Confidential informants in Northern Ireland

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…”