When did the DCIs back the peace process?
Counter-subversion and intelligence diplomacy in Northern Ireland
Welcome! I’m Tom Griffin and this is my intelligence history newsletter. Feel free to share this post with the button below.
There’s been something of a spate of stories on the intelligence dimension of the Irish Troubles recently. I was particularly struck by this from the Belfast Telegraph this morning:
The most senior MI5 officer in Northern Ireland told Margaret Thatcher that a political push by Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness could be “a development to be encouraged”, according to a new book.
David Ranson, who was the Director and Co-Ordinator of Intelligence here, expressed his view in a letter to the Prime Minister in 1981. It followed secret negotiations between the security services and the Provisionals to try to end the H-Block hunger strike.
The correspondence is revealed in ‘Four Shots in the Night: A True Story of Espionage, Murder and Justice in Northern Ireland’ by Henry Hemming who discovered it in the National Archives in Kew.1
I was all the more intrigued because I wrote about what looks like the same quote for openDemocracy in 2012. I have not yet seen how it is interpreted in Henry Hemming’s book, but in context, I believe its significance is almost the opposite of that attributed to it by the Belfast Telegraph.
A key document in this respect is an intelligence-based analysis of the IRA prepared for Mrs Thatcher on 16 March 1981 by Northern Ireland Office (NIO) official David Ranson. Ranson is known from other sources to have been a senior MI5 officer, who went on to head the service's counter-terrorism branch. His role at the NIO and his attendance at top security meetings suggest that at this period he was the Director and Co-ordinator of Intelligence, the senior intelligence advisor to the Northern Ireland Secretary.
If British intelligence had been using agents of influence to undermine the republican movement by nudging it towards electoral politics, Ranson would have been among the key officials involved. In fact, however, he warned against the assumptions underlying such a strategy:
From time to time and in particular at the beginning of this year - we have considered whether and under what circumstances the Provisionals might switch the focus of their efforts to the political front - it has sometimes been thought that a consequence of this might be a reduction in the amount of energy and effort they put into their terrorist campaign.
The reality is of course that they have for some months been devoting increasing effort to political action, while continuing the "military campaign" at the lower level which their now limited capabilities permit...
...We have tended to regard the involvement of the Provisionals in political activity as a development to be encouraged. but it is a development that requires a response from Government, as their terrorist activities receive a response...
...to take no action in the face of the Provisionals effective political campaign centred on the hunger strikes is not standing firm, but is admitting defeat in the political arena. This will be proved to be so as the Provisionals gather wider support with serious implications for security and law and order.2
Ranson, an experienced MI5 counter-subversion officer was if anything warning of the risks of the hunger strike negotiations being pursued by MI6’s Michael Oatley.
I believe there is enough evidence in the National Archives and elsewhere to begin to characterise the role of each of the Directors and Co-ordinators of Intelligence (DCIs) from the inception of the office in 1972 until the early years of the peace process.
Neither MI5 nor MI6 was a monolith, but I have yet to see evidence that any MI5 officer supported peace process-style political engagement with Sinn Féin before 1990.
The first DCI, Fred Rowley, was an MI6 officer who probably supported the early efforts of his colleague Oatley to conduct intelligence diplomacy with the IRA.
All of Rowley’s successors were MI5 officers. The first of these was Denis Payne who Oatley later described as ‘openly hostile to the whole exercise.’3
Payne was succeeded by John Cradock. A former SOE officer of Tipperary extraction on his mother’s side, Cradock told the Joint Intelligence Committee in January 1976 that current strategy ‘involved encouraging the Provisionals to continue to lose their way politically and preventing the Protestant groups from uniting and supporting obstinate and unacceptable political aims.’
Cradock’s successor John Parker was one of the most mysterious of the DCIs I have examined, although Stephen Dorril reports that he later headed MI5’s S Branch.4
Parker was succeeded by David Ranson. His warning against allowing the Provisionals to ‘gather wider support with serious implications for security and law and order’ suggests the counter-subversion approach one might expect from an officer who went on to head F Branch during the 1984 Miners’ strike.
Ranson’s successor, Harold Doyne-Ditmas supported calls for the proscription of Sinn Féin after the Harrods Bombing of 1983, arguing that ‘circumstances in the last couple of weeks (Darkley, Edgar Graham, Don Tidey, Harrods) have cumulatively given us the opportunity, which will pass if we do not seize it, to hit the Provisionals really hard where it hurts by taking away, or at least severely disrupting, the political prong of their two-pronged strategy.’5
Doyne-Ditmas’ successor, Alan Ferneyhough, took part in a 1986 study group within the Belfast branch of the Northern Ireland Office which considered measures to support ‘the long-term drive to eradicate republican terrorism and erode political support for Sinn Fein.' The study reflected significant tensions within the NIO in the wake of the Anglo-Irish Agreement and was rejected in London in part because of the difficulties of devising ‘an effective constraint on Sinn Fein’.
Ferneyhough was replaced in 1987 by Michael Knight, another relatively little-known officer, although according to Dorril, he headed MI5’s B3 section in the early 1980s.6
It was only with the arrival of John Deverell that we find an MI5 officer involved in political contacts with Sinn Féin. Deverell had worked with Oatley on the Middle East in the late 1980s, and his role in Northern Ireland has been extensively documented by Peter Taylor. It was with Deverell, around 1990, that MI5 became involved in running the back-channel initiated by MI6.
The evidence above suggests that MI5 penetration operations prior to that point were not aimed at strengthening Sinn Féin at the expense of the IRA, but at undermining both wings of the republican movement.
Northern Ireland's new chief constable, Jon Boutcher, recently described claims that Britain's penetration agent 'Stakeknife' in the IRA was ‘the goose that laid the golden eggs’ - as 'rooted in fables and fairy tales.'7 The reinterpretation of the peace process based on such fables, conflating intelligence diplomacy with intelligence penetration, took root in the early 2000s. It may have shaped ideas about the ‘British way in counterinsurgency’ on the eve of the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan.8
In 2012, I wrote that ‘the conspiracy theory of the peace process is a dangerous myth.’ It implies that the tortuous political negotiations in Northern Ireland, the two referendums North and South, were simply a facade for an outcome pre-cooked by the spooks decades earlier. That myth risks giving succour to those who oppose the peace in Ireland, and misleading those who seek to replicate it elsewhere.
Suzanne Breen, ‘MI5 wanted to aid Sinn Fein’s growth so IRA would end armed campaign’, Belfast Telegraph, 29 March 2024.
Tom Griffin, The conspiracy theory of the peace process is a dangerous myth, openDemocracy, 27 June 2012.
Martin Pearse, Spymaster: The Life of Britain's Most Decorated Cold War Spy and Head of MI6, Sir Maurice Oldfield, Corgi, 2017, p.323.
Stephen Dorril, The Silent Conspiracy: Inside the Intelligence Services in the 1990s, Mandarin, 1994, p.486.
Eamon Phoenix, NI state papers: Government considered proscribing Sinn Féin, BBC News, 27 December 2013.
Stephen Dorril, The Silent Conspiracy: Inside the Intelligence Services in the 1990s, Mandarin, 1994, p.485.
OPERATION KENOVA NORTHERN IRELAND ‘STAKEKNIFE’ LEGACY INVESTIGATION, Interim Report of Jon Boutcher QPM, 2024, p.36.
The confusion of intelligence diplomacy and intelligence penetration was a specific issue in Afghanistan. See Stephen Grey, The New Spymasters: Inside Espionage from the Cold War to the War to Global Terror, Penguin, 2015, p.240. This is not to say that the boundary between the two is always clear, or that the existence of penetration agents might not influence back-channel negotiations. This may have been one reason for the 2005 exposure of Denis Donaldson, an agent inside Sinn Féin.