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For its entire existence, Ireland’s military intelligence service has operated in the shadows. Its leaders are known as the men without faces, whose identities are a guarded secret. Now for the first time, one of its leaders has been authorised to talk candidly about how it protects Ireland in a rapidly changing world.
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[The] interviewee is one of the senior leaders in the Irish Military Intelligence Service (IMIS) ... He is among those who brief the government on national security and can authorise covert operations.
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The scale and complexity of the threats facing Ireland were impossible to overstate. Hybrid warfare practised by hostile states, which can involve espionage, disinformation and influence campaigns, are very real. He said: “They are weaponising the state, I won’t say against itself, but certainly influencing the debate. We are being portrayed as the weak underbelly of Europe, which is not the case.”
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“Russia would be one hostile state actor we have a key concern about. China is another. We have a huge relationship with China, economically the EU [trades] with them, but there is also the Chinese Communist Party’s concept for One China 2049 [which includes national rejuvenation and reintegration with Taiwan]. If you look at that, and how that fits into the rest of the world, that would be a concern we are interested in."
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IMIS is constantly finding and monitoring foreign agents that are then discreetly forced to “pack their bags” and leave without the need for an arrest. “They don’t necessarily know we’ve been in the background, but we have had a lot of success doing that,” the man said.
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It is almost impossible to overstate how the Russians’ full invasion of Ukraine affected Irish military doctrine and security thinking. It caused the Defence Forces to look at every conceivable threat to the state and also its own integrity. Counter-intelligence and internal security have become the priority.
“We have counter-intelligence that looks into the Defence Forces. We’ve had soldiers in Lebanon approached by various nations looking for information or trying to recruit them, and we’ve worked against them because the soldier involved declared what happened,” he said.
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To fulfil its mission, IMIS works in conjunction with Europe’s intelligence services including Germany’s BND and France’s DGSE. In Ireland, it liaises with Garda Headquarters. Which agency takes responsibility for a specific operation is sometimes complicated because of the ever-evolving nature of threats. “Look at GRU [Russian military intelligence] activities all over Europe, if it’s proxy-based or if it’s overt. If it’s via a defence attacker crew, we have an expertise in it but we would alert the gardai as appropriate. If it’s not appropriate, we don’t.”
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The threat posed to Ireland by Russia is continually escalating. Ireland has already fallen victim to the Kremlin’s hybrid efforts. He points to the deployment of a Russian tactical group of warships off the south coast four years ago and Moscow’s engagement with Irish fishermen. The event, he says, was organised to embarrass Ireland. “The area they chose had cables underneath it, hugely valuable and important to a variety of multinationals,” he said.
“They were undermining the government, ridiculing the Defence Forces, creating the impression we can’t do anything. The Russian embassy involved itself, they met fishermen and suggested they saved the day. If you remember, the former chief of staff had met the Russian defence attaché at the time and they published his photo online. The net result was a media outcry about how the navy can do nothing.
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