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British military, policing & intelligence engagement in Northern Ireland - SAS, HQMSU, Det, NITAT, FRU, MRF, 14 Int Coy, 4 FST, paramilitaries etc

DaveCinzano

DaveCinzano

WATCH OUT, GEORGE, HE'S GOT A SCREWDRIVER!
There's loads of interesting stuff on different threads about different aspects to it all, but couldn't find a natural home for what I wanted to post. Hence this.

In respect of threads both mothballed and extant, here's a stack of them:
(Put in the World Politics forum rather than UKPCAN in acknowledgement of Wallace Thompson's belief in the ‘inevitability of a New Ireland’)
 
Anyway, what I had is this...

Years back I picked up a copy of The Bedside Guardian 26. This was the 1976-1977 edition of an annual compendium of curated articles from Manchester's fenist newspaper. In it was a curious piece by Simon Winchester in which he described a chance meeting with a senior SAS officer whilst on a train journey to the Midlands. The context is that 1976 was the year that Harold Wilson's government deployed 22 SAS to Northern Ireland officially; ‘F’, the putative SAS officer, claims that the regiment carried out two previous ‘quick in-and-out jobs’ there (in 1972 and 1974, both in Belfast). He distances the SAS from the car-crash MRF, though current understanding is that the SAS certainly provided personnel who reviewed the MRF's mission, and provided training to personnel in the period between the MRF being shuttered (it operated 1971-1973) and 14 Intelligence Company being set up (in late 1972).

But I also have a memory of reading somewhere else a description of how British intelligence (military or civilian I remember not) engineered a ‘chance meeting’ between a soldier and a not-considered-to-be-sympathetic journalist working in Northern Ireland in order to shape a softer narrative of some kind around the army's actions. It was ages before I was able to connect the two things together, but by then both books were either forgotten or jettisoned.

Eventually I got another copy of TBG26, but for the life of me I can't recall where the other jigsaw piece was located. I have already worked through obvious candidates like Who Frame Colin Wallace by Paul Foot, War Without Dishonour by Fred Holroyd, and Ireland: The Propaganda War by Liz Curtis, without striking gold.

Can anyone shine a light on this? Maybe something by Martin Dillon, Peter Taylor or Ed Moloney? Or Mark Urban's Big Boys' Rules, or perhaps Tony Geraghty's The Irish War? Any help gratefully received :)

The Simon Winchester article is below. Be warned that ‘F’ displays what I would euphemistically describe as of-its-time attitudes to race and ethnicity.

GUARDIAN_SAS_1.jpeg

GUARDIAN_SAS_2.jpeg

GUARDIAN_SAS_3.jpeg

GUARDIAN_SAS_4.jpeg
 
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DaveCinzano said:
There's loads of interesting stuff on different threads about different aspects to it all, but couldn't find a natural home for what I wanted to post. Hence this.

In respect of threads both mothballed and extant, here's a stack of them:
(Put in the World Politics forum rather than UKPCAN in acknowledgement of Wallace Thompson's belief in the ‘inevitability of a New Ireland’)
Click to expand...

top work!
 
Now bear with me, juggling is in order.

Whilst trying to run down the pre-1976 timeline of the SAS in Northern Ireland, I found this passage in Tony Geraghty's Who Dares Wins:

WDW 190-191.jpeg

WDW 192-193.jpeg

Geraghty often fudges dates and names (which is perhaps why he was able to put off being nicked until 1998), so I'm presuming that the “long-serving MI6 Intelligence Chief at Army HQ” who was then posted elsewhere abroad was Frederick Allan Rowley (or alternatively plain Allan Rowley), and the “less competent individual from MI5” was Denis Payne (the Clockwork Orange guy).

As Payne was noted as being DCI in the period 1973-1975, then it looks like the MIO mentioned by ‘Fred’ as having committed suicide because “within a week” of MI5 taking over “ten first class sources...all had a head job from the IRA” would be Staff Sgt Charles Apcar. (There's also the reference in Ken Wharton's Northern Ireland: An Agony Continued, which lists Troubles deaths in its appendix, which gives Apcar's death as the only one listed in a section titled ‘Security Services (Date and cause of death withheld by MOD)’, labelled as “Death by violent or unnatural causes”.)

Anyone have any more on this situation - the loss of a large number of informers/turned personnel so quickly after MI5 primacy, who they were etc, and also the role of an SAS Major as ‘G1 Intelligence’ - wouldn't Intelligence be a G2 function? Or does the nomenclature here reference something else?

ETA

And who is ‘Fred’?
 
DaveCinzano said:
Click to expand...

From that thread: "patrick daly was a special branch and later mi5 agent (according to don bateman in 'lobster' 27, 1994) living in bristol. he involved himself in leftwing political activity, and in 1984 appears to have been the provocoteur/informer who set one peter jordan up for arrest, having met with jordan, a local leftie, at the swan with two necks pub in st judes, and one 'grimes', an inla 'field officer', and shown them a gun. jordan was subsequently picked up in liverpool in possession of 2kg of explosives picked up off a sailor. jordan got 14 years; daly wasn't even tried.

daly was also regularly transporting guns/people for this apparent inla cell."


I won't bump the thread but my dad knew Pat Daly, I remember meeting him in the late '70s when he visited us in Birmingham.

My dad was involved in Clann na Heireann, amongst other things...so probably a close call.

Clann na hÉireann - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
 
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Okay, so Pete Winner is - based on his SAS memoir Soldier ‘I’ - as one might expect somewhat reactionary and right wing (after 18 years in the Regiment Winner slid into private sector work through David Stirling's long-running arms-length mercenary outfit Kilo Alpha Services, and more recently was providing surveillance training to Benefits Agency snoops so they could “track down and prosecute all the bad-back merchants that we find grafting on building sites and pumping iron in gyms”).

But he does have a whole chapter on pre-1976 SAS deployment in Northern Ireland. In line with most Taff-Tosh-Dave-Mac fare, it's light on checkable details, but he describes arriving in Belfast with his team in January 1974. He describes the team as being a composite unit made up of men from all four troops in his Squadron (B). By his account the tour was exclusively surveillance and intelligence-gathering, and towards the end of the chapter he summarises “the Regiment's mission [as being] to support the fledgling 14 Intelligence Company known as the [sic] ‘The Det’.”

Winner claims that B Squadron's stint in Northern Ireland was foreshortened by a couple of incidents. In the first, four troopers popped into a pub in Derry for a swift drink and what do you know, only happened to spot “a senior IRA player” whom they recognised from source photos. Despite not being tasked with it, they decided on the hoof to jump him in the pub car park where they pistol-whipped him and attempted to snatch him, whereupon the pub emptied and they were chased off by a crowd of angry locals.

In the second “two Irish members of Seven Troop snapped”. Winner says they were “sick of simply taking photographs of hardened terrorists when they should have been slotting them. What made it worse was that some of the IRA were regularly raiding post offices and filling their boots with cash. Tony, a Bogside boy and now a Seven Troop man, had gone to school with some of these criminals, and was now forced to take photos of them living the high life while he and his mates struggled on Army pay.” (😐) So, err, Tony and his chums went out and did an armed robbery on a post office themselves, and got caught.

And so “it signalled the end of B Squadron's time in Northern Ireland, and we were unceremoniously ordered out of the province.”

FAST SHOW - WHICH WAS NICE.gif
 
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I’ve just finished reading Killing for Britain by ‘John Black’, a first-hand memoir by a Loyalist paramilitary whose gang were recruited and used by the MRF. He explains in detail how they were recruited, trained, supplied with weapons. They were given accurate information (photos, appearance, addresses) of ‘targets’ (Republicans or PIRA) to hit, but a lot of their other victims were random Catholics.

The apparent motive was to terrorise the Catholic population sufficiently as to make them
lose faith in the IRA’s ability to protect their communities, so that they’d give in and cease supporting them :confused::hmm:

A large section of the book consists of a long list of mostly Loyalist bombings and killings which becomes depressing in its repetitiousness, but are important in that the MRF-sanctioned murders had one-hour OOB (out-of-bounds) orders in place in the vicinity. Regular army and RUC patrols would be told to avoid the area for an hour as an intelligence operation was going on - thus enabling UVF etc Loyalist murder gangs to get into the area, hit their target and make their escape without worrying about being stopped as suspects fitting the description and carrying weapons.

‘Black’ makes the point that the MRF strategy (terrorising the population, recruiting and ‘turning’ informers from within the Nationalist side, and skilful propaganda) had previously been deployed successfully in places like Kenya.

Indeed, at one point in their training, Frank Kitson (of Low Intensity Operations) gives ‘Black’ and his mates a pep talk :mad:
 
How about just enforcing the laws and fixing the sectarian idiocy instead of adding to it?
" Well their going to kill anyway we are just pointing them at people we want killing" was one justification. How about stopping them no one think of that?
 
dylanredefined said:
How about just enforcing the laws and fixing the sectarian idiocy instead of adding to it?
" Well their going to kill anyway we are just pointing them at people we want killing" was one justification. How about stopping them no one think of that?
Click to expand...
There were conflicting approaches in the twilight years of empire. Some definitely believed the perceived counter insurgency successes in Malaysia and elsewhere could be replicated and the only explanation for failure was a lack of political will. From this perspective, in terms of population the North was a relatively minor trouble which would have been pacified effectively if only the gloves were allowed to be taken off.
Perhaps the provisional's military campaign within England and on the continent added an extra political dimension that had been missing from earlier campaigns.
 
kenny g said:
There were conflicting approaches in the twilight years of empire. Some definitely believed the perceived counter insurgency successes in Malaysia and elsewhere could be replicated and the only explanation for failure was a lack of political will. From this perspective, in terms of population the North was a relatively minor trouble which would have been pacified effectively if only the gloves were allowed to be taken off.
Perhaps the provisional's military campaign within England and on the continent added an extra political dimension that had been missing from earlier campaigns.
Click to expand...
I was talking to a mate originally from Kenya, who was explaining the details of the Mau Mau 'Emergency' to me (as experienced by his parents and grandparents); he pointed me in the direction of some books on the subject. One of them mentions a young Frank Kitson being involved in British operations there, and fifteen years later was advocating similar tactics in N.I.

Seen in this light, early 1970s internment in Long Kesh is comparable to the mass internment and screening of the Kikuyu people during the 'Emergency'. IIRC they are put into categories depending on how dangerous they were perceived to be - were they Mau Mau activists or just farmers? And had to swear loyalty to the Crown to be released... as I recall, Long Kesh internees were also put into three categories, reflective of their presumed threat levels.

To be released, they had to swear some sort of declaration that they weren't Officials or PIRA, or wouldn't participate in IRA activities. IIRC I read this in the recent book on Stakeknife; Freddie Scapaticci was interned and spent a longer time there than others as he refused to make this declaration.
 
scalyboy said:
I was talking to a mate originally from Kenya, who was explaining the details of the Mau Mau 'Emergency' to me (as experienced by his parents and grandparents); he pointed me in the direction of some books on the subject. One of them mentions a young Frank Kitson being involved in British operations there, and fifteen years later was advocating similar tactics in N.I.

Seen in this light, early 1970s internment in Long Kesh is comparable to the mass internment and screening of the Kikuyu people during the 'Emergency'. IIRC they are put into categories depending on how dangerous they were perceived to be - were they Mau Mau activists or just farmers? And had to swear loyalty to the Crown to be released... as I recall, Long Kesh internees were also put into three categories, reflective of their presumed threat levels.

To be released, they had to swear some sort of declaration that they weren't Officials or PIRA, or wouldn't participate in IRA activities. IIRC I read this in the recent book on Stakeknife; Freddie Scapaticci was interned and spent a longer time there than others as he refused to make this declaration.
Click to expand...
The Legacy of Empires book was recommended by someone here and is well worth a read.
 
also Northern Ireland was always a side show the real high flyers were playing cold war games chasing Karla and co :rolleyes:
spooks went to Northern Ireland to do a tour to show they were "Hardmen" the ones that stayed had either blotted their copybook everywhere else. Or were true belivers and had little or know adult supervision and left to get on with it.:eek:

Pira though they were in an exsential struggle with the British state the British state had them labelled under any other buisness
 
Lurdan said:
That c*nt Kitson snuffed it yesterday. Revisionist obituary in The Times (archived):

General Sir Frank Kitson obituary
Click to expand...

0041CF6600000258-3057471-image-m-42_1430141494338.jpg

The Late General Sir Frank Edward Kitson, GBE, KCB, MC & Bar, DL (far right) is pictured with the (then) British monarch, Elizabeth Saxa-Coburg-Gotha (Windsor), General Sir Charles Patrick Ralph Palmer, KCVO, KBE (centre), and General Sir Edward Arthur Burgess, KCB, OBE (left) during a visit to York in May 1983.

"On January 2 (2024), Frank Kitson, a lifelong British Army officer, writer, and military theorist died peacefully in his sleep at the grand age of 97. It was an undeservedly dignified exit for an individual who directly and indirectly inflicted misery upon untold people for much of his lifetime. It is likely many will continue to suffer adverse consequences as a result of his teachings for decades to come ..."
Click to expand...

How Britain invented modern torture
 
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