coordinated riot or street disturbance. As for last year’s Bloody Sunday, the Paras were under intolerable pressure from those same well-tried tactics – Derry hooligans backed up by sniper fire. The Widgery Report last April, produced with commendablespeed, had confirmed the facts. That said, it was clearly an operational error to have an aggressive and highly motivated outfit like the Paras policing a civil-rights march. It should have been the task of the Royal Ulster Constabulary. Even the Royal Anglians would have been a calmer influence.
But it was done, and the net effect of killing thirteen civilians on that day was to endear both wings of the IRA to the world. Money, arms and recruits were as rivers of honey in spate. Sentimental and ignorant Americans, many of Protestant rather than Catholic descent, were feeding the fires with their foolish dollars donated to the Republican cause through fundraisers like NORAID. Not until the United States had its own terrorist attacks would it even begin to understand. To right the tragedy of Derry’s wasted lives, the Official IRA slaughtered five cleaning ladies, a gardener and a Catholic priest in Aldershot, while the Provisionals murdered mothers and children in Belfast’s Abercorn restaurant, some of them Catholics. And during the national strike our boys confronted ugly Protestant mobs, spurred on by the Ulster Vanguard, as nasty a bunch as one could hope to meet. Then the ceasefire, and when that failed, utter savagery dispensed to the Ulster public by psychopathic gun and bomb toters of both persuasions, and thousands of armed robberies and indiscriminate nail bombings, knee cappings, punishment beatings, five thousand seriously injured, several hundred killed by loyalist and Republican militias, and quite a few by the British army – though not, of course, intentionally. Such were the tallies for 1972.
The brigadier sighed theatrically. He was a big man, with eyes too small for the bony mass of his head. Neither a lifetime of spit and polish nor his tailored dark suit and breast pocket handkerchief could contain the shaggy, shambling six-foot-three bulk of him. He appeared ready to dispatch a score of psychopaths with his own bare hands. Now, he told us, the Provisional IRA had organised itself into cells on the mainland in classic terrorist style. After eighteen months oflethal attacks, the word was they were about to get worse. The pretence of going for purely military assets had long been dropped. The game was terror. As in Northern Ireland, children, shoppers, ordinary working men were all suitable targets. Bombs in department stores and pubs would have even more impact in the context of the widely anticipated social breakdown brought on by industrial decline, high unemployment, rising inflation and an energy crisis.
It was to our collective dishonour that we had failed to expose the terrorist cells or disrupt their lines of supply. And this was to be his main point – there was one overriding reason for our failure, which was the lack of coordinated intelligence. Too many agencies, too many bureaucracies defending their corners, too many points of demarcation, insufficient centralised control.
The only sound was a creak of chairs and whispers, and I saw in front of me a restrained movement of heads tilting or turning minimally, of shoulders canting slightly towards a neighbour. The brigadier had touched upon a common complaint in Leconfield House. Even I had heard some of it, from Max. No flow of information across the borders of the jealous empires. But was our visitor going to tell the room what it wanted to hear, was he on our side? He was. He said MI6 was operating where it was not supposed to be, in Belfast and Londonderry, in the United Kingdom. With its remit of foreign intelligence, Six had a historical claim which dated back before Partition and was now irrelevant. This was a domestic issue. The territory therefore belonged to Five. Army
But it was done, and the net effect of killing thirteen civilians on that day was to endear both wings of the IRA to the world. Money, arms and recruits were as rivers of honey in spate. Sentimental and ignorant Americans, many of Protestant rather than Catholic descent, were feeding the fires with their foolish dollars donated to the Republican cause through fundraisers like NORAID. Not until the United States had its own terrorist attacks would it even begin to understand. To right the tragedy of Derry’s wasted lives, the Official IRA slaughtered five cleaning ladies, a gardener and a Catholic priest in Aldershot, while the Provisionals murdered mothers and children in Belfast’s Abercorn restaurant, some of them Catholics. And during the national strike our boys confronted ugly Protestant mobs, spurred on by the Ulster Vanguard, as nasty a bunch as one could hope to meet. Then the ceasefire, and when that failed, utter savagery dispensed to the Ulster public by psychopathic gun and bomb toters of both persuasions, and thousands of armed robberies and indiscriminate nail bombings, knee cappings, punishment beatings, five thousand seriously injured, several hundred killed by loyalist and Republican militias, and quite a few by the British army – though not, of course, intentionally. Such were the tallies for 1972.
The brigadier sighed theatrically. He was a big man, with eyes too small for the bony mass of his head. Neither a lifetime of spit and polish nor his tailored dark suit and breast pocket handkerchief could contain the shaggy, shambling six-foot-three bulk of him. He appeared ready to dispatch a score of psychopaths with his own bare hands. Now, he told us, the Provisional IRA had organised itself into cells on the mainland in classic terrorist style. After eighteen months oflethal attacks, the word was they were about to get worse. The pretence of going for purely military assets had long been dropped. The game was terror. As in Northern Ireland, children, shoppers, ordinary working men were all suitable targets. Bombs in department stores and pubs would have even more impact in the context of the widely anticipated social breakdown brought on by industrial decline, high unemployment, rising inflation and an energy crisis.
It was to our collective dishonour that we had failed to expose the terrorist cells or disrupt their lines of supply. And this was to be his main point – there was one overriding reason for our failure, which was the lack of coordinated intelligence. Too many agencies, too many bureaucracies defending their corners, too many points of demarcation, insufficient centralised control.
The only sound was a creak of chairs and whispers, and I saw in front of me a restrained movement of heads tilting or turning minimally, of shoulders canting slightly towards a neighbour. The brigadier had touched upon a common complaint in Leconfield House. Even I had heard some of it, from Max. No flow of information across the borders of the jealous empires. But was our visitor going to tell the room what it wanted to hear, was he on our side? He was. He said MI6 was operating where it was not supposed to be, in Belfast and Londonderry, in the United Kingdom. With its remit of foreign intelligence, Six had a historical claim which dated back before Partition and was now irrelevant. This was a domestic issue. The territory therefore belonged to Five. Army
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