Mimicry by paramilitary groups during the Northern Ireland conflict

A new chapter by Professor Heather Hamill reveals that deceptive mimicry tactics were a prominent part of the Northern Irish conflict known as ‘the Troubles’.

The chapter is included in the book Fight, Flight, Mimic, edited by Diego Gambetta and Thomas Hegghammer – the first systematic study of deceptive mimicry in the context of wars.

Deceptive mimicry can be described as the manipulation of individual or group identity. This includes a person passing themselves off as a different individual or as a member of a group to which they do not belong, or a group ‘signalling’ their actions to another group. 

Beginning in the late 1960s, the Troubles were a low-intensity conflict taking place mostly in Northern Ireland, but at times spilling over into parts of the Republic of Ireland and England.

A key issue was the status of Northern Ireland. Unionists/Loyalists, who for historical reasons were mostly Protestants, wanted Northern Ireland to remain within the United Kingdom. Republicans, who were mostly Catholics, wanted Northern Ireland to leave the UK and join a united Ireland.

Professor Hamill argues that paramilitaries on both sides of the Troubles used mimicry tactics for camouflage, defence and aggressive purposes. 

Firstly, mimicry allowed paramilitaries to blend in with the civilian population to avoid detection by opposing forces. 

Many paramilitaries were already working-class citizens who did not need to modify their appearance or behaviour much to blend into the background. This allowed them to live two simultaneous lives - for example, moving weapons in cars with their wives and children would be simultaneously an ordinary family on their way to visit grandparents and paramilitaries moving weapons from one safe house to another.

While this tactic was useful for the paramilitary, it put ordinary people at risk of being targeted indiscriminately. In Northern Ireland, many Catholic citizens were subjected to house raids, arrested, or detained without trial by the British Army on suspicion of being members of illegal paramilitary groups.

Mimicry was also used as a defensive tactic, notably in prison escapes. A number of Irish Republican Army (IRA) prisoners escaped during the Troubles after disguising themselves as prison officers, British soldiers, civilian visitors or as the opposite sex.

One breakout in 1983 saw 38 prisoners escape after disguising themselves as prison guards; in the confusion soldiers on the prison watchtowers were unable to distinguish between genuine prison officers and the mimics, allowing them to escape unharmed.

Finally, mimicry was also used for aggressive purposes. Often, paramilitaries would assume someone else's identity in order to harm others.

Professor Hamill studied data regarding over 3,500 deaths that resulted from the conflict between 1966 and 2006. She found that aggressive mimicry occurred in 124 cases or 4% of the total number of deaths. In such cases, perpetrators posed as shop customers, taxi drivers, postmen, builders, council workers, hospital workers, police officers and more, in order to assassinate their target.

Such tactics would usually be used when assassins required an extra element of surprise or when they needed to manoeuvre their victim into another location. While dangerous, the daring that this mimicry required meant it could also lead to additional pay-offs such as increased status within one's paramilitary group.  

Although the overall number of instances of aggressive mimicry was small relative to the overall number of violent events, it is likely that this kind of mimicry was more prevalent – however, the use of mimicry in unsuccessful assassinations has not been recorded.

Another reason to adopt a strategy of aggressive mimicry was to gather intelligence. Members of paramilitary groups or intelligence services mimicked ordinary citizens and members of rival groups during surveillance operations.

As well as being a tactic adopted by individuals, aggressive mimicry was also a tactic used by entire paramilitary groups, often to discredit rival groups or avoid blame for acts of violence. 

This behaviour can be seen as early as 1969, when bombs planted by the Loyalist Ulster Protestant Volunteers (UPV) were designed to look as if they had been planted by the Republican IRA.

The most widespread evidence of aggressive mimicry by groups was in the use of false flags. This occurred when an armed group adopted a pseudonym when carrying out particular actions or formed a new, smaller group whose membership was made up of members of the parent group. For example, the Ulster Freedom Fighters (UFF) was a cover name or false flag used by the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) when they killed civilian Catholics. 

This tactic allowed the primary groups on each side of the conflict to avoid blame for attacks which resulted in a higher number of casualties than anticipated or that had targeted the wrong victims, or attacks which if correctly attributed would cause the group to lose certain political concessions.

The incentive to operate under a false flag increased with the introduction of 1998 legislation allowing for the early release of paramilitary prisoners for those groups participating in the peace process. Crucially, only organisations that were on ceasefire could benefit from the scheme. That same year, a Loyalist group called the Red Hand Defenders (RHD) emerged and claimed responsibility for numerous explosions and attacks. It is thought that members of the UDA/UFF may have used the RHD as a false flag to avoid being blamed for attacks and jeopardising the early release of their prisoners.

This use of false-flag operations led to the development of complex dynamics surrounding the use of code words as group signatures, a peculiarity of the Northern Ireland conflict in the history of conflict mimicry.

Such code words were originally used by paramilitary groups to communicate with the authorities or press: to forewarn about explosions, claim or deny acts of violence, or communicate their policies to a wider audience. They evolved into a device to prevent particular groups from being mimicked i.e. to prevent one group mimicking another to ‘claim credit’ for a bombing to the press.

However, the verification of code words posed challenges. While code words could be linked to specific events, such as bombings, and confirmed through investigative techniques, this verification process was not always consistent. Known members of paramilitary groups sometimes communicated code words, adding credibility to warnings, but this was not always feasible.

The reliability of code words was also undermined by their use in hoax calls, making it difficult to distinguish genuine warnings from false ones.

Overall, while code words served as identity markers for paramilitary groups, their effectiveness was limited by the challenges in verifying their authenticity and the prevalence of hoaxes.