With my little eye: Intelligence is very much a must in the post-9/11 world, but we do not know enough about its seamier covert dimension. Eunan O'Halpin looks back on the British-Irish experience
In June 1973 the British ambassador "told the Taoiseach that HMG were not conducting espionage activities against the Government of the Republic and had never done so".
This statement came after two cases which appeared to suggest the contrary: the arrest and conviction of Sgt Michael Crinnion for passing Garda intelligence documents to an employee of the British Ministry of Defence; and the extradition from Britain of the Littlejohn brothers, wanted for armed robbery in Dublin, crimes which they claimed were carried out with the tacit approval of the British government.
These two cases caused acute political difficulties for Jack Lynch's government and lent weight to suspicions that Britain was conducting secret intelligence operations in Ireland while simultaneously seeking closer co-operation against the IRA.
There is now general acceptance of inter-state intelligence exchanges as a necessary process in international relations, whether bilateral or through international institutions.
Intelligence on international crime and terrorism is now high on the EU's agenda, and Kofi Annan has spoken publicly in Ireland of the UN's need for good intelligence to improve its early-warning and crisis management capacities. In the war on terror, intelligence is in the front line. The first US fatality in Afghanistan was not a soldier but a CIA officer.
In September 2002 the British government published an assessment of Iraq's WMD capacity prepared by the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) in the cabinet office. Mr Blair's use of the JIC to help make the case for possible war was much criticised: the Butler inquiry on the matter emphasised the problematic drafting of the assessment, and its unprecedented publication, while stopping short of saying that the document had been tweaked to overstate the evidence on Iraq's WMD capabilities and intentions.
Most Whitehall insiders privately complained, not about the inadequacy and limitations of the intelligence available, but rather that Mr Blair's acolytes outside the JIC system were allowed to influence the drafting of the document prepared for public consumption.
Such arguments assume that left to themselves the intelligence agencies are simply the stoic bearers of "uncomfortable truths which governments would prefer not to hear but need to hear" (to paraphrase a former intelligence chief), and that the JIC is a fount of carefully distilled, disinterested wisdom.
Yet, however honourable, patriotic and selfless their calling, intelligence systems the world over are associated as much in the public mind with the hidden hand and with dirty tricks as they are with cerebral, cautious analysis of the kind customarily gestated by the JIC in the cabinet office every Thursday afternoon.
During the second World War, the British security service MI5 developed close links with G2 (Irish Army intelligence), as did the RUC with the Garda Síochána, and these understandings served both countries well in thwarting Axis espionage, in preventing the leakage of information through Ireland to Britain's enemies and in dealing with the IRA threat.
On the other hand, on cabinet orders the British secret service MI6 (or SIS) developed clandestine networks of informants in Ireland, though only reluctantly and to a limited extent because of the danger of jeopardising Anglo-Irish co-operation; an argument which both SIS and MI5 successfully used in 1941 to stop their sister agency SOE (Special Operations Executive) from operating in Ireland.
In fact SIS's own Irish operation was quickly penetrated by G2 but was left undisturbed because it was not working against Irish interests, and because action against it might have led the British to set up other networks which would be harder to detect and monitor.
British secret agencies also systematically fabricated rumours designed to influence international opinion against Irish neutrality. In the United States the American Irish Defence Association, which made a strong case for Irish support for Britain in her war against Nazi tyranny, was under secret British control.
Late in 1944 SOE hatched the Casement Plan, an elaborate scheme to lower the morale of the German people by spreading tales that their leaders were planning to flee to a comfortable retirement.
The Foreign Office suggested Argentina as a credible bolt-hole for Hitler and his henchmen, but SOE's Maj Gen Gerald Templer, an Ulsterman, fought repeatedly for his choice: damp, dismal, neutral Ireland.
This scheme, which Templer evidently pressed as much to damage Ireland internationally as to dupe the German people, was eventually blocked by ministers on grounds of potential diplomatic complications. Its fate demonstrated that, in wartime at least, intelligence operations were ultimately under political control.
The problem faced by the Irish government in the early 1970s was not new. On the one hand, co-operation with the British on security questions was essential if republican and loyalist violence were not to wreak havoc throughout the island. The two governments were moving towards an agreed position on radical change in Northern Ireland, with what was to become the Sunningdale Agreement.
On the other hand, why were the British spying in Dublin? And at what level were the operations sanctioned, and how were they to be reconciled with broader British policy (which was, as Foreign Office records show, explicitly to support the Lynch government for fear that something worse might replace it)?
The Crinnion case had come to light because the Irish realised that a detailed dossier on IRA Border activists passed to Jack Lynch at a meeting in London was based on information collated by the Garda Security Section C3.
The minister for foreign affairs, Patrick Hillery, put the problem very bluntly to the British ambassador, according to the latter's report to London:
"The British action in penetrating the . . . Gardaí displayed such a lack of confidence that it completely undermined the very hopeful new relationship and the plans for practical co-operation that were being developed between him and the prime minister.
"Dr Hillery added that politically Mr Lynch was now out on a limb. The IRA, who were practically broken, would now take on a new lease of life and (quote) we are right back to square one (unquote)."
The main consequences of the Crinnion and Littlejohn affairs were political: they damaged the Lynch government, they made Irish government co-operation on Border security and related matters more difficult, and they strengthened republican claims about Britain's secret hand in Ireland.
A former British official whom I asked about the logic of attempting to spy on a friendly state while seeking closer political and security co-operation replied, somewhat ruefully: "Insurance".
But were the possible risks of exposure and loss of trust put against the likely benefits of such insurance? And at what level was the decision taken? Was it the work of some buccaneering outstation, or was it an operation requested or sanctioned at JIC or even political level? Similar questions may be asked about the activities of the Littlejohn brothers, who after their arrest made expansive claims about their dealings with British intelligence agencies.
Even if such claims are discounted - and they did not prevent the British government from extraditing the two men - at a minimum British officials had encouraged the pair to come to Ireland in the knowledge that they were likely to resume their trade of armed robbery. At what level was that decision taken, and why?
Since the end of the Cold War western governments have encouraged research into the history of their intelligence and security agencies, and have promoted debate between practitioners, journalists and even academics about the role of intelligence in foreign affairs. In Britain such discussion tends to focus on the crucial role of intelligence assessments at the highest levels of policy-making.
But we also need to know more about the covert activities of intelligence agencies, and the extent to which these are linked to wider policy in peacetime as they clearly were in respect of Ireland during the second World War, and perhaps also in 1972.
Eunan O'Halpin is Bank of Ireland Professor of Contemporary Irish History at TCD, and the editor of MI5 and Ireland, 1939-1945: the official history. He is preparing a book on British intelligence and Ireland in the second World War