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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
June 2017 6 7
Chair of UK investigation (IICSA) changes suspiciously
often as it investigates role of MI5 and MI6 in protecting
paedophile networks under pressure from hypnotic
cover-up powers of the British establishment
by Joseph de Búrca
T
HE LONDON-BASED Independen Inquiry ino
Child Sexul Abuse (IICSA) ws esblished in
. I hs mnde o invesige VIP
busers wih links o Wesminser. Regrebly, i
cnno be described s ruly independen since i is
creure of he Home Office, he pren deprmen
of MI which blckmiled, proeced nd exploied
pedophile neworks in he UK nd Irelnd nd hs
diry ricks embedded in is DNA.
Sex-abuse
musical chairs
Judge Lowell GoddardLady Ann Elizabeth Oldeld Butler-Sloss
The three former chairs of the IICSA
Dame Catherine Fiona Woolf, DBE, JP, DL
6 8 June 2017
An “independent” Inquiry?
The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse
(IICSA) was established in 2014 by Theresa May
in her then capacity as Home Secretary. Her first
choice as chair was Lady Ann Elizabeth Oldfield
Butler-Sloss, whose appointment was
announced on 8 July 2014. A storm of protest
swept her off the chair within days because she
was the sister of the late Michael Havers. He had
served as Margaret Thatcher’s Attorney General
in the 1980s. As reported in Village last month,
Havers spoke up for the high-ranking British dip-
lomat and MI6 officer, Sir Peter Hayman, after he
had been exposed as a paedophile in March
1981 by Geoffrey Dickens MP in the House of
Commons. The police had discovered that
Hayman had been involved in a paedophile net-
work and was a connoisseur of child
pornography. Havers, speaking in his capacity
as Attorney General, parried that Hayman’s col-
lection was not extreme and had not
warranted prosecution.
Butler-Sloss was born on 10
August 1933. Since the IICSA is
likely to last another 12-15
years, she would have been
well on the way to her cen
-
tury when it finished. Just
what was Theresa May
thinking?
May’s second choice as
chairman was Dame Catherine
Fiona Woolf, DBE, JP, DL, who
was appointed in September 2014
and lasted a month. She was a friend and
neighbour of Leon Brittan who had served as
Home Secretary in the 1980s. In 1984 he was
handed the Dickens Dossier which exposed a VIP
paedophile network, by Geoffrey Dickens MP.
Brittan commanded all the resources of the
police and by lifting a telephone could have
ensured that immediate action was taken to end
the rape and brutalisation of children described
in the institutions in the dossier. Instead he did
precisely nothing. Why?
In 2014 it emerged that the Dickens Dossier
had disappeared. When quizzed about this, Brit-
tan initially claimed he had no memory of ever
having received it but later relented and
“recalled” he had handed it over to an official in
the Home Office.
After media reports that Brittan had been a
dinner party guest at Woolf’s house on at least
three occasions, she stepped down from the
IICSA and was replaced by Judge Lowell Goddard
who shouldered the burden until 2016 when it
became too much for her. One would almost be
forgiven for suspecting that the Inquiry was
designed to topple over under its own weight.
A subterranean
campaign
against the truth
A campaign to suppress the
truth about manipulation by MI5
and MI6 of VIP paedophile networks
has been afoot for decades and shows no sign
of abating. As detailed in recent editions of Vil
-
lage, last year MI5 and MI6 (which is attached to
the Foreign Office) lied to the Hart Inquiry about
their involvement in the Kincora scandal and
received a clean bill of health from it.
Meanwhile pro-establishment figures in the
media (at least one of whom has been linked to
MI6) have been campaigning to end police inves-
tigations into historical child abuse. There is
growing support for this initiative among the
British public on account of the behaviour of the
police who investigated the singer Cliff Richard
and others for child abuse when - patently -
there was no evidence against them. Their
behaviour was so inept one would be forgiven
for thinking their intention was to poison the
public against historical abuse inquiries.
Some of the vice rings which the IICSA should
be investigating overlap with networks in Ire-
land. The odds are stacked high that the IICSA
will be persuaded to ignore them in light of the
publication of the Hart Report earlier this year
which was meant to have dealt comprehensively
with Irish issues but was hoodwinked by the
spooks.
General-Election woes
A small number of courageous Westminster par-
liamentarians have tried to shine a light on these
issues during the last few years. Proving that no
good deed goes unpunished, they have suffered
nothing but bad luck and now face a more diffi-
cult battle to retain their seats in the British
general election.
Simon Danczuk MP is one of them. He is a can-
didate in Rochdale and author of the book which
denounced the notorious paedophile Sir Cyril
Smith. He revealed in 2014 that a Tory minister
Sir Michael Havers
Lord Leon Brittan
Simon Danczuk
The IICSA cannot be described
as truly independent since it is a
creature of the Home Office, the
parent department of MI5 which
blackmailed, protected and
exploited paedophile networks
in the UK and Ireland
The late Geoffrey Dickens MP, campaigned
against VIP paedophile rings
INTERNATIONAL
June 2017 6 9
attempted to get him to back down as pressure
was mounting on Leon Britton over the disap-
pearance of the Dickens Dossier. He explained
how: “As I was making my way from the House
of Commons on Monday night after a late vote a
Tory minister stepped out of the shadows to con-
front me. I’d never spoken to him before in my
life but he blocked my way and ushered me to
one side. He warned me to think very carefully
about what I was going to say the next day before
the Home Affairs Select Committee, where I’d be
answering questions about child abuse. ‘I hear
you’re about to challenge Lord Brittan about
what he knew about child abuse’, he said. ‘It
wouldn’t be a wise move’, he advised me. ‘It was
all put to bed a long time ago’. He warned me I
could even be responsible for his death. We
looked at each other in silence for a second. I
knew straightaway he wasn’t telling me this out
of concern for the man’s welfare”.
Danczuk persisted and became the target of a
torrent of salacious reports about his private life
in the red tops. Worse still, an accusation was
hurled against him that he had raped a man in
2006, an allegation he described as “malicious,
untrue and extremely upsetting”. At the outset
of the 2017 British general election, the media
reported that a woman had claimed Danczuk had
raped her at Westminster, something he emphat-
ically denied. Combined, these allegations may
cost him his seat in the imminent election.
Keith Vaz MP, the former Chairman of the
Home Affairs Select Committee (HASC), is
another politician with a commendable record of
campaigning against paedophile rings. He is
also running in the British general election.
When he was Chairman of the HASC it had
probed these issues effectively. Last September
he was filmed secretly in the company of male
prostitutes, all of whom were adults. It was
enough to force him to resign as Chairman of the
HASC. MI5 must have been delighted. Time will
tell whether he retains his Parliamentary seat.
The Tory MP who
visited Kincora
Other substantial threats to the Anglo-Irish pae-
dophile network which have emerged in recent
years have been swept back under the carpet. In
2015 two RUC officers who had been involved in
the inquiries that led to the conviction of
the staff at Kincora disclosed the
involvement of a Tory MP at the
home. On 23 January 2015 the
late Liam Clarke reported in
the Belfast Telegraph that
they had told him that a
Tory MP had “visited Kin-
cora during the 1970s”.
Both officers, he
reported, were “willing to help any inquiry into
Kincora either here or in England. They revealed
that the MP died before they could arrange to
interview him”. One of the officers revealed that
the MP had been “coming over to the Northern
Ireland Office quite regularly… We were told by
criminal records in Scotland Yard London that he
had a conviction many years ago for indecent
behaviour or something in a gents’ loo against
another boy but his death meant we never got a
chance to question him”.
Clarke’s report adds credence to what Clint
Massey, another Kincora survivor, recalls about
his time at the home. “In those days, there were
loads of people over from London. I have always
assumed they were senior figures from White-
hall. I certainly heard English accents”.
Unfortunately, in 2017 the Hart Inquiry inac-
curately concluded that the abuse at Kincora
was confined to the staff members who were
convicted in 1981 and that a wider sex-abuse
ring did not exist.
The establishment’s
Achilles heel
On a more positive note, there is a treasure trove
of records which could act as a roadmap to pin-
point much of MI5’s complicity in covering up the
VIP paedophile networks. They can be found in
the archives of the D-Notice Committee.
D-Notices are issued to the press to suppress
the publication of information on the basis of
“national security”. They are signed by judges.
Clearly, they are not issued to curtail fiction, and
therefore tend to attest to the accuracy of a
story.
A D-notice was issued to sup-
press details about the rape of
children at Elm Guest House,
the notorious child brothel
in London frequented by
Jimmy Savile, Cyril Smith,
Peter Hayman and others.
Richard Kerr was one of
Keith Vaz
‘May’s second choice
as chairman was Dame
Catherine Fiona Woolf lasted
a month. She was a friend of
Leon Brittan, Home Secretary
in the 1980s, who ‘lost’ the
Dickens Dossier
MI5’s Orwellian London HQ
Elm Guest House
Sir Cyril Smith MP
7 0 June 2017
those abused at it. Hilton Tims, editor of the
Surrey Comet, 1980-1988, has revealed that in
the 1980s one of his journalists made inquiries
about it only to receive a D-Notice which shut his
probe down. Who applied for it? What grounds
did they offer the judge who issued it? Indeed,
who was the judge?
The same questions could be asked about the
D-Notice issued to journalist Dan Hale to quash
his investigation into a VIP network involving
politicians. It had been based on information
supplied by Barbara Castle, the former Labour
cabinet minister and MEP.
What, other than a blackmail operation, could
have amounted to a “national security” interest
at Elm Guest House and justified the suppres-
sion of Hale’s inquiry?
Time will tell if the IICSA allows Kerr to testify
about Elm Guest House and bothers to examine
the D-Notice archive.
An inconvenient witness
One survivor who will not be welcomed by the
darker elements of the Home Office should he
turn up to testify at the IICSA is Richard Kerr. He
was raped as a young child in Belfast and as a
teenager at Kincora before he was trafficked to
England where he was exploited by a string of
VIP abusers at locations such as Elm Guest
House and Dolphin Square. At least two of his
friends and fellow victims died many years ago.
One of them, Stephen Warren, couldn’t take any
more and committed suicide by jumping into the
sea from the Liverpool-Belfast Monarch Ferry.
One of Kerr’s abusers was a senior politician
whom he has yet to name in public. The abuse
took place in London so the IICSA should inves
-
tigate it. Kerr has hinted at who the culprit was
on Channel 4 News in 2016. Village believes that
he was a high-profile Tory cabinet minister who
died not long before the Channel 4 interview.
Unfortunately, the culprit is also one of those
named by a preposterous and wholly discredited
source who claimed he had been a victim of child
abuse. (See Village April 2017.) Hence, if Kerr
names him at the IICSA, he will probably be
labelled a fantasist. A cynic would be forgiven
for suspecting a conspiracy is afoot to divert the
wind from Kerr’s sails before capsizing him.
Sir Anthony Blunt
Kerr is holding yet another ticking time-bomb:
he saw Sir Anthony Blunt, formerly of MI5, at Kin-
cora during the period 1975- 1977 in the company
of two other men. Blunt was a member of the
Cambridge Spy Ring which betrayed Britain’s
secrets to the Soviet Union.
Blunt was the third and youngest son of the
Reverend Stanley Vaughan Blunt (1870–1929)
and his wife, Hilda Master (1880–1969). He was
also a distant relative of the Queen Mother. He
was born at Holy Trinity vicarage, Bournemouth,
Hampshire, on 26 September 1907. As a child he
lived for a while in Paris, where his father was
the British embassy chaplain. He was later edu-
cated at Marlborough School where he
developed a strong interest in art. According to
one of his biographers, Michael Kitson: “Blunt
was part of a group of rebellious young aes-
thetes”, he was producing precociously fluent
defences of modern art, much to the infuriation
of the deeply conservative art teacher - an early
indication of his academic talent and his instinc-
tive contrariness”.
Blunt worked for MI5 during WWII and then
pursued a career as an art historian. He was to
become a Knight of the Realm and Keeper of the
Queen’s Pictures. His world was turned upside
down in November 1979 after he was exposed as
a Soviet mole. Photographs of him were plas-
tered over newspapers in the UK for months on
end to remind Kerr of exactly who he was.
‘Small boys are cheap today,
cheaper than yesterday’
Blunt developed an appetite for so-called ‘rent
boys’: impoverished male youths condemned to
eke out a living as male prostitutes in seedy toi
-
lets in London: hardly a lifestyle any of them
embraced voluntarily. Blunt ‘cottaged’ for them
around the lavatories in Hyde Park, near to
Speakers Corner. Details of Blunt’s private life
and his fondness for visiting Northern Ireland
have been described in many of the biographies
written about him. If Kerr had not stepped for-
ward, there would still have been ample grounds
for the IICSA to enquire into his background. Kerr
is significant nonetheless because he places
Blunt at Kincora with two other men. This fact
makes it imperative that the IICSA should roll up
its sleeves and take a long hard look at Blunt.
Although Blunt did not abuse Kerr himself, his
two companions did.
There are also unconfirmed reports that Blunt
was a visitor to Elm Guest House.
Blunt acquired his taste for ‘rent boys’ from
Richard Kerr
As detailed in recent editions
of Village, last year MI5 and MI6
lied to the Hart Inquiry about
their involvement in the Kincora
scandal and received a clean
bill of health from it
Sir Anthony Blunt
Queen Elizabeth II and Blunt
INTERNATIONAL
June 2017 7 1
his fellow MI5 traitor Guy Burgess, with whom
he once lived. Burgess was addicted to them.
While Burgess purported to be concerned for the
downtrodden, he made jokes about the children
he exploited from their ranks. On one occasion
he wrote a nauseating adaptation of La donna e
mobile which he thought was hilarious: “Small
boys are cheap today, cheaper than
yesterday”.
Blunt’s treachery was uncovered by MI5 in
1963. The following year he agreed to make a
confession in return for immunity and the
wholescale betrayal of the secrets of everyone
he knew. Peter Wright of MI5 was assigned to
interrogate him. In return for his co-operation,
Blunt was given a pardon and his treachery was
concealed from the public. The pardon was not
limited to his treachery; in addition it afforded
him blanket immunity for any crime he had ever
committed, something undoubtedly designed to
cover his sexual transgressions.
A marathon seven-
year interrogation
When Peter Wright sat down
with Blunt in 1964 he was
determined to smoke out any
member of the intelligence
community, military, civil ser
-
vice or Parliament who – like Blunt
- was homosexual: in short anyone of
importance who might have been suscepti
-
ble to blackmail by the Soviets. Homosexuality
remained a crime in England and Wales until
1967.
Blunt must’ve felt he had smashed a mirror for
bad luck. His face-to-face encounters with
Wright would drag on for seven years. They were
still proceeding apace during the early years of
the Troubles by which time MI5 was keen to find
any mechanism to gain control and influence
over Loyalist politicians and paramilitaries.
Blunt was in a pole position to assist them with
his knowledge of the Anglo-Irish Vice Ring of
which he was a leading light. The opportunities
for sexual blackmail were immense.
For seven years Wright and MI5 pored over the
careers of the Oxbridge graduates of the 1930s
and anyone else of possible interest known to
Blunt. Ostensibly, the pair became so friendly
they exchanged Christmas cards. In reality they
did not trust each other. Wright wrote later: “We
had to adopt a subtle approach, in an attempt to
play on [Blunt’s] character. I could tell that Blunt
wanted to be thought helpful, even where it was
clear that he was not. Moreover, he disliked
intensely being caught in a lie. We had to extract
intelligence from him by a slow process of cumu-
lative pressure […] Often we drank, he gin and I
Scotch; always we talked, about the 1930s,
about the KGB, about espionage and friendship,
love and betrayal. They remain from me among
the most vivid encounters of my life”.
Blunt’s circle of friends
in Ireland
Wright’s odyssey into the
hidden recesses of Blunt’s life
unravelled an array of friends
and associates in Ireland, con-
nections which reached back
to his childhood. Blunt had
attended Marlborough School
where he had befriended the cele
-
brated Belfast poet Louis MacNeice, who
was born in the same month as him. For a long
time the pair remained the best of friends. Mac
-
Niece recalled in his (unpublished) memoirs that
Blunt was bullied because he was an individual-
ist and non-conformer: “Boys of that age are
especially sadistic…They would seize him, tear
off most of his clothes and cover him with house
paint, then put him in the basket and push him
round and round the hall. [..] Government of the
mob, by the mob, and for the mob [..] a perfect
exhibition of mass sadism”.
Sir Samuel Knox Cunningham,
MP, KC
Blunt earned a scholarship to Cambridge in 1926
where he made more Irish friends. One of then
was Sir Samuel Knox Cunningham who was
slightly younger than him. Cunningham became
known as the ‘Boxing Queen’ because of his
homosexuality and prowess as a pugilist. He
was a heavyweight boxing champion at Cam
-
bridge. In later life he was elected as a Unionist
MP. In the 1960s he represented South Antrim.
He served as Parliamentary Private Secretary to
Prime Minister Harold MacMillan, 1959-1963,
and as such routinely attended Cabinet meet-
ings at 10 Downing Street. Knox Cunningham
often stayed with Blunt while in London and also
knew Guy Burgess from their days at Cambridge.
He was a rich man and lived on a 70-acre estate
at Glencairn Park, and once came within an inch
of becoming Grandmaster of the Orange Order.
He chose not to stand in the 1970 general elec
-
tion and was succeeded by his fellow Orangemen
and election agent, James Molyneaux who later
led the Unionist Party. Molyneaux was a friend
of another high-ranking Orangeman, William
McGrath, one of the staff at Kincora who was
convicted for child abuse in 1981.
Cunningham was also a key figure in the
odious Anglo-Irish Vice Ring. At the start of
Blunt’s debriefing, Peter Wright’s interest in Cun-
ningham would have centred on the fact he had
sat around the Cabinet table, was gay and the
friend of a self-confessed KGB mole (Blunt) and
Time will tell if the IICSA allows
Kerr to testify about Elm Guest
House and bothers to examine
the D-Notice archive
Guy Burgess
Sir Knox Cunningham
Guy Burgess
Peter Wright
7 2 June 2017
another traitor who had defected to Moscow
(Burgess). By the end of the debriefing in the
early 1970s, Cunningham’s lofty position within
the Orange Order and central role in Unionist pol-
itics would have been of equal interest to MI5.
Cunningham was one of many homosexuals
active inside the Orange Order who were suscep-
tible to blackmail, especially as homosexuality
was still a crime in Northern Ireland, and he
undoubtedly knew many of them, including a
leading light in the Orange Order, William
McGrath, the housefather at Kincora.
Richard Kerr has revealed that Knox Cunning
-
ham was a visitor to Kincora. Since the IICSA is
charged with investigating VIP child abuse,
especially abusers who were Westminster MPs,
the Inquiry will, it is to be hoped, listen to what
Kerr has to say about Cunningham.
The Deputy Lord Lieutenant
of Tyrone
Another of Blunt’s Irish friends was Captain
Peter Montgomery, a cousin of ‘Monty’, the
famous WWII field marshal. The Captain lived at
a magnificent estate in Blessingborne, County
Tyrone. The pair first met at Cambridge. Mont-
gomery became one of Blunt’s earliest lovers,
possibly even his first. Montgomery later
became Deputy Lord Lieutenant of Tyrone, which
meant he was one of a string of personal repre-
sentative of the Queen in Ulster. He also became
President of the Northern Ireland Arts Council.
Montgomery always kept a room for Blunt at
Blessingborne, and Montgomery often stayed
with Blunt when he visited London. When Blunt
suffered nervous exhaustion in 1943, it was to
Ulster and the embrace of Montgomery he
repaired for recuperation. After Blunt was
exposed as an MI5 traitor, Blunt’s signature was
found by Sunday Times reporters in the guest-
book at Blessingborne. Captain Montgomery
was also a key figure in the Anglo-Irish Vice Ring.
According to the whistleblower Robin Harbinson,
who knew him well, he procured boys from Por-
tora Royal College, Enniskillen, for those in the
vice ring with a penchant for well-bred
children.
One of Blunt’s biographers, Miranda Carter,
has provided a glimpse at the lifestyle Blunt and
Montgomery enjoyed: “The writer Hugh Mass-
ingberd, Peter Montgomery’s great-nephew,
remembered meeting Blunt, very much ‘off duty’,
with his uncle in 1965. ‘It was a very hot day, and
Blunt came in wearing virtually a G-string and a
light sleeveless T-shirt, and said, “Peter’s over
-
dressed and I’m underdressed. How do you do?”.
It was a bit stagey. His [great] uncle also once
took him to a party at Blunt’s old stomping
ground, Palace Court. ‘There seemed to be a lot
of oriental youths around, and Blunt and my
uncle, one felt, had dropped their guards. It was
full of opera queens and an odd mixture of seedy
old faggots and oriental boys. It was very much
a gay party’”.
Britain’s insatiable appetite
for revelations about the
Cambridge Spy Ring
As the bloodhounds in the UK press picked up
the scent of Blunt’s MI5 treachery in 1979, he
became preoccupied at the prospect of the
seamy side of his private life being exposed. At
the same time, senior members of the British
Establishment were trying to talk Margaret
Thatcher out of confirming that Blunt had been
a KGB mole. They must also have been con-
cerned that a root and branch investigation of
Blunt’s sordid life by the media would expose
the Anglo-Irish abuse network.
Now, if Richard Kerr manages to get to testify
before the IICSA, he might yet manage to prise
open this long-sealed can of Anglo-Irish worms.
In the first instance, he will focus attention on
Blunt and the Anglo-Irish network. While the Brit-
ish media has little interest in Kincora, it has an
insatiable appetite for stories about the Cam-
bridge Spy Ring. New books are published every
year and receive a wider readership, and this
has been the case for decades. If Blunt were
linked to the vice ring that swirled around
Peter Montgomery
Portora Royal College
Kerr is significant nonetheless
because he places Blunt at
Kincora with two other men. So
the IICSA should take a long
hard look at Blunt. Although
Blunt did not abuse Kerr himself,
his two companions did
INTERNATIONAL
June 2017 7 3
Kincora, some sections of the British media
might become difficult to muzzle. If it became
apparent that MI5 learnt about the inner work-
ings of the Anglo-Irish vice ring through Blunt,
and that this was what led them to Kincora, MI5
might yet face a torrid time in the British press,
whatever about at the IICSA.
There is also a Byzantine and ironic possibility
that Blunt - the arch traitor - returned to the MI5
fold in the 1970s, albeit with his tail between his
legs. Those in MI5 who controlled him might
have assigned him to work as an agent provoca-
teur. And his mission? To lure influential
pederasts and paedophiles to places like Kin-
cora and Elm Guest House where MI5 surveillance
teams were waiting to film them for blackmail
purposes.
Blunt’s pardon was not
limited to his treachery;
it afforded him blanket
immunity to cover
sexual transgressions
Richard Kerr
Sir Anthony Blunt
MI5 possesses an archive of the notes and
reports which Peter Wright compiled during
his debriefing of Blunt. It preserves a record of
what MI5 learnt about the fabric of the VIP net-
work in the UK and Ireland, and therefore who
they were able to target for blackmail.
Time will tell if the IICSA is serious about
unravelling the role of MI5 and MI6 in protect-
ing paedophiles networks or if it will succumb
to the hypnotic powers of those orchestrating
the cover-up on behalf of the darkest elements
of the British Establishment. A few positive
harbingers would include the following:
•
That the IICSA call for evidence from the
police officers who have spoken publicly
about the suppression of their inquiries into
Sir Cyril Smith, something that was perpe-
trated by MI5 and its puppets in the Special
Branch. (See Village May 2017);
• That it permit Richard Kerr to testify about
the overlaps between British and Irish abuse
circles;
•
That it identify the two RUC officers who
spoke to Liam Clarke about the Tory West-
minster MP who visited Kincora;
•
That it comb through the archives of the
D-Notice Committee;
• That it demand of MI5 that it furnish it with
the notes and records Peter Wright compiled
during his marathon debriefing of Blunt;
•
That it vet any of its staff with links to the
Home Office to ensure they never had any
connection to MI5.
The credibility test
