Dissidents set sights on Olympics
WHEN the flame of peace comes to Northern Ireland this summer, police will face an Olympic task to ensure that IRA diehards don’t try to blow it out.
The Olympic torch will spend five June days travelling through dozens of cities, towns, and villages across the island of Ireland. The flame’s ambitious course into predominantly Protestant and Catholic turf in the North should offer a poignant measure of how the region has travelled down its own road to reconciliation.
IRA dissidents are committed to shattering that image and, experts agree, are bound to see the Olympics as an unprecedented opportunity to advertise their defiant existence.
“I’d be very surprised if the dissidents don’t try something during the Olympics,” said Richard English, director of the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at the University of St Andrews in Scotland.
“Putting a small bomb anywhere near an Olympic venue would put them on every front page in the world.”
Mr English said leaders of today’s three main IRA splinter groups were desperate to be taken seriously in an age when Northern Irish peacemaking was seen worldwide as a triumph following the 2005 demise of the long-dominant Provisionals. He said the Olympic torch would present the first, easiest target.
“Anything in Ireland is easier for the dissidents to hit. And the torch is a target that just carries on and on and on, its course choreographed far in advance. So it’s a nightmare logistically for the police,” he said.
The SIRS Consultancy, a security thinktank offering advice to British companies for the Olympics, says the Olympic flame’s June 3-7 procession through Northern Ireland has been recklessly timed.
The leg will coincide with celebrations marking the diamond jubilee, the 60th anniversary of Queen Elizabeth II’s ascent to the throne. The UK has made that weekend a four-day holiday capped by the queen’s June 4 birthday. The PSNI expect heightened tensions between Protestants, many of whom will celebrate the jubilee, and Catholics, many of whom may not.
SIRS noted that the flame will spend parts of two days in Derry, a focal point for recent dissident attacks, and visit several republican districts from Belfast to the border town of Newry, Co Down. It will also travel through Omagh, scene of the Real IRA’s 1998 car-bomb slaughter, which killed 29 people, mostly women and children.
“Whilst it is of course essential to involve Northern Ireland in the UK’s Olympic Games,” SIRS said in a statement, “routing the torch procession though the most insecure areas of the country during the queen’s diamond jubilee presents a needless security risk.”
IRA experts say disrupting the torch’s Irish travels could well be an opening act. They say police must be braced for the dissidents to attempt to plant at least one bomb in England — where no IRA faction has exploded a device since before 9/11 — at some point during the July 27 to Aug 12 London Olympics, chiefly because tens of thousands of foreign journalists will be there.
“Most of the world has forgotten these new IRAs even exist, so it would be in their publicity interests to use the Olympics as a platform,” said Mr English.
Real IRA dissidents last attacked the British capital in Aug 2001, when a midnight car bomb in a west London nightspot wounded 11 people. Over the previous year the Real IRA had car-bombed a BBC building, bombed a bridge spanning the River Thames, and fired a Russian anti-tank rocket at the headquarters of Britain’s foreign spy agency, MI6.
Experts say the IRA dissidents’ failure to attack London since then reflects the British security forces’ heightened powers and resources following al Qaeda’s 9/11 attacks on the US in 2001 and on the London transport system in 2005.
Britain’s domestic spy agency MI5 in 2007 took charge of anti-IRA surveillance in Northern Ireland, operating from a British army base east of Belfast with a reported staff of 300.
“I suspect there are more members of MI5 in Northern Ireland today than there are members of dissident republican movements,” said Kevin Toolis, author of Rebel Hearts, a study of the Provisional IRA.
Mr Toolis doubted whether today’s three principal factions — the Continuity IRA, Real IRA, and Óglaigh na hÉireann — can attack England, given British surveillance and infiltration of their relatively puny ranks.
“It’s clear that British army intelligence and MI5 were very successful in penetrating the upper echelons of the [Provisional] IRA, and they’ve cracked the dissident groups too,” said Mr Toolis.
“If there’s three men in a room trying to organise an attack, they can’t be confident one of them won’t phone up their MI5 handlers five minutes later.”
Tom Clonan, a security analyst and former Irish army captain, said IRA dissidents would see an Olympics-linked attack as a powerful way to embarrass Britain.
“The dissidents have already demonstrated they’re mad and bad enough to want to target Britain,” he said.
“If they end up doing nothing during the Olympics, or just phoning in threats with nothing real behind them, it would show that they’re being surveilled within an inch of their life.”
The UK’s Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre in London rates the likelihood of an attack in Britain by IRA splinter groups or al Qaeda both as “substantial”, meaning an attack from either is a strong possibility. It puts the risk of dissident IRA attacks in Northern Ireland at the higher level of “severe”, meaning highly likely.
At an Apr 9 ceremony in a Derry cemetery, a masked Real IRA member told supporters the group would keep attacking police and British soldiers and “their installations, as well as British interests and infrastructure”. The person did not specify any threat to the Olympics.
An Irish anti-terrorist officer said two Óglaigh na hÉireann operatives were trailed from the Irish border to London in early 2011, where they met supporters and saw several Olympics-connected sites as tourists.
The officer, who spoke to the Associated Press on condition he not be identified because he wasn’t authorised to speak to the media, said it was not clear if the dissidents were scouting Olympics sites, because their trip also preceded the Apr 2011 royal wedding of Britain’s Prince William and Kate Middleton. The officer said the two men remain under surveillance back home.
The experts are unanimous on one key point: If any dissident IRA group does plant a bomb near the torch route or an Olympic facility, it will be to generate panic and headlines, not civilian deaths.
That means the use of telephoned warnings using recognised code words. The Provisionals already have demonstrated how much chaos can be caused by this tactic.
In 1997, the group used bomb threats to force 70,000 to evacuate the Grand National, Britain’s biggest horseracing and gambling event. Extensive, fruitless searches for a bomb meant it took two days to relaunch the race.
But bitter experience shows that phone calls don’t always work. Too often, the telephoned warnings are vague or delivered in thick rural Irish accents. Both problems meant that in Omagh, police unwittingly evacuated crowds into the bomb’s path.
The homemade bombs by dissident IRA groups also are often flawed. Many are duds and some explode sooner than intended.
“The dissidents aren’t in the business of planting no-warning bombs against civilian targets,” said Mr English, contrasting their behaviour with that of al Qaeda militants.
“But the worrying fact is, they are not as technically able as the Provisionals were. And that incompetence can make you more lethal.”
* Shawn Pogatchnik has covered Northern Ireland for the Associated Press since 1991.
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