The Other View

Collusion or Infiltration

by Billy Mitchell
The views expressed in this article are the personal views of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of any party or group with which he is associated.

Allegations of collusion between the security forces and loyalist paramilitaries have been so well rehearsed that political commentators, journalists and academics accept almost every allegation as a matter of established fact. The subject of collusion is now being written in to almost every armed action ever undertaken by loyalists, and with each fresh allegation comes the ritual demand for an inquiry.

Allegations of structured collusion usually come through journalists from unnamed sources “close to” either the security forces or loyalist paramilitaries. “Unnamed sources” can mean anything from disgruntled or disgraced security force personnel with an axe to grind to conmen living by their wits on the fringes of the paramilitary underworld. In many cases the “unnamed sources” are a cover for creative imagination on the part of the journalist. Since the signing of the Belfast Agreement ‘republican’-based front groups whose spokespersons appear to suffer from amnesia when it comes to talking about the armed activities of ‘republicans’ have joined in the chorus.

Collusion necessitates a formal agreement between two or more parties to act in concert, and collusion on the scale alleged by ‘republican’ front groups would have required agreement at the highest level within the command structures of both the security forces and the several loyalist organisations. This would necessarily include the Army GOC, Chief Constable, Security Minister and the most senior paramilitary figures. It is inconceivable that a conspiracy to collude on such a scale could ever have been formed let alone implemented, and not one shred of evidence has been produced to confirm that it was. But, as the saying goes, if you repeat a lie often enough people will start to believe it.

Again, collusion on the scale alleged by ‘republican’ front groups would have required a strategic programme of action that was endorsed by the several arms of the security forces as well as the several wings of loyalist paramilitarism. If, as we must suppose, the key objective in any effective military strategy by the state against anti-state forces is to isolate and eliminate those who pose a military threat to the state and its loyal citizens, such collusion would have called for joint action in the strategic targeting and elimination of key anti-state militarists. Yet there is no evidence that such a joint strategy ever existed on a grand scale.

The strategy of the security forces was to manage the conflict by restricting it to a politically acceptable level of violence (provided the violence remained this side of the Irish Sea). In fact it was because there was no clear evidence that the security forces were allowed to pursue an active programme of isolation and elimination that loyalist paramilitaries developed beyond their original role as street defence groups. The strategy of loyalist paramilitaries was to punish the anti-state nationalist community for the ‘sins’ of its secret army through a campaign of retaliation and terror. That clearly ran counter to the security force policy of conflict management and containment. With two conflicting approaches to the conflict there were no strategic grounds for collusion.

One analysis of the deaths from the conflict in Northern Ireland, compiled by a credible academic, reveals that between 1969 and 2001 loyalists were responsible for killing 729 civilians, 42 members of anti-state armed groups and 31 anti-state political activists. This would support the belief that the loyalist response to anti-state terror was one of random retaliation and not one of conflict management and containment. If the random targeting of members of the nationalist community was the loyalist response to anti-state terrorism, and the statistics would tend to support that this generally was the case, there would have been no need for a strategic programme of collusion with the security forces. The random targeting of people and property within a single-identity community did not require sophisticated intelligence gathering or security force support.

The infiltration of local security force structures by members of loyalist groups is a very different matter, and it is reasonable to assume that such infiltration did happen. Indeed it is not only reasonable to assume that it happened; it would be wholly unreasonable to assume that it didn’t happen. It is part and parcel of human nature. Anyone who believes that it did not happen, or that it should not have happened, is naïve in the extreme. There are a number of valid reasons why loyalists would want to join elements of the local security forces – intelligence gathering and military training being among them.

One would assume that loyalist groups would have been keen to know, as accurately as possible, what was going on in terms of security force movements at certain times in certain areas. They would also have an interest in finding out what information the security forces had on armed anti-state groups. Loyalists had a duty to their organisations, and to their communities, to embrace every opportunity available to them to enhance their capability to retaliate for attacks on their community. To move their response away from random retaliatory action to a more strategic policy of isolation and elimination it would have required loyalists to build up a profile of who was who within the various armed, civil and political wings of anti-state organisations. The infiltration of local security force units would appear to be an obvious means of doing this.

Infiltration is not collusion. It does not require mutual knowledge, understanding or agreement. In fact the opposite is true. Infiltration is best achieved when the organisation being infiltrated has no knowledge or understanding of what is happening. If recruitment statistics take account of the reason why individuals were refused admission to the local security forces I am confident that a fair percentage of those turned down were turned down because they were thought to have militant loyalist sympathies or associations.

Again, if statistics relating to disciplinary action taken against members of the local security forces are available they will reveal that members found to be aligned to, or suspected of being aligned to, loyalist organisations were regularly disciplined and discharged.
The onus is on the critics of the security forces to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that there was any state policy to turn a blind eye to loyalist infiltration of local security force units. On the other hand, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that rigorous vetting often frustrated loyalist attempts to effect large scale infiltration. There is also a verifiable body of evidence to show that when members of the security forces were identified as having been engaged in loyalist paramilitary actions they were arrested and, if found guilty in court, imprisoned.

It must also be acknowledged that elements of the security forces infiltrated both loyalist and republican organisations with a view to gathering intelligence, creating dissension and generally undermining the operational capabilities of those organisations. Republicans, no less than loyalists and the security forces, engaged in infiltration of some form or other. No one should be surprised that such activities were common practice during the past thirty-odd years of armed conflict.

Any armed group that is serious about its involvement in conflict must accept that both it, and its civil and political arms, are always open to infiltration by enemy agents. That is a risk that comes with the job and, because it is practiced by all sides, should never be cause for complaint. What is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.

The idea that a loyalist couldn’t break wind without his ‘handler’ advising him where and when to do it is part and parcel of the re-writing of the history of the ‘troubles’ by ‘republican’ and nationalist propagandists. Anti-state violence, and most certainly anti-unionist violence, is gradually being written out of the history of the past thirty years as revisionist ‘republicans’ seek to portray their armed struggle as a struggle for peace and reconciliation as opposed to an anti-state and anti-unionist struggle. (How do those involved in a violent campaign against the existence of the state end up as the self-proclaimed champions of state institutions? History has to be rewritten to justify ‘republicans’ administering British rule in Northern Ireland). An essential part of this revision is to write loyalists out of the conflict as a working-class community response to anti-state terror and to re-brand them as the creation and tools of the security forces.

It is against this background of ideological and historical revisionism that ‘republican’ front groups are pursuing a campaign of defamation against the security forces. Since the self-proclaimed architects of the peace process cannot be made accountable for their past actions someone else has to be; and who better than the security forces! Hence the ghoulish trawl through the list of deaths and injuries attributable to loyalists in an effort to link the security forces to as many incidents as possible. The dead and injured have been shanghaied into service as front-line activists in a campaign of vilification and denigration against the security forces.

This re-opening of wounds in an attempt to make one combatant force a scapegoat for all of the hurts of the past thirty-odd years is one of the core reasons why the so-called peace process is now being viewed with a great deal of suspicion by many who genuinely believe in authentic peace-building. Indeed, for many, the ‘peace process’ is seen simply an extension of the ‘republican’ war effort. Clearly the war is not over, it is just being pursued by other more devious means.

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