In this issue, as in No 3, we are recycling a lot of material from Irish newspapers, and one in particular, the Sunday News. One of our Irish readers describes the Sunday News as ‘almost wholly Catholic..Nationalist … moderately Social Democratic Labour Party rather than moderately Republican.’
We have no way of checking the veracity of many (most) of these stories. We offer them because they are interesting; because even if they turn out to be wrong in detail they are indicative of the kinds of things that the British state is doing in Ireland; and because, as far as we are aware, no one else on the mainland UK is taking much notice of events in Northern Ireland.
The Sunday News may or may not be reliable. Our impression is that it probably is, in general. Its reporters, notably one Frank Doherty, seem to have a wide range of sources inside the state apparatus on both sides of the border.
One final thought. The Sunday News is published in Belfast, and Belfast is in the UK.
This means that the same conditions – D notices etc – which apply to the Times, Guardian etc also apply to the Sunday News. Yet the Sunday News chooses to ignore those ‘agreements’ with the British state and publishes an enormous amount of material which would cause real trouble for any mainland UK paper.
Is it that the Sunday News is especially bold, or merely that when it comes to the crunch the major mainland UK dailies are always willing to roll over for the state when it comes to Irish questions?
Perhaps one of our readers working for those dailies would care to explain.
CIA in Northern Ireland
The Irish Republic’s Military Intelligence (G.2) discovered that the CIA were behind a plot to spy on loyalist paramilitary groups. (Sunday News 27th November 1983)
Lyn Macrey, who does welfare work for UDA prisoners, was approached by ‘The Hettinger Institute’, a phoney ‘Conflict Studies Institute’ set up in Norway by, it is claimed, the CIA.
G.2 also discovered that a number of other people in Northern Ireland are acting as ‘consultants’ for the Institute, including a top Unionist politician. “The politician made one of his first international trips to meet his CIA spymasters in autumn of 1982 according to intelligence sources in Dublin”. (Could be a smear).
Lyn Macrey had been approached first by letter and later had seven visits from a ‘Stuart Delroy’ who said he was born in Zambia and worked for the Institute.
Nairac Linked to Killing of IRA Members in Republic?
Security forces in Ulster are investigating claims (or looking the other way) that Capt. Robert Nairac was involved in the killing of IRA members in the Republic during the mid-seventies. (Sunday News 27th November 1983)
Capt. Nairac, the SAS officer who was abducted and killed by the Provisional IRA, has been linked with three murders by a former British Military Intelligence Officer (‘X’).
Nairac’s ex-colleague maintains that the SAS man enlisted the help of some members of the UDA and RUC in carrying out plans to eliminate Provo suspects who were operating from bases in the South. One was IRA ‘Staff Captain’ John Green who was shot dead at a farm house in the Republic in January 1975. Nairac is alleged to have produced a polaroid of the body taken after the ‘execution’ of Green.
As Lobster 4 was being prepared this story broke on Channel 4’s Diverse Reports and in the Guardian and New Statesman. It is of interest, re the reliability of Sunday News reports, that in this instance their story was correct. More on this in Lobster 5.
Phone-tapping in Northern Ireland
Former ‘spy officer’ – the same ‘X’ as above? – claims that Military Intelligence has tapped the phones of many Ulster politicians including Ian Paisley, Paddy Devlin, Gerry Fitt and Harry West. The latter tapped after an approach from MI6 to stand against Bobby Sands in the Fermanagh by-election. (Sunday News 5th June 1983)
‘X’ is quoted as saying:
“It’s impossible to say how many phones are being tapped at one time. The RUC Special Branch tap a lot … others, including Box 500 (MI5), Six (MI6) and 12 Int (Military Intelligence). Sometimes you get a local ‘research cell’ (Brigade or Battalion Intelligence) doing their own tapping on a particular target..a favoured method being to put a special recorder on a line to show what calls have been made.. intelligence signallers from the 14 Sigs. Regiment are the technicians who put on the military intelligence taps … the person who needs the information seldom listens directly to a phone-tap. He only gets a typed summary of what has been said … these are produced by ‘translators’ – special intelligence people who analyse each call to find out what the conversation means.
…. British Intelligence cracked the Provisionals phonetapping system in a swoop codenamed ‘Operation Nightingale’.. they had a big Sig. Int. (eavesdropping system) running in several parts of Belfast. The man who organised it was Brian Keenan, who is now in jail in Britain …. a joint SAS, Army Intelligence Unit set up an elaborate decoy system – sending out recorded messages on the undercover channel, which we had discovered the IRA was monitoring using computerised radios … the decoy messages led them to relax their security – and the SAS pounced, catching most of them..several were British Telecom workers from Telephone House in Belfast. Hundreds of phones had been tapped over the years – including the General Officer Commanding line at Lisburn HQ”.