I think some of the loyalist want to purge any association with Combat 18, and so use the Israeli flag as PR. I have no idea how accurately that perception works.
As far as the IRA, they didn’t hang around with Muslim militants. The PLO and Gaddafi were socialist-types who just happened to be Muslim. They weren’t Wahhabi-style theocrats.
To be clear,whoever carried out Omagh, it wasn’t the IRA, or the Provisional IRA, which carried out most of the other bombings mentioned in this thread, and is probably the organisation the OP meant. And it was never clear that the warning in Omagh was intended to herd people towards other bombs :- the warning was unclear and ambiguous, but that may have just been incompetence or confusion.
Why were the messages coded?
They weren’t actually in code, but used phrases that had been agreed in advance between the IRA and the security services in order to establish credibility.
Agreed in advance? You mean the IRA and the MI X (can never remember if it’s 5 or 6) had a sit-down and discussed these things?
Or more likely, talked on the phone and discussed these things?
I’ve often wondered about this. You’d hear on the news things like “The warning used a recognised IRA code word” - what were the words? Have they become public knowledge by now?
I remember reading in a book - it might have been Mr Nice by Howard Marks, but I could be wrong - that, in the 1970s at least, the “code” was simply the phrase “This is your man…”, as in the guy would phone up and say “This is your man Seamus O’Whatever of the IRA…” and they would know to treat it as genuine.
But how did they get the genuine code-words in the first place? The fact that they exist must imply some sort of collaboration* between the two. Right?
*And by collaboration I mean that they met and spoke, not that they worked together on any projects (except the codeword project).
Well, I guess the first time they phoned up someone fairly high up in the police and gave a warning, they said “If we say X then the warning is coming from us.”
Then the bomb went off to confirm that this first warning was genuine, I guess the police would take it seriously.
They probably wouldn’t have met in person, but there were certainly channels for communication between the two. That’s how the Good Friday agreement and so on were worked out. Alternatively, they may just have posted a list of code words to the security forces, or even more simply just start each warning phone call with a specific phrase like “The anchovy marshmallows are cavorting in purple” and rely on the authorities correlating that with genuine bombs.
:Beaten to it by Colophon. Curses!
Or a mutually-trusted intermediary was used - the secret services of the Republic, for instance.
So, in fact pretty straight forward and not weird at all.
Occams Razor yet again…
MI5 is the internal security service; MI6 handles foreign intelligence-gathering. So it would be MI5 that dealt with the situation in NI.
But in reality it was usually the media or the police who received the warnings.
Yes, but I’ve never understood why the IRA wanted to “establish credibility”. Obviously the security services wanted to be able to tell a genuine warning from a hoax by some crackpot, but why should the IRA care if the security services were having to respond to hoaxes as well as genuine threats?
Probably because the security services would have been swamped with fake calls and not been able to respond properly to actual bombs, thus more civilian casualties, more bad press and the like. Remember also that there was more than one group planting bombs, perhaps credit was important too, to be seen doing their job or something like that.
That was my thought too.
I don’t know anything about the codes used other than a strange reference on an episode of Millenium, where someone types in “kaboom” using the digits on the telephone keypad to spell it out and reference is made to the IRA.
As mentioned, the IRA wanted to create bad headlines for the British Government, not themselves. There were plenty of slumps in support when they killed the “wrong” people, like the aforementioned Remembrance Day bombing which let the SDLP take over for a while as the main political party for Catholics in Northern Ireland. So a coded warning to send people in the right way come the evacuation was always handy.
In one office (only one, which seems a tad strange) we were given a list of things to do if someone phoned a bomb warning to our office. It went from the straight forward “where is it, when will it go off?” to the more technical “what kind of bomb? who do you represent?” to the silly “where are you calling from?”
I remember those lists. Very important as I was working in local government and then the defence industry at the time.
Hey, it never hurts to ask, right?