The announcement on Friday that the Armed Forces Special Reconnaissance Regiment (SRR) was being drafted back into Northern Ireland to keep watch on suspected dissident republican terrorists may have accelerated the timing of the attack on the army base.

Although the shooting would have required considerable planning, including regular monitoring of visitors in and out of the Massereene Barracks in Antrim, the confirmation by Sir Hugh Orde, the Chief Constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland, of the arrival of the SRR appears too coincidental to be dismissed.

The secret surveillance units from which the SRR was formed on April 6, 2005, played a vital role in the counter-terrorist intelligence-gathering operations that went on for decades in Northern Ireland.

The legendary unit was 14 Intelligence Company, also known as The Detachment (The Det), which kept watch on suspected Irish terrorists, not from the safety of armoured vehicles or from protected observation towers, but from ordinary vehicles cruising the streets or parked in republican areas.

Members of The Det often went on covert missions as couples, men and women posing as lovers, in an attempt to mingle with Irish communities. Their courage and the increasingly sophisticated electronic-listening devices that they used to eavesdrop on suspected terrorists provided a mass of intelligence information that was passed to the police and Army.

The techniques they learnt over the years proved so productive in the war against the Irish terrorists, republican and loyalist, that when the peace deal was signed and the province officially returned to “normality”, army chiefs made it clear that this unique talent for surveillance should be exploited in other fields of battle and on the mainland against international Islamic terrorists.

The decision to create the SRR was announced in 2004 by Geoff Hoon, then the Defence Secretary, and established the next year. Since then members of the new special forces regiment have been deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan and in support of MI5 and the police in Britain.

The SRR is today a key component of an expanded Special Forces group that includes the SAS, the Special Boat Service, the Special Forces Support Group – made up of soldiers from the 1st Battalion The Parachute Regiment – and communications, logistics and helicopter assets.

The SRR’s return to Northern Ireland underlined the increasing alarm expressed by Jonathan Evans, the Director-General of MI5, over the rise in the republican dissident threat. He even made his concerns public when he gave an interview to The Times and other newspapers in January to mark the centenary year of the founding of MI5.

Unlike the SAS, the SRR is not a combat unit. Its role in the Special Forces’ world is confined to surveillance and reconnaissance. Yet it seems that in the eyes of the republican dissidents who are intent on stirring up the troubles once again, the presence of these surveillance specialists has awakened old hatreds.

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