The Defence of the Realm (111 page)

When I asked him what he really wanted, he proclaimed that he wanted to bring down the government. During the election campaign, even the Labour Party had to disown McGahey when he demanded that any troops which might be called out to deal with a national emergency should support the miners.
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On 14 November the Service obtained an HOW on Arthur Scargill, whom it regarded as a Communist sympathizer, ‘to help establish the extent of communist influence on present negotiations in the mining industry'.
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This time the government was well prepared – or thought it was – for another miners' strike. In December 1973 it pre-emptively declared a three-day working week, instead of delaying as in 1972. On 12 December the Secretary of State for Employment, Willie Whitelaw, summoned a group of senior Security Service officers to his office and told them that intelligence was ‘one of the keys of success in handling the present situation'.
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The Service view of the origins of the latest conflict with the NUM, summarized in a note of 8 January 1974, was very similar to its analysis of the seamen's strike almost eight years earlier and was once again drafted with a possible Commons statement in mind. Its author had had the lead role in drafting Harold Wilson's celebrated Commons denunciation of the seamen's leaders in 1966 as a ‘tightly knit group of politically motivated men':
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Communists in the [NUM] were largely responsible for framing the pay claim which is the subject of the present dispute. This originated from the Communist-controlled Scottish Area and was subsequently endorsed by the NUM's National Conference in July 1973. The Party's aim was to try to ensure that this claim would ultimately result in a strike . . . Throughout the whole of this period leading Communist
members of the Executive have kept closely in touch with the Party's National Industrial Organiser, Ramelson, and continue to discuss their tactics with him. Before meetings of the NUM National Executive Committee, McGahey, the Vice-President of the NUM, usually consults privately with Ramelson and agrees with him the policy which the Communist Party would wish to see pursued by the Executive as a whole.
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The transcribers within the CPGB transcribing room, who provided much of the highly sensitive raw intelligence on which this assessment was based, worked inside a glass partition which separated them from the other transcribers. The young English graduate who transcribed Mick McGahey's phone calls during the three-day week had the same difficulty as her predecessors with his sometimes impenetrable Scottish accent. Though already aware of his alcoholic tendencies, she had the impression that at the height of the crisis he ‘more or less reinvented heavy drinking'.
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With a miners' strike due to begin on 9 February, Heath called an election to be held on the 28th. Unlike Wilson, Heath decided not to use Security Service intelligence to launch a public attack on ‘a tightly knit group of politically motivated men'. Instead he chose to fight the election on the larger constitutional issue of ‘Who Governs Britain?' After an indifferent campaign Heath lost the election and Labour emerged with five more seats than the Conservatives. ‘The miners yet again appeared triumphant, indeed in the euphoric view of young left-wingers like Arthur Scargill virtually invincible.'
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3

Counter-Terrorism and Protective Security in the Early 1970s

The main shift in Security Service priorities during the last two decades of the Cold War was from counter-espionage (CE) and counter-subversion (CS) to counter-terrorism (CT). The transition, however, was very gradual. The Service had no sense during the 1970s, or even for much of the 1980s, that CT was destined to become its main priority. Counter-terrorism was initially regarded as ‘the violent side of subversion'
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and was included in the responsibilities of the counter-subversion F Branch. The first step towards the creation of an independent CT Branch did not begin until 1976 and was not fully implemented until 1984. Protective security against terrorist as well as other threats remained throughout the responsibility of C Branch.
²

After long periods of quiescence, Middle Eastern terrorism and the IRA (the two main targets of the Service's CT operations in the later Cold War) both re-emerged as threats almost simultaneously at the end of the 1960s. For historical reasons, the counter-terrorist responsibilities of the Security Service against the IRA were quite different from those against Middle Eastern terrorism. Ever since the foundation of the Metropolitan Police Special Branch (originally Special Irish Branch) in 1883 during the Fenian ‘Dynamite Wars' in London, it had held the lead intelligence role against Irish Republican terrorism on the British mainland. The lead role in Northern Ireland belonged to the Special Branch of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC). Within the United Kingdom the Security Service thus had only a supporting role against the IRA. Against all other terrorist threats to mainland Britain (even including those from Northern Ireland
Loyalist
paramilitaries) the Service had the lead intelligence role, though that role was not formally acknowledged until 1972.
³

For twenty years after the disappearance of the post-war threat to London from Zionist extremists,
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Middle Eastern terrorism ceased to be a significant Security Service concern. In 1968, however, it suddenly became front-page news. This time the threat came from Arab rather than Zionist
terrorists. The leading terrorist strategist was Dr Wadi Haddad, deputy leader and head of foreign operations in the Marxist-Leninist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), headed by Dr George Habash. From the day Israeli forces had destroyed his family home in Galilee, Haddad had sworn that the rest of his life would be devoted to liberating Palestine from Zionist occupation. Convinced of the futility of attacking military targets in Israel after the humiliating Arab defeat in the 1967 Six-Day War, Haddad devised a new strategy of aircraft hijacking and terrorist attacks on Jewish and Zionist targets in Europe which attracted worldwide publicity. The first hijack, in July 1968, took place on board an El Al Boeing 707 bound for Tel Aviv which two PFLP guerrillas forced to land in Algiers and renamed (with no acknowledgement to James Bond) ‘Palestinian Liberation 007'. After more than a month's negotiations, the Israeli passengers on board were exchanged for sixteen Palestinians in Israeli jails.
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Because there was as yet no evidence that British airlines were at risk from the PFLP, Whitehall showed little urgency in responding to the hijacking menace. Following a second PFLP hijack in September, however, this time of a TWA Boeing 747 also en route to Tel Aviv, the cabinet secretary, Sir Burke Trend, set up a working party to study hijacking and other attacks on civil aircraft. Progress was slow. C Branch issued threat assessments to El Al and Jordanian Airlines, which were thought to be most at risk from the PFLP, but did not yet think it necessary to contact British airlines.
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The first PFLP attacks on Jewish targets in London were so amateurish that they failed to give a greater sense of urgency to British counterterrorism. Incendiary devices planted in Oxford Street at Selfridge's and Marks and Spencer on 18 July 1969 caused minimal damage. A third PFLP bomb attack, not far away at the Israeli Zim Shipping Office in Regent Street, was slightly more successful, breaking several windows and causing minor injuries to a member of staff. None of these incidents was thought serious enough to merit investigation by the Security Service, which left inquiries to the MPSB.
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The Service, however, expected further, more dangerous ‘Arab Terrorist Attacks'. The DG, Sir Martin Furnival Jones, was pessimistic about the prospects for preventing them:

It is not difficult for terrorists previously unidentified as such (as they usually are) to gain entry to Britain for short periods, possibly carrying explosives with them. There are a large number of pro-Arab supporters of different nationalities in Britain, including many Arab students, who would be prepared, or could be induced, to give help in minor ways or provide cover, even though they themselves condemn the use
of violence as bad publicity for the cause. In our view, attempts to perpetrate terrorist attacks, not excluding assassination, are likely to continue and not to diminish.
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The Security Service was even more pessimistic about the prospects for ending the violence of the ‘Troubles' in Northern Ireland, which began at almost the same time as the terrorism of the PFLP.

The last IRA bombing campaign in mainland Britain dated back to 1938–9. The most recent campaign in Northern Ireland, which began along the border with the Republic in 1958, had little impact and passed almost unnoticed in London. Although the Security Service, at the request of the Unionist government at Stormont Castle, sent a liaison officer to Belfast,
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the RUC were able to cope with the threat from the IRA with only limited assistance from the British army. The IRA blamed public indifference as one of the reasons for ending its campaign in 1962.
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The Stormont government remained cocooned within the complacency generated by almost half a century of one-party Unionist rule in Northern Ireland committed to maintaining the union with Great Britain, and by the Unionist sense of superiority over the supposedly backward Republic in the south, some of whose citizens continued to emigrate in search of a better life overseas. Westminster mostly looked the other way, doing its best not to become involved in Northern Ireland. Long-established convention forbade the tabling of questions by MPs concerning any issue within the direct responsibility of a Stormont minister. Until the late 1960s, despite the presence of Northern Ireland MPs at Westminster, the Commons usually devoted less than two hours a year to discussing the Province.
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Until violence began in the summer of 1968, provoked by some of the supporters and opponents of civil rights campaigns against discrimination affecting Ulster's Catholic minority, there seemed little in Northern Ireland to concern the Security Service. On 6 November the Home Secretary, James Callaghan, asked Furnival Jones for ‘an up-to-date appreciation of the prospect of violence in Northern Ireland from the IRA'.
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FJ seems to have been somewhat taken aback by the request. The DDG, Anthony Simkins, told the PUS at the Home Office, Sir Philip Allen, that Callaghan's request placed the Service in ‘a rather Gilbertian situation as we derived our information from the [RUC] and had no independent coverage'. MI5's own inquiries would therefore require ‘discreet handling'.
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The Service appreciation, entitled ‘The Threat of Violence in Northern Ireland', completed in December, implied that the Home Secretary had too narrow a perspective. Though Callaghan had asked only for an assessment of the
threat from the IRA, Furnival Jones insisted that ‘The threat from the IRA cannot be viewed in isolation from the other factors making for violence in Northern Ireland.' The Service concluded that ‘The IRA may well see in the Civil Rights Movement the broader base necessary for the achievement of its political aims,' thus provoking a violent backlash from Loyalist extremists. The tone of the appreciation was gloomy and implied that little could be done to resolve the root causes of the violence:

In basic terms the security problem in Northern Ireland is simple. It springs from the antagonism of two Communities with long memories and relatively short tempers. Their differences, originally religious and cultural, largely coincide with political divisions and, with the passage of time since the formal constitution of the Northern Ireland state, have been aggravated by social and economic grievances. Thus, the Roman Catholic and Nationalist minority almost instinctively attributes its problems to what it believes to be the inherent and deliberate bad faith of the Protestant and Unionist majority, while the latter, conscious of the minority's Southern orientation, with almost equal instinct believes that the demand for the remedying of grievances is a preliminary to the dissolution of the State itself. In this atmosphere attempts to improve relations, however genuine and well founded, only too often are greeted with suspicion by both groups.
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Following the worsening of the Troubles in the spring of 1969, a Head Office Newsletter told staff:

Until very recently the interest of this Service in the security situation in Northern Ireland has been both limited and indirect. In practice we have been almost wholly dependent for information on the Royal Ulster Constabulary who, for good reason, have always regarded the Irish Republican Army as their primary security target. The fact that responsibility for the investigation of I.R.A. activity in Great Britain rests upon the Metropolitan Special Branch has tended to reduce our interest yet further. The total effort deployed by F. Branch in matters Irish was until recently confined to one part-time desk officer in F.1.C.
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Whitehall responded to the beginning of the Troubles with a predictable flurry of committee meetings: among them the newly founded Official Committee on Northern Ireland, chaired by Allen, the Home Office PUS, on which the DDG, Anthony Simkins, represented the Service. In addition, at the prompting of the cabinet secretary, Sir Burke Trend, the JIC set up a Current Intelligence Group on Northern Ireland, which as the JIC (A) Ulster Working Group held its first meeting on 30 April 1969. On 25 April 1969 Simkins told a meeting of Allen's committee, which acted as the main Whitehall channel for advice to ministers:

The [RUC] Inspector General had told [the Service] a few days ago that [RUC] Special Branch was overwhelmed and that he wished we could help them by posting an officer as we had done in a previous emergency. If we took up this suggestion we should probably get a very good idea of the reliability of the RUC's intelligence about the IRA. Allen said the Home Secretary approved of our doing so, and the meeting warmly endorsed the idea.
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