The British Intelligence War Against the Irish Republican Army (IRA)

Can intelligence wars ‘win’ small-scale conflicts for the state against politically violent groups? The importance of this question in relation to Northern Ireland emerged after 2005. By that point, two senior Irish Republican Army (IRA) members were revealed as long-term informers for British intelligence, including the man who had been the IRA’s chief spy hunter. These revelations led to many academics and journalists concluding that the IRA ‘lost’ the intelligence war. Alongside other factors, they suggested that the intelligence war helped force the IRA into peace by 1998. In their view, British intelligence ‘won the war’ (for examples, see Thomas Hennessey 2009; John Bew, Martyn Frampton, Inigo Gurruchaga 2009; Ed Moloney 2007). Yet there was no dedicated academic study of this topic to justify this conclusion. My new book 'The Intelligence War Against the IRA' (Cambridge University Press, 2020) offers the first detailed study of this topic. It provides a nuanced regional analysis of the intelligence conflict against the IRA. In this paper, I evaluate the effectiveness of the British intelligence war against the IRA. This research cross-references new interview material with conflict participants alongside statistics, memoirs, Irish and UK archival material. I provide four reasons to explain why the IRA was not facing terminal decline because of the intelligence war by the 1990s. First, many rural IRA units had an elusive nature. Second, the cellular structure of the IRA in Belfast and Derry city provided at times extra security for these units after 1975. Third, the IRA leadership proved difficult to infiltrate because of its isolation from the rest of the organization, permitting high-profile IRA operations in England and arms shipments from Libya to occur frequently. The fourth factor is that the nature of some British intelligence operations against the IRA maintained and increased IRA support in parts of Northern Ireland, prolonging the conflict. Together, these factors limited the effectiveness of the intelligence war against the IRA. I build on Niall Ó Dochartaigh’s work to further suggest that the IRA’s persistent campaign and sizeable minority of the Irish Catholic electoral vote in the north of Ireland by the 1990s actually convinced the British government to include Irish republicans in political negotiations in the 1990s. I explain how political factors better explain why the IRA ended its armed campaign in 1998. The conflict ended in a military and political stalemate. All conflict participants had to accept political compromises by 1998 to varying degrees based on their electoral mandates to create peace and in order to further their achievement of their political objectives. This paper engages with various broader questions in political violence. Can intelligence wars against paramilitary groups be effective? When should governments talk to politically violent groups? Do particular actions by the state actually encourage further political violence and support for paramilitaries? Does regional variation help explain the outbreak, persistence and conclusion of political violence?