The Stalker Affair
Frank Doherty
(Mercier Press, Cork, Ireland, 1986)
The Genesis of Revolution
James Kelly
(Kelly-Kane, Dublin,1976)
Frank Doherty, whose reports in the Dublin Phoenix and the Belfast Sunday News have frequently featured in Lobster, has uncovered a fascinating mass of information relating to covert cross-border operations by the Ulster security forces, and the subsequent “shoot-to-kill” inquiry conducted by the new retired Deputy Chief Constable of Greater Manchester, John Stalker. Basing himself largely on the evidence of Captain Fred Holroyd, Doherty unravels a whole series of covert operations during 1974, made possible by the presence of a British informer in the Gardai.
Codenamed “the badger”, this informer was recruited by the Special Military Intelligence Unit, MI6’s connection with the RUC, and, although of low rank, was (and still is) in a key position to assist the British clandestine border crossings: “the badger” is responsible for scheduling the Gardai border patrols.
Through “the badger’s knowledge of Gardai operational details, the RUC’s paramilitary Special Support Unit and E4A covert surveillance team, and Loyalists on orders from the SMIU were able to launch a series of cross-border incursions which, according to Holroyd, involved one murder, two attempted kidnaps and several undercover surveillance missions. One of these operations, in March 1974, is the beginning of the Stalker saga – an attempt by Loyalist paramilitaries briefed by the SMIU to kidnap INLA man Seamus Grew, later to be one of the victims of the 1982 “shoot-to-kill” incidents.
According to Holroyd, three Loyalist paramilitaries from Lisburn were briefed by an NCO from the SMIU for a kidnap operation mounted against Seamus Grew and Patrick McLoughlin, with whom Grew lived in the border town of Monaghan. The Loyalists were given maps of Grew’s house, surveillance photographs (some taken by the Gardai) and details of Grew’s movements. They were to be paid £500 from intelligence funds to kidnap the two suspects and deliver them to a rendezvous point on the border where they could be collected by intelligence officers. “The badger” would ensure that the Loyalists did not run into the Gardai.
In reality, the operation collapsed when neighbours noticed the Loyalists behaving suspiciously around Grew’s house and called in the Gardai. Two of the kidnappers were arrested in possession of the dossier of maps and photographs, the Loyalist leader escaping.
However, so certain was he that the Gardai were in the know that he walked into a Garda station to demand the release of his two companions! He was promptly arrested, and the three were sentenced to five years each at the Special Criminal Court in Dublin in June 1974. On appeal, the sentences were increased to seven years, but no notice was taken of the Loyalists’ repeated references during interrogations to the “English soldier who had given them the photographs”.
The case was linked directly to the killing of Grew and Carroll on December 12th 1982, a key part of the Stalker enquiry, not only through the identity of the victim, but also through that of the organisers of both operations: ‘the badger’ had also ensured the border would be clear on the night of the Grew-Carroll killings, and one RUC officer investigated by Stalker in connection with the incident had previously been named by Holroyd as involved in the kidnap attempt 8 years earlier. Holroyd was in a position to know, as he had taken over the handling of “the badger” during his service in the SMIU from 1974-1976.
Doherty also reveals that less than one month before their killing, Grew and Carroll had been threatened with death after being detained at a UDR checkpoint. A statement issued by six priests from the parish of Armagh hours after the shootings in December reads:
“Following a message at midday an November 19th, 1982 to the parochial house that Seamus Grew and Roderick Carroll were being threatened with death at a UDR checkpoint, a priest from the parish went to the scene, verified the threat and, seeing their distraught state, stayed for about 20 minutes until he was ordered to leave by the UDR officer in charge. The priest concerned assured the two men that they were safe because he had tape-recorded his interview with the UDR officer at the scene.”
Details of the two men’s movements on the evening of the shooting are also given: after attending the funeral of Carroll’s grandfather in Magherafelt, Co. Derry, the two drove Carroll’s sister back to her home in Monaghan, and then went on to visit a veteran Sinn Fein member in Castleblaney, Co. Monaghan, 8 miles south of Armagh.
The English-born man they met had been closely associated with the IRA in Monaghan/Armagh for years, and also maintained contact with local INLA members like Grew and Carroll. But unknown to the two INLA men, the Castleblaney man had been recruited by “the badger” as a Garda informant in the early 1970s, and since “the badger’s” recruitment by the SMIU in 1974, had been providing information that went to the British.
Alarmed by the mention of an unidentified informer and of details of a cross-border incursion that night aimed at kidnapping or killing INLA leader Dominic McGlinchey made by a Special Support Unit constable during his trial for Grew’s murder, the Castleblaney man slipped over the border to Keady, walked into the RUC station, and disappeared. Three days later he contacted his family, admitting that he had been working for British intelligence, and said that he would not be returning home.
Whilst Doherty’s book had produced a goldmine of information from Holroyd, Colin Wallace and others an the Grew-Carroll case and other covert operations in Ireland, it suffers from the mishap of going to print just too soon: the last few months of 1986 provided much valuable information about the Stalker inquiry that does not appear in the book. In particular it is premature in its assessment of another key killing in the Stalker enquiry, that of Michael Tighe, the 17 year-old with no record of paramilitary involvement, killed in the “hayshed shoot-out” in November 1982.
Doherty is critical of early reports of the existence of a tape-recording of the incident made by E4A using an MI5 bug, and dismisses it as a red herring. This seems unlikely considering the amount of information about the tape, and Stalker’s struggle to obtain it which has since been reported, notably by Peter Murtagh in the Guardian (17 June, 16 July and 7 October 1986). However, the official explanation of the incident as a blunder caused by indistinct noises relayed by the bug being mistaken for the sound of a rifle being cocked does not ring true: the hayshed had been examined by E4A officers planting the bug, and they cannot have overlooked the rifles on open display, even visible through the window from outside. They would not have failed to examine the rifles and notice that the rifling of the three old weapons was corroded, that one rifle lacked a bolt, and that there was no ammunition.
Doherty is also premature in his rejection of an RUC hand in the smearing of Stalker: evidence published in The Observer (29 September 1986) reveals that the allegations of improper conduct between Stalker and his friend, Manchester businessman Kevin Taylor, were made by an RUC informer, David Bertlestein.
In 1980 Bertlestein had given the RUC accurate information about how Manchester criminals were arranging to have their property in Northern Ireland blown up by the IRA so as to make fraudulent compensation claims to the Northern Ireland Office. Bertlestein’s allegations were not investigated sufficiently by West Yorkshire Chief Constable Colin Sampson to reveal Bertlestein’s RUC connection, or to discover that the RUC enquiry set up on Bertlestein’s leads was headed by Chief Superintendent Bill Mooney, a former head of RUC CID, who knew of Stalker’s friendship with Taylor. Bertlestein himself was later convicted and died in prison in March 1985, by which time the smear had had effect.
Doherty’s book closes with John Stalker reinstated. Since then, crippled by a legal bill of £21,000, subjected to intense publicity, and frozen out of the Myra Hindley case (Observer 21 December 1986) by Chief Constable Anderton, Stalker has resigned and taken up a contract as adviser to Mersey Television. His Deputy and senior detective on the Stalker team, Chief Superintendent John Thorburn, has also resigned from the Greater Manchester police, having been demoted by Colin Sampson (Guardian 25 October 1986)
Unfortunately Doherty was right when he wrote in conclusion: “It is too early yet to say if the final chapter will ever be written on the Stalker case”, but his remains an invaluable source of information on the clandestine war in Ireland, and no doubt the Stalker affair is not the last we shall hear of it.
If the Stalker affair is the most recent chapter in the history of intelligence involvement in Ireland, Kelly’s The Genesis of Revolution takes us back to a watershed in the past – 1969.
Kelly served in the Irish Army for 21 years and was editor of An Cosantoir, the Journal of the Irish Defence Forces during the sixties. In August 1969 he was posted to Irish Army headquarters as an Intelligence Officer concerned solely with the Northern Ireland situation. In his book he unfolds the story of how, on October 25th 1969, a meeting took place between Irish Military Intelligence (G2) and representatives of Northern Ireland Defence Committees at a hotel in Bailieboro, Co. Cavan. On the following day a report was submitted to the Ministry of Defence, recounting that the Defence Committees considered the supply of weapons essential to guarantee the protection of the Nationalist community in the North, and indicating that money was available to pay for them, but that weapons training would be needed. The Dublin Government was requested to assist the Committees in this.
In fact, the Dublin Cabinet had been discussing plans for intervention in the North since August, discussions which culminated in the Minister of Defence, Mr Gibbons, instructing the Chief-of-Staff on February 6 1970 to prepare for incursions into the North, and to set aside gas masks and surplus arms and ammunition for supply to the Nationalist community. Mr Gibbons further authorised the undercover importation of arms and ammunition for distribution in the North.
As the situation in Belfast worsened, and the imported weapons had not yet arrived, he ordered the transportation of arm and ammunition to the border on 2nd April 1970. These preparations for military defence of the Catholic population did not go unnoticed by the British: indeed, a British agent calling himself Captain Peter Markham-Randall was exposed in November 1969 when he came to Dublin to uncover the extent to which Eire was prepared to go in arming the North. Later, when the weapons were actually purchased in West Germany, it was common knowledge in European intelligence circles that they had been purchased by Eire for supply to the North.
Unfortunately, by that time the political winds had changed and the Taoiseach, Jack Lynch, had decided against any move to intervene militarily in the North – including the supply of arms to the Defence Committees. Lynch cancelled the order but, unable to conceal his original intentions from the British, attempted to have the importation plan declared illegal, so as to show “good faith” towards Westminster. His bringing of charges against those involved also allowed Lynch to bring down three of his ministers in favour of intervention – Boland, Blaney and Haughey. Lynch was not the only one anxious to undermine the three ministers’ popularity. Kelly recounts that
“After the attack on the Nationalist areas of Belfast in 1969, the one action sure to short-circuit the Official IRA’s plan (of a take-over on the Cuban model) was Dublin intervention in Northern Ireland. When this seemed likely, a major propaganda campaign was mounted (by the OIRA), directed primarily against Blaney, Haughey and Boland, the three ministers who, in varying degrees, were seen as supporting some kind of intervention. In that period of relative calm between August 1969 and mid-1970, the portrayal of the ministerial triumvirate as war-mongering opportunists, capitalising on a situation for their own dubious aims, was so effective that it was a factor which influenced Jack Lynch in accepting Northern Ireland as a British area of responsibility”.
Having brought charges, Lynch then suborned his Minister for Defence, for, if his role in the plan had become known, the importation could not have been declared illegal – the Minister for Defence being the relevant statutory authority for weapons orders. Mr Cosgrave obliged by declaring, despite the information in his possession to the contrary, that Gibbons had not been involved. This subterfuge failed when Gibbons’ evidence fell apart under cross-examination in the High Court and the judge ruled that the importation had been authorised by the Dublin government. Despite this setback, Lynch had succeeded in making it publicly clear that from now on Eire regarded the North as a solely British concern. On July 2 1970 with the threat of military intervention from the South lifted, the British Junior Minister of Defence visited Belfast and authorised the use of troops for the ransacking of the Falls. British military rule in Northern Ireland had begun.
Kelly himself resigned on May 1 1970 in protest at Dublin’s abandonment of the North, and later emigrated to Australia. Before he left, however, he wrote a detailed account of the Dublin arms trial, Orders for the Captain. Like The Genesis of Revolution, privately published by Kelly-Kane , Orders for the Captain is unfortunately unobtainable – Kelly’s insider position during this period would make it interesting reading.
Although he resigned his commission in 1970, Kelly evidently kept in contact with the Irish security forces for some while, as The Genesis of Revolution also sheds some more light on the Littlejohn episode in 1973.
Although Bloch and Fitzgerald (in their British Intelligence and Covert Action) give a more exhaustive account of the affair, their description of the MI6 informer inside the C3 subversion branch of the Garda as “Sergeant Patrick Crinnion” belittles his significance as an MI6 source. Kelly records that Crinnion was in fact the chief confidential clerk of C3 and, as such, had access to all of C3’s most secret files. Kelly also details (and Bloch and Fitzgerald omit) the complicated bargaining conducted by Eire and the UK after the Littlejohn/Wyman/Crinnion exposures.
Kelly describes how, a few days after the admission on 3 January 1973 that the Littlejohns were MI6 agents, the British Director of Public Prosecutions flew to Dublin to meet the Irish Attorney-General Condon and Justice Minister O’Malley to obtain an affidavit that the Littlejohns would not be charged with political offences but only with their criminal activities. In this way the role of British-paid agents provocateurs in criminal violence in Eire could be suppressed.
The deal that the three men finally struck was that Wyman and Crinnion (an Eire subject) would be allowed to leave Eire for the UK in return for the extradition to Eire of the Littlejohns on charges of armed robbery. Eire further demanded a series of assurances from the UK which could be used to quieten public unease at the Dublin government’s actions. The assurances, listed in a public statement by Lynch on August 13 1973 were:
- An assurance from the UK that the Littlejohns were not employed “to suborn the Irish security forces”;
- An assurance from the UK that the Littlejohns had not communicated to Her Majesty’s Government any information obtained from the Irish security forces;
- A guarantee that the affidavit issued in favour of the Littlejohns would not be used as grounds for a protest against Wyman’s trial;
- A declaration that there was no connection between the Littlejohn and Wyman cases.
That the assurances demanded were a sham intended to deceive the Irish public is transparent from their wording; the Dublin government knew full well that the Littlejohn’s mission had been to infiltrate the IRA, not to suborn the Irish security forces – that was Wyman’s role. The same applied to the second assurance. The trial of Wyman mentioned in the third clause was never a serious proposition under the terms of the deal struck between the DPP and the Irish Ministry of Justice. As for the fourth assurance, Wyman was the Littlejohn’s MI6 controller.
Kelly’s book provides a fascinating insight into the murky world of inter-governmental conflict and cooperation over the Northern Ireland question. It is a pity that his revelations have had such limited publication in the past.