I had the good luck to meet Col­onel Richard Iron a couple of months ago. He was the kind of typ­ic­ally self-effacing Brit­ish Army officer who one under­es­tim­ates at ones peril.

Iron cur­rently com­mands the UK Army’s Doc­trine Branch in the Dir­ect­or­ate of Land War­fare. His philo­sophy is summed in some­thing he told the Tele­graph in sum­mer, 2008 about Iraq: “We have made some ter­rible mis­takes … and it is only by talk­ing about them that we will learn from them.”

And now I just read his chapter, ‘Britain’s Longest War: North­ern Ire­land 1967–2007,’ in Coun­ter­insur­gency in Mod­ern War­fare.

It’s a fas­cin­at­ing read, point­ing out the premium the Pro­vi­sional IRA (PIRA) put on pre­serving the lives of its ‘volun­teers’ and the impact that had on the basic organ­isa­tion of Brit­ish Army patrols.

Iron describes the simplest type of PIRA oper­a­tion as involving some 12–15 people. It always struck me vis­it­ing North­ern Ire­land (on one of my Bar­ton Fink* TV news excur­sions) just how much com­pli­city every murder required.

But, being a journ­al­ist, this was the para­graph that really stuck out for me:

Run­ning agents in an insur­gency demands dif­fi­cult decisions. To reach a pos­i­tion of trust and influ­ence, an agent needs to be phys­ic­ally involved with ter­ror­ist oper­a­tions. Thus those in the pay of the Brit­ish gov­ern­ment con­duc­ted crim­inal acts, prob­ably includ­ing murder. Addi­tion­ally, choices some­times needed to be made between agents, allow­ing one to prosper to the det­ri­ment, and pos­sibly death, of another. The prin­cipal cri­terion was pre­serving the greatest long-term benefit.

Do the same prin­ciples apply to agent-running in the cur­rent domestic coun­ter­insur­gency cam­paign? I leave it to you to spec­u­late. But Col­onel Iron’s injunc­tion that we learn from our mis­takes by talk­ing about them was a pub­lic and not a private one. Enough said.

* From Bar­ton Fink: “…C’mon Bar­ton, you think you know about pain? You think I made your life hell? Take a look around this dump. You’re just a tour­ist with a type­writer, Bar­ton. I live here. Don’t you under­stand that…”