A Very British Jihad: Collusion, conspiracy and cover-up in Northern Ireland
Paul Larkin
Belfast: Beyond the Pale, 2004, £10.99 p/back
<www.btpale.com/>
Larkin was an investigative journalist and producer for the BBC in Northern Ireland and this book is based round the TV programmes he made there about the paramilitaries and the British state in the late 1980s and mid 1990s. Basing the book round TV investigations is mostly good news: since TV journalists in this kind of field have to undergo much more scrutiny than most of their print colleagues, the core factual content of the book is reliable; it would not have got broadcast had it not been. The minor bad news is that the book is a slightly episodic. I understand why Larkin wrote the book the way he did, around progammes he had made and the format gives the book a personal edge which I enjoyed. (He makes investigating paramilitaries sound about as hairy as you would imagine.) But there is enough material here for him to have a written a more straightforwardly linear narrative.
The book is centrally about the collusion between the loyalist paramilitaries and the British state. Except that ‘collusion’ isn’t really the right word. Yes there was a ‘fraudulent secret understanding between ostensible opponents’, as the Oxford Pocket defines collusion; but this was more than an ‘understanding’. To all intents and purposes the Army and the RUC Special Branch were directing and arming some of the loyalist gangs. By the mid-1980s almost everything else, including some fairly ad hoc joint Army-loyalist operations going back to the mid 1970s – where Fred Holroyd came in – had been tried without destroying the Provos. Larkin believes that a decision was made by the British state in the mid-1980s to train, arm and direct loyalist para-militaries against the IRA. The one piece missing from his analysis is evidence of the political dimension. Did the Conservative government approve of this? Did they know of this? Larkin presumes so but cannot demonstrate it. Larkin lacks a senior British Army, intelligence officer or civil servant, let alone a cabinet minister, willing to admit this was the policy. (1)
For example, he writes p.42: ‘this elite group had made a decision to prosecute a “dirty war”……which in its late 1980s and early 90s phase was to use militant loyalism was a battering ram’. But the group in that context is ‘covert elements of the British Army and intelligence services’ and RUC Special Branch.
He writes, p.44: ‘It was the British government which took the massive decision in the early 1980s to introduce the FRU into the conflict and to reactivate Brian Nelson’. But he cannot show when, where, or by whom.
There is a presumption by Larkin that the politicians are informed by the state and take the big decisions. Our understanding of intelligence matters in this and other states, notably America, says that this may not be the case. Larkin occasionally insinuates that the decision was taken at the top of the Conservative government, but he hasn’t got any evidence. For example, on p.188 he quotes the jail diary of the soldier running the UDA’s ‘intelligence’, Brian Nelson:
‘At the debrief the following week I was told by Mick [his Army handler] that permission for me to go [to South Africa, for guns] had gone all the way to the top, all the way to Maggie, was the words he used.’
‘Mick’ may have said this but it doesn’t make it true. (And how would a lowly FRU handler know this?) (2)
Around this central theme of the British state manipulation of the loyalist gangs are gathered all manner of sub-themes: the Official IRA and racketeering; the IPLO-Provo feud; the transition from sectarian gangs to organised crime gangs; interagency rivalry among the Crown forces; the role of Ian Paisley and the DUP as cheerleaders for paramilitaries; the arming of the Loyalist gangs with South African-supplied weapons and the subsequent alliance between the South African state and some of the loyalists; and, centrally, the career of Brian Nelson, the British Army’s man directing the UDA killer gangs using intelligence from the British Army and RUC Special Branch.
Larkin thinks that the ‘collusion’ can be traced back to the ‘quiet coup’ run in the UK in the 1970s which led to the election of Mrs Thatcher. This chapter, the one which he has written from other published sources, without the kind of detailed research he conducted in Northern Ireland, is the weakest bit of the book. Based in part in the analysis in Lobster 11 and Smear!, Larkin correctly identifies the anti-communist, anti-subversion alliance formed by elements within Whitehall and a section of the Tory Party but oversimplifies it and makes many errors of detail. For example, on p.182 he writes of the ‘right wing of the British establishment (Airey Neave, Ross McWhirter, Ian Gow and Colonel Peter Brush in particular) were pushing for all out war against the IRA rather than this “appeasement”.’ Did Peter Brush amount to anything outside Northern Ireland? Was McWhirter in ‘the establishment’? I’m sure he would have found that idea hilarious. Did Ian Gow, who became Mrs Thatcher’s PPS in the 1980s, count for much in 1974? Indeed, did Airey Neave?
Larkin introduces the Gladio story, the NATO stay-behind network which was created in Europe; but did the British end of Gladio play a role in the UK in the 1970s? I see no evidence that it did.
He writes on p.267: ‘Unison was formed by Sir Walter Walker and Civil Assistance by Airey Neave’s wartime comrade David Stirling.’ In fact Unison was formed by G. K. Young and Civil Assistance began as a branch of Unison. (Stirling’s contemporary outfit was GB75.)
He writes on p. 267: ‘Neave built a groundswell of support through an organisation called Tory Action which fed into a group called the National Association for Freedom (NAFF).’ Did he? Tory Action was another of Young’s projects and Neave is nowhere to be seen in the story of NAFF as I understand it.
In the penultimate chapter he reexamines the cases of Colin Wallace and Fred Holroyd: helped by Wallace, Holroyd was the original whistle-blower on ‘collusion’ between the British state and the loyalists. Larkin takes the unusual step for a journalist of criticising fellow journalists John Ware and David McKittrick for their smearing of Wallace and Holroyd in 1987. He makes the welcome but obvious point that had Wallace and Holroyd been taken seriously when they first appeared, the ‘collusion’ might have been ended then.(3) But without the joint loyalist-state operations against the Provos, would the Provos be involved in the ‘peace process’? Is it not the case that the British state’s use of loyalist killer gangs forced the Provos to the negotiating table? (Just as the latter’s bombing of the City of London in 1992 forced the British government there?)
Ignore the flawed chapter on mainland events in the mid 1970s. This is one of the best books on the war in Northern Ireland I have read and the best account we have of the loyalist-British state alliance there.
Notes
1 My guess is we will never get that, not even if we get some kind of Truth and Reconciliation process there. And there will be no paper record of such decisions.
2 About the political input into this kind of operational decision in Northern Ireland we seem to know almost nothing.
3 That the Holroyd-Wallace campaign began getting publicity in 1985/6, when the Army-Loyalist operations were being organised, may explain why the Holroyd-Wallace revelations were resisted so ferociously by the major media with links to the state.