100 years of Northern Ireland
The truth on Troubles and ‘dirty war’
As Ulster reaches its centenary this week, our Writer-at-Large – who has spent decades covering Northern Ireland violence – speaks to historian Dr Aaron Edwards about how Britain’s secret intelligence war lies at the heart of the Troubles and the peace process
WAS it the secret war carried out by British agents inside the IRA which brought the Troubles to a close? Did British intelligence manipulate Sinn Fein into peace? Did either side really “win” the war in Ulster?
Northern Ireland turned 100 years old this week. It is a fitting time to reassess the Troubles. Like most conflicts, it’s only with the passage of time that the violence which shook the north of Ireland and the rest of Britain for 30 years can begin to be understood.
We know why the Troubles began – Northern Ireland was essentially a sectarian state, the Catholic population demanded civil rights, Ulster’s security forces brutally mishandled the situation, the IRA seized its opportunity and the British army was dragged into the conflict. But why did the war follow the course it did? Why did the violence come to an end? And what’s the legacy that the Troubles leave behind today?
In terms of the scope of history, peace arrived just a relatively short time ago – little more than a generation has passed since the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. So historians are only now trying to make sense of how the Troubles unfolded and how the war was brought to a close.
One historian unravelling the big questions at the heart of the Troubles is Dr Aaron Edwards, senior lecturer in defence and international affairs at Sandhurst, the Royal Military Academy. For a man who teaches the British officers of tomorrow, his take on the the Irish troubles can be uncomfortable from a UK perspective.
Edwards says the British state treated the north of Ireland like a colony, imposing a military solution on Ulster lifted straight from the Empire’s handbook. Yet his analysis also poses hard truths for republicans. While the IRA believes the violence ended in stalemate, Edwards says it’s clear the paramilitary organisation was defeated.
One of the biggest question raised by Edwards’s new book – Agents of Influence: Britain’s Secret Intelligence War Against the IRA – is whether the end of the Troubles was down to agents, run by the army, RUC and MI5, outsmarting the IRA and manipulating Sinn Fein towards peace.
The agent war
FOR more than 20 years, I’ve investigated the intelligence war in Northern Ireland for The Herald.
In essence, the dirty war – or the agent war – worked like this: the British government was overwhelmed by the ferocity of Ulster’s ethnic conflict. In order to contain violence, the UK’s spying machine – British military intelligence, police Special Branch, and MI5 – realised they had to infiltrate agents into terror gangs, like the IRA and its loyalist counterpart the UVF, or turn existing terrorists into informers.
Where the intelligence war got dirty, though, was in the way these agents were run. In order to maintain an agent at the heart of an organisation like the IRA, they had to be allowed to act and operate as terrorists.
If a high-level mole wasn’t carrying out bombings and shootings they would not only fail to gather top-grade intelligence, but they
would also crucially fall under suspicion of working for the British and more than likely be executed. Intelligence sources have claimed that agents were used to kill targets the British couldn’t get to, and sometimes even aided and abetted by their state handlers in assassinations.
Perhaps the most infamous agent was codenamed Stakeknife – the British Army’s highest-placed spy inside the IRA.
I named senior IRA figure Freddie Scappaticci as Stakeknife in The Herald in 2003. Stakeknife was run by the Force Research Unit (FRU), a wing of British military intelligence. With chilling irony, Stakeknife was central to the IRA’s Internal Security Unit – he so-called Nutting Squad – tasked with mole-hunting and executing traitors within IRA ranks.
The FRU also ran agents like Brian Nelson, a mole inside the loyalist UDA involved in the assassination of Belfast human rights lawyer Pat Finucane.
FRU officers interviewed by The Herald admitted the unit conspired in the murder of multiple civilians in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. The FRU was run by a Scottish officer, Brigadier Gordon Kerr – one of the army’s most senior figures, who would eventually become British military attache to Beijing.
One FRU handler interviewed said that the actions of British military intelligence were a “utilitarian numbers game” – if an agent saved more lives than they took then that was seen as a success. Police investigations into the dirty war have essentially gone nowhere. One inquiry, Operation Kenova, remains ongoing into the role of agent Stakeknife.
Manipulating the IRA
AARON Edwards says his latest book explores “how the secret state responded to the IRA and how it built the mechanisms by which it managed to push the IRA into negotiations”. One of the key figures Edwards spoke to was Willie Carlin, an agent who has appeared many times in the pages of The Herald through our investigations into the Dirty War. Carlin was a former British solider – a Catholic from Derry – who was instructed to infiltrate Sinn Fein on behalf of MI5.
He became close to IRA commander Martin McGuinness, who would later become the Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland after the peace process kicked in. Carlin’s cover was eventually blown and he had to flee Ireland or risk execution.
Carlin described his role as an agent like this to The Herald: “Essentially, I had to push Sinn Fein – and by extension the IRA – towards a political rather than military solution.”
In effect, that’s exactly what happened with the peace process in the 1990s.
Edwards says the purpose of the agent war was “to bring the IRA to what some former intelligence officers would call a culminating point … to move the Republican movement in a political direction”.
He says Carlin’s story poses the question: “How far was Sinn Fein actually created by the British state?”
Edwards adds: “I think that there’s a strong, compelling argument in there that the politicisation of Sinn Fein, of the professional Republican movement, was deliberate.”
There’s been speculation for years that McGuinness was a spy for Britain. However, there is no evidence to back up such rumours. What does seem clear today, however, is that McGuinness was being manipulated to some extent towards a political solution by British intelligence.
Edwards says that when it comes to the views of former agents like Carlin – of British intelligence deliberately trying to move Republicanism in a political rather than military direction – “we have to take them seriously”.
He says it was important for British intelligence to get McGuinness elected for Sinn Fein “because he’s the IRA chief of staff allegedly, with total control over the military campaign … you’re essentially moving the pieces around the chess board”. This begins a process where the IRA’s army council becomes more supportive of a peace strategy. “You see very clearly a political project emerging,” says Edwards, “and that’s done at the expense of the military campaign.”
There were competing strategies, however. While MI5 may have been keen to slowly move Sinn Fein in a political direction, RUC special branch was concentrating on minimising daily violence on the streets. “I don’t believe there was a unified strategy,” says Edwards. “Different worldviews were clashing.”
Like most conflicts, it’s only with the passage of time that the violence can begin to be understood
IRA defeated?
SO who won the war in the end? “A lot of commentators say there was a military stalemate,” says Edwards, “that nobody won – that suits a lot of people. It suits the idea of an honourable compromise, a magnanimous compromise.”
Within some sections of Republicanism there’s a belief the IRA “took the magnanimous route. They decided they’d give [Northern Ireland] peace, that the best way forward to secure a United Ireland was though politics”. Edwards says: “We don’t really hear much from the British state … there’s not an awful lot of people [from the British side] running around saying ‘we won’.”
Edwards believes there’s a reason for the silence. In trying to establish the edgy peace that now exists in Northern Ireland, any sign of British triumphalism “would signal a humiliating defeat for the IRA”. That would not have been sound ground on which to try to bring an end to “an intractable ethnic conflict”.
“In order for the peace process to develop, there had to be this idea of an honourable compromise,” Edwards says. However, he points out that the IRA did not achieve its goals – Ireland is still not united – while Britain did secure its goals by “turning off the IRA’s violence”. Edwards adds: “I believe in a strategic sense it was definitely an IRA defeat, no doubt about it, but in terms of how it was sold for a peace process to be