The Defence of the Realm (112 page)

Four days later a Security Service officer arrived in Northern Ireland as security liaison officer (SLO) and was given an office in RUC headquarters at Knock near Belfast.

At about the same time as this posting, a full-time desk to cover all Irish security intelligence, with particular emphasis on the North, was set up in F1B at Leconfield House.
¹⁷
By the autumn, F1B consisted of one female assistant officer (then the highest rank usually open to female staff) and the young Stella Rimington, who – after part-time work for the Service in India – had begun full-time work at Head Office only a few months earlier. Rimington recalls in her memoirs:

My boss and I very rapidly became almost submerged, trying to make sense of the information that began to come in . . . I began to have to stay late into the evenings just to keep up with the flow of paper. My colleague had a habit of talking out loud all the time, telling herself what to do next and, as the days wore on and the pressure mounted, her instructions to herself became more and more manic. Anyone coming into the room was faced with two dishevelled-looking women, one chattering like a parrot and the other peering squirrel-like from behind a tottering pile of paper.
¹⁸

Northern Ireland, previously rarely discussed by the JIC,
¹⁹
became a regular item on its agenda. In June 1969 it concluded, like Furnival Jones's report to Callaghan six months earlier, that ‘the potential disorder in Northern Ireland comes from the interaction of three distinct groups': the IRA, the civil rights movement and the ‘ultra Protestant' supporters of the Reverend Ian Paisley. It also noted increasing Communist influence in the IRA and Trotskyist infiltration of the civil rights movement.
²⁰

On 14 August 1969 the Wilson government took the fateful decision to send British troops to keep the peace in Ulster, thus beginning what almost no one foresaw would become the longest-lasting military operation in British history. Despite the army's early welcome from Catholics in Belfast and elsewhere, it inevitably came to be seen by nationalist supporters of Irish unity as the defender of the Unionist one-party state. Callaghan realized as much when he gloomily told his cabinet colleague Dick Crossman on 11 September that ‘There was no prospect of a solution. He had
anticipated the honeymoon wouldn't last very long and it hadn't. The British troops were tired and were no longer popular, and the terrible thing was that the only solutions would take ten years, if they would ever work at all.'
²¹

Despite the fact that the constitution of the Irish Republic claimed sovereignty over the North as well as the South, Dublin was even less prepared than London for the beginning of the Troubles. ‘Northern Ireland in 1969', writes Eunan O'Halpin, the leading historian of Irish security, ‘might as well have been North Korea, so sparse was the reliable information available.' Irish military intelligence did not even possess an organization chart of the RUC and made strenuous efforts to assemble one based chiefly on gossip of varying reliability – only to discover that the information it required was freely available in Northern Ireland official publications which were on sale in Dublin.
²²

Counter-terrorism would have been a higher priority for the Security Service had it known that both the PFLP and the IRA were seeking arms from its main counter-espionage target, the KGB. The first contacts between Wadi Haddad and the KGB took place in 1968 – probably in the aftermath of the first PFLP hijacking. By the spring of 1970 Haddad had been recruited as Agent NATSIONALIST. The KGB Chairman Yuri Andropov proudly reported to the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev (whom he was to succeed twelve years later): ‘The nature of our relations with W. Haddad enables us to control the external operations of the PFLP to a certain degree, to exert influence in a manner favourable to the Soviet Union . . .' With Brezhnev's approval, an initial delivery to Haddad of five RPG-7 hand-held anti-tank grenade launchers in July 1970 was followed by the elaborately planned Operation VOSTOK (‘East'), during which a large consignment of arms and ammunition was handed over to the PFLP at sea near Aden under cover of darkness. Thanks to Haddad, the KGB almost certainly had advance notice of all the main PFLP terrorist attacks for which he was responsible.
²³
News of his recruitment was very tightly held within the Centre. Though Oleg Lyalin began supplying the Security Service in April 1970 with intelligence on the activities of the First Chief Directorate Department V, which was responsible for ‘special operations' of the kind discussed with Haddad, he appears to have been unaware of the KGB's links with the PFLP when he defected in September.
²⁴

Lyalin was, however, aware that Seamus Costello, a Marxist member of the IRA Army Council, had submitted a request for arms to the Soviet embassy in London but had been rebuffed.
²⁵
The Security Service does not seem to have discovered until much later that, following the rebuff, another
appeal for arms from Costello and Cathal Goulding, the IRA chief of staff, was forwarded to the KGB by the general secretary of the Irish Communist Party, Michael O'Riordan, confirming earlier Service reports on links between the IRA and Irish Communists. O'Riordan claimed that there was now a serious possibility of civil war between the two communities in Northern Ireland and of serious clashes between British troops and the Catholics. Yuri Andropov, however, was doubtful of O'Riordan's and the IRA's ability to keep secret the supply of Soviet arms. It was two and a half years before he was sufficiently reassured to go ahead with the shipment requested by Goulding and Costello. Several consignments of weapons and munitions in waterproof wrapping were submerged by a Soviet intelligencegathering vessel, disguised as a trawler, on a sandbank 55 miles from the coast of Northern Ireland and attached to a marker buoy of the kind used to indicate the presence of fishing nets below the surface. The consignments, picked up by a fishing vessel manned by what the KGB called ‘Irish friends' (Communists) who were unaware of their contents, went undetected by the British intelligence community.
²⁶

Shortly after O'Riordan delivered the request for Soviet arms, the IRA – as the RUC and Security Service had anticipated several years earlier – split into Marxist and nationalist wings: the Officials under Goulding and the Provisionals led by Seán Mac Stíofáin. The sympathies of the KGB were with the Marxist Officials rather than the nationalist Provisionals. But it was the Provisionals, not the Officials, who were to establish themselves as the major protagonists in the Troubles. By the time Soviet arms arrived, the Officials had given up the ‘armed struggle'. The probability is that the weapons smuggled into Ireland by the KGB were used not against the British but in internecine warfare between Republican paramilitaries.
²⁷

A mid-air explosion which destroyed a Swiss airliner bound from Zurich for Tel Aviv on 21 February 1970 with the loss of forty-seven lives gave modest impetus to the development of a Security Service anti-hijack strategy. Though responsibility for the attack was never claimed, it was believed to be the work of a breakaway group within the PFLP. The destruction of the airliner at last prompted C Branch to set up a liaison system to enable urgent threat assessments to be passed to British airlines. By later standards, however, these arrangements were primitive. Implementation of protectivesecurity recommendations was left solely in the hands of the airlines, with no supervision or co-ordination by either the Security Service or the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI). A proposal for a director of security who would oversee arrangements at airports came to nothing.
²⁸

C Branch (protective security) still had an ambivalent status within the
Security Service. Though few high-fliers had been attracted to MI5 by the prospect of a career in protective security, new entrants were told that if ‘one wanted to get on in the Service one had to do a stint in C Branch', which then had the closest contacts with government departments, especially the Cabinet Office. When the future DDG Julian Faux was posted to C Branch in 1971, Personnel ‘went to great lengths to tell me how lucky I was'. The post did indeed provide Faux with far more frequent opportunities for contact with Whitehall than most of his contemporaries enjoyed. Though all government departments were issued with copies of the Service bible, ‘Security in Government Departments', they frequently required assistance on how to interpret particular cases. ‘I really did not enjoy this esoteric and arcane work,' Faux later recalled. ‘It all seemed like splitting hairs to me.'
²⁹
Whitehall still thought of the Security Service's role in protective security primarily in terms of vetting and safeguarding classified information rather than protection against terrorist attack. During the 1970s, C Branch dealt with an average of about 300,000 vetting inquiries a year.
³⁰

During the last thirty years of the twentieth century, protective security became a steadily more important part of the Security Service's counterterrorist strategy. But the change occurred gradually and it began slowly. At Furnival Jones's first meeting with Edward Heath in July 1970, he raised the subject of protective security exclusively in the context of counterespionage. During a wide-ranging survey of Service priorities, the DG mentioned terrorism only briefly, and solely in the context of Northern Ireland. Whitehall, for its part, was unenthusiastic about a major extension of protective security in any context. When FJ stressed its role as a ‘security weapon against espionage', Burke Trend intervened to say that this was a ‘vexed question' in the civil service. FJ believed, no doubt correctly, that what really concerned Whitehall was the fact that ‘the complexity and cost of protective security were both very large.'
³¹

PFLP terrorism, however, made clear the need for greatly improved aircraft security. On 6 September 1970 the PFLP hijacked four airliners bound for New York (a feat unequalled by any other terrorist organization until the Al Qaida hijacks on 11 September 2001) and took them to a remote former RAF airbase in Jordan known as Dawson's Field. Wadi Haddad gave the most difficult assignment on the day of the hijacks to the world's best-known female terrorist, Leila Khaled, still photogenic despite plastic surgery to change her appearance after her first hijack a year earlier, and the Nicaraguan-American Patrick Arguello, who together posed as a newly married couple. Their aircraft, an El Al Boeing 707 departing from Tel Aviv, was the only one of the four which carried an air marshal.
Though they succeeded in smuggling aboard both handguns and grenades, the hijack failed. Arguello was shot dead by the air marshal and Khaled, who was prevented by other passengers from removing grenades hidden in her bra, was arrested when the plane made an emergency landing at Heathrow. The hijackers aboard a TWA Boeing 707 and a Swissair DC-8, however, successfully diverted their aircraft to Dawson's Field, which they promptly renamed ‘Revolution Airstrip'. A hijacked Pan Am Boeing 747, which was discovered to be too large to land at the Airstrip, was forced to land instead at Cairo where passengers and crew were evacuated and the aircraft blown up. A fifth plane, a BOAC VC-10, was hijacked three days later and flown to the Airstrip to provide the PFLP with British hostages. As the PFLP had planned, the hostages were eventually exchanged for Khaled and six Palestinian terrorists imprisoned in West Germany and Switzerland.
³²
The aircraft were destroyed by the hijackers. Discussions within Whitehall about how to deal with future hijacks were confused and sometimes bizarre. The future cabinet secretary Richard Wilson, then working in the Private Office of the Minister for Civil Aviation, recalls ‘surreal discussions' which included the use of blow-darts to overpower hijackers.
³³

The September hijackings swiftly led to further mayhem in the Middle East. King Hussein of Jordan, infuriated by the hijacking of aircraft to a Jordanian airfield and by the emergence of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), led by Yasir Arafat, as a virtually independent state within his kingdom, used the Jordanian army to drive it out. Thousands of Palestinians were killed during what became known as Black September. A shadowy terrorist organization of that name was set up within Arafat's Fatah movement at the heart of the PLO when it regrouped in Lebanon. Following the hijacks, the JIC concluded that the danger to UK interests from Arab terrorism had ‘significantly increased'. A series of JIC and MI5 assessments over the next month envisaged the possibility of further hijackings, kidnappings, sabotage of aircraft, ships and oil terminals in the Persian Gulf, and armed attacks on tankers in the Gulf and Eastern Mediterranean. The Home Secretary was informed that, as ‘the responsible authority for advice on counter sabotage', the Security Service, sometimes acting in conjunction with the MPSB, the DTI and the armed services, had provided protective-security advice at oil installations in the Gulf as well as in the United Kingdom.
³⁴

For almost two years, however, aircraft and airports seemed the only British interests at serious risk from Arab terrorists. The C Branch Assistant Director responsible for counter-sabotage, Cecil Shipp (a future DDG),
took the initiative in the creation of the National Aviation Security Committee, whose first meeting took place in May 1971 with representatives of the police, the British Airports Authority (BAA), the principal airlines and trade unions. C4 officers provided a comprehensive threat assessment and took the lead in discussions on counter-measures. Agreement was reached with BAA that security surveys should be carried out by C4, beginning at Heathrow, and that the implementation of protective security required effective supervision.
³⁵