SPECIAL BRANCH
OFFICER 1
Informants are a VITAL part of detective work all over the world. Police must infiltrate the ‘enemy’ criminal or terrorist groups to get ways of knowing what they are about to do. Should police use informants who have been involved in serious crime? That’s the most difficult question, I often swithered about it in private. Knowing for sure that someone, who is giving lifesaving information did what he did in the past, particularly if it was serious crime, I just have grave reservations. How can you balance that? It’s hard, there might be intelligence it happened, but you need evidence, if you do have evidence that he has murdered someone, particularly a policeman or a soldier, if you know he has done that, I don’t think he should be getting money every week as a paid informant.
I suppose when ‘The Troubles’ were going on, there was limited intelligence coming in and if your only source had been involved in serious crimes you held him on until you got someone better, so you don’t cut the cord altogether. I might say that, but it runs against the grain. It was a big dilemma. I was in Uniform most of my service, and, it was never a dilemma I had. I told SB, I don’t want to know, I have enough bloody problems of my own without knowing yours, just tell me what I need to know; they had their chain of command to deal with their problems.
The danger was the most important thing the police faced. I said to SB, look I don’t want to know all your secrets, I just want to know what I need to know, but if you try to save a tout and one of my officers gets killed because you saved a tout – I will be annoyed! I was trying to save them, protect officers without hindering the job the Branch were doing. I knew they were doing a good job, being quite successful and I was happy with that, and, they were able to give me a few successes which pleased me no end.
In all my service I only know of 1 or 2 cases when the intelligence gave us a complete picture - a definitive time, place and details of what was going to happen, the rest of the time the intelligence was a very vague thing. For example, SB would tell you ‘the terrorists have a bomb ready in such and such a place and they are thinking about moving it but we don’t know when’, so all you can do is put in some counter activity, even if you don’t know the time - you try and deter the terrorists for a while until you get the timings.
I know informants have to be involved, they have to join the IRA, they have to prove themselves to the IRA, show they are keen to be a terrorist, and, are willing to be involved. So, they have to do something before they become of any use to us, and, the IRA will not trust them either, until they do something.
It’s not easy to recruit an informant, I think there are some areas where money is a good talker, but when you get out to the ‘Countryman’, he’s not attracted by what he would call ‘dirty money’, to be an informant. One way, not the only way, was to use Uniform men to help identify potential sources. You would ask a Uniform man, who had his head screwed on, when he was on patrol to note the cars at a certain house, or, do a VCP and see who was in the car with known people, this began to help SB. To recruit a terrorist source you have to have a strong lever on him one way or another, we tested a source to see if he was willing to work with us.
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Handling sources within the rules is OK. I don’t know of any handlers who got into a ‘collusive’ situation. I know some handlers could almost be good friends with some of their informants, that happens that’s getting into danger territory. If it happens you start to wonder if the handler would cover for something his informant has done, or, if the informant is using that friendship, so you do wonder at times, have things reached that stage? There was certainly reluctance, if you were a SB man, or, you had a team of officers around you in the Branch, and, you had a good set of informants producing good material, you were very reluctant to identify an informant as a suspect, knowing they would be arrested by CID and charged, you were reluctant. It was selfishness, but it was pride that he was a good source that made you want to keep him. The big problem was deciding when his criminality out-weighed the value of his intelligence.
There are a whole lot of similarities between a SB source and a CID source. If the source is going to be any good to CID, he has to be involved in crime. He has to be pals with the criminals, meet them, maybe play golf with them, and, drink with them; there has to be some liaison like that before the source is any good. It is easier to recruit a criminal as a source, he is in it for the money. Money is more attractive to the criminal than to the terrorist, particularly if he is an out and out Republican reared to revere ‘the boys in The Kesh’ [HMP Maze a high security prison].
Terrorists are the greater threat because they are more likely to kill somebody. Protecting life is the most important thing for the police. Informants face risks, it’s down to the police handler to manage those, and warn the source not to be too talkative, or, if they are paid money not to spend it recklessly so that others start to ask ‘where are you getting all that money from?’ I thought some of the terrorist informants I became familiar with took tremendous risks, risks I wouldn’t take, so they had to have courage. Some informants were making big money, I don’t know the amounts involved, these were people near the top. Police have a duty of care for their informants, if there is a risk he has been compromised, we have a duty of care to get him out, give him a new name and identity, somewhere else to live, if he is willing to go. That duty of care, to protect life, extends to how we use their information, and, if we use it, we have to consider the risks of disclosing the identity of the source. Meeting a source is very risky, you have to meet somewhere quiet where he has a good reason to be, and, when he goes back to his community of associates he has to be on his guard all of the time. The terrorist’s final word on informants is a body in a black bag on a border road.
I wasn’t in Special Branch very long; I was reliant on colleagues for advice. I never really got to grips with the job, and, that’s why I left after a year with over 30 years police service. I had great helpers, people who kept me right because I needed to be kept right. In Uniform I had the experience of working in different places dealing with many things, so when something came up I was able to recognise the possibilities for action almost immediately, but not so when I was in the Branch. I didn’t feel content being in such a position and not having a good grip of it, so I decided to leave.
The Branch became too incestuous at times, that was a problem. It did change after the unfortunate helicopter crash [1994 RAF Chinook Helicopter carrying a number of SB and MI5 officers crashed on the Mull of Kintyre killing all onboard] it had to change. A number of us were brought in as replacements, I was one of them, and we knew nothing! It opened the door a bit. After I went in I thought one senior officer was going to have a heart attack in a meeting when I said ‘Where are the Standing Orders [instructions] for meeting informants?’ It was a simple thing and I followed it up, I asked, ‘On a Saturday night there is one man on duty?’ he answered ‘Yeah’ and I said ‘what if he gets
SPECIAL BRANCH Page 2 of 96 a call from a source who asks for an urgent meeting saying there is something going to happen tonight, what does the handler do?’ The reply was ‘He goes and meets him’. ‘Say he doesn’t turn up and he isn’t here on Monday morning after the weekend and we don’t know where he is, and, his wife is ringing up saying he didn’t come home. Where are you now? He has been kidnapped by the IRA, he is being tortured. Where are you if you don’t have Standing Orders telling people what to do and get back up?’ I asked. They were all the students of a previous Regional Head of Special Branch who never wrote anything down unless it was on a scrap of paper in pencil. It took something to get the Branch opened up a bit. It has changed now.
There was no guidance or structure to guide SB officers, none that I found anyway. There was too much incestuous movement within the Branch, you joined as a Constable, and, some got to be Chief Superintendents and never left the Branch. While that can be a strength in many ways, you can become isolated from reality on the ground. If there had been some interchange between CID and SB personnel, or, even if some Uniform men went in at Inspector level they could learn the job from the Sergeants and Constables out meeting the informants, they would soon pick it up. I wasn’t in that position to start talking to the boys about their informants and where to meet them, I wasn’t knowledgeable about that. The Branch men seemed to have too much freedom to act on their own initiative, you could get the odd reckless fella, who without consulting a superior would say we’ll just go and see the informant anyway. I think this might have been because there was little guidance and supervision at a time. I was a bit concerned, even the man standing in the Sangar, guarding the police station had a list of orders telling him what to do while he was doing his duty; everybody else had them in Uniform. So why not have some guidance, some outline at least telling handlers that you’ll not go out and meet an informant without informing others and getting some back up? It’s simple guidance like that that would have helped.
It is not a risk, in some ways, allowing some terrorist activity. We had access to explosives dumps and their firearms, there were things done to those instruments to make them harmless, and, I would allow a ‘tout’ to be involved in the production and delivery of that. But if you think they are going out with a 100% weapon or 100% Semtex or explosive device, NO, that doesn’t happen.
We got to the stage we had a good intelligence capability, we had good intelligence coming in near the end of the campaign, we had them well sown up. We were able to put counter measures in place, and, we gave a few people lots of shocks. So that was putting out such a deterrent that the ‘enemy’ considered they were too infiltrated to carry on with their activities. You do get an ‘out and out’ IRA man who knows nothing else but hatred, wants the ‘Brits Out’, and, will do anything to get the Brits out, there were some of those and there was no ‘turning them’ (dissuading) they had to be met with equal force to arrest them, and some lost their lives. It was, I don’t want to be bitter in my views, I hated seeing anyone killed but I thought it was professional and responsible to see that innocent people weren’t killed; if it was the terrorist it had to be necessary and justified in the circumstances.
Was Special Branch effective in the Intelligence War? They were the only people who could do it nearly right, I couldn’t give them 100% for their success rate but they were much better than the Army intelligence unit, the FRU, they came in and drove about the country with a suitcase full of money trying to buy anybody and everybody, especially those they thought were Special Branch informants. I didn’t like that. I always thought it took the Irishman to know the Irishman, and they
SPECIAL BRANCH Page 3 of 96 are different in different areas. The Belfast man is maybe easier to recruit as an informant for money than the County Tyrone man, you needed a different lever for him. I found Irishmen were much better at doing the job recruiting and running informants, they were excellent at it and knew how to handle things. SB used Uniform officers out on the ground as their spotters in some cases, which I thought was good, it allowed Special Branch to think of further recruits from Uniform branch by using officers in a minor way to see if they were suitable for Special Branch, and, to let Uniform officers see if the Branch was suitable for them. I worked with a number of Branch men and I have a high regard for them, and, I still have.
OFFICER 2
Ah I can’t tell you that, ha ha!!! There are a lot of myths about Special Branch, many of which have now been exploded by Billy Matchett’s book, Secret Victory , in a way which we signally failed to explode ourselves in the past. Special Branch was an easy target for propaganda because of this secrecy thing. Special Branch can be accused of things and cannot give a satisfactory answer, because to give a satisfactory answer is actually a breach of everything you have been trained to do, and, could in fact lead to serious threats to people who are still living, or, to the reputation of people, or, to difficulties for the families of people who are dead.
I think one of the things you need to bear in mind when you look at some of the allegations, you know the ‘Force within a Force’, obviously we know that the whole thing was designed as a propaganda exercise by the Republicans, because Republicans will always seek to damage those bits of the security apparatus which are most effective in frustrating their objectives. That’s perfectly normal and I think everybody understands that, what they don’t understand is the fallacies of the arguments that were used as a way to try and undermine the credibility of the Royal Ulster Constabulary’s Special Branch. So this ‘Force within a Force’ thing, really started in the ‘80s when SB was starting to be pretty effective, having some good operations, really hurting the opposition. Now I’m not belittling the efforts of Special Branch Officers before that, but that’s really when it started to get effective, and, when you got the nonsense allegations like that ‘Force within a Force’. The Republican propagandists were so successful that you even had one or two Police Officers telling Patten that they believed there was a ‘Force within a Force’.
The people who say these things, have not really thought through the concept of secret operations and a ‘need to know’ basis. I mean the work of Special Branch is secret, everybody who goes into Special Branch has to be vetted to show that they can keep a secret. I remember I caused a few sniggers and raised eyebrows, and, I hope a few nods of approval when I gave an interview to the BBC just after I retired. I remember I went to the BBC dressed wearing a black polo neck jumper and a black leather jacket, I think had just come back from the Balkans, and they asked what I thought if an Officer refused to tell me something because it was secret, and, would I be prepared to have this man working for me? I said, ‘Well, yes, I jolly well would, because I wouldn’t want anyone working for me who couldn’t keep a secret, that’s what Special Branch has to do’
You’ve got to accept that if there’s a violent conflict, secret intelligence is one of the best tools you’re going to have for reducing loss of life. The Walker Report, and the concept of Police Primacy for law and order after 1976, gave SB Primacy in relation to handling any agent that might be able to produce intelligence in relation to subversive activity. It’s fairly simple, if you’re a CID Officer, and you’re handling a tout and the tout starts to say, ‘well I can tell you not just about this series of
SPECIAL BRANCH Page 4 of 96 burglaries going on, but I can tell you about terrorism if you give me a bit more money’. Then the Walker Report says at that moment the CID officer should say, ‘Great, I’d like you to meet another friend of mine’ and then SB take it from there. If you go one step further, people outside SB knew if they were going to do certain searches or certain arrests, they needed SB clearance first.
Now, there is a big intelligence picture; the intelligence thing was very complicated and blundering around could compromise, not just individuals, it could compromise technical devices which might have taken three years to get into a location. It could have compromised a source who was providing life-saving intelligence, who had taken four or five years to recruit and get into the right place, all sorts of things could have gone wrong. That doesn’t mean to say, as those people who want to do Special Branch down say, that SB would then take it upon itself to break the law, protect law breakers and all the rest of it, in order to maintain their secret empires. That wasn’t the thing at all, any more than an Out of Bounds was designed to protect any malfeasance in public office by Special Branch Officers. There were basically two reasons for Out of Bounds, either a belief that the opposition had presented a threat in an area and we couldn’t be more specific than that, so for the safety of the officers we would just say, don’t go in there. You will find if you speak to ex-SB Officers, there are anecdotes of times when Out of Bounds information failed to get through and people got hurt as a result. You may know examples yourself, but I’ve certainly been told about one or two where an Out of Bounds was declared, and, one Inspector failed to pass it on to the next one taking over, for whatever the reason, and people said, ‘Oh well the Branch must have known about that and why didn’t they do something?’ So, there were Out of Bounds to protect people, and, then there were Out of Bounds to protect operations which were taking place.
So, operations might have led to danger, for example, Loughgall obviously had to have a big Out of Bounds. There might have been an Out of Bounds simply because some of the people who worked for me were going out with friends from Thames House and some soldiers to carry out a little task and didn’t want to be interrupted. They didn’t want to be interrupted by hostile armed gangsters, nor did they want to be interrupted by Uniform Branch responding to a call reporting a burglary going on at such and such a house where they were working, so, there are all sorts of reasons why you had to do things and not tell anybody. The Walker Report in a way, was a reflection of the Government’s overall strategy which, for a long time up to the 31 st August 1994 anyway, supported the main function of the Police and the Security Forces to stop people being killed. If we could in addition, prosecute the people who were doing the killing, great, but actually the first thing was saving lives.
When we look at how the policy, which Matchett identifies, developed, I think you can look at it in more ways than simply police and other security officials trying to find out what would work and what wouldn’t work, I think again there’s a slightly bigger context. For example, there were various reviews of what the RUC was doing, including in relation to Special Branch, including a regular series of independent reviews by intelligence experts from outside the RUC. Very often these would be either military or MI5 or MI6, or, somebody who’d been in an Imperial or Colonial Police Force or something like that, or, a General who’d fought against insurrection, but basically it was people who were looking at the problem, not from an RUC perspective, to offer advice on how things could be developed and improved. Basically, there were a lot of ideas coming from outside, and, they were melding with ideas that were being generated within the RUC in response to specific problems and
SPECIAL BRANCH Page 5 of 96 shortcomings of then current methods to address those problems, so we were constantly developing things.
But setting aside the security professionals, you’ve got the political element, so during my time when I was relatively senior within this context, security policy was formed at a very high level. In fact, in effect it was formed by the Prime Minister and top advisors in Whitehall, and, it permeated down to the operational level through a mechanism called the Security Policy Meeting (SPM) chaired by the Secretary of State, and, it set the Policy. Now it wasn’t quite as sophisticated as I make it sound because SPM was a regular thing, so it was addressing problems as they arose as well as asking, what is our response going to be, not what is our operational response going to be, it was ‘what is our policy response going to be?’ It was down to the Chief Constable with the assistance of the GOC and the Director and Co-ordinator of Intelligence to implement the policy.
Underneath that tier there would be bi-laterals for the purpose of discussing these matters. But anyway, be that as it may, impetus to make changes to the way we did things came from a lot of directions. But, one of the milestones if you like, was the Walker Report, which I thought was supposed to be secret but Jonty Brown chose to discuss it in his book, in what I believe to be a rather foolish chapter in which he says, ‘I knew full well what the report said and what the rules were, and, I ignored them, I didn’t much care for them, I thought it allowed Special Branch to get away with all sorts nonsense’. But what Walker said, and what came, basically signalled the acceptance that the most important thing that the Security Forces had to do was to stop more people being killed.
If, in addition to that they could arrest and prosecute, successfully, the people that were doing the killing, so much the better. Now in order to, or one of the ways in which that policy was reflected was by having a co-ordinated structure for dealing with the secret side of policing, and, informants were part of the secret side of policing. So if CID was running an informant with access to intelligence which might be useful in dealing with National Security matters, terrorism is a National Security matter, then Special Branch had to be give priority and be involved with the informant.
The main policy came from Downing Street to the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, it went through the Security Policy Group which probably met once a month, chaired by the Secretary of State, he had the Permanent Under Secretary, who in my time was Sir John Chilcott, the Chief Constable, the General Officer Commanding, Director and Co-ordinator of Intelligence who was the Head of Station for MI5 and various others. The Chief Superintendent Command Secretariat didn’t sit at the table, he sat one row back and I deputised for him, so I saw it at that level before I was ever involved in anything else. So policy wasn’t some sort of spontaneous decision by some Superintendent in Special Branch, this was a Policy set by government, and, the Policy was, we’re going to protect lives; the way we’re going to do this is by penetrating the organisations through the use of what are now called ‘human intelligence sources’, informants, ‘touts’, agents, whatever word you want to use, and through surveillance, which can take the form of old women with shopping trolleys, cars containing middle aged men, usually any combination of those. And, technical surveillance to find where people are or to follow them or to listen to what they’re saying, telephone intercepts, everything under control, audited, documented. Now, because there was so much of it going on and because we thought we were adhering to Data Protection regulations, some of the records would have been jettisoned after a while. And now of course, that for some is an indication
SPECIAL BRANCH Page 6 of 96 of ‘collusion’ and God knows whatever invented crimes, but really, anybody who’s got a realistic understanding would know that such conclusions are all nonsense.
Another other thing about the ‘Force within a Force’ is, look at the supervision that took place. First of all, the idea that Constables did what they liked in CID and even more so in SB, I don’t think is right. The fact is, you can’t say as a Uniform Branch constable, or a D/C in the SB or CID ‘I can do what I like’; they couldn’t, because there were rules to control them that didn’t even involve going to an official Discipline Board at Ormiston, so I don’t accept that argument for a minute.
I do accept that a D/C in Special Branch could go and see a Superintendent in Uniform Branch and say, ‘I’m asking you to do this’. Now the Superintendent would have been perfectly within his rights in saying, ‘Bollocks, get lost’, but then he’d get a phone call from a Chief Superintendent in Special Branch, so why bother? You know if the Ambassador goes to see the President, he’s speaking with the authority of Her Majesty the Queen and her Government, he’s not just some career diplomat who happens to have got a nice posting, that’s his function, he speaks with that authority. If I ring up an ACC when I’m Superintendent in Command Secretariat and say, ‘have you thought about doing this, that and the other’, the ACC will very quickly know from the tone of my voice whether I’m saying have you thought about doing this, that or the other or whether I’m saying the Chief Constable would like you to do this or that or the other, so again, I don’t accept the ‘Force within a Force’ on that principle.
The other thing which these people should bear in mind is, if you look at the personnel who have filled the rank of Superintendent, Chief Superintendent and ACC in Special Branch during the period when it was at its most effective, how many of them were career Special Branch Officers? Brian Fitzsimons who died on the helicopter, his Deputy for the last couple of years, yes, career Special Branch Officers, the man who was ACC of Special Branch when most of the Loughgall type operations took place, a career Traffic Division Officer; me, I was the Head of the Assessment Desk when I started, I then became Head of Intelligence, I subsequently came back as ACC never been in Special Branch below the rank of Superintendent. At one time the three Regional Heads, two were basically Uniform Branch and one was ex-CID, the most successful Regional Head of Special Branch in South Region who launched most of those operations which were so successful in saving lives by removing the people who were doing most of the killing, was a CID Detective Inspector when he lost his arm and leg and fingers, he wasn’t a career Special Branch Officer, but he was very good at it. So if this was really a ‘Force within a Force’, or, a ‘Committee’ of secret people, we were pretty lax about who we let onto the committee.
Then you have conspiracy theories, but how many people ‘need to know about an operation? The Branch worked on a very strict ‘need to know’ basis but to launch a big operation, a lot of people ‘needed to know’, they maybe didn’t need to know all aspects of the operation, but they needed to know some aspects of it. So if you were going to engage in any kind of activity about which you had the slightest doubts in terms of integrity, lawfulness, appropriateness or anything else, you really had to be sure that a huge number of people, many of whom you may never have met, were going to stand by you if something went wrong, or, if it came out in the open. Now maybe I’m too risk adverse but I wouldn’t want to be compromising my personal integrity or my professional integrity or reputation or conceivably my liberty or pension by doing something that was wrong in those circumstances. It just doesn’t hold water, but may start to gather water if determined propagandists
SPECIAL BRANCH Page 7 of 96 repeat the mantra sufficiently frequently to an audience of people who really don’t know any better, that’s how these sorts of things get off the ground. The reason why they get off the ground is because, and, I’ll use the word that I used in the speech our pusillanimous politicians are engaged in some kind of secret stitch-up deal with the people who are trying to belittle us, and, that’s why they can’t come out and say ‘look, this is complete rubbish and what’s more, we’re going to re-gig institutions to enable these people to defend themselves against these pernicious and false accusations’, but I can’t see that change any time soon. Secretaries of State, and Theresa May made a particularly good speech, Brokenshire has said something along the same lines about not allowing Republicans to alter History, but actually, having said that, they’re not doing anything to stop this process, and, everybody is trying to shift responsibility and Westminster simply doesn’t want to know. I can say as an Englishman that the Ulsterman’s belief that Westminster would love to betray Ulster is accurate. I am becoming more Irish than the Irish, going native, all the other expressions that people use about Brits who come to Ireland, there you are, I’m worse than the rest of them.
OFFICER 3
CID were good, they followed up on cases. SB, I had very little to do with them, they didn’t really come into my area of policing, they were a separate Branch altogether, I had no contact with them, but I did with CID all the time and got great support from them.
OFFICER 4
SB had the lead for all intelligence operations, CID and Uniform had to consult SB before they could carry out arrests or searches. Sometimes it might have been for good reasons SB refused, but they never explained the reasons, and, that left it difficult and frustrating for investigators. Nobody ever knew what was lost or gained by a decision by SB, but they had the upper hand in the control of these things. This left investigators not knowing, it was never explained and sometimes it would have helped if additional information had been given.
Sometimes you were left with intelligence that said, “Mr A was involved in the murder of Mr B” and that was it, you would have liked the information expounded so that you could actually pursue levels of investigation. But all you could do, if you got that sort of information, was go and arrest that person, search his/her home and then look at alibis, and, if that person didn’t speak, all you were left with was that bit of intelligence. You could go and arrest and hold them for up to 72 hours, and, when they put in a complaint and a civil claim for wrongful arrest and detention you had to try and justify the arrest and the period of detention to question using that bit of intelligence, and, a ‘one liner’ was virtually useless, and, it became a real joke in the courts. Civil claims became very common during the 1980s, and, besides getting compensation they created an admin burden with police having to justify arrests and detention to lawyers and at court. It was best if you had evidence to justify an arrest as it was factual. Today we are criticised by the Ombudsman because he ignores the role of professional judgements and doesn’t want to understand what it was like.
Police had to use their professional judgment and try and balance individual rights with the appropriateness of making an arrest. In making a decision you had regard to the available evidence; and considered ‘how good is the intelligence?’ ‘Can I develop the intelligence into evidence’, and, ‘How long will it take?’ Often there was limited information, and, we had to assess the information and intelligence available e.g. how accurate is the intelligence from a technical source as those being
SPECIAL BRANCH Page 8 of 96 listened too might be talking in code? Is the information a summarised version of a conversation or a third party assessment of the material collected? Will use of that intelligence compromise the source? Then there are all the difficulties associated with single source information. Other considerations include the possibility of a civil action for wrongful arrest and detention, and, the likelihood of the person to be arrested talking during interviews. If someone had been arrested previously and never spoken during interviews, was it appropriate to make the arrest when you only had a one liner of intelligence and no evidence? What about public confidence and the victim’s family? Is the arrest too early and what are the dangers that the suspect will learn what the police know? You had to make a professional judgement as to the best time to make the arrest, each incident was different; it was very difficult.
There is a risk when you interview suspects that they can learn more about what you know than you learn from them, simply because we have to put what we know to the suspect to make it evidence. There has to be a balance, the difficulty was if you got a ‘one liner’ and you didn’t arrest then you were criticised by the Ombudsman for not carrying out the arrest. The Ombudsman doesn’t have any understanding that the person who had been arrested on six previous occasions, never spoken, and, was unlikely to do this time on a ‘one liner’ when there was no other evidence. And, then there was the issue of civil cases which the Ombudsman didn’t understand – so you are damned if you did and damned if you didn’t.
I do agree that if SB were to give additional information it could lead to the identity of the informant being disclosed, but at times some information could have been passed that wouldn’t have risked disclosing the identity of the source. It may have been information you could have been given to carry out searches which we could have carried out and masked the information so as not to show where it came from.
SB largely worked in a vacuum in my view, they had all the intelligence and it was held on a ‘need to know’ basis. They recruited informants, and, for the protection of informants it was a ‘need to know basis’, which I agree with, but I still felt that intelligence could have been disseminated better, and, there could have been a more joined up approach between SB and CID in order to use intelligence wisely while still protecting informants.
I think the ‘need to know’ principle is very, very important. If you don’t need to know you really don’t need to know. The more people you tell, the more things get lost in translation and you endanger methodology, and, if a human source is involved that person could get killed. The need to know basis is very important.
The various paramilitary groups used counter intelligence measures. It is known that PIRA had a very sophisticated cell network and had their own ‘need to know basis’. As soon as an operation went wrong or someone was arrested they had an investigation. It was carried out outside and inside the prison, and, the two joined up; they were very professional at it. They didn’t always get it right, but certainly every single word that was said during questioning was examined in detail, and, some of the people carrying out these things were very astute, and, some went on to get Law degrees and doctorates, all sorts of things. Hence the need for our ‘need to know basis’ rule.
The paramilitary groups questioned their volunteers, Loyalists were at it as well, but they weren’t as good at it as Republicans. They would question their people, they went along, and, I know of
SPECIAL BRANCH Page 9 of 96 occasions they did house to house enquiries, they went along and asked different neighbours who saw what. On one occasion they went along and asked a Priest what he had seen, and, what he reported to the police. They just went into things in detail down to seizing CCTV.
[As for informants] I think we did follow an ethical approach, and, we continually looked for legislation to improve things, both from an evidential point e.g. more powers to seize material and clothing as evidence and reduce civil claims, and, to guide intelligence gathering. Police continually looked for legislation rather than say ‘it’ll do, alright carry on and see how you do.’ I think government would have been happy at the time if the police had just said ‘we’ll try it and see’. The ethical approach was, I think, always upper most in police minds, and, to be morally correct and not to be doing things that were going to put the police in a bad light.
Prior to RIPA [2000] there were really no rules to guide us on the recruitment, registration and management of informants. You weren’t allowed to use informants as agent provocateurs, and, you couldn’t have an informant involved in murder; these dated back to a 1960s trial involving organised crime criminals in London. If they were involved in murder you couldn’t accept them, but it was very much the case there weren’t many guidelines in place.
We had ‘Supergrasses’ giving information; some ‘Supergrasses’ were genuine, others weren’t, some I believe were throwing in names just to add to their credibility. That’s why the system was discredited through those people who were out and out criminals, and, I think it was a wrong decision. There should have been a panel of senior officers to discuss the credibility of potential ‘Supergrasses’ before they were accepted, although at the time the DPP was asked, but he said it was an operational police decision. Some ‘Supergrasses’ were remorseful, but others were out to save themselves, and, I found some ‘Supergrasses’, let’s say, totally and utterly unreliable, I knew some of them before they became ‘Supergrasses’.
Dealing with informants is ethically and legally difficult, and, the big dilemma is judging the potential of a CHIS to save lives against their previous involvement in crime. If you don’t have long term CHIS in terrorist groups you can’t effectively deal with them. But working with informants is a moral trap. I believe that if someone like that is giving information, and, they expose themselves to prosecution it should be explained to them they will be investigated, and they take the risk that it could happen. One issue that comes to mind in particular relates to drug dealers. Drug dealers are regarded as the most devious people, they will inform on their competitors to reduce the competition. The issue for the police is when these people are arrested and there is little evidence, and, they turn round and say, ‘listen I have information there’s a lorry load of drugs coming in through Dover tonight worth about £20millon but I was caught last week with a bit of stolen property could you do something for me?’ do you turn round and say, ‘No there’s nothing I can do’ and allow the £20millon worth of drugs to come in? You have a dilemma, do you forget about the stolen property to get the drugs? It’s also the case when someone being questioned about a murder, says ‘I didn’t do it but I know who did another one’ and offers to give you that information. Now it seems you are taking information from a person who you know or strongly suspect of involvement in murder is giving you information about another murder, do you disregard the information? No, you take it. As long as those things are written down, I think it covers the police who are placed in an unenviable position faced with a moral dilemma of what to do. Informants are human, a lot of them are very devious, they can give you very little information, false information, or information about someone they hate,
SPECIAL BRANCH Page 10 of 96 or, they will include someone in a conspiracy who wasn’t anywhere near it, those are the dangers associated with informants.
There are dangerous CHIS, sources who seek to gain advantage from being a CHIS, be that immunity from prosecution, or, protection for their activities, or, a financial reward. Loyalist terrorists particularly fall into this category, they tend to be mostly gangsters involved in crime. To manage dangerous CHIS requires a legal framework such as RIPA, strong supervision, regular reviews to assess the usefulness of their product, and, the evidence and intelligence on their involvement in crime and terrorism. The use of CHIS must be appropriate, proportionate and necessary relative to the information they can give, no point having a big criminal who only gives low level intelligence.
There were massive risks for those supplying information to the police; it was a matter of life and death. It wasn’t a matter they would get a brick through their window, or, someone would assault them, they would be taken away and murdered. On the other hand if we ignored their intelligence we ran the risk of the source drying up.
CHIS can be difficult to manage and difficult to control. CHIS will tell you what they want to tell you, they will do their own thing, and, use the fact they are a source to protect their criminality. Sometimes they will lie to get revenge on someone, or, to get rid of a competitor. There needs to be close supervision of the Handlers as well to check that the CHIS is under control.
I do believe police should use CHIS in terrorist organisations, very much so, these organisations even down to top drug dealers and criminals are very secretive, and, the only way you get information on them is to get very, very close to them, you don’t get information coming out of the sky. You have to go and target them, and, it may be someone who is right in the middle of them, or, someone on the periphery, but you certainly need that information, and, I believe always will need it.
I think there are ethical issues in using informants and moral issues, and, I think it gets to the stage no matter how good a CHIS is, if they commit a murder they should not be used, if they pull the trigger they have broken the rules. You need to remember that terrorists are part of a disciplined organisation particularly PIRA, they are not like crime gangs, they have wider support, and, they have people who can step up to replace those arrested. So if you use CHIS to make a few arrests you will quickly lose the source; terrorists know that the police can’t use sources involved in murders so they try to get as many as possible involved in murders to counter efforts to recruit sources. It is difficult, and, sometimes a distinction is made between those involved in a murder e.g. whilst technically part of a murder those that help the killers could be a CHIS because they did not do the actually killing.
Now RIPA brought in a lot of different guidelines which are very, very helpful to the police as to a person’s role as an informant, and, the guidelines it provides on necessity and the Human Rights Act, I think are most, most helpful and important. I don’t believe the ends justify the means, if you have people like Brian Nelson being given information, and, at the same time supplying information that should not happen.
Whether or not a source should be arrested or allowed to remain in place, if he is implicated by another source is a very difficult one, and, it does place the police in a dilemma. If he acts outside his agreement with police he should be arrested, if he is acting within the agreement I think it all needs
SPECIAL BRANCH Page 11 of 96 to be balanced out by a number of people in authority in the police to decide on that issue as opposed to leaving it with a particular officer. You certainly can’t allow ‘the tail to wag the dog’; the informant must always be effectively controlled by his handlers and senior police supervisor. The retention of a source is based on necessity, proportionality and balanced with their level of involvement in serious crime.
If we look at Al Qaeda or ISIS and you have someone involved; these are dangerous groups and there are trade-offs. Any trade-offs would probably be very necessary, so it’s down to proportionality and it just needs a decision-making process based on saving life. Since 2000 RIPA has structured the decision-making process, prior to that there was very little, basically it was a source must not commit murder, and, must not be an agent provocateur.
This type of decision making process didn’t exist too much during the 70s, but during the 90s it did, the process just developed. In the beginning, in terms of West Belfast and North Belfast in particular, there was so much going on it was difficult; sources were coming in left, right and centre, and, there were the confidential ‘phone calls giving information.
I think the police worked to the letter of the law, I do, I mean the rules were ‘bent’ at times, but they weren’t broken. When I say ‘bent’ I mean in terms of dealing with terrorism there were many cases when you did your best to work within the rules e.g. when prisoners were being released from detention they had to be medically examined. But the law stated as soon as you had finished questioning someone they had to be released immediately, but in order to safeguard the police and prisoner welfare, the prisoners had to be medically examined so they couldn’t get injured and say this happened to me when I was in custody. It meant that when a prisoner was released they were over held for half an hour in order for a medical examination to be carried out and they were paid compensation. Police tried everything within their power in order to try and prevent civil actions by having the [police] doctor on standby to reduce any over holding to a few minutes. So, that is what I mean by ‘bending’ the rules.
I think we did follow an ethical approach and we continually looked for legislation to improve things both from an evidential point e.g. more powers to seize material and clothing as evidence and reduce civil claims, and, to guide intelligence gathering. Police continually looked for legislation rather than say ‘it’ll do, alright carry on and see how you do.’ I think government would have been happy at the time if the police had just said ‘we’ll try it and see’. The ethical approach was, I think, always upper most in police minds, and, to be morally correct and not to be doing things that were going to put the police in a bad light.
Prior to RIPA [2000] there were really no rules to guide us on the recruitment, registration and management of informants. You weren’t allowed to use informants as agent provocateurs and you couldn’t have an informant involved in murder and these dated by to a 1960s trial involving organised crime criminals in London. If they were involved in murder you couldn’t accept them, but it was very much the case there weren’t many guidelines in place.
OFFICER 5
I was only in Derry 6 months when I was told I was going to Special Branch in Enniskillen [County Fermanagh] which amazed me, because I hadn’t made any application for SB. But it was at a time
SPECIAL BRANCH Page 12 of 96 when a number of uniform Inspectors were co-opted in, Brian Fitzsimmons [later ACC SB and was killed in Chinook helicopter crash 1994] was one, there was a guy McCartney, me and a couple of others – I ended up in Enniskillen and I knew nothing about Special Branch. I knew very little about CID although I had been an AIDE [trainee detective] for a while dealing with routine crime during the Malvern Street murder investigation, and the most serious crime I dealt with was burglary when someone broken into a house to steal money from the gas meter.
The SB records in Fermanagh were useless they were all about activity in the 50s, there was very little on the younger generation who we only got to know when they were arrested, and, that was probably the picture in most SB offices across the province. I knew nothing about Special Branch. At Enniskillen I had a Sergeant called Marcus Lyle, no surprise his nickname was ‘Sugar’, who joined the RUC in 1944, he had been a very good SB man in the ‘50s but the SB records were so out of date there was nothing dynamic there at all on the new threat. Beside him I had a Detective Constable and a MILO (Military Intelligence Liaison Officer). At the start of ‘The Troubles’, Crime Special on the face of it was useless, perhaps I am being unfair as they were dealing with a new problem, one they had no experience off, they were small in number and their background didn’t fit with the new situation, most had been in Crime Special in the 1950s and used to the Cold War.
CID had a Detective Sergeant and a number of Detective Constables, they were overworked investigating a number of murders including the ‘The Pitchfork Murders’ of two guys were killed, and, another when the victims were left in freezer of a butcher’s shop in Derrylin. There were also a number of cross border IRA murders of part time UDR men (IRA came across the border and escaped back across after the attacks), and, the murder of a Catholic postman (one of the few Catholics in the UDR) who was delivering a letter to a house in a remote area when he was assassinated by the IRA lying in wait for him. He was shot simply because he was a Catholic in the UDR, he was a man in his 40s from memory. Two years later there was a similar incident in Castlederg.
I had a Loyalist source at the time who told me that Loyalists were responsible for the ‘Pitchfork’ killings, his information was absolutely convincing, but it later turned out that it was a ‘load of bollocks’ everything he said was from newspaper reports and local gossip. A sign that you shouldn’t accept without question what an informant tells you.
In 1985 I returned to SB in Belfast. I saw such a massive spectacular change compared to when I left in 1976. Up to ‘76 SB hadn’t changed much since its early days, we lived off the intelligence we collected locally, relied on a few isolated guys working in the Divisions who did their own surveillance, and, there was no co-ordination, analysis and exploitation of intelligence. Intelligence was collected and reported to the local Divisional Commander, and, if possible a response was organised at that level, all the intelligence was copied to HQ, but they didn’t have the resources to develop and analyse everything they received. By 1985 this had all changed and TCG was working in Belfast supported by a Source Unit, E4A and HMSU. We had morning meetings to discuss the intelligence, and, to put plans together to develop and exploit the intelligence. The Army were involved; it was a phenomenal change from my previous experience but it worked, it worked! The re-organisation turned an incompetent situation that was open to high risk and chance to something that was co-ordinated, focused, managed, under good quality leadership, had a command capability, and, the commitment of all those involved who worked together under the direction of the police.
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The catalyst for this change was Police Primacy which meant the police had to be seen to be professional, effective and competent. Raymond White was on the scene, he was a thinker and he was the catalyst for bringing forward ideas, he was not bombastic but his arguments were persuasive. He was highly respected by the younger element in SB who saw his proposals as a new and effective way to use intelligence to arrest terrorists and seize their munitions. This was a whole new type of thinking. I think the creation of E4A and HMSU under strong leadership was a good idea.
Belfast SB developed the system of TCG, Source Unit and the other elements, and, the SB Head of Belfast was a strong advocate. The then ACC, Micky Slevin, was old school and his replacement Trevor Forbes, who had no SB experience, was good, but the key people were the SB Belfast Regional commanders and the people who coalesced around them. Once the TCG was up and working in Belfast they set one up in Gough Barracks Armagh, it never achieved the same level of cohesion and effectiveness as Belfast but it was good. There was one in Londonderry, when I went there it was nothing like Belfast, and, wasn’t really effective so I decided to replace some staff. We were all in Strand Road which wasn’t convenient, as it was a security risk as people had to come there for briefings and meetings, it was an awful place to work out off. I moved my office and TCG to Ballykelly, where the Army Detachment (Det) and E4 had offices, we remodelled some Portakabins to set up TCG on the Belfast model.
A problem I had was the huge amount of intelligence we produced and discussed at my morning meetings with my Superintendents, Heads of TCG, E4A & HMSU and sometimes the handlers. We discussed the intelligence to see how we could develop it a bit more, or, what action we needed to take immediately, mid-term or long term. Sometimes we got intelligence that something was imminent so we had to pull things together quickly, make a decision and deploy people to abort the terrorist activity, make arrests and protect life. Most times the intelligence was patchy and sometimes we just knew something was going to happen but nothing more, so if we had time we tried to develop it to get a better picture. We would have called for Army support when needed, we used E4A for relatively short term jobs, and the Army for longer term jobs because they were more self-sufficient, particularly in rural areas.
E4A surveillance took over some tasks from the Army, it was entirely new and we had to build up its technical and surveillance expertise. The Army were better suited and equipped for long term monitoring and surveillance tasks, and, were trained to live in the field for long periods while our guys lived at home with their families. The Army were here for a short time, lived in Barracks while our people went home to their families, so long absences weren’t possible. We didn’t have the capability for long term jobs that could last weeks and months.
One ACC couldn’t get his head around the need to tamper with arms and explosives rendering them harmless, he just could not understand why once we had it that we could return it. He just couldn’t understand that this allowed us to balance our responsibilities to protect life with the responsibility to arrest and prosecute offenders by developing the intelligence to create opportunities to arrest terrorists red handed; it was a real dilemma for him.
The source was not the primary one to be protected, everybody was to be protected. The idea that SB sacrificed people in order to protect a source is nonsense, it is not something we did, but I would do what I could to protect a source. The reason we returned the weapons after tampering was because the source would be one of the few in the know. After a security force success, the first
SPECIAL BRANCH Page 14 of 96 thing the IRA security team did was identify their people who had knowledge, and, they would be brought in interrogated and possibly tortured. So it was a question of trying to protect the source and his ability to collect intelligence. In my view such action was to protect the lives of potential victims and the source. I remember one instance involving the FRU, who had received intelligence about an arms dump in the coal shed of a house in Belfast; we couldn’t watch or tamper with the dump so I asked the FRU to arrange for a search to recover the weapons. I called in to my Office on the Saturday and found that the weapons hadn’t been recovered. I tracked the Colonel down, he was playing golf, and I told him if he didn’t organise recovery I would as we had no control of the weapons and we were powerless to stop them being used in murders. The weapons were recovered a rifle, pistols and a SMG and found to have a history in a number of murders.
Certainly there was an obligation to reduce the chances of a source being discovered, we had a duty of care to our sources, Republican and Loyalist. Some informants were motivated by money, others out of anger because of the way the terrorists treated someone they knew or their family, or, terrorised and dominated their community. When you look at the money it was really pittance, they had a retainer of £5, £10 or £20 a month. Some sources were in the terror groups, others were just used by them, people like taxi drivers, who could tell us who was meeting where and when, and, sometimes they picked up a bit of conversation; a number of these types of sources were very valuable.
The IRA security team had a system for analysing operations that had gone wrong from their point of view, to look at why it went wrong. Was it disrupted by a police presence? Was it a security force raid? Was it an arrest before during or after an Op? They would go on a hunt for an informant. Quite literally they would have a chart and tick off parts of an operation that went wrong, identify the people who knew about it, and, compare this to other failed operations to identify people involved in both Ops. They would be brought in for interrogation by the security team, and, if they suspected someone they would use torture. So, there was a bit of interest in looking after a source because he was a source, but also because he was an individual who was vulnerable and at risk.
In order to make arrests the question was how to use the source intelligence without unduly compromising the source either by him being caught in the act, or, casting suspicion on him to the security team. If the source was arrested and jailed you lost his intelligence, and, his might be the only intelligence you have, so the dilemma was how to use the intelligence and keep the source in place. To try and manage this we would use an operation to disrupt them, the IRA were very easily spooked if they saw something unusual or out of the ordinary. That is why you would find so many roadblocks around the city centre, which drove the whole community and the Divisional police chief for the city centre Nuts! We would disrupt sometimes because we didn’t know what was happening, or where the device was, or how it was going to be moved, other times to protect the source, or get more time to find out more, or, to allow us to set up an operation to arrest and/or seize munitions; sometimes it was to test the IRA ASU. Deciding what to do was a matter of professional judgement having regard to the protection of life of the potential victims, the source and indeed the terrorists, and, assessing the risk of the attack happening in the future without our knowledge. If the source was caught in the act you just had to live with it and try to get another one. I was never in a position when I was on the ‘head of a pin’ having to decide whether it was either the source of the victim. I would have withdrawn the source rather than risk a life. Ultimately it was all about protecting life.
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We regularly analysed our source coverage and if we found a gap we discussed ‘Who could we recruit to fill the gap? What was their commitment to the cause? How could we make an approach?’ In one case we identified a senior Republican for recruitment. We found a way and put our people out, after making contact we asked to meet him and he agreed asking what took us so long? He initially thought we were MI5 or Army, he proved to be a great catch.
The IRA was very aware about electronic bugs and had a guy who swept for bugs, they didn’t really use telephones. The Security Services could bug a variety of places, but they were slow and cautious, it took them a year to install one bug, and, within 24 hours I knew it was next to useless because it was beside a water cistern and every time someone used the toilet or tap you couldn’t hear a thing, so after all the planning and waiting it was a disaster.
Recruiting a source can present a moral dilemma. There were people we knew who were involved in murder but had no evidence against them, who had been ‘converted’ by their experience, so do we put it to them to work for us, or, do we arrest and try to get the evidence to prosecute them? We had discomfort with some sources, for example, Stake Knife a key IRA player who was directly involved in executions and murders as well as being an Army agent. I have difficulty with that, I don’t know if I could have rested comfortably with that if he had been our source. Certainly there were others who committed terrorist crime, but I would never consider allowing anyone to lose their life for a source. I couldn’t have overlooked someone being a murderer, if it was a case of them being involved in a murder for which they were being paid to get intelligence on I wouldn’t have gone along with it – involvement in a murder is a red line. For the police it was almost impossible to recruit someone who had been sourced as being a murderer.
An informant taking the lead in a murder is a No No. If an informant pulled the trigger I would have passed that across to CID. If he had a secondary role like a driver and did not have fore knowledge of the crime then that is more difficult and you would weigh things up, the value of the source, what CID already knew and what they needed. Each case was judged on its merits and the information that was available at the time.
Sources were lost, some were bloody good. The IRA security team would abduct, torture and interrogate those they suspected until they made a ‘confession’. Losing informants? I have grave misgivings and I have turned over in my mind many times what we could have done to avoid their deaths, probably very little. The IRA was not a stupid organisation it was probably the most sophisticated terrorist group in Western Europe.
I find these moral dilemmas very difficult, I fall back on the law, my own moral compass and the policing principle to protect life. To those who say you shouldn’t recruit terrorists I say, you must! The only people who know what is going on in an ASU are those in it. The only people who know what is said, when, how, and who the victim is, are the people in the ASU, so sources have to be in the ASU. If there was someone I could recruit that would be able to prevent loss of life or detect people with guns and explosives intent on killing others I would do that. It’s a bit like a ‘ticking time bomb dilemma’ do you ‘torture’ the bomber to find the bomb? I don’t think there is an easy answer to that, but I couldn’t have gone along with recruiting a murderer if there was evidence against him.
In our decision-making we had regard to the Rule of Law and Protection of Life, it could be a moral dilemma having to decide to act, or not act, on limited information, as the lives of potential victims
SPECIAL BRANCH Page 16 of 96 and the source were at risk. Also, terrorists had a pattern, and, with their ASU based cellular structure changes were easier seen, and, this made things more difficult for us.
Intelligence rarely produces a full and clear picture, usually all you get is what the source can tell you. Analysis, assessment, the interpretation of the analyst, and, perhaps a comment from the handler, which often is not a lot, can help. We would try and develop it using surveillance or going back to the source, but rarely did we get a complete picture. We were never sure if the source was withholding information, lying, setting us up, or, if he was under suspicion and being tested, we kept all this in mind and worked on the basis that the intelligence needed to be verified.
One problematic source, not a terrorist per se, but one who knew what was going on, had money problems and was trying to ‘curry’ favour by providing us with intelligence on threats to police officers. We investigated his information. We knew the IRA watched police stations to identify cars and we wanted to know if there was someone in the public service providing details. We looked for a common denominator and it was a business man who was ‘clean’, he was trusted by the police officers who used his business. It transpired that the source had access to the business man’s files and was taking details of police officers and passing them on to both his handlers and the IRA. He was working both sides for his personal gain. What we learnt was you can’t trust a source, he is likely to tell you what he wants to tell you.
Making a decision on evidence is easier, with intelligence the trail could be easily tracked back to the source, and, if the source was a person they could be killed. To protect sources we would have a trigger point for a criminal investigation, and during such intelligence led operations SB would be in the Ops Room to provide advice. Sometimes we would make a bogus 999 call reporting suspicious activity, and, we used that as the starting point for the arrest operation and subsequent criminal investigation rather than disclose it was intelligence led to protect the source. The IRA might be suspicious, but they couldn’t be sure what the trigger was.
I was in England on a course for 6 months, and, when I came back the Loyalist threat was higher than the IRA due the Stevens investigations. Stevens won’t admit this but prior to his enquiries there was a large degree of control over Loyalists in Belfast, there was good source coverage and covert ops going on, but his arrests disrupted this, and, Loyalists became randomly ruthless. His arrests led to the Loyalists re-organising and a reduction in our coverage. We helped Stevens categorise the stolen security documents he had recovered, the documents including photo montages contained low level material which was necessary to alert officers to criminals and persons of interest, and, criminal intelligence bulletins, all stuff that would be routinely displayed on notice boards for briefing purposes - they were not secret documents.
Stevens uncovered Nelson, the biggest Army source, and just shows you the dangers of using a source. Stevens removed some of the Loyalist leaders that reduced our control of Loyalists, and, led to a new brand of Loyalist appearing. But from what I saw some of his ideas and approaches to his investigation were quite amateurish. He pursued his investigation with great vigour and did bring some Loyalists before the courts for minor crimes. You could say this was a success, but some of those convicted were sources and their removal reduced our source coverage and increased loyalist crime.
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Trying to find a safe place to meet informants was difficult because people didn’t leave their own areas. When I looked at where Republican source meets were taking place I found they were mostly on the edge of West Belfast, it seemed to be absolutely reckless. I was appalled because it was the same places all the time, whether it was carelessness or poor supervision I don’t know, but I put a stop to it. It was the same for Loyalist source meets.
A big issue is the possibility that handlers see informants as ‘theirs’; if you talk to SB men that is the way they describe a source, it’s their source not our source or SB source, I had to continually remind them that they were all RUC sources. They may have recruited the source but after a period of time handlers should be rotated, to co-handle sources recruited by others, or, a new handler introduced. You had to instil in the handlers’ minds the importance of source and handler protection, the need to prevent crimes, detect criminals, make arrests, and never to allow the source to become involved in murder whatever form it took. And, if the source had to participate in crime, even in a minor role, then his participation had to be pre-authorised. Let’s be clear, there is no point speculating, the only people who could tell you what was going on were those involved, or, those very close to them. Our objective was to defeat the terrorists. We were in a difficult position with informants and we learnt over years some of the pitfalls.
Before using E4A we had to try and anticipate risks and what might happen; you couldn’t anticipate everything and there were many unknowns. You couldn’t be sure that the informant had told you the whole story, or, if things had changed in the interim, or, if the source was telling us what he thought we wanted to hear, or, if he was keeping something back to protect himself.
It was difficult, there were things we did to prevent the exposure of sources, which, when you look at them are unusual. I got a call one night at home after a source arrived at the station with his baby to meet his handlers, his wife knew he was a source, and, after a row she left the house saying she was going to tell the IRA her husband was a source. He grabbed the baby and went to the station. My son was very young at the time and I went up to the station with some nappies and cream my wife packed for the baby. We contacted the local priest asking for his help, we didn’t tell him the full story just that the wife had threatened to make false allegations to the IRA about her husband. He found that she had gone to her parents and not the IRA, that’s how we resolved that. We discontinued using him as a source, if he had continued the domestic could happen again, and, we couldn’t be sure his wife wouldn’t have gone to the IRA, so it was best to let him go. If he had been shot we would have been accused of all sorts of things – we should have taken him into custody, sent him to England or done this or done that. But, at the time we don’t know how things were going to go, so we did what we thought was best to protect his life.
Achieving a balance between source protection and protecting the public required innovative actions and technological developments to help us. The technical capability of E4 was amazing, there was a shipment of explosives and we decided to go for it, but we needed a plan to protect the source. We had access to the vehicle and a device was put on the engine that allowed us to switch the engine off whenever we wanted making it look like mechanical failure; we arranged for a Traffic car to come across the’ broken down’ vehicle to discover the explosives by ‘chance’. So that’s one of the things we invented to cover the source.
It was morally and legally wrong to put officers in a position that exposed them to prosecution. During Operations I was there to guide and direct but the officers were on the ground and had to
SPECIAL BRANCH Page 18 of 96 react immediately to the events they faced. It angers me that some enquiries, to investigate a ‘split second’ decision made in the heat of the moment, take place years afterwards, use hindsight and take years to complete don’t understand the pressure of the situation.
Some jobs were risky, we tried to manage the risks, but some places were very dangerous. Take areas such as South Armagh, parts of Tyrone or Londonderry, the IRA was able to work almost at will, we weren’t very effective. Maggie Thatcher was so appalled at the situation she ordered in the SAS. I think when the SAS were deployed there wasn’t any other option. The risk those ASUs posed required the SAS, and, their use was proportionate to the risk the IRA posed. My view of Loughgall, and I wasn’t involved, is that knowing the terrorists involved, any risk to try and intercept them before they arrived at the police station was too high to take. Why should we take that risk when we could intercept them on ground that offered us best advantage? The terrorists were experienced trained killers who were better armed than the police, it was necessary to intercept them on ground that gave us the advantage.
OFFICER 6
It wasn’t until 2000 when RIPA [Regulation of Investigatory of Powers Act] came in, did we have any legal framework to govern, manage and handle informants. RIPA was based on our own procedures, our own processes. I mean we developed certain processes along the way on how we did things, so, for instance, when I started in Special Branch in the mid 1980s I don’t think I went on a course until 1988, so for four years I learned on the job. So, what they were looking for, and it was one of the things that, again there was quite a high attrition rate of people not making it through their Special Branch probation because they were looking for people who were, and I have used the word earlier, dynamic and who’d had the ability to learn and not make the same mistake again, not make glaring mistakes and not make stupid mistakes. We had to have the ability to develop the systems ourselves so that we could learn from each other and benefit from previous experiences. So as I say, the first course I went on didn’t teach me anything to do with Special Branch (bar my initial course which taught me the very, very basics about ‘what is intelligence’ and stuff like that), and it was the first one I did four years after I joined Special Branch.
All we had was just the policing principles we were taught in ‘The Depot’ which are, Protection of Life, Prevention of Crime, Detection of Crime, Keeping the Peace and Protection of Property to guide us and the SB development process during that period of time. To go back to the Prevention of Crime and the Detection of Crime, yes, they were all responsibilities, but there is a hierarchy, it’s the Protection of Life and then the Prevention of Crime and then Detection of Crime, protecting life was at the top end of that, and that was our focus. As for the other principles, you simply couldn’t do the job we did in those days if we only focussed on those.
So, disruption was a tactic we used, and we had to make a decision to recover the bomb through searches after we stopped it being planted. Often the intelligence we had was incomplete, we only had a partial picture, a bit like a jigsaw with bits missing. A lot of people like to think in this type of work that if A happens the answer is B, if C happens you do D; it doesn’t work like that because what you’re dealing with is people. So often we got a piece of information to say two people were going to meet at such and such a time in such and such a place and I put surveillance on at such and such a time and at such and such a place and they didn’t turn up, but they did an hour later but we had no information that they were going to turn up an hour later. So what happened? The intelligence may
SPECIAL BRANCH Page 19 of 96 have been from a phone call or from an overheard part of a conversation, after which somebody might not have been able to make it, so they called round at the first person’s house that night and said, look remember I was going to see you at 10 o’clock, let’s make it 11, we didn’t have every part of the picture, every time, it wasn’t like that.
It’s like a massive jigsaw with most of it missing. We got really good at making those connections in between, sometimes we’re very lucky and we’d have lots of information, but essentially it was about being able to make the right connections in the right way at the right time. So sometimes we would have had enough information to let us say, take the ‘A’ standard, which is, to catch the people making the bomb, putting it all together with the car outside and the gun team going with them who were going to cover them to do the whole job, that’s your ‘A’ standard, that’s what you want but we may not have had the right information to lead us to there.
Surveillance in the areas the terrorists prepared their attacks was hugely difficult and bearing in mind the IRA were very aware of surveillance work and were well trained in anti-surveillance just as well, if not better than us. Therefore for our surveillance to be able to operate and to be able to report back live time was a huge difficulty. It wasn’t just like if A happens, do B, it didn’t work like that, what we did was aim for the ‘A’ standard and then depending on everything else, depending on all of the other circumstances, depending on source protection, depending on how much we knew, depending on resources because in those days within Belfast we could have had ten terrorist operations going on at one time, we did what we thought was best. You know resources are finite as well and you’re trying to plan round that, there were days when the surveillance teams were going from one job to the next, things they would never do now, one surveillance team handing over to another surveillance team, again you would never do it now. So, all sorts of stuff like that, I don’t really want to get into our tactics in any detail, so what I’m saying is, in the overall scheme of things, you aim for the highest standard possible which was to make arrests and prosecute. We wanted to catch them with the stuff (bombs, explosive, guns), arrest them, put them in prison, get as much information from them as possible about what was going on, where it was made, where it came from, that’s your ‘A’ standard. But quite often we had to accept D or F or G standard because by the time we actually got the ‘troops’ on the ground to hit the place and eventually made enough connections of the massive jigsaw with so many pieces missing to be able to make the decision to go, we might be lucky just to get the material, sometimes.
Source protection is one thing in the myriad of reasons we had to consider, but the first thing was not simply to protect the informant, it was only one part of everything that had to be considered, this is a whole package. It comes back to saving life and the informant is one of the lives that have to be protected. That is an essential bit and therefore we had to consider that too. Sometimes we’d have the possibility of actually acting but maybe the informant is there, is part of what’s going on and they’ve told us they’re going to be there and what their position is; it may be that we simply need to let it get two or three or four or five steps from that point where the informant was involved, and that means we may get a bit less than we would have got at a certain point earlier, but as I say I don’t really want to get into those tactics. The sort of questions we had to answer were, I keep going back to the word dynamic but that’s what we were dealing with, we were dealing with evolving, changing, moving live situations when things could happen very quickly. I mean at times too quickly for us to make a decision, or decisions had to be made by those on the ground. In a sense
SPECIAL BRANCH Page 20 of 96 what we have now, RIPA, wouldn’t allow you to react as quickly we did, RIPA is not sufficiently robust to give you the ability to make those on the job decisions.
A lot of decisions in those days on how an operation should run were made in the car between the handlers and the source. The plan would be developed around that once the handlers got to back to what is now called a Controller, their supervisor. The ‘boss’ within the area knew a bit more than the handlers because he had all sorts of other technical intelligence as well, surveillance and all sorts of other things going on before it went into the TCG where the final decisions were made. So what was agreed between the handlers and the source, based on what they believed was the best outcome possible and assured the source he was protected, went through a whole decision making process which required authorisation at various levels. That’s why I say, that sort of decision making on the ground simply doesn’t happen under RIPA.
The TCG system we had at that time was the best there was for the situation we faced. For more normalised policing and for the public to get greater confidence, and, to reduce allegations that SB just did it to save the source RIPA is much better, much, much better for today’s type of policing, but it’s not robust enough for what we were dealing with during ‘The Troubles.’ The government realised that and that’s why they never legislated, that’s only my personal opinion and what weight that would hold would be very little.
Going back to the end of ’80, start of ’81 a directive [The Walker Report] came out saying that all CID sources having any connection to terrorist activity had to be handed to Special Branch, or, sufficient information given to Special Branch to allow them to assess the source. Now CID was really quite unhappy because their ability to make detections was reduced. This was a step to formalise the relationship between CID as investigators and Special Branch as intelligence collectors.
The Head of Special Branch in Belfast, when I joined in the mid 1980s, wanted some sort of formalisation on how we did what we did, because there was no national co-ordination of what we were doing and there was no specific law. The only law was the common law requirement to save life and that left us quite vulnerable; I think he was quite far sighted at the time and he would regularly ask government for some sort of law to be created or some sort of formalisation to be made for why we did what we did. Now that didn’t happen until RIPA came along in 2000. However, RIPA was enacted after the terrorist ceasefires in 1998 it is designed to deal with sources in a more peaceful society, where there is a level of terrorism or a level of insurgency that is mild to moderate. RIPA wasn’t designed for what was going on in Northern Ireland during ‘The Troubles’ which was essentially all out terrorism. There was nowhere in Northern Ireland untouched by terrorism, take the safest place that you could think of that you might live, Donaghadee, Dundonald, it doesn’t really matter, people were blown up there. So RIPA wasn’t designed for that in those days, it wasn’t a fit for those days. With hindsight the Government probably realised that and put it in the ‘too hard to do box’. As Police Officers, we did what we did on the basis to save life and that’s everybody’s life. So therefore you don’t take a hierarchy out of that, you don’t say ‘oh we’ll ignore a uniformed officers life because that’s less important than a very good informant’, that’s not the way it was. Some people within the police believed that that might have been the way it was, but it wasn’t, we couldn’t always say what we did, because to protect lives we had to work on the basis of ‘need to know’. The ‘need to know’ was for everyone’s safety, it was not for the protection of Special Branch it was the opposite of that, it was for everyone’s safety. Special Branch essentially saved Gerry
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Adams’ life; we saved lots of lives including members of the PIRA, UDA, UVF and INLA. We didn’t differentiate between people; our role was to protect all life.
INFORMANTS
There was no template to bring across, it was just Special Branch working and learning as it went along. I mean what we did in those days, we developed the system of meeting sources now used right across the UK and in a lot of places across the world. How we recruited, handled, managed and met our sources, how we dealt with the intelligence and the systems we developed are used across the world, nobody came and taught us, there was no one to teach us, because nobody else had to do what the RUC did. We had to develop the best possible system that we could, to make us, the people we dealt with, everyone around us, and society as safe as possible.
Why not arrest the bomb team along with the source at the earliest stage instead of waiting three or four steps removed?
I’ll tell you why, because it might take 5 years to get the source into a position to report that one piece of information, and if you don’t wait it could take another 5 years to get that piece of information again. You could say, yeah but we removed the bomb team, but there were people we didn’t know, queuing up to be the next bomb team, so we needed sources in place, because once they are gone the opportunity of gathering similar or better intelligence the next time is removed. As I said earlier we could have had ten operations going on at one time in Belfast, maybe more, right across both sides of the divide, against the Loyalists and Republicans. That was during the ‘80s in my time, I couldn’t tell you about the ‘70s but certainly in my time, in the ‘80s it was constant, TCG was open 24 hours a day. It was rare that you could have gone into the Special Branch Office in Castlereagh in the ‘80s and maybe into the early ‘90s that the place wasn’t open with at least two offices packed with people because they had jobs running.
Some people would think, ‘well yes that’s the way to do it arrest everybody source and all’. That’s the investigative mindset, it’s the approach that CID would perhaps take for organised crime, get the source in such and such a position, make the arrests, happy days, we got our detection even if we arrested the source. Crime gangs don’t pose the same risk to life as terrorists so crime sources face a significantly lesser threat to their lives than a source reporting on terrorism.
I accept that CID has a valid point of view and I’m not entirely disagreeing with it. But what I’m saying is it wasn’t the point of view that we took at the time given the amount of time, effort, money and luck that went in to getting a source into place, the last thing we wanted to do was remove the source. Very often terrorist sources were heavily involved, and they could be reporting on more than one thing at a time. I had sources who had four, five, six jobs going at the same time, if we arrested a source in the middle of one job, what do we do for the other five jobs? Do we just ignore those potential victims lives? So these were not simple decisions and I go back to what I said earlier, these decisions were never taken lightly and they were NEVER taken on the basis of, it’s the source or the soldier, or, the source or the police officer, or, the source or the civilian, decisions weren’t taken like that, they were taken in the whole round of everything that was going on. The best possible option was the one that we were aiming for.
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When you’re combating an insurgency or an irregular war situation you need to know the thinking of the opposition leaders, how the organisation is funded, how recruits were trained, where it’s level of support is, so that is at the level of strategic intelligence. But you also need to know what, where and when they were going to attack, that is the tactical level.
We looked to get intelligence about the terrorist organisation as well as about their attacks and we achieved it in a number of ways. Essentially in the first place it’s dealt with by those we recruit, you would be amazed over the years the different people who, at different levels in the organisation would have told us to ‘Go and F*** yourself’ when we approached them. There were others who you thought would never open their mouths and in fact had been interviewed and approached so many times before, but on the right day, the light went on and they said, ‘Yes’. You would be absolutely amazed at the people who in strategic positions within an organisation agreed to be a source, in fact strategic sources were actually much easier to handle in the sense that they didn’t know the detail, so it was very hard for them to be blamed later on [by the Nutting Squad the IRA Internal Security team]. The difficult sources were the sources who were actually involved in the ‘stuff’ that was going on, but I agree that strategic sources were very difficult to come by, so when we got one, they were given an awful lot of effort to keep them in place.
You wanted sources to move up the organisation and that often happened, very often happened, but sometimes some of the most strategic information we got was not always from someone who held even a position within an organisation, people have wives, children, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, confidants, they have quirks in their lifestyles, things that they like to do, places they like to be that might be very odd and it was about us being good and being smart about how we did our job.
Someone asked me a question the other day about, was there ever a policy within the RUC or the PSNI about hooding prisoners, about hooding people? My understanding, by the way, is our policy was no, we didn’t but the interesting part of the question for me, was that the CIA when dealing with drug dealers in Columbia quite often would actually march a drug dealer out in front of a crowd of people and they would be dressed from head to foot in black, with a black hood on but they’d be given a million dollars or five million dollars in a bag, which would be shown to the crowd to encourage people to give information, okay. We called that ‘shaking the tout tree’ we did it very differently but for people like that, if you want more sources, that’s how the CIA do it. Okay that might be an American way to do things or perhaps because they’re working in another country, simply how they feel they have to do it. We used other tactics but we regularly ‘shook the tout tree’, which basically meant that the people who might have been just teetering, would have heard about offers that were made and would have been surprised at the generosity of those offers, and, might have been surprised about the people those offers were made too, and, when they considered their own positions it made them think twice. And that’s why I say, sometimes you could go back to the same person twenty times and the answer isn’t even no, there is no answer because they don’t speak to you, but on the twenty first time you can’t shut them up.
I was in CID for a short period of time, less than a year on a secondment, and, I was involved in a number of source recruitments and source meetings during that period of time. I can only really talk about my own experiences, so I’m not saying that this is widespread but the biggest issues came with meeting sources, and CID Officers faced the biggest issues because their way of meeting
SPECIAL BRANCH Page 23 of 96 sources was entirely different to Special Branch. For example, a particular Detective Sergeant in the City Centre, when I was there, met his informants in a particular pub, at a particular time, every day, because he liked being in a pub. He would get them to come in to meet him down the back end of the pub, do a short de-brief, get a few quid and then leave. Now, whether he remembered who told him what the next day is open to question but the risk of others learning who his informants were, was very high; his protection of his informants was poor. His personal security may have been reasonable enough because the bar was safe for police officers to frequent, so you could see why he used it but essentially all those things would not have been done by Special Branch. CID used informants to make arrests and recover stolen property, they were very short term.
Special Branch had a different approach, wanting sources in positions where they could give them information which would save lives. Essentially, that’s it! Stopping bombings, stopping shootings, stopping attacks, knowing when the terrorists are going to do an attack; what they are going to do and where they are going to be, and, who the terrorists were. So for Special Branch to do that, they could take someone, let’s say Marty McGartland, who would be known as a low-level criminal, very socially aware, very switched on about everything going on around him. Nothing went on in Ballymurphy that he didn’t know, didn’t see, wasn’t aware off, and people like that could be used by Special Branch. People like Marty were never likely to join the IRA but they still knew exactly who was who, where they were, when they were there, what they were carrying, who they met with, they even got to hear bits and pieces. There are a lot of these people on the fringes of the terrorist organisation who were ‘allowed’ to carry out their criminal activity by the paramilitaries. There was a certain amount of criminality and extortion going on and if they made a few quid as a criminal they would keep ‘the boys right’, either by passing information to them about police officers or giving them a share of the take. These people could also help us.
That was fairly widespread, absolutely! There were certain things the terrorists would not put up with, don’t steal cars in your own area, don’t bring cars into your area and drive them round dangerously, don’t steal in your own area, don’t sell drugs in your own area; don’t do drugs essentially because they wanted to be seen as protecting the community.
Some terrorist organisations weren’t involved with drugs, but there were exceptions, for instance the Official IRA and the Provisional IRA, did not do drugs, but there were people within those organisations who did. Occasionally the leadership would turn a blind eye if those involved were still of use. These groups were pretty smart; they thought that if they used these people, active criminals, to help them we wouldn’t keep an eye on them in the same way as a dedicated terrorist. They thought a criminal could get away with things and were under our radar because we were watching the terrorists. So, with people like McGartland, you could be fortunate, if you could get him in the right place at the right time with those with terrorist connections, people like McGartland made the connections work for them and got you information. The IRA needed stolen cars, the IRA needed information, little ‘scroats’[low level criminals] as the IRA have called them at the time, were running around Belfast breaking into houses, stealing cars, seeing things going on, actually accrued a lot of ‘scale’ as they called it, information that was useful to the terrorists . So, it was okay to be a wee ‘scroat’ as long as the terrorists benefitted, and, there was no impact on the local community. If it did that was unacceptable and that’s when the IRA internal departments and punishment squads would deal with them usually by a beating or kneecapping. So Special Branch would have recruited
SPECIAL BRANCH Page 24 of 96 someone like that and encouraged them towards a position where they would maximise the information they could gather about the terrorists, to maximise our opportunity to save life.
RECORDS
In my time in Special Branch I developed a system of recording a lot of the things that I did, and I don’t mean the secret stuff, I mean why we did it, what we did and why we made a decision.
That’s all, that was it, a bit of a justification process and I found that very useful later on, especially when we got to the point of RIPA and all that, because it was actually almost familiar, because it was logical you know, that we had to do a certain amount of that the whole way through. The record was a bit like a SIOs decision log to record why we did what we did and when we did it, those are the difficult questions that police officers always have to answer. So, legally we didn’t have many problems with the recruitment process, we simply came in and a decision was made after considering, is it worthwhile, do we believe the person, can that person bring something to the table that will assist us in saving lives or will they create a huge risk. So that was how we made sure that our decisions were legal and ethical and to make sure what we did, we did ethically.
LOYALIST AND REPUBLICAN INFORMANTS
They were recruited in different ways because the dynamic between the Police Officer and the Loyalist and the Police Officer and the Republican was simply different. The connection was different and therefore, yes of course there’d be different methods used, but essentially, what we were achieving was exactly the same and in exactly the same way.
There was nothing easy about either side, okay going back to my way of putting it, if A happens, the answer’s B, but it’s not, and it never is. If A happens then everything must be taken into the round and considered, and resources looked at, and, then we’ll see what the answer is to combat that. At times for instance an organisation like the INLA may have had a huge amount of focus from Special Branch because they were doing things that were so wacky, so off the wall, so last minute planned that it was really, really difficult to stop, and, the only way to stop it or to combat it, was to have so many informants within that organisation. Far more than you would perhaps be comfortable with, but because they did their things last minute, for example someone would arrive at a suspect’s house with two guns and a car, and say come on, and that is it: nothing said in the house, nothing said between anybody and all of a sudden on the way they would know the target, they were really, really difficult to combat.
There were times that people, again I’m sure the Ombudsman, looking back on it now would find all sorts of difficulties with our assessment, doesn’t understand the need to spend so much time on some of these smaller organisations, but they were done for very good reasons at the time. What we tried to do, as best as we could, was to have a source somewhere in each element of an organisation. So, you look at how a terrorist organisation is financed, and how important that is. How much are you going to focus on that? Well do you know what? see if there’s a bomb coming down into the town every day of the week, you’re probably not going to focus that hard on finance, there’s probably other things that you should be looking at first. Doesn’t mean you’re not looking at it, just your priorities change from time to time. We would look at the terrorist organisations as a whole, and, then try and focus on what is the most dangerous threat at that particular time, that’s
SPECIAL BRANCH Page 25 of 96 how we prioritised what we did. This process has evolved into a system using a tactical Tasking and Co-ordination Group (TCG) to help decide what to do, when, why, and what resources are needed. This system is now used across the globe and it teaches people, who have never had the experience that we’ve had, how to do basic intelligence led policing. When we were using this system at the very pointy end of ‘The Troubles’ when people’s lives were under threat it helped us to do the right thing, on the right day, at the right time.
It’s fair to say that Republican terrorist organisations because of their cell structures are hard to penetrate, and, are very organised and structured when it came to doing operations. So, in a sense, they were hard to break into, but they were relatively predictable because they had this sort of disciplined sort of structure and processes. Whereas the Loyalists were the opposite, they were a loose federation, which made it perhaps easier to identify and target sources for recruitment, but when it came to the operational side because of this federal approach, they were very unpredictable, so therefore it was harder to actually hit their Ops side. That’s a very fair comment, no one who was there at the time could disagree with it. There would be another couple of things that I would add, the Loyalists were so poor at what they did, and, I would use that as evidence of the lack of security force collusion or any form of collusion whatsoever with Loyalists. I’m not talking about the odd rogue officer here and there, and there were some who helped both sides by the way. The Loyalist organisations were just a loose collaboration of smaller groups.
Whereas on the Republican side, they were born out of communism, which meant that they had a very formal training at one time. You know, their people went to Eastern Bloc countries and were trained in certain things and brought that back with them. When the IRA developed all their different types of weapons, all their homemade weapons, it wasn’t because a genius sat here and just thought them all them up, their basis was in a manual given to them by Communists, and, I mean like a Communist Military or a Communist Anti-Insurgency organisation. These manuals were based back in what was going on during the First and Second World Wars: how the Communists dealt with the Germans and how to fight an insurgency type campaign, a counter-insurgency campaign, how to make loads of devices out of tin cans and bits and pieces, homemade bits and pieces and put it all together, for instance like a sticky bomb, that you’ve probably heard of, using ammonium nitrate, fertiliser and fuel oil it wasn’t just something that somebody in the IRA one day thought, ‘hey this would be a ‘quare way’ to make a bomb’, in the same way they changed from ANFO to what is called to ANS, which was the addition of sugar. It wasn’t a guess, they didn’t have a science department working on this, they were being fed the information, therefore what I’m saying is, that’s where the collusion was [outsiders supporting the IRA], that’s where their structures came from, that’s where that type of discipline came from, it came from the military background of what they had learned previously, which simply, the Loyalists didn’t have.
CONVERTING INTELLIGENCE INTO EVIDENCE
Actually the biggest part of my career was to do that, and, it’s simply not a simple system. You can go round Europe and eight or nine out of ten countries will allow you to present a telephone transcript as evidence. We don’t have that, it is not evidence. Understanding the difference between intelligence and evidence is still difficult for many people at the moment. Many people listen to a telephone conversation or see a telephone transcript and, like as I said to you earlier in our conversation about standing in the car park for five minutes, they read it and they see two
SPECIAL BRANCH Page 26 of 96 completely different things, they hear it and they hear two completely different things, it’s how we’re wired, that is why we’re human beings, you can train people as well as you can, but they will still get different things out of it, but the ability to interpret what’s going on is what’s key.
Interpretation is down to honesty, a bit of social awareness, a bit of emotional intelligence, a bit of experience, a good knowledge of how your target organisation works and the language they use. You know, some people talk about ‘smarties’, they’re not meaning ‘smarties’ the sweets, but something very different. It wouldn’t be the first time we heard people talking about ‘smarties’ and we asked around to find out what ‘smarties’ meant thinking it was maybe tablets or bullets or all sorts of stuff, but what they were talking about was going round to a fella called Smart’s house.
You could take them to be whatever you like. Some people talk about ‘wee silver things’, some people talk about ‘the dough’, some ‘the cash’, and others ‘the readies’, there’s all sorts of words that people use that you and I can attach different meanings too, but in actual fact to the two people having the conversation it could be a completely different thing and therefore it’s down to that sort of shared knowledge. That’s when a human source is vital. I can have a ‘bug’ in a room, listening to you and me with someone outside trying to understand our conversation, and, they will get a different impression at different points in our conversation, for lots of reasons. That’s where the human source is vital they can help us understand colloquialisms and slang.
I used to go over to GB and interpret stuff they had; it was our language, our dialects are so difficult at times and I would see the transcript that they had made and it in no way reflected what I actually heard which was down to my personal interpretation being someone from Belfast. Perhaps if I was listening to someone from Dungannon or South Armagh or even from County Louth or County Meath who had rang into Northern Ireland I would not be able to understand what they are talking about.
I think I said right at the very start, the two guys who recruited me into Special Branch said, it’s the hardest job you’ll ever do, and they were right, because it was thankless at times, because you knew how hard you were working to achieve what you did achieve and constantly saw the criticisms coming from what I now know to be essentially, the ‘Shadow Army Council’, aimed at combating our effectiveness.
OFFICER 7
Crime Special (in the 1960s) would have been somewhere between 60 and 100 people spread across the whole of the province. It had cut its teeth on two main areas monitoring the Official IRA or what was the Old IRA from the 56/62 campaign, and, the residue of what you would call the Communist Party in Northern Ireland. This surprises most people but it loomed large because the Cold War, the communist aspect was still very much to the fore for most UK Police Forces. Another aspect that occupied most Crime Special Officers time was vetting people applying for Government appointments and things of that nature. They were very few in number and I think they just reported to the local County Inspector at the time and then up to Headquarters.
The Crime Special Headquarters role was quite small, from my knowledge of it at the time they were a fairly exclusive group of people, and, once you were in the door it closed behind you and that seemed to be where you spent the rest of your days and the rest of the police got on around them.
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The problem I think arose when this whole civil rights thing sort of mushroomed, it just subsumed this small cadre of people that were there when the protests started and quickly progressed on through to the actual use of violence and things of that nature. I think the Crime Special intelligence was outdated and a whole new breed of people emerged that weren’t on the radar. The IRA was involved in the form of the Old IRA because it hadn’t split at that point.
When I was leaving Headquarters one day I was stopped at the gate and told to go back, that a Senior Officer wanted to see me immediately. I thought to myself, ‘Uck, he’s looking for a file or something’, I went back in and went into his office only to find that he was accompanied by our future Chief Constable, Jack Hermon, and I was asked perfunctorily if I was on the list for promotion and I said, ‘Yes I am’, ‘Well, we’re doing a list of promotions now and you’re going to Special Branch’ and when I said, it wasn’t something I was overly familiar with, I was told that didn’t matter, I was going to Special Branch, and the only thing I had to decide was which one of three stations did I wish to go to. After listening I decided to ask for a bit of time to think, I was told I had until nine o’clock in the next morning to tell Mr Liggett my decision and was warned ‘Remember young lad that should you decline this, you’ll not know where you could actually finish up on the list’. So it was fairly clear to me that I was going and if I didn’t go, I might never go off this list. I went home, I had a quick conversation with my wife, we were living in Dungannon at the time and I thought, well I don’t want to go West and I don’t want to go further North, so I finished up saying the next morning, ‘I’ll take the vacancy that’s coming up in J Division’, which was Lurgan. So in ’74 I became a Special Branch Officer at the rank of Detective Inspector and I was sent to Lurgan, so that was just more or less at the beginning of the Mid-Ulster murder triangle times, so that was my introduction into Special Branch.
After 1969, simply the whole paramilitary scene had literally mushroomed, exploded really, it had outstripped the knowledge of those in Crime Special, with a whole host of new faces out there that were active, but we didn’t know who they were. I had twelve Detectives to cover the whole of the Division which stretched from Banbridge, the new town of Craigavon that was just beginning to develop, Lurgan and Portadown and the surrounding areas half way to Armagh you might say and half way to Lisburn. So that was the area that we had to cover, those three major towns and a growing conurbation in Craigavon where people were arriving literally on a daily basis from Belfast and elsewhere to take up the new houses and accommodation bringing with them their paramilitary baggage and associations and things. So it was a very busy time from the point of view of trying to see who we could recruit as possible informants to give us a picture of what was happening in the various areas. At the same time bombs were going off, Police Officers were being shot and then we had the emerging mobility of the paramilitaries, and, developing associations between the UVF in Lurgan and the UVF in Dungannon (which was in K Division), so we had this cross boundary aspect to consider. But I mean, how could twelve people spread over that geographical area cope; a Sergeant and two Constables in the Lurgan area, a Sergeant and two Constables in Craigavon, a Sergeant and two Constables in Portadown and a Sergeant and two Constables in Banbridge; that was my manpower gone so it was very difficult.
At the same time, we didn’t have good communications within the Police Service, radio communication was still almost of a stone-age nature and anybody could tune their analogue radio in their house and sit back and listen to all the Police conversations as to what incidents were happening and where. Secure radio communications were missing, we had no surveillance capacity,
SPECIAL BRANCH Page 28 of 96 we were at the embryonic stages with military surveillance, but the demand for it was such that they could ‘cherry pick’ the pieces of intelligence that they worked on. In the seventies, mid-seventies it was still the Military that had authority over the security problems, they were in the ascendency in relation to the actual paramilitary issues and we had to sort of work with the Military Liaison Officers (MIOs) and Field Intelligence Non Commissioned Offers (FINCOs) and things of that nature.
We had the UVF and a big contingent of the IRA, Jimmy O’Hagan, the Green family and a number of other traditional republican families. We had the big Kilwilkie area, Lurgantarry and this new growing area out at Craigavon, which was sort of showing Orange and Green sentiments here and there. Of course there was a big UDA contingent in Portadown and the UVF element of course in the form of Robin Jackson in Lurgan with all his people who were associating with the UVF company up in Dungannon and were co-operating across divisional borders, while we were just totally constrained by a total lack of manpower, equipment and specialist skills such as surveillance.
The military had primacy at the time, the police were just about capable of protecting themselves and their stations so when we received information which was outside our capacity to mount a sophisticated surveillance or counter operation we had to call on the military, who themselves were still experimenting and struggling to cope because they rotated their troops every four months. So when the military came into an area, they were all pumped up and ready to go, but their tactics were yesterday’s tactics, they weren’t tactics for dealing with what you’d call an armed insurgency which basically is what it was here in Northern Ireland. The military were used and trained for war, that’s the enemy over there wearing a blue uniform now go and attack them, but terrorists are invisible foes, so your average foot soldier didn’t have a visible target.
The military had great enthusiasm and promotions could be made on the back of a number of seizures or arrests they made and things of that nature. It was the story of the ‘tortoise and the hare’, we had to sustain ourselves at a level of operation that allowed us to come in day after day after day, while the military would come in and burn themselves out in four months and go home. So there was a bit of friction over what could be done and how; we wanted to build up for maximum gain whereas the military wanted quick results in terms of people arrested and arms seized. So there was a lot of what could be called preventative policing going on in the form of road stops and things of that nature but not very much of it was intelligence led as we had no sophistication or capacity, other than a small military unit of surveillance people. But as I said before, the competition for their services was across a region (comprising 6 Divisions) not a single division; we could have employed the whole unit in one division alone. We also needed the capacity to develop the intelligence so opportunities probably went amiss and mistakes were made, and, possibly people’s lives were lost, but I mean, Northern Ireland was one large experiment as to how you deal with an armed insurgency in a democratic way using the rule of law.
Divisions were very much self-sufficient and looked after themselves but that’s not to say they didn’t help each other. I liaised and co-ordinated with Special Branch in K Division to build up our intelligence picture of what was going on in the murder triangle area at the time. But you know, when you look back on the near total absence of surveillance capacity (which is almost second nature today), the lack of technical capacity (from simple radio technology to sophisticated eaves- dropping technology) and all the other things that you need and have today, back then they were non-existent or existed as an antique from the stone-age. We had a near total lack of capacity.
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In terms of professionalism, today people hardly believe that we were coming out of that era when we typed using type writers and used bakelite telephones as our only means of communication. So, we just didn’t have the structures and practices for gathering intelligence, meeting with informants and exploiting the intelligence, although we had small groups of SPG that we could call upon to do a road stop or a search or something like that. We were massively limited in the capacities compared to what exists today and are second nature to develop intelligence.
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 military means, although the Army didn’t introduce Internment it was structured around what they 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, were out to get them, or, saw them all as terrorists and that was all they could expect from the British Government, the British Army and their RUC ‘lackeys’. So, you can understand how people will 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 intelligence targets the right people, and communities will accept the police searches and arrests and are less likely to resent what we do.
There was resentment in Loyalist areas as well as Nationalist areas and that is not surprising in a scenario where on a daily basis people were losing their lives, bombs going off and there’s no clear strategic direction for the security forces. Everybody was caught up in the fog of what was actually happening, it was a day to day existence as opposed to the working out of a strategic long term plans. Things have to be learnt and as I say the situation was a big, big experiment with different things being tried, developed or rejected.
I can only speak really in terms of the ‘Branch’, Loyalist terrorism was a blinking annoyance. The only thing the Loyalists did not do was target Police Officers for murder, but they were involved in every other aspect of terrorism. We went at them in exactly the same fashion as Republicans; anybody who isn’t bored by statistics and drills down into them will see in actual fact that when Loyalist terrorism in the early eighties peaked more or less at an equivalent level with Republican terrorism in terms of attacks on civilians, they will see we were actually locking up, as a Police Service, two Loyalists for every one Republican paramilitary. So we were able to put two Loyalists away for one on the Republican side even though it was the latter who were committing more crimes. We had no love for any paramilitary group, nor did we see the Loyalists as having some sort of mission to protect the state, they were out and out thugs and killers. They didn’t have the capacity to say they were fighting for the British State, they were just collectively killing those that they deemed to be on ‘the other side’ and they went out and took lives simply to demonstrate that they were there. They weren’t even fighting a war against the paramilitaries on the other side because again, if you look at the statistics there were about forty odd active Republicans over three decades of ‘The Troubles’ killed by Loyalists, the rest were innocent people going about their business, waiting at bus stops or
SPECIAL BRANCH Page 30 of 96 serving in shops. So, no matter what way the Loyalists tried to dress up their contribution and their stance in terms of ‘protecting’ the State, when you actually break it down and you look at who their targets were, who they were actually waging ‘war’ against, it just crumbles into the dust in terms of any sort of credibility.
There are two aspects to intelligence led policing, there’s the gathering of intelligence and then being organised to be able to understand what and who the key people are in paramilitary groupings, how they’re structured, the leaders, who is joining the organisation, and who is doing what; every paramilitary group has its own structure. We had a ‘fire fighting’ approach at the time, we would get a piece of intelligence and do something with it, got another a piece of intelligence and did something else, we existed in that mode, we didn’t have the capacity to exploit some bits of intelligence, so in essence we lacked the capacity to put things together and build up a picture.
In Special Branch we started to develop structures, whereby we could understand the ‘enemy’, it was an ‘intelligence war’ we were fighting and no matter what was said or done it was a ‘war time’ type survival thing. The first thing we had to understand were the structures and the dynamics of the organisations we were dealing with. Each terror group had its own motives and dynamics and were led by different types of people. Some were of the ‘doomsday’ variety like the UDA, with a lot of talk and little action, but they were preparing for the day when they thought they would have to step in and ‘protect’ the province. Then on the other side we had PIRA who had a political/strategic paramilitary agenda to drive the ‘Brits’ out of Ireland by destroying property and killing people they labelled ‘legitimate targets’.
So the dynamics of the various organisations had to be understood first, then their structures and how they actually worked, they had people to train, they had people to recruit, they had quarter- mastering to take care of, and they were gathering their intelligence on people to kill. We had to understand the structures of the various groups, before we could identify where we needed to recruit agents to provide us with intelligence.
When we did all this we then had to understand what we had; the flip side of the coin was, having gotten the intelligence, what could we effectively do with it? So having developed our intelligence gathering capacity, we then had to start looking at how we could start exploiting this intelligence to gain some element of success without destroying the sources providing it. Now that doesn’t happen overnight, so there was a big, big period of a decade or more where we went through the early stages of realising that surveillance is a definitive capacity and we had to find a means of trying to use it at the same time as trying to recruit and hold on to agents whilst exploiting their information. Now it was a massive big learning curve for everybody and it was trial and error in many cases. All this was happening in parallel with people using the information product to protect lives and disrupt the terrorists, so we had to balance using the intelligence without jeopardising anyone’s life. So it was a big burden, a big demand on Special Branch, we had to work our way through it and we did this without a template or previous experience from anywhere else in the world.
We were the lead agency in terms of countering terrorism and still had to deal with most of the issues facing SB in the other parts of GB. What we had to do was away over their head when we asked for their help they wondered, ‘What are these people asking for? What are they demanding here? What actually are they trying to do?’ Countering terrorism was a whole new issue, a whole
SPECIAL BRANCH Page 31 of 96 new concept that required a whole new response; there was a massive amount of trial and error, and, it took nearly a decade or more before we got the structures that are in place today.
INFORMANTS
The Home Office 1969 informant guidelines were created in an era when even organised crime wasn’t recognised, let alone terrorism so they couldn’t apply to the situation here, but because it was a Home Office thing, and, like all the UK police we had to adopt it. It was totally unsuited for the fact that, for an informant to even be an informant in a paramilitary organisation, he had to be committing a crime of being a member of a paramilitary grouping, and then if he was to be a good terrorist, he had to follow what the organisation demanded of him. So all this business of saying, well no, you can do this but you can’t do that sort of thing, was almost laughed at by the informant. He had to be a model terrorist meaning he had to participate in the preparation of terrorist activities and the Home Office guidelines didn’t help much in this type of situation.
Now when the Home Office guidance was there it talked about minor participation but that wasn’t defined and when you translate it across to paramilitary activity, minor participation could be the movement of half a ton or more of fertiliser. Now some people might sit back fairly aghast at that, and say, that couldn’t be minor by any means, but it’s not anywhere near being a bomb, it’s not ground down and a lot more had to be done before it was used to make a bomb, but it’s a preparatory stage and if you don’t have your source involved, then you don’t know where that half ton is going to go.
So, given the scale and dimension of the situation things ratcheted up immensely, we tried to apply the participating informant guidelines but they were redundant before we even got started. We had to take our guidance from Case Law and things of that nature and made sure we weren’t guilty of entrapment or agent provocateur and things of that nature. At this stage, by and large, all we had was the available law and thereafter it was on a scale of proportionality, today it’s talked about in terms of Article 2 and being proportionate to the problem being addressed including the conduct of the source and things of that nature. Proportionality is sort of hidden today in the complexity of the language that’s wrapped around these things now and the layers of paperwork and everything else. I would say in actual fact, back then we were going through exactly the same thing, we didn’t want the source to be participating in the final act, but we were trying to guide him through the preparatory stages so that we could either disrupt or make arrests and do things of that nature.
When we asked for guidance in the 1980s and for the next decade and a half we were basically told ‘It’s impossible’ but then whenever the Human Rights Act came in, all of a sudden, all of that which was impossible, became possible. Now in the aftermath of ‘The Troubles’ we have a fairly good RIPA system where masses of approval are given for the conduct and recruitment of informants and everything else, and, there’s masses of records kept and authorities granted and everything else. This is fine in a peacetime situation but I’m still waiting to see it being ‘road tested’ in an armed conflict situation, when you have thirty incidents in a week for which written approval is required, rather than thirty incidents in a year. I wonder if it would work, I’m not saying it won’t work but I’m simply saying that the Government of the day turned its back on us and basically gave us no guidance, so it was very much a grey area in which we operated. I think it’s to our credit, massive credit that we actually developed systems that became the template for what is now RIPA, you know this is an area which is massively overlooked. But that doesn’t say that mistakes weren’t made in
SPECIAL BRANCH Page 32 of 96 terms of who we recruited and how we managed and handled them; I’m not making any apologies in respect of those things, I think we actually did the ground work for what the UK now has in RIPA and how to do things.
The basic guidance available to us was the same as that available the day I signed up and took the oath of office namely, the protection of life and property. Fundamentally that is all that underpinned the whole basis and philosophy of policing, our common-law duties to protect life and property. Now it didn’t always result in people being made amenable to the Courts, if they were that was a bonus. We didn’t set out to see people killed, we set out to protect them as best we could. There was a balance to be struck and whilst it wasn’t spoken about during ‘The Troubles’ we applied a sort of Article 2, Duty of Care thing. We had a Duty of Care to the person who was giving us the information not to put his live at risk as well as protecting as best we could the lives of those being targeted. All that had to be achieved in way that was reasonably possible; we couldn’t set ourselves unachievable targets. We couldn’t provide protection for somebody living in the middle of Ballymurphy or Kilwilkie or somewhere like that there, except for a very short period of time until they moved out, but if those people chose to stay it was beyond the capacity of the Police Service to provide indefinite protection to them.
Case law recognises that the police can’t provide protection indefinitely and people can’t have it unreasonably and at the price of the life of those that are providing the protection. The person either takes steps to immediately remove himself from the trouble or else he ignores the advice he is given and continues to live with the threat; that’s the reality of it. If that’s the position in a peaceful law-enforcement situation today, then how could we start to protect other people in any long term way during ‘The Troubles’ when we couldn’t even protect ourselves and our officers in their own homes? The best we could do for some people was to say, look you’re being targeted but we can’t do anything for you, we can patrol the area where you live but that will be periodic and it will not guarantee you anything, and, that was the harsh reality of the day.
Threat to life information was passed on, well it was passed on where it could be passed on, but I mean, the real dilemma arose when we were dealing with the information that came out of one organisation and related to another member of the same organisation. So if we went out and told an active terrorist that his own organisation was targeting him he would react in one of two ways either he won’t believe you, or, he goes straight to his own organisation and says, you won’t believe this, but the Police were at my door telling me that you think I’m a ‘tout’ and you are going to do shoot me. So some in the organisation will say, well that’s very interesting because only three or four of us have discussed it, this is the second time this has happened and we know who was at the meeting, so the real and immediate threat is not to that individual any more, but to the individual who provided us with the information in the first place. So, the big dilemma is, how to balance the two competing Duties of Care, without destroying one of them, and blinding yourself by the fact that the informant’s capacity to provide further life protecting information will be gone.
HOW COMPLETE IS THE INTELLIGENCE PICTURE?
Well you can have strategic intelligence that gives you a fair insight into their organisational structure but when it comes down to the street level activities paramilitary groupings do not openly declare to all in sundry what their next target will be. Maybe one or two people know the details but the target wouldn’t be declared until all the ASU was assembled. So depending on where your
SPECIAL BRANCH Page 33 of 96 source is, if he is in the ASU, he may simply be told, look turn up at such and such an address in Ballymurphy or Lenadoon, there’s a job on. That’s it! That might be all he is able to say, he doesn’t know what his role is, or, what the job is, or any other detail, just to be in a certain place at a certain time and that is it. So all we have was an address, we have the location and maybe the opportunity to do a bit of surveillance to see what was happening and then after that it was total guess work in terms of the comings and goings, if any vehicles appeared or disappeared or whatever else, we had to read ‘the bones’ as it were drawing on previous experience as to what might happen and to decide whether to intervene or not, where and how. Sometimes we got it right other times we got it wrong; we just did our best. In some occasions we had a reasonably clear picture, what we had could range between 30% and 70%, if we had 70% we were ‘walking on water’, but 30% was more likely and whatever the amount of prior information ‘Murphy’s Law’ always applied. Paramilitaries, like everybody else can make grandiose plans and then on the day, suddenly change everything. So we had to be very careful in making our response that we weren’t being totally guided by what was supposed to be their plan, things could change quickly maybe it was wet that morning or they didn’t get the second car hi-jacked or there was a road stop somewhere so they decided to change their target, and instead of going to the city centre, they just dumped the bomb outside Andersonstown Police Station or other some secondary target, we had to be fairly flexible.
NEED TO KNOW
I think it’s central. Those within the intelligence structure, need to have an understanding of the broad objectives for intelligence gathering, the broad threat areas that they’re dealing with, and, those at the top need to have a strategic overview of what’s happening, where good information is flowing from and how it’s being used so that they’re managing both the collection and exploitation of the intelligence. Those lower down only need to know what’s going on relative to the contribution they’re making. One of the biggest dangers would be a handler going out with the knowledge that other informants were reporting on his source and him listening to his source sitting there telling him, ‘well I don’t know anything about that’ and knowing that his source is lying. Now, what is he going to do? Probably his emotions will take over and he will say to his source, ‘you’re lying to me’, well immediately he has told your source somebody else is informing. This is one of the simple internal working dangers that we had to guard against, in terms of how knowledge is passed, how it’s used and exploited. There needs to be a fairly sophisticated system with a core group of people who have the bigger picture and know what’s going on. There has to be that element of trust amongst those further down the structure that they are being told everything they ‘need to know’ and once outside the intelligence circle our uniform colleagues have to trust us, that yes, we will tell them everything they ‘need to know’, and we need to trust that they will treat what we tell them appropriately.
So I think one of the fundamentals at the core of any intelligence system is that you work on the basis that intelligence is a sensitive product that needs to be well guarded and that you don’t treat it as a topic of conversation over a coffee table in the canteen for everybody to hear. Two legged sources, with real lives still provide a good bit of intelligence, and technical activity provides other parts. Both take a long time to get into place, so all intelligence has to be treated as a very, delicate plant that needs to be properly nurtured and managed and not frivolously abused.
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So I certainly would advocate, and I’ve never felt offended, whenever issues that were relative to another area were being discussed that I didn’t know all the intelligence. I might have had a general picture of what was going on because that’s all I needed to know, but the detail of what they were doing I didn’t need to know, so did I go away and feel offended that they don’t trust me? No, they were actually protecting the intelligence and protecting me at the same time.
OFFICER 8
As a young police officer in West Belfast I knew all the ASUs (Active Service Units), I knew where the ‘Rocket Man’ (Terrorist who favoured firing a RPG 7 rocket propelled grenade) lived, where ‘Crip’ McWilliams (Republican Terrorist) lived and a number of INLA (Irish Republican Liberation Army) guys lived, I never doubted for one minute they were active terrorists. So I suppose my view in those days was surely the intelligence must be right.
Right back in the day when I was a 19 year old infantryman in the UDR carrying a rifle for the first time in Belfast and the Intelligence Officer said have a look at these photographs of Persons of Interest (POI), take that montage with you, and if you see anyone on the montage stop and search them. When you did you thought you had struck the jackpot, you searched the car and recorded the identities of everyone in the car and debriefed that to the Intelligence Officer at the end of your patrol. Then at the next briefing when you were told who the POIs associates were you thought ‘I got that’ and it made you feel you were contributing to the counter terrorist effort. So the whole thing is very basic, it starts with short briefings and photos to video briefings, and, as the years went by as I rose up the ranks the briefings became more detailed, at times it seemed I was being let into a secret - it was invigorating and I never doubted the intelligence was wrong.
I always saw the job having two strategies: Intelligence Led and Community Policing, the latter being a strategic priority for me but there was a place for both as one is not better than the other nor should one be used to the exclusion of the other. A ‘smart’ police officer should be focussed on intelligence within a community policing context and my plan when I was SDC in Belfast and ACC was to have an intelligence led community policing strategy ensuring that the intelligence side was never dominant to the exclusion of community engagement. I was always aware of Intelligence Led Policing but for me it was a “dip in and dip out activity” - whereas community policing was the constant. For me intelligence was a resource, something that would inform what we did, not be what we did, so for me every day action was community policing.
During ‘The Troubles’ there was the feeling that we were there to get the bad guys (the terrorists, the paramilitary gangsters and criminals) and we could do this by using intelligence to put them away. I always favoured the community policing approach, a ‘hard’ community policing approach that got the intelligence. For me the real heroes were the officers who went on patrol, that engaged with the communities in Springfield Road, Divis and Ardoyne, and, Loyalist areas of Belfast who got the information that kept a patrol out of trouble or helped CID and SB search and arrest operations.
Special Branch was preventative trying to stop the next Car Bomb, even if that meant at times letting a few people go or protecting the informant, this is a very difficult area but, yes I do believe that happened. I acknowledge SB have to take a macro or strategic view of terrorism, whereas with Community Policing the view is more short term focusing on problems in the community as they arise. SB must have informants and Participating Informants (PI) to learn what is going on inside
SPECIAL BRANCH Page 35 of 96 terrorist groups, but a big question is how long can an informant run? I understand the view it should be short but that is too simplistic and it carries the risk of ‘blowing’ the informant’s cover and their execution by the terrorist group. Police need the information from the higher levels of terror groups as it offers the best opportunities to disrupt and arrest terrorists. But recruiting informants in high places is virtually impossible and it takes time for informants to work their way up in a terrorist organisation, it is very difficult. Life is more complicated than some suggest.
Throughout ‘The Troubles’ the police needed proper guidelines for intelligence and there weren’t many, and, those available were ‘blurred’. Now there is RIPA (2000) and its protocols, whereas back in the day people had to make calculated decisions. There were things going on to combat PIRA terrorism in particular that with hindsight have left people open to all sorts of allegations with the Police Ombudsman in particular criticising SB.
Sometimes it is possible to get so involved in something that perhaps you don’t see what is happening or could happen. So if you have a handler for an informant you nearly need a handler for the handlers-that’s what good supervision is all about. It’s like my colleague, a very successful consultant running his own company, he is always on about efficacy, he is totally against ‘water boarding’ because it doesn’t work and it is wrong. Putting a wet towel over someone’s head to make him feel like he is going to drown to force him to divulge information, just doesn’t work, he will tell you anything and that makes you no better than the terrorist. Torture is morally and ethically wrong, I cannot stand the thought of someone being tortured or being party to it.
So I suppose, what works? What can we do that is effective, that doesn’t put the honest decent police officer at risk of prosecution? We must be ethical and follow practices that comply with the law and Human Rights. This requires a legislative framework supported by appropriate leadership and management, and, proper training for skilled investigators. At the end of the day the legislative framework, selection of the right person, training the right person, the supervision and oversight it all has to be there. It seems to me that it is still evolving, evolution didn’t stop in 2001 when the RUC became the PSNI.
There is a danger of collecting too much intelligence, there needs to be a threshold of what and how much intelligence should be collect, lack of guidance can allow some to go farther than is necessary, and, if there are multiple intelligence agencies working who is in charge can be disputed. Also there can be questions over information sharing, clashes between organisational priorities and competition between partner agencies so it’s important to have guidance. The dilemma for intelligence agencies is trying to achieve a balance between exploiting the intelligence to arrest terrorists, protect the public and informants whilst maintaining the flow of intelligence.
If Intelligence Led Policing means anything it means listening to the people who know the community and have that low level intelligence vital to good policing. Intelligence and community engagement were vital to the success of managing major events with the Community Impact Assessment being the visible aspect. Community engagement was vital, we needed to consult and involve the maximum range and number of stakeholders from the community, community leaders, the protagonists on each side and the local politicians. We had to engage with the wider public by communicating through the press setting out what we were doing and being open to try and help the public understand. But intelligence was important too, it was the invisible side, it gave us
SPECIAL BRANCH Page 36 of 96 insights to the intentions of the various parties, it allowed us to plan our tactics to best manage the incident and assess the impact of our plans on the community.
In my view Intelligence Led Policing is absolutely the way forward, but it should never be pitted against Community Policing or prioritised too highly at the costs of community relationships.
I believe we need Special Branch and other specialist branches. Take Cybercrime for example, how could an ordinary officer deal with that? So we need specialist squads and counter terrorist squads but they should not be working in isolation. The counter terrorist strategy in the UK has 4 pillars Protect, Prepare, Pursue and Prevent to try and unify the policing effort. It is the last one, “Prevent”, preventing radicalisation and terrorist crime, where excellent community-based work such as the Channel programme is used to de-radicalise kids. Today former terrorists are engaged (with police and other agencies) be they from the East End of London or former Provos (PIRA) in west Belfast or UVF from the Shankill (Loyalist area of Belfast), to prevent people being drawn into violent extremism. This is a great example where intelligence agencies understand and value community-based counter terrorist (CT) work. I think the people doing the Prevent work are not respected enough by people in the other silos.
POLICING TERRORISM
In my opinion, the cliché that a ‘dirty war’ justifies using ‘dirty tactics’ is not true. One of the lessons from NI, in my view is, in a counter terrorist campaign no matter where it is in the world the police should be the police and the military should be the military. Of course you have the Secret Security Services who are independent of the police. The police should deliver a civilian service and in my day we (RUC) were almost military in some aspects of culture and values. We made the mistake of trying to turn police officers into soldiers, and soldiers into police officers. 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 he 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. So the mistake we made at the start of ’The Troubles’ was making police officers redundant and having a military led campaign in the same way as they did in Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s important to build up police capacities to enable them to do policing even when they are protected by a posse of soldiers, but let the police be the police. Once you move into Counter Terrorism or Public Order the question is should there be another agency like a gendarmerie?
As we got better at tackling the terrorists a mystic grew up around our initiatives and special units to such an extent the terrorists responded to undermine them; it was a series of action and counteraction between us. It was a unique challenge for the RUC who had to develop new ways to combat terrorism and when they started to be successful the terrorists tried to reverse them. For example, the success of Crime Squads obtaining confessions through interviewing led to allegations that confessions were obtained through force, the use of HMSU to arrest terrorists in the act lead to ‘Shoot to Kill’ allegations, and, then the CID initiative of using Supergrasses (or Converted Terrorists), initially a massive breakthrough that got a lot of terrorists into court only for the Court of Appeal to reject the CT evidence unless it was supported by collaborative evidence. The most recent are the allegations about the police use of informants. Every time the police took a step forward it was termed as unfair, the police weren’t playing by the rules, Supergrasses were wrong, HMSU was
SPECIAL BRANCH Page 37 of 96 wrong and participating informers are wrong. We knew mistreating suspects didn’t work, it just tainted the evidence and undermined the police case, so we improved our interview skills.
I absolutely relied on SB to advise me and my SDCs, and to keep us informed in order that we could keep our officers safe and protect the public. At this time 2001 through to 2003, (and when I was in West and North Belfast) I had the highest regard for SB. SB had grown and developed along with the RUC and had many people as Chief Superintendents, Superintendents and Chief Inspectors who knew their stuff. That is why I think it’s unfair to say SB were terrible in the 70s or badly managed in the 80s because they too were developing, so it is harsh and unfair to judge them by today’s professional standards and practices which are very different from what they were. Some things like integrity and ethics are non-negotiable but they (SB) along with the whole of UK policing didn’t know as much then as we do now and clearly mistakes were made. So, everything I say should be viewed in that light.
OFFICER 9
I didn’t know before joining if Special Branch was for me, but now I know it certainly was. Initially however, I had no inkling to join SB; it’s a strange story. My Chief in ‘B’ Division called me in for my performance review in 1983 and told me my performance was very good. He went on to say that as I’d been in the Sub Division for four years, had survived many threats, was married and recently had a baby, maybe it was time for a change. He asked if I would like a transfer somewhere else for a break and said I could always come back. I didn’t have the sense to say ‘no, I love it here’. He then asked me where I wanted to go and so I began thinking about driving around in an ordinary car, walking the beat, having cups of tea with the public, and so I said ‘Yes’ and ended up in Holywood; I regretted it from the start. Before long, I became aware that a ‘trained monkey’ could do some of the jobs we were doing, such as opening the station gate. Soon, I was going stir crazy. Another substantial drawback was that in ‘B’ Division I had been pulling in around £1000-1100 a month, after tax and deductions. Even when the overtime dropped back to 60-70 hours per month, I was pulling in good money. In Holywood, my wages dropped to the basic £720 per month. It was the same every month; there was no overtime and no mileage, just the basic wage. Now take away a third of anyone’s wages overnight and before long they’ll be in financial difficulty; after a year I was.
Having been talked into a transfer to Holywood I assumed that the largely normal seaside town, less than three miles from my east Belfast home, would be a welcome relief but the opposite unfortunately, was the case. As a twenty three year old with energy to burn, I found the lack of danger and excitement made policing in Holywood tedious and dull. The station party was largely made up of older men who simply wanted an easy life, I became frustrated and bored, not to mention the fact that I hadn’t considered the drop in my income. As my bank balance dwindled, so did my interest in my work.
My wife and I had agreed she would give up work to stay at home and look after the baby. We were determined to try and stick with the plan but the financial pressure started to tell and we argued. After one argument I went down to the station to look through the Vacancy Bulletins intending to apply for Community Relations branch, thinking I was the guy to drive kids round in a minibus. The first vacancy bulletin on the top of the Force Order box was for Constables and Sergeants to join Special Branch and as I looked at it, I thought, I can do that. As I had always known all the local PIRA scum in ‘B’ Division really well, I assumed that this might be useful in Special Branch, so I applied and
SPECIAL BRANCH Page 38 of 96 joined the Branch by chance. In truth, I’d never considered SB prior to that point, but then and there I knew it was for me.
My application was successful and to my surprise, I was posted to North Belfast dealing largely with Loyalists, rather than Republicans. I found myself among a group of guys who really knew their stuff, these men worked hard and played hard, and, although I wasn’t an instant hit, I made sufficient progress within the team to pass through my Aideship and probation, to become an SB detective.
As it turned out, this was the work I was born for and I spent the next sixteen and a half years in North Belfast. I’d say my record in terms of sources recruited, poor sources turned into productive ones, weapons seized and terrorists imprisoned was the equal of any in RUCSB, and, if it had been replicated by other handlers, ‘The Troubles’ might have ended much earlier. I would have loved to have been able to establish the numbers of arrests, finds and lives saved due to the intelligence we collected over the years, but that type of information wasn’t recorded or stored. It would be interesting to see what the figures were.
To the amazement of my colleagues I passed the Sergeant’s promotion process when I had around twenty years’ service. I was given a temporary promotion to South Belfast, which later became permanent, and when they down-sized the South Belfast office I was in charge. Then as I approached retirement and Patten, I was offered the opportunity of a temporary D/Inspector’s post in return for an extra years’ service, which I gratefully accepted taking charge of my old stomping ground, C3 Intelligence, National Security, North Belfast.
We were capable of recruiting terrorists so why wouldn’t we? Why recruit ‘eyes and ears’ sources, who are only able say where the group is going to meet, when you could recruit somebody who is actually at the meeting? That’s the logic behind it all. I had no personal interest in any source and there are few I would say I was well disposed towards. There were some I liked, they were pro-police and they worked for us for moral and ethical reasons rather than money, and some of these were members of terrorist groups.
We were very successful, and records show by the latter stages of ‘The Troubles’ that SB source intelligence was preventing around 85% of planned terrorist attacks. I am proud of the use of the agents I recruited and ran, we saved scores perhaps even hundreds of lives during my quarter of a century in SB. Indeed, actions which I and my colleagues took on the basis of intelligence supplied to us by an agent prevented a single terrorist attack which, had it occurred I believe would have plunged Northern Ireland into an all-out civil war. The difference between winning and losing the war against the IRA/SF and their loyalist counterparts was Special Branch agents and the intelligence they supplied.
The Branch had its own mind-set, its own practices and social scene, and, a ‘protective bubble’, from the rest of the force. In some ways, when I joined ‘the Branch’ in 1984, I left the police. When I joined, there was very little structure and direction given to what we were doing, any direction came from the DS or the DI in charge of each office, but little else came from higher up the chain of command. The only time I saw the ‘Super’ was when I went to brief him on my successes; there was little direction from the top. I think the senior SB officers wanted to remain remote from the ‘nuts and bolts’ of agent handling. I strongly believe they ensured an element of deniability and wanted to take the credit for all the good stuff, but didn’t want to hear about any problems. I don’t
SPECIAL BRANCH Page 39 of 96 remember any policies being passed down, just the DS at morning briefings reading out minutes and notes from the ‘Super’ and that’s it.
Any direction and strategy came from the ‘bottom up’, that’s the way we worked and it needed to be done by us, down at our level, because we, more than anyone, knew what was required in our areas of operation. ‘The Branch’ had to be “bottom up” because it was the people on the ground who fought the war, who knew the terrorists and how to ‘fight’ them. It was the DI and DS who directed how we operated and we reacted to our strengths and weaknesses, often learning by trial and error. By the time I left, Intelligence Department, as it had become, was a ‘top down’ organisation and it still is. The PSNI are no longer capable of fighting an irregular war, largely because the people at the top don’t really know what they’re doing and have certainly never been ‘down and dirty’ agent handlers. To be successful, any intelligence organisation fighting an irregular war and/or insurgency must be a ‘bottom up’ organisation.
In 1984 overtime was running at about 80-100 hours a month, that’s a lot. By the time I left twenty five years later it was down to 30-40 hours. A thing I couldn’t understand was ‘the Branch’ moving to a five day week with weekends being our Rest Days; fantastic for the guys but it didn’t make any sense. We would work weekends only when absolutely necessary, and anything happening on Friday would be written up on Monday unless it was life and death stuff when permission from a D/S or D/I was required to work on. I thought this was nonsense; the Branch should be a seven-day-a- week operation, but the bosses at the time didn’t seem to think so.
Today the maximum number of ‘source meets’ a day is three. With the current regulations you probably couldn’t do any more than that, and, if you did you’re probably not giving each ‘meet’ a 100% attention. One ‘meet’ probably requires the whole office to be involved, as you have to pay attention to tradecraft and defensive surveillance. The number of ‘meets’ was dictated by the number of emergencies, threats, life or death incidents and sources who needed to debrief information; the number was outrageous back in those days, particularly on the Loyalist side. We had far more Loyalist sources per handler than the guys working on the Republican side. It was relatively easy to recruit Loyalist sources but it wasn’t easy to handle them reliably, whereas Republican sources were always very disciplined and followed instructions far better than Loyalists, who were often a nightmare with little or no discipline. Recruiting Republicans was a lot more difficult but, they were often easier individuals to handle because they were more disciplined. That’s not to say that the situations the handlers faced were any easier to deal with, or find a way around, but PIRA had a track record of discipline and sticking to plans. Loyalist paramilitary organisations were notoriously ill-disciplined and unreliable.
The way a ‘source meet’ worked, was that two handlers would meet the agent and at least another two would provide cover. At the start it was basic; we were so busy we would do 2-3 ‘meets’ in the morning, the same in the afternoon and again in the evening on overtime. My Office had one Detective Sergeant, six or seven Detective Constables and we covered all these ‘meets’ ourselves, with a minimum of four officers involved per ‘meet’. Divisional SB detectives had other duties as well, such as vetting, sensitive enquiries, writing intelligence reports, updating records and even researching new locations for source meets. Therefore, we all had plenty of enquiries to do and we were generally very busy.
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The length of time for ‘source meets’ was variable, depending on how much the source had to say. I have had ‘meets’ with sources who had top grade intelligence to report, and it could take all day with more than two handlers being present for the debrief and everybody else in the office deployed on the cover teams. In these ‘meets’, the source often had a lot to report and required the handlers to question him sensitively and thoroughly to be certain of obtaining all available intelligence; then it took another day to write up the debrief and complete all the admin. On the other hand we could have prearranged to meet an ‘eyes and ears’ source, and in the days before mobile phones that’s what we had to do, and he would be standing waiting on a street corner. We might pick him up and literally five minutes later, he was on his way; sometimes there was no debrief, simply because he had nothing to report, so we’d check he was OK and arrange the next meet, and that’s it.
INFORMANT FRAMEWORK
In the early days we weren’t required to complete Contact Notes, we were just too busy. As for original notes, the tradecraft of the day dictated that we didn’t keep them, as they’re a liability. Following the ‘need to know’ principle, we debriefed to the Source Unit using our notes and once that debrief was securely logged in the Source Unit, the notes were redundant and a liability; so whatever we wrote on, even a scrap of paper was burnt or shredded. That was simply part of the accepted tradecraft, not that we were trying to hide anything dodgy.
Tradecraft is how we did our work. A huge bank of knowledge and experience was accrued over the years, which acted as a handler guide; it was like an unwritten manual. After RIPA, the CHIS Manual was written by people who were once Handlers, but often maybe weren’t great ones; it’s funny that those who wrote the CHIS Manual didn’t have great reputations as Handlers. The CHIS Manual was approved and handed out as guidance to replace the unwritten tradecraft which helped us do our job. This tradecraft covered everything from our demeanour as we drove around on enquiries, to doing defensive surveillance and covering ‘meets’, the mannerisms, how to speak to sources during ‘meets’, what to do with the product of the ‘meet’, how to debrief to the source unit, write intelligence reports, and, what and when to comment on the information you had collected. Then there were the ways to pass information between agents and handlers; things like brush contacts, dead letter boxes, live letter boxes and anti surveillance, all that is what was known as tradecraft.
The difficulties for SB Detectives handling agents in active terrorist groups and cells were greater, from a legal viewpoint than any other aspect of policing which were all governed by clear laws and guidelines. Agent handling was covered by a series of internal police and Home Office reports and recommendations, dating back to the early 70s, each one superseding the other. Throughout the entire period and up until the introduction of RIPA in 2000, handlers were primarily guided by an informal but highly effective mixture of intelligence tradecraft and, of course, the principles of police work, which were learnt by every constable in ‘The Depot’ in Enniskillen. This tradecraft varied from region to region, division to division and office to office, but retained a certain common sense structure, logic and core values with the preservation of life being the primary and overarching principle.
The RUC saw countless reviews, inquiries and modernisations with the attendant revision to guidelines and instructions. During this process, as an organisation the RUC consistently showed willingness to make such changes as were deemed necessary and the membership became accustomed to a constantly shifting regimen. Proof that the RUC both as an organisation and its
SPECIAL BRANCH Page 41 of 96 officers overwhelmingly operated within the law, comes in the form of the almost complete lack of prosecutions of police officers despite the insurgent strategy of bombarding the force with complaints of collusion and the plethora of false allegations of wrong-doing. No matter what one’s opinion may be of the Police Ombudsman’s Office and the suitability of some of those working there, one certainly could not accuse them of showing anything less than an ideologically driven tenacity to see police in general and SB officers in particular, indicted for infractions alleged by the gamut of Sinn Fein-influenced ‘victims’ groups.
Yet, despite the so-called newspaper exposés, the numerous books by enemies of the RUC and even some within it with an axe to grind against SB, all alleging collusion, there have been precisely zero prosecutions. This, I believe, stands as the most compelling proof of the legality of RUC actions.
There is no doubt that by the end of my career guidelines and laws were available and replaced our tradecraft. We did what had to be done without any law saying we could do it as part of government policy. So therefore yes, I understand why Da Silva said what he said, but we did what we did because it had to be done. It wasn’t illegal, it was ethical, moral, necessary and proportionate in the circumstances of a time when people’s lives were at risk and people were going to die unless we did something to prevent it.
I don’t know if we were empowered to do everything people say we were. Let’s take an example of a terrorist explosive device or a gun; the source gives it to you, which you render inert and give back to the source. No record of that is kept because it’s too sensitive and too close to the source, so it just didn’t appear in writing. Is it unlawful, because there was no law to say we could do it, and there’s no record made of it happening? At the time, both were considered necessary actions to protect lives, including the source, and there is nothing to say that it’s unlawful either. What we did, was debrief what the source had told us about something that was likely to happen leaving out the fact that our operational plan was to ‘jark’ the gun or ‘inert’ the explosives; that was never recorded with the debrief. Is what we did unlawful? I don’t think so; there was no law to say what we did was lawful but there was no law to say it was unlawful. .
There is another criticism of the Loughinisland Report, the Ombudsman criticises Special Branch for having agents who showed support and were involved in the activities of illegal organisations even though they were authorised, it just shows he doesn’t understand what an agent has to do to be an agent. It wasn’t until 2000 when RIPA and Human Rights Act came in were we were told what we were entitled to do. When RIPA came in it legalised what we did up to that point, which was proportionate, necessary and common sense. But according to the Ombudsman what we did before RIPA was wrong, but doing exactly the same thing after RIPA is OK.
It’s certainly worthy of mention that the introduction of RIPA, along with the associated data retention system for agent handling known as CHISM, provided handlers for the very first time with a legal accountability framework. This required their actions, which were previously carried out guided by tradecraft, to be approved and documented by their superiors to permit and authorise agents to be actively involved in terrorist and criminal ventures. What we did under tradecraft guidance is now covered under RIPA and authorised by CODAs. These are the same actions which are at the centre of allegations of collusion by IRA/SF and PONI. Today CHISM in particular, has altered agent handling forcing it into a top-down model rather than the bottom-up version which was clearly so successful in fighting a counter-terrorist, counter-insurgency campaign.
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The RUC, in contrast to the insurgent/terrorist/paramilitary groups ranged against it, acted within the laws of the day and always under a regimen which was prepared to change and improve when errors or weaknesses were identified. The RUC I joined in 1976 was a very different force to the one that appeared after 2001 when the RUC became the PSNI. The change-management process in the succeeding decade was so far-reaching and fundamental that the PSNI was barely recognisable in comparison to the RUC of the late sixties and early seventies.
Under RIPA every source every 6 months, has to be re-authorised to show support for his organisation, to go along to meetings, discuss terrorist activity and ‘back slap’ terrorists. A Superintendent authorises him to do that, and yet according to the Ombudsman the same thing pre- RIPA, is unlawful. So because there was no RIPA, he says it was unlawful. I don’t think it was unlawful, immoral or unethical to do what we did; we did what we did to save lives. Today there are CHIS Operational Deployment Authorities (CODAs) for agents involved in terrorist activities; an ACC will now decide ‘yes I will authorise that agent, given the circumstances outlined to me, to do this, this and this and the timeframe for these activities will be this and when the operation is over, then I will rescind that authorisation’. We never had that; we had de facto CODAs drawing on the 1969 Home Office guidelines and our experiences to tell the source what he could and couldn’t get involved in and if he had to go beyond this, he had to ring and tell us as quickly as possible. We were giving agents exactly the same as RIPA gives, therefore RIPA legalises what we did. The Ombudsman doesn’t understand that we weren’t doing anything illegal or immoral and that’s one of my criticisms of the Ombudsman. He doesn’t understand that we did exactly what RIPA allows us to do today. RIPA was based on what we did.
I think the lawfulness and legality of SB activity in general is entirely misunderstood by Da Silva, Cory and all three administrations of PONI, particularly within the circumstances of the irregular war and insurgency that was taking place. The critics of RUCSB all fail to grasp the fact that the role of SB, as the lead intelligence agency, was to win the counter-intelligence, counter-terrorist and counter- insurgency war, primarily against the IRA/SF, but also against INLA, the UVF, RHC, UDA and UFF. The main thrust of RUCSB activity was the generation and exploitation of intelligence to counter this three-fold threat, emanating from five or six separate terrorist organisations, each with their own strategies, tactics and methods of operation. Add to this, our statutory duty to protect the state and the fundamental differences between the role of SB and the other branches of the police force becomes obvious.
Running agents within these highly sophisticated and well-resourced terrorist groupings was a policing activity entirely unlike any other and was not subject to a set of rules and guidelines within a strict legal framework. In order to be successful against the insurgents and terrorists, RUCSB operated by a set of utterly different rules than other branches of the force. RUCSB tactics were the result of a tradecraft built up through decades and developed from the experiences of generations of Special Branch detectives. The secrecy, the ‘need-to-know’ principle, the retention of only essential documentation, the obsession with the maintenance of the anonymity of agents and sources, and the unwillingness to trust many outside their own ranks, formed the doctrine upon which this success was founded. It worked incrementally; we won that war against PIRA and against all the terrorists and insurgents.
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RIPA introduced a legal framework for the handling of agents and the gathering of intelligence by government agencies in a peace-time scenario. Rather than highlighting illegal practice by SB during ‘The Troubles’, RIPA accepted and legalised its activities. PONI in particular, has regularly criticised SB for allowing its agents to show support for the aims and objectives of terrorist organisations and for permitting its agents to be involved in criminal and terrorist activity, even with the objective of disrupting such activity in the long term. Under RIPA ‘Participating Status’ for agents is now a recognised and legally defined tactic, authorised through the use of CODAs, after due consideration by an ACC. Therefore, although RIPA made the decision-making process a ‘top-down’, rather than ‘bottom-up’ process, the principle is the same, and, the previous activities of SB which drew such criticism from the likes of Da Silva have now been placed on a formal legal basis.
NEED TO KNOW
As I said before we didn’t talk about our sources and operations to anyone not involved with them. I didn’t share confidences with anyone, even those I guys I trusted implicitly. I didn’t tell them anything about my sources and operations and they didn’t tell me about theirs. Our operational security was, ‘don’t tell anybody anything if they didn’t need to know’. If they didn’t qualify for the ‘need to know’ basis they didn’t get to hear.
As you know yourself, in ‘the Branch’ one might have been serving in an Office where there was a D/S and say six DCs; if I handled Source A with another two in a three man team and one of the other two was handling Source B as well, I didn’t know anything about B, even if the handler was my close friend. He wouldn’t talk about Source B to me; he would only talk to the others who handled that source. With that level of secrecy you would often see people huddled in corners whispering about operational matters regarding their source. That wasn’t taken as a snub, it was operationally secret security which protected all of us including the sources; it was our tradecraft and that’s how we did it. I didn’t draw any inference other than it was something I didn’t need to know, so I didn’t ask.
OFFICER 10
Shortly after the SPG formed the Bronze Support Unit to support Bronze Section surveillance operations Bronze Section was subsumed into E Department to make a second surveillance team creating E4. Of course that meant the Bronze Support Unit was sitting outside E Department as a SPG section selected to provide protection and reaction for a surveillance team. So for three months we were outside Special Branch E Department and when we supported any E Department operations we were given a brown envelope and instructed only to open it after we received a radio message to do so. The radio message meant someone was in immediate danger but it was going to take us time to read the contents of the envelope and get to where we were to go, the whole arrangement was quite farcical. The overtime at the time was quite high and it was paid by the SPG authorities, of course they were unaware of what we were doing and they got to the point where they said ‘look this is eating into our budget, we don’t know what they are doing; we have no command and control of them’ so it was decided that the Bronze Support Unit would join Special Branch. We were given the option of joining Special Branch or transferring to another SPG section, I think perhaps two guys opted to stay in SPG the vast majority joined Special Branch and formed the Special Support Unit (SSU) later it was the HMSU.
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I stayed in the SSU for about 10 months, the reason being I had passed the Inspectors Promotion Board and it had been decided to form a third surveillance team: I applied. I was lucky and was selected and set off to do the E4A assessment which lasted a fortnight, it was a bit like the Bronze Support course but better structured and it tested your resolve and mental resilience. I completed that and luckily I passed the course.
After that I went off to England to do surveillance and covert observation courses and on completion of those I came back and took over the Red Team which was largely the old Bronze Team. I spent 3-4 years in that surveillance setup and the only major change that happened was my team and the Blue Team being dedicated to Tactical Control Group (TCG) for exclusive use in Belfast. We would carry out surveillance and covert operations in response to intelligence, it was a fantastic time, very demanding with a typical day being 16-18 hours. We were lucky perhaps to get a day and a weekend off a month. It was a tremendously successful period for operations recovering firearms, explosives and arresting terrorists from both sides not simply the Republican side. I would suggest that the vast majority of weapons and explosives recovered were the result of intelligence operations. The number of successful operations from a snap Vehicle Check Point (VCP) was virtually none, I can’t remember any during my time in the covert world. All recoveries were intelligence based.
I stayed in the [surveillance] teams for about 4 years before moving to TCG at Castlereagh for another 2 years. TCG received the intelligence, assessed the intelligence and decided if it could be operationally exploited. Again that was a tremendously interesting time whereby we were allowed to take the intelligence and exploit it with the aim of preventing terrorist crime, recovering weapons and arresting terrorists etc.
E4 was the covert wing of Special Branch who would mount operations to exploit intelligence. Each operation had its own specific aims normally to investigate an aspect of a particular organisation, or if the intelligence was sufficient, to launch an operation to prevent a crime from taking place, or, to arrest people in the course of a crime or in possession of weapons or explosives. HMSU was the uniform body who made the arrests. What would happen was the covert side, E4A, would carry out covert surveillance and take it to the point where the perpetrators were in a position to be arrested in possession of explosives or firearms, or, to a point where we could do nothing other than act to prevent them carrying out their crime. The uniform teams would be co-ordinated by TCG, and, they would take the decisions when and where the arrest would take place and to stop the vehicle.
TCG conducted an investigation to develop the intelligence in order to exploit it to its absolute extent. An ideal piece of intelligence from a covert op would say when the incident was going to take place, where it was going to take place and who was going to be involved in it; but often there would be large elements of that missing. So there may well have been surveillance carried out on individuals over a period of time to try and establish what their daily patterns were, what vehicles they used, what their associations were, so when the intelligence didn’t give us the full picture that background helped fill in some of the missing bits.
After 2 years I was promoted Chief Inspector and went back the covert side and looked after both the two covert teams and the SSU which had been renamed HMSU. Again, I was there for 2 years, it was another interesting and demanding role. After that I went back as Chief Inspector to TCG and probably spent another 3 years there directing and controlling covert operations.
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I was fortunate to be promoted Detective Superintendent in charge of West Belfast Special Branch charged with collecting intelligence; that too was a demanding and interesting time. I had responsibility for ensuring the intelligence collected was dealt with and reported appropriately, as was the targeting and recruitment of potential informants. This played to my strengths, experience and understanding of the sort of intelligence that was required by the covert side and I was able to help target where we could get that sort of intelligence.
By this stage a disaster happened to Special Branch, it occurred on 2 June 1994 with the Chinook disaster on the Mull of Kintyre when a number of my colleagues were killed in the crash. That was a very challenging time, we lost a lot of very, very able officers who had vast experience, but I think, one thing I have learnt about the police is that when faced with a challenge they will respond. That was a challenging time. Fortunately the senior officers who were left provided good guidance and saw the organisation through that terrible time; certainly it was severely damaged but it was able to come back. I think we have been very good at that, when faced with what potentially looks like an unworkable system we make it work.
From my career point of view I moved from Divisional Special Branch to Deputy Head of Belfast Region Special Branch and had more of the admin responsibility for running Special Branch in Belfast. I was in that role a couple of years. We were still recovering from the loss of so many officers and I was made Acting Chief Superintendent and took over the role of Regional Head of Belfast Special Branch, in fact because we were so short staffed I doubled up and did the Deputy role at the same time. It was fantastic to be given that role and responsibility and I responded as best I could. I was promoted and was transferred to take over E4 looking after all the surveillance and uniform teams, that lasted 6 months and following a promotion of a colleague to ACC I moved into his role as Head of Intelligence Management Group in Headquarters with responsibility for looking at intelligence right across the province ensuring it was collected properly and exploited and recorded properly. That continued until the retirement of the then ACC E, when I was made Head of Special Branch and remained in that role until I retired.
I suppose the main difficulties were those day to day difficulties such as making sure you are going in the right direction. I think we had a reasonable relationship with the rest of the force. Clearly within Special Branch there was the ‘need to know’ principle, having said that when I was in Belfast any time we were planning an operation I would go and brief the uniform ACC telling him the aim and objectives of the operation, where and when it would take place, and, he would give his approval. From that point of view we had a very good working relationship at senior levels. An operation isn’t mounted now and lasts only for 3-4 hours, operations in my experience can be protracted with the longest lasting 3 years. We couldn’t go out and brief everyone on what we were doing and the operational aims and objectives because in a very short space of time the operation would be compromised jeopardising people’s lives, and, of course the subject of the operation would disappear.
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
SPECIAL BRANCH Page 46 of 96 there was a little bit of tension at the lower level, generally like most organisations it didn’t pose any great issue. Other than these the normal day to day management issues were people being sick or not having enough resources were the main problems.
I think the biggest dilemma was when we obtained intelligence. We had the responsibility to do something with it particularly when we were going out to actively look for the intelligence. We developed strategies to deal with intelligence to achieve our objectives, protect the person supplying the intelligence and protect those who were endeavouring to exploit it. There were many occasions when the intelligence didn’t give us a full picture, instead it was only sufficient to indicate there was a danger in a particular area so these occasions were probably the more challenging times, and we couldn’t shy away from them. We ensured if the intelligence placed anyone, a community or place in danger, we took appropriate action to ensure any attack didn’t take happen, either by increasing patrols, reducing patrols or deploying helicopters, there were various strategies we would use. The most frustrating situations were those when we did not have the full story but only part of it, which was not enough to mount an operation to frustrate the terrorists or make an arrest etc, but it was enough to indicate something could happen, so the questions were ‘how do we deal with it? How do we take that forward? We had to make sure we still provided the duty of care to the person who supplied the intelligence because their life is equally important as the next persons. We had a range of responsibilities and we tried to come up with a balanced decision that would achieve the objectives, and, these situations were probably the biggest dilemmas.
In making decisions the bottom line was the first principle, Protect Life. It wasn’t the case of walking away, it had to be dealt with in some way whether that was going out and informing the potential victim or providing additional police protection at the point of vulnerability; we had to come up with an answer to the problem – we couldn’t walk away at all.
There were service rules and Force Orders giving officers instructions on what to do and who to tell when they received intelligence. The Force Order was approved by the Chief Constable [process was the originator of the order researched evidenced and submitted a consultation draft to interested internal parties after which the order was submitted to the Chief Constable’s Group for approval and issuance as a directive to the force] and we took those as guidance and complied with them.
There was a Force Order instructing officers on dealing with threats to life, I am retired 15 years I am sure it has changed now, which said to tell the person concerned, and, the local police SDC in charge of the area. Usually a uniform Inspector called with the person and told them of the threat and offered personal security advice. In some cases (usually Republicans) the person wanted more information and to know the source of the intelligence; we had a responsibility to protect the source so couldn’t disclose all our information, but we did give enough to ensure the person could take steps to protect themselves. On occasion people took a Judicial Review to get much more information and we had to get a Public Interest Immunity Certificate to protect the source of the information. We tried to disclose as much as possible without jeopardising disclosure of the source’s identity, striking a balance was dilemma.
Everyone was given the same amount of information whether it was a Loyalist, Republican or police officer. When I was under threat all I was told was ‘A Republican organisation had information that made them believe I was a police officer and that there was targeting going on at my home’, that was it! I wasn’t told where the information came from, how current it was, there was no other
SPECIAL BRANCH Page 47 of 96 background information, I wasn’t told what the police were going to do other than offer me advice on my personal security and if I wanted to move house they would provide access to the NIO SPED scheme [which bought the house of someone under threat who wanted to move home]. It wasn’t the case I was taken into a ‘huddle’ and given more details, I was given the same as anyone else enough to make me aware I needed to be careful, that was all, that’s my personal experience. If I had asked for more information I would have been told to ‘go take a running jump, I wasn’t getting any more’.
Sometimes depending on the information, we would try and exploit the intelligence without telling the person under threat beforehand, but not to the extent we would put that individual’s life in danger. If, for example, there was a team going out at a specific time in a car with weapons we would mount an operation to arrest them and recover the weapons. So for operational security [protecting security forces and the source] we would not tell the person beforehand, but we would have ensured that he was adequately protected to allow the operation to proceed safely. When the operation concluded the individual would be told of the threat. This was a very difficult decision. The best long term solution is to arrest the gunmen and recover the weapons rather than telling the individual ‘we think you are under threat’. What if he ignores the advice and then a night or two later the gunmen come and do the job? [Police can’t provide 24/7 protection]. There is a balance, I think it is very difficult but we would ensure the individual was adequately protected before allowing an arrest operation. It is a dilemma, any decision involved consideration of everything we knew and using professional judgement on how to exploit the intelligence, the capabilities of the units and resources we had, the likelihood of success, the risks, the value of the intelligence (was it an overheard conversation in a pub or from someone involved), the grade of the intelligence and the source and how closely we could monitor the gun team – I don’t want to get in to discussing how we would monitor that or control it but if we could get into a position where we knew exactly what these people were doing then we could greatly reduce the risk at the other end, all this and more have been taken into consideration. We ensured there was a backstop to prevent their operation reaching its planned conclusion and ensured the individual was fully protected.
If the individual went public with the information there was a danger to the source and those taking part in our operation so we would always try to maximise the protection for the individual, the source and our people. This wouldn’t prevent us from telling him about the threat but it may well have determined the form of words we used. At the end of the day we tried to maximise protection for all those involved, the life of the person supplying the information is equally important at the target’s life and in a terrorist situation if a person is identified as a source then the consequences are that person will be executed; that is the way the terrorist organisations worked. They were absolutely petrified of informants, petrified of leaks from within their organisations, and, I think that probably was one of the big factors that brought, certainly, the Republican organisations to the table. They felt their organisation was so deeply infiltrated that they couldn’t operate. So their sanction, their ultimate sanction was to prevent people becoming informants and it made our job so much more difficult to recruit individuals.
There had to be a balance, a balance on every occasion, as the ultimate objective was to protect life whosever’s life that was, be it the intended victim, passer-bys, the source, the security forces going out to apprehend the terrorists, even the terrorists, all these lives were part of the risk assessment.
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We considered the risk to our people, whether or not we could safely follow the terrorist car, the chances of actually stopping them safely, all that was part of the risk assessment.
We talked earlier about balance, balance is the thing we took into consideration in all our operations and we looked to see where the risks lay and if they were acceptable or not, if they tilted towards not acceptable then the operation didn’t take place and we looked for alternatives, it’s as simple as that! We balanced multiple factors and the need for balance would be kept in mind throughout. So if an operation was taking place it wasn’t a case of saying to the Teams ‘Right off you go and let us know what the result is’, it was very much controlled by TCG they watched the operation unfold and where in a position to change the operational objectives at any time including saying ‘Stop we’ll go warn the person now!’ right through to ‘Right stop the car Now!’ earlier than planned; it depended on how the situation developed. It was a very, very controlled situation it wasn’t the case of ‘right boys away you go’, it was very controlled by the senior officer present in TCG who made decisions and would be aware of the circumstances as they changed during the operation, or, something unexpected happened.
I think Da Silva, when he said, what we did to be effective was unlawful, is right in so far as no legislation existed despite the numerous times we asked government to provide us with a legislative framework. All we had was a Home Circular which had no legal basis, so all we had was advice and guidance from the Home Office which ran to 2½ pages; there was no legal framework. Many times government said ‘you’re doing a fantastic job; this is marvellous’ while ignoring the fact we produced the results we did in the absence of a legal framework and had to recruit people in illegal organisations who before they left their houses were guilty of the criminal offences of membership of an illegal organisation, guilty of conspiracy and a whole raft of others, and, here we were working with these individuals without legal protection.
There was an understanding of this dilemma within government, but they said they didn’t have the money and parliamentary time to give us a legislative framework and it wasn’t until 2000 when the European Convention of Human Rights came in that the government was forced to come up with RIPA. Government actually brought it in ‘kicking and screaming’ under pressure from the Security Services and RUC. ACPO had produced a Code of Conduct for Intelligence Operations which was laughable; it took no account of terrorism. I actually wrote a report about the Code’s shortcomings and it was taken up by the then Chief Constable Sir Ronnie Flanagan, and, he along with the Security Services brought pressure to bear on government and eventually money and time were made available to produce RIPA. So throughout ‘The Troubles’ we had nothing, and, it was only when we got to the point the Labour government adopted the ECHR, were they forced to bring in RIPA, without it we would still be operating under the Home Office Circular. Don’t forget it wasn’t only the RUC that wanted a legislative framework it was every other UK police force too. The Met was responsible for the investigation of Irish terrorism in GB and they were involved in a range of similar operations as us without a legislative framework, so it wasn’t just the RUC. We much preferred to have a legislative framework, indeed RIPA in terms of informants is based on the way the RUC operated throughout ‘The Troubles’.
I did explain to the ACPO Working Group the Special Branch angle and why the Code wouldn’t work in our context and they clearly said they had been to government wanting legislation and were told there was no money and no parliamentary time. To be quite honest it was the pressure of the
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Security Services who because they would be taking the National Security Lead for the UK actually felt they needed a legal framework for them to operate under because they were working within the same level of guidance as we had, and, had done right throughout ‘The Troubles’.
It wasn’t the RUC in isolation it was every police force and intelligence gathering operation conducted across the UK which lacked the legislative framework we all wanted. What we did was only unlawful because here was no legal framework. The rules and regulations we operated under were not only informed by that very flimsy Home Office Circular but also by all the reviews of Special Branch that took place over the years and case law, so we didn’t work in isolation. Our rules and regulations weren’t constructed to make our job simpler; they were to make sure that what we did was within the law. The real test is the way in which we operated particularly in the running of agents, that process was basically the same as the one brought in by RIPA. It was a case of seeking approvals throughout the organisation, so if we wanted to do something we needed approval based on doing a risk assessment and getting approval, that’s how we operated and that’s how RIPA operates.
NEED TO KNOW
I have to say by the very nature of Special Branch and its work from the day you joined Special Branch ‘the need to know’ principle was applied. So, if you weren’t told about a piece of intelligence it’s because you didn’t need to know it, and that applied right across the board. Senior management frowned upon and discouraged sharing too much intelligence and information on what we were doing with officers at the lower levels in the organisation. But you can be absolutely assured at senior level the Regional Uniform ACC was informed of every operation, he was told the objectives, where and how we were going to carry out the operation, and based on his recommendation that information would have been disseminated within his management group. So it wasn’t done in isolation we didn’t work alone without any contact with Uniform and understanding their needs. As for the allegation of Special Branch being remote it’s certainly not the case. Information wouldn’t have been shared so much at the lower levels to protect the integrity of an operation, we wouldn’t roll into a station and say ‘Ok boys we are going to give you a briefing on our operation today’, that wouldn’t happen at the lower levels but it did at the senior levels and they made the decision how far down to disseminate the information.
INTELLIGENCE FRAMEWORK
Each of the organisations I worked with inside and outside the police had its own guidance for mounting and running operations, the documents to be completed and the approvals required; so it wasn’t on an ad hoc basis. These were self developed policies because there was no overarching legal guidance. The only guidance was a Home Office Circular, which I think ran to 3 pages on the use of informants in the investigation of criminal offences. There were many occasions when requests were made to government to provide guidelines, on one particular occasion the then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was receiving a briefing in Castlereagh on the situation in Belfast and she was asked for some structure, some legislation because we felt that the Home Office Circular was totally inadequate, she gave an undertaking that our thoughts would be given consideration. The paper duly went in and I understand it ‘disappeared into the ether’; it was later resubmitted and found to be too hard to deal with. It wasn’t until 1998 when the Blair government brought the European
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Convention of Human Rights into UK law (although the UK was a signatory to the convention) was there a desire, or rather, a hard fought battle with government to come up with what is now known as RIPA (Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000). Until RIPA there was only the Home Office Circular we could follow and as for a legislative framework there was nothing to ensure we weren’t committing any criminal offences. What happened in 1998 with the UK passing The Human Rights Act and in the absence of any legislation ACPO (Association of Chief Police Officers) came up with guidance without any reference to the RUC. I got a copy as Head of IMG and when I read it I was absolutely horrified, it bore no resemblance to what was happening in the real world. I spoke to the author who told me ACPO had asked government for legislation and were told there was neither the money nor parliamentary time. I wrote a paper and submitted it to the Chief Constable who went back to government and I think with the influence of the Security Services, who recognised the dangers to their working practices and effectiveness, persuaded the government to find the money and parliamentary time. I sat on the Steering Committee and Working Group for RIPA that eventually produced the 2000 regulations. The RUC desire to be compliant and embrace the legislation was recognised by the Commissioners who came to review our working of RIPA when we were the only UK police force to receive a favourable report. We wanted regulation, we sought regulation, we saw the difficulties without it, but unfortunately government let us down for a long time and that’s the bottom line.
So we used the knowledge within the organisation to come up with the best sets of circumstances, the best guidelines to produce the best scrutiny to guide our officers and to provide a structure to ensure that operations were properly conducted, supervised and reported on. So until RIPA there were strict internal rules for each (E Dept) branch which had been approved by the Head of Department (ACC E); it wasn’t just a bunch of guys coming together to do what they wanted in the absence of Home Office guidelines or legislation.
The only principles we had were the Policing Principles, and they were absolutely the overarching principles for us on every occasion. I am very proud of the work that Special Branch did, not only was every one of the principles part of the planning, they were applied on a daily basis to ensure officers weren’t exposed to prosecution, and, in my opinion, they were achieved. The attitude taken in RIPA was that no one should break the law; it provided guidelines and that whatever action was taken it must be approved at the correct level. That’s the whole basis of RIPA, whether it is an Inspector approving the issue of a pair of binoculars right through to the Home Office issuing a warrant for an interception or installation of a covert device. From one extreme to the other, we considered that there should be regulation requiring that every action should be appropriately approved and that risk assessments should be made in order that people didn’t just act on what they thought was the greater good. Police action had to be shown to be necessary, proportionate and appropriate to achieve the particular objective. Legislatively none of this was in place before RIPA although the principles and the operating policies that existed in RUC Special Branch formed the basis for RIPA.
Record keeping was essential, there was no point collecting intelligence and then disposing of it. So what happened was the source would be met, the intelligence collected, debriefed, recorded in full and then it was sifted through and all the relevant parts taken from it and recorded on the system whether it was associations, vehicles, houses etc that low level stuff. Any other intelligence relating to Quarter Master activity, Finance activity, ASU activity whatever, that would be taken out and disseminated on SB reports which were logged and recorded. The original source reports were kept
SPECIAL BRANCH Page 51 of 96 for 3 years unless there was a specific reason to keep it, for example, if the source was involved in an operation. The 3 year period was simply because of a lack of space and secure accommodation, what happened every year the 3 year old reports were reviewed and assessed for their relevance to ongoing operations and if they didn’t they were shredded and burnt. The source reports were the raw intelligence, they were essential and created a vast bulk of paperwork, we could only keep them for 3 years before destroying them to make room for the new records, but the specialist units kept their operational orders forever. So the 3 year rule was forced on us by practicalities of not having enough secure space and accommodation which forced us to weed our records every year.
Records were kept right across the Department, TCG who ran the operations maintained an operational file which was kept forever; it was not the case they were destroyed after a period of time.
In the 70s and 80s there were no regulations, later there was the Data Protection and other regulations for record keeping. In the mid 90s I took on a task to look at records held at HQ to see if there was some way they could be maintained and securely stored at the Public Records Office (PRONI) for a substantial period of time before being released to historians because I saw them as important documents, but PRONI didn’t want to know, it was just too hot for them to handle, they felt they didn’t have the secure space and accommodation. I suppose I was looking to solve our practical storage problem because at HQ we were busting at the seams and needed to do something, the alternative was to shred and burn. I thought this would be wrong but I also realised the sensitivity of the documents even going back 50, 60 even 70 years.
There were family sensitivities particularly on the Republican side which if someone was revealed as an informant or the records released would allow someone to come rightly or wrongly to that conclusion would have consequences for the family today. Irish people have long memories and it could be quite difficult for the family today if one of their ancestors was thought to be an informant. As PRONI didn’t want to know it couldn’t be taken any further and I believe the documents are in vaults in Carrickfergus.
As for Special Branch being incestuous, it really wasn’t the case, there was a lot of movement within the various units allowing us to gather intelligence, but the objective was always to better do our job, it wasn’t an ‘old boy’ network. It wasn’t an ‘old boys’ network, it was very much a professional group of individuals with the same goal. You can be assured that if someone wasn’t performing or complying with the rules and regulations they would be removed from Special Branch no matter what unit they were in. Remember the vast reservoir experience and knowledge we built up and the methodologies of gathering and exploiting intelligence were developed by learning doing the job, there was no model to follow so moving people out of Special Branch would have prevented building up this expertise. Look at the experience and knowledge gained by the RUC, the terminology used, and our structures for gathering and exploiting intelligence, they have all been taken and are now used right across the UK. The RUC experience was taken and used in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is fair to say that the RUC model has been used worldwide to combat terrorism, so our experience was absolutely essential, not only essential and successful in Northern Ireland but worldwide. It isn’t exaggerating to say that the RUC methods were and continue to be successfully used worldwide.
So this professional knowledge and experience was used to make key decisions in a high risk challenging environment to combat terrorists. Some say that Special Branch was out of touch with
SPECIAL BRANCH Page 52 of 96 the needs of the rest of the organisation, you only have to look at the reporting structures and remember every member of Special Branch was a police officer who came from a uniform background. Look at the number of senior officers who over the years came into Special Branch from CID and Uniform, it wasn’t the case all our senior officers were promoted up the ranks through Special Branch from Constable to Superintendent, some were of course but not all. I would say about 50% of Special Branch senior management were brought in from CID and Uniform without any previous Special Branch experience, and, we were part of the same management structure as everybody else. So that is how Special Branch kept in touch.
Bearing in mind the number of operations that were supposed to happen and didn’t happen at all, others were postponed until the next day nor the day after, some rolled on for many days until the terrorists had all their ‘ducks in a row’ and they felt everything was fine to mount their operation. So their plans could take days or weeks, and some of our operations could last months or years in fact the longest single operation was 24 hours a day for 3 years. If we had briefed everyone in the Region on what we were doing it wouldn’t have lasted 3 years, nor would it have produced the immense results it did. Ultimately it led to the recovery of numerous items and arrests many of whom were convicted and jailed. So, the protection of the information, and, what we were doing was absolutely essential to the integrity of the whole operation, and, was part and parcel of allowing us to achieve objectives.
At station level Divisional Special Branch would interface with Uniform colleagues, the specialist units didn’t of course, they stayed in the background because they were conducting secret operations. Divisional Special Branch maintained a very good liaison with the Uniform officers who were also in the position to help us by being our ‘eyes and ears’ on the ground reporting certain individuals were using certain cars or houses and who they were associating with. At this level Divisional Special Branch maintained that liaison going to weekly meetings and giving intelligence briefings. Intelligence sharing happened at these weekly meetings, and, if there was something of an immediate nature that was briefed immediately. Divisional Special Branch had daily contact with Uniform officers and attended scheduled weekly and monthly meetings giving an assessment of the current threat level, the terrorist tactics and how they could be counteracted, this was continual.
I think those officers I have spoken too who came into Special Branch from a CID or Uniform background were often in awe of the professionalism and the type of work that was being done. So initially there was perhaps ‘shock’ when they realised the extent of the work that was going on that they didn’t know about. Without doubt no one ever said ‘this is not a Department I can’t work in, what you are doing isn’t right, I want to go back to Uniform or CID’, to a man they took on and engaged in their role and added something to it by applying their experience. There was always a period of assimilation for anyone moving from one role to another and those coming in at the higher levels were complimentary of the work that they saw being done.
Special Branch processes were a bit more flexible and different to some of those used by Uniform and CID. The structures we had, helped to support individuals, particularly those coming into the Department, by giving them all the information available to allow them to make a decision, and, advice and guidance was available as to what was appropriate in particular circumstances. They were not working in isolation, it wasn’t the case of pushing information across the desk and saying ‘Ok boss what do you want me to do?’ the process ensured they were fully briefed, knew what the
SPECIAL BRANCH Page 53 of 96 options were, what the risks were and what the dangers were; a risk assessment was carried out for every operation.
OFFICER 11
[Joining SB] It was always my inkling; I thought it was going to be exciting, it was this feeling I could do more to prevent a lot more stuff, that’s why, it was a preventative thing. Another thing was, for 2 years I had been involved in ‘Supergrass Trials’ and I had already made my decision to join Special Branch, but for those 2 years I learnt about all the PIRA attacks and incidents they were involved with and that educated me to the fact that all the times an area had been put OOB had prevented things, and, I thought so much is being done behind the scenes that nobody knows about, I want to get involved and that’s why I joined.
Before Gilmour came forward as a ‘Supergrass’, we would be sitting in the CID office, and when we heard somewhere was OOB and we thought there’s the Branch again justifying their existence. But in light of what he (Gilmore) said you remembered back, the things that happened and more importantly you realised what didn’t happen. After I joined the Branch I was asked what I thought of the Branch now I knew more about what they did, I said, and this is my quote, ‘we get more credit for what we don’t know than what we do know’; people always thought we knew more than we did. If something happened people said we knew about it, but nobody knows what didn’t happen on other occasions, so that’s my take ‘we get more credit for what we didn’t know than what we did know’.
The big problem with Raymond Gilmour was he was too honest, he was incapable of telling a lie, which flies in the face of what Lord Chief Justice Lowry said about him, Raymond was incapable of telling a lie. He was someone who had become a policeman without becoming a policeman.
He lived a lie, yes, his life was a lie, but when it came to being asked a direct question, he was incapable of telling a lie, he was just incapable of doing it, and, up to a point he was a bit naive. The other ‘Supergrass’ Bobby Quigley had a knack, if the barrister asked him a question he would not tell a lie either, but he had what I call a ‘nocturnal vision’, he could look down 8 ‘roads’ and ask himself, where is the barrister going with this line of questioning? and he would use his answer to divert the barrister down a road of least difficulty, he was brilliant at that. But Raymond Gilmour couldn’t do that, Gilmore just blurted out his answer and never thought what the next question might be, and, that put him under a lot of pressure he didn’t need to put himself under in the witness box.
The biggest issue for a Handler is, some people can’t handle it because they have a black or white thought pattern. To get information Handlers have to talk to criminals and by getting the information, they can’t forget that once having the information they might possibly be guilty of something themselves, so they can find it difficult and awkward. You have to be able to bury your feelings about the source and be their friend; you might not like much about them, but you’ve got to work with them and talk to them at their level. You can’t put yourself above them, the only way to get them to open up is by being their friend. You have to put your personal feelings aside to work with them, that’s not to say you give them carte blanche to do what they like, you don’t, but when you are talking to someone who you don’t have a lot of time for, you must pretend you do otherwise you won’t get anywhere. No informant will give 100%, if you get 60% you’re doing well, and, if it’s 90% you’re there!
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During ‘The Troubles’ SB evolved, it had been decimated in the 60s and 70s; the intelligence wasn’t there, and numbers were low; well and truly it didn’t get going until the early 80s. If you go to the memorial for the policemen who were murdered in ‘Derry and look at the dates they died you will see from the early 80s the numbers fell and the gaps in between were longer. Incidents became fewer because the attacks were getting more complicated and calculated so deaths were dropping, and I believe that was due to the informants, better intelligence and better use of intelligence.
Being a handler was very busy, the biggest majority of informants were met on a weekly or fortnightly basis. If you had the right one, and, there were a few you could have been on the end of a phone with a 60 minute deadline, and, you could meet him 2 or 3 times a week, but only if he was at particular level. It wasn’t a case of going out to see him if there wasn’t any point, or, if he didn’t have something for you. Sometimes we met to give him a few pounds and check everything was OK, and, then there were others you met on a regular basis. As a handler you wouldn’t want to do 5 or 6 meets a week if you could avoid it. We also had to cover meets for the safety of the handlers and sources, but again the number of meets varies from office to office and Belfast had more manpower than ‘Derry.
I don’t think a lot of people from a CID background, like a lot of these people coming from a CID background into the likes of Historical Enquiries and the Ombudsman, really understand intelligence work. From personal experience having been over there and worked on a few jobs there, they don’t have the same knowledge or experience of source handling and intelligence work unless they have been in specific units like the Anti-Terrorist Squad in London. But if they worked outside London maybe Birmingham, or, in a Crime Squad they didn’t have the types of sources or enquiries we had, their experience is totally different. The CID boys who come over might be brilliant detectives, but they don’t understand how things work or what it was like; CID just use sources to get people before the courts.
Special Branch collects intelligence for that as well, but they collect intelligence on what is going on politically inside terrorist organisations, who is who, who is meeting who, who is doing the recruiting and things like that, it is a far wider scope. CID aren’t really interested in who is meeting who, and, what they are doing politically, they are more interested in solving the crime, I have experience of that and seen it umpteen times.
To understand and combat terrorism you need people on the ‘inside’ over time. For example, prior to the ceasefires Sinn Féin were preaching to the IRA for a long time, and, the British government needed to know what was going on at their meetings, that’s the intelligence, that’s the sort of thing that was very important at that particular time, and, that is what the Branch did. A CID handler wouldn’t really be interested in that, he would probably pass it up the system, but a CID handler in a CID office isn’t going to be encouraged by his people to spend time gathering that sort of intelligence; they want to know who mugged the Old Lady down the street, or, the identity of the gunman who robbed the Chip Shop last night. I am not criticising CID but there is a difference, they just had a different outlook to Special Branch.
As a CID man I really didn’t have a view one way or the other on SB, it was only after I saw the Gilmour file did I realise what had actually happened. I was friendly with SB and joint handled a couple of sources with them before handing them over. When I was working with the Army, the thing with them was when they were on the ground they stopped everybody, questioned
SPECIAL BRANCH Page 55 of 96 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.
OFFICER 12
Intelligence Led Policing is in vogue since may be 2000 when people started to write about it. The way you log on to your computer and buy a Barbour coat and then a couple of days later on the right hand side of the screen all these messages appear about Barbour coats; in a way that’s like intelligence policing, it’s looking at what you did and trying to forecast what you might do in the future.
In a place like Northern Ireland, intelligence led policing is about getting pre-emptive intelligence as to what the terrorists are going to do next which is different from the popular definition. If you look at the definition of intelligence, you need it in a timely fashion and it needs to be secret, how then is this done? Some people think intelligence is evidence, but intelligence can’t magically mutate into evidence, all it can do is point the police towards evidential opportunities. Not every piece of intelligence that points to an evidential opportunity can be acted on, and that’s a dilemma! It could be, going back to ‘Norman’, some old lady, and the terrorists know she knows where the guns are hidden, and if we go and recover the weapons then the terrorists can quickly work out who told us, and what is ‘Norman’ going to do for that old lady? It’s not as easy as everyone thinks that every time we are given information we should pounce to get evidence. Sometimes evidential opportunities have to go begging, and these have to be balanced against the risk to the community, the police and the source. What is the risk if we go and get the weapons? Can we do something to the firearms so they don’t pose a threat? So, it’s not just as simple as, in normal policing, documenting the opportunity and taking it. I think understanding this is a difficulty, particularly post conflict when people look back and say we could have stopped a crime earlier rather waiting, as we did sometimes, for a few days or weeks to allow the source to be removed by 3 or 4 steps before taking the evidential opportunity. But people don’t realise that at the time we couldn’t always take the opportunity as it posed a threat to the person who told us, or it could have been because we didn’t have the resources to do anything else, we didn’t have the people to go and search because they were being used somewhere else. It’s not an exact science, it’s a policing approach that is widely misunderstood because a lot of people don’t want to understand. The more you look at it, study it, the more it makes sense, especially when you relate it to conflicts today.
Success was prevention. Here it was prevention, prevention was more important than detection. I mean keeping people alive was more important than putting someone away for killing someone. It sounds daft but we’re focussing on the living because we couldn’t cope with the ‘historic’ aspect. Every scenario is different, but it’s all about prevention, we might not be able, if we know there’s a bomb because a source told us, to take that evidential opportunity, but at least we could prevent the attack. In the West, and in post conflicts policing tends to be investigation led, so detections are the main priority not prevention, and, a lot of people don’t understand that.
Putting it in stark contrast, is it better to prevent an attack today or detect a crime from yesterday? What’s the balance? Of course you’re going to protect the living. It’s not that you are ignoring detections, it’s a priority, and the priority has changed, it was a fundamental shift in policing and
SPECIAL BRANCH Page 56 of 96 people didn’t realise that especially when they came here looking at our policing approach unless they have been here and done it. A lot of people who worked in conflict zones around the world in Iraq, Afghanistan Africa suddenly realised we were dead right, you have got to protect society and prevent attacks, and, in the process look to get detections. It’s not just about detections, detections are not the ‘God’ at this time it’s prevention. Ideally you are looking to catch terrorists ‘red handed’ because that takes the community out of the equation as you don’t need someone to give evidence. Say someone is caught in the process of moving a bomb, they are wearing Marigold gloves and boiler suit, they travel in a stolen vehicle on the road for 10-15 minutes and have an ‘on/off’ switch beside them; there is no doubt that they are going to explode a bomb and kill someone. The ‘5 star’ option is to catch these people in the process of doing an attack. That essentially is what everybody was aiming for in the operation, catching the guy driving the bomb, and may be the guy fronting it, or, if possible to pounce when they were making the bomb to get the bombmaker. But every situation is different, but the main point is people are caught and they are shocked, and, wonder ‘How did the police know?’ That actually sends out a big message along with the sentence of 20-25 years jail, compared to pouncing early and getting them for something quite minor and smaller sentences. So, the number of covert operations that caught them ‘red handed’, and, got them the big sentences absolutely devastated the IRA. It was prevention first, but detection was close behind. It was about sending out a message to the rest of their organisation ‘Wow we have a problem here’. A number of very active terrorist units were shut down for periods of time because they didn’t know where we were getting our information from.
A lot of the time it’s slow, there are evidential opportunities you can’t take but you can exploit them, bear in mind the priority is always prevention. At times it’s getting everything to come together neatly where you have the opportunity to take everything as a package and have the opportunity to pounce on the people you are working against. The IRA spends a lot of time watching its own shadow, it’s very careful, very deliberate about how it goes about its business, and, is very conscious about informants and surveillance, so they try to make it very difficult for us. People will look at it and think it was quite easy, but Northern Ireland was the Islamic State of its day, and, Loyalist groups were quite sophisticated, and at times were more radical and less predictable than the IRA. To an extent we had to be clairvoyant and no-one can predict everything. You could try to predict what they might do based on what they did in the past and get it right, but things happen no one can predict.
There are limitations in every police model, and there are limitations in this one too. At times we were developing an intelligence picture but the aim was always prevention, it’s not a matter of ‘Oh we’re happy if this happens and risks somebody’s life’, that’s not prevention.
It’s like everything there can be improvements, I know when I look and reflect back, I have yet to see anywhere in the world where there was a similar environment of armed conflict what was actually done better. When you look back at conflicts since ours, that academics categorise as an irregular war, like Iraq and Afghanistan which have torn themselves apart, if you look at how dysfunctional and ineffective the police are in those places, where corruption is endemic, you have to say ‘Hold on what did the RUC do differently ?’ When you look back at the facts in Iraq and Afghanistan half their populations fled and you have the migrant crisis in Europe. When it comes to terror groups they are very prone to shoot first rather than ‘arrest’ anyone; they do not have an arrest centric culture. Looking at the number of covert operations over 30 years in which people were shot dead here it
SPECIAL BRANCH Page 57 of 96 doesn’t speak ‘Shoot to Kill’. And, the number of the minority population who said the police were oppressive decreased by 10% over the conflict so the RUC must have done something right, keeping one side from the other and vice versa. So, the RUC were that thin ‘blue line’, or, rather ‘green line’ that kept this place stable and bought enough time for local political parties to get their act together, and, it has been given absolutely no credit whatsoever.
I think the limitations on the police, when you read the Chief Constable reports, as far back as Jamie Flanaghan’s time, they beseech the leaders of the nationalist community, the Catholic Church and the SDLP, to please support the police. But that support never ever came throughout the lifetime of the conflict, and, even since their support has been withheld retrospectively from the police. When you don’t support the rule of law, even if you don’t like it because it’s uncomfortable, the reality is you are actually supporting the terrorist organisation that is trying to subvert the rule of law. You can’t be neutral, and people didn’t see this; you were either on one side or the other in this equation. If you’re not supporting the police, which is the rule of law you are actually supporting the other side, whether you like it or not. That was the great limitation here, once we realised that, the police just got with it, we were never going to get that endorsement, it didn’t really matter as long as we were effective and impartial, we could buy enough time for people to begrudging say ‘I don’t really like them, but you know, they’re not bad’.
Special Branch is specifically there for collecting information, and, they recognise there are people in society who want to report crime, but can’t be seen to do this, and, this is one reason it was set up 200-250 years ago, so it’s not like it’s unique to ‘The Troubles’ or NI. SB takes that portfolio on until society becomes more normal and ‘Norman’ can return. When you don’t have a police presence how do you find out what is going on in the community?
There are 2 aspects, the heartbeat of the counter terrorist effort is SB gathering intelligence from people in terrorist organisations and the people close to them, and, that’s what makes it tick. That’s the way it evolved, E Dept did very well to co-ordinate its surveillance and executive arm, the HMSU, but it also became highly skilled at co-ordinating the military support which was superb. But Special Branch would have been nothing without the professional front line officers – the ‘Normans’. If you don’t have ‘Normans’ on the front line serving summonses with soldiers in Newtownhamilton or on a bicycle in Bangor or in armoured Land Rovers in Derry’s Bogside, if you don’t have that professional front line Special Branch becomes incidental and I think a lot of people miss that, and that that is where people came from to join the Branch. Without professional frontline police officers, who are essential and seen by the public day and daily, if the community are asked about the police it’s the uniform front line officers they talk about not the people in plain clothes who the majority never meet. If the front line isn’t professional you’re screwed. Special Branch made the counter terrorist effort tick, Special Branch getting intelligence from agents in terrorist organisation was vital, and, the way surveillance became so professional, the rising number of ‘red handed’ operations and the co-ordination with the military was just out of this world.
In my experience it was easier to work against Republicans probably because we had more success when it came to recruiting people in their units. On the Loyalist side it was annoying, in the Offices I worked we never managed to get anyone inside a unit which people will find a surprise as everyone thinks, sure every Loyalist was talking to you, but we didn’t manage to get one. That said it was funny, we did totally dismantle the main Loyalist organisation in that town and we didn’t have
SPECIAL BRANCH Page 58 of 96 anyone on the inside. We had someone with good access, and with good surveillance and a bit of luck the thing just bounced our ‘road’. In my career I worked in areas more against Republicans, and, I know people say it’s easier to work against Loyalist because they see us as ‘one of them’, but Loyalists were more unpredictable, at least the IRA had a methodology, a plan and a grand strategy, Loyalists were very reactive.
I talked to guys in the Branch who worked in really bad Loyalist areas in Belfast on the Peaceline areas, and they said all of a sudden somebody would be called into a house for a few beers then a couple of inches of coke would come out, people snorted it up their nose then they would decide to go out and murder a Catholic, totally spontaneous, no planning, no nothing, how the hell do you deal with that?
To an extent I am glad I wasn’t faced with that, I suppose this behaviour might become predictable if it set a pattern over time although you could be caught off guard at the start, but if that was their regular behaviour it could be a predictable pattern. In the end a lot of the Loyalist stuff, like drug dealing, was crime. Working against them was difficult but it still could be done, my first HMSU operation was against a Loyalist unit and we arrested a few of them going to do a ‘hit’, the person they were going to ‘hit’ they thought was a Catholic from his radio interviews, but he was a Protestant, so their targeting wasn’t good.
The police didn’t let themselves down, Special Branch was the heartbeat of the counter terrorist effort, which was intelligence led. I don’t think people truly understand how all that was joined up, nobody has taken a step back to look at it, it frustrates me that they turn round and isolate Special Branch. But you can’t talk about Special Branch without talking about the whole police family and the wider security apparatus, may be the fixation with SB is because of the ‘need to know’ principle I don’t know.
If you don’t have that professional front line Special Branch becomes incidental and I think a lot of people miss that, and that that is where people came from to join the Branch. Special Branch was anything but a ‘Force within a Force’. It was part of it, is your heart separate from your body? No that’s nonsense because the veins and arteries connect the heart to everything. It’s the same with Special Branch, it was small, it punched above its weight but its strength was it was connected to the rest of the body. Special Branch made the counter terrorist effort tick, Special Branch getting intelligence from agents in terrorist organisations was vital, and, the way surveillance became so professional, the rising number of ‘red handed’ operations and the co-ordination with the military was just out of this world.
OFFICER 13
In the 60s SB was small, perhaps around about 100 officers in total with roughly one Constable in each District under the command of a Sergeant or Inspector who was answerable to the County Inspector and supported by a small HQ contingent. The County Inspector was briefed on the intelligence and was responsible for taking action. However, when ‘The Troubles’ erupted the scale and nature of events, and, the demand for information overwhelmed SB just as it did for the RUC in general in 1969. These events necessitated a total re-organisation of the RUC, including Crime Special which was renamed SB, after the 1970 Hunt Report and followed a path of continuous improvement and development right through to today. As Dr Matchett points out in his book, the
SPECIAL BRANCH Page 59 of 96 early ‘reform’ period was largely a Uniform deterrent, and as CID developed, interviewing and investigation became the incisive weapons against terrorism, but as they blunted SB and the intelligence led approach came more to the fore, and, into the vanguard against terrorism.
By the late 1970s Special Branch began to emerge as a new policing discipline because the level of violence was such that the Security Forces didn’t have the time to respond in the traditional ways of community policing and investigations which relied on community support and investigations by interviewing. There was a heavy reliance on deterrence as a means of social control with the prospect of being caught the foremost deterrent. The level of violence had negated these methods, the community were fearful about coming forward, while some refused, so securing witness evidence was difficult. Forensic evidence from the scene was problematic because in some areas the Security Forces came under attack, whilst the terrorists, particularly Republicans, were learning organisations who critiqued their activities and through court cases learnt to frustrate the police quest for forensic evidence. Efforts to obtain evidence by questioning were becoming less successful as the courts started to demand higher standards of evidence amidst allegations of police forcing confessions, and, the terrorists becoming more resistant to questioning. The terror groups trained their people to remain silent during interviews and to ask for a lawyer as often as possible, this was to alleviate the pressure on suspects which naturally flowed from a period of detention, the aim was to narrow the opportunities for the police to collect evidence. The last throw of the dice using traditional methods was the use of ‘Supergrasses’ or Converted Terrorists (CT), this had the effect of decimating several terror groups by providing intelligence and evidential opportunities for the police to make numerous arrests and to disrupt them further. Initially the accomplice evidence from the supergrasses secured the prosecution of many terrorists, however most convictions were overturned on appeal as the courts required a higher evidential standard because of absence of jury trials, so in the absence of any corroborating evidence, irrespective of how credible and convincing the CT evidence was, many of those convicted were released. The process started to be questioned. The initiative wasn’t helped by the choice of some CT, who were totally disreputable liars lacking any credibility, which was possibly driven by competition between SIOs and the elation because of the harm being done to the terror groups that the CT process would beat the terrorists. Furthermore, the terrorists acted to undermine the process by sending people forward as CTs who would quickly retract their ’evidence’, and, of course there were many legal challenges and propaganda attacks. In the end the majority of those arrested and convicted were acquitted. This was another example of the absence of appropriate legal rules applicable to prosecuting terrorists using a rule of law approach. The CT process has since developed and was used most recently in the trial of Mount Vernon Loyalists using the evidence of Mark Haddock.
Public confidence demanded that the Security Forces get to grips with the terror groups and this could only be done by changing approach, that new approach had to be one that gave the Security Forces the initiative, protected lives and curtailed the activities of the terror group within a rule of law context. To achieve this, information on the terror groups, their people and what they were doing was required, this foreknowledge would allow the Security Forces to act to protect lives and disrupt the terrorist groups. The approach was to be proactive priority on saving lives, prevention of terrorism supported by investigations.
I joined Special Branch in 1982 when the CT system was in progress, it was an exciting time there was a ‘feel good’ factor because of the impact on the terror groups we had lots of inside knowledge
SPECIAL BRANCH Page 60 of 96 and were able to identify areas we needed source coverage. Each Sub Division had a SB Office and the number of staff was determined by the Threat so the higher the threat the more SB officers. At any one time SB had around 800 officers, including the specialist units, out of a total service strength of 12000 it was small but punched above its weight.
The job entailed researching identifying and recruiting informants alongside administrative tasks such as vetting those seeking to join the police or applying for a firearms license. However, when informant information was received it was busy if you were involved, it wasn’t unusual not to be told what was going on until the time arrived when you were needed. And, you only knew the sources you dealt with, you might have known there were other sources but if you were involved with them you weren’t told their identity. You understood that that was the way it was, the need to know, you accepted that was the way it was, you knew how valuable source information was, how difficult it was to get it and that the price of discovery of the source was his or her life, you had to protect the informants identity it was literally a case of life and death, perhaps having this appreciation at first hand made it easier to accept that was the way it was but when I had to brief the local SDC some made it clear they were happy being told by a DC to put an area OOB or of a threat without more details, others understood why we couldn’t give more details and trusted what we were saying. I think this reticence, for very good reasons, caused some colleagues in Uniform and CID to think we knew always knew more than we were saying. Sometimes I knew as much as they did, and at other times I knew a bit more, but they didn’t need to know, it would have been nice for them to know but they didn’t need to know, it wouldn’t have added to their job. It is surprising how little information it takes to identify a source of information, just take the somebody in the workplace reporting a colleague for some misdemeanour the person reporting can be very quickly identified or suspected and ostracised by other colleagues. However, all the terrorists need is suspicion to kill, or abduct and torture someone, disclosure posed the greatest risk to life of the informant, our job was to protect life, all lives, so the need to know had to be strictly adhered too. The terrorists were always on the look out for our informants and tested their members by giving an individual information of an attack and then watching to see if there was a security response, and, if there was that person was under suspicion, so we had to act with caution on their intelligence.
The SB focus on security and collecting intelligence to reduce and prevent terrorism and other national security threats was distinct from what CID did collecting evidence to prosecute serious crime criminals. Uniform had a hybrid function needing intelligence to prevent crime and disorder and although they investigated the less serious crime they still needed evidence. Some CID found this division of labour difficult to understand, thinking SB was there to collect intelligence on all serious crime and disorder issues. Traditionally SB across the UK collect intelligence on subversive activities which history has shown included radical trade union and political activism. However due to the scale of such activities Special Branch in the GB forces are too small to warrant having its own department so have been under the command of ACC Crime which gave senior CID officers responsibility for SB and this is why several GB officers such as Stalker and Stevens thought SB should be under CID control; they failed to understand the size and potency of the threat posed by the various terror gangs in NI and the nature of Intelligence Led Policing.
I remember one CID officer a very motivated and dedicated investigator was always very eager to discover our informants. Even though we passed intelligence to him he wanted to arrest and interview the arrest our sources to get them to provide him with information on terrorist crimes,
SPECIAL BRANCH Page 61 of 96 even though this would ‘blow’ the source putting their lives at risk and limiting our capacity to prevent, deny and disrupt the terror groups and save lives. I think he thought he could convince the informants to turn Queens Evidence for him.
He later transferred into SB and was a strong adherent to the ‘need to know’ principle although he did start to brief his CID counterpart on operations to catch terrorists in the act, he was one of the first proponents of intelligence led policing.
There is an obvious dilemma between the approach of SB which is saving lives reducing victimisation and CID making criminals amenable for their crimes and helping victims get closure and some degree of comfort. Perhaps the evolution from investigation to intelligence led caused some tensions between the Branches, personally while I found some tensions between CID and SB, I think they were more to do with personalities, egos and a lack of understanding of each other’s needs.
The terrorists, like us, worked on a ‘need to know’ basis which meant it was entirely possible your informant didn’t know of the attack until afterwards. This is difficult for some to understand because there is a common misconception that if you have an intelligence source you know everything or should, but these groups are compartmentalised with sub units assisting each other and their operatives just being told as little as be at a certain place at a certain time, and, this can happen within minutes with no time for the informant to report in.
OFFICER 14
No comment
OFFICER 15
My first appointment in Special Branch was to TCG, when I arrived I was briefed by the Chief and the other Inspectors, this was my first time in SB and a new experience. I count myself lucky that the Detective Superintendent in charge of TCG had been in CID for a long time and was very experienced. It was interesting to see the internal ‘politics and dynamics’ because the SB Regional Head had been in SB his entire career. Every morning we had ‘morning prayers’ to review what had taken place the day before, the progress of operations, the targets we were working on, what other agencies we were deploying, the DET, SAS, E4A and HMSU, and, planned what we would do that day. Sometimes the wheel came off and we would put it back on. The dynamics were the Regional Head had his agenda, and, the TCG Super had his; every time the Regional Head asked questions the TCG Super’s standard reply was ‘there’s the legislation, that’s what I am bound by, there is what I can do, what I can’t do’ and that was on every occasion. I welcomed that, I was in a situation completely new to me; it was good to see that the world of surveillance and intelligence was steered straight down the line by legislation. Ok, the legislation wasn’t as tight as it is now, but I didn’t see any operation being mounted outside the principles of policing, and, the legislation that existed at the time.
Every operation had a log book, and, as a DI you had to complete each log book meticulously recording every action you took, and, the reasons why as part of your decision making process; so there was a record. Was there a degree of latitude on the ground? To be fair to the SB guys they were out on a limb in that there wasn’t sufficient legislation to cover the decision making they were required to make, I like to think that they drew on their experience, legislation and the policing
SPECIAL BRANCH Page 62 of 96 principles. Now, do I believe police apply the law to the spirit and letter of the legislation? Yes, any policeman, I don’t care who he is, once he reaches the point where he has utilised all the legislation, experience and common sense he has, he has no excuse to go beyond that point. When you look at Da Silva and Judge Cory and others, they have gotten a big brush and just painted every individual the same colour. My view is every police officer who has stepped over the line and broken the law, put the evidence before the court.
Do I think there was too much asked of SB officers in those days? I think there was. Did a few make genuine mistakes? Yes. Did some make deliberate mistakes? I think some did. I watched the Panorama program about Scapaticci and I think some police officers were asked to do the impossible. Look at the Walker Report, it is a set of guidelines, that is all. Were there 1 or 2 SB officers I wouldn’t trust? Yes, there were. I am not sure if it was down to their personality or mine, I don’t know, but the majority of the SB and Surveillance officers I know were decent honest individuals trying to protect life.
If an informant told me X was going to be killed and I did nothing, just to protect the source, and X was killed I couldn’t live with that on my conscience, certainly not as a police officer and a human being. If there was something that risked compromising the source, we dealt with that. Some officers were placed in seriously difficult situations, and, I don’t think any police officer should have to make a decision that puts one life as more important than any other. I don’t think we can judge that one life is worth more than another. The reverse is, what do you do if your informant tells you that his organisation is going to do something that endangers 20 lives, and, if you do something to prevent the 20 being killed that will compromise the informant, who if he is killed or you have to pull him out, you lose his life saving intelligence in the future? I am not strong enough or experienced enough to make that type of decision. That’s a real dilemma!
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, maybe 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.
Look at it another way, look at the Loyalists, Loyalists were certainly penetrated to a great degree, and I am genuinely convinced that the PIRA was penetrated at the higher echelons; it was that level of penetration that brought PIRA and the Loyalists to the negotiating table. In a perverted way, Johnny Adair, a ruthless killer who fulfilled the definition of a terrorist and applied terrorism in its rawest form, targeted Republicans, he in went into Nationalist areas and, if available, he shot the first person he came across just because he thought he was shooting a Catholic. To me, in a perverted way, that he was killing innocent Catholics and prepared to go into the Nationalist/Republican heartlands put pressure on Republicans. Republicans changed their habits, some slept every night in a different house, and, others put cages inside their front doors because they were worried about Adair’s UFF and UVF. I feel for the decent ordinary Catholics who lived in
SPECIAL BRANCH Page 63 of 96 those areas that incurred the wrath of Loyalists, who if they couldn’t find a PIRA target just took the first available target even if it was just an ordinary Catholic, in the end anybody would do for the Loyalists.
I think Steven’s enquiries disrupted the flow of intelligence to the Security Forces, although SB kept working on Loyalists. Even when we had good coverage of an organisation, and this never ceased to surprise me, several sources could be at the same meeting of their paramilitary group and each one had a different take on what went on, so we had to ‘read between the lines’ to find out what went on, and, that was a difficulty. Even when we had a technical source, and, you read a source debrief, you wondered was he actually at the meeting. If 10 people are at a meeting and you debrief them all afterwards you will get 10 different stories.
You would only mount an operation when you had sufficient credible intelligence. If you had corroborated intelligence today it could take 3 or 4 months of work before you could launch an operation on it, so a lot of work goes into setting up an operation. What you do depends on what you want to do, is it to prevent and disrupt them to allow you time to put in a longer-term operation, or, is it sufficient to allow you to mount an immediate arrest operation? Don’t forget, and Loughgall is a good example, these were seasoned terrorists. Should we or could we have stopped the Loughgall team earlier? I would love to know what the various agencies involved thought, and, how complete the intelligence was. What were the risks? Was it possible to interdict them earlier or was the best thing to minimise risks and wait for them at the police station?
The only time I have experienced, ever, having all the information I wanted about a terrorist operation including the date, time and place, the identity of the terrorists involved, the ‘meeting up point’, the routes to and from the target, the target, the weapons to be used and their vehicles, is when I read a book or watch a movie!
There were no rules about how long we should keep our Decision Logs in TCG, all I recall is being told in ‘The Depot’ to keep your notebook. I can’t recall anything or anybody saying we had to keep our Logs for 10 or 20 years. It was good practice to keep documents as long as possible, but storage was always a problem. The TCG I was in had little accommodation, documents were kept as long as possible but when the store was full the old stuff, which was deemed unimportant, was destroyed to make room for the new stuff. Later in the 90s when I was at HQ, I was looking at incidents from 1974, I went to Registry to look through the microfiche, and, it was surprising the amount of information there was there.
For me, you can have a good SB man, and if he has his finger on the pulse he will have good intelligence and be as good as 10 uniform officers. When you have good intelligence you can action and exploit it. If I was a SB man I would look for the person who has the greatest level of access, the greatest influence within the group. That may mean cultivating and recruiting someone I think has potential, and, is either in the group, or, on its periphery. There is no point recruiting someone if they don’t have potential to move into the group, a source needs to be in the core with those making the decisions and those who have influence; do this and you start to influence their decision making. I do genuinely think that the level of penetration we had of IRA/Sinn Féin did help influence their leadership in Sinn Fein, Northern Command and the IRA Army Council to decide their campaign had run its course.
SPECIAL BRANCH Page 64 of 96
Intelligence work is like a jigsaw without all the pieces. You could put three pieces together but because others were missing, you had to second guess where the other pieces we had went. People read the books, and, watch the TV programmes. The unfortunate thing is people don’t understand that lives could be lost during operations because something unexpected happened, or, something different took place where we had no coverage or early warning. People now look back and say, ‘you were the police, you should have known that or done this’; it’s a ‘no win’ situation for us. I wouldn’t like to think that anybody lost their life through any deliberate decision or action by the police.
WITH HOLDING INTELLIGENCE
It’s difficult, if you are running an informant or an operation, should you tell investigators at every stage? I don’t see how that is possible. Then again, are SB guys always looking for evidential opportunities to pass on? No, their focus is on gathering intelligence putting it into the chain where it is analysed. As a SB officer you put in a piece of intelligence, you don’t know what else there is and at a strategic command level what decisions have to be made on it. But I can’t see any situation whereby a SB officer should be sharing every bit of intelligence that is coming in. There would be a stage when the intelligence is exploited operationally, and, arrests are possible. It’s at that point I would expect CID to be given a ‘heads up’ and told ‘here’s what is happening, here’s what we are doing, and, this is what we hope to get’.
Without a shadow of doubt SB made a major contribution to ending ‘The Troubles’, without any shadow of doubt. I am one of those individuals, who because SB got the intelligence, is still alive today, I am just one, there were many others. It was only when I went into TCG that I saw the level of operations and the amount of intelligence that came in that prevented so many other bombings and killings. Some of the intelligence was for political use as well as tactical intelligence for us to prevent the bombings and killings.
OFFICER 16
E Dept did a vital job, and, I believe did it very well; I’d say we did an outstanding job. I believe, and, in my knowledge, SB strove to get the best intelligence, and, acted on it appropriately for the benefit of the whole community to save lives. If we didn’t do what we did, we wouldn’t have gotten to the point we are at now, and, there would have been a bigger trail of death and destruction. The E Dept work I did prevented a lot of deaths and destruction, by preventing groups of terrorists carrying out attacks, and, that made their ‘buddies’ think twice.
In E Dept, it was another step up in the level of ‘excitement’. We were highly trained and there was a lot of training to work as a ‘tight team’. Our objectives were a lot more serious, we were often in life threatening situations, and, we always wanted to do our best to make sure people weren’t killed. We found ourselves in many frightening and dangerous situations; absolutely! Even on ‘day to day’ surveillance jobs you could find yourself in the middle of a totally hostile environment. In my earIy days, I remember it was very hard to shift the idea that everybody would know I was a police officer, I felt that I had ‘police’ written across my forehead. I remember one particular time I accidentally locked myself out of my car in Andersontown, that was a terrible feeling, I felt exposed and in danger even though it was broad daylight. I had ‘comms’ so I walked away and was able to call somebody to come and get me, I got the spare key and went back to recover my car. There was no
SPECIAL BRANCH Page 65 of 96 danger to anyone, the public didn’t know who I was, the targets didn’t know me, but to me it was a big thing!
We had to deal with the worry that we might be recognised even if there was no obvious threat, and that was the case with every Operation. It was the perceived threat, and, every time you had to deal with it. If things had gone wrong, you weren’t in a good place, so you had to deal with that perception all of the time, and not allow it to interfere with what you were trying to do.
In those early days when we went out on routine surveillance we mostly had no uniform support with us, it was just you and your colleagues on the team. If things turned ugly you hoped you could get a message out and that somebody would know where you where, and, hopefully come to your rescue. So, a lot of the time it was just you in your car and your colleagues in their cars.
You have to remember that the people we were working on took steps to see if we had them under surveillance. It was obvious some of them had had training, or, had read up about surveillance in books as they did things to try and catch us out. We could see what they were trying to do so we avoided following them too closely, although sometimes we would get really close, so they couldn’t see us, or, we made sure we weren’t where they were looking.
We did a lot of work on Drugs for CID, and back then a lot of it linked back to terrorism. It was the terrorists who were in control of the Drugs trade, and, all the big crime like stealing containers of cigarettes from the Docks and running bootleg alcohol; the main terrorist organisations were behind it all.
Most of time I found the intelligence was good, but you had to treat it as just an outline. Some people I worked with believed it was the ‘gospel truth’, and, if things didn’t go according to what they were told they didn’t know what to do. All the people who trained me, taught me to treat it as ‘loose’, to always be flexible, and, to remember that something different might happen to what we were told was going to happen; and it frequently did. I found the flexible approach to intelligence was the best.
The intelligence we got was never so good we knew everything. We only got snippets, and someone would try to put them together to try and find out what their plan was, and things never went according plan. We just had to rely on our training and use our dedication and experience ‘doing the job’ to try and find out what was likely to happen, we had to think on our feet all the time. The ‘targets’ we worked on were unpredictable and would do things we didn’t anticipate. They weren’t just terrorists, they had ordinary lives and families, so they also did everyday things. It was easy to think that they were out doing some terrorist activity every minute of the day, but you had to bear in mind they could just be going to the shop ‘a message’, or, doing the school run. So, it was difficult, very difficult.
Working in hostile places where these people lived, and, trying to pass the time while you waited for them to move without ‘blowing your cover’ was difficult. Waiting is not easy, particularly if you are waiting for somebody to do something and you don’t know when and where. Training helped you to hang around and not be compromised, and, to gauge the situation, and to fit in using your common sense. You could be waiting for hours so you had to find ways to pass the time.
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Surveillance isn’t like on TV where you can follow a car for miles and never be ‘twigged’, absolutely not! It’s impossible for one car to stick to the tail of a ‘target’ car the whole time without being ‘twigged’. We used a team, we had good ‘comms’ and used them a lot to try and anticipate where they were going, and, we used our local knowledge to decide whether to stay back or take an alternative route to stay on the ‘target’.
The type of work I did, you went into work on a Monday and didn’t know if you were getting home later that day, the next day or several days later, you just didn’t know. There was a wide diversity to the places I could find myself, it could be a derelict house, lying in a hedge at all times of the day and night, anywhere in Northern Ireland. Sometimes I was covered in cow dung with little or no equipment or clothing, no toilet facilities and no food. Also, the available space dictated if you worked alone or with a ‘buddy’; time was also a factor, sometimes there would only be enough time to get one person in or if it was done at short notice. When you did go in alone you tried to explain where you were in case they had to come and rescue you. I found myself working in areas I was unfamiliar with and that added to the stress, not knowing where you where, and, the names of the streets, or, how long you were going to be there, or, how long you might have to wait for rescue if you needed it.
My general work in E Dept involved general intelligence collection by surveillance. When it got to the point the criminals were setting out to commit their crimes we would have stuck with them until hopefully we could get them stopped and arrested. A lot of my work was on reactive operations to intelligence received, and we did 9 or 10 of these Ops a year, they were exciting, sometimes there was a short build up, and, other times it was a lot longer.
What we did was usually take the job to the point that HMSU would make the arrests, and then CID would take over and take the case to court. We did things this way to protect the identity of our surveillance officers and methodologies. You can be sure at court that you would be asked about what you did, how you did it, why you did it, the way you did, what you knew beforehand, and who trained you. All that did was educate the terrorists, and, if the operation was triggered by informant intelligence they would be able to work out the identity of the informant. If we had to go to court for every job it would have destroyed us, we needed the anonymity and protection of the law, because if the terrorists had identified any of us we wouldn’t have just be murdered, we would have been taken away tortured and then murdered.
OFFICER 17
Yes, SB did, I do think they gave good support. There were a lot of intangibles involved, threats and secret intelligence. ‘The Branch’ saved dozens and dozens, even hundreds of lives by using ‘Out of Bounds’ areas, and, by finding out what was going to happen and stopping it. These actions saved lives, but they couldn’t say what they were doing or ‘boast’ about the lives they saved.
What ‘the Branch’ did was a fantastic job, but you don’t know how fantastic because they can’t tell you everything. There has to be a firewall, not a ‘Force within a Force’ firewall, but one that is breached when necessary to share information. Here’s another thing that fed the ‘Force within a Force’, a ‘Branch’ Detective Constable would go and brief the SDC, and, sometimes he had to tell him ‘Sorry you can’t tell anyone else’, that left the SDC with a dilemma as to what he should do with the information, what to share and with whom. So it seemed that a Constable was telling the SDC what
SPECIAL BRANCH Page 67 of 96 to do. I know in West Belfast senior Uniform officers were very annoyed when this happened. When a place is OOB, you are never told why it was OOB, there could have been a gun team lying in wait for a patrol. Where I think ‘the Branch’ could have done better was by telling more people, as it was it was always the senior officers who were briefed, and, information didn’t get down to the ordinary Constables who were the ones risking their lives every day.
Sometimes police see things in very simple Black and White, or right or wrong terms, but sometimes things can be grey, perhaps the term I am looking for is acceptable. Is it acceptable that a person can be involved in crime and allowed to ‘get off’ because he is reporting on somebody else committing other crimes? Is it acceptable that someone who has committed a serious crime is not prosecuted because he is giving information about other people? Both are necessary, I think the best way to put it, is looking for the common good.
The common good is doing the right thing and keeping people alive. It was about keeping people alive by doing the right thing, the right way. As to what is acceptable, that is problematic and means different things to different people. 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 man 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.
I do understand Special Branch run informants who aren’t nice people, but they save lives and that’s the way we looked at it. Where does it tip the balance between right and wrong? That is what ‘Branch men’ had to deal with; ‘the Branch’ did what they did for the right reasons, to protect life. If the informant is involved in murders that can’t be condoned or protected, but I don’t think you can understand what it’s like until you do it. I’ll say this about Special Branch they saved many, many lives. I know I said we didn’t trust them for a time, but their problem was they couldn’t publish what they did, or the number of lives they saved. Everything they did was in what we called, the ‘Dark Side’ or ‘in the Shadows’, they couldn’t go out and say sure we saved so many lives today.
Is there a dilemma in trying to balance the Art 2 obligation to protect life by using a source involved in a murder? What if the source is very likely to be able to protect lives in the future? How does that sit with the Art 2 obligation for a full and thorough investigation of that murder? The Human Rights Act (HRA) says there should be a full and thorough investigation, but let’s be realistic. There were 3200 murders here during ‘The Troubles’ and 3000 weren’t solved, so for the vast majority of the murders of my friends and other innocents nobody was ever brought to justice. So did we uphold the HRA in the 70s and 80s? No, we didn’t because it wasn’t possible to do that, but we did the best we could in the circumstances. In relation to the Right to Life, this is a dilemma I never faced but I am sure some have, should a person be given immunity today to ensure 20 are alive next year? That’s a decision people have to make for themselves, I don’t think in our time, I don’t think anybody would have allowed that to happen. The people I worked with in Special Branch and others throughout my career, I don’t think any of them would have given anybody immunity, No, not at all.
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Could some people make that decision? I am sure there are. Decisions are made by individuals, an organisation can’t defend any individual’s action, individuals have to stand up and defend their actions themselves. When I was in SB we had a system to prevent anyone making a decision ‘off their own bat’ that someone’s life would be sacrificed to protect a source, that couldn’t happen, the system wouldn’t allow it because there were too many checks and balances. Can the system prevent somebody going rogue and stepping outside the system? I don’t know, but it never happened as far as I know.
Yes, people as participating informers, were allowed to commit crimes to protect lives. The organisation made rules for people to follow to authorise an informant to be involved in crime. That authorisation needed to be signed off first, and, if the planned crime involved murder it wouldn’t have been authorised, we would have acted to prevent it taking place.
Some of the things levelled at us are easy to allege but difficult to disprove. For example, the allegation that SB authorised informants to be involved in murder, absolutely No, we did not! People worked as informants to save lives, so they weren’t allowed to be involved in murder. Informant involvement in crime had to be signed off, and nobody would authorise an informant to be involved in murder.
With crime you can be upfront, and, every time you get a bit of intelligence you can go and do something with it. But with terrorism you have to think a bit more strategically and longer term, which I think prevented people being killed. If a source comes to me and says three people are going to be involved in a murder tonight, I have to stop that murder. Do I arrest those people on the intelligence making the source redundant and of no use to me in the future? Will such action cost the source his life? Or, do I try to do something to prevent the murder from taking place and leave the source in place to provide more intelligence which could save lives in the future? What is the balance? What is the objective, bring down one ASU or get further up the chain to get more people in the terrorist group arrested? I think one reason why we did go for the long term stuff was we never saw the end of ‘The Troubles’ coming, ask any policeman if he ever saw ‘The Troubles’ ending, and he will tell you ‘No’. This was going to be a long haul, it was going to take years for us to actually beat them, and we were beating them when the government surrendered. If you have a long term strategy, and, you have a guy in an organisation, the perennial question is ‘Do you want to take out the low hanging fruit, or, the commander?’
OFFICER 18
Mounting an operation required a lot of authorisation, from a handler’s point of view there were always firewalls between the handler, and, surveillance and the others involved during operations. Finance was always a big thing, the tighter finance was, the more difficult it was to get an operation, and if the teams were busy there was a whole prioritisation thing to see which job was done.
The aim of our operations was always to save life. I can’t say what exactly the HMSU brief was because I wasn’t there, but the overall aim of our Ops was to save life and protect property. From a surveillance point of view, you would be briefed on where the HMSU ‘checks’ would be; our job was to’ cover’ the terrorist into the HMSU ‘check’ and then pull off. This whole ‘Shoot to Kill’ thing is a joke!
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The last thing any source needs is for the people who don’t need to know about him, to know. Again when you used his information you have to think of his safety as well, how can we deal with it? How can we use it? You have to use the information, or, exploit it in a way that safeguards the source as much as possible. The safety of the source is one of your aims, but at the end of the day if someone’s else life is going to be in the balance we had the facility to remove the source, take him away and give him a new identity, a new life, and, that is how it was dealt with. So if we had the information prior to the attack we could protect the target and if necessary take the source out, we could control things and prevent the loss of life. No way would information be ‘slow waltzed’ or not acted on if somebody’s life was at risk.
Years ago, record keeping wasn’t important, getting out ‘to do’ the job was. In surveillance there was always a record, when we were on a ‘job’ a record was kept by the Desk Officer controlling the Op; we hadn’t the time to make personal records. From a SB point of view you could be running from one ‘meet’ to the next, and if you weren’t doing the ‘meet’ you were covering those that were. Afterwards you had to go back to do the ‘debrief’ and get in all the information you had. The last thing you thought about was your notebook, and, now that is used against you. The volume of work was very high, we could be doing 3 or 4 ‘meets’ a day, and, still have to cover people doing other ‘meets’. Of course after the ‘cull’ we had fewer sources. For us the record was the ‘debrief’, so putting it into your notebook wasn’t necessary. The ‘debriefs’ were protected, but you weren’t sure about notebooks having the same protection, so you didn’t make a duplicate record that could compromise everything else, and, of course now that’s held against you as well. It didn’t make sense to keep two records, we used the notebook to make a record of what we did, maybe doing a briefing at a station or with the SDC, hours of duty and expenses things like that, not what we were told by a source.
Information was always shared with CID, stuff that was pertinent to CID went across. I know CID always hated us. I was very friendly with a lot of my local CID so I had no problems having a good relationship; that helped understanding and sharing information.
With Uniform you tried to build a relationship with certain people in each section you felt you could trust, who you could talk too, who you could ask to do something and have confidence it wouldn’t spread more that you wanted, and that’s the way it worked. Sometimes stuff did go outside, it was probably a combination of ‘loose talk’ and a small few who did it deliberately. Some people were stupid, talking when they should have been keeping their mouth shut, and, of course it is possible that some did in the full knowledge of what they were doing.
Our aim was to protect life and arrest people, but the main thing at the end of the day was to save life. Sometimes things didn’t end up in court because it would compromise details of how an operation was carried out, or, it disclosed information that could compromise the source, but at least the result was right, someone’s life was saved. Disrupting a terrorist operation might be all we could do, and hope that we would get them another time, but at least lives were saved, or, Belfast still had Christmas. Did we risk lives to protect informants? No, not at all! And it certainly wouldn’t have been something I would have tolerated. That’s a very easy allegation for people to make. I remember going up to do an OP in Woodbourne, we went up in armoured vehicles with the Uniform guys who gave us ‘dogs abuse’ because there had been a shooting a couple of days earlier and they said ‘You F’ers have been at your work again, you knew that was going to happen and you didn’t
SPECIAL BRANCH Page 70 of 96 say’. There is no way anybody I know would have allowed that to happen, absolutely No, Never! Getting that response is difficult, but you try to understand their point of view, Uniform are relying on SB and hope they will be able to do everything to stop things, but SB can’t, there is no way SB can know everything, and no way they can prevent everything.
I am not from a CID background, I don’t know how far their ‘need to know’ goes back, but, is knowing all the intelligence going to contribute to them doing their job? If it doesn’t why would you put it across? Take for example, SB mount an Op to intercept and arrest terrorists moving guns, why does CID need to know the intelligence? If they knew they have to disclose it, and, the defence lawyers go on a ‘phishing’ expedition to try and find out the source, so why give it to them? OK there are systems to protect the source and allow us to share information with the DPP, but why do CID need it if they get the guys with the guns and the DPP gets the intelligence, why does CID need the intelligence too?
Now, today some people say CID should be told everything, but that’s too simple. I think CID should have access to information that benefits their case, or, will aid prosecution. But if you keep putting source intelligence out there, sources will be compromised particularly if CID have to disclose it at court. It just means you will get less and less intelligence, and the next time it comes round you won’t have anybody to tell you the guns are being moved, or, that somebody is going to be killed or blown up. You have to remember the terrorists will use any information they can to try and find informants and kill them. There has to be some weighing up process to give some form of protection to the informant if the police are to save lives.
Ordinary police work is very much governed by the law, but it doesn’t necessarily get justice. The jobs we were doing in E4 and SB brought more justice because we helped bring more people to court. Without doing what we did there would have been a whole lot more bombings, shootings, murders, everything, carried out, so because we used our tactics, not just the Uniform role, a lot of people were brought to justice. People seem to think that we were doing things we shouldn’t, we didn’t, we were governed by legislation and regulations even then. Everything we did was authorised, we had to justify what we did and what we wanted to do, it went up to the Chief Constable or wherever before we were allowed to do anything. I think people outside the Department maybe thought we were running wild doing what we wanted, but it certainly wasn’t anything like that, it was all controlled, logs, paperwork and justifications for everything whether that was just internal regulation or not I don’t know, surely there that’s oversight? Was there a law to say that it was illegal to do those things (covert entry, eavesdropping and intrusive surveillance)? I don’t think so, although RIPA gave us a legal framework to do those things. I think Da Silva sees things like the others and tries to apply today’s standards to something we did 30 odd years ago, it’s just ridiculous.
I do think the police tried to act ethically and within the law, I do. There is no doubt some individuals didn’t, it was a big organisation, and, no matter what the organisation is, doctors, bankers, there will be individuals whose ethics don’t live up to the ethics of their organisation.
‘Force within a Force’, I think you could say that, it had to be, it was forced on them. There was no option because the sort of things we were dealing with they had to curtail the circle of knowledge, and the only way to do that was to have a small compact unit that controlled the intelligence, what was done with it and who it was going too. I know some SDCs didn’t like being told what to do by a
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DC, perhaps we should have gotten the SB Super to tell the SDC what to do. I think with the amount of stuff that was going on, I think that’s just somebody being ‘a bit anal’ about their rank, no offence! At the end of the day, don’t shoot the messenger! At the end of the day it’s somebody trying to pass information to protect life and there were a whole lot of other things going on as well. I didn’t have a problem when I went to ask for an area to be placed Out of Bounds, or, to have a search done telling them ‘sorry I can’t tell you why but if you do you’ll find something’, I never had an issue any time I did that.
Special Branch was necessary during ‘The Troubles’, totally, because there was no other way to achieve the things we achieved. There was no other way of doing it. It would have been murder and mayhem all over the place otherwise. Look at CID, what’s the point of clearing up afterwards? To be fair CID investigate after the event, we were pre-emptive, we were preventing and they were reacting.
SB SUPPORT THE RUC
Yes, there would have been a lot more police officers killed, on and off duty, if we hadn’t been doing the job we were daily.
OFFICER 19
In 1985 I joined Special Branch. My experiences as a police officer made me very aware of the reality of policing here, and, that made me interested in doing more to deal with the terrorist violence. I had been in Uniform and Special Branch sounded exciting, so the anti terrorist work attracted me. Getting to investigate terrorism was what it was all about.
Legal framework? There wasn’t one! It wasn’t illegal to gather intelligence; it wasn’t illegal to run agents which was the ‘bread and butter’ of Special Branch. When I joined I only knew about the area I was working in; it was only as I moved around did it become apparent to me what the whole Special Branch system was. There was a framework for gathering intelligence and what intelligence to gather, the only thing we had to go on before RIPA in 2000 was the Walker report which was more geared towards CID informants than SB. There was no legal framework as such, and, I know everybody who wasn’t in Special Branch cringes at the phrase ‘National Security’, but the primary purpose of Special Branch is to gather intelligence to meet the National Security priorities, and a lot of people don’t get this. Forget about what is going on elsewhere, those priorities exist whether or not we had to deal with a campaign of terrorism. Because people don’t understand the National Security remit they use it against us, but the job of the RUC Special Branch, unlike in the rest of the UK, was to have the lead for national security.
Special Branch isn’t there to collect intelligence for criminal investigations, that’s not their purpose. If CID want intelligence or evidence about a crime they gather it themselves. However, if Special Branch happen to have intelligence about crime they give it across and that’s the way it was. There might have been occasions when intelligence wasn’t given across immediately. Raw intelligence has to be assessed and analysed before it is processed further. Sometimes it comes in from another agency, and, if that is the case you have to clear its release with the originating agency because it’s not ours to give, and, it depends on what CID are going to do with it. When CID requested such intelligence, we would have a discussion with the CID Head and tell him the caveats under which the
SPECIAL BRANCH Page 72 of 96 intelligence could be shared, these were all about safeguarding the source, it was never about giving the agent immunity.
I know people have difficulty understanding that what other intelligence agencies give us we can only pass it on with their permission, if it relates to crime and they wanted CID to have it, why would they pass to us to keep? Only the originator knows the background of the intelligence, who and how it was obtained so it always belongs to the originating agency. The originator owns it because they know the circumstances how it was obtained and the risks to the safety of the source, and consequently sets the limitations on dissemination.
The only framework we had was the National Security priorities which included threats from espionage, sabotage and terrorism, but in terms of terrorism in Northern Ireland the RUC had primacy and lead responsibility. Everything we did was to that aim, the Chief Constable was responsible to the Secretary of State, and, this is the bit the Change Managers didn’t grasp when they were doing the Patten work in 2000. They looked at some of our units and decided we didn’t them, we told them that the RUC had a legal responsibility under RIPA and the National Security remit for the function of those units, but they couldn’t understand, they just said the Chief Constable says Patten is to be implemented. They wouldn’t accept that the Chief Constable had this responsibility to the Secretary of State for National Security, instead thinking that under Patten the Chief was to be accountable to the Policing Board for everything. Even after they spoke to the ACC they still failed to understand, but what we told them was confirmed by the Oversight Commissioner.
Another thing people don’t grasp is that because of our National Security remit we had access to resources we wouldn’t normally have, these could only be used for the specific purpose of National Security. So, until RIPA we didn’t have a legal framework, and, we had to work under the direction of those responsible for UK National Security.
What we did was always about the protection of life, it had to be. We had a strategic plan that set out our aims and objectives, but certainly protection of life was No 1. So what we had, in the absence of a legal framework, was the National Security priorities, the protection of life and our strategic plan. It was the protection of life always, and that was the framework we worked with. It worked for Constables and Sergeants but it didn’t do much to help Regional Heads and other decision makers, they had very little to guide them. I can remember the Belfast Regional Head asking the Prime Minister for some legal guidelines but we didn’t get them. I don’t think I was ever at a meeting when something I didn’t agree with was discussed, or, a plan was agreed for a covert Op which bothered me, it was always to protect life in pursuit of the National Security priorities. But we needed something to guide us.
If we had known then that we would be in the situation that we are now in, with the Ombudsman going back over decisions made 30-40 years ago looking for notes and decision logs which weren’t regarded as necessary back then, and now, because we didn’t keep those records, he says its collusion, simply because we didn’t keep the records that they have to keep today. And there was the Regional Head back in 1983 asking for legal guidance to tell us what to do, what the threshold was for what we could do and not to do, and, what records to keep. We were ethical and followed the law, we followed the core principles and tried to do the right thing, that was our ethos and we followed it.
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The ‘need to know’ comes in here, people in Special Branch are never offended when they are asked to leave the room so something can be discussed, they just accept that is the way it is. Other people can be offended because they don’t understand the ‘need to know’ principle, but it needs to work like that when you are dealing with intelligence. It’s not because I don’t trust you, but you simply don’t need to know, literally you don’t need to know. So whenever you are discussing an agent or their intelligence only those that need to be involved are; it’s not there is anything underhand going on. The ‘need to know’ principle is extremely important. If you know a secret which isn’t sensitive to you, there this no pressure on you to keep that secret, so you will tell somebody sometime, and once you do, and that is replicated by the person you tell, before you know it half the world knows. Unless you are handling the intelligence you don’t know how sensitive it is, so you don’t know who should or should not know it. Even if we told CID we have a source involved they didn’t always keep it to themselves, and, it would get to the stage too many people knew because they didn’t treat it the way they should have. If sensitive intelligence was treated the way it was supposed to be there wouldn’t be a ‘need to know’, but we needed one because people talked too much.
Things aren’t black and white, every relationship is different and depends on the personalities involved, both the agent and the handler. Some handlers think their agent is the best in the world but there could be another agent bringing in 10 times as much in a quieter manner.
You need agents for both strategic and operational intelligence, and you need them long term if you are to get the best intelligence, you can’t ‘burn’ your source just to get a ‘find’, and, go out and get another, they aren’t easy to come by. Dealing with the operational intelligence is very different to dealing with strategic intelligence which involves getting access to long term planning. That is very different to operational intelligence which comes in every day of the week including threats. You always have to do something to safeguard the target always, always, and if it came to it, you pull the source out. I say this until I am blue in the face you always have to safeguard the target without question. It angers me when I hear anybody say, ‘so and so was allowed to die to safeguard the source’, why would we? Do they honestly believe that anybody in Special Branch would do that? There were 800 officers in Special Branch at any one time, and thousands over the years, do you think they all condoned murder? Does anybody think to ask, why over the years have none come forward and said ‘Somebody died to save an agent? Do you honestly think that the people we had would sit down and decide to let a person be murdered? If we had condoned murder somebody would have come forward by now, but they haven’t because it didn’t happen. When I joined in ’85 there were a number of good sources bringing in really good stuff stopping Belfast from being blown to bits, and police officers and soldiers being killed who aren’t working anymore. They ‘retired’ for a variety of reasons, some felt it wasn’t safe for them to continue and others felt they had done their bit. An agent can’t work for you indefinitely, they live under some tremendous strain and their circumstances change.
Terrorists didn’t make it easy for us, they tried to stop us hearing about their operations, they would pull a team together at short notice, and only once they were altogether would they be told what they were going to do. Once they knew what they were going to do they wouldn’t be allowed to leave until they set out to do the job, so if the agent was involved he couldn’t tell you until after.
Republicans had a counter intelligence capability and they were always on what they called a ‘tout hunt’. If something went wrong from their point of view, if we had a ‘find’ or their bomb didn’t go
SPECIAL BRANCH Page 74 of 96 off they investigated, their security enquiries were going on all the time; they were paranoid about informants. If they were having a meeting they had the place ‘swept for bugs’, they would go to extreme lengths. That’s why we had to analyse and assess the intelligence to find the best way to deal with the situation we faced. Remember there were no rules to help us, it came down to a combination of your moral compass, training, organisational aims and objectives, and professional experience. Training in the early days was done in London but in later years other UK forces came to us to be trained. All decisions had to be thought through using whatever you had.
OFFICER 20
I was in SB for 20 years and I never had a day’s sick in those 20 years. I was motivated, I loved my work, and, I had worked hard to get into Special Branch. It was the only job I wanted in the police, and, I really enjoyed it.
The terrorists simply didn’t know what our capabilities were, not the physical capabilities, not the technical capabilities, they simply didn’t know the depth they were infiltrated. I know from personal experience that at least one terrorist saw Special Branch as a prestige target and kept extensive records on who he thought was in SB. But really, I don’t think the IRA and Loyalists made any distinction between us, if they wanted to shoot a policeman, they shot a policeman, basically it was whoever was the ‘easy target’. One of the reasons there were so few SB casualties was they simply didn’t know about our capabilities. They knew we would probably be better armed that Uniform police, but they didn’t know how well trained we were, the extent of our operations, our communications and all the rest. So, with their lack of knowledge they just didn’t know the size of threat we posed to them, they were totally ignorant.
Some of our informants went to great lengths to help us, they volunteered to go to prison to find out what was going on there, and, some moved house to get closer to units we needed information on. In subsequent years some informants became inactive but because of their relationship with the handlers they promised to come forward if they heard anything was starting up again; some did.
In Londonderry we had 6500 personal files, some were very thick and went back to 1922 with handwritten notes. There could be details of entire families, so with a modern day suspect you could trace his lineage down through the years and see where he was radicalised. A lot of it, the ‘hate’, the giving yourself to a cause comes from the female side. I was there 5 years and probably read most of the files; whenever I started the only advice I was given was ‘read everything’ and I did. The files were invaluable in helping you prepare to go face to face with those you were trying to recruit. I was told to keep going back to make a ‘pitch’ because sooner or later they would agree to work for you, and, that’s the way we went about it.
I enjoyed every minute being in SB, I would do it all over again tomorrow. A lot of people, even in Special Branch, thought it was a James Bond thing, it’s not, it’s the total opposite, it’s about researching things, assessing before you do it, asking is it worth it? Is it possible to get a result? And if the results warrant it, you go ahead, and, you do it right, in the end it’s a relatively simple job.
Our aim was to effectively manage informants so as to permit uniform officers to go about their job as safely as possible. We were briefing people all the time, patrol officers, Divisional Commanders and issuing Action Sheets on threats, all to keep people safe. Obviously, we couldn’t tell the public
SPECIAL BRANCH Page 75 of 96 everything, if we had threats to the public we told them either as individuals or a community. The public knew we did the counter intelligence thing and CID did the investigating, so if the public wanted to talk to us they would ring the station or call in to talk to us, and, that did happen.
Years after the Teebane Bomb one of the bombers died and at the funeral the priest said something about past sins coming back on the deceased. People took this to mean that the deceased had been involved in the bomb. We followed up on this and visited a few people who told us what they knew about the preparation of the bomb because they had come to see the futility of violence, and, in some ways telling us what they knew did them some good by getting a burden of their shoulders. After that they passed on snippets they picked up from time to time, but they didn’t want to talk to CID or go to court and many years after the event the evidence wasn’t there.
The main focus of Special Branch was to protect life, 100%, even the lives of extremely active Republicans. I never saw getting people into court as my main responsibility; my main responsibility was to get information to keep people alive. It was CID’s responsibility to get the evidence to get people to court, and, if we could help them we did, if we had information that would aid their investigation we passed it on.
In Mid Ulster there were 2 Loyalist groups- one was the UVF and the other operated with the blessing of the UVF Command Belfast. In all, this second group killed 13 people; only one of whom had no links with SF/PIRA. We brought the Loyalists into Gough for interview, but they didn’t speak, and, we had to release them without charge once their time was up. So yeah, I think it took too long to get information on some Loyalist groups in areas where PIRA were active. But in places like Tyrone you couldn’t drop working against PIRA to work on Loyalists, you had to try and do both, and, we didn’t have enough resources to deal with both. The Loyalist violence was a distraction from the bigger threat.
I learnt a lot about these Loyalist groups, the background to their operations and who was involved. I would go to some of those involved trying to recruit them by telling them that the killing had to stop, and, the next time we made arrests they might not be released without charge. They did cease operations and their weapons were amongst the first to be decommissioned by General De Chastelain. In retrospect that second group maybe had an effect on IRA/Sinn Féin in Mid Ulster, and, may even helped them to talk peace. For example, the attack on Boyle’s Pub in Cappagh actually put fear into IRA/Sinn Féin, and I think that had some effect in making Republicans move towards peace. I think to our credit we were able to bring the Loyalists killings to a complete stop.
We made no allowances for Loyalists, nobody in Special Branch said, ‘let’s go lighter on the Loyalists because they are putting IRA/Sinn Féin in fear’. When we got information of a threat, there were a number of avenues open to us. Overtly we could put them off, or, using covert methods we could try and develop the intelligence to do an arrest operation, but if it came to the point we couldn’t do an operation, or force them to abort we had to think of something else. Sometimes we would selectively arrest some people we thought might be involved, and, try to sow mistrust among them to put them off.
You can only do something with what you know, at Loughgall for instance, there are only 8 officers with maybe only 2 or 3 on duty at any time. The PIRA team came from a wide area including some who lived in the ‘South’, they were heavily armed, experienced, wore body armour and had radios.
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They were involved in the murders of the Stronge’s at Tyan, they murdered two police officers at Ballygawley and tried to get into the station armoury, they attacked The Birches and blew the station up there. This was a PIRA team intent on killing people, and, prepared to take on targets, so this was a very dangerous team, there was only one option and that was to use the SAS.
If all the details of the IRA operations had been known you maybe could have looked at doing something earlier but I don’t think that was the case, we maybe knew an attack was imminent but not where and when. In these cases when things start to move they move very quickly so I don’t think they had enough time to do anything other than ‘stakeout’ where they thought the attack might be. After the attack they found out that the van came from a farm about a mile away, so that didn’t leave much distance to do anything even if it had been known beforehand. There were 8 heavily armed men in the PIRA team and you have to look at all the risk factors, I think what happened probably had the least risk to everybody. This was an experienced cohesive IRA team, with better weapons than the police, confident they could take on anybody. With a team like that intent on killing, you have to be prepared you might have to use force, and, that people could be killed.
I don’t think there was another way, if they had put out a Police VCP the IRA team would have wiped it out. In military terms to win a battle you should have 2 to 3 times the size of your opposition, so to take on a 8 man IRA team you need 24 police officers, and, it’s impossible to put them out on a VCP. You could block the road, but as soon as they see it in a rural area they could easily escape, take on the VCP or go to a farm and hold people hostage so the whole situation deteriorates, and you lose control. So, when the information is incomplete you have to try and guess what they might do from the snippets you have.
I think all they knew was there was going to be an attack on a police station somewhere in Mid Ulster sometime soon. When you think of the physical location of Loughgall police station it is in a valley with high ground and a church on one side, and, a wood on high ground on the other side. Basically, there was only one road, so that was controllable, the station was fairly solid and isolated with a football pitch and trees for a wind break behind it so that was controllable. In the end the PIRA team drove through the village, so to have intercepted them there would have posed too great a risk to the community. Until the bomb went off you wouldn’t have known for sure what was happening, and, if the SAS had gone too soon, they would have ‘blown’ the operation, so it is fine margin between going and waiting.
From 1979, after the RUC and Special Branch were re-organised, there was a shift to try and arrest the terrorists ‘in the act’ so we had a good chance of putting them in jail for a long time and to stop the killings. So, our operations were aimed at getting people put in prison after they were caught in the act.
One of the satisfying things about Special Branch is the effect you have behind the scenes saving lives and recovering weapons. I got a great deal of satisfaction from it, but it is not something you can share, you can’t tell people about what you did because it could put the source at risk.
WITHOLDING INFORMATION
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Yes, sometimes if the intelligence could be developed to get a better result. Our principal duty was the Protection of Life, but we also had a duty to protect the state, National Security, so a particular piece of intelligence might be held back if it was believed could damage national security. For example, in trying to deal with the problem with fundamentalist Islam you might get information, which if released could lead to that community or a section of it being ostracised, and, if that happens that could strengthen others, like Right Wing Groups, which could further polarise the whole community; it’s an action reaction situation. The people in the middle trying to maintain a balance are the Security and Police Services, it’s a balancing act between the action they need to take to counter active terrorism whilst not inflaming tensions or strengthening opposition groups. I don’t think our thought process was as finely tuned as this during the early 70s, I think we were merely reacting to the level of violence we had to deal with, and, because we were so badly prepared back then. As time went on the intelligence gathering effort became quite sophisticated and focused to remove terrorist threats, and, to reduce the collateral impact on the wider community. What the RUC did worked, it worked at different levels locally, regionally and nationally, and I think it worked very well.
Look at other countries such as the USA, in the Middle East and Eastern Europe where the state seems to be a lot less tolerant of anti-state activity than the UK. The UK has all this diversity stuff, basically in a democratic society people have free speech but sometimes people abuse that, and, we have had that with the likes of Ian Paisley and Republicans whose comments could amount to incitement to hatred. Every government needs the machinery to manage that, to investigate when it gets too far, and, to gather intelligence to try and stop it going too far. It is up to the government to decide, what are threats, what should be done and what information to make public.
OFFICER 21
Investigating terrorism was difficult, getting the evidence was difficult. When people you knew were killed, and, you ended up working on their murder it was very difficult. In the mortar attack on Newry Station, John Dowds my Sergeant Instructor in the Training Centre, was one of the officers killed, that was a difficult investigation, but you just got on with it.
Getting intelligence was difficult and getting the evidence was difficult. When you are interviewing people in a Police Office were terrorist prisoners were taken, there is nothing as soul destroying as ‘talking’ to someone who chooses to lie under the radiator for 7 days and not utter a word. Not that they were under any obligation to answer our questions, but interviewing people who do that is very difficult. Interviewing, and, gathering intelligence and evidence was very difficult. The terrorists were very surveillance conscious, for example, we were working in Newcastle and by Day 2 the local IRA had ‘sussed’ us out. Terrorists were very evidence conscious too.
We were never going to get the help from the public because no one wanted to go to court, it wasn’t that they didn’t want to help, they did, but they didn’t want anything they said put ‘on paper’ because they feared an attack or retaliation by their neighbours, or, the terrorists. People on both sides didn’t want to give evidence, I can’t remember the number of times I have gone into a house and spoken to people who told me ‘I don’t want this put ‘on paper’ but I saw such and such thing, or, this car was there…’. So many Catholics/Protestants, Loyalists/Nationalists would tell us what they saw or knew, but virtually no one was prepared to give evidence. What they told us was just intelligence which could help us take another step, but it wasn’t evidence, and, it is evidence that
SPECIAL BRANCH Page 78 of 96 gets the case into court; you can’t get to court without evidence. I think that’s the most important thing that people don’t realise, intelligence and evidence are two different things.
Turning intelligence into evidence is difficult. Say they gave you a car, you put that in on a ‘Message Form’, you don’t mention the person who told you, and an ‘Action’ is raised to check out the car, identify the owner, find out what sightings there are of the car, who is associated with it, and, you try to see how far you can take it to connect it to the incident. We would use whatever intelligence we had to try and build things up to connect the car to the incident, and people to the car, it was just basic investigation. But until you have a witness prepared to go to court or physical evidence that ties the car to the scene, suspects to the car, and, that the car was directly used in the incident, you don’t have evidence. It is exceedingly difficult to convert intelligence to evidence. It’s not easy to bring people to court in those circumstances because its only intelligence not evidence.
Nowadays there could be CCTV to put the car at the scene, that’s evidence; if you have a police officer who can identify a person who had driven the car, that’s evidence, or, you get a fingerprint in the car, that is evidence which connects them to the car and the car to the scene. And, even if the person denies everything during interview you have evidence to connect him to the scene and the car, but that may not be enough evidence to convict, we need something to show his involvement in the incident.
To a degree E Department did support the rest of us in the RUC. My relationship with Special Branch and HMSU was always very good. HMSU were the ones who very often turned Special Branch intelligence into evidence because they were prepared too, and, did go to court.
I was aware of the role of Special Branch, and that they were in possession of intelligence. When I was in Uniform and was told you can’t travel between Roundabouts 1 and 3, I wanted to know ‘why’? But as I went through my service I realised I didn’t need to know why. If I needed to know why, or my life was in danger, or, that I should be looking out for something, somebody would tell me. And, if I was told not to do something or not go somewhere I knew there was a reason. I knew my ‘Super’ or ‘Chief Super’ would know the reason, and, he/she would have had a discussion with Special Branch and made a judgement on what to tell us.
If I got intelligence from Special Branch that took me somewhere that was great, and if I didn’t, I didn’t. The problem is, you know Special Branch know things and have informants, and, unless it is to save life, I don’t know the whole ins and outs of Special Branch, unless it is to save life they can’t put the life of the source at risk. If the intelligence they give me identified their source, then they could lose any future intelligence and the source could be killed; I just understood they gave you what they could give you.
They wouldn’t withhold anything unless it put somebody else’s life at risk. Getting more than a ‘one liner’ from Special Branch could have aided some investigations more, but would Special Branch not have given more if they could? There must be a reason if they didn’t give more, maybe it was because the circle of knowledge within the terrorist group was so small that if it was released would lead to the identification of the source. I think, acting in good faith, they told us what they knew so long as it didn’t compromise the source, they had to protect the life of the source. In my experience Special Branch didn’t unnecessarily withhold information. I don’t think the Branch would risk any lives to protect a source.
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Special Branch was necessary, what they did during ‘The Troubles’ was necessary. It was necessary to have E Department, including the HMSU to do operations to catch terrorists in the act. We could only act before, after or just as it starts, if we had intelligence that something was going to happen, or, the identities of the people involved we would mount an operation to catch them in the act. If you have highly trained units like E4A and the HMSU capable of taking terrorists off the street, then you use them. If you caught the terrorists with guns and explosives they got longer sentences which protected the public for longer. The greatest thing for the police to do is the protection of life, that’s most important. Discussions about where and when these operations would take place was above my head.
During the 70s, investigators were reliant on getting confessions, but during ‘The Troubles’ the paramilitaries became more professional. It became very difficult for the Police to obtain confessions and physical evidence, so we had to use intelligence to catch them in the act with the evidence. That’s a nice neat package for those arrested and charged, but the investigation never ends, it goes backwards, forwards and sideways. The criminal investigation starts when people have been arrested, we investigate the firearms, the people involved, their associates, their vehicles, any sightings to find evidence to connect them with other offences and to find any others involved. If there are explosives involved you investigate how they were made up, who made them, where did the ingredients come from, and, is it similar to other devices used in the past?
Once HMSU make the arrests the evidence to convict is alongside the terrorists, and, it is straightforward for us to collect. Once we have the evidence we use it to try and identify the others involved, such as those behind the scenes and in supporting roles. So, arrests are only the start, whereas in the 60s and 70s those arrested would have been taken to court and that would have been it.
The Investigating Officer doesn’t need to know all the Special Branch intelligence leading up to the start of the investigation. If the IO did and passed it on to the interviewers, they could let it slip during interviews and that could compromise the informant. So, what you don’t know, you can’t let slip to anybody else, and, you don’t put anybody’s life at risk.
OFFICER 22
I worked with Special Branch many times during my service, and sometimes the relationship was strained because they, quite rightly, didn’t tell everything. For example, they would put an area ‘out of bounds’, so we couldn’t go in, but they wouldn’t tell you why it was OOB, you just had to accept it. The intelligence they were able to provide saved lives, definitely saved the lives of police officers. It really annoys me to hear someone say ‘Special Branch would have sacrificed the lives of police officers to save their agents and informants’, they didn’t. I know they didn’t. I found them excellent to work with, I never had a difficulty with them. No matter where I was, I never had a difficulty working with them.
Could we have done without Special Branch? Yes, but we would have had a lot more people dead; more police officers and members of the community, dead. Would society have disintegrated more without them? Yes probably. If we had an intelligence structure something like they have now, with the Security Service in charge, it wouldn’t have worked as well. No, definitely, it would not have worked as well. I think you need to have that day to day intimate knowledge of Northern Ireland
SPECIAL BRANCH Page 80 of 96 that Special Branch had, for it to work successfully the way it did. I don’t think that an external agency would have been able to do what Special Branch did, and, certainly the current structures wouldn’t have worked. I just don’t think what we have today would have worked during ‘The Troubles’, the pace was too quick. The intelligence agencies have to be integrated within the Police.
OFFICER 23
Special Branch saved my life at least three times, and I know they saved many more lives. Through my work I represented police in legacy cases and I know better now how the Branch worked; I think I have a good insight into how they worked. The first case was the Billy Wright Inquiry and I had to learn how SB worked. To me SB played a vital role in bringing an end to the violence. I know Billy Matchett, in his book, gives a very good account of what SB did, and, I do believe SB brought the IRA down. Personally, I think Tony Blair jumped too soon, if he had held his nerve a bit longer the IRA would have admitted defeat, and, said, ‘it is over’, because they couldn’t progress their campaign any further. I think Tony Blair just wanted to say ’I’ve done it’. If he had held on for a short time we wouldn’t have the remains of the IRA influencing what is going on now, and, Sinn Féin using the threat of the IRA returning to violence to make progress. Here we are 20 years on, and Republicans still say, ‘don’t upset the peace process’, the Peace Process has to come to an end sometime for us to be at peace.
Special Branch and the RUC played a vital role in securing peace. Did we get it right every time? No, mistakes were made, genuine honest mistakes were made. We hear this word ‘collusion’ talked about, that’s a Sinn Féin slant to try and put the IRA on a level footing with the Police and Army by calling the IRA ‘combatants fighting a legitimate war’, that is rubbish. The Police as a whole, the majority went out, and, OK there were a few ‘bad apples’, but the majority went out to serve the community, to do their job professionally and with integrity. The only police officers prosecuted for wrong doing were prosecuted by the Police, not the Ombudsman, it was the Police who investigated and prosecuted them, and the courts convicted them. The ‘bad apples’ were outed by the Police; the vast majority of officers worked for the good of the people.
OFFICER 24
Special Branch [They] did a very good job that is difficult to quantify. I don’t want to look through rose tinted glasses or be accused of doing so. I don’t think what they did will ever be told in our life time because of Article 2 considerations. There are those out there who are still attempting to identify sources and if they are successful that could lead to further loss of life in my view. I think Special Branch did an out outstanding, and, as yet untold job, because to do so could put lives at risk.
Converting intelligence to evidence is possible. For example, if you have an intelligence flow and you are able to put specific questions back to get more information to exploit then yes, it’s possible.
OFFICER 25
I joined Special Branch because my Sergeant in Uniform had come from CID, from one of the old Murder Squads, and, he was very much switched on to the anti-terrorist side of things. I enjoyed the Uniform side of things, but he was ‘switched on’ to the anti-terrorist thing and because of that SB tended to ask us to do occasional jobs for them. On one occasion I stopped a couple of people for various things and rather than prosecute them, I gave Special Branch the opportunity to talk to
SPECIAL BRANCH Page 81 of 96 them, to see if they could be of any help. I also played Rugby with a number of guys who were in Special Branch, and once my probation was over a Vacancy Bulletin came out asking for volunteers for Special Branch. The Rugby guys were in the Surveillance team and said I should apply for the Branch and go for Surveillance, so I applied. At the Interview Board, they asked me would I be prepared to go to Surveillance and I said, ‘yes I’ll give it a shot’. But I think the sense of purpose was the big thing, and it was made easy by the fact that I played Rugby with these guys and knew them. And, because of our close relationship with Special Branch, it wasn’t mysterious, I wasn’t leaping into the dark, I had a fair idea of what I was going to.
Being a Surveillance Operator was incredibly satisfying and pretty difficult, but not as difficult as it subsequently became. I went into surveillance in ’79, the Department had been up and running for about two years with about 35 members; later on, we had over 100 operators on the ground on any one day. In those days, we were well trained by the standards of the time, but compared to what came later, we were very basically trained. In some ways it was easier than it subsequently became because the terrorists were not as switched on to surveillance as they subsequently became. Once they started taking big ‘hits’ from being arrested in possession of bombs and guns and things, they ‘switched on’ and became very, very anti-surveillance and counter-surveillance aware, after 6 months training I became fully operational.
People tend to think that a Surveillance Operator sees everything, and, that an intelligence operation captures everything, was it like that? No. When we were out, we could be working alone. At times we operated in small teams of generally around about 6 or 7 individuals with the ideal team at that time being, five cars with one guy and one car with a double crew, a male and a female probably. You can’t see everything, and one good old fashioned two-legged source is going to tell you more in a 5 minute debrief than sometimes five or six weeks of surveillance will tell you. What surveillance was good at doing was exploiting intelligence; it was less good at gathering intelligence. If the source says that A is going to meet B, but he has no idea what they are going to do, surveillance can confirm the meet and incidentally confirm that your source is actually quite good, and, sometimes surveillance can fill that knowledge gap and tell you what they did together. Surveillance is really good at exploiting intelligence, but it cannot see everything, and, it is difficult, but things became easier, in some ways, when there was proper command and control of the resources, and, much safer with the advent of the HMSU which provided backup if we got into trouble, it was reassuring to know that the backup was there to rescue you.
I worked mainly in North and West Belfast against both the IRA and Loyalists. Funny enough if you look at the record you’ll find that in the Greater Belfast area surveillance teams probably spent more than 50% of their time on Loyalist targets although it was the Provisional IRA who were the main threat to society, killing the most people and doing the most bombings. Surveillance can’t go out and just drive around looking to pick up targets, the chances of picking up something suspicious are very remote. You will pick up individuals, you’ll see individuals and you can follow them, but actually they’re just going about their normal daily business, because to be an effective terrorist you’ve only got to be a terrorist for two hours a month. You can be a fantastic terrorist, the rest of the time they’re just doing your normal business, so if you follow them all the time all you’re doing is risking exposure and getting ‘clocked’ as we call it, getting seen and ‘blowing’ your cars or your own cover, so you need to focus.
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The problem is, and something people don’t fully appreciate, is how damaging the Loyalists were to our efforts to deal with the IRA. The IRA posed the main threat, caused the most deaths and destruction, and, exploded the most bombs, but because of the Loyalist threat we weren’t able to fully concentrate on Republicans.
The Loyalists had been so well penetrated by Special Branch that there was more intelligence, so there was more of a ‘starter for 10’ for operations against the Loyalists. So, the people who managed the intelligence said well, rather than quite a speculative operation against the IRA, we’ve got serious intelligence that these two Loyalists are going to kill a Catholic or get guns or something like that, so a job would be launched against them. A huge number of our successes were against the Loyalists, and, involved arresting people and securing good evidence that enabled CID to get convictions. A huge percentage of our successful operations were against Loyalists because that’s where the intelligence was.
Doing surveillance was very dangerous. In GB if a surveillance operative was caught by the criminals he was watching it usually just ‘blew’ the operation or at worst he would be assaulted, whereas in Northern Ireland there was a high risk of death or serious injury to the operator. The Army surveillance teams, who were the inspiration for the first Police surveillance team, I think they lost three or four operators, killed, where they were compromised and ambushed. I can think of about three definitely that I know of, in fact its five, yeah.
Initially, here, it was just you and your pistol and that was it. Later on, most of us would have had a sub-machine gun, a Heckler and Koch MP5 or 5K sitting beside us or under our feet, plus a pistol, but once we got the Headquarters Mobile Support Unit for cover they were never very far away. They trained very hard at what we call ‘paralleling’ and they listened to the operations, so they knew where we were and they just concentrated on staying out of the way, but close enough to ‘bail us out’ if we got into trouble, or, to put in a vehicle check point if the decision was made to do a ‘stop’ once it was confirmed they’d guns or a bomb in the boot of the car. The HMSU would be there ‘in a flash’ and make the arrest. The advent of the HMSU increased the quality of the surveillance because it meant that the operators were prepared to push the envelope just that little bit more each time and their confidence grew. So, having the HMSU reduced the risks and allowed surveillance to do a better job.
As time passed surveillance training became so good, so comprehensive that the risks were minimised because the guys were well trained before they went to the teams. There could be a problem with some teams not getting enough time for continuation in-service training, and that very much depended on the Team Sergeants and the Inspector. In the end ‘operators’ were very well trained before they went out, I mean, they had 4½ months training before they went out on the ground, now that’s comprehensive by anybody’s standards.
We were very lucky in that we never lost anybody dead. We certainly had one who nearly died, he was attacked with hammers before the HMSU rescued him. We had quite a few instances where the surveillance operation was compromised, sometimes we ‘self-assessed’ the operation had been compromised, and, other times we learnt from source reporting. A fairly large number of source reports came back over the years saying they had twigged surveillance, and, sometimes the source reports came back saying they had twigged surveillance when there was no surveillance. The terrorists became so paranoid about surveillance and about how effective it was, because it was
SPECIAL BRANCH Page 83 of 96 effective, that they began to see surveillance operators everywhere and they cancelled numerous operations because they convinced themselves there was somebody following them, even when there wasn’t.
Special Branch work tends to be deadly boring or deadly serious. There’s a great deal of comradeship in small units and nearly everybody in the Branch works in a small unit or in a small office. Whether they’re Agent Handlers or they work in the HMSU or in E4A or whatever, there’s a lot of comradeship. There are occasions when there is a tremendous amount of danger, there are occasions when it’s frightening, thankfully there’s very few of those. I can remember a couple of occasions when I was genuinely frightened, I can remember one occasion where my legs started shaking, the nerves in my legs, my leg wasn’t shaking visibly but the nerve inside my leg was going ‘ten to the dozen’ because I was in a situation and there was no HMSU.
As you become more and more mature you can cope with the pressure, and, with the advent of the Special Support Unit and HMSU, help was always nearby, so if you were a Surveillance Operator support was only a few minutes away. Now you can die several times in a few minutes, but it was good to know that they were there, and, if you got into difficulties they would ‘bail you out’.
There were numerous occasions when the HMSU came in just in time to save the situation. Because they were there, the surveillance operators felt confident to continually mature and get that little bit better all the time, they just pushed the envelope a little bit more, a little bit more, a little bit more trying to do the best they could. Maybe on occasions they pushed it too far by taking unnecessary risks, but the HMSU, if it hadn’t been for the advent of our own armed response unit within Special Branch, the Surveillance Teams could never have produced the outstanding results they did produce.
I think there’s only one alternative to good intelligence gathering, processing and exploitation, and that is repression. The only way you’re going to stop people being killed in any society where you have, virtually a Civil War on your hands, or what could very quickly degenerate into Civil War, the only way to stop people being killed, places being blown up, is total suppression and repression, so if you had a hundred thousand soldiers you could stop everything happening. But in a democracy, you can’t do that, you don’t have the numbers and you don’t want to repress the people, so you need intelligence, good quality intelligence.
A good sort of analogy is going through the airport everybody has to queue up to get checked out. Now, if you had perfect information you wouldn’t need to do that because you’d know exactly who was involved and what they were doing, so you would only look for them. But because you don’t have perfect information it means that absolutely 100 per cent of passengers must be inconvenienced and must go through the hoops every time they get on an aeroplane. Intelligence work is the same.
The problem is, getting the intelligence in the first place, and, then getting it speedily assessed and shared quickly with those that need it. The second problem is you are always working with incomplete information and usually it’s a snippet, it’s a wee tiny snippet, often as little as A and B are going to be doing something this weekend. Well what are they going to do? Are they going to kill someone? Are they going to do a reconnaissance for killing? Are they going to grind explosives, or are they going to a football match or for a drink, or fishing? It’s a massive big jigsaw, and a friend of mine put it to me one time, he said, ‘it’s like a 400 piece jigsaw, you’ve got 20 pieces to start with,
SPECIAL BRANCH Page 84 of 96 you’ve got one straight edge, one corner, and of the remaining 18 pieces, 10 pieces appear to be nothing more than green sea or blue sky or something like that, but they are unconnected and you don’t have the picture on the outside of the box to tell you what the jigsaw looks like so you’ve got to start filling in the picture’. Experience helps to fill in bits of it, but you also need to put out Surveillance Teams, Close Observation Platoons out, task agents, put telephone intercepts on, analyse previous attacks and all the rest of it, and, gradually you try to build up the picture. But actually, come Friday afternoon you might not have the picture, and still not know what they’re doing. So, then you may start to do ‘suppression ops’, you may just have to say to the Divisional Commander, ‘sorry sir, we have a problem’ and he will maximise his resources and put vehicle check points out all over the town or whatever, or he may pull them all back into ‘hard cover’, into shelter depending what the threat is assessed to be.
It’s constantly moving, and you may not be just handling one of these situations, you may be handling five of those in the Region in one weekend, and, that’s where the difficulties come in. You don’t get it right all the time, but by and large, I think we thwarted, we saved a huge number of lives, both from the Provisionals and the Loyalist Paramilitaries.
People think that the Branch was very Machiavellian and always calculating, and, would let an innocent person or policeman or soldier die to protect source, in my experience that was never, ever the case. We went to extraordinary lengths to protect people’s lives and tried to protect the source. Now on a couple of occasions that I know of, it proved impossible to protect the source, so the source was extracted and taken away to a new life somewhere at the other side of the world, wherever. But we would do handstands or headstands, manoeuvre and suffer a great deal of anguish to try to make sure that we protected the intended victims. Sometimes that was remarkably easy to do, sometimes we would simply swamp the area with Police and Soldiers, put helicopters in the sky or whatever, or search a number of locations to throw the terrorists off. But you couldn’t keep doing that. I mean if we did that every time the ASU went out to shoot a Policeman, they’re would smell a rat very quickly, and I know that quite a number of sources were extracted to protect the victim, because it proved impossible to protect both the informant and the victim. The victim was always protected, always protected.
One of the things that I’ve seen in a lot of reports I’ve read, is this notion that every Senior Special Branch Officer should come from a CID background. Now, the first person to really articulate this in a big way was Stalker. Now not everything that Stalker said was wrong or bad, but overall Stalker I think it was a very bad report, a very bad enquiry. Stalker himself didn’t control the whole thing, apparently, he only stayed, of all the months and years he was in Northern Ireland, he only spent four nights here. He just flew in and flew out again, he didn’t really get a feel for it; he lost control of the whole thing to his Second in Command, a boy called Thorburn, who, the people who were interviewed by him say was an absolute bully and threatened people and so on, and, that somebody should have gone to him actually wired up and recorded what he was saying, because he was trying to, you know do a stitch up job, but anyway, that’s another thing for another day. Stalker was very firm, because he was from a CID background, he was very firmly of the opinion that every senior Special Branch Officer should be from CID. Now I can understand where Stalker was coming from because his experience was solely of ordinary crime in Great Britain.
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Traditionally Special Branch in Great Britain was a sub-unit of CID, although not in the MET, and, then later, as the threat grew some big forces like Merseyside and Strathclyde set up their SB as an independent department. But, for Avon and Somerset or Devon and Cornwall, their Special Branch, at one time was a Sergeant and three men and there was absolutely no point whatsoever in creating a whole new department for a Sergeant and three, or, even for some places with an Inspector and ten, and where would their Force get the staff from anyway? So, in these circumstances it was quite logical to have a small SB unit under CID. CID detectives had the skills and knowledge to conduct enquiries, write reports and run a few low-level informants, so it made sense to have your Special Branch manned from CID when the threat was very low and small. This was fine in the ‘Cold War’ and in non-terrorist afflicted societies where the threat of murder and violence was low, and, the number of enquiries and the work load was not great. However, that’s not the case in a terrorist insurgency where you have a ‘full blown’ counter-terrorist campaign going on, and, the pressure is on to save lives.
So, Stalker drew on his experience and was very much in favour of SB being part of CID because, he thought it was perfectly logical to act on the evidential opportunities early. Now there’s some truth in that, but you don’t actually have to have your Senior Officers from a CID background to do that, because, if you’ve got the proper systems in place, CID will spot the evidential opportunities for you. So, for instance, whenever there was a big operation planned, the Regional Head of CID was called in by the Regional Head of Special Branch and given the full briefing including if a source was involved, but not the identity of the source. Now the CID head may not have passed that briefing down to his investigating officers, but he was briefed, and he would tell us, right if it pans out this way, that’s where I will start the enquiry, and, that way we could protect the source by keeping him out of CID investigation. So, it’s a false notion that CID Officers would make good Intelligence Officers better than anybody else. What I said in the past is that CID Officers are no more likely to make bad SB Officers than anybody else, and, the reason I say this is that some of the worst promotions in Special Branch were internal promotions. These were people who were promoted way, way beyond their level of capability, so I’m not saying internal promotions is the way to man Special Branch, even in a big Special Branch like ours.
Now if you take some of the people that we knew, who were very good CID detectives, very logical, very, very systematic, they’re not suited to working in a world of doubt. I have a great quote from one fella who was a very good SB man and he explained about one CID guy who came to him on promotion to Superintendent, he said he was one of the loveliest men he’s ever met in his life but he had four or five years of misery in Special Branch, because nothing he had ever done in his whole career had prepared him for this whole world of uncertainty and doubt, and, he was thoroughly miserable. He just couldn’t cope, and he said he was a very, very happy boy when eventually he managed to get out of the Branch and go somewhere else. Simply because somebody from Great Britain comes over and tells us that all the Senior Officers in the Intelligence side should be ex-CID, it is no reason to do it. Stevens said it, and, Stalker said it, because that was the background they came from, and, they believed that the role of Special Branch was solely to support CID getting convictions. Now yes, that’s what we did in practice, but actually the role of Special Branch in Northern Ireland during ‘The Troubles’ was carrying the National Security Responsibility which made our overwhelming priority to save life and property, not to solely support CID.
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We were constantly trying to manoeuvre the terrorists into situations where we would catch them red-handed, because the only way in a western democracy was to subject them to attrition by arresting them and getting them locked up in jail. The big problems we had here in Northern Ireland were, A) it was incredibly difficult to convict them using the criminal law, B), once they did go to jail, they went into their own environment, and, C) they were let out after serving only 50% of their paltry sentences, and, were back on the streets before you knew it. If we had been serious about defeating terrorism, we would have been banging them up for long periods of time like they do in America. I don’t know if you know, but if a terrorist murdered a Policeman in Northern Ireland, or a Soldier who was acting in support of the Police, he only served 12.88 years on average in jail, in the Irish Republic they served 40 years, in London they would serve 28 years before making a parole board and in America, they would never be released.
My point is that Senior Special Branch Officers or Intelligence Branch Officers shouldn’t be drawn exclusively from any one Department, and, they most certainly all should not be internal promotions. Our problem was, we invested nothing in the selection and training of Senior Intelligence Officers, nothing at all; they got no training whatsoever. One officer told me that when he was told he was being posted to Special Branch he asked himself ‘what have I done wrong?’ he didn’t know anything about Special Branch and suddenly one Friday he was told, you’re promoted on Monday to Special Branch. Being a Special Branch officer is one of those roles you either have an aptitude for, or, you don’t. You’ve got to be comfortable with it because it’s a whole world of doubt. How many things actually turned out the way they were initially anticipated? Percentage wise, it was one, two or three percent.
In England CID, used undercover officers to collect intelligence to mount arrest operations, but that wasn’t possible when dealing with terrorists such as the IRA and Loyalists because the risks were too great, although we did for ‘ordinary’ crime situations. In England, you can insert undercover officers because there’s a huge and transient population, however Northern Ireland is like a village where people know each other, so how are you going to go out there and pretend you’re something that you’re not? It was just impossible in our situation to use undercover officers, so our primary task was recruiting people who were already in, or, were about to go in to the terrorist groupings.
I went into the Branch in ’79 and basically spent the next 15 years acting on intelligence. I was pretty much involved in all that sort of thing and it was almost like blazing a trail, everything was new, everything was new within the Police. All the things which happened in the RUC were unique to British Policing, and indeed Irish Policing, and very often unique to European Policing. We had for example, E4A Surveillance Teams, E4B who were the SSU, the Special Support Unit, subsequently Headquarters Mobile Support Unit, the HMSU, E4C which was the Training Team for the Surveillance Operations, E4D was Technical, E4E was Admin and E4F was the Air Support Unit, which at the time was a totally unique thing in British Policing.
E4 Department was the first operational Special Branch Operations Department in the United Kingdom. E4A Surveillance was the first professional police surveillance capability in the United Kingdom, and, was on a par with the Army teams who were the inspiration for us; we were the only other people who had surveillance teams like them. Our response unit, the SSU/HMSU, was the first ever integrated uniformed armed response service within a UK Special Branch. E4C, was the first professional Training Team in the United Kingdom for any Police Special Branch, E4D, the first
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Technical Department in Special Branch, E4E was just Administration and Stores [but incredibly important] and E4F was Air Support, so that’s all brand new. We needed an operational structure to effectively use these new units. We introduced Regional Source Units and Tasking Co-ordination Groups, and, the Weapons and Explosives Research Centre; all these things are unique to British Policing, so the RUC blazed this trail.
It was a case of learning as we went along and none of the units that I’ve just mentioned, not a single one, including, the Regional Source Units and TCGs, actually ended up anything like what they were when they started, they all evolved tremendously. The Regional Source Units started off with, I think four core functions, they ended up with about thirty-four core functions, and, they just got bigger and bigger. One of the interesting things was how sophisticated the training became; Surveillance, the Armed Response and Agent Handling, at the beginning, their training was very, very rudimentary, but it had to start somewhere, it started small and became more and more sophisticated. Actually it was not difficult to persuade ‘the powers that be’ that we needed to put more and more resources into training, because they could see the quality coming out the other end. Now it could have been very easy for some Senior Officer somewhere to turn around and say that E4A Training course, which, by ’82 took four and a half months before trainees were allowed ‘out on the street’, was too expensive. By any Policing standards, that’s an incredibly generous amount of training, that’s not unusual in the Army, but very unusual in Policing, to train someone for four and a half months before you start to get some payback from them. And so, the term quality, not quantity is applicable, because it would have been very easy for some Senior Officer to say, ‘ah they don’t really need to do all of that. Do they really all need to do a week’s photography training? Do they really all need to do OP Training? Do they need high level foot and mobile surveillance skills before we send them out?’ The answer is, ‘Yes’, if you want to have a quality product at the end of the day. Just look at how the agent handling training started to pick up, once it started going, it ended up very sophisticated indeed, and, again it had the backing of ‘the powers that be’, and it’s to their great credit that the Senior Officers, the ACCs and so on, said ‘yes, that’s okay, carry on, take your time, give me a quality product at the end of the day’.
There was a hell of a lot of trial and error, and there was no template to work too, nobody had ever done it before. Certainly, never in a western democracy, a liberal democracy, where we abided by the law; all the advantages lay with the terrorists, especially the IRA and especially in the Border areas, where they would hit us and get back across to the safety of the security of the South, then they were home and dry. So, they had all the advantages and we had very few I’m afraid.
Later I was involved in planning operations, that was very difficult, you’re looking at the intelligence, you’re trying to decide, is it at all credible, is the source qualified to make that statement, could they reasonably be expected to know information at that level and so on and so forth. If you think all criteria have been satisfied, think there is a chance that the terrorist thing is going to happen, you’ve got to consider things like, is the source being tested? is the source under suspicion by his own people? have they told the source this in the hope that the source will reveal he is a source by going to his Handlers, and, if we act will it prove to them, ‘yes he’s a source’ because he’s the only person they told about the action and suddenly there’s a massive change to the policing posture or something else gives it away that we are expecting something? So, if you take it, that all those things are satisfied, we are happy that this is good intelligence, the next step is how can we do it?
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Northern Ireland is a ‘village’, locals are quick to notice changes, so how do you respond without changing the atmosphere, and the circumstances of the local environment? That’s where the planners of Loughgall were quite clever, because I know from reading one of the books, they put in two HMSU guys in with the Army guys, plus one of the local Policemen who volunteered to stay behind in the station. So, if anybody called in from the local community, they would realise that this local Policeman was there, and they wouldn’t think, well they’re all strange Police and start talking about it in the village, and, before you knew it word would have spread something was going on.
I’ll go back to some people’s idea that a secret is still a secret if you only tell one person at a time; so the way they did it at Loughgall, couldn’t have been sustained for very long, it wouldn’t have been long before somebody thought something strange is happening up at the Police Station. It could be as simple as not seeing Constable such and such’s car outside anymore, or, I don’t see Constable so and so; so small changes to routine would have been considered.
Another big consideration is the risk of civilian casualties. So, risk to source, risk to civilians, risk to the potential victims, the risk to the Security Forces involved in the counter operation, but the biggest single thing was risk to the intended victims all these were considered. If it was too risky to the victim, or, there was a risk of civilian casualties, then the operation was considered unviable and we would have done something else, maybe ringed the place with hundreds of police and soldiers to put them off. If you remember, maybe 98% of these things, attacks, did not happen for whatever reason, they were not going to happen anyway so that whole effort, deploying large numbers of police and troops would have been unnecessary, but who is to know in advance?
In terms of Loughgall, some people have said we should have tried to intercept the terror gang somewhere else. The problem with that is, where? That’s where the big problem is, where? Bearing in mind that we had no idea how the attack was going to be mounted, and again, I only get this from reading a book or maybe it was the Ombudsman’s statement or something like that, that the van used only became known to the police just literally minutes before the thing happened. You don’t know which direction they are coming from, where they are going to, if they are coming from the north or the south or the east or the west. Maybe there’s only one road so will they come left or right, but the further out you go there’s more roads and options for them to use, so where do you do the intercept if you don’t know what you’re looking for? It’s very, very difficult and I’m not at all sure that even with the benefit of hindsight you could place this intercept anywhere else. You certainly can’t, simply at a bend in the road have somebody, have a Policeman standing there with his hand up to stop the traffic as if they’re checking driving licences or for vehicle excise duty issues, because these ‘boys’ will just execute him, so you can’t do that.
Very often the terrorists would use a scout car ahead of the bomb or murder team to check the road was clear for them, interestingly I’m not sure if it was ever discovered there was one at Loughgall. I was subsequently involved in a number of incidents, and, on occasions we never discovered the scout car or who was in it; generally, it was in front of the main team. There may well have been one that day at Loughgall, I don’t know enough about it, but it may well have been, I would be surprised if there wasn’t some sort of scout car in front of that van. It probably drove through and nobody realised, it may well have been quite a distance in front, because they used radio communications, phones or whatever they had. I don’t know what they had at that time but in the early part of ‘The Troubles’, the scout car had to be within visible distance because the driver would rapidly hit the
SPECIAL BRANCH Page 89 of 96 brake lights or something like that to give a sign to say, stop, pull off, reverse, do a 3 point turn and get the hell out of there. But later on, the distances became greater because they had radio communications and they could go down the road, and, say, yeah there’s no vehicle check points, no Army/Police or whatever. So, a scout car may have been several hundred metres ahead of that van and just gone clean through and gave the ‘all clear’. I don’t know, I simply don’t know enough about Loughgall, but yeah, it was very rare that they moved anything without a scout car.
People seem to think that in an operation like Loughgall we know everything, who’s involved, where they’re going to meet up, what they’re going to do, and, where they’re going to go to afterwards. But it’s not like that at all. There was one operation I was involved in that ended up in a shooting incident with the IRA opening fire first, they tried to kill a guy; the Army responded and killed them. With the benefit of hindsight all sorts of things could have been done to stop the shooting starting in the first place. Maybe we could have simply surrounded the area with police and military vehicle checkpoints to put them off, so the incident wouldn’t have happened that day. But we couldn’t rule out the possibility of an attack on one of the vehicle checkpoints or that the attack wouldn’t take place on another day. We didn’t know everything; did they have a secondary target? Or with the ‘blood up’, would they take on a checkpoint as their whole getaway system was in place, the safe house, people to take the weapons away, the getaway cars, somebody to take the car away and burn it, somebody to drive them across the border to safety, everything’s in place, well, why not have a pop at one of these vehicle checkpoints? we’ve got two rifles and we could hit them from a couple of hundred yards away. And, before you know it, you’ve one or two policemen dead. But we did not know who was involved, didn’t know how many were involved, we didn’t know if ‘the shoot’ would be somebody out of a car with a pistol or a rifle, or if the car would drive up, drop the gunman off to walk back 15, 20, 100 yards with the pistol in his pocket and just shoot the man who was standing there waiting outside a place. We didn’t know the direction of travel, we didn’t know whether it would be in the morning or the evening, because the target stood there at the beginning and end of his working day, we didn’t know if it was going to be the Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, we weren’t sure, we just knew they were planning to do it. We didn’t know what vehicles were involved, we didn’t know how many vehicles, who would scout them in, who would scout them out, we didn’t know where they would form up to do the attack, we didn’t know where they would dispose the weapons, who would drive them away, where they would do the forensic clean up having a wash and shower and burn their clothes, or, if they were relying on getting across the border before we could respond or if they would hide up for 24 hours before crossing the border. We knew none of this, all we knew was that they were planning to kill a particular individual, at a particular spot, either in the morning or the evening, some day this week; that was all we knew. After the event we knew they came from one direction intending to drive out another direction, but we still don’t know the scout car which was through before the incident happened, we didn’t know if they had a backup vehicle. After the IRA opened fire the backup vehicle may well have just driven past when it was all happening or turned ‘round and driven off. We had no idea and to this day we don’t know who else was involved.
The IRA was in some ways very sophisticated and in other ways they weren’t sophisticated at all. They became more and more sophisticated, I think it’s beyond doubt that if you look at the South Armagh Provisional IRA probably by ’86, ’87 or thereabouts they had become the most sophisticated and innovative IRA unit, their methods of ambush using IEDs, the way they wired them up, the way they triggered them and so on, were incredibly sophisticated. The broad spectrum of their
SPECIAL BRANCH Page 90 of 96 operations was much more developed than any other ASU that I came across and I have some knowledge of probably every ASU in the province. But the reason for that was the border. In other areas like East Tyrone or Mid Tyrone it was more difficult for them because they were subject to attrition by the Security Forces, with their members arrested, jailed, and sometimes killed by the Army.
If they are wanting to target an individual, procure a vehicle, maybe hi-jack it or buy a vehicle in a cash deal, which was quite common, because very often the owner when selling, never bothered reporting who they had sold it too. Or maybe to spray that vehicle or do some alterations to that vehicle so that they can launch mortars out of it, by cutting a hole in the roof and covering it with paper or cardboard sprayed the same colour as the vehicle; or grind explosives, or build an IED, or dig it into a roadside in the dead of night or set up a sniping position, or, lie somewhere to trigger or press the button and then retire. Plan the getaway, the pick up and taking them to a house to do their forensic wash up, get a shower, scrub themselves, burn their clothes and cache the weapons, even in a temporary cache and then come back four days later and then retrieve them again, oil them up before putting them into the deep hide. If you want to do all that and lots of other things which I haven’t mentioned, if you want to do that in East Tyrone or Mid Tyrone to kill somebody, you’ve got to do all of that in a safe house in East Tyrone or Mid Tyrone. Whereas if you’re in South Armagh you do nearly all off that South of the Border, all the preparation, the hides are there, so if you’re going to empty or refill your hide with your weapons, it’s in the South it’s not in the North. If you want to do your forensic wash-up, I know they never even bothered in the end because they realised they didn’t have to, nobody was flipping bothering them down there. If they wanted to grind explosives, they didn’t grind it in the North where they might get caught, they ground it down South, built the bomb, procured the vehicle down there, sprayed the vehicle, did the engineering work to the vehicle, made the mortar tubes or whatever, they did it in Co Louth not in Co Armagh where they’re liable to be banged up after a company of Royal Marines swooped in on helicopters. So that’s why South Armagh became more and more sophisticated, that’s why they led the campaign, it was because of the border. The only bit they did in the North was plant the IED and press the button before going back South again. So, they were very sophisticated, we allowed them to be sophisticated, they listened to prosecution evidence in court and became incredibly forensic aware, when DNA came in they started shaving their eyebrows and hair and doing all sorts of things, but they weren’t nearly so sophisticated in some other things.
PIRA had a counter intelligence capability, by that I mean their Security Team, which was running around looking for sources all the time. They had the ‘infamous’, John-Joe Magee, who died in Dundalk in the early ‘90s, I think he had a heart attack, he was an ex-Royal Marine, he was the head of their Security Team and of course this boy Scappaticci was involved along with others. Their Security Team certainly did make things more difficult and they executed, they definitely executed some people who weren’t sources. I mean one guy, definitely, definitely was not a source, but they had him for weeks and they gave him such an awful time that eventually he may have mumbled something that he was, I don’t know. But this guy, absolutely one hundred per cent was not working for anybody, he wasn’t working for the Army, ‘The Box’, the Customs, the Branch or CID or anybody, and, they executed him leaving a widow and I think a young family. The death of this guy, who was not a source, made me query for the first time, and maybe I should have queried this a lot earlier, but it made me query the confessions of a lot of people in Castlereagh and so on, did any of them not commit the offences they confessed too? However, nobody in Castlereagh was ever subjected
SPECIAL BRANCH Page 91 of 96 to anything remotely like the torture and deprivation and pressure that this guy was subjected too. But some of those taken to Castlereagh may have been weak characters and it suddenly made me realise that some weak characters may, after a day or two in Castlereagh, especially those who got themselves up to ‘high-doe’ before they even got there because of the IRA propaganda about Castlereagh Interrogation centre being like the dungeons of the Tower of London, which terrified people before they even went there, when in actual fact they just sat down and got a cup of tea. So, their propaganda about Castlereagh backfired a bit on them.
So, PIRA Security Team definitely did have an effect. It had a big effect on them because they became paranoid about sources, even when there were no sources, and, our sophisticated surveillance capabilities and so on which we used to build our intelligence picture. Sometimes we got lucky and managed to get key pieces of the intelligence jigsaw to get the thread and realised what was happening, so we deployed resources and they thought there was a source involved and became absolutely paranoid about the sources. Of course, their Security Team caused a great deal of resentment as well because they gave some people, who were totally innocent of being our sources, such a hard time, they went away vowing vengeance on these people and spread the word about what sort of people they were.
They sent people to listen to the forensic evidence in court and they also had quite a few, they didn’t just need all that, they had so many lawyers who were involved. There were a certain number of lawyers who were just very ‘friendly’ towards the terrorists, and, one that I know was definitely in the IRA, was Finucane. I’m not sure that I ever heard of any others who were in the IRA but there were a number of lawyers, and solicitors especially, who were very sympathetic to them. There were also a number of barristers who were very sympathetic to them, but they weren’t actually in the IRA.
The IRA intelligence capability, I think, could be described as hit and miss. A huge amount of their intelligence on policemen, soldiers, UDR men, part-timers, or judges, a great deal of it came from sympathisers who simply reported in through Sinn Fein, who said, there’s a judge goes to a particular shop, or walks his dog at the same time in the park, that’s how a lot of it happened. One guy I know of who they tried to have a go at, was a policeman who built a house and somebody making a delivery to a nearby house said, that’s a beautiful house up there and the neighbour in total innocence said, ‘oh yes, that’s a policeman built that house’ and that went straight back, and, the IRA tried to assassinate him. Their intelligence simply came from this guy, who was delivering oil, I think, and a lot of their information came from those sources.
There was a Post Office guy killed, I think he was a Post Office guy, by an undercar booby trap and the IRA said they’d killed a member of the UDR. But the fella wasn’t in the UDR and top ranking Provos, I think it was Adams and Kelly were talking about it with a number of other people, and they couldn’t understand how they got that wrong because they had three sources reporting in on that guy. So, they had three people who worked in the Post Office that had falsely identified their colleague as being in the UDR. Now maybe the boy was a fantasist and maybe he tried to pretend he was in the UDR or something. There was another poor fellow, a student killed at Millfield College who was trying to join the police who told his fellow students that he was trying to join the police and then a few nights later he was assassinated, even though he hadn’t actually got into the police, but simply because he told people he was joining; so, a lot of it was opportunistic. Then there is
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Bobby Storey, who was alleged to be their Head of Intelligence, he had people planted in areas like Holywood and Bangor, one was a primary school teacher and her brief was to find out from the kids in her class whose daddy was a policeman. And there was another in a theatre group if I remember correctly, Rosie Brown, she had the affair with the prison officer. They got a lot of information out of prison officers in the prisons and some policemen, by putting them under pressure by saying to them things like ‘that’s a nice new car you’ve got’ and he wonders how do they know I’ve got a new car? Or ‘I see that your child started primary school this morning in P1’, so straight away the Prison Officer feels under pressure. So, there was a degree of sophistication about their intelligence gathering, but it would be wrong to exaggerate it, it would be nothing that anyone with any sense could have had a go at.
OFFICER 26
I didn’t have informants, nor was I directly involved with Special Branch informants. I don’t think we will ever know how good Special Branch were, we couldn’t have done without Special Branch, they were vital. I don’t know if they did things that went too far, but in general what they did was necessary. There was a danger that people could get too close their informants, but I just don’t know, some people say that they did, I just don’t know. However, informants were necessary, absolutely, I think we had to use informants who were terrorists, how else were we going to get information on terrorism? There could be problems, there’s Stake Knife, and, when you have more than one organisation collecting intelligence, how do you know they are all sharing information, or are they just working on their own? I know what they are supposed to do, but how well did they do it? I don’t know.
I think if an informant is involved in murder, that’s very difficult, knowing that they were responsible, yet you don’t have the evidence, that’s very difficult. I think it is very difficult, you join the police to help people and to do that you have to work with criminals and other people who do bad things to protect others, that is a real dilemma. I don’t know much more about informants really, I never worked in that field. I knew it was happening and that it was necessary, but I wasn’t involved in it.
OFFICER 27
I don’t think there was a ‘Force within a Force’ to the extent Special Branch have been condemned for being. Special Branch were effective, and I think that is the problem for those who wanted SB neutered. I don’t know every Special Branch officer or everything they did, but they were a vital part in fighting terrorism, and they did a good job.
Yes, Special Branch needed to keep secrets, absolutely and utterly, that’s how they keep their informants alive. How could you have someone who is giving you information about an organisation as ruthless as the Provisional IRA and blab their name all over the place? We had Diplock courts, because they would murder jurors and witnesses to stop them convicting them or giving evidence, and, if they would do that to innocent people what would they do to people who come from within their own ranks to help the police? We know, from experience they would be taken to the Border tortured, shot and left naked with a bin liner over their head; that’s what the Provisional IRA did, and it should never be forgotten.
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If Special Branch didn’t anonymise the intelligence and gave out the intelligence verbatim, don’t forget with disclosure you have to disclose everything you have to the other side in the court case, all of that is good stuff but not if somebody ends up being murdered. I have no doubts, even though this is an anonymous interview anybody that knows a little about me could read this and work out it’s me; I am passed worrying about that to a large extent. But if you had a person in a terrorist organisation who is giving you information to disrupt their organisation we know what is going to happen to them if he or she is discovered; so, it’s absolutely vital that secrets like that are kept.
Going back to what I said earlier, if there was anybody in Special Branch who did anything criminal or illegal they should face the consequences just the same as anybody else. In terms of anything I saw, the relationship between Special Branch and CID was good. I am well aware after working in different areas there were egos in play, and back, as far back as the early 80s career investigative detectives, senior detectives at various levels were transferred into Special Branch. So, that could have done nothing but breakdown barriers and open Special Branch up to CID thinking, and, CID to SB thinking. I think the idea of transferring investigative CID detectives into Special Branch was to engender a process for CID and Special Branch to better understand each other’s work. I imagine there were briefings going on at a high level between the two Departments, although I wasn’t involved in those.
The police need informants - definitely. Criminals have become very sophisticated and use a lot of technology. Now I am retired many years and am out of touch with modern policing techniques, but you just have to watch television to see that the technology and forensics have a big part to play in criminal investigations. But I think there is nothing like having information from someone who knows what is going on, and is able to tell you that, but it’s a fraught area.
I am currently reading a book about the history of the CIA called Legacy of Ashes and the general theme is that the CIA was very ineffective throughout its existence. I am at the part where they have an informant in a country, now this is on a grander scale than we had here, who in order to prove his bona fides to his terrorist friends was told he had to murder a politician. The information was brought back to the authorities in Washington who said, ‘No he can’t, get him out’, and I think that is clearly the right thing to do. If an informant went too far, or, became part of the problem he is there to solve he needs to be stopped. Informants need to be clearly managed, they need to know the boundaries set for them, but informant information is always vital. That’s the big problem for police, informants to be useful have to be involved.
I didn’t have much to do with informants, anything I did went to court. I had my evidence, the witnesses went through the ‘Box’ in succession, and, the case stood or fell on the evidence, so, I personally never had to make decisions about informants. I think, in general, if somebody is already involved in a paramilitary organisation and comes forward to give police information, you don’t have a lot of influence over what they did before, you would be better trying to balance the greater good of what he can help you stop against what he has already done, it’s a difficult area. That’s a real dilemma and today it’s being used to berate the police and of course re-write history. That is only a small part of what the police service provided in this country from the start of ‘The Troubles’ in 69, although you could say ‘The Troubles’ started before that, and they haven’t really gone away.
Think of the good policing and the lives that have been lost trying to deliver a service to the community whatever their outlook. What detractors have done is reduce things to what 2 or 3
SPECIAL BRANCH Page 94 of 96 people may or may not have done which they claim was wrong, now that’s a tiny, tiny picture. That tiny picture has been blown up, inflated and used to whip the police. I would say if a guy had murdered 10 people and there was a prospect he was going to murder another 10 and he comes forward to tell you that ‘so and so’ hadn’t paid their TV license, you wouldn’t take him on as an informant. At the other end of the scale if he had been involved in a murder and it had had such an impact on him that he realised the error of his ways and wanted to commit himself to preventing more murders and was giving police information to do that or identified those responsible then there is a greater good, police would have to look at it differently. But I have to say, thankfully, personally I never faced that dilemma. My career took me a different path, I took statements from people, gathered evidence and forensics, made a case and went and sat in the ‘witness box. Many times, I asked myself, ‘why did I bother?’ Because some barristers, who were getting paid multiple times what I was paid, were on occasion being downright dishonest about what they were doing.
I think police have to try and make a balance between what an informant has to do to be able to help you; we’re talking about good and bad here, it’s not black and white. Whenever I started in CID some of the old hands said, ‘you’ll never get information going to church, you’ll only get information by talking to those involved’, and, there is an element of truth in that. You need to get the information from those involved because those that aren’t involved don’t know.
In the very early days we could meet people we thought had information to help us, I met people, I am talking low level crime stuff not life and death matters, as for rules there weren’t any really. Informants would ring you and you would meet them somewhere and they would tell you bits and pieces, but the process was all very local. But by late 70s and early 80s the whole thing became highly formalised, informants had to be registered, Special Branch took the terrorist informants and we developed a criminal intelligence system, and crime analysis became more important. A whole new formal means for handling informants was introduced. I never really was involved with informants because my career took me another path.
I can tell you that many witnesses lived in similar ways as informants. I had a witness who was under severe threat and he went way beyond what a lot of people would have done to give evidence against the paramilitaries, and, he lived under tremendous threat. We had to move many witnesses out of their houses and re-locate them to keep them safe. It was a similar process to the re-location of informants, but the witnesses stood up in the witness box and gave evidence and were known to the accused, whereas with informants, nobody knew who they were, and, they would meet you in a ‘dark corner’ to give you information.
Working with informants is difficult because we want to put the ‘bad guys’ in court, but we had to use to them to get the ‘badder’ guys, so that’s a dilemma. Of course, your informant could tell you one thing and go and do something else, or he could be totally untruthful with you and you might not know what he is involved in. But, you have to see him as this person who tells you something from which the police and society benefit because you are interrupting crime, but he could be a ‘double agent’, you can’t trust him 100%, so things aren’t as simple as black and white.
Having got the information police have to do a constant balancing act, is what the person, this is what I would do, is what the person is involved in more damaging and more harmful than the activity we want to stop? If the answer is yes, then shut him down. The other side is if his actions are less harmful and the information he provides frustrates terrorist acts and saves lives is that not the
SPECIAL BRANCH Page 95 of 96 greater good? I think you have to err on the side of saving lives which might not be saved or otherwise could be lost. There is a balancing act police have to make in finding the greater good, thankfully I never had to apply that, but where it was done, as far as I know, it was done well and done properly. You need information to try and prevent crime, and to make arrests. There are some ‘celebrated’ instances that regularly come up in the news and talked about time after time, as I said before if there is evidence of police wrongdoing why haven’t people been brought to court?
Finding that balancing act, that’s hard, and, I have to say I admire those police officers, at all ranks involved, but particularly those in senior ranks who had those decisions to make. And, I think they got it right, by and large, for all the talk about collusion, what evidence has anybody produced to put somebody before a court? None, none has been produced. Some of the most ‘celebrated’ cases, Loughinisland, the Ombudsman talked about collusion and the Judicial Review has shown he was wrong, and said clearly in black and white, that he was wrong to use the word collusion and the evidence he used to support what he said and his conclusions. So, if you actually break it down to putting people into court for offences of collusion by police officers there haven’t been any, and, that’s because the evidence isn’t there.
I could sit here and give you what I think is a reasonable approach, in CID we used the Lord Denning test of ‘the reasonable man on the bus’. Is it better to prevent people being murdered even if you know the person who is giving you information was involved in a murder previously, or, is it better to prosecute that person for murder and not be able to prevent murder in the future? I would say the ordinary guy ‘on the bus’ would say ‘prevent as many murders as you can.’ I think too, that is why Special Branch had secrets. If Special Branch had been a secretive ‘Force within a Force’ like the police in less democratic countries in the world where thousands of people have been dragged off, disappeared or ended up in a shallow grave and all the rest of it, the human rights outcry would have been absolutely enormous. But here the outcry is from the enemy, the people who caused the most damage and probably whose organisations suffered the most at the hands of Special Branch, and, they are wanting to re-write history, and, that’s who are making all the allegations.
There are police officers who have done wrong, but let’s face it, they have stood trial and answered to the courts. So, overall in the balance of ‘The Troubles’ and their aftermath, I think this thing about collusion is more to destroy the image, the reputation and history of the RUC. That is by far and away the purpose of this collusion thing because the whole drive seems to be to sanitise history, particularly by Republicans who are intent on polishing up their image and re-writing history to say they were the ‘good guys’ fighting against a sectarian police force, and, that just wasn’t the case.
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