Encirclement, engagement and Counter Terrorism: Intelligence and the development of multi-agency CT strategies in the UK, 1969-present.

The development since 2003 of the UK’s CONTEST Counter Terrorism Strategy, utilising multiple police, intelligence, military, education and social service agencies in the application of the four strands of Pursue, Prevent, Protect and Prepare has widely been seen as a new approach to CT and a step away from the application of previous Counter Terrorism policies. This paper sets out to illustrate a number of key overlaps between current policy and the application of intelligence in Counter Terrorism during the Northern Ireland Troubles. This paper will look into the activities of the Laneside Talks conducted with Republican and Loyalist paramilitaries in the 1970s (and continued via MI6 and MI5 s connection with the backchannel Brendan Duddy into the early 1990s) but will also consider the later funding and encouragement of community, religious and cross-community groups, as well as the use of government sponsored advertising, in its attempt to identify the development of a multi-agency Counter Terrorism strategy in Northern Ireland that has much more in common with CONTEST than might at first be assumed. The links between Counter Insurgency strategies and Northern Ireland have long been assumed, by looking elsewhere this paper hopes to identify the adaptation of soft-power techniques pioneered in Northern Ireland to post-9/11 applications now used in the rest of the UK.