MI5 and the Anglo-Irish Agreement

Documents show how the Security Service backed hardline officials after 1985 deal

Last week, I looked at some of the evidence that Alan Ferneyhough was a senior MI5 officer in the mid-1980s. One reason this is interesting is that references to Ferneyhough start to appear in Northern Ireland Office (NIO) files in January 1985, not long after the name of another Security Service officer, Harold Doyne-Ditmas, disappears in December 1984.

I believe this is evidence that Ferneyhough succeeded Doyne-Ditmas as Director and Co-ordinator of Intelligence (DCI (NI)), the main intelligence advisor to the Northern Ireland Secretary.

The Shoot-to-kill Affair

This would have been a challenging brief at that particular moment. The Deputy Chief Constable of Greater Manchester Police, John Stalker, was in Northern Ireland investigating a series of shootings in which the RUC had killed IRA suspects. He was after one key piece of evidence in particular, the 'hayshed tape' - the recording of a bug at an IRA arms hide in a disused outhouse where the RUC shot dead teenager Michael Tighe, and injured his friend Martin McCauley. The recording would tell Stalker whether they had given a warning before opening fire.

A senior MI5 officer was present on 14 June 1985 when RUC Chief Constable Sir John Hermon told Stalker that the tape had been destroyed. What nobody told Stalker was that the Security Service still possessed a second copy of the tape, a fact which would lead to strong criticism of MI5 by Stalker's successor, chief Constable Colin Sampson of West Yorkshire Police.

The NIO files I have seen do not tell us what role, if any, Ferneyhough played in these events personally, but they do shed light on MI5's involvement in Northern Ireland at a crucial period, from January 1985 to April 1987, when references to his name peter out, replaced by that of another MI5 officer.

The Anglo-Irish Agreement and after

There are competing accounts of MI5's role at this time. Former agent Willie Carlin claimed that his handlers favoured the growth of Sinn Féin and that military intelligence worked to promote it during the 1980s. Critics of the peace process on both sides have seized on such claims to interpret the end of the troubles in counterintelligence terms. Back-channel negotiations and lethal dirty tricks were seen as a part of a single manipulative carrot and stick strategy, effectively implying that participants in the former were colluding in the latter.

More conventional accounts emphasize that covert diplomacy was at a low ebb for much of the decade, until it was revived by the failure of other strategies. In his new book, Operation Chiffon, Peter Taylor writes:

Politically the second half of the 1980s was marked by Mrs Thatcher's determined attempt to stem the rise of Sinn Féin by signing the Anglo-Irish Agreement with the Irish Taoiseach, Dr Garret Fitzgerald, at Hillsborough Castle on 15 December 1985 (ref 1, p.175).

The Agreement seems to have caused some tension between the London side of the Northern Ireland Office, rooted in the culture of Whitehall, and the Belfast side, based on the departments of the old Stormont government.

In September 1986, A.W. Stephens, the Deputy Secretary at the NIO’s Belfast Office reported on an ‘informal security review’ that he had undertaken with Ferneyhough, Under-Secretary A.J. Innes and the Law and Order Division (LOB) headed by Basil Blackwell.

The report argued that progress in security since the late 1970s was not being maintained. It identified continuing IRA effectiveness in the border areas and the growth of Sinn Fein as factors contributing to a belief in the majority (i.e unionist) community and the security forces that the Government lacked the will to defeat terrorism. It called for the continuation of policies intended to win nationalist support as 'fundamental to the long-term drive to eradicate republican terrorism and erode political support for Sinn Fein.'

The main emphasis was nevertheless on measures designed to reassure unionists in the wake of the Anglo-Irish Agreement. This included assurances on the constitutional future and the counter-terrorist aims of government policy, as well as action against the IRA and Sinn Féin.

Recommendations included a hardening of border security, and the retention of executive detention as an option in the event of a deterioration in the situation. While the authors concluded that proscription of Sinn Fein would be counter-productive, they suggested criminal or electoral sanctions for those who supported proscribed organisations. At the same time, they called for 'pressure on moderate nationalists to declare that they see NI remaining within the UK for the foreseeable future.'

In conclusion the report stated:

There is a pressing need for the Government to act firmly to restore confidence in its Northern Ireland policies, and in its security policy in particular. The Anglo-Irish Agreement will not bring sufficient short-term security benefits to restore stability and reduce tensions. This can only be achieved by early action to curtain [sic] PIRA's operational effectiveness - mainly in border areas - whose malign presence in the political scene here is a major obstacle to political progress.

In a comment of 22 September, D. Chesterton, the Under-Secretary responsible for law and order in the NIO’s London Office, noted the ‘ominous’ reference to executive detention, and stressed the difficulties of devising ‘an effective constraint on Sinn Fein’. He largely dismissed the proposals in favour of focusing on the long-term potential of the Anglo-Irish Agreement.

The difference of emphasis between the London and Belfast wings of the NIO was underlined when the head of the Northern Ireland Civil Service, Sir Kenneth Bloomfield, asked to be included in any further discussion of the review. “While various colleagues have pointed out the difficulties which lie in the way of taking any dramatic initiative on this front, I do think we need to be looking for some very positive signals to the law-abiding community of our determination to continue to confront the IRA and other terrorist organisations.”

The following month Ferneyhough was involved in further discussions with Innes on cross-border security in the context of the Anglo-Irish Agreement. Innes’ subsequent briefing paper pressed for Garda intelligence organisation along the lines of RUC Special Branch, criticizing Irish attempts ‘to establish a link between cross-border security co-operation and relations with the minority community in the north’.

If Willie Carlin was right that MI5 were seeking to build up Sinn Féin at the expense of the IRA, senior Belfast intelligence officers like Ferneyhough would have had a key role, yet the evidence is that he was doing something quite different.

His involvement in the Belfast NIO initiative suggests that, in the mid-1980s, MI5 still saw Sinn Féin as a subversive dimension of the IRA threat rather than a potential interlocutor in a political process.

References

Ref 1: Peter Taylor, Operation Chiffon: The Secret Story of MI5 and MI6 and the road to peace in Ireland, Bloomsbury, 2023.

Other sources

Willie Carlin, Thatcher's Spy: My Life as an MI5 agent inside Sinn Féin, Merrion Press, 2019.

Ian Cobain, Northern Ireland: when Britain fought terror with terror, Guardian, 9 July 2015.

John Stalker, Stalker: Ireland, 'Shoot to Kill' and the 'Affair', Penguin Books, 1988

National Archives: CJ4/6321 Security: general