Phoenix: Policing the Shadows
Jack Holland and Susan Phoenix
Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1996
The Origins of the Present Troubles in Northern Ireland
Caroline Kennedy-Piper
Longman, London, 1997
The war in Northern Ireland is apparently in its closing stages. There is still some way to go before it is all over, however, and undoubtedly there will be more people killed, maimed and imprisoned, but Britain’s thirty years war seems finally to be coming to an end. All that is needed is a government in Westminster that is in a strong enough position to override Unionist objections to a settlement acceptable to the Catholic minority, a settlement that will inevitably fall a long way short of a united Ireland.(1)
Phoenix: Policing the Shadows, is a personal odyssey put together from the papers of a senior Special Branch officer, the late Detective Superintendent Ian Phoenix, by his widow, Susan, and the journalist and chronicler of The Troubles, Jack Holland. Phoenix apparently planned to write his own memoirs once he retired, but was killed, along with twenty or so other senior officers and officials involved in the war against the PIRA, when their helicopter crashed in June 1994. Was the fact that all these valuable personnel were on one helicopter a cost-cutting exercise? If so, it proved somewhat counter-productive. They were on their way to a security conference that was to discuss the likely response of the Protestant paramilitaries to a deal being struck between the British government and the PIRA. Phoenix was most unhappy at the prospect of such a deal.
His biographers paint a picture of an almost saintly man, and while this is unsurprising from his widow, one might have expected a more critical stance from Jack Holland, the author of an important book on the INLA. He admits to having known Phoenix since 1992, but apparently thought he was a hearing-aid salesman right up to his death. Hmmmm! A leading journalist has a friend who, unknown to him, is a senior Special Branch officer? I believe him but others might be more sceptical. More to the point, saints are somewhat thin on the ground inside the British secret state.
An Ulster Protestant from County Tyrone, Phoenix had served in the Parachute Regiment before joining the RUC in 1970. He was a hard man. On one occasion, he and another constable dispersed a crowd of fifty Protestants stoning a Catholic church, hospitalising fourteen of them in the process. He transferred to Special Branch early in 1979, joining E4, the department specialising in surveillance, as a detective inspector. From the beginning, he wanted to put the organisation on a more military footing and was always concerned to work as closely as possible with the Army, particularly the SAS. Phoenix, we are told, favoured ‘a more aggressive counter-terror policy’. By then the security forces’ surveillance methods were so effective that they had accurate profiles of the PIRA’s main activists and forewarning of many of their operations. Operation Judy, the Loughall ambush of 7 May 1987 in which eight PIRA volunteers were killed, was a classic demonstration of this.
For the soldiers involved in the Loughall ambush, the moral of the situation was clear: the PIRA volunteers would have killed any soldiers or police who crossed their path without hesitation. It was ‘Big Boys’ Rules’: killed or be killed. Despite the fact that the PIRA plan was known, the decision was made to mount an ambush. This was not police work, this was ‘counter-terror’; and it cost the life of an innocent bystander, Anthony Hughes; and left his brother seriously injured when the SAS fired some forty shots into their car. If the PIRA operation had been stopped earlier not only would the republicans have been denied eight martyrs (a real concern for some of the security establishment), Anthony Hughes would still be alive. Although the scene of the ambush left Phoenix shocked and shaken, Phoenix remained an active proponent of counter-terror and a supporter of the SAS. His friendship with members of the regiment extended to his home becoming an open house for off-duty members. Four months after Operation Judy, Phoenix was promoted to Detective Superintendant and put in charge of Tasking and Coordination Group (South), responsible for all covert operations in the Armagh and Tyrone area, coordinating the activities of Special Branch, SAS and MI5.
By the 1990s the British government was seeking an accommodation with Sinn Fein and counter-terror was passing out of favour. Whereas under Thatcher, the SAS (‘her boys’) had what amounted to a license to kill PIRA volunteers, under John Major the license was revoked. After 1990 the Chief Constable had to personally approve any SAS deployment and such approval was not forthcoming. Phoenix describes how on one occasion senior officers arrived in his office to supervise an operation and make sure that he did not have the PIRA volunteers shot. Phoenix found his activities curtailed and was fearful that the Protestants were going to be sold out. He believed that the handing over of responsibility for intelligence work to MI5 was part of this sellout. Those thought most likely to oppose any deal, whether politicians, civil servants or even police, were themselves to be placed under covert surveillance. His disillusion was such that he was seriously considering resignation at the time of his death.
In a postcript, presumably written by Holland, the point is made that it was security force successes against the PIRA, successes in which Phoenix played a significant role, that forced them into secret negotiations with the British. The PIRA had been effectively defeated in the cities and only really retained freedom to operate in Armagh. They were being ‘pushed into fighting something like the failed border campaign of 1956-62.’ Moreover, in Belfast in particular, Protestant paramilitaries were stepping up their attacks, placing Catholic communities under considerable pressure. The PIRA did, however, retain the ability to stage spectacular bombings in Britain. It was, Holland quite correctly insists, military failure (not defeat, but failure) that led to the PIRA ceasefire in August 1994 and has accounted for their failure to launch an offensive once that ceasefire broke down. He admits that Phoenix wanted nothing short of complete military victory and regarded any settlement short of this as a sell-out, but argues that regardless of this he contributed to forcing the republicans effectively to abandon the armed struggle. A better case can be made that the ‘counter-terror’ strategy he favoured actually prolonged the conflict.
The Origins of the Present Troubles in Northern Ireland is an account of the conflict by an academic, appearing in Longman’s prestigious ‘Origins of Modern Wars’ series. This is not an account of the ‘Origins of the Present Troubles’ (only 48 out of 180 pages actually deal with the origins), but chiefly a history of British security policy in the province. Interestingly enough, she acknowledges the part the Army played in worsening the situation in the early 1970s, culminating with the Bloody Sunday massacre. This is now a commonplace, accepted by many within the Army itself. She goes on to argue, however, that by early 1974 the Army had the PIRA on the run but premature introduction of police primacy threw the advantage away. This is very much the Army’s own account of the situation and one is entitled to be sceptical. My own view is that police primacy and the associated policies were introduced because of the failure of the Army’s counter-insurgency strategy and its high political cost. Instead, the British turned to a strategy derived more from Continental experience, in particular from Italian success against the Red Brigades. Indeed, the RUC can best be seen a Continental-style police force, equipped for dealing with public order challenges of a kind that have not yet manifested themselves in Britain. The ‘supergrass’ initiative was directly modelled on the Italian use of ‘penitents’ against the Red Brigades. While it suceeded in Italy, it failed in Northern Ireland where the many convictions secured were quashed on appeal. According to one British security specialist, the problem was that the PIRA had not killed enough judges!
The internal security strategy that police primacy inaugurated successfully contained the PIRA but did not defeat them. Unlike the Red Brigades in Italy, the republicans had a strong base of support among the Catholic working class in Northern Ireland that allowed them to replace their losses. Moreover, this support was strengthened by the beating of suspects in RUC barracks at the end of the 1970s and the Hunger Strikes at the start of the 1980s. The failure of British governments to successfully erode that base of support made some accommodation inevitable. Kennedy-Pipe does not pay enough attention to these kind of issues. Her book is a useful but not a particularly outstanding contribution to the literature.
Notes
- This was written before the recent general election.