The Sunday Times
Liam Clarke
Martin McGartland, the former RUC agent within the IRA, recently told me of an attempt to get counselling after he was resettled in England. McGartland, it will be remembered, was code-named Agent Carol and escaped from an IRA interrogation squad by jumping from a third-storey window. Later he was tracked down to the northeast of England, shot and seriously wounded before he managed to fight off his attacker. This and the strain of living a lie under an assumed identity away from his family left him traumatised and one day he got his doctor to refer him to a psychiatrist for counselling.
The psychiatrist listened to his story, sympathised and then wrote up a report saying that this patient was suffering from paranoid delusions. He thought the IRA were after him and had been a secret agent. Later, when MI5, who were handling McGartland's resettlement, clarified matters, the psychiatrist met him to apologise. "I didn't know these sorts of things really went on," he said.
The doctor's reaction is understandable. Being chased by terrorists and being a secret agent now rank alongside alien abduction as the main fantasies encountered on psychiatric wards. Yet the world of spies, what James Jesus Angleton, former head of the CIA called "the wilderness of mirrors", is all around us. Many leaders of paramilitaries, criminals and their relatives have friendly relations with the police, though they deny it publicly. The back stories of many crimes reveal double and triple loyalties through which it can be hard to draw a clear moral line.
There was shock in some circles last week when it was revealed that even today the PSNI pays informers £299,000 (¤350,000) a year, the third highest sum in the UK after the London Metropolitan Police and the Greater Manchester Constabulary. As a former IRA prisoner herself, Martina Anderson, now a Sinn Fein MLA and Policing Board member, has a natural wariness of "touts".
She was first out of the traps with comment, right on the ball, expressing concern at the size of the figure and suggesting that many of the recipients of this largesse were active in dissident republican groups. She should put her mind at rest on that one — under post-Patten provisions, all informants in dissident republican groups in Northern Ireland are under the control of MI5, Britain's internal security service which took over responsibility from the PSNI for all security related intelligence in 2007. They handle the dissidents and any international terror groups. Their local HQ in Palace Barracks, Holywood, is their largest centre outside their London HQ and from this, it must be judged, their operation is considerable.
The £299,000 figure is paid to those who inform on the loyalist paramilitaries, who are not judged to be a threat to Britain, and on criminal gangs. This is the relatively clean end of the business. Informers are now termed Covert Human Intelligence Sources, they get contracts and their handling is strictly regulated. Agents working for the security service, so far as we know, are still governed by the same protocols as were used by RUC Special Branch. That certainly was the impression given by Chris Albiston, former head of Special Branch, when he spoke at a dinner to mark the hand-over.
Albiston talked of his pride that the antiterrorist operation methods developed in Northern Ireland were now seen as a "beacon of good practice" in mainland Britain. "In an attempt to belittle your efforts and to rewrite history, the word 'collusion' has been bandied about in a disgraceful, irresponsible and potentially libellous fashion," he told 300 guests from the police and intelligence community, adding ominously that some members of the power-sharing executive "would really not be too keen on any public revelations of the truth about the last 35 years."
Was he just referring to the fact that Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness had been surrounded by informers who helped steer Sinn Fein into the peace process? The list of those who have been named is long: Freddie Scappaticci, a British agent who headed the IRA's internal security department; Willie Carlin, a former British soldier who joined Sinn Fein, reported regularly on McGuinness and was an enthusiastic supporter of the peace process; Denis Donaldson, who ran Sinn Fein's operations in America and later in Stormont, worked for the police. It has been claimed that at least one of Adams's drivers was also an informant.
In the republic, the gardai succeeded in steering their agent, Sean O'Callaghan, to the position of head of the IRA's Southern Command, allowing him to rob and steal to preserve his cover and, at one point, Sean MacStiofain, the IRA's former chief of staff, also reported to the gardai. Paddy Dixon, a crooked Dublin-based car dealer reporting on the Real IRA to the gardai, was allowed to run a stolen car ring, so valuable were his services.
The extent of this penetration points to the fact that informants did not necessarily report all that they were involved in. On the loyalist side, John White, a mutilation killer in the 1970s and Johnny "Mad Dog" Adair's right hand man, was also an informer.
Questions are now being raised by the case of Mark Haddock, a former UVF leader in Mount Vernon, who reported to RUC Special Branch on efforts to bomb the republic, amongst other things. Haddock is currently remanded in custody for two murders and an attempted murder and is being questioned about other crimes. He was linked, under Dail privilege, to up to 10 killings.
Haddock's role came to light in a massive investigation by Nuala, now Lady, O'Loan, the former Policing Ombudsman for Northern Ireland. At the time sources close to the investigation told me they were amazed at the extent of police penetration of the UVF. In fact, five out of its seven leading figures had police handlers and in the Mount Vernon unit where Haddock operated, there were at least two other police informants.
"You can have a situation where it isn't clear if this is a UVF brigadier using the police to sustain his position," my source told me. "They become untouchable and their intelligence is marked 'not for downward dissemination'."
During the troubles these northern terrorist informers were all handled by RUC Special Branch, but funded by MI5, who set the intelligence priorities and decided whether they should be kept in play. Raymond White, a former assistant chief constable who served 15 years in Special Branch, has said ministers were regularly briefed on undercover operations. In 1986, he briefed the then prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, on intelligence operations in Belfast and took the opportunity to ask her for guidance on the treatment of informers who were involved in crime.
It was never forthcoming, and it is never likely to be. The handling of terrorist informants remains a grey area protected by layers of official secrecy both in Britain and Ireland.
Mediators and politicians are Ireland's only exports to the world's trouble spots. As Albiston said, what happened here is still regarded as a "beacon of best practice" because, whatever the moral conundrums it threw up, it succeeded in containing the IRA and bringing it to the negotiating table.
Like McGartland, many of today's agents would be greeted with snorts of disbelief if they told their stories to strangers, but when the history of intelligence operations against contemporary terrorist groups is written, we can expect to be surprised by who was in the pay of western governments. One thing is for sure, there will be people like Haddock and Scappaticci feathering their nests among the ranks of the Islamic fundamentalists.
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