MI5/MI6 - Trick or Treat?
01 January 1994
On 24 November 1993, customs officers displayed to the press a consignment of weapons and explosives taken from a container ship docked at Teesport, Cleveland. The ship had arrived the previous evening from Gdynia, Poland, having stopped at Tilbury on the way. They were seemingly acting on information from MI6 that the ship, the 6,400 ton MV Inowroclaw, was carrying arms bound for the UVF in Belfast. One of the 200 containers on board was addressed to the east Belfast company Frackleton and Sons, suppliers of paint and tiles, and the weaponry was found buried amidst boxes of tiles. Frackletons knew nothing of the order - they import tiles from Italy, France and Germany, but not Poland The shipment included 320 Kalashnikov assault rifles with 60,000 rounds of ammunition, 500 hand grenades, 53 9mm pistols (Russian made) with 14,000 rounds of ammunition, bayonets, two tonnes of plastic explosives (probably Semtex) and several thousand detonators.
The "find" was initially seen as a big success story both for British intelligence and international co-operation. MI5, MI6 and the Polish security service, UOP, had worked together to track and intercept the weaponry, valued at £250,000. The Brian Nelson affair showed that British intelligence at best had bungled, and at worst had actively co-operated, in the re-arming of loyalist groups in the late 1980s. The Teesport operation seemed to show that the intelligence agencies can be effective, even against loyalists. The find was made on the same day that the British government published the Intelligence Services Bill which will place MI6 and GCHQ on a legal footing for the first time.
In broader political terms, the Polish shipment gave weight to warnings over the last two years from RUC Chief Constable, Sir Hugh Annesley, that loyalists have been preparing a major bombing campaign south of the border. Loyalists had recently issued a statement that they were "preparing for war". The prospect of loyalist groups acquiring significant quantities of plastic explosives is frightening for Irish nationalists living in the North and sends a strong signal to people in the South regarding loyalist opinion. The shipment suggested that loyalists were now getting strong financial backing from middle-class sources - the Nelson weapons deal was a fraction of the cost of this one. There were other political ramifications. The Inowroclaw docked at Teesport just days before The Observer revealed that the British government had been engaged in secret exchanges with Sinn Fein's Martin McGuinness since 1990, and at a time when there were clear difficulties between the Irish and British governments over the wording of the Joint Declaration, finally published on 15 December 1993. As one security source is quoted as saying at the time, "the Irish know what to expect if the loyalist paramilitaries get their hands on proper explosives. It must have concentrated their minds wonderfully."
The Inorowclaw operation was greeted with considerable scepticism, however. No arrests accompanied the weapons find, either at the Polish or British end of the operation. If this was a "sting" then the container, if not all the arms, should have been allowed to proceed to Belfast. Who had paid over the cash and who had received it? The official story was that MI6 was first alerted to a loyalist plan to purchase weapons by UOP. Co- operation between themselves and MI5 allowed the consignment to be monitored all the way to Teesport. Even the London Evening Standard was sceptical: "on the face of It, all that has happened is that Polish government weaponry has been shipped across the Baltic to attend a photocall in Britain".
A few days later The Guardian explained the find in terms of attempts by the Polish authorities to get on top of the growth of unofficial arms dealing in eastern Europe. Huge surpluses of weapons and explosives are available as a result of the collapse of state socialism and the redrawing of natio