The IRD in Northern Ireland

By Tom Griffin 9 October 2007

In his June 2006 obituary for Fr Dennis Faul, Dean Godson suggested that the life of the Irish human rights campaigner ‘offers profound lessons for democracies on how to fight, and not to fight, terrorism.’

Godson may well be right, but for reasons other than those he intended.  As he acknowledges, Faul was labelled a ‘Provo priest’ by his critics. The irony is that this smear originated in precisely the kind of ‘political warfare’ that Godson advocates.

“During the Cold War, organisations such as the Information Research Department of the Foreign Office would assert the superiority of the West over its totalitarian rivals,” Godson wrote in an earlier Times article from April 2006. “For any kind of truly moderate Islam to flourish, we need first to recapture our own self-confidence. At the moment, the extremists largely have the field to themselves.”

The Information Research Department (IRD) was founded in the early days of the Cold War by Christopher Mayhew , a junior Labour Minister and veteran of the wartime Special Operations Executive.

One of the first people Mayhew hired for the new organization was the KGB spy Guy Burgess. The Soviets were therefore aware of the IRD’s activities from the beginning, although the British public were to remain in the dark for many years.

In his history of MI6 , Stephen Dorril concludes that disinformation was a routine part of the IRD’s activities:  “Although IRD apologists have always denied it, ‘black’ material such as forgeries, lies and fabrications was disseminated for use by its own outlets and by MI6-funded radio stations and news agencies. By the organisation’s engagement in these ‘cowboy’ operations, however, the more worthwhile task became tainted.”

This pattern was replicated when Edward Heath’s government brought the IRD into the propaganda war against the IRA in the early 1970s. The first IRD officer to arrive in Northern Ireland was Hugh Mooney in June 1971. He was followed a month later by Clifford Hill, who compiled a report on information requirements that was circulated in September 1971.
Hill called for the appointment of a press liason officer, who would “ensure close liaison between the information agencies in Northern Ireland, London and overseas, to plan a systematic campaign of propaganda, and to cultivate visiting journalists. He will be concerned with all information activities.”

Hill’s report noted that “a senior Army officer is joining the HQ staff (temporarily) and will be made available for contact work ‘downtown’ in close contact with the Press Liason Office” This was Col Maurice Tugwell who was seconded to the IRD by the Chief of the General Staff, Lord Carver.

The report were accepted by the Prime Minister and Hill himself was appointed to the press liason post. On 15 October, Downing Street Press Secretary Sir Donald Maitland invited the Home Office, the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defence to join a liason committee to oversee Hill’s work .

In a 2002 statement to the Bloody Sunday Inquiry, Sir Donald claimed he had little involvement with the IRD. However, in a letter to the Prime Minister on 4 November 1971, he stated: “The liaison group, consisting of representatives of No. 10, the Home Office, the Ministry of Defence and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, met under my chairmanship with Clifford Hill this morning. We agreed on Hill’s tasks and objectives.”

“Parallel with this committee, Sir Dick White, Norman Reddaway and I have decided on the machinery for placing anti I.R.A. propaganda in the British press and media. This machinery is already in operation. Its first major task will be to produce articles which will counteract the effect of the Compton Report.”

It is interesting that the notion of countering IRA propaganda should have extended to countering a report on internment by a British civil servant which found that the sensory deprivation techniques used on internees did not amount to torture .

The targets of the British state’s information operations machinery in Belfast would later be extended far beyond the IRA and even Ireland. The tasks set out for Clifford Hill presaged the way this would be justified. The brief sent to the Prime Minister by Maitland concluded: “The IRA’s connections with other urban guerrilla organizations should be emphasised in order to show that the hard core Provisionals have ambitions quite unconnected with the status of the Catholic minority in Northern Ireland or indeed with partition.”

This is an absurd statement given that only two years before, the Provisionals had split from the Official IRA precisely because the latter’s Marxist priorities had led it to take a relatively passive stance at the outbreak of the Troubles in 1969.

The same apparent lack of understanding was evident in an appraisal of IRA propaganda produced by Col Tugwell on 9 November:

IRA Propaganda Organisation
7. IRA propaganda has its base in Dublin where both factions run their own information centres, both with the title "Irish Republican Publicity Bureau." Each has a full time staff and has subordinate directors in Belfast, Londonderry and elsewhere. The campaign is pushed by numerous front organisations and by Republican sympathisers who, having themselves been taken in by the propaganda, are willing to spread the word. These organisations include:
a. The Association for Legal Justice (which has been the principal agency for co-ordinating the campaign alleging brutality during internment and interrogation).
b. Republican Clubs (which have always been fronts for the Sinn Fein political party and which now help to disseminate the propaganda of whichever faction they have chosen to support).
c. The Belfast Central Citizens Defence Committee (once given a cloak of respectability as representative of the Catholic population of the city, but now heavily involved in promoting IRA interests).
d. The Irish News (a newspaper that has long represented Republican opinion in Ulster and is now an organ for printing IRA propaganda).
e. Catholic Ex-Servicemans Association (is becoming increasingly involved with the IRA as a front organisation).
f. NICRA (Directed by Kevin McCorry)
g. Various Relief and Action Committees in Catholic Areas.
h. Minority Rights Association.
j. Various regional Citizens Defence Committees working to the CCDC.
k. SDLP.
l. PD and other "New Left" organisations.
m. Vigilante or street committees, who organise allegations and fake damage, etc.
n. University groups and teachers.
o. RTE and newspapers in the Republic to varying degrees, with the Irish Press particularly active.
p. Committee for Truth (Fr Denis Faul - brutality allegations vehicle).
q. Association of Irish Priests (Ulster Branch) (Secretary Terrance O'Keefe, Coleraine University)).
r. A number of RC priests, but Frs Brady, Faul and Egan are prominent.

This remarkable document reads as if it were written on the assumption that any organisation criticizing British policy in Ireland must be an IRA front. This definition was wide enough to draw in not only human rights activists like Fr Faul, but the Irish state broadcaster, establishment newspapers and the main constitutional nationalist party in the North.

Col Tugwell’s view of ordinary nationalists was equally jaundiced:

So long as it appears to the majority of Catholics that the British Army is a threat to their community by acting as an "instrument of Stormont" and is believed by many as being an obstacle to their political aspirations they can be expected to believe most of IRA statements; and as long as they believe they repeat. The indigenous Irish, once convinced that their cause is just, possess a breath-taking ability to lie with absolute conviction, not just in support of something they believe to be true, but to put across a story they know very well is untrue. In this way, convincing witnesses can invariably be produced at a moment's notice to sell whatever line the IRA consider to be to their advantage. Members of the IRA and their supporting propaganda agencies have good contacts in high places in the various media newspapers, radio and television, who can guide them over publicity at short notice. The Irish are also remarkably adept at picking up and repeating propaganda points they hear being expounded by their leaders, both political and IRA, on the radio and television.

Even though it was intended for internal consumption, it is difficult to know whether this document was the product of calculated disinformation, genuine paranoia or a confused mixture of the two.

Col Tugwell told the Bloody Sunday Inquiry that his staff branch, Information Policy, did not engage in psychological warfare. However, his evidence was contradicted by Colin Wallace, an army press officer who worked with the unit.

“Senior Intelligence officers from London came to Northern Ireland and ‘saw’ communist figures involved in various civil rights and protest groups. This in turn gave credence to the theory of a world-wide terrorist conspiracy. There were a number of organisations in Britain that were sympathetic to the IRA without really understanding what the IRA was about. The paranoia took on a level of importance which it did not merit, but nonetheless, it existed.”
Wallace presumably did not know that playing up this theory was part of the IRD’s brief from the Whitehall Liason Committee chaired by Sir Donald Maitland. Ironically, the focus of Information Policy’s propaganda would eventually be turned back on Downing Street itself with the Clockwork Orange operation, which Wallace described in his second statement to the Bloody Sunday Inquiry.

“Clockwork Orange was designed to target sectarian assassination groups by psychological means to reduce their effectiveness,” Wallace testified. “After the first general election in 1974 the targets changed to focus more on left wing groups and Labour politicians. “
An example of this black propaganda is attached to Wallace’s statement as appendix five . 

Supposedly written by an IRA defector, it includes a reference to Wilson’s meeting with the IRA in March 1972.

“I believe that the pieces relating to Harold Wilson were included by the Security Service to demonstrate that the Labour Government’s policies in Northern Ireland were helpful to or approved by the IRA,” Wallace testified.

In late 1974, Wallace refused to have anything further to do with Clockwork Orange. He was suspended a few months later, ostensibly for passing documents to the journalist Robert Fisk.

Although the Security Service, MI5, denies it to this day, there is ample evidence that some of its officers were plotting against Wilson. As well as the accounts of Wallace and of Peter Wright, there is the testimony of Wilson himself. In August 1975, Wilson called in the head of MI6, Maurice Oldfield, who admitted that elements of MI5 were unreliable. Oldfield was the source for accounts of this meeting by former MI6 agent Anthony Cavendish and journalist Chapman Pincher. Wilson recounted his version to BBC journalists Barry Penrose and Roger Courtiour.

Wilson told both Pincher and Penrose that he had then called in the head of MI5, Michael Hanley, who also admitted the existence of the plot.

Last year, a BBC documentary broadcast a recording of Wilson asking Penrose and Courtiour to investigate the affair. One of his suggestions was that they interview Colin Wallace.

Wallace’s knowledge of Clockwork Orange may have had fateful consequences for him. When an acquaintance of his, Jonathan Lewis, was found dead in 1980, Wallace was convicted of his manslaughter and served six years in prison. His case was taken up the investigative journalist Paul Foot , who suggested he had been framed by the secret state.

In 1990, the British Government admitted for the first time to the existence of Clockwork Orange and Wallace’s role in it, although it continued to deny the operation had targeted British politicians. His murder conviction was not overturned until 1996.

By this time the IRD had long since ceased to exist. It was abolished by Labour Foreign Secretary David Owen in 1977, amid concerns about its relationship to right-wing journalists.
It is clear from the IRD’s record in Northern Ireland what a revival of its methods would mean.

It would signify a resort to disinformation, ostensibly for enemy consumption, that would soon find its way into intelligence analyses and the domestic media.  It would mean the paranoid condemnation of all opponents as the dupes of a monolithic terrorist conspiracy. Above all it would mean the exploitation of national security concerns to justify domestic political manipulation by unaccountable elites.

Perhaps it is not surprising that this example commends itself to today’s neoconservatives.