The Defence of the Realm (128 page)

Born into a wealthy Palestinian family in Jaffa which was forced to flee its home during the Arab–Israeli War of 1948, Abu Nidal (born Sabri al-Banna) split from the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in the early 1970s on the grounds that it was too moderate. After assassinating several of its leading representatives, he was sentenced to death by the PLO in 1974. By the time Abu Nidal ordered the killing of Shlomo Argov in June 1982, he was the most feared terrorist in the Middle East. Two months later an ANO group machine-gunned a kosher restaurant in Paris, killing six people and wounding thirty.
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The way that Abu Nidal had selected the three intended assassins of Argov (one Iraqi and two West Bank Palestinians) made the Service pessimistic about the prospects of detecting future ANO terrorists in Britain. All were students at a London language school with valid passports and visas issued by British embassies in the Middle East. None was known to the Security Service or had any contact with groups the Service was investigating: ‘It is unlikely', F3/6 concluded afterwards, ‘that they would have come to our notice in the ordinary course of events . . .' The quartermaster of the Argov assassination team lived inconspicuously in a YMCA hostel, where he stored his weapons: ‘The fact is nothing short of a blanket refusal to admit Arab students can prevent an assassination team in that guise entering the UK.'
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As a result of Security Service success in identifying and investigating several members in London of the Marxist-Leninist Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia (ASALA), it was able to forestall an assassination attempt on the Turkish ambassador three months after the shooting of Argov. Between 1975 and 1985 more than forty Turkish diplomats and members of their families worldwide were killed by Armenian terrorists.
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On 4 September 1982 a telephone intercept revealed that an unidentified Armenian gunman had travelled to London to carry out a terrorist attack.
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The intercept also revealed that the gunman was staying at the Lancashire Hotel, Norfolk Square, where a police search of the register identified him as a Syrian national, Zaven Bedros.
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A white plastic bag found in his hotel room contained a machine pistol, a Russian-made hand grenade, detonators and ammunition.
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Bedros was later sentenced to eight years' imprisonment for firearms possession.
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Although the Security Service role
in the intelligence case was not relevant to the criminal proceedings a police source revealed the Service's involvement.
The Times
commented:

Only a brilliant undercover operation started by MI5, continued by the Special Branch, and completed by Scotland Yard's anti-terrorist squad (C13) prevented Zaven Bedros from [carrying out] a terrorist attack in London . . . it was a brilliant piece of work. It is often said what a lot of duffers the Security Service people are, but this is a classic case of how effective they have been.
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Technical and A4 surveillance of ASALA almost certainly prevented a serious terrorist attack in London similar to those which took place in France and Turkey. In July 1983, while Bedros was on trial, an ASALA bomb attack at Paris's Orly Airport killed seven people and wounded fifty-six at the Turkish Airline check-in desk. In August ASALA killed eleven and injured over a hundred in separate attacks on Ankara's Esenboğa Airport and the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul.
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The rapid and unexpected decline in Armenian terrorism thereafter, due to a series of arrests, the revulsion of much of the Armenian diaspora at the loss of life, and faction-fighting among the terrorist groups, illustrates the difficulty faced by MI5 and all other security services and police forces in foreseeing the rise and fall of terrorist groups.

Despite the great variety of international terrorist groups operating in Britain at various times in the early 1980s, PIRA continued to pose the greatest direct threat to UK security. On 10 October 1980 Republican prisoners in Long Kesh Prison near Belfast, many of whom were already refusing to wear prison uniform and were engaged in a ‘dirty protest', wearing only blankets and smearing excrement on the walls of their cells, issued a statement which inaugurated what has been rightly called ‘one of the most dramatic and terrible episodes in Irish history':

We, the republican prisoners of war in H-Blocks, Long Kesh, demand as of right political recognition and that we be accorded the status of political prisoners.

. . . We wish to make it clear that every channel [of negotiation] has now been exhausted and, not wishing to break faith with those from whom we have inherited our principles, we now commit ourselves to a hunger strike.
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At the time it was widely believed in both London and Belfast that the initiative for the hunger strike, which began on 27 October, had come from the Provisional and Sinn Fein leadership. The IJS Belfast station, however, had reliable intelligence that the hand of a reluctant Republican leadership had been forced by the prisoners in Long Kesh.
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On 18 December, with one of the H-Block hunger strikers, Sean McKenna, close to death, the strike was called off. The official explanation given by
Belfast Sinn Fein leaders was that a note from the British (whose contents were in reality vague and ambiguous) had met the strikers' demands.
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The PIRA prisoners' disillusionment with the terms of the British note, which failed to resolve their demands for ‘political' status, led to a new and more determined hunger strike, begun on 1 March 1981 by the twenty-sevenyear-old Provisional officer commanding (OC) in Long Kesh, Bobby Sands. This time the hunger strike was staggered, with other prisoners joining in, usually in groups of two, every two or three weeks. The strike won worldwide publicity with the handsome, long-haired Sands achieving cult status as a revolutionary icon – especially after he was elected Westminster MP for Fermanagh-South Tyrone in a by-election on 7 April. Streets were named after him in cities as far apart as New York and Tehran. IJS sources reported that, shortly after Sands's election, in order not to distract attention from the hunger strike, the PIRA leadership had given instructions to suspend attacks on off-duty members of the security forces and commercial targets in Northern Ireland.
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On 5 May, with rosary beads sent by the papal envoy around his neck, Bobby Sands died what Republicans and his many foreign supporters believed was a martyr's death. By 7 July five more hunger strikers had died. The IJS Belfast station reported to London that PIRA had decided to end its earlier ban on attacking off-duty members of the security forces and business premises:

The reason for this about-face was the pressure from rank-and-file members of the IRA in the North. They had reported to their commanders that they were being jeered at in the streets for their inaction . . . They were also burning to retaliate for the deaths of the ten republican prisoners.
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Despite reliable intelligence reports that the initiative for the hunger strike had come from the strikers themselves, Mrs Thatcher was sceptical. Even when told in July 1981 by the Catholic Primate of Ireland, Cardinal Tomás Ó Fiaich, that he believed ‘the hunger strikers were not acting under IRA orders', she was ‘not convinced'.
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Recent historians of the Provisionals, however, corroborate the intelligence provided at the time by the IJS. Most of the PIRA leadership feared that the hunger strike might prove an unwinnable battle, play into the hands of the British government and do severe damage to Republican morale.
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They proved wrong on all counts. Though the hunger strike ended on 3 October after a total of ten deaths without winning major concessions from the British, the IJS reported that PIRA believed the hunger strike ‘was the greatest unifying force the Republican movement had had for decades'.
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The death of Bobby Sands
turned Margaret Thatcher, though she did not realize it at the time, into PIRA's main target.
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It took over three years, however, for PIRA to put itself in a position to make a serious assassination attempt during a Conservative Party conference – a strategy first devised, according to IJS intelligence, even before Mrs Thatcher came to power.
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Four days after the death of Bobby Sands, due to a lapse in protective security by British Petroleum (BP), PIRA came close to achieving one of its most spectacular coups. On 9 May 1981, the Queen on the Royal Yacht
Britannia
and the King of Norway on board the
Norge
arrived at Sullom Voe in Shetland for the official inauguration of the BP oil terminal, the largest in Europe. Other top brass were conveyed on a P&O ship chartered by BP. Because of several days of dense fog, however, most of a large police contingent from the Scottish mainland was unable to arrive in time to complete more than brief physical security checks before the opening.
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Just as the Queen appeared there was a small explosion at the power station some 500 yards away from the oil terminal, which was believed at first to be an electrical fault and passed unnoticed during the ceremony. The explosion, however, turned out to have been caused by a bomb, though this was not made public at the time. There was very little structural damage and no casualties.
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The Queen was characteristically unruffled. The PIRA Overseas Department was deeply disappointed not to hear news that the inauguration ceremony had been disrupted. Several news agencies received phone calls from people speaking with an Irish accent, asking if they had been sent reports of an incident at Sullum Voe.
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PIRA claimed afterwards to ‘have breached the English Queen's security'.

It was later discovered that the large construction team at Sullum Voe, many of them Irish, had included a number of known or suspected Republicans. After forensic examination of more than sixty dustbin loads of debris, the bomb detonator was identified as coming from the Irish Republic. Subsequent police inquiries established that two parcels, each containing a bomb, had been posted to a Republican militant working on the construction of the terminal. When the second parcel was delayed in the post, he appears to have panicked, believing that it had been intercepted en route, and fled without collecting either his cards or his bonus pay for two years' service at the construction site. The Republican militant stayed only long enough to plant the first bomb (or possibly give it to an accomplice). The second parcel, containing a 6-pound bomb and a twelve-day timing device, arrived after his departure and remained uncollected in the construction village post office until, absurdly, it was forwarded to (but failed to reach) his address in Northern Ireland.
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A C Branch officer, who was present at the opening ceremony, had previously paid several visits to Sullum Voe, producing a report on protective security which had been agreed by both BP and Whitehall's Official Committee on Terrorism. It included a specific recommendation for the security of the power station. BP, however, balked at the cost of implementing all the recommendations, which ran into seven figures, and detailed discussions were still continuing at the time of the attack.
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Cost remained, as it had been for the past decade, the main obstacle to implementing the Security Service's protective-security recommendations in the private sector. Throughout the 1980s the Security Service believed that, of the hundreds of Economic Key Points (EKPs), ‘only a small number were even reasonably protected.'
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C Branch went by helicopter to inspect most North Sea oil platforms and organized a series of exercises with the Royal Marines to practise recapturing a platform in case one was ever taken over by a terrorist group.
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Whitehall showed little interest. C Branch complained that Whitehall found counter-terrorist protective security boring as well as expensive:

Security organisations in departments are not staffed by high fliers. The Departments of Transport and Energy seem to find particular difficulty in making decisions quickly on the protection of EKPs. This is frustrating not only for C Branch but also for the industries and organisations concerned. On a number of occasions recently, after lengthy and frustrating delays, both departments have eventually taken the action recommended by C Branch.
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Security Service staff found arguing the case for improved protective security to unresponsive Whitehall committees a wearisome business.
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The Provisionals, however, failed to grasp how vulnerable many EKPs remained. The Cabinet Office concluded in 1982 that PIRA had no coherent strategy (such as it developed in the 1990s) for causing serious damage to the economy and national infrastructure:

There has been no attempt to study supply systems, such as electricity or telecommunications. PIRA is therefore unlikely to be able to identify and simultaneously destroy mutually dependent targets in supply systems in Great Britain, although it might be able to do so in Northern Ireland.
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Even the attack on Sullum Voe seems to have been designed as a spectacular demonstration of PIRA's ability to penetrate royal security rather than as an operation to do serious damage to the North Sea oil industry. PIRA's ‘armed struggle' did not yet aim at undermining the British economy.

As with the attempted bombing of Sullum Voe, the Security Service had no advance intelligence on the targets of PIRA's continental campaign, which resumed on 16 February 1980 when Colonel Mark Coe was shot dead at Bielefeld. On 1 March a Royal Military Police patrol in Münster was fired at while approaching traffic lights and the driver wounded. Nine days later a corporal in the BAOR was shot, but not seriously wounded, at Osnabrück. No further attack took place until 3 December when two shots from a slow-moving car were fired at Christopher Tugendhat, a British EEC commissioner in Brussels. It was another month before PIRA admitted responsibility. The Service concluded that there had been a major reappraisal of PIRA strategy, stemming from the fear that further operations might compromise the propaganda success on the continent of Sinn Fein's campaign to exploit sympathy for the hunger strikers.
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There were no further PIRA attacks on British targets on the continent until 1987.