MI5 or MI6: Who was really running Operation Chiffon?

The upcoming anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement has produced a surfeit of BBC documentaries on intelligence in the early years of the peace process.

Earlier, this week Spotlight covered David Rupert's infiltration of dissident republicanism in the late 1990s. Tonight, Peter Taylor, a distinguished veteran of the Northern Ireland intelligence beat, returns to the subject of the back-channel which kicked off the process a few years earlier.

The programme goes out tonight at 7pm in Britain and 21.50 in Northern Ireland, but Kirstie Brewer's BBC report already has some intriguing new details.

[A British spy] has revealed he met IRA leaders in March 1993, despite talks being called off by the British government after IRA bombs killed two young boys in England.

What he said in that meeting encouraged them to declare the ceasefire and move towards the process that eventually led to the 1998 Good Friday Agreement.

The BBC's Peter Taylor has been trying to find the spy for almost 30 years.

He has discovered that what the spy said during the talks was not authorised by the British government.

While this spy, 'Robert' is described as an MI5 officer, the link between the British Government and the IRA was originally run by MI6 (or SIS) members such as Frank Steele and Michael Oatley, the latter of whom re-opened the connection to Martin McGuinness in the early 1990s.

Tony Blair's Northern Ireland point-man, Jonathan Powell, wrote in 2008:

Stella Rimington, then the Director General of the Security Service (MI5), was vehemently opposed to the idea of the SIS, which was normally confined to operations overseas, treading on their turf in this way, but the Security Service's Director and Co-ordinator of Intelligence in Northern Ireland, who had worked closely with Oatley on Arab terrorism, supported the initiative. Still, MI5 insisted that the operation had to be mounted by one of their staff and found for the role a retired senior SIS officer who had recently been re-employed by the Security Service (ref 1).

Stephen Dorril's history of MI6 suggests that the DCI who backed Oatley was John Deverell:

Although when the retiring Oatley passed on the mantle to an MI5 officer, he had the support of the MI5 Co-ordinator of Intelligence in Northern Ireland, John Deverell, the process faced near-collapse following the death of Deverell in a helicopter crash. MI5 Director-General Stella Rimington was a hardliner who briefed Prime Minister John Major that McGuinness and Adams were IRA members and could not be trusted. Privately, senior MI6 officers accused their MI5 counterparts of being 'a bunch of idiots' whose efforts had sabotaged the process (ref 2).

The BBC's new account suggests that even Deverell was out of the loop:

After hours spent soul-searching in the countryside south of Stormont, the spy resolved to go ahead, defying his boss John Deverell, the head of MI5 in Northern Ireland who had ordered him not to go.

Senior republicans Martin McGuinness and Gerry Kelly were at the meeting, representing the leadership of the IRA and Sinn Fein. It lasted around three hours and took place in Londonderry at the home of Brendan Duddy, a nationalist businessman passionate about peace. The republicans had expected Robert to be accompanied by his boss, and were suspicious that he had turned up alone.

The upshot seems to be that MI5 moved in on an MI6 operation, appointing to run it a former MI6 officer who promptly ignored them. The obvious question is whether 'Robert's' previous employers were happier with his bold step than his new ones. Perhaps tonight's programme will shed further light.

One reason why all this matters is that republican critics of the peace process have claimed that the Good Friday Agreement was the 'product of British state strategies.'

In one sense this is trivially true. The British Government was a key party to the agreement and the diplomats and intelligence officers who brought it about were colleagues of the counter-terrorism agent-runners who were infiltrating the IRA at the same time.

This does not, however, prove the larger claim that those agent infiltration was used as part of a strategy to support the growth of Sinn Féin rather than simply degrade the IRA, and that republicans were manipulated into supporting the Good Friday Agreement.

Willie Carlin and Freddie Scappaticci were not part of a grand plan to nudge republicans towards politics. Indeed, for much of the 1980s, prior to the appointment of John Deverell, the MI5 DCIs who oversaw agent-handling in Northern Ireland were sympathetic to measures to constrain the electoral progress of Sinn Féin.

Certainly, 'Robert's' actions could be described as manipulative, to his own colleagues as well as republicans, but the unreliability of his promises about Irish unity was already exposed by the collapse of the back-channel under John Major, well before the Good Friday Agreement.

A decade ago, with the DUP holding the whip hand at Stormont, it is easy to see why some republicans might have subscribed to the conspiracy theory of the peace process, but at this particular post-Brexit moment things looks very different. 'Robert' may not have had the imprimatur of the British Government when he said: 'The final solution is union. It is going to happen anyway. The historical train - Europe - determines that. Unionists will have to change. This island will be as one.' That doesn't mean he was wrong.

References

Ref 1: Jonathan Powell, Great Hatred Little Room: Making Peace in Northern Ireland, The Bodley Head, 2008, p.71.

Ref 2: Stephen Dorril, MI6: Inside the Covert World of Her Majesty's Secret Intelligence Service, Fourth Estate Limited, 2000, p.741.