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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
7 4 June 2017
MI5 and MI6 divert resources from persuing
ISIS to cover up its paedophile blackmailings
by Joseph de Búrca
I
HAVE SPOKEN to Fred Holroyd from time to time. Hol-
royd worked with the British Army and MI6 in
Ireland, 1973-75, and has written a book about his
experience, ‘War Without Honour’. Incredibly, Brit
-
ish spies are still meddling with his post.
Holroyd has furnished me with a photograph of an
envelope he received from me. It contained an academic
book about the origins of the Troubles, something that
interests Holroyd. To protect the book from damage, it
was placed inside a bubblewrap cover and then
slipped inside an ordinary white enve-
lope. Somewhere along the line
someone pierced both layers of
the package with what was
undoubtedly a micro camera
wand to see what dangers to
the Realm lurked inside.
The misuse of precious resources
Moreover spendthrift paranoia like this and the decades-
long Special Branch monitoring of Jeremy Corbyn and
Diane Abbott compromises scarce resources.
Since Theresa May became home secretary in 2010
total police numbers in England and Wales have fallen
by 46,700 or 19.5%.Home Office figures for authorised
firearms officers have declined from 6,976 in March 2010
to 5,639 in March last year.
In contrast to this, the overall budget of the
Single Intelligence Account – which covers
expenditure on MI5, MI6 and the govern
-
ment monitoring service GCHQ – rose to
£2.63bn lin 2015 upfrom £2.48bn in
2014; in 2010, it stood at £2bn.
As a result of these cutbacks, armed
troops had to be placed under the con
-
trol of the police after the Manchester
suicide bomb atrocity.
Meanwhile, MI5 is making excuses for its
failure. One of these is that it is overwhelmed
and under resourced. A fact shouted from the
rooftops is that it requires 30 officers to place a
single suspect under surveillance 24/7. Since there are
approximately 3,000 such threats, it would require
90,000 surveillance officers to watch them all. Yet despite
this MI5 is still able to find resources to interfere with Hol-
royd’s post; photograph its content; compile reports and
send them to whatever departments analyses them. After
this MI5 probably liaises with MI6 which in turn contacts
its spies in Dublin to find out more about the threat posed
by the sinister forces who sent a history book from Dublin.
Holroyd’s phone is probably also monitored. Since he is
scrutinised daily, a fair estimation is that 10 working hours
are consumed daily. Why?
The surveillance of Holroyd intensified after the pres
-
sure to reinvestigate the Kincora Boys Home scandal
grew to the point where the Hart Inquiry into child abuse
in NI was established. Holroyd’s handwritten notes from
Since Holroyd is
scrutinised daily,
a fair estimation
is that 10 working
hours are
consumed daily.
Why?
Taking the eye
off bombers and
stabbers
Manchester bombing
Fred Holryod
This photograph shows how a
hole was punctured through
the outer and inner layer of a
package posted from Dublin
by one of Village’s writers to
Fred Holroyd
INTERNATIONAL
June 2017 7 5
his time in NI confirm that he had been told that
Loyalist politicians were visiting Kincora for
sexual purposes.
If Holroyd’s post is being surveilled, other Kin-
cora whistleblowers who have featured in recent
editions of Village such as Brian Gemmell and
Colin Wallace are probably being scrutinised too;
not to mention Kincora survivors such as Richard
Kerr and Clint Massey. If only 30 individuals are
being monitored, that means about 300 man
hours are being consumed daily.
This is only part of MI5 and MI6’s misuse of
time, energy and gold. They have both had to
prepare for the Hart Inquiry and the Independent
Inquiry Into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) in
London. Their only interest was to maintain the
cover-up of their sordid role in a swathe of child
sex abuse blackmail scandals. Officers would
have had to talk to serving and retired officers to
get a full picture of what went on; trawl through
records; cull embarrassing documents; liaise
with Home Office and Foreign Office officials and
pull the wool over the eyes of senior politicians;
engage with lawyers; consider PR and propa-
ganda initiatives; and last but not least: coach
their witnesses to lie to these inquiries. Tens of
thousands of man hours must have been spent,
and this will continue to be the case as the IICSA
looks like it will last another decade.
An avoidable massacre
There is no doubt that the Manchester massacre
could have been avoided. Amber Rudd, the Home
Secretary, has stated that the bomber was
“known” to the security services “up to a point”.
His mother told them that he had been radical-
ised. Two of his friends called the police hotline
in 2012 and warned that he believed that “being
a suicide bomber was okay” and that he was
“supporting terrorism”. He also made trips to
Libya and, it now appears, Syria.
In addition to wasting time on Holroyd et al,
MI5 has a lamentable record of eavesdropping
on trade unionists and other civil rights groups.
One of those placed under the microscope was
that well-known threat to the Realm, Jeremy
Corbyn. It’s anyone’s guess how much of this
nonsense is still going on at the expense of Brit-
ish taxpayers while Isis terrorists gambol
back-and-forth from the Middle East.
The present Director-General of MI5 is Andrew
Parker. He believes that MI5 is an honourable
organisation. We will give him the benefit of the
doubt and assume that all the recent child-abuse
skulduggery has taken place behind his back.
Will someone now please tell him that he should
redeploy his troops from Holroyd et al to Isis
terrorists.
The politics of the pirouette
The demons unleashed by Britain’s destruction
of Libya loom large in the story of the Manches
-
ter bomber. He had a Libyan background and
was trained by Isis in Libya and/or Syria. Going
back a few years, MI6 (which is responsible for
overseas intelligence activity) failed to predict
what was likely to happen in Libya when David
Cameron was considering bombing Colonel
Gaddafi’s forces in support of the rebels. It cer-
tainly didn’t impress this likelihood on him with
sufficient force to prevent the bombing of Libya
by the RAF. Chaos and civil war engulfed the
country and created a haven for Isis.
Overall, recent British-Libyan history defies
belief. Gaddafi furnished the IRA with arms, his
agents had planted a bomb on an airliner which
exploded over Lockerbie and shot a police
officer dead outside the Libyan embassy in
London. On the other side of the fence, the US
and UK plot against Gaddafi and on one occa
-
sion bombed his family tent. Then suddenly it
was time to be friends. Tony Blair was soon
posing for the cameras with Gaddafi all smiles
and handshakes while secretly MI6 was sliding
details about Gaddafi’s opponents over to his
spy chiefs in Tripoli.
Move forward a few years and it was time for
another pirouette. David Cameron dispatched
RAF bombers to deplete Gaddafi forces from the
air while MI6 and the SAS lent support to anti-
Gaddafi rebels on the ground. Anti-Gaddafi
Libyans who were resident in Britain were
allowed to travel home to fight with Al Qaeda
groups including the father of the Manchester
bomber. After Gaddafi was toppled, Cameron and
President Nicolas Sarkozy of France visited Libya
where they congratulated the insurgents calling
them “lions”. The problem is some of those lions
are now biting the hand that once fed them.
Passing the buck
At the moment MI5 is doing what MI5 does best:
pumping out propaganda. On the positive side,
Whitehall ‘sources’ are briefing a compliant Brit-
ish press that MI5 foiled five serious threats this
year and is managing 500 investigations of
3,000 suspects. Even if this is true, it could have
carried out more investigations if it hadn’t been
busy covering up its blackmail of paedophiles.
On the negative side, blame is being heaped
on the Internet providers who host radical
websites.
Recruitment woes
Senior MI5 and MI6 officers complain that they
cannot attract high-level recruits; moreover, that
they have difficulty retaining experienced offic-
ers. Some of this is self-inflicted by old-fashioned
narrow-mindedness. As of 2016 none of the
senior officials in MI5 or MI6 are from minority
ethnic backgrounds, according to diversity fig-
ures released by parliament’s intelligence and
security committee. In any event who’d want to
work for organisations that have perpetrated
such heinous crimes as Kincora, the murder of
Patrick Finucane, and have colluded with Loyal
-
ist assassins.
The problems inside MI5 and MI6 are only
going to get worse: new recruits will have no
stomach to work for organisations that continue
to divert scarce resources towards the protection
of child molesters while children are literally
being blown up by ISIS terrorists.
Andrew Parker, Director-General of MI5, the defence of the Realm is now in his hands
The strength of the
British police force has
been reduced by 22%
since 2010 while the number of
armed response officers has
been cut by 50%
