The Defence of the Realm (119 page)

On 23 August a press statement from 10 Downing Street announced:

The Prime Minister has conducted detailed inquiries into the recent allegations about the Security Service and is satisfied that they do not constitute grounds for
lack of confidence in the competence and impartiality of the Security Service or for instituting a special inquiry. In particular, the Prime Minister is satisfied that at no time has the Security Service or any other British intelligence or security agency, either of its own accord or at someone else's request, undertaken electronic surveillance in No 10 Downing Street or in the Prime Minister's room in the House of Commons.

Callaghan repeated the same statement to the Commons, adding that there were no grounds for doubting Wilson's loyalty and that he was also ‘quite satisfied . . . with what is going on in the security services'. Callaghan's official biographer, Kenneth Morgan, comments: ‘On the face of it, the affair implied a rebuke of his predecessor by the Prime Minister. One of his main concerns, however, was to protect Wilson who was already showing signs of the illness that was to dog his later years.'
⁹²

After the front-page story in the
Observer
in July 1977, Wilson seems to have lost the desire to publicize his claims of a Security Service plot against him. Part of the explanation probably lies in his growing, though reluctant, awareness of the declining credibility of his claims that the allegations against Jeremy Thorpe were part of a great conspiracy by BOSS to undermine British democracy. On 19 and 20 October the
Evening News
led with confessions by Andrew Newton and Peter Bissell, headlined respectively: ‘I was hired to kill Scott. Exclusive: Gunman tells of incredible plot – a murder contract for £5,000' and ‘Former MP reveals murder plot. Exclusive: He [Scott] must be bumped off.' The
Observer
followed on 23 October with more in the same vein from Penrose and Courtiour. Next day the Home Secretary asked Hanley if the Security Service had ‘any hard security information against Jeremy Thorpe other than allegations of homosexuality'. The DG ‘said there was none. We had known about these allegations for some time but Thorpe was not otherwise a security case.'
⁹³

The ‘Wilson plot' conspiracy theory was given continuing currency by allegations of dirty tricks by the Security Service and other sections of the intelligence community made by a number of others including Colin Wallace, an MoD information officer in Northern Ireland from 1968 to 1975, and Captain Fred Holroyd, who had served for a year as military intelligence officer in the Province in 1974–5.
⁹⁴
The DG, Sir Antony Duff, assured staff in 1987 that Wallace's and Holroyd's allegations of dirty tricks were ‘equally baseless'.
⁹⁵
Duff also declared that claims that the Security Service had tried to encourage the Ulster Workers strike were ‘completely untrue', and that the allegation by the future Labour minister
Peter Hain that his arrest on an unfounded charge of robbery in October 1975 might have had assistance from an element in the Service was ‘rubbish'.
⁹⁶

The longevity of belief in the Wilson plot owes as much to Peter Wright as to Harold Wilson. A decade after Callaghan's public statement that he was ‘quite satisfied' with the role of the Security Service, Wright claimed in
Spycatcher
that thirty MI5 officers ‘had given their approval to a plot'. During a television interview Wright admitted that this figure was exaggerated: ‘The maximum number was eight or nine. Very often it was only three.' When pressed further and asked, ‘How many people, when all the talking died down, were still serious in joining you in trying to get rid of Wilson?', Wright replied, ‘One, I should say.' In reality, instead of orchestrating a plot, he spent his final years in MI5 before retiring in January 1976 ‘mostly going through the motions'.
⁹⁷
Though Wright had effectively discredited his own evidence,
Spycatcher
persuaded many who had dismissed Wilson's conspiracy theories a decade earlier that there must have been something to them after all. The former Home Secretary Roy Jenkins noted that ‘the publication of Peter Wright's tawdry book . . . nonetheless chimed in with a chorus of other allegations.'
⁹⁸
Callaghan reached a similar conclusion. So did the official biographers of both Wilson and Callaghan. The DG, Sir Antony Duff, recorded after a meeting on 31 March 1987 with Callaghan and the then leader of the Labour Party, Neil Kinnock: ‘Callaghan fixed me with a fairly penetrating, not to say hostile glance, and said that even if only a tenth of what Wright had said about destabilising the Wilson government was true, it was still a “bloody disgrace” that it had happened. I said that it was all in any case untrue.' Though not all Callaghan's suspicions seem to have been laid to rest, he acknowledged ‘Wilson's “paranoia” and said that Marcia and others had been responsible for a lot of it'.
⁹⁹

The stringent internal inquiry ordered by Duff, which examined all relevant files and interviewed all relevant Security Service officers, both serving and retired, concluded unequivocally that no member of the Service had been involved in the surveillance of Wilson, still less in any attempt to destabilize his government. When Stella Rimington became director general, she tried ‘once and for all to knock on the head the Wilson plot allegation' by inviting former Labour home secretaries and other senior Party figures to her office. The attempt failed. ‘Though I did my best to convince them that they were wrong,' she recalls, ‘I knew that further efforts would be fruitless.'
¹⁰⁰
A decade later she also failed to convince the
Guardian
, which accompanied the serialization of her memoirs in 2001
with an article claiming that, while there might have been fewer than the thirty plotters claimed by Peter Wright, ‘there is no doubt that some MI5 officers were out to destabilise Labour ministers.' Old conspiracy theories never die. This one has not even begun to fade away.

¹
Wilson was made a Knight of the Garter on resigning as prime minister in 1976.

5

Counter-Terrorism and Protective Security in the Later 1970s

By late 1975 the secret talks with the Provisionals, in the view of the British negotiators, had become ‘largely meaningless':

Our interlocutors were unable or unwilling to control their followers and there was nothing we could plausibly say to them which would materially affect events – except in so far as their continuing contacts with us gave them a certain status within the Provisional movement which itself enabled them to exercise a limited restraining influence.
¹

Though PIRA did not formally end the ceasefire until early in 1976, during the final months of 1975 it embarked on a bombing campaign against restaurants and hotels in the West End of London. A detective in the Met's Anti-Terrorist Squad identified a distinctive pattern in the PIRA attacks. Most occurred between 6.30 and 9.30 p.m. on weekdays, none took place at weekends, and the bombers sometimes attacked the same target more than once. The Security Service played little part in defeating the London bombing campaign. The campaign was successfully brought to an end by the Metropolitan Police's Operation COMBO, which for an eight-day period early in December saturated the West End with patrols. When PIRA bombers launched a second attack on Scott's Restaurant in Mayfair on 7 December, they were spotted by a police unit and pursued to a flat in Balcombe Street where they held the occupants hostage during a six-day siege before surrendering to the Met. The Balcombe Street siege proved to be a turning point in PIRA operations in Britain. Though sporadic attacks by the Provisionals on mainland targets continued, there was no further sustained mainland bombing campaign until 1989.
²

On Harold Wilson's instructions, James Callaghan, like all other cabinet ministers except for Rees, had been kept in ignorance of the negotiations with the Provisionals during the previous government. His first briefing on the now moribund negotiations did not take place until shortly after he became prime minister in April 1976.
³
At the same time Merlyn Rees
(SOSNI) sent Callaghan a confident account of the functioning of the intelligence system:

The first point I should like to make is that we now have a well-established, single machine for processing intelligence and covert work in Northern Ireland. The overall responsibility for the coordination of intelligence operations is exercised by the Director and Coordinator of Intelligence (DCI) . . . [in] the Northern Ireland Office in Belfast. He is responsible to me through the Permanent Under Secretary.
⁴

Rees had announced to the Commons in March 1976 that henceforth the RUC was to have ‘primacy' in counter-terrorist operations in Northern Ireland,
⁵
and he told Callaghan that its intelligence collaboration with the army was working well.
⁶
He also praised the ‘breadth of view and . . . knowledge of social and political background' shown by the DCI and Security Service officers in the Irish Joint Section (IJS).
⁷

In May 1976 the DG, Sir Michael Hanley, made a three-day tour of the Province – his first extended visit for eighteen months – and was impressed both by the improved performance of the RUC Special Branch (of which he had earlier been critical) and by the new Chief Constable, (Sir) Kenneth Newman, formerly of the Met. Hanley wrote on his return:

The main emphasis of our support must now be switched to the RUC. Since the NIO was formed in 1972 I have followed a policy of helping the Army first. Of course we must still help the Army, but henceforth our first priority must be the RUC, and we ought to pursue an active and positive policy towards them and be on the alert for any ways in which we can be of assistance.
⁸

PIRA, Hanley concluded, was losing the ‘armed struggle':

The bombing and shooting had not diminished and the PIRA continued to possess a considerable capacity for violence, but their sterile tactics were taking them relentlessly along the road to isolation. It would take time to complete the process, but that must be the aim. The PIRA/PSF [Provisional Sinn Fein] should be hit hard and their claims to ‘respectability' should be utterly destroyed. It was encouraging that it was now considered practicable to press ahead with the concept of the primacy of the Police, the intention being gradually to return the Province to a system of normal policing with crimes being investigated and criminals brought to court . . . The process would inevitably be a gradual one, but at least it held out the prospect of success in the long term, lowering the security temperature as it progressed. The joker in the pack was the politician.
⁹

Hanley probably had in mind politicians at Westminster as well as in the Province. James Callaghan, burdened with unhappy memories of his
experience of Northern Ireland in the previous Wilson government,
¹⁰
did not share the cautious optimism of Rees and Hanley that PIRA was losing the ‘armed struggle'. The newly appointed DCI reported after briefing the Prime Minister during his visit to Belfast in July 1976:

I had the impression that he found the problem of Northern Ireland dispiriting and frustrating and that it was not one that was likely to engage a great deal of his personal attention. In the middle of the talk we were silenced by the noise of the G[eneral] O[fficer] C[ommanding]'s helicopter taking off from the lawn outside the S[ecretary] of S[tate]'s office and the PM somewhat wearily remarked that it reminded him of ‘last days in Vietnam' [the removal by helicopter of the last occupants of the US embassy in Saigon as the city fell to the Vietcong].
¹¹

Like the DCI, Callaghan saw little point in maintaining the secret backchannel to the Provisionals. On 3 August he approved the DCI's proposal ‘to distance ourselves' from further dealings with Brendan Duddy, the ‘Contact' who had been the main conduit to the PIRA leadership (and over a decade later was to play a significant part in the peace process).
¹²
The IJS concluded at the end of the year: ‘It seems certain that the leadership today is less sophisticated and more hard line than it was when the talks were progressing.'
¹³

The DCI, probably like many other British intelligence officers, believed that the underlying political problem was the lack of a coherent long-term strategy by the Westminster government: ‘HMG has no clear cut or agreed long term policy for dealing with Northern Ireland and the Irish problem. Its short to medium term policies are based on the fact that Northern Ireland is part of the UK and the assumption that it is likely to remain so for some time.'
¹⁴
Callaghan's senior policy adviser, Bernard Donoughue, was equally critical of the government's lack of a long-term policy.
¹⁵
The problems posed by PIRA and the Troubles are scarcely mentioned in Security Service records of Callaghan's occasional meetings with the DG after the summer of 1976.

Despite the improved co-ordination of intelligence in Belfast by the DCI, Northern Ireland remained an unpopular posting for many in the Security Service. Because of the shortage of volunteers, the letter of appointment issued to new officer recruits in the mid-1970s formally obliged them, for the first time, to serve anywhere ‘including Northern Ireland'.
¹⁶
Few current staff who had, sometimes reluctantly, accepted postings in Belfast had any previous experience of Ireland, North or South. In the mid-1970s, at a time of horrendous sectarian killings, most probably sympathized with the Service's assessment at the beginning of the Troubles that the root of
the security problem, which the security forces could not solve, was ‘the antagonism of two Communities with long memories and relatively short tempers'.
¹⁷