The British Spy, Saor Éire and The Murder Of Garda Richard Fallon

July 2021 37

1. Taoiseach Jack Lynch and

British Ambassador John

Peck alarmed at prospect of

Captain Kelly’s book

After Captain James Kelly was acquitted by the jury

at the infamous Arms Trial in October 1970, he began

to write a book about what had happened to him. His

efforts were closely monitored by the British

Embassy. The embassy was led by John Peck, a dirty-

tricks expert who had earlier commanded the

notorious Information Research Department (IRD).

The IRD was complicit

in the massacre of hun-

dreds of thousands of

people due to the black

propaganda it pumped

out. Peck was involved

in the coup against the

democratically elected

and secular – and pop-

ular – leader of Iran in

the late 1940s, the

event that precipitated

so much turmoil in the

Middle East. The IRD’s

most reprehensible

crime was the malign

encouragement it gave

to the anti-communist

By David Burke

POLITICS

Garda Richrd Fllon

Ambassador John Peck,

dirty-tricks expert.

Captain James Kelly; a copy

of his book was stolen by the

British Foreign Ofﬁce.

The British Spy,

Saor Éire and

The Murder Of

Garda Richard Fallon

forces in Indonesia who slaughtered hundreds of

thousands of people as a result.

In January 1971, Peck alerted Kelvin White, a

senior diplomat at the West European Department of

the Foreign and Commonwealth Oce (FCO), about

Captain Kelly’s book: “When I saw the Taoiseach

[Jack Lynch] just before Christmas [1970] he men-

tioned casually that Captain James Kelly was trying

to produce in double quick time a book about the

arms trial which, he claimed, was going to be full of

damaging material about the involvement of the

whole Irish government”. Why Lynch passed-on this

information is a mystery.

2. Dirty Tricks to halt the

Publication of Captain Kelly’s

Book

Captain Kelly managed to secure a contract with the

British publisher Collins who described his book as

the “most explosive book for some time”, in the

London media. The title of the forthcoming book was

‘Orders for The Captain’.

Peck was determined to halt the book. He provided

the FCO with some thoughts about how London

might exert pressure on Collins to drop it, such as

that it might be libellous. The FCO was soon advising

Peck they had a contact in Collins. AC Thorpe of the

FCO met a disloyal employee who undertook to steal

a proof of the book. When the FCO read the stolen

38 July 2021

manuscript, they found something in it that

conﬁrmed their worst fears: something so

alarming they intervened and successfully

persuaded Collins to abandon the publica

tion. Thorpe was well pleased with the result

and commented that the author’s search for a

publisher would now “have to start again from

scratch”.

Michael Gill, managing director of Gill and

Macmillan, stepped into the breach with an

oer to publish it. Plates were made up and

sent to a ﬁrm called Cahills for printing. On

this occasion, George Colley, a minister in

Lynch’s cabinet, swooped. As Captain Kelly

put it, Cahills had some “valuable govern-

ment printing contracts and this was the soft

underbelly that gave the Irish government its

chance, with word coming down from George

Colley’s Ministry of Finance to halt printing or

else! As far as both governments were con-

cerned, ‘Orders for The Captain’ was not going

to see the light of day and they nearly

succeeded”.

Undaunted, Captain Kelly decided to self-

publish the book and approached a number

of printers but, “the word had got out” and

they were “not prepared to print in the face of

ocial opprobrium”.

Help materialised out of the shadows: the

Captain next received a phone call from a man

who refused to identify himself but “requested

that I meet him in an oce in Jervis Street in

Dublin’s city centre. He indicated that he

might be in a position to help solve my print-

ing problem. In Jervis Street, I climbed one or

two ﬂights of stairs in the designated building

and found myself in a dark, dingy oce. An

apparently sturdy ﬁgure of average height sat

hunched behind a small bare desk. He ges-

tured towards the chair. Reiterating that he

did not want to be identiﬁed, he requested

that I should forget the meeting once it was

over. To this day, I have not met the man again

nor do I know who he was, but somehow or

other I got the impression that he was a

lawyer”.

The mysterious ﬁgure told him that there

was a “small printing machine,

operating on the phonographic

system around the corner in

Abbey Street, which I could

rent. We discussed the ‘ins and

outs’ of the matter and it was

agreed that I should print

2,000 copies of the book ini-

tially, sell them and then pay

the rent of the machine and

the wages of the operator;

and carry on from there. We

shook hands on the deal and

I went straight to the printing

shop, where I introduced myself to the

young machine operator and explained

what I intended doing. Obviously, he had

been briefed to expect me and I arranged to

bring in the plates the following week. With-

out hesitation or payment, Michael Gill

instructed Cahills to release the plates to me,

while the printing ﬁrm, despite the ocial

diktat not to print, agreed to collate and bind

the book. On the due date, I arrived in Abbey

Street; the machine was set up, and we were

ready to go”.

The ﬁrst 2,000 prints sold out in days, but

Captain Kelly found himself short of copies

when the “clamour for them was at its high-

est”. Nevertheless, he spent a year producing

and distributing the book, “considerably

relieving the impecunious position I and my

family found ourselves in after the trauma of

the trials”.

3. What was in the book

that so alarmed the

British?

One of the more unpleasant myths to emerge

from the vines of dishonesty which have

wrapped themselves around the Arms Crisis

was a tendril which tried to manufacture a link

between Captain Kelly and Saor Éire, the para-

military group which murdered Garda Richard

Fallon on the Quays in Dublin in April 1970.

Captain Kelly was arrested in May 1970 by the

Head of Garda Special Branch, John Fleming,

and an Inspector Doocey. The pair interviewed

Captain Kelly at the Bridewell. As the Captain

recounted in ‘Orders for the Captain’, the ﬁrst

question put to him by Doocey was: “What do

you know about the Garda Fallon murder?”.

When Captain Kelly responded with purple-

veined outrage, the question was

withdrawn.

The reason for the question was a false and

malicious rumour that the Captain and his

associates had helped Saor Éire to procure

the gun used to shoot Garda Fallon. While

there was no evidence for

this, the allegation clearly

poisoned the attitude of

the Garda against Captain

Kelly and his associates.

Neil Blaney, one of the

Cabinet ministers dis

missed by Taoiseach Jack

Lynch during the Arms

Crisis, was so incensed

about rumours linking him

to the group, he not only

denied them but referred to

the organisation in the Dáil

during the Arms Crisis

debate as “that lousy outﬁt

Saor Éire”.

4. Where did the murder

weapon come from?

So, where did the murder weapon come from?

According to Seán Boyne, author of the bril-

liant book, Gunrunners, Saor Éire had been

amassing weapons in the late 1960s. One of

its members revealed to him that they had

established a contact who worked at the Brit-

ish Small Arms factory in Birmingham. It

‘proved’ 9mm Star pistols for the Star muni-

tions factory in Spain. The contact was able to

set aside perfectly good pistols as ‘rejects’

and later smuggle them out of the factory.

They were then sent to Ireland, passing sur-

reptitiously through Dublin Airport.

Another source of guns for Saor Éire had

been a high-proﬁle Dublin underworld ﬁgure.

Boyne discovered that the Gardaí had come

to believe that one of the Birmingham guns

had been used to murder Garda Fallon in

Dublin on 3 April 1970.

5. British Intelligence spies

on Saor Éire but lets

them smuggle guns to

Ireland

British Intelligence could have halted the

importation of the murder weapon but chose

not to. The British agent who knew all about

the Saor Éire gun-running eorts was the mys-

terious Captain Peter Markham Randall.

Captain Kelly had saved his life in Dublin in

November 1969 when he had tried to gain

access to what he believed were IRA gun-train-

ing camps by oering arms to Northern

Nationalists including John Kelly, a later co-

defendant at the Arms Trials.

Captain Kelly described the British spy in

‘Orders for the Captain’ as a “small, dark-

haired, goatee-bearded man”. This description

bears a striking resemblance to the arms

dealer that Boyne described as having helped

What was in Kelly’s book that was

of such concern?

Sean Boyne

describes efforts

by a British agent

to inﬁltrate Saor

Éire. He was

undoubtedly the

same man who

featured in Kelly’s

book.

July 2021 39

Saor Éire. He was also a “small man with a goatee

beard” and was called ‘Randall’. According to

Boyne’s source, Randall had made contact with a

person linked to Saor Éire in the UK in the late 1960s:

“‘arms dealer’ gave his name as Randall, although

other versions of the name were also reported. The

Saor Éire-linked individual in the UK, in good faith,

passed on this contact to his friends in the organisa-

tion back in Ireland, who were equally unsuspecting.

In retrospect, the possibility opens up that British

intelligence somehow detected Saor Éire activities

in the UK and decided to inﬁltrate the subversive

group by using an agent or a ‘front’ man, the myste-

rious Mr. Randall”.

Suce it to say, if British Intelligence had moved

to cut o the supply of weapons from Birmingham

instead of exploiting it to preserve Markham-Ran-

dall’s cover and develop other leads, it is possible

Garda Fallon might not have been killed, or at least

not by a weapon from Birmingham.

Bearing all the foregoing in mind, a passage in the

Captain’s book can only have alarmed Peck and his

masters in London to wit:

“The quest for arms by Northern representatives

continued, and in November a suspected British

agent was lured to Dublin. After three or four days’

negotiation in the Gresham Hotel, the supposed

arms salesman oered a bribe to one of the North-

erners. Negotiations were immediately broken o

and an agent, who was using the name of Peter

Markham-Randall, presumably returned to England.

I reported the aair to Colonel Heeron and he initi-

ated enquiries with Garda Headquarters”.

6. Spying on Charlie Haughey’s

Brother in Portugal

Another person the British went to considerable

lengths to monitor was Jock Haughey who knew

about Markham-Randall from his participation in the

attempt to purchase arms from him in November

1969. In October 1970 he went on a holiday to Por-

tugal with his wife Kitty. One leg of the journey took

the couple through Britain where they noticed they

had picked up a tail, a British gentleman who shad

owed their every move. In the mornings he would sit

at the table next to them while they ate breakfast and

then monitor them during the day. At night he would

sit next to them again. While the Haugheys had been

disturbed by him at the start of their holiday, they

soon found his pedantic and predictable behaviour

amusing, especially his habit of ordering lobster –

and no other meal on the menu - for his evening meal.

On at least one occasion they attempted to engage

him in conversation much to his embarrassment and

without success. On their return to Britain, he

skipped the passport control queue and went

directly to talk to the ocials while the other pas-

sengers were queuing up.

The most plausible reason for trying to sabotage

‘Orders for the Captain’ and for the shadowing of Jock

Haughey across Europe was because they were

members of a tiny group of people who knew about

Markham-Randall and could provide clues linking

him to the murder weapon Saor Éire might have used

to kill Garda Fallon; further, that British Intelligence

had not shared the information Markham-Randall

had gathered about Saor Éire in the late 1960s to

help shut it down. Fallon was not murdered until April

of 1970. Had this volatile connection been made, the

incandescence among the rank-and-ﬁle gardaí, not

to mention at middle and senior level, had the poten-

tial to set garda relations with MI5 and MI6 at nought,

with little prospect of any reconciliation for years.

The roots of the British operation to suppress this

information undoubtedly reached far deeper than

anything described here. For a start, MI6 had clearly

learned of the Haugheys’ holiday plans in advance

and had been able to book an agent into the same

hotel they proposed to visit.

To achieve this, they must have had access to the

family’s phone conversations. In 1970 phone tap-

ping was carried out by making a physical connection

to a phone line, something that could only be done

in the vicinity of a junction near the target’s phone.

It is unlikely that MI6 deployed a tapping unit to

Dublin in 1970. Instead, the information was prob-

ably furnished to them by a senior ﬁgure with access

to the transcripts generated by Special Branch

tappers.

7. Smearing Jock Haughey

A retired Special Branch ocer familiar with Saor Éire

and the two informers who were recruited by the

gardaí from inside it is adamant that Jock Haughey

had “nothing whatsoever – absolutely nothing – to

do with Saor Éire’. Yet Jock Haughey spent the rest of

his life unfairly tarnished by questions about the

murder of Garda Fallon. Garret FitzGerald continued

to press the issue in the Dáil over the next decade.

The Garda did not forget their fallen colleague. In

2014 a fresh inquiry was conducted by a detective

superintendent attached to the Serious Crime

Review Team at the National Bureau of Criminal

Investigation. He and his team would have been well

advised to have made enquiries in London about the

spy who masqueraded as Captain Peter Markham-

Randall and the ﬁles MI5 and MI6 undoubtedly have

about him and the Saor Éire gun-smuggling network

he penetrated.

Captain Peter Markham-

Randall inﬁltrated the Saor Eire

gun-smuggling operation

Jock and Kitty Haughey