the bridge in Newry], there was no one objecting, but that was the way it was. The police were used badly, and the fall out was they didn’t have the proper equipment to deal with this and became overwhelmed. It got to the stage the police couldn’t cope and the Army had to be brought in. Was this a good decision or bad decision? In hindsight it was a bad decision to bring the Army in, but something needed to be done.

In Nov 1973 there was an attack on the [Keady] police station by the South Armagh Provisionals [PIRA]. It happened at 3 o’clock in the afternoon, about 25 heavily armed members of the PIRA attacked the Police Station; first they placed a bomb at the front door and when it exploded they opened fire with rifles. The police officers, 4 of them, made their escape out the back door after hearing the rattle of the Calor gas cylinder being placed. Once the police officers were out the gunfire started and that went on for 20 minutes with PIRA using high powered rifles, armour piercing

MI5, MILITARY & AGS Page 2 of 28 ammunition that went right through the steel window shutters. A helicopter arrived on the scene and they fired a RPG 7 rocket at it and the helicopter retreated. Police returned fire and 1 member of the PIRA was shot dead and his body taken to Castleblaney [in the Irish Republic]. After that the station became an Army base, and for policing that was a bit of a backward step, but it was necessary for the Army to come in and the station had to be rebuilt. There were maybe up to 50 soldiers there and the public were reluctant to go to the station; things had changed. The police were accepted by a lot of the people, but the Army weren’t and the UDR even less. The terrorist threats continued, the terrorist activity continued. Up until late 1975, early 1976 it intensified greatly to the point there were shooting attacks on the station almost every day and people were murdered. I was married by this stage and living in Keady.

You had South Armagh becoming a ‘No Go Area’ because it was so dangerous, the PIRA started to train and equip themselves with explosives. Army vehicles were blown up and as the years went on it became so dangerous that patrols could only go on foot and travel had to be done by helicopter.

I don’t think there was any alternative, you still needed the Police to be in control. Who would you bring in? There was talk of UN forces, that would not have been acceptable, that would have been usurping the role of the British government. The Army were there, they thought they were equipped but they weren’t, they had no experience of it [working in support of a UK police force]. They came with the experience of various colonial wars, they had no experience of dealing with the community and trying to get community support, it was purely a military response [they had to offer]. The RUC could not have been removed to do community policing only, Northern Ireland is a small place, it’s tiny and people would still have looked to the police. I think everyone thought ‘The Troubles’ would be over soon, they would only last another year and fizzle out in 2 or 3 years and they would bring in a few political changes, a few changes to the police and everything would be rosy for another 20 years, but it didn’t happen. I don’t see how the RUC could have been removed.

OFFICER 5

There were 4 Garda districts bordering Fermanagh – Monaghan, Cavan, Leitrim and Donegal- so I started meeting the DOs (Detective Officers) in these areas, they did a dual role Special Branch and Crime Ordinary. By this stage the term Crime Special was no longer used by the RUC being renamed Special Branch. The DOs were friendly enough, the Cavan man was really of no help, we were being hit by a team from the midlands of Ireland who regularly came across the border; the Garda in Clones were no use, the Sergeant there was very pro-IRA; Monaghan were not interested in the Fermanagh border, their interest lay on the border around Crossmaglen (South Armagh), but Leitrim was responsive. I got on well with the Uniform Inspector there who had arrived on promotion, he would come and visit me at my home when I lived in Enniskillen, and sometimes he was looking to buy tyres or a colour TV as things that were more expensive in the South. My wife and I used to visit him in Leitrim, it was madness when I think of it now. When my wife and I went to his house in the Republic, we travelled across the border, which was pretty hostile to the police at the best of times, when I think of it now, I must have been mad! The D/Sergeant and Superintendent in Donegal were responsive and helpful.

During my time in Fermanagh I couldn’t get the Garda to deploy or get them to deploy the Irish Army, but I kept talking to the contacts I had in the Garda I told them that sooner or later the Loyalists were going to have a ‘go’ down south. I had a very good liaison with Leitrim and the

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Sergeant in Donegal Town, the least helpful were those in Monaghan and Cavan, we never got any breaks from them.

We were badly let down by the Irish approach to extradition, and, by the response of the Garda on some occasions, although I understood it could cause them some political problems. A former Irish diplomat told me that they had great admiration for the RUC, although their concerns had been with the ‘B’ Specials, reports of a ‘shoot to kill policy’, Supergrasses and the UDR patrolling without police accompaniment, he also acknowledged that the Garda, like the RUC, had individuals who could be involved in collusion.

Since 2001 RUC expertise has been exported across the world, the Australians and Canadians have learnt from it even the Garda has learnt from it as well, not only in the collection, analysis and exploitation of intelligence but also how to go about operational deployments and learning the lessons from our successes and operations.

Some Army people never came to terms with the police in the lead. Most of the Army people I worked with I had confidence in, the only group I didn’t was FRU who weren’t accountable to us at all; they were a separate organisation. I wouldn’t undermine the Army effort at all, they had the back up and fire power to match the IRA, the police didn’t, although E4A and HMSU possibly could but not the ordinary police officer. The only trouble I had with the Army was with the Colonel in charge of the FRU, he was a Captain and my military LO in Fermanagh, fortunately when he came I was on the move. He was a ‘wild thinker’ and if I had stayed he wouldn’t have last very long. When he was appointed CO FRU in Belfast he came to see me, the problem I had with them was Nelson. I told the Colonel that Nelson was troublesome, and that he was going to cause trouble. We had a source in the same Loyalist group as Nelson who was producing twice as much as Nelson but not on what Nelson was planning. FRU were just sending us a summary and handler comments on Nelson’s intelligence, but this was of limited value because they only gave us what they wanted to tell us, so I asked the Colonel was he, or, Nelson withholding intelligence? I told him we needed the intelligence and that a summary and comments were no good on their own as we could not distinguish between the intelligence and their interpretation of the intelligence. After a relatively short time my boss rang me and asked, if I was giving the FRU a hard time, I told him NO, what I wanted to know was what Nelson was saying not just what FRU wanted to tell me. After that FRU stopped coming to me and went to my boss instead.

We probably had better liaison with the Army Military Intelligence people who were attached to us.

The number of times the SAS were used in NI was relatively few. Certainly, Thatcher insisted on their deployment to South Armagh for a period and they were used a few times by the police. Generally, they weren’t used all that much, of course there is a great myth about them.

OFFICER 6

The Military approach was different, they are trained to deal with situations of war not situations where terrorists hide in the civilian community. The Military were in Northern Ireland but de facto, it was not a war, it was an insurgency. The book I bought today talks about whether it was a type of warfare and to some degree I would agree with that. We certainly looked at it as a type of warfare, but as Police Officers we didn’t deal with it the way the Military deal with warfare, because we do

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not go out and attack and shoot and kill people. If we have to use firearms, we use them under very strict rules; it’s not like the Military where two sides simply shoot at each other.

It’s totally the rule of law and that was our bottom line. The Military didn’t have that, the Military had a militaristic approach to stopping an insurgency where the rules are much more flexible, much less restrained right from the very basics compared to the Rule of Law police approach. Therefore, they look at things in terms of their training and law for military action, and, they have an acceptable level for losses to achieve their ends. For example, if they’re looking at taking a hillside that’s occupied by the enemy, they’re not taking that hillside without losing troops, so they make a judgement to deploy the troops in a certain way and then carry out the attack using whatever methods and whatever weapons they think necessary to minimise losses, but they do accept there will be losses to take that hillside, that’s also the Military approach to gathering intelligence too. So, while there are similarities and differences in our procedures, there are differences in what is acceptable and what’s not acceptable.

I can only talk about information sharing at my level, it was relatively low, but I would have seen FRU intelligence coming across, but not in a format similar to a de-brief that Special Branch would have done. Special Branch officers would have come in from a ‘meet’ and physically de-briefed all the information into de-brief reports, and, from those they would have then created the information that they could share, after what we call sanitising. The FRU handed Special Branch the sanitised information, so we didn’t get their original de-briefs.

They only got the sanitised version of our intelligence which was all they needed, but bear in mind, we were in the lead and responsible for analysing all National Security intelligence, so we should have received the full de-briefs, but we never got them. We had the original and sanitised reports of our stuff, but all we got from them was the sanitised stuff. Essentially MI5 did the same, but they would have discussed things deeper at a higher level.

Why were we not receiving the full de-briefs? Once again, I put this down to the structures of the day; did it suit the Government? Yeah, did it suit MI5? yeah. You know the rule was that the RUC had primacy on all matters of security in Northern Ireland. Okay, that’s all well and good to have primacy but you’ve got to have autonomy for it to work, but we didn’t have autonomy because MI5 held the purse strings. Everything to do with intelligence that Special Branch did in Northern Ireland, was governed by the finances of MI5, so essentially, did we have control? No, we didn’t, we had a certain amount of control of the tactical things that we did, but not the ‘big picture’ stuff, and, MI5 pretty well got access to everything that they needed at every stage, but they did not share everything they had.

MI5 had technical stuff going on that we simply weren’t allowed access too as they looked at a different level, put very simply they looked at the top leadership, at the Martin McGuinness, Gerry Adams level. Those at the top level were not ‘full on’ targets of ours, of course they were targets of ours in a certain sense, but from a technical point of view, that would be looked after by the Security Service.

From my point of view the working relationships between all the agencies were always pretty good. Anything that we needed from one of the other groups, we mostly got, mostly. But as I say, during that time I was at a lower level or I was working in a different field, so I wouldn’t have had clear view

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of this, you would need to be talking to someone who was. Sharing was based on your personal relationship with your counterpart rather than a sense of everybody being on the one side.

You know information sharing was and still is very much part of what we did and very much understood to be on the ‘need to know’ basis, therefore a lot of things simply weren’t questioned, you got the sanitised version of what they gave you, that’s what you got. You understood why they did that because it afforded them a level autonomy. Some of the sources that FRU had at that time, again I can only talk about what was in the press, like Stakeknife for instance, and if that was a real person, and, if that person was who people say he is, it would have been an immense ethical difficulty for us. If we go back to what I said earlier, recruiting him would have posed an immense legal difficulty, it would have been an immense difficulty right across every bit of the 3PLEM for us to run someone like that. So, if that was a real person doing the real things that is alleged, it couldn’t have happened within the Police. Now to have an agent like that was it a Government decision? Was it an MI5 decision? It certainly wasn’t a Police decision.

I took on a particular job in the late 1980s after I got promoted, and within that job I liaised with the Guards (An Garda Sióchana). At certain times when liaison between the RUC and the Guards was fractious, the liaison that we had was maintained, and, I think for that exact reason, because both sides wished to maintain a liaison, but politically they were constrained at various times, through other things going on such as attempts at extradition and whatever. So, what I saw, it was pretty good.

It may well be a fair comment to say that there was more intelligence going South than coming North, but there were liaisons at different levels. I can only tell you about the liaison at the level that I was at, and, some of the stuff that we were liaising about was some of the most important things, in my mind, going on. I’m not talking about operational intelligence about things that were happening between County Louth and South Armagh, I’m not talking about that type of stuff, I’m talking about bigger picture stuff. The liaison on that stuff was pretty good and I would have said was relatively even. Relatively, but yes, I do agree, and I have heard it on many occasions that on other levels that it was more one-sided than it should have been.

OFFICER 7

The military saw themselves as the lead agency as regards dealing with security and that didn’t change until 76/77 when Police primacy came in, then following the Walker Report different things came to consolidate what we were doing. The Army had treated the situation as a security problem to be dealt with by Army means and, not that the Army introduced Internment, but it was structured around what the military could deliver in terms of swamping areas, conducting searches, hard patrolling, and, things of that nature. Without good intelligence whole areas were closed off and searched, so we just stacked up I suppose an element of resentment in certain areas that massaged or confirmed the community belief that the Security Forces had no interest in them, or, we were out to get them, or, we saw them all as terrorists, and, that is all they could expect from the British Government, the British Army and their RUC lackeys. So, you can understand how they feel if there’s a blanket approach; that type of activity is a very blunt instrument as it puts whole communities off because people say to themselves, they should know that we’re not involved and here they are searching and wrecking our house, that angers people. People actually know who the troublemakers are and don’t understand why the Security Forces don’t know as well. So, acting on good quality

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intelligence targets the right people, and communities will accept the police searches and arrests and are less likely to resent what we do.

The ‘Branch’ was conscious that in an organisation where thirty thousand odd people are passing through, some of whom are part-time, people would seek to take pieces of information and carry it out. But we had to give them information in the form of montages of active paramilitaries in their area, because we had a responsibility to make them aware that if these people were seen in their street or avenue or driveway or watching them and other police officers in any way that they could at least recognise there was a potential threat against them and their colleagues. So, a certain amount of information had to be given out so that the actual organisation could do its job. You’ll see a lot of criticism that we gave out information, we had to tell the green army who to look out for at road stops, when on patrol and things, so we had to share information.

OFFICER 8

When I joined the UDR in 1974 we had a police officer with us, we would be looking out for terrorists, guns and bombs, while the police officer would be giving out a ticket for a baldy tyre or no (vehicle) tax disc. As a result, there was antipathy amongst the Military towards the police, and, on the other hand the police hated seeing the Army and the Military Police taking over their role.

OFFICER 9

As a Uniform constable, particularly in ‘B’ Division, I witnessed a close and supportive relationship between the Police and Army, particularly at ground level. We regarded the ‘Squaddies’ as rather daft but trusted colleagues, whose function was to protect us and facilitate us to do our jobs. Because we ourselves were armed, and, because we considered that our best defence against attack by IRA was to use our brains, rather than guns, the Military were merely an addition, a supplement to our security.

From a ground-level SB perspective, the Military intelligence infrastructure was largely an irrelevance. Prior to my arrival in 1984, the FINCO system had existed, in which a Military Field Intelligence NCO was allocated to every SB office with the envisaged outcome of increasing co- operation between the Military and SB intelligence efforts. I gather that in effect, this was really designed to give the Military an intelligence gathering capability, and, the Force Research Unit (FRU) a much-needed leg up; FRU was studiously avoided by most SB detectives. By my time, FRU were regarded as an unnecessary level of competition and a distraction we didn’t need.

I did on one occasion come into operational proximity with them, when saving the life of one Gerry Adams. I and a colleague had recently recruited a source, who we will call ‘Blackie’ for the purpose of this anecdote. He was a bit of a ‘toe-rag’ and a ‘ner-do-well’, but, was also a member of ‘B’ Coy UFF West Belfast Brigade, and as such, was of interest to us despite the difficulties connected with Loyalist agents. Following several months of low-level intelligence about ‘B’ Coy, a unit we knew little about, ‘Blackie’ announced that he’d been given a role in a UFF operation to kill Gerry Adams by placing a limpet mine onto the roof of his armoured car whilst in motion!

Remaining calm, we established that although the plans were advanced, the attack was not imminent and that there appeared to be opportunities for us to intervene. ‘Blackie’ assumed, not unnaturally, that as Adams was widely thought to be public enemy no.1, we would allow the attack

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to run its course. Both my colleague and I were of course, sorely tempted to do precisely as ‘Blackie’ assumed, but neither of us was of a mind to attempt to play judge, jury, or executioner; hence, we returned to the Source Unit at Castlereagh and gave a full debrief. A major factor was the sheer magnitude of such an event, the distinct possibility that we were the only members of the intelligence community who were aware of the plans, and, that unless we stopped the attack we would be complicit in murder.

Knowing the personalities of the Source Unit staffers, we approached a particular D/S who was renowned as an ‘oul hand’, who told us ‘put it in lads, our friends across the road (FRU) have somebody involved’. It turns out from reading some books recently that the FRU agent appears to have been Brian Nelson, and, by the admission of one of their own handlers, FRU had played fast and loose with this very situation, on more than one occasion before. Our intervention however, rendered their plans moot, and, with careful planning and the use of ‘Blackie’ to muddy the waters, we not only made a successful interdiction protecting Gerry’s life, but also recovered the IED and sent ‘B’ Coy UFF into a significant period of introspection.

It’s clear from reading the books about Brian Nelson, apparently given the FRU codename 6137, that FRU operated very differently to SB. Having also subsequently worked with some FRU people I can confirm that their very mind-set, not to mention their tradecraft, is utterly different from SB. I can’t really comment on why specific intelligence in the hands of FRU, might not have been acted upon, in those previous attempts on Adams’ life.

There may well have been regular contact at the HQ level /upper echelons of these organisations, perhaps even a level of co-operation; but at ground level SB officers of all ranks considered FRU to be rivals to be avoided and the ‘Box’ (MI5) to be a necessary ‘evil’ within our midst. SB primacy was a severe thorn in their flesh and an annoyance, which was barely disguised. On the ground, we avoided each other, which was easier for them than for us, largely because we were larger and handled significantly more agents. SB was sceptical about the practices and handling strategies of the others, and, by extension their intelligence product. In such circumstances, it’s not difficult to see how this scepticism may have coloured the impression by senior SB staff of the veracity and validity of FRU intelligence. My earlier story regarding Gerry Adams however indicates that there was no unwillingness within SB to protect the lives of people who we regarded as the ‘enemy’.

My view of how we in the RUC were regarded by other UK forces was largely informed by my interaction with them on operations and training courses. In general, I’d say we were highly regarded and thought to be in the eye of the storm, so to speak. I remember going on the ‘Box’ course in ’86, just out of my SB probation and very inexperienced as an agent handler. The guy taking the course recommended that a handler should have no more than four agents and only do one meet a day; he was gobsmacked when I told him I had twelve or thirteen agents.

The Security Service (MI5/Box) thought of RUC SB as enthusiastic amateurs, however my experience of them was largely that they were well educated posh boys, out of their depth in the theatre of Northern Ireland. At handler level we saw them in the way a bright student might regard an absent- minded professor who had some nasty habits. We treated them with respect and learned some tradecraft techniques from them, but, we regarded them as over-qualified theorists in the context of our down-and-dirty irregular war. We were also aware that they regarded us as necessary bumbling

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amateurs who they would gladly sacrifice if they perceived us to be surplus to their requirements. They were smiling assassins who would undermine you if they took a dislike to you.

The SB mindset was to own up to mistakes, so if you were doing a job as a cover officer and you thought you might have compromised the source meet, you got on the radio and said ‘abort. It was important that you owned up and didn’t try to bluff it out, because you could be jeopardising guys lives. We were very open and ‘fronted up’ to mistakes. If you had a run in with the Box, they would shake your hand afterwards and tell you that you’re doing a great job, and, then they would go and see if they could get you transferred. They didn’t play with a ‘straight bat’ and I still find them like that; I found them a bit two-faced, their whole organisation was like that. Also, they weren’t very good at what they did. I covered some of their recruitment pitches, it’s difficult for a ‘toff’ from the Home Counties to identify with Sammy, a quick-witted Belfast character, they struggled. I am sure they are brilliant in their own situation, but they weren’t really very good here in Northern Ireland.

OFFICER 10

I think there was a little bit of tension with the Army because the RUC had primacy. At a senior level the Uniform ACC was briefed making him aware of what was happening where and when, and, to inform his military counterparts. If there was an operation in which we felt there was any jeopardy to the lives of police officers or the Army the area was placed out of bounds. We always conducted a risk assessment of the range of possible outcomes and whether they were acceptable or not. While there was a little bit of tension at the lower level, generally like most organisations it didn’t pose any great issue.

There were other agencies collecting intelligence and running agents but to a much lesser degree, Special Branch by far had the largest number of agents and produced the largest number of intelligence reports. The Army had their intelligence collection capability, their agents tended to produce relatively low-level intelligence on associations, places visited and cars etc. Their reports tended to be in the format of a few lines of intelligence and several pages of assessment. They certainly did produce operationally exploitable intelligence on occasion, which was very welcome, and was dealt with in exactly the same way as police source intelligence.

The structures to share intelligence were there, they came across with their report and that was dealt with in exactly the same way as a police report. Initially they would phone across and give us a flavour of the intelligence which allowed us to put Units on standby with ‘the meat’ of the intelligence coming across in a written report, a MISR. These reports came across reasonably quickly, generally within an hour depending on the urgency, if it was absolutely urgent to have the report ‘right now’ they would have brought it across ‘right now’. To be sure, and, to be fair to the Army, the Security Services and the police who were going to exploit the intelligence, we always insisted on a written report so there would be a written document to work from to help avoid any disagreements and misinterpretations over a conversation. It was exactly the same for the police. TCG always operated on a written Source Report, while they may have been given a verbal heads up, they took no action until there was a paper record of the intelligence for them to fully assess. This was born from earlier experiences whereby people made differing interpretations of what was said in a conversation rather than working from a written record. The Security Services also ran a small number of agents and sent their written reports to us.

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Our relationship with ‘The Guards’ was good, personally I held formal monthly meetings with them in Dublin and Belfast, and, as necessary we would speak on the telephone or meet if there was a cross border dimension. At lower levels there was liaison with our opposite numbers across the border, overall the relationships, on a personal level was good. The passage of intelligence from one to the other like any other organisations, there was an element of suspicion that not everything was being passed. I think the intelligence they felt they could pass was passed, and, there was a good working relationship. Again, I hark back to what I said earlier, once you pass a piece of intelligence you lose control of it, so you have to be measured in what you share. When I say lose control, we could be jeopardising the source, human, technical or whatever. We had to bear in mind not to compromise a technical operation or source because it would have consequences not only in Northern Ireland but also for the security of the whole of the UK, because the technology being deployed was cutting edge and was used by the Security Services right across the world. So, any compromise of our technical capacity and methods of operations could have had massive consequences. So, when you have that responsibility then you have to think very carefully about the dissemination of that intelligence and what form of words to use to disseminate it. The liaison with the Guards was good, very good on a personal level, they were very personable individuals and I think we had a good relationship with them. I attended those meeting for 3½ to 4 years and at no time do I recall any harsh words or criticism, it worked well.

I think the intelligence gathering capacity in Northern Ireland was much larger than that in the South, and that goes some way to explain why some say there was more information going South than coming North. I think there may well have been intelligence they could have shared, but again it’s down to ‘when you pass intelligence you lose control of it’. They were in exactly the same dilemma about protecting sources and ongoing operations. We did mount many successful joint operations, so probably more could have been shared but it was the issue of losing control, as once you shared intelligence you created a risk of compromising ongoing operations and/or sources, so again it was a question of balance. We had a responsibility to protect the source and ongoing operations because it’s not just the short-term gain, it’s the long-term gain too we had to consider. For me the relationship was OK, it’s the same when you want to release information to your own organisation, you have to be very measured on what you release, the form of words you use and who you release it too; these were the responsibilities we had when sharing intelligence. Once you release the intelligence you lose control over it, and, there is a responsibility on the recipient to deal with it sensitively, appropriately and properly, and by and large they did. As soon as you pass the intelligence it’s gone, and in terms of the old Special Branch saying, ‘There’s no point having a secret unless you can tell someone about it’.

OFFICER 11

The relationship we had with the Guards in Donegal especially up around Strabane and ‘Derry was brilliant. We had regular meetings, regular contacts and with some in Uniform, we had very good contact. We had a very close relationship and shared information it was very good. I think the higher up you went the less good it was but at the ‘worker’ level it was very good, we had good contact. What we shared was always general in nature, who was coming and going, who was meeting who, not the specifics, they were helpful, and, we tried our damnedest to help them.

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Myself and a CID colleague, who was murdered a short time later in a bomb explosion, had been out patrolling around the border when we saw a local criminal, we pulled him in and discovered he had almost 250,000 cigarettes stashed in a burnt out car right on the border, it turned out they had been stolen the night before from a supermarket in Carndonagh in County Donegal. Later, myself and another Detective Sergeant went to return the cigarettes and the local Garda Sergeant said it was the biggest crime in Carndonagh in a lifetime. He insisted we went for a beer with him before he took us to his home for a meal with his family. The next day he came across to tell us that when we were in the pub we had been recognised and a call had been made to the IRA to get guns and come and shoot us, but we had left the pub by the time they arrived. I thought at the time it was a bit of a ‘cock and bull’ story but in a subsequent interview with a suspect terrorist I discovered it was true.

When I was working the Army the thing with them was when they were on the ground they stopped everybody, questioned everybody, knew every crack in the street and handed a bundle of stuff into their collator; I would get that and give it over to the Branch. And, if the Branch had a person of interest and wanted to know what he was doing I would look for him and have a chat with him to find out and give that back to them. At the time our security precautions were very big and up to ‘77 or ‘78 police didn’t go into the Creggan, Bogside or Shantallow without an Army escort.

OFFICER 12

The support of the military cannot be over-estimated, and they were professional enough to support the police. At the start however, their thinking was the police were stupid – thick ‘Paddys and Micks’. For the military to realise and have the intellectual capacity to realise that police primacy was the right way to go, even though they had more clout at Westminster, for them to actually support police primacy, I think was absolutely phenomenal.

In my time there [on the Border], a few soldiers were murdered but the camaraderie in the Station and in the Army, who were with us was second to none; people just looked after each other so that helped us cope.

The IRA threat had a big influence, there only a few pockets in Newtownhamilton where we could go out without the military. We were on the border and our patch stretched down to Cullyhanna, usually when we were on patrol outside the village we had 16 soldiers with us and we flew out in two helicopters even if that was only to serve a summons, or to show a presence that the police were here, it was like trying to create a police presence. It was good to have the military because they gave us a ‘hard edged protection’ when we were out on patrol. We could do ‘town beats’ without the Army and we could see the benefits of that when we weren’t surrounded by soldiers.

We were conscious it was a Nationalist community we were trying to win over and it’s easier done when the military aren’t there, now, no disrespect to the military but when you have soldiers beside you it doesn’t look normal. It’s hard enough to convey a picture of normality when we’re carrying rifles, but they just compounded that image when they were with us, but we needed them as there were places we couldn’t operate without them.

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OFFICER 13

I had no contact with the Security Services, I did for a short time with Military Intelligence via a FINCO but that wasn’t really productive for the police, and the military system was changed, probably to the FRU type of thing.

As for the AGS on the border, I thought it was none existent, despite having radio contact we had to ring across and arrange a meeting, it seemed they needed to get approval from a high rank. Of course, the problem on their side was the shortage of patrol officers, like other forces they had a staff allocation model and with the population of the border counties it was difficult to justify a large allocation of officers. There was the Garda Task Force and Armed Response Unit working along the Border, but IRA activity wasn’t a high priority for them so long as there were no attacks on their turf. I think there was undoubtedly some political interference in the Garda not least because all promotions to Superintendent and above required ‘sign off’ by the Minister of Justice to whom the Garda Commissioner was accountable. It is remarkable that political control of the Garda lasted until 2016 when an Independent Police Authority was established to whom the Commissioner would now be accountable. Of the few Garda I did meet they all seemed very willing to help and they did, but there was that undercurrent of caution, so informality was key. Even today I have spoken to retired Garda and they are reluctant to speak about policing during ‘The Troubles’ citing to do so would breach the provisions of the 2005 Garda Act.

OFFICER 14

At that time, liaison between the RUC and Army was minimal, but most of the Army guys I met were OK, though some very naïve. I remember talking to a young Army captain one night and we discussed the ongoing situation. This guy had been in Northern Ireland for about three weeks and seemingly had all the answers to our problems. He kept pointing out how wrong my views were. I think he soon got a rude awakening.

One night when I was part of a static guard on a local MPs home; I was in the rear garden of the house that backed on to open ground. It was very dark, and I was keeping in the shadows when I heard some noise just over the hedge, I had a Sterling with me but didn’t cock it as I didn’t want any noise from my end. I waited and soon three soldiers came through the hedge. I quickly made my presence known and everything was OK. They had also been told to pay attention to this house, neither of us knew of the others presence, and, that could have been dangerous.

OFFICER 15

A difficulty in the early stages of ‘The Troubles’ was the number of intelligence agencies, you had SB, the Military and the Security Services, and, they were competing with each other. Was there a sharing of intelligence? No, I think the military in particular were vying for primacy. Did they operate unknown to the police? Absolutely. I don’t think Scappaticci was a police informant, I think he had some contact early on, but he became a big player for the military and may be the Security Service. In the absence of legislation each agency had its own rules for informants which was a real recipe for disaster, look at how limited the rules and regulations were. The military, I know a few guys in the military end of things, don’t see the things the same way as the police, they don’t understand the rule of civilian law.

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We always moved our resources to deal with the most pressing threat whether it was Republican or Loyalist. I am glad we were able to hold the line because otherwise the Military would have had to be brought back on to the streets. Republicans were aggressors and a large part of their aggression was directed at the police because we were there, if we weren’t there Loyalist would have been pulled in to a confrontation, and, I dread to think about the carnage there would have been if we didn’t hold the line.

There was generally a mutual respect, I think the Guards on the border, in Dublin Castle and the Irish government could have done more without a shadow of doubt. On the ground at checkpoints there was a level of understanding, they knew who the players were, we knew them too. I think generally speaking, they could have done more in places like Dundalk, Castleblaney and Bundoran, but the political will wasn’t there. Any Guards I met professionally all had the same moral compass as I have, and, the same reasons why they joined the police, but I think their hands were tied to a great degree.

OFFICER 16

Any relationship I had with them [military] was fine and cordial, probably more social than professional. Sometimes there were tensions, professional tensions because a job was taken off one of us and given to the other. They weren’t any better trained than us, they might have been better equipped, had a bigger budget and better equipment but they certainly weren’t better trained. I suppose them being soldiers who didn’t live here they maybe took bigger chances, maybe wanted to be more involved in actual ‘combat’, they wanted to be at the front. I think a lot of them wanted to be more involved and some did ‘takeout’ terrorists.

I believe it was good. I remember when I was in Strand Road doing VCPs near the Border, we could be on one side and they [Garda] were on the other side on the same road. On one occasion we were close enough to speak to them, some of my colleagues didn’t want to speak to them, and it was probably the same for them too, but to my mind we were both doing the same job and I had no problem talking to them.

On a personal level I think things were good, they got a bit more professional as time went by, and as they took part in cross border operations they became quite professional and the relationship was I believe quite good, and it has got better over time. While a lot of the stuff happened on our side of the border it came from their side, so there could have been a bit of ‘blind eye’ turned at times so long as things didn’t happen their side. But they weren’t armed, they only had a small armed unit, so you can’t tar them all with the same brush; they had a difficult job policing the Border unarmed.

OFFICER 17

From 1970 to 76 the military had primacy for security, and, in dealing with disorder they used Baton Rounds or Rubber Bullets which we didn’t get until the late 70s early 80s. Incidentally the first we used them was against Linfield supporters at a football match.

The Army were deployed to support the police and I couldn’t praise them enough. These were soldiers who were trained for a war situation to go and kill enemy soldiers. So, bringing them into a hostile environment like West Belfast, and telling them they couldn’t react as they had been trained,

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instead they had to be half police half soldier, was very difficult for them. Soldiers aren’t trained that way. I have respect for the discipline and control the various units exercised when they came into West Belfast. They were there the ones taking casualties for us. I could name you half a dozen soldiers who died doing foot patrols with the police. These guys came over for 3 or 6 months, taken away from the comfort of their barracks in England or Germany only to lose their lives walking the streets of Northern Ireland. I have total respect for them, and, the control and discipline they had, despite what other people may say, they were fantastic.

The police couldn’t work in areas like West Belfast without the Army, if we didn’t have them we would have needed several thousand more police. The Army did a job we probably couldn’t do, they could put large numbers of soldiers on the ground and their training was gradually tailored to suit working here. For example, going out on foot patrol from Grosvenor Road, there were two police accompanied by 12 -16 soldiers, the patrol went out in ‘bricks’ of 4, the Command Brick had the police with 4 soldiers and the other ‘satellite bricks’ ‘orbited’ around them. The idea was to prevent PIRA launching a gun attack because of the chance a ‘satellite brick’ could be behind them. It also helped deter bomb attacks being set off by command wire. To do this solely with police would have needed literally thousands more police.

Relationships were generally harmonious, although the FRU [Military Intelligence] could be testing at times handling informants. The relationship was generally fine, they provided us with their intelligence and they couldn’t approach anybody without first telling us, so there was some control over them. They ran their own little ‘empire’ and I have no doubt that when the Army Surveillance teams weren’t working for us they were doing jobs for the FRU even though they shouldn’t have. I remember having an argument about this with a Major who said the Military would never deploy without the right to gather their own intelligence, I disagreed with him. The Military should never have been allowed to handle informants, they had different ideas and ways; they are soldiers not police. Their sources caused them grief mainly because the sources were controlling the handlers, not as it should have been with the Handlers controlling the sources. The Military objective is to defeat the enemy not protect life, so their priorities weren’t always the same as ours. We kept good relationships with the Army, I respected them, this wasn’t their fight, they came over here because they were sent.

Would Military Intelligence have accepted a greater risk than the Branch? I think they would. Everybody has their ‘red line’ and these can be drawn in different places. For Special Branch any threat had to be notified to the person concerned irrespective of who they were, it didn’t matter if it was the top IRA who had murdered my friend, if the threat was against him he was warned; there were no ‘ifs or buts’. Could I say the Military would do the same? If you look at some of the cases they were involved in, I am not sure. Our moral compass was tilted towards doing the right thing. The ‘Branch’ put in place systems to make sure we never went the wrong way.

MI5 only controlled Loyalist sources, and, when they took responsibility for National Security there was confusion as to who was in control of what. There was be clear control, and, for me one agency should run things, you can’t have multiple agencies because they will conflict. Once I made a suggestion that everybody should come together and share everything, I was laughed at for saying this because knowledge is power, so everybody holds something back.

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[Today]The agenda is that people [Republicans] want they their version of history to be cemented in history as the truth, they are equating terrorists, the IRA, with police and military, and, they are succeeding!

We worked with the Garda, did they give us everything? No, they did not, by no means did they. In fact, I had a discussion with a Garda and basically, he told me they didn’t share everything because they felt we didn’t do enough to defeat the Loyalists, it was just nonsense! They were so politically controlled that when you dealt with them it was all politics, it was only in recent years with the ‘Dissidents’ that they have actually started to behave the way they should have done. They are now taking it seriously and passing information whereas before what they gave us was always controlled by politics. The Garda was a pure political force, promotions required government authority, so whatever political party took over it influenced who got promoted.

I have no doubt there was an element of collusion between the Garda and the Provies. For example, I was on foot patrol along the Border when we stopped to chat to a couple of Guards, I was the only one there from a Protestant background, everybody in my patrol and the 2 Guards were Catholic. We were chatting away when another 2 Guards arrived, one of the Guards we were talking to warned us to say nothing to the new arrivals whom he described as Provies; now that is a Guard talking about two of his colleagues! I thought, No, it couldn’t be, but it was. When I was working on the Border I was shot at twice and mortared from within a supposedly secure Garda/Irish Army cordoned area, and, the Irish Army cocked their weapons at me because they were more interested in stopping me than they were in stopping the Provies shooting at us, so I have no doubt there was sympathy and collusion with the Provies. It got to the stage where I was reluctant to tell the Garda where we were going to patrol near the border as they could tell the Provies and make us vulnerable to attack or frustrate our patrol aim.

OFFICER 18

When I was in Uniform ‘Op Snowflake’ was on, the barriers were up protecting the City Centre and I did those with the RMPs. I never had a problem with the Army and there were times and places they went with you. I suppose the RMP thought more like police than soldiers. Anytime I worked with them in surveillance they were all fine, and, when I was in SB I had very little to do with them.

Surveillance teams tend to stick to themselves, yes you worked with other Police teams, and I only worked once with the Military teams, and, that was in Londonderry when they needed a female. I wasn’t keen on that experience because their operating procedures were completely different to ours, they probably would be happy to get into a confrontation more so than a police surveillance team. The Police teams live here, most are brought up here, we will always live here, and we started out doing policing. The Military, to be fair to them, are coming from a different place, coming from outside, and are here short term; maybe I have the wrong impression, but if they ended up in a confrontation they would be quicker to engage, shall I say, than we would have been. We would try to keep a lower profile, maybe a better way of putting it is they were maybe more prepared to take risks. I think it’s down to, they are over here for just a short time, live in Barracks before going off somewhere else. They changed their names and their cars in a ‘click’, they went away for 6 months and came back with a new identity and dyed hair, while we were still driving around in the same cars using our own driving licences which showed our home address, so it was totally different.

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I think they [Garda] were probably the same as us and they had the odd ‘bad apple’, same as the RUC and PSNI. Other than that, the rest of them would have been working just as hard as we did.

OFFICER 19

With the Security Service it was generally very good. They had a completely different way of doing things and a different attitude, but the relationship was grand.

My dealings with FRU were limited, but with the regional Military Intelligence Officers (MIOs) relationships were always excellent.

GARDA

The relationship was fine. At HQ level, there were monthly meetings and relevant intelligence was shared.

OFFICER 20

{The Military were] Very good, the DET were excellent. People are looking at FRU with hindsight; you have to look at what they did and when they did it. The Military hadn’t used a FRU type unit before coming here. You have to see things in the context of the times. Probably what they did seemed logical at the time. Yes, they had agents like Nelson and Scappaticci and that takes you back to the question who was running who? We don’t yet know the answer to that, will we ever know? Remember the handlers were only here for 6 months and they changed regularly. With informants like they had the questions will be never ending, and, I don’t think there will be a satisfactory closure to the whole thing.

I look at the anti-terrorist operations in the UK, Belgium France and Germany with a critical eye and wonder, what are they doing allowing press cameras in so close, the press should never be anywhere near active operations. Even when the assault teams go in the cameras are watching live, yes, police forces need that ‘military’ edge, but to allow it to be broadcast live, I don’t think so. Most anti-terror operations start as a civilian or normal policing operation, but at some point, when that doesn’t work, a decision has to be made to go ‘military’. Now that’s a difficult decision for the police commander to make, to hand over to the ‘military’ commander, and, for him to take over in the glare of the cameras.

They [Garda] were brilliant, very good. People in Northern Ireland generally don’t realise the threat the Garda officers worked under in the Republic. As far as the IRA were concerned the Garda were the enemy, generally speaking you could say there was enough discipline in the IRA that they didn’t actively target the Garda. Up here people can say the two were running hand in hand, but that’s not my experience. The simple fact is MI5 did joint training courses for the Garda and us, we were teamed up with a colleague from the Garda which was helpful even after the course because we now had a contact we could call. You can see how well Garda and RUC officers worked together in Afghanistan.

At a higher level it’s probable that they didn’t give us everything, perhaps because of a fear of compromising their sources. If you give somebody information you don’t know what they are going to do with it, or, what the effects might be for the source if they do use it, so keeping something

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back is a perfectly natural reaction. Did we give them more than they gave us? You just have to look at the two political states to realise that it was the case that we didn’t get everything, but at least we got something. What they shared was out of our control.

The Garda were like the RUC was in 1972 and they have come on in leaps and bounds recently, all organisations need time to develop.

OFFICER 21

MILITARY

I honestly, I didn’t work with them much, they gave us ‘cover’ during VCPs, searches or on some CID investigations; overall, I had no issues with them.

GARDA

To be honest I don’t think anybody trusted anybody else, I know there was contact between senior officers and meetings on both sides of the border. Generalising a lot, the Garda thought we were involved with Loyalists, and, likewise we thought a lot of them were protecting, and, knew a lot more about the IRA and the Republican side of things, because the majority of firearms and explosives came from their side of the Border.

I did have some contact with them over ordinary crime and there wasn’t an issue. I think the relationship has improved a 100% over the years and everybody now recognises we are all on the same side.

OFFICER 22

Anecdotally, from talking to others and some soldiers who joined the RUC, I think it was initially difficult. The Military arrived here in ’69 having been briefed that the Police had been attacking the Catholic community, and, that they were coming in to protect that community while the Police were being taken off the streets. I think there was a real annoyance amongst some police officers about the attitude of some of the Military, not that they were brought in, but that they had this attitude ‘we have been in Aden, we have been in Kenya, we know how to deal with these post-colonial situations’. There was an arrogance amongst some of the Military that didn’t rest easy with the Police, and I think that took a long time for that to change. By the time I joined we had ‘Ulsterisation’ and the Police were in the lead role. I worked with an awful lot of soldiers and got on well with them. By the time I was dealing with them, from the mid-80s, they were better informed about Northern Ireland and I found them to be very professional.

I had dealings with Military Intelligence, and, I do have reservations about them. The reason that Military Intelligence seemed to exist in Northern Ireland is because the Military liked to have their own sources of intelligence. It wasn’t that they didn’t trust the Police, rather they felt they needed to have their own independent resources, and of course ‘the General likes it’. I would deal with the MILO, he came to meetings and always hung around afterwards to see if he could pick up a bit more, even though he was told everything. He never got the identity of agents, but he got their intelligence.

I think the RUC was much more professional in its handling of CHIS and safeguarding their identities than Military Intelligence. Certainly, the Military approach to agent running was markedly different to

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that of the Police. They were very much short term and the quality of the people they recruited as agents was not as good as those recruited by the Police. They had a sense they were brilliant, but a lot of their agents and intelligence were perhaps not as good as they believed.

I had some dealing with the Garda and I think day to day relationships were good. I went to meetings with them and I remember one old Garda Superintendent, whose family had been in the RIC, telling me to be careful when dealing with his replacement who was a Fianna Fail appointee. The relationship between the Garda and their Government is very different to our relationship with our Government. Their relationship was very much akin to the old Stormont regime relationship with the RUC, with the Garda subservient to their Government. Individually I couldn’t say a bad word about them, I thought they were great, and their local knowledge was fantastic. An example of local co-operation was when the Garda took a RUC officer in uniform through the Republic to get him quickly to where he needed to be, and, travelling with them was the quickest way. So, there was some excellent co-operation, however at a higher level we had to be conscious of the political niceties. At the end of the day they worked in another jurisdiction with their own priorities which we had to acknowledge.

OFFICER 23

To me the three [RUC, Military & MI5] tried to get on and work together, but they each had their own agenda.

Again, I’ve engaged with several Inquiries, and, in my personal opinion the Security Services put their interests above all others. They will protect their material over and above others, and, I have witnessed it. I have seen material, from them to the Police, which they denied providing even though the material was on their headed paper.

I saw a senior RUC man accused of wrong doing by the Ombudsman, tell the investigators who to approach in the Security Services for access to the material. The PONI investigators told him they had and were told by the Security Services that the material didn’t exist. The RUC officer then produced a copy of the document in question, and, showed it to them pointing out the name and signature at the bottom of the document. They went back to the Security Services who were able to confirm they had the requested document but wouldn’t release it.

Military Intelligence personnel add their opinion to their intelligence reports. They would get material from Special Branch, Security Services and Uniform patrols which their Intelligence Officer would write up as reports which included his impressions and opinions. There are cases when it is put to RUC officers that they knew something they didn’t, and, when they deny knowledge the Ombudsman produces the MISR which, when you look at it you can see its bullshit and is at variance to the original intelligence document. It is full of the soldier’s opinion of what he sees and hears, its opinion not fact, but the Ombudsman takes it as fact.

Every 6 months we got a new Army Unit into West Belfast, and every time we brought the CO in and said ‘We know you want to resolve things here in 6 months but it’s not going to happen. We can’t work without you, you are here to support the police so please do as we ask, we live here and have worked here for 20 years, please work with us’. But they didn’t always do as we asked; some did think they could solve everything, and they were a nightmare. There was one particular unit we had to order off the streets. We could only allow them out when we could put two police officers with

MI5, MILITARY & AGS Page 18 of 28 each ‘brick’, so that took eight police for each patrol. Usually 2 police officers went out with the ‘Command Brick’, but with this particular unit, the ‘bricks’ without police were running amok doing their own thing. We couldn’t operate without them, so we had to put the entire NPU out 2 officers to each ‘Brick’.

GARDA

Generally, it was a good enough relationship, I think from my time on the Border we got on very well. Did they have a few ‘bad apples’? Yeah, they did. I know a couple of Guards stationed in Dundalk were found by the Smithwick Tribunal to have colluded with the IRA, and, he was right. There was one particular ‘bad apple’ which the Garda didn’t do anything about. They knew about his activities and eventually they moved him, they didn’t deal with him just moved him and he went sick. Other than that, I think it was a good enough working relationship, and, certainly higher up they tried to work together.

I think there was government interference with the Guards. If their government changed you would see a lot of their senior ranks move, Superintendents and Chief Superintendents in Dublin moved towards the border and vice versa in accordance with the wishes of the politicians who wanted ‘their own’ people in Dublin doing the plum jobs, and, I think there is ample evidence of that.

OFFICER 24

The Military were very professional. Trying to get a ‘multiple’ to move through West Belfast to visit a scene could be mind-blowingly awkward. We had to talk to a liaison officer who talked to his people while we talked to our people, the logistics of making things happen could be immense.

From my criminal investigations I saw the relationships in the intelligence world between the Police, Military and the Security Services. Those relationships were very good. The relationships were close, and many officers became close friends with their various counterparts. I think that was a good thing that helped them to work better together. I know there are some who will call this collusion, but that’s not true, those relationships were built on mutual respect and a desire to do good. I also had those relationships with members of the Garda at a professional level.

Recently and sadly, a close friend of mine in the Garda died suddenly. Anytime I met the Guards they were always eager to learn about our processes. They didn’t have systems like HOLMES and just used a ‘book of evidence’ when investigating serious crime. A lot of the Garda law and procedure can be seen as ‘imperialistic’, having its roots from the Royal Irish Constabulary. When my friend was stationed on the Border, they would have 2 men in a Garda patrol car whereas on our side we had a load of police and soldiers. Recently we have seen the announcement of the appointment of the PSNI deputy being appointed as Garda Commissioner. I wish Mr Harris every success and look forward to seeing how the Garda evolves under his leadership.

OFFICER 25

I would describe their [Garda] co-operation as very variable. I had very little direct experience of it, until I went to Headquarters and liaised with my opposite numbers in Dublin. From talking to quite a number of people, there were certain areas along the Border where there was very, very good liaison, very, very good co-operation with our opposite numbers in the Guards. One chap who, in

MI5, MILITARY & AGS Page 19 of 28 the early ‘70s, was in Fermanagh, and I think he had to liaise with six or seven Garda Stations on the other side and I think of the seven, six of them were first class, but one was awful because the Garda Inspector in charge was a Republican. Therefore, that whole station was bad because he was very anti the RUC, anti the North; he was a very bad influence and we got ‘back flow’ that he was intimidating the Garda Sergeants in the Station trying to get them withdraw co-operation; generally, a lot of boys would tell me that there was a good liaison.

I’ve heard of one occasion in Strabane, the boys had an excellent liaison with the Guards on the other side and in fact, on one occasion, I remember hearing that the Strabane boys lent a car to the Guards who at the time didn’t have a car and needed to go round and serve summonses so the Strabane boys lent them one of our cars for the day. Now that’s good co-operation. The individual Guards, certainly the ones that I met, I never had any problem whatsoever with any of them, they were first class blokes. The problem for them was, the Garda was a very political organisation, until fairly recently, until only about a year ago I think, 2016. Up until then, all appointments for Superintendent and above were made by the Taoiseach’s office, or with the approval of the Taoiseach’s office and the Minister for Justice; the Minister for Justice had this great control over them and they were very political. I know of occasions when some of them said to some of our guys, ‘look for God’s sake don’t ever put this in writing, nothing like this must ever come back our way otherwise I’ll be hung out to dry’. Now I’ve been told on at least one occasion at a formal meeting very little of substance came across, but on the stairs, the Garda guy told one of our guys the true way of things, because he was just terrified of being caught by his own authorities. The problem was, the Minister for Justice set the tone for them and of course in the days of Charlie Haughey and people like that, who was very anti the North and wanted the North to fail, so there was no co- operation. You’ve only got to look at 100 or 101 failed extradition attempts, and these weren’t attempts to extradite people who we suspected were involved in something, these were Extradition Files, I mean, all the prosecution evidence was in the files, these were very sophisticated attempts, in the end the RUC just gave up trying, I mean there was no point.

I can’t think of any fleeing terrorists being arrested in the South after an operation in the North, the only one I can think of being handed over was Dominic McGlinchey, but I can’t even remember the circumstances of that. Things changed after Good Friday, I mean, suddenly it was all co-operation all the way, which is as it should have been all along, but I mean it was a different time, you know the 1970s and 80’s was a different time.

The 1970s was, 1972 is 50 years after 1922, and in that 50-year time, there was very little change in attitudes. You know, in more modern times, attitudes have changed in the last 20 years, far more than it changed in those 50 years. You’ve only got to look at the political system, the power of the churches, the whole of Europe and all the rest of it; it was a totally different bygone era. The Garda in the Border areas was starved of resources and they were in very small stations like the old RUC/RIC Stations with a Sergeant and four Constables, that sort of thing.

I know of an incident where we had observation across the Border on an area where there was massive IRA activity and I think in four years we saw one Garda car going up that road. The Garda knew the IRA were active here, they couldn’t afford to go up, these were unarmed constables, what are they going to do, go up there and give the IRA people a hard time who would kill them in a moment, wouldn’t even think twice? The only reason they didn’t kill them was because the IRA was

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under orders not to carry out jobs in the South, although they occasionally did, when they shot Garda McCabe and did all sorts of robberies and stuff like that.

Outside the personal liaison I think Garda cooperation was poor, and there were times when people talked about it being at a high level but I can’t think of one example from the period 1970 to 2000, in that thirty-year period, one single example of where the Garda gave us intelligence that enabled us to catch, to intercept and capture an IRA murder gang coming across the Border, not one. There’s not one, in thirty years, so that pretty much sums up what the real level of cooperation was. And in my experience of the Guards coming up, they came up every month, we gave them all the answers to every question they asked. They were terrified of the UVF going down and doing more Dublin and Monaghan bombings and things like that and they got everything from us that they asked for. Everything we asked them for, we got nothing back, in the end I refused to even ask them questions, because there was simply no point. We would draw up a list, each desk would draw up a list of twenty questions, ten, fifteen questions, where is such and such at the moment, is such and such still living in Dundalk or is he still involved or whatever? We got nothing, and it wasn’t that the boys didn’t want to help us, it was the orders they were under from above.

OFFICER 26

The Army had overall control of security up to 76, they were stationed in the old Grand Central Hotel on Royal Avenue, and they went out with us, and, at the time they did the city centre security, the ‘Segments’. I never had much of a problem with them, perhaps the only time they troubled us was at the ‘Segment’ gates, they had soldiers and female RMPs searching people going into the city centre, and, even when we were in uniform they searched us. I think sometimes their attitude was a bit ‘suspect’. When they went out with us it was to protect us, I think it was necessary to have them for security at a scene, and, there were plenty of them to do security and let the police deal with things, so the Army was there to protect us.

OFFICER 27

The Army, as a young Constable in Glenravel Street we had the Army co-located with us. The Army in those days ‘ruled the roost’ in terms of security and controlling scenes. At scenes they would be running all over it, and, as a young Constable I would be left standing about not really doing too much. There was an incident one night, the Inspector arrived and myself and two other Constables were at the scene, we hadn’t taken a grasp of it because we thought the Army was in control, when we got back to the Station the Inspector told us ‘if you go to crime scenes, regardless of your service, you as a police officer are in charge, if you get things wrong there were plenty of your authorities who will kick your ass, but you are the police officers at the scene and you are in charge. So, make sure you take charge.’ What he meant of course was preservation of the scene for evidence, and, not to let people trampled all over it. So, that was timely advice early on in my service which led me to the view that whenever I was at a scene, no matter who turned up I would try and ensure that the police view prevailed, and, that got a bit easier as I got experience, and, particularly as I got a bit of rank. But generally, relationships were very good, without the support of the Army we couldn’t have operated in places like B and D Divisions.

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I mentioned earlier doing additional security patrols at night, we did some of those in an Army Saracen Armoured car, it seems ridiculous now, but that was the type of precautions we had to take against the level of threat we had to face.

GARDA

I didn’t have any personal knowledge of that relationship, it is all anecdotal. I heard stories about places around the Border, particularly those that weren’t totally politicised that when a criminal went across the Border and was found, he was marched back to the nearest crossing point and handed over, that was by both sides, but it’s all anecdotal.

I think Jack Hermon made a statement that the Guards ‘were well meaning but incapable’, I know that soured relationships. The first time I had a face to face meeting with the Guards was when I was in the Anti-Racketeering Squad, and, I found they were police officers dealing with the same sort of things as we were, and by and large, they wanted the same sort of outcomes as myself. I established some very strong relationships with the Guards.

OFFICER 28

I saw both sides, I did three tours with the Royal Marines. A police officer and a soldier are different animals, they are trained differently and think differently, on top of that soldiers are only here for a 4, or, 6 month tour. They are hyper because they are working all of the time. It’s difficult when you are a soldier, you don’t know the area and the people, so in high threat areas you viewed a member of the public as a potential hostile, that’s the way the general public were viewed by the military in high risk areas.

As a police officer you see things differently. The military could be over-exuberant, at times they were perceived as rude and bad mannered because of the way they were trained. A soldier is not trained as a police officer or to deal with public order, but their training over the years improved greatly. For my first tour, my unit was already here when I finished basic training, I spent a weekend in Ballykinlar and a day in Belfast to prepare for my deployment in Londonderry, that was my pre- Northern Ireland deployment training. Was I prepared to go on the streets? I would say not. To put me on the street as an 18 year old with a General Purpose Machine Gun with a lack of training probably wasn’t that good, but it was a numbers game, they needed people on the ground, and that isn’t making excuses for the Army. Things did happen, and mistakes were made during the early 70s, while they were never eradicated they certainly greatly diminished over time as training improved. For example, a lot of the shootings by the Army that were deemed to have been wrong in the early 70s had virtually been stopped by the early 80s.

The Army looked at things differently, and they provided vital support in areas police needed it like West Belfast, South Armagh, South East Fermanagh and East Tyrone, in places like that they were essential. There could be issues because of differences between regiments, if you knew the Marines were coming you knew it would be OK, but if another Regiment was coming you knew there could potentially be problems because of their training.

The Army looked at the police as being lazy, I think most of them did, but the likes of me were able to educate the soldiers by telling them ‘you are only in Northern Ireland for 4 ½ or 6 month tours while the police are here for their whole lives so they can’t do the things at the same pace as you,

MI5, MILITARY & AGS Page 22 of 28 it’s impossible for the police to do that’. I think in the circumstances the relationship worked well. Incidents did happen, incidents when the Army got it wrong, but the Army didn’t step out in the morning to go and kill somebody, they simply got it wrong just as the police got it wrong at times. Yes, we did get it wrong at times, when you looked back during debriefs, you realised what you got wrong, but it was a genuine honest mistake, was it a mistake to the level of being criminal? I very much doubt it. When somebody did do something criminal, committed a criminal act they were prosecuted. Any police officer or soldier who offends should be prosecuted with the full weight of the law the same as everybody else. The reality is there are some ideologues out there thinking that a lot of soldiers and police officers should be prosecuted because they have been prosecuted, so the same should happen to the Security Forces, but that can’t happen because what they allege didn’t happen, and that’s the reality!

The military guys I worked with were very good, very well trained. Ultimately, they are soldiers who were trained in a different way to a police officer, but they were very good, very professional very thorough and dedicated beyond reason. The things they would do at times, not illegal things, to get the job done, they went out on a limb making it more dangerous for themselves as they tried to get ‘a result’, it was unbelievable what they would do.

I got to know some of the [Garda] ERU people very well and they were very good guys and gals, there were a few girls in it, but they were restricted in what they could do. They were acting like everybody else in a chain of command, individually I think they got better. I make a generalisation here, but there was a lack of trust in the Guards due to what happened over the years right up until I retired. Could the level of trust ever be built up to a level you could say they would be totally onboard with what we were doing, which was for the better good on both sides of the Border? To me it looked as if it suited the Irish government to keep Northern Ireland unstable, that met their needs and their security posture could be patchy. I always refer to this as do many others and Henry Patterson refers to it in his book ‘Violent Frontier’, I was subjected to this myself as I crossed the Border with my wife, and, my brother and his wife to go for a meal at the time of the Foot and Mouth outbreak. On the southern side of the Border was a Garda checkpoint, it was never there before during ‘The Troubles’, it was there solely for the protection from Foot and Mouth. We had to get out of the car, dip our feet into a bucket of disinfectant and they sprayed the wheels of the car before we were allowed to continue on our way. Yet through the bad years of ‘The Troubles’ they couldn’t make any effort to seal the Border, but they could when there was Foot and Mouth.

That’s one thing that stands out for me, they made no effort to seal the Border to save lives of people here, but they did to save the lives of their cattle.

I think the level of Irish government complicity in what happened here is going to come out, they failed to extradite anyone before 1989, and this was a co-signatory to the Extradition Act within the EU, I mean the Republic failed to extradite hundreds of people because they deemed their criminal offences to be politically motivated. The murder of my brother, a civilian who was shot in the back sitting on his tractor, was deemed to be a political offence. So those actions caused hostility and suspicion with the Irish and the Garda, a lot of whom were good decent people. The motivation of the Irish Government was political, I think they were political, when it suited them they were able to move resources around, from the Midlands up to the Border as they required.

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You have the Irish Army in Finner Camp in Donegal, they never left the Camp and they had all resources to do what they needed to do, but they failed to do it. They can do EU and UN peace keeping missions in Lebanon and elsewhere, but they weren’t prepared to do something on their own Border. It comes back to the view they were happy if Irish Republican violence was going North, let them get on with it, but if it’s happening here in the South we’ll deal with them, and that was their approach. They allowed the Provisional IRA monster to grow, the Irish Republican monster to grow to such an extent that it was only when it became a threat to their state, only then did they feel they needed to do something about it, and that’s when they started to intervene. There’s no doubt about it, so long as it didn’t affect them they did nothing. The reality is their failure to do anything created the situation that Loyalists did things like the Monaghan and Dublin bombings, and the Cavan bomb. The Irish created a vacuum and that lead to the Loyalists doing those bombings, which were obviously wrong and shouldn’t have happened. The Irish government has a lot to answer for, you even see now with this NIO consultation into the Stormont House Agreement that the Irish are trying to absolve themselves of any responsibility for dealing with the Past. I heard a comment by a member of the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs ‘that the consultation was by a foreign government and it has nothing to do with us.’ In other words, the British Government is a foreign government, and this is said by an official of a government which has direct involvement in Northern Ireland affairs and is a co-signatory to the Belfast Agreement and the Anglo-Irish Agreement, and, has direct involvement in what is going on here saying ‘The Troubles’ have nothing to do with them.

OFFICER 29

We couldn’t have survived, particularly in places like Woodbourne, without them [Military]. I do tours of the RUC Memorial Garden where the last memorial is to the Armed Forces, and, I tell people the story of going out to do calls in West Belfast and seeing the patrols getting ready. I was lucky in West Belfast because I went to work in a suit every day, the patrols brought the prisoners into me to interview, charge and take to court, so I didn’t have to go out onto the ground surrounded by up to 40 soldiers as the Uniform officers did. The Uniform officer’s job was to do what policemen everywhere do, the ‘Beat’ and answer calls, the soldiers’ job was to keep them alive.

I had a lot of contact with English and Scottish police and the Garda too, only the Garda got it, they knew what it was about, most Englishmen hadn’t a clue, they thought they knew it all and had all the answers. I don’t know what the problem was, but they seemed to think they had the solution, but it didn’t work like that. The Garda knew, they were dealing with the same problems as us, maybe from a different angle, but they knew and understood.

I worked closely with the Garda for many years, there was an official level that could be a bit strained, but below that we never had any bother. If you wanted something you had to go through the official level at the top, if you wanted to go to Dublin to interview somebody, you had to make a formal application. Once you got permission, you were told to report to ‘so and so’ at a particular station who would be your liaison officer, once you got to that level it was extremely friendly. One of the things we were told was when we went into ‘The South’ the Garda liaison officer would interview the witness, record any statement and give it to you. When we went down and met the Liaison officer, he just told us to go ahead and do the interview and record any statements ourselves, when you asked him if he was sure he just said, ‘yeah yeah go ahead’. However, at a political level it was frosty, but once you got below that to the reality, the nuts and bolts of reality

MI5, MILITARY & AGS Page 24 of 28 there never was any problem. Having worked with and been entertained by many Police Forces, the Garda were by far the best hosts. I had a lot of time for the Garda over the years.

OFFICER 30

Most of the time the relationship was fine, but it was often down to personalities. You got ‘level headed down to earth’ people who were very good at their job, then you had others with the ‘medal syndrome’, and some of these were really a nightmare, they were sneaky. You would ask them to do something and they would go behind your back and do something else. Those I got on best with were local UDR guys, some of the English were very good and those English regiments with Irish lads in their ranks were good, but there were others who felt because they had Intelligence units attached to them thought they were ‘Dan Dare’ or the Special Forces. They would try and fly under the radar, I remember one time one such character went off to do a search near the Border, I was tipped off and I went down and asked him if he had clearance to do the search, he just ‘hemmed and hahed’ so I told him to pack up and leave before I reported him to Lisburn. He had just gone off on a whim.

When I was in Uniform you would have some ‘mad’ colonel with a wild idea which he would throw hundreds of resources at, and, when you heard what he wanted to do you just knew it was only going to annoy people and not do any good. Could you talk to them? No, they would just ignore what we told them and off they would go.

Generally, the local police had a good understanding and relationship with the Army. Sometimes Army units that were new would be a bit edgy until they settled in, units that had been here before or who had ‘old hands’ who had been here before were a bit better. That is what we found in South Armagh, those who had been here before settled in really quick, and, those that hadn’t, you could see it in their faces. They didn’t understand, some of the officers didn’t understand, some of them had this ‘gung ho’ thing, there are medals to be won here!

When you saw the resources the Army were putting into those hilltop sites and what it took to sustain them, when you saw the results, I honestly think they would be better deployed and dispersed across the whole area. I could never see the value of them. I was later asked, when I was in Special Branch on the Border, whether that thinking should be extended outside South Armagh I told them they were a waste of time. There were a couple of worthwhile Border Checkpoints but not the Hilltop sites. When you saw the resources the Army put in to maintain and defend them, what they got, as far as I know, was minimal, the costs and benefits weren’t equal.

Military Intelligence, there was one unit I wasn’t that enamoured with, they came down for advice and then went off and did their own thing only to end up with a load of crap which continually kept coming back to my desk, eventually it ‘died a death’. My position was, if someone came for my help and I can give it, I will, and, if I can’t I won’t, so if I say Yes, I mean Yes, and, if I say No, I mean No, it’s as simple as that. Some accepted that and some didn’t, the latter would just plough on and end up with a bad result. They had no answer when you asked them ‘why did you do that when you were told not too?’ It was frustrating when they went behind your back.

I had some dealings with the Security Services, most of it was above my level, but whatever I asked for I got, so I didn’t have any problem with them. However, it used to be ‘could you please help’, it

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was nice requests, but that later became ‘I want’ and ‘you will’, and, reply by such and such a date, so who was leading who? Where was police primacy? But generally, when they helped, they were good.

GARDA

I found it good on a personal level, at an official level and at meetings I never got an awful lot out of them. I found if you got to know someone and built a relationship with them, they would help, but as soon as you mentioned officialdom the ‘Guards’ would literally run a mile rather than be seen to help. Help was on an ad hoc basis, there were a couple of things we wanted done and we went through RUC Headquarters where there was an officer who had good contacts down there and things worked absolutely perfectly.

It was the same when I was in Uniform, it was personal relationships very much so.

OFFICER 31

In terms of the Army supporting the police I think the Army were a necessity in Northern Ireland. When ‘The Troubles’ started the RUC couldn’t cope with the level of violence, they needed the Army. The Army helped save lives, protected us on patrol, and they provided a necessary specialist capability, for example they had the DET who did what we did in terms of surveillance. The day to day working relationship was both good and bad, and at times it could be frosty.

I think the tactics and how they approached things were different to how we did the job. They were compromised much more than we ever were doing things we wouldn’t have done, but then we could walk into area and talk, and, they couldn’t. Their biggest downfall was, they had English accents, so if they were challenged, they couldn’t talk their way out of it whereas we could.

The relationship with FRU, they were viewed like the DET, they did things that our handlers wouldn’t have done. As far as MI5 is concerned, they were an integral part of what we did in surveillance, we had a good relationship with MI5. I think there is a danger when you come from another country into Northern Ireland that it’s very difficult to understand the complexity of life here, the social communities and backgrounds. Whether you are Green Army or MI5 you will always struggle to appreciate what the RUC officer does because he has grown up here in the community and can see things and interpret things according to the local context. At times we could see that MI5, when they told us to do things, we could see they had misinterpreted what was going on, that sort of thing happened quite often.

I personally didn’t have a great deal of interaction with the Guards in my police service, and when I was in Surveillance it was none. When I was in Uniform and worked on the Border, yes, I encountered the Guards, on a one to one there was no problem, at that personal level it was great, but at the organisational level, that higher or formal level, there could be difficulties. But on the ground, the average Guard just across the Border was dealing with people who were doing things on his side that were illegal, and, they came across the border to do things on our side that were illegal before going back across, so they were criminals on both sides of the Border.

I have no definite experience, but I don’t think they were as prepared to deal with terrorism as we were, they weren’t under the same threat as we were, they worked in a sort of neutral environment

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which we didn’t. North of the Border in South Armagh was dangerous, but south of the Border it wasn’t. The IRA wasn’t attacking their State, they were unarmed for a reason, their Constitution meant they weren’t armed apart from their Taskforce. The average Guard wasn’t under the same level of threat as us, that’s not to say the IRA didn’t shoot Guards, they did, but the perception was once armed terrorists were across the Border into the South, they were home and dry. Whether the Guards could have done more, I don’t know, I don’t have that experience.

OFFICER 32

Very little other than the UDR would come in at night to do security with us, and we got on alright.

OFFICER 33

The relationship was OK, it wasn’t perfect on the Branch side, the Army had their intelligence officers and they wanted to do their own thing, and they did stupid things. The Army in general, in later years, when they were under better control it was better, but in the early years they wanted to do it their way. Eventually the police managed to pull them into line and told them ‘you’re doing it our way’.

Then Ops Planning was set up and where possible there was a Uniform police officer out with every one of their patrols. The Army caused quite a bit of friction with the Nationalist community particularly when the checkpoints were on. If they had a hunch somebody was a Republican, or, if they got abuse from somebody, they would make it quite difficult for them, pulling them over every time they went through the checkpoint, and, maybe kept that going for some time even though there was no need for it. I have to say that in my experience the Army created a lot of hassle.

The Guards were very good on a one to one basis. At one stage they introduced Border Superintendents, and nobody was to talk to the Guards. Anything to do with the Guards was to go through the Border Superintendent who would speak to his opposite number in the Guards, but that didn’t work and was never going to work. The guys on the ground, the Sergeants or your opposite number were the men to talk to, and we did talk unbeknown to the authorities. The Guards authorities wouldn’t have wanted that co-operation, but to be fair there were a lot of good Guards along the Border who were keen to help us. It was a case of you scratch my back I’ll scratch yours. I remember in my early CID days in Strabane, we were looking for a fella for a string of burglaries and I asked the Guards if he was doing burglaries on their side as we couldn’t get our hands on him. One night the Guards rang and told me he was heading across the Border towards Strabane, I called ‘the car’ and told them the guy was crossing over from Lifford, they went down and there he was, and he was arrested. So, we helped each other and that way you didn’t need extradition, that’s the way it was dealt with. Some of the Guards would tell you when they thought something was up and to look out, they maybe didn’t know what was going on, but they did tell us to ‘batten down the hatches’, we shared that information with Special Branch, and they would issue a threat message warning people to be careful.

There was one instance, there were 2 or 3 OTRs we were interested in Monaghan and the Guards would tell us when they thought they were up to something but this time they didn’t, and they slipped across the Border and shot 2 policemen. How much did the Guards know? you never knew how much they knew. To an extent their Special Detective Unit dealt with the terrorist aspect, but

MI5, MILITARY & AGS Page 27 of 28 there were always a couple of detectives in the local station dealing with it as well, they did both CID and Special Branch work, they did all detective duties. Personally speaking, the Guards were very good I could never say they let us down, they were able to warn us to be on the alert about a lot of things, and, as a result we were able to take preventive measures and prevent people getting killed. In general, they had enough coming in to suggest if something was going on and they told us that we needed to do something, so we were able to ‘batten down the hatches’ and make it more difficult for them at least, but we never really got the specifics.

OFFICER 34

Honestly, I never really liked the Army, there was a need for them to stabilise the situation, but I think they overstayed their welcome, probably because the government was afraid to do something. I never really liked having them here, never saw much use for them aside from a bit of protection for us. The soldiers didn’t ‘get’ what was going on here, most of them were young fellas who didn’t have a clue, they just thought everybody here was a against them, and probably 90% were.

I don’t have much experience apart from ‘Derry, up there the Guards were always quite helpful at the local level.

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