This electronic thesis or dissertation has been downloaded from the King’s Research Portal at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/ Informers, Agents, the IRA and British Counter-Insurgency Strategy during the Northern Ireland Troubles, 1969 to 1998 Leahy, Thomas Daniel Melchizadek Awarding institution: King's College London The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. END USER LICENCE AGREEMENT Unless another licence is stated on the immediately following page this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work Under the following conditions: Attribution: You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Non Commercial: You may not use this work for commercial purposes. No Derivative Works - You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work. Any of these conditions can be waived if you receive permission from the author. Your fair dealings and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact [email protected] providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 30. Sep. 2021 Informers, Agents, the IRA and British Counter-Insurgency Strategy during the Northern Ireland Troubles, 1969 to 1998 By Thomas Daniel Leahy. Department of History, King’s College London. Submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History, August 2015. The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. 1 Abstract This thesis investigates the impact of informers and agents upon Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) military strategy, and British counter-insurgency strategy in Northern Ireland between 1969 and 1998. The importance of this topic was highlighted by revelations in 2003 and 2005 concerning two senior republicans who had both been working for British intelligence for decades. The uncovering of these two senior spies created intense debate within the media and Irish republican community as to whether the IRA ended its military campaign largely because of significant infiltration. Yet, surprisingly, there has been no dedicated academic study of the impact of informers and agents upon the IRA. A few academics have briefly considered this topic in recent monographs and journal articles. Whilst acknowledging other important factors, they argue that intelligence successes against the IRA played a crucial role in influencing that organization to end its military campaign in 1998. This first in-depth study of the influence of informers and agents on IRA and British strategies during the Troubles cross-references new extensive interview material alongside memoirs from various Troubles participants. Its central argument is that the elusive nature of many rural IRA units, its cellular structure in Belfast, and the isolation of the IRA leadership prevented the organization from being damaged to any considerable extent by spies. In fact, the IRA’s resilience was a key factor encouraging the British government to try to include republicans in political settlements in 1972, 1975 and the 1990s. The IRA’s military strength also points towards the prominence of political factors in persuading republicans to call a ceasefire by 1994. The role of spies in Northern Ireland and the circumstances in which the state permitted negotiations with the IRA are key considerations for those interested in other small-scale conflicts. 2 Contents Acknowledgements: p.4. Abbreviations: pp.5-6. Introduction: pp.7-27. Chapter one: ‘Building something out of nothing’: Informers, agents, the IRA, and British counter-insurgency strategy, 1969 to July 1972: pp.28-67. Chapter two: Informers, agents, the IRA, and British counter-insurgency strategy, July 1972 to December 1975: pp.68-112. Chapter three: The struggle to contain the IRA, 1976 to August 1994: pp.113-181. Chapter four: A change in republican and British strategies, 1983 to 1998: pp.182-226. Conclusion: pp.227-237. Appendix 1: IRA ‘intended target’ killings by year in various geographical areas where the IRA operated: pp.238-239. Appendix 2: Seats won by Sinn Féin and the SDLP in district council elections between 1985 and 1997: pp.240-241. Appendix 3: Other suspected agents and informers killed by the IRA: p.241. Bibliography: pp.242-256. 3 Acknowledgements I thank Professor Ian McBride and Doctor Paul Readman for their guidance throughout the writing of my PhD. Professor Stephen Lovell and Doctor Michael Kerr also provided valuable feedback during my upgrade. I am very grateful to all interviewees for participating in my research, and to all of those who helped to arrange interviews. A number of people have kindly discussed this topic with me at length, including Drs Huw Bennett, Tim Stevens, Martyn Frampton, John Bew and Simon Prince. The staff at the following institutions kindly granted permission to quote from their material: Imperial War Museum Sound Archives, King’s College London’s Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, The London School of Economics Library Archives, and the National University of Ireland Galway Archives. Finally, I really appreciate the support of my parents, family and my wife Sara Leahy. 4 List of Abbreviations: CAIN – Conflict Archive Northern Ireland. CLF – Commander of Land Forces (British Army). DCI – Director and Coordinator of Intelligence (British state). FRU – Force Research Unit. Gardai – Irish police force. GHQ – IRA General Headquarters Staff. GOC – General Officer Commanding (British Army). INLA – Irish National Liberation Army. Loyalists – Paramilitary groups that support the British union. MI5 – Military Intelligence Section Five, the UK’s internal counter-intelligence agency. MI6 – Secret Intelligence Service, the UK’s external counter-intelligence agency. MILO – Military Intelligence Liaison Officer. MRF – Military Reaction Force. Old IRA – old Irish Republican Army. Provisional IRA – Provisional Irish Republican Army. PSNI – Police Service Northern Ireland. RUC – Royal Ulster Constabulary, the old Northern Irish police force. RUCR – Royal Ulster Constabulary Reserve. SAS – Special Air Service. SDLP - Social Democratic Labour Party. Sinn Féin – The political-wing of the Provisional IRA. Special Branch – Royal Ulster Constabulary Special Branch. UDR – Ulster Defence Regiment, locally recruited force supporting the RUC. Incorporated into the Royal Irish Rangers regiment (RIR) in the 1990s. 5 14th Intelligence Company – Undercover surveillance unit for the British Army. 6 Introduction Informers and agents have been a constant feature of modern British counter-insurgency strategy. Some obvious examples are the ‘small wars’ that marked the demise of British colonial rule during the 1950s. Christopher Andrew’s recent history of MI5 reveals that, during the British campaign in Cyprus in the late 1950s, some captured Greek-Cypriot EOKA1 insurgents and local Turkish-Cypriot civilians worked for British intelligence. Their information enabled British security forces to capture and kill a number of leading EOKA rebels. Amongst other factors, Andrew believes that this ‘intelligence-led’ effort against EOKA enabled the British government to avoid capitulating to EOKA demands for unity with Greece, and to create a political compromise between Greek and Turkish Cypriots. Earlier, during the Malayan Emergency between 1948 and 1960, Andrew believes a coordinated intelligence effort between the local Special Branch and MI5 helped ensure that the communist insurgents did not win.2 Elsewhere, in his detailed and insightful study of British counter-insurgency efforts in Kenya during the 1950s, Huw Bennett describes how a combination of techniques, including ‘screening’ villages where the Mau Mau were believed to be hiding and amnesties for some Mau Mau prisoners, enabled British intelligence to gain informers within the movement. Bennett’s account contains numerous examples of informers damaging the Mau Mau insurgency.3 By the time that British troops arrived in Northern Ireland in 1969, it can be no surprise that informers and agents again formed a crucial part of an intelligence-led strategy against the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA). Like EOKA, the IRA was an underground organization hiding within specific host communities. British forces once more required insiders either from within the paramilitary group, or the community where the paramilitaries operated, in order to disrupt the insurgency. The IRA were fully aware of the threat posed by informers and agents. ‘[T]he greatest weapon England has’, they declared in their newspaper An Phoblacht in 1974, ‘is that of the informer. Without [them] it is possible that the people of Ireland would have had full control over their country a long time ago’.4 A brief survey of previous conflicts between Irish republicans and the British state shows that there is some truth in this claim. For instance, informers hindered the United Irishmen rebellion under Wolfe Tone 1 Greek acronym meaning the National Organization of Cypriot Fighters. 2 Christopher Andrew, The Defence of the Realm: The Authorised History