In a second review this month published by Aspects of History, I review Peter Taylor’s book Operation Chiffon.
This was a difficult book to review. On the one hand, I feel that Taylor gives too much of a free pass to the ‘men of violence’ of the PIRA and INLA who brought such outrageous terrorism to Northern Ireland and Great Britain during the years of the troubles, violence which Sinn Fein are attempting to describe today as a legal pursuit of war by a bona fide belligerent. None of this is, of course, true. The terrorists always had recourse to a wide wide array of peaceful mechanisms in our democracy for settling the demands for better representation for Catholics in Northern Ireland. The truth, as we all know, is that violence was deployed precisely because the PIRA and INLA knew they would never achieve their ultimate political ends using a peaceful road alone. They believed that violence would scare ‘the Brits’ back to the mainland. Violence was, in the end, defeated in Northern Ireland, and the terrorists knew it then and Sinn Fein know it now.
Nevertheless, the book is important historically, for revealing the so-called ‘back channel’ (as nasty a euphemism for the PIRA and INLA as I can imagine) into the terrorist organisation for British interlocutors from MI6 and MI5.
This is both a fascinating and uncomfortable book. Fascinating, because it tells the story of the authorised and (sometimes) unauthorised MI6 and then MI5 ‘back channel’ to the IRA (first the Official and then the Provisionals) during the troubles in Northern Ireland. In retrospect, this was fundamentally important to the peace process. It provided the IRA a way out of the no-through-road of violence, allowing tentative conversations to take place about peace with London when they recognised that the Armalite and the bomb alone would no longer achieve their war aims. It also allowed the British Government, even at the height of the IRA campaign, to assure the IRA that when they wanted to talk, the door would be open. Uncomfortable, because what the authorised representatives of the British Government were doing, mostly officially but sometimes entirely without superior sanction, was vehemently denied in public and belied the protestations of successive administrations in Westminster that they would never talk to terrorists. These representatives were talking to the IRA within three days of the murder of two children in Warrington in March 1993.
As a young soldier in the Province during Operation Banner tours in the 1980s, I and my colleagues knew that the war would come to an end one day, and that it would come about not by defeating the terrorists on the field of battle (this is rarely if ever possible in an insurgency), but by oppressive security measures (which included the use of Army, Police, and Intelligence) that denied the IRA the fruits of their terrorism. The evidence suggests that we were right to believe that this strategy would work, exhausting the will of the terrorists to continue their campaign to the bitter, violent (and successful) military, end. Instead, despite what Sinn Fein is currently attempting to deny in its blatant re-writing of history, the IRA had to accept that the British government would never give up on Northern Ireland as an intrinsic part of the United Kingdom, without the express wish of the majority of people in the Province to leave. The ‘Armalite and Ballot Box’ strategy adopted by the IRA in the 1980s allowed it to pursue both political and military routes to their end goal. The IRA thus had a way out of a military strategy which as the 1980s ran its course began to seem unlikely to be achieved. The British weren’t going anywhere, and the original IRA assumption that, like the Anglo-Irish war of 1916-1921, the British would soon tire of dead soldiers and policemen and would leave the Province to its squabbling inhabitants, proved to be wide of the mark. It was in these circumstances that the ‘back channel’ through a courageous Derry business man, Brendan Duddy proved to be incredibly useful in allowing the IRA to have a means of communicating directly with London, and vice versa.
The book demonstrates that, as is so often the case in war, the personal agency of one or a small group of people, can play an outsized role in determining its beginning, its progress and its end. Two particular MI6/5 agents together with the Brendan Duddy made this possible, at great personal cost.
This is an excellent book, though I cannot agree with all of Taylor’s assertions, not least that during the 1921 negotiations it was accepted by London that this would be a temporary affair, and that the Unionist North would one day be united with the remainder of Ireland. I also think that his assertions about the consequences of Brexit are too uncritical, lazily assuming without convincing argument that the Good Friday Agreement was put at risk by the act of Britain leaving the EU. As the ending of the Troubles demonstrate, it was the active agency of a small number of brave interlocutors that assisted in the construction of peace. Surely, the resolution of post-Brexit difficulties is small fry in comparison?