Disrupt and Deny by Cormac Rory;

Author:Cormac, Rory;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2018-02-17T00:00:00+00:00

Hit squads

Propaganda formed the backbone of broader deniable activities. In Belfast, Hugh Mooney considered himself involved in ‘all SPA’, or special political action, projects.45 In London, Heath demanded more than just propaganda action and complained to Burke Trend, the cabinet secretary, about the timidity of the intelligence services. In turn, Trend, perhaps simply to appease Heath’s desire for action, instructed the secretary of the JAC, then seconded SIS officer Brian Stewart, to come up with a list of possible responses. Much like Stewart Menzies’ menu to counter communism over two decades earlier, it included the entire gamut of covert operations. Stewart, who described himself as the last of SIS’s ‘robber barons’ in a time when special operations had gone out of fashion, particularly advocated black propaganda in the form of forged letters to incriminate and undermine terrorist leaders.46 In summer 1971, the Joint Action Committee invited IRD representatives to participate in its top-secret discussions on Northern Ireland.47

Stewart also recommended sabotaging IRA weapons and ammunitions. He suggested keeping booby-trapped weapons inside poorly guarded British depots from where the IRA could steal them.48 The JAC likely sanctioned this operation, whilst another former JAC representative remembers more ‘hairy’ schemes, which will never see the light of day.49 JAC-sponsored activity on the streets of the UK alarmed officials in the Home Office. Philip Woodfield, heading its Northern Ireland department, was particularly concerned and accused Denis Greenhill, the senior official at the Foreign Office and himself a former chair of the JAC, of driving covert activity. Woodfield reassured his own permanent under-secretary, Philip Allen, that he would personally attend any JAC meetings on Ireland to keep emphasizing the political risks involved.50 The military, as was so often the case, proved the most vocal proponents of such operations, although, as one person involved recalls, ‘nobody wanted to touch Ireland so everyone passed the buck. Northern Ireland was the graveyard of reputations.’51 Formal JAC involvement was relatively short-lived and took a back seat after the creation of the Northern Ireland Office in 1972—perhaps unsurprisingly given the earlier Home Office caution. In fact, the Northern Ireland Office knew nothing about the JAC at all.52

In the meantime, assassination also featured on Brian Stewart’s list. Dick White, now Whitehall intelligence coordinator and the most experienced secret servant in the land, had little enthusiasm for special operations in Ireland. His face went ashen grey when he saw the reference to assassination, but he passed the whole paper up to Heath regardless.53 The prime minister’s reaction is not known. When Alec Douglas-Home, the foreign secretary, saw Stewart’s proposals he shook his head and wisely said that after hundreds of years of the Irish problem, Britain did not need more blood on its hands now.54

Nonetheless, the alleged use of extrajudicial killings in Northern Ireland has sparked particular controversy, with much criticism focusing on the Military Reaction Force (MRF), a top-secret unit operating in 1972. Britain had long used subterranean teams to fight terrorists and insurgents across the empire. These units operated undercover, disguised

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