Martin Ingram on British Spies in N Ireland

Martin Ingram, a pseudonym, was a British Army (Force Research Unit) covert agent in Northern Ireland.

cryptome: ... Let us move on to the topical issue of agents. Mr Adams and Mr McGuinness know, only too well, how and why agents operate? They operate to provide both tactical and strategic intelligence upon the target and to allow the persons charged with operating those agents to make informed decisions. Those decisions will be designed to disrupt the effective running of the target and to influence its' own decisions into areas which are controllable and desired. In other words make the enemy do what you want it to do without it knowing because you want that target to operate for as long as possible believing it is operating to its own agenda.

Now when we all stop smirking we can get back to the serious business.

If you are a Republican one would assume rightly you would be asking the following question of the movement. How do we counter this type of activity? (Espionage - or spying for the layman).

The obvious questions a republican should have been asking over the last twenty-five years are some of the following.

Firstly, you would put yourself in your enemies mind and work out your own Vulnerable Points (VP). You would then - armed with this information - develop a sophisticated security department, whose sole job would be to analyse and expose any agents who work against your interests, just like the Brits have. It would be manned by dedicated and trustworthy individuals and rotated and at unpredictable intervals to disrupt any long-term infiltration. Republicans would know that the one unit in its army that could cause the most harm if compromised would be the Security/ Intelligence Department.

What did the IRA do under Adams/McGuinness leadership? It established a unit manned by one ex-British marine ( J J Magee) and promoted [db link] Freddie Scappaticci to his deputy. Read more