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By Root 882 0

his Armalite, and was shot twice. The car driver tried to escape, as two soldiers pumped rounds into the car, shattering its windshield. It was found abandoned two miles away with blood inside. A soldier dressed a wound Campbell had in his shoulder, and inserted a breathing tube as he went into shock and died. It is conceivable that the PIRA men could have been photographed carrying the weapons and arrested later by the RUC, but that was not the spirit of those times. If it is true that the British army ensured that the PIRA never achieved its fundamental strategic objective, this was in no small part due to special-forces operations that made it very risky for terrorists to operate. This inculcated the idea that the PIRA faced a military stalemate and hence inclined it to the view that a military solution was a pipedream.

In order to monitor PIRA activities, a vast security net spread over republican areas, whose visible manifestations were watchtowers and observation posts that sprang up in both towns and country. Overhead there were also incessant helicopter flights, some of them carrying heli-teli or cameras recording movements below. RAF surveillance aircraft took aerial photos of country areas looking for signs of ground disturbed by arms dumps or command wires. Electronic eavesdropping devices, hidden cameras and motion sensors all helped intelligence agents to build up a rich picture of their terrorist opponents, as did the replacement of card indexes with ever more sophisticated computers to which foot patrols and roadblocks fed routine fresh intelligence on the movements of suspects. The Provos responded with their own counter-intelligence operations. The number plates of cars owned by respectable middle-class people were cloned, and attached to identical vehicles, which would then raise no suspicions if stopped. They had lookouts watching for undercover agents in unmarked vehicles, or for people whose accents or demeanour did not fit in ‘their’ territory. Having identified anyone too muscle-bound around neck and shoulders and with too short-cropped hair, the PIRA were soon alert to the scruffy, unshaven, weedy individuals with long hair who replaced them. PIRA technical experts examined weapons that may have been tampered with, and sought out new frequencies for triggering bombs remotely.

By far the sharpest weapon in the security services’ campaign against the Provos (and loyalist terrorists) was informers recruited from, or groomed to join, the terrorist organisation, arguably the tactic that would so stimulate PIRA paranoia that the group ultimately lost the armed struggle. In addition to MI5, an army intelligence formation called the Force Research Unit (FRU) was specifically tasked to recruit and handle republican and loyalist agents, a job requiring formidable abilities on the part of those doing it. Most agents and informers were recruited because of familiar human failings. A letter arrived with £50 inside and details of a meeting where more was to be had. A couple of hundred pounds would be handed over. Perhaps the man approached nursed a grudge after squabbling with another Provo. Perhaps he was shown graphic photographs of a local Provo commander sleeping with his wife. Perhaps he just started to talk to the man who deliberately bumped the back of his car so as to provoke a conversation.

For some terrorists the nervous tensions of the job had become unbearable, especially as victory seemed endlessly deferred. A few were appalled by indiscriminate bloodshed in which innocent civilians were killed, a theme underlined whenever relatives of the dead appeared grief-stricken or stunned on television. Apart from those being blackmailed, many probably took up the offer of avoiding a prison sentence when they were caught drunk-driving, dealing drugs or with a gun. A few probably welcomed the £20 a week they were given by their handlers, with the odd £200-300 bonus when they came up trumps with information that led to an arrest. The wife of one agent used to accompany her husband to meetings with his handler,