The McGurks Bar Bombing by Ciarán MacAirt

Author:Ciarán MacAirt
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Frontline Noir
Published: 2013-05-19T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter 8 Information Policy

A city built upon mud;

A culture built upon profit;

Free speech nipped in the bud,

The minority always guilty

Louis MacNiece,

Autumn Journal

In September 1970249, as Britain prepared for a longer war, they deployed Brigadier Frank Kitson to take over 39 Airportable Brigade (39 Brigade). Ten battalions, including the élite troops of the first Battalion of the Parachute Regiment (1 Para), were under his control in Belfast mainly, but with security over part of the surrounding areas of Counties Down and Antrim. Kitson was an able and vastly experienced commander, having served in theatres of war as varied as Kenya, Malaya and Cyprus. He was also a counter-insurgency theorist and practitioner of repute, having honed his skills during his distinguished career. This also included authorship of books on the subject, beginning with Gangs and Counter-Gangs in 1960. He became somewhat of a Republican bogeyman, especially after the publication of Low Intensity Operations: Subversion, Insurgency and Peacekeeping, first published in 1971 – or rather, this is how it is portrayed to this day in the press.

This portrayal, no doubt managed at the start by information policy units he instigated, has blurred his true influence at this crucial juncture of Britain’s war in the North. I am sure the irony was never lost on him. It may even be that scholarly examination of the importance of his tenure, which lasted until early 1972, has been stunted as well. In-depth interrogation techniques, psychological operations, pseudo-gangs, the murder of civilians by Special Force units were all instruments of war used by the British military on the streets of Northern Ireland. We know this as fact now and yet there are many who are still in denial that such counter-insurgency techniques were included within Britain’s military strategy – especially against “British” subjects. Of course, there was that certain “otherness” that set these people apart from citizens on the island of Great Britain and these techniques are as old as war itself. What would have made the conflict in Northern Ireland unique was if they had not been deployed here in some form.

The bedrock of all these techniques is how information is extracted, handled, developed and then used against an enemy. If we leave these highly emotive low intensity operations to the side momentarily, Kitson’s significance is that he re-aligns Information Policy to the heart of military operations and he begins to overhaul military information activity in Northern Ireland straight away. In October 1970, Lieutenant Colonel Bernard Renouf “Johnny” Johnston, the head of the British Army’s Psychological Operations (Psyops) training at the Joint Warfare Establishment (JWE)250 was sent to Northern Ireland to run the Information Liaison Department. This worked beside the Army’s normal Public Relations Branch. A secret report251 prepared for the Chiefs of Staff of the Joint Warfare Committee which I found buried in archives, records the syllabus Johnston taught at JWE:

“a. Propaganda techniques and the use of mass media

b. Intelligence and planning for psyops

c. Communist propaganda

d. Revolutionary warfare

e. Psyops conducted since the Second World War

f. Modern advertising techniques

g.

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