More than luck to dissident failures
"THIS has been one great piece of work by the wee man with the stick that goes 'beep beep'. He's really excelled himself this time". That was how a senior RUC Special Branch officer batted away my questions about how a major consignment of loyalist weapons was intercepted at Belfast docks in 1993.
Of course he was joking. The weapons, concealed in a shipment of tiles from the Baltic, hadn't just been detected as part of a routine sweep with a metal detector. The police had made their own good luck when they seized the weaponry.
As it later emerged, the UVF haul had been the result of painstaking intelligence work in three countries. It constituted a major sting that robbed the UVF of much of its working capital, tied up for months raising money and making contacts in the Baltic, only to have the prize seized from under its nose at the last minute.
By the same token we, and they, may suspect they made the dissidents' bad luck when last weekend's 400lb bomb at Clarendon Dock failed to detonate.
The tiles had concealed 320 Kalashnikov assault rifles, 500 hand grenades, 53 9mm Makarov pistols, 74,000 rounds of rifle ammunition and two tonnes of commercial explosive. Instead the UVF left with a series of demoralising questions. Where was the leak? Who could they trust? What was the point of carrying on?
Republican dissidents are in a similar position this week. They had hoped to murder a police officer and wipe out the Policing Board Headquarters just as the DUP conference ended. Matt Baggott's claim to have enough resources to combat the dissidents would have been thrown back in his teeth. Peter Robinson's confident and encouraging speech at the DUP conference would have rebounded on him and deep instability would have been injected into the political system.
Instead the terrorists are left wondering how the police knew so much. Far from an empty boast, Baggott's statement now emerges as a sober and realistic assessment, perhaps even a calculated encouragement to the dissidents to show their hand at a point where the police are ready and waiting to chop it off at the wrist.
Terrorists aim to fight what Robert Taber, a guerrilla war expert, called "the war of the flea" - striking so widely and so quickly that it is impossible to anticipate their next move or react in time to stop them. That was the plan. Instead they found police waiting for them at Garrison and their bomb mysteriously failed to go off in Belfast. Earlier there had been specific, well informed warnings to policing board members, the judiciary and others that they are being targeted.
I have no inside knowledge but the failure of the Policing Board bomb to explode is suspicious, coming as it does on top of other "malfunctions" and decisions by dissidents to abort terrorist operations at the last moment. During the Troubles, the security forces knew how to substitute inert substances for explosives and disrupt the detonation of bombs. They had the technology to "jark" weapons - bugging them, damaging them so that they would misfire and even reducing the charge in ammunition to reduce its effectiveness. None of these skills have been lost and, as they review operations, the dissidents are bound to be worried.
They will look at the pattern of recent arrests. They will wonder how many of the new recruits swelling their ranks were “floated in” by the police or MI5? The dissidents have complained when arrested suspects reported attempts to recruit them as informers; the terrorist leaders will wonder how many “volunteers” accepted the offers. After all, faced with the choice, who would want to go to jail for a campaign that is so deeply compromised and has little apparent chance of success?
That being said, the odds are that the dissidents will be “lucky” at some point, perhaps quite soon. There will be moments, when the police are wrong footed and the politicians have to deal with difficult and destabilising situations.
I don’t buy the argument that devolution of policing and justice would immediately halt or even diminish dissident violence; when it occurs, they will want to bring it down. However it is obvious that political instability and the endless squabbling at Stormont encourages the terrorists to think they can some day succeed.
Success for them would be to see these institutions fall and to show, in their terms, that Northern Ireland is a failed, ungovernable, entity. That would enable them to grow and give them the chance they crave.
There have been solid intelligence and security successes in the last week. The onus is on the politicians to make good use of them and drive home the damage which they will have done to dissident morale.
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Weather for Belfast
Tuesday 14 February 2012
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