The Defence of the Realm (136 page)

The newly introduced Security Service Annual Report to the Home Secretary for 1985–6 noted that counter-terrorist staff were ‘under great pressure' and ‘fully extended':

The main thing to be said about our work in the counter-terrorist field is that it increases monthly . . . One welcome result of the diminution of activity by the Russians since [the] September [1985 expulsions of KGB and GRU personnel]
¹⁰
has been the greater availability of the [A4] mobile surveillance teams for action against terrorist targets. [Director FX, Patrick Walker, wrote on his copy of the report: ‘But still not enough']
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The main features of the year have been –

  i.  the increase in violent attacks against Western targets, both in the Middle East and Europe;

 ii.  the increasing danger of Sikh (and other sub-continental) terrorism in the UK;

iii.  the intense political pressure, mainly from the US, for more active retaliation against terrorist groups and governments sponsoring terrorism;

iv.  the continuing and increasing need to take part in inter-departmental [counterterrorist] work in Whitehall and in a variety of international meetings;

 v.  a further increase in the quality of our links with liaison services, especially on the European continent. These embrace not only the exchange and assessment of intelligence but a number of cases of fruitful, though sometimes unsuccessful, operational cooperation.
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Sikh extremism, which the DG, Sir Tony Duff, put at the top of the list of current terrorist threats in mainland Britain in the 1985–6 Annual Report, illustrated once again the often unpredictable rise and fall of the threat from international terrorist groups. In the early 1980s terrorism by Armenian extremists, who attempted to assassinate the Turkish ambassador in 1982, had been a serious problem. Within a few years, however, the problem had virtually disappeared.
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By contrast, terrorism by Sikh extremists in the UK, which scarcely existed at the beginning of the decade, suddenly emerged as a major threat during the summer and autumn of 1984. In early June the Indian Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, sent troops into the Punjab where they stormed the Sikh holy of holies, the Golden Temple of Amritsar. On 31 October two of her Sikh guards took their revenge by shooting her dead in the garden of her house. While Mrs Gandhi's body lay in state, with Indian television cameras broadcasting
live pictures of her decomposing remains, Hindu mobs looted and torched Sikh neighbourhoods and businesses, hacking or burning to death Sikh men in front of their wives and children. The Indian police, save for a minority who joined in the massacre, were nowhere to be seen.
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In Britain the invasion of the Golden Temple and the massacres produced an upsurge of support within the Sikh community for the creation of an independent Sikh state of Khalistan on the Indian sub-continent. The Service reported ‘a wave of support among Sikhs in UK for the Khalistan National Organisation', led by Dr Jagjit Singh Chauhan, who formed the Khalistan ‘Government in Exile'.

Before the state visit to Britain in October 1985 of Indira Gandhi's son and successor as prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi, a year later, the Service reported to the Home Office: ‘Since June 1984 there have been a number of relatively minor attacks in the UK by Sikh extremists against Indian official targets and moderate Sikhs. The level of support for the extremists has diminished considerably but this is making the hard core increasingly frustrated and could lead to further violence.'
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Good intelligence, combined with the arrests of Sikh and Kashmiri extremists, was believed to have frustrated plots to attack Rajiv Gandhi during his state visit.
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In April 1986 the DG, Sir Tony Duff, warned the Home Office that the minority of ‘violence-prone extremists' within the Indian Sikh Youth Federation and the fundamentalist Dam Dami Taksal ‘form a small intensely security-conscious group who, because of the nature of the Sikh community, are a difficult target':

We cannot at present increase our technical coverage . . . because we do not have enough transcribers. This is chiefly a question of finding suitably qualified linguists. I would also like to see our agent running effort improved but again it takes time to find the right staff for the difficult task of recruiting and running this kind of agent.
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By 1987, despite its lack of success on the British mainland since 1984, PIRA was far better armed than it had been at the time of the Brighton bombing. Between August 1985 and October 1986, four large arms and explosives shipments from Libya were secretly landed on the coast of County Wicklow, south of Dublin.
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However, a fifth and even larger shipment (including SAM-7 missiles capable of downing British army helicopters), loaded on board the rickety fifty-year-old Panamanianregistered
Eksund
at Tripoli on 13 and 14 October 1987, was successfully intercepted off Ushant. On 27 October the
Eksund's
steering failed and it began drifting closer and closer to the French coast. Next day, after attempts to repair the steering had failed, the senior Provisional on board,
Gabriel Cleary, took the decision to sink the ship and its cargo before it ran aground, go ashore with the crew on an inflatable dinghy and catch a ferry back to Ireland. Shortly after leaving Tripoli, Cleary had fitted a timing power unit (TPU) to twelve explosive charges below the
Eksund's
waterline to enable him to scuttle the ship if it was intercepted before it reached its destination. When Cleary was unable to activate the TPU, he concluded that it had been sabotaged and that there must be a traitor on board. At various stages during the voyage he had noticed what seemed to be spotter aircraft. At Gibraltar one had swooped so low that he been able to see the pilot. As the
Eksund
ran into difficulties off Ushant, another spotter plane monitored its movements. The ship was surrounded by motor launches and boarded by armed French customs officials, who arrested the crew.
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During questioning, the crew revealed that over the previous two years they had brought 120 tons of arms from Libya to the Irish Republic – including many tons of Semtex, about twenty SAM-7s and other sophisticated weaponry.
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Despite the loss of the
Eksund
arms shipment, PIRA already had a total arsenal of about 150 tons of weaponry – enough, it believed, ‘to prosecute its “Long War” almost indefinitely'.
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A gloomy Security Service assessment concluded that ‘PIRA has acquired from Libya more weapons etc than it can use.'
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Only one of the SAMs, however, was ever fired. It missed.
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The Security Service retained the lead intelligence role in monitoring the mainland activities of Loyalist paramilitaries as well as PIRA overseas operations and funding. UDA members in Britain increased from about 200 to 800 from 1985 to 1988 and those of the UVF from 70 to 200 during the same period. The Service reported that in London the UDA had ‘attracted members of the skinhead movement of the extreme right'. But it believed the UDA had no formal links with right-wing extremists of either the National Front or the British National Party: ‘Indeed, at leadership level, there is mutual suspicion.' The Service reported to the Prime Minister in 1988: ‘A hard core of activists within the UDA and UVF will continue to attempt to obtain arms and explosives for shipment to Northern Ireland.' As in the past, the Service remained cautiously optimistic about its ability, in co-operation with local police forces, to disrupt the shipments. Arms seizures in 1987 led to the conviction and imprisonment of a number of UDA and UVF activists on firearms charges.
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Within Northern Ireland the Security Service was usually successful in keeping a low profile for its operations, which included increasing (and still classified) technical assistance by A1 to the RUC. One instance of this assistance, whose details cannot be revealed, led to considerable soul-searching
and a fraught internal inquiry which found that several Service officers had been at fault. It is reasonable to conclude with the gift of hindsight, though the inquiry did not reach that conclusion at the time, that the errors of individuals reflected a larger management failure. Sir Patrick Walker remembers the whole affair as ‘a gruesome business' which kept him awake at nights.
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The most controversial aspect of Northern Irish counter-terrorist operations in the 1980s concerned the RUC's alleged preference for shooting, rather than arresting, suspected Republican terrorists. In May 1984 John Stalker, Deputy Chief Constable of Greater Manchester, was appointed to investigate three specific allegations that the RUC was conducting a shoot-to-kill policy. In June 1986 Stalker was replaced as head of the inquiry by the Chief Constable of West Yorkshire, Colin Sampson. Though the official explanation for Stalker's replacement were charges (later dismissed) that he had associated with ‘known criminals', it was widely alleged that the real reason for his dismissal was that he was close to discovering illegal acts which the authorities wished to conceal. The fact that Stalker had already concluded that the RUC had no shoot-to-kill policy was generally lost sight of amid a spate of ill-founded conspiracy theories.
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There is no evidence in Security Service files that it countenanced or assisted a shoot-to-kill policy in Northern Ireland. In 1988, however, it became embroiled in the shoot-to-kill controversy as a result of Operation FLAVIUS, which successfully prevented a PIRA attack on the Gibraltar garrison. In Gibraltar, as on the rest of the continent, the Service had the lead counter-PIRA intelligence role which it did not yet possess in the United Kingdom. On 6 March 1988 the three members of a PIRA active service unit, Seán Savage, Danny McCann and Mairéad Farrell, who were preparing an attack, were shot dead in Gibraltar by military personnel in civilian clothes who said they believed that the ASU was about to detonate a car bomb by remote control and/or to draw their weapons. The confusion which followed encouraged claims that the military believed no such thing but were following a deliberate shoot-to-kill policy, in league with the Security Service and the Thatcher government. BBC Radio 4 News reported at 7 a.m. next day: ‘It's now known that the three people shot and killed by Security Forces in Gibraltar yesterday were members of the Provisional IRA. It's thought they were challenged while trying to leave Gibraltar after planting a huge car bomb in the centre of the colony.' After the news, the Armed Forces Minister, Ian Stewart, interviewed on the Radio 4
Today
programme, congratulated the Gibraltar government and added: ‘There was a car bomb found which has been defused.' All the
morning newspapers also reported that a bomb had been found and that the terrorists had been armed. Some claimed that there had been a shootout. Later that day, however, the Foreign Secretary, Sir Geoffrey Howe, gave a different account of the deaths of Savage, McCann and Farrell:

On their way to the [Spanish] Border, they were challenged by the Security Forces. When challenged, they made movements which led the military personnel, operating in support of the Gibraltar police, to conclude that their own lives and the lives of others were under threat. In the light of this response, they were shot. Those killed were subsequently found not to have been carrying arms.

Howe added that no car bomb had been discovered on the Rock.
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Savage and McCann had been under surveillance for some time since intelligence had revealed that they were preparing for a continental operation. The Security Service considered the introverted Savage ‘probably PIRA's most effective and experienced bomb-maker'.
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A later Republican obituary described him as ‘a quiet and single-minded individual who neither drank nor smoked and rarely socialised', but attended Mass regularly and helped his parents care for his Down syndrome brother.
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The much more extrovert McCann was later remembered by friends as a good family man and devout Catholic who ‘liked nothing better than a bit of
craic
at the local pub'.
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The RUC and Security Service saw a different side of McCann. Though aged only twenty-nine, he was regarded as one of the Provisionals' most experienced and ruthless hitmen, and was thought to be responsible for as many as twenty-six killings. A stamp in his passport which revealed that in mid-November 1987 he had been at the La Línea border crossing between Spain and Gibraltar was one of a number of pieces of intelligence which pointed to preparations for an attack on the Rock. By this time the Security Service had discovered that the ASU had gained a third member: Siobhan O'Hanlon, an explosives expert, devout Catholic and committed feminist who would always insist on doing her share of the digging when constructing weapons hides. On 25 November F5 warned the Gibraltar authorities by telex of the danger of a PIRA attack. At a meeting with the Governor soon afterwards, it was concluded (correctly) that the ASU probably intended to bomb the ceremonial changing of the guard, involving up to fifty soldiers and bandsmen. PIRA preparations for the bombing, however, were delayed for several months by cancellations of the changing of the guard due to renovation of the Guard Room and roadworks along the route of the procession.
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In mid-December F5/0 and A4/0 visited Gibraltar to discuss A4's role when the ASU returned – which it now seemed clear would not be until the changing of the guard resumed in the New Year.
A4's surveillance team sent to the Rock during Operation FLAVIUS was to be its biggest deployment so far, either at home or abroad.
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It was believed that, if the members of the ASU were arrested in Spain before they were ready to go ahead with an attack on the Gibraltar garrison, they would face only minor charges. All were regarded by the Security Service as ruthless terrorists who remained at liberty in the UK only because of the lack of usable evidence against them and would kill again unless brought to justice on this occasion. At a meeting in Gibraltar on 15 February, the Governor, Director FX, F5/0 and a JIC representative therefore agreed that the ASU should be allowed to travel to Gibraltar with their explosives, so that they could be caught red-handed. This strategy, however, would require the assistance of the military: ‘The Gibraltar police had never fired a shot in anger and simply did not have the manpower. It was common sense to deploy the most professional body against such hardened terrorists.' On 18 February, after Mrs Thatcher had approved a secret military deployment on the Rock (whose details remain officially classified), F5/0 and the army commander flew to Gibraltar to brief the Governor and the Police Commissioner. The military team arrived from Britain a few hours later and began joint exercises with the A4 surveillance team next day.