Counter-gang strategy

Counter-gang strategy turns a movement’s internal loyalties into an instrument against it: an adversary recruits insurgents to betray their comrades and supply intelligence from within. The book traces Frank Kitson’s formative encounter with the tactic in Kenya and sets it against later clandestine operations in Belfast, where the Irish Republican Army tried to reverse the direction of the deception. In both settings, intelligence depends not only on access but on a precarious relationship of trust, with the recruited agent’s survival placed in the hands of the force he has agreed to serve.

Origins in Kenya

While serving in Kenya, Kitson encountered Mau Mau members who had been induced to work with the British Army. Their identities were hidden beneath white robes, with narrow openings for their eyes, noses, and mouths. From this concealment, they could observe prisoners and identify them to their British handlers. The episode gave Kitson a practical model for counterinsurgency: intelligence could be obtained by persuading members of an insurgency to change sides and disclose what they knew about their former comrades.

Kitson understood that recruitment could not rest on coercion alone. A prospective agent who agreed to assist the enemy was entrusting that enemy with his life, so the relationship required trust as well as leverage. When cultivating a recruit, Kitson would take him on patrol into the bush and hand him his pistol, keeping only a machete for himself. The gesture was dangerous, but Kitson used it to communicate that the recruit belonged to the team. Counter-gang strategy therefore joined intelligence gathering to a performance of solidarity: confidence had to be created inside a relationship founded on betrayal.

A clandestine organization in Belfast

The Irish Republican Army’s Unknowns provide a later setting for understanding the secretive structures surrounding such work, though the book does not identify the unit itself as a counter-gang. The small cell answered directly to Gerry Adams rather than fitting neatly into the organization’s regular structure. Its commander, Pat McClure, had served in the British Army before the Troubles, and the unit undertook dangerous, confidential tasks. Its members trained at a remote farmhouse, where they practised moving through a river while an instructor fired live rounds into the water around them.

Dolours Price joined the Unknowns with Hugh Feeney, and her sister Marian Price joined as well. The unit was assigned to transport Joe Lynskey across the border for his court-martial and likely execution. The episode shows the world of clandestine operations in which intelligence, internal discipline, and command authority overlapped. It also establishes an important difference: the Unknowns were a secret operational cell, while counter-gang strategy specifically describes turning members of an opposing insurgency into sources or agents.

Turning informers into triple agents

The counter-gang logic returns in reverse when the Irish Republican Army discovered that Seamus Wright and Kevin McKee had been working with British handlers. Rather than execute them immediately, Brendan Hughes saw a chance to use them as triple agents. The men returned to work for the British, but were instructed to pass on only low-level information or misinformation. Wright could, for example, identify an Irish Republican Army member to his handlers as belonging to a rival republican group. Hughes offered both men immunity for their original betrayal if they could provide useful intelligence to the Irish Republican Army.

The arrangement gave Wright and McKee a chance to survive, but it multiplied their exposure. They risked imprisonment if the British discovered the deception and could also be killed by the Mobile Reaction Force. Their accounts nevertheless revealed a substantial British intelligence network in Belfast. One component was Four Square Laundry: while operating as a real door-to-door laundry service, it enabled authorities to examine clothing for traces of explosives and compare household laundry with the apparent number, ages, and genders of residents. An apparent mismatch could point to an arms drop or a safe house. The triple agents thus helped disclose how ordinary commercial activity could be adapted for surveillance, while their own shifting loyalties made them vulnerable to both sides.

Secrecy, command, and the cost of betrayal

The contrast between Kitson’s recruitment of defectors and the Irish Republican Army’s treatment of suspected informers reveals the strategy’s human stakes. In the Lynskey case, the organization used an internal court-martial to judge a volunteer accused of trying to murder a fellow member and concealing the attack. He subsequently disappeared: there was no public verdict, body, or explanation to the rank and file. More broadly, Dolours Price told Ed Moloney that decisions to disappear people were made by the Belfast Brigade after discussion, and that Adams was the brigade commander. The account presents disappearance not as an accidental by-product of secrecy but as an authorized policy.

Counter-gang strategy makes loyalty both a source of intelligence and a weapon of coercion. An agent’s access can expose the organization he once served; the same access makes him suspect to his former comrades and dependent on the handlers who recruited him. The Irish Republican Army’s attempt to turn Wright and McKee into triple agents demonstrates that this method could be appropriated by insurgents as well as governments. In the book’s account, deception does not dissolve the chain of command or the threat of punishment: it makes allegiance harder to establish, while raising the cost of being discovered on the wrong side.