EXPOSING THE MOST SINISTER AND HITHERTO SUPPRESSED SCANDAL OF THE TROUBLES
Lyra McKee’s book on the murder of Robert Bradford MP is to be published shortly. Copies of it can be pre-booked by visiting the website of her publishers, Excalibur. The book is called ‘Angels with Blue Faces’. Those interested would be well advised to pre-book it as it is sure to sell out quickly when it reaches the bookshops.
Bradford was shot by an IRA unit in public in broad daylight in front of multiple witnesses. The faces of the hit squad were neither disguised nor concealed. They clearly believed they had little to fear from the RUC. They were never apprehended. One of the assassins has since been identified by a witness as a notorious British agent. Lyra McKee’s book will undoubtedly flesh all this out.
The date upon which Bradford was murdered is crucial: 14 November 1981. At that time MI5 and MI6’s involvement in the intelligence cesspit that swirled around Kincora Boys Home, Williamson House and other tortured children’s homes in NI was still a secret, at least insofar as the public was concerned. In the background the Kincora cover-up was firing on all four cylinders.
The trial of three of the staff at Kincora took place the following month. MI5 and the RUC were determined to control the evidence so that it would appear that the only abuse that had taken place was that perpetrated by the staff at the home.
One key RUC Kincora investigator assaulted at least one former Kincora boy, Richard Kerr. He did so in Preston, England. Kerr had been abused by politicians, paramilitaries and others. The RUC officer told Kerr to keep away from the trial in Belfast and even threatened to arrest him for engaging in homosexual acts. Pause and think about that for a moment: the boy had been abandoned by his parents; raped by an adult male at Williamson House as an 8-year-old while clutching a soft toy, and then pimped out for the next decade to Loyalist terrorists, a high profile and still popular British TV star, a number of Tory MPs among many, many others. The RUC officer who assaulted him is alive and well. He can rely on the RUC/PSNI and MI5 to safeguard him from inquiry in return for keeping their most vile secrets under wraps. (See also ‘Kincora Survivor’ and ‘How the Anglo-Irish Vice Ring Operated’ and ‘Suffer Little Children’ on this website.)
The TV star has been involved in a child charity in recent years. Richard Kerr is prepared to name him and identify the address in London where he was abused by him, to the Independent Inquiry into Child Sex Abuse. So far, it does not appear interested.
Also in the months in the run up to the trial, William McGrath, the sadistic ‘Beast’ of Kincora prowled around Belfast hunting his former victims down in a vehicle driven by a group of hoods. They menaced and threatened at least one of the boys to stay silent. That victim told his story to Chris Moore who published it in his book on Kincora. The thugs were probably Tommy Lyttle’s UDA henchmen. (See ‘Her Majesty’s Hatchetman’ on this website for further details about Lyttle and MI5.)
As part of the Kincora cover-up, McGrath’s friend and supporter, the Reverend Ian Paisley descended upon the Cumberland Hotel in London to bully Richard Kerr into keeping quiet. He warned him not to tell anyone about the ‘Englishmen’ who had abused the boys he knew. (See ‘Blackmailed’ on this website.)
Two Englishmen, Peter England and Robert Imrie from the Northern Ireland Office were named in the House of Commons by Ken Livingstone in respect of Kincora a few years later. (See ‘MI5’s Flasher-General’ on this website.)
The RUC also forged at least one witness statement purporting to be that of an Englishman with access to files on McGrath who was stationed at Lisburn Barracks where Britain’s military and civilian services were based. Village will be reporting on this in the near future.
One of the most depressing Kincora stories is that of Stephen Waring. The RUC did not need to threaten him for he had committed suicide by jumping from the Monarch Belfast-Liverpool car ferry in 1977 rather than suffer any more rape.
Crucially, the RUC only interviewed boys who had been abused inside the home by the staff. Richard Kerr, the boy assaulted in Preston by the RUC officer, had been one of a smaller sub group taken to the Park Avenue Hotel, the Europa Hotel, a hotel in Bangor and other venues to be abused by paramilitaries such as John McKeague and also a senior DUP figure. Stephen Waring was also part of this group. It was a quite small one. A number of them have since died – apparently by suicide – but at least two are alive.
The key point of this article is that by November 1981 MI5 and the RUC’s multifaceted cover-up of Kincora was holding fast. Robert Bradford MP may have been on the verge of exposing it. Then, he was killed by the MI5-controlled hit team, the Kincora trial proceeded without exposing the MI5 dimension to the scandal.
When John McKeague – the most important Loyalist terrorist of the late 1960s and early 1970s – threatened to expose what he knew shortly after the trial if he was to be arrested, he was shot dead by MI5 agents in the INLA. His death occurred in February 1982. (For more information on McKeague see ‘Profiled, The Men Who Tried to Kill Haughey’ on this website.)
Joss Cardwell, the senior Unionist politician who ran Belfast’s children’s homes, committed suicide a few weeks later (or so we are led to believe) when the Kincora focus fell on him. He was a key figure in trafficking Kincora boys such as Kerr and Waring to London. It was on one such trip that the flamboyant TV star abused Kerr.
The media, however, were onto the story. In the Republic the Irish Times published a series of revelations. In NI Chris Moore did the same on BBC NI.
Colin Wallace who worked as a PSYOPS officer at Lisburn had tried to expose McGrath in the 1970s. After the Kincora story broke, he was framed for manslaughter and sent to prison. His conviction was later overturned. It is possible to detect the hand of the intelligence community in his framing. The killer of the deceased man in the Wallace case has never been found.
The Terry, Hughes and Hart inquiries into Kincora dismissed MI5 and MI6 involvement in the scandal on a number of grounds including the existence of the selective and manipulated statements compiled by the RUC.
Lyra McKee was not impressed with the results of any of these inquiries. Her forthcoming book now threatens to demolish what must be the most repugnant and shameful secret of the Troubles: the murder of a sitting Westminster MP by MI5 to conceal the MI5-MI6-RUC Special Branch exploitation of a NI paedophile network and the blackmail, murders and State-terrorist collusion that swirled around it. Put simply, it threatens to capsize the most garguantan cover-up of dirty tricks in the history of British Intelligence.
More on the incendiary significance of Lyra McKee’s book will be posted shortly. The book may yet prove to be the rock on which the Kincora cover-up finally flounders.
