Declan Daly - Borderline - An Oral History of the Brexit Wars 2020-2022

I sometimes think back now, we thought this was it. Clear out the Cooleys and the war was as good as over. Deal with the clean up ops and get back to reality. We thought this was the big, final fight that the whole thing would end on. Those guys died thinking they were near the end. But it only got worse, didn’t it?’

Interlude: Project Drift

Comdt Brian Rafferty AC Ret’d

‘You have to give it to the spooks, they know the game alright, don’t they? By all accounts; and again some of this is based on heresay and some is experience, the NSCC wanted their own U2 spy planes. They weren’t for sale so they had to make do with something else. At the start, the National Security Coordination Centre wasn’t meant to have any actual assets of their own, they were just meant to be a clearing house for intelligence coming from the Gardai and J2. They knew though, that if they wanted to really have the ability to grasp and control a situation quickly they needed to be able to directly task things themselves and they couldn’t as it stood. They had to request extra resources from us or the guards be thrown at something, and usually the resources weren’t there. From an oversight point of view, their spending was accounted for very carefully by the Public Accounts Committee (although not in public) as no one wants a new intelligence agency going rogue in year one, do they? Line by line, every item accounted for. Labour intensive work that for an accountant.

Now, reasonable expenditure was fine if you could justify it and thats where Project Drift comes in. What I’ve heard, is that it was buried in plain sight in the PR section of the budget. So the PR guy needs a Laptop – seems reasonable. Needs a phone – sounds about right. Needs a Canon DSLR – okay, that’s normal. Needs a TST-14 (SL) – Well don’t know what that is but it probably goes with the camera. Needs photo editing software – legit! And so on and so on. So an accountant looking through all that probably won’t know that a TST-14 (SL), is a jet powered self launching glider. I mean, I didnt’t know that and I fly for a living. Not so expensive that anyone will notice and so cheap to run that you don’t have to worry about budgeting for fuel or maintenance costs that would attract any attention. And that was it, with a bit of clever accounting, Ireland’s new intelligence clearing house got it’s own operations section, and an airborne one at that.

You may well be thinking that a glider is a great idea for a bit of sport flying at the weekend, but that it has certain restrictions inherent in it’s design for operational flying in Irish conditions. You’d be absolutely correct, but Project Drift was designed to fail so that they could buy something else legitimately. First though, it had to work well enough to be replacement worthy. That was the problem.

Initially, the kit onboard was exactly just that one Canon DSLR and an iPhone to remotely operate it. They cut a hole in the airframe underneath the pilot, mounted the camera in there and faired it over with a flat glass panel. They drew a rough ‘X’ marks the spot on the canopy with a marker for the pilot to aim in roughly the right direction and then another guy in the back would fine tune the shot with the iphone and click ‘snap’. Very basic, but when they also mounted a go pro in there, they started to get some usable results. But it was a glider. The little retractable jet engine on board that made it self launching had enough fuel for about an hour and a half. That’s more than fine if you want to take off, climb a little bit and then shut it down and glide for a while as a sport, but if you want to take off, cruise to an operational area and then remain there for a useful time and then get clear again, well… They were pushed into use as soon as they were purchased, initially with the PR guy – it was actually the public relations officers idea – as the pilot. I’ll be straight up, that job we did in May 2020, none of us had any idea that after we all left the scene, this guy was orbiting away overhead for another few hours. One of the other assets there pinged him alright and reported it, but it was all quietly dealt with then.

Pretty soon, it was clear that these things were not up to Irish conditions – that’s how I know so much about them, I was tasked one day with flying a team of ARW out to a field in Sligo, where this PR guy was sitting very sheepish beside his glider with no fuel and well short of where he intended to be. He’d been flying into a headwind in Donegal that was stronger than he expected, and any of us could’ve told him that would happen, he’d cranked up his engine again to stay in position over his target for longer and then ran out of juice when he was on the way back to his landing site.

So we’re sitting there, the Rangers are securing the place, this guy is trying not to say much of anything but is also a little bit shook so he’s saying too much at the same time. Anyway, this unmarked truck pulls up with a container on the back, another guy hops out and between this second guy and the pilot the glider is disassembled and lifted into the back of the truck with a small crane. And lo and behold, Project Drift got some wider attention than it wanted in DF circles. Now, the NSCC brazened this one out. They said the problem wasn’t that they were using gliders, it was that they didn’t have the proper powered aircraft for the job. The whole thing about ’why the hell were you using anything?’ never got addressed in the climate of the time. The Air Corps got extra Spectres as a result, but the NSCC got their birds too. There’s was a Grob 520NG. If you’ve never seen one, go to Shannon. Theres at least one there that gets airborne multiple times a day for ‘Atlantic weather surveys’. They look for all the world like a PC-9 with very long wings and a lot of unusual pods and antennas hanging out of it. It takes off, heads west over the sea and then disappears. Once its clear of any primary radar, those are the ones everyone thinks of as ‘radar’, they send out waves which bounce off a plane and come back, once it’s clear of them, it stops transponding and vanishes. I saw a glint off a canopy of something at altitude one day when we were up just across the border from Derry, and I’m convinced that’s what I saw. I don’t know who’s flying it,it’s not any current or ex Air Corps guys that I know, or if they are they’re not telling.

Similarly, I did spot two MD500 helicopters coming across the border, North to South, a few miles ahead of us one morning just after dawn in Monaghan. They had to have been on NVG and they had to have been up to something funky, but I didn’t get a clear look at them and I couldn’t swear they belong to NSCC. The gliders are still going too, though, they took the cameras and the guy in back out of them and put in a bunch of radios instead. They use them for rebros – rebroadcasting for someone who’s out radio range of whatever ground callsign they’re trying to talk to. The planet gets in the way sometimes, so they bounce the signal off the gliders. Apparently they were quite succesful in the Sliabh Blooms, in that they didn’t land where they weren’t meant to and they didn’t get in the way. I’ve seen them once or twice closer up to the North as well which begs the question, who are they rebroing for up there?’

The period between the end of April, and Operation Swallow, and the end of October 2021 became known in Defence Forces parlance as ‘The Simmer’. Unlike the Black Winter, this phrase did not enter public use to the same extent. It appeared, after everything that had happened, that things would return to normal. A newer and more generally effective vaccine was being promised to be available within months with the hint existed that going away for a Summer holiday in Europe might be back on the cards again. The public deserved a boost after the horrors of 2020 and early 2021 and the national mood was high. The Defence Forces mood, not so much.