Brits: the war against the IRA
Peter Taylor Bloomsbury, 446pp, £20
ISBN 0747550077
The deployment of British troops in Northern Ireland in the summer of 1969 was a momentous event. But it has always been retold with irony: those black and white shots of squaddies accepting cups of tea from Catholic housewives in west Belfast, the first troops arriving so unprepared for their task that they had to buy maps of the city at a petrol station on their way in from Aldergrove Airport. How were they going to restore order when they didn't seem to know where they were? And when James Callaghan, the home secretary who had sent them in, believed that nobody in Britain "understood" Ireland?
Peter Taylor explains in Brits that the model most readily available to the soldiers deployed in Belfast was their recent operational experience in Aden. There, the rules of engagement were simple, although they involved a cumbersome, almost medieval display of pageantry. In Aden, as Taylor writes, "when rioting became dangerous the platoon commander would normally shout through a loudspeaker 'Banner men out!', and they would then march forward and unfurl their banner on which was written in Arabic the words 'Stop or we will open fire.' At that point the rioters were supposed to disperse. If they didn't the threat would be carried out." The first person to be shot was usually "the man in the white turban".
In 1969 the banner men appeared in Belfast, seemingly unaware, however, that their cloth needed to be recut according to local requirements: on at least one occasion during a riot in Belfast, the banner, when unfurled, revealed that the order to stop was still written in Arabic.
Confusion was at the heart of the British response to Northern Ireland - the developing emergency was certainly a threat to peace but it wasn't war. Belfast might have been as exotic to the English mind as Kuala Lumpur but it was still part of the United Kingdom. When Taylor asked Sir Robert Andrew, a senior civil servant in the Ministry of Defence when internment was introduced, if interrogation techniques used in the colonies were not allowed in Northern Ireland, he replied: "Well, when you do the things in the United Kingdom they are viewed rather differently than elsewhere."
For the Brits, modern conflict in Ireland has always been a test of their deeply held self-image as the arbiters of fair play. In November 1920, the Times denounced Lloyd George's campaign against the Irish separatists not in terms of its effect on Ireland, but as an affront to Britain's reputation as a champion of civilisation. Just over 50 years later, a member of the committee appointed by Edward Heath's government to investigate the interrogation methods employed in Nortern Ireland condemned them as ". . . alien to the traditions of what I believe still to be the greatest democracy in the world".
Taylor identifies Bloody Sunday (when the paratroopers killed 13 civilians in Derry in 1972) as the pivotal event of the British war against the Irish Republican Army. It provided the IRA with recruits and boosted their fragile authority to wage war against soldiers. And it eventually convinced the British military that conventional methods could not be used to defeat the IRA while Britain remained committed to the rule of law.
The intelligence war that followed provides Taylor's richest material. It was an intimate and hidden struggle between a small handful of soldiers prepared for the extraordinary rigours of getting as close as possible to the IRA on the ground, and the guerrillas whom they ended up imitating. It started out with soldiers running a door-to-door laundry service in west Belfast, a real business that allowed them to test clothes for traces of explosives before returning them starched and neatly pressed. The IRA ambushed the laundry van. After that the British intelligence agents went about their job in a much more systematic way.
They hid in ditches for days watching IRA men, in one case coming so close to their quarry that they were pissed on by those they were watching. They put listening devices in IRA safe houses, bugged weapons in arms dumps so they could be tracked when removed, and they planned ambushes, killing IRA volunteers on their way to carry out attacks. They were aided by remarkable advances in surveillance technology. In the end, it was this intelligence war that forced the IRA leadership to recognise that they would never be defeated, but would never win.
What is remarkable about Taylor's extraordinary contacts and his lengthy interviews is how the intelligence campaign was almost a private war in which larger questions of nationalism, sovereignty or even politics rarely intruded. Taylor quotes one commander as saying that the problem with the Irish was that they were genetically inferior. But there is remarkably little of this hauteur on display. The senior MI6 agents, who are among the main characters in Brits, are more sympathetic to Irish nationalism than, say, the Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern. The IRA was lucky to have enemies such as this.
Maurice Walsh works for the BBC
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