In the mainland UK press the bugging of a house used by Seamus Mallon, deputy leader of the Social Democratic and Labour Party, was presented as (merely) another mysterious and rather inept example of ‘dirty tricks’ in Irish politics. (See eg Guardian 20th February 1984) A brief story appeared and then vanished again.
But Irish press reports suggest that the bugging was merely one part of a complicated story which leads to a failed 1982 MI6 coup against then Prime Minister Charles Haughey.
The story (Sunday News 25th March 1984) is long, complicated, and itself apparently based on press reports from the Irish Republic. These, in turn, are based on information from former Irish Republic Counter Intelligence personnel. But these, albeit at third hand, seem to be the main points. And if it isn’t very clear it’s because the Sunday News report is pretty fuzzy in places.
- The bugging led to the discovery that Britain’s MI5 had recruited a group (numbers unspecified) of Irish Special Branch personnel, apparently to get information on IRA activities in Dublin. One of the MI5 recruiters was a ‘Michael’ who ‘posed as a civil servant dealing with security matters at Stormont Castle’.
- above led (somehow) to the discovery of ‘Operation Brogue’, an MI6 attempt to run a coup against Haughey.
- Details of (2), the coup, include:
- the planting of false stories about Haughey in the British press.
- Irish Counter Intelligence (CI) put the MI5 officer responsible for the false stories under surveillance.
- But some of the CI people were the Special Branch personnel recruited by MI5 (see 1 above).
- When MI6 offered a £100,000 bribe to one of Haughey’s Cabinet colleagues, the offer was recorded by CI.
- Irish CI then prepared to arrest the MI6 people. But MI6 was tipped off by the MI5-recruited Special Branch people, (This I have inferred from the text) and somehow stage-managed a scandal involving Irish Justice Minister Doherty.
- Information on the CI surveillance was leaked to the press and Doherty had to resign and CI was purged.
- Two KGB men in the Irish Republic, Salines and Lippasov, who knew about this, were hurriedly expelled from Ireland.
- The purged CI people took their files with them and began leaking the story to the press.
- Ex CI personnel and Haughey’s party have called for a full judicial enquiry into the affair.
Confused? Perhaps we won’t be when we get hold of The Phoenix’s version of all this.
The thought does occur that the MI5 man ‘Michael’ referred to above might be Bettaney. Although the press reports of Bettaney’s MI5 career are sketchy, the Phoenix did claim that Bettaney had been in MI5’s Irish section.
If this ‘Michael’ does turn out to have been Mr Bettaney, it may in the long run shed some light on some of the odd features of the official version of Bettaney. For the version we have, the right-winger who sees the light and goes left, doesn’t convince me. The most interesting part of it is the claim that Bettaney, while a serving MI5 officer, joined the Labour Party. But joining the Labour Party entails membership of a trade union. Are we really to believe that MI5 personnel are allowed to join trade unions? In the absence of information to the contrary, eg that Bettaney lied about either his union membership, or lied when becoming a union member, this particular episode in Mr Bettaney’s implausible story has a very distinct smell about it.
RR