W2C-010 Sunday Life 2-5.txt
RUC left in the dark

Police officers serving in the toughest loyalist areas of Belfast admit they are not making big inroads into the terrorist organisations.

As the activities of the three loyalist terrorist groups claimed four lives last week, experienced police officers said they now faced structures as tight as any IRA cells.
One detective who has interviewed many loyalist activists at Castlereagh said: "Usually when you got four Prods in, one spilled some of the beans and that enabled you to get at the others. It's not happening like that now. And one uniformed officer who patrols the area said: "Headquarters won't admit it, but they aren't giving us any good grade intelligence on the UDA/UFF crowd, because the Branch just isn't getting it.
"We 've got five or six UVF teams with their gear in the last year, but only one UFF team."

The officer said there had been no significant finds of UFF weapons on the Shankill in the last 12 months.

Searches

"The intelligence isn't there. We even suspect they have made hides in the foundations of new houses, because they 're using guns and we 're not getting them later in searches," the officer said.

The Red Hand Commando, revived after lying dormant for eight years, is much further down the Special Branch's priority list, despite its terror campaign against the GAA and attacks on Catholics recently in North Belfast.
One Special Branch officer said "The UFF is by far the greatest danger because it is expanding, and its internal security is very, very tight.
"The UVF we have penetrated well, as arrests in Belfast and Mid Ulster have shown, but the Red Hand is small and that makes it more difficult to infiltrate."

The officer said that type of harrowing loyalist murders of last week were virtually unstoppable.

"If we don't have intelligence we can't prevent these atrocities. And the more quickly they are organised, the less time we have to act even if we do get a hint," he said.
