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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
2 4 December - January 2017
S
OME SAY soil never rests easy on a
troubled grave. In late November
came news of two long-delayed
‘legacy inquests’ in Northern Ireland.
The remains of Daniel Rooney were
exhumed in Belfast by the PSNI’s Legacy Inves-
tigation Branch, overseen by a forensic
anthropologist engaged by his family. Back in
1972, Daniel was with a friend at a street corner,
watching odd traffic behaviour, when a car tore
back past and sprayed the pair with rapid gun
-
fire. Rooney (18) had been shot dead by a British
Army maverick undercover Military Reaction
Force (MRF) unit. The ‘good news’ is that “an
object of interest” has been found in the coffin,
a bullet. The family is now engaging a ballistics
expert to check its provenance.
Another inquest concerned Manus Deery (15),
shot by a British soldier from Derry’s walls in
May 1972. The army version was that the soldier
had fired a single shot at a “gunman”, or that
Deery had been gesturing with a stick at the
observation post. Now, a Ministry of Defence
barrister has admitted that Welsh Fusilier Pri-
vate. wwWilliam Glasgow (now deceased) acted
in breach of Yellow Card rules, and that young
Manus was going about his lawful business. You
might think this scant comfort after 44 years of
grief; but the vindication was not lost on Deery’s
long-suffering sister, Helen.
The Deery family’s solicitor, Richard
Campbell, is also acting for the upcoming
inquest for unarmed teenage IRA volunteer
Seamus Bradley (19), shot dead (in the back) in
1972 during Operation Motorman, the outland
-
ishly vast British military operation to bulldoze
into ‘no-go’ Republican areas in Belfast, Derry
and border towns, involving over 20,000 troops.
Among thousands of disclosed documents,
Campbell found the minutes of a Stormont secu
-
rity meeting on 10 July, 1972, between NI
Secretary of State William Whitelaw, the head of
the British Army (GOC), RUC, MI6, senior politi-
cians and civil servants. Article J of the minutes
stated: “The Army should not be inhibited in its
campaign by the threat of Court proceedings and
should therefore be suitably indemnified” – just
three weeks before Operation Motorman.
This shocking document is one of many,
mostly freshly declassified papers from the UK
National Archives at Kew, and elsewhere, which
historian Margaret Urwin marshals for her new
book, 'A State in Denial': a darkly powerful exam-
ination of British policy from the beginning of the
Troubles to 1983. It traces an inevitably fragmen-
tary arc, as most relevant British papers have not
been released, and all files on the UDR may
remain closed for 50, 80, 100 years; perhaps for-
ever. Urwin’s is a sectional, but not partisan,
history which starkly records the frightful death
tally attributable to the IRA and the British army;
and the more sectarian preferences of paramili-
tary loyalists like the UVF and the UDA - a
perfectly legal (until 1992), violent mass move-
ment throughout the Troubles. Quite openly in
these papers, British or Northern Ireland Office
(NIO) bureaucrats discuss with military brass
and MI5 how, rather than open up a war on two
fronts, the British and Ulster elite were keen to
Adventures in
British Imperialism
Books by Margaret Urwin, Ann Cadwallader and
Ian Cobain illuminate the viciousness of end-of-
Empire Britain from Ireland to Kenya
by Mic Moroney
Minutes of a Stormont security meeting in
1972, between Secretary of State William
Whitelaw, the head of the British Army RUC,
MI6, senior politicians and civil servants record: “The
Army should not be inhibited in its campaign by the threat
of Court proceedings and should therefore be suitably
indemnified” – 3 weeks before Operation Motorman
NEWS
December - January 2017 2 5
keep loyalists onside, the UDA patrolling nation-
alist areas beside the Army like an auxiliary
force. The enemy is very much the IRA and the
Catholic minority – despite the headaches of
UDA weapons raids on UDR barracks, intimida-
tory “shows of strength” and regular outbreaks
of sectarian killing.
In these early troubled years, one discerns a
set of complex but ultimately asymmetric rela
-
tionships bedding down across Ulster, and
between the British and Irish governments.
Urwin incontrovertibly puts the lie to official
denials of collusion between violent loyalism
and state forces as diplomats and high-level civil
servants discuss strategy, memos of meetings
or briefing documents for Ministers, all the way
to Downing Street.
There were high-level meetings with the IRA
and Sinn Féin - MI6 representative Frank Steele
met two IRA men outside Derry on 20 June 1972.
On the back of it, the IRA called a ceasefire on 26
June. 10 days later, on 7 July, a larger IRA delega-
tion, led by Seán MacStíofáin, met Whitelaw in
London – but the positions were polarised, and
two days later the détente broke down in
Belfast.
This document mentioned above reflects Gen-
eral Harry Tuzo’s elaborate 28-page game-plan,
which he sent to Whitelaw the previous day, 9
July, the day the truce broke down. Tuzo recom-
mended all-out, maximum-force war against the
IRA. While serious consideration was given to
this, the government retreated by 20 July when,
at a meeting between the PM, the NI Secretary
of State and the General Chief of Staff, a decision
was taken not to proceed. However, the follow-
ing day, ‘Bloody Friday’, the IRA detonated 26
bombs in Belfast within an hour, killing nine and
injuring 130. This presented the British Army
with the justification for Operation Motorman.
The decision to proceed was taken by ministers
on 27 July.
Tuzo turned a blind eye to the source of UDA
arms (regular mass weapons thefts from UDR
barracks), Tuzo wished to up the ante, and “take
the war to the IRA”. He recommended the rein-
forcement of the MRF, or replacing them with the
SAS. By any measure, this was a war on a whole
community, exemplified by the use of screening
– arbitrary arrests of nationalists and their
removal to barracks for interrogation, to help in
the mapping out estates and homes and house
-
holds. Highly discriminatory, this was never
General Sir Frank Kitson
was posted to Northern
Ireland as commander of
39 Brigade in Belfast in
1970, importing techniques
he perfected in Kenya
and Malaya: psychological
warfare as introduced in
Lisburn by the IPU; and
pseudo-gangs
British soldiers guard Mau Mau rebels, Kenya 1950s
2 6 December - January 2017
deployed in loyalist areas, and was declared ille-
gal in 1981.
This was an information war too,
steered by MI5 and the Information Policy Unit
(IPU) at British Army HQ in Lisburn, with its
SyOps.and black propaganda - but the streets
had their own reality. To bring down the power-
sharing Sunningdale Agreement, the Ulster
Workers Council (UWC) staged their vast, prov-
ince-wide shut-down of factories and utilities.
from 15 May, 1974, with the UVF playing a big role
in the intimidation, having killed 24 people that
year. Meanwhile, friendly discussions with the
NIO’s James Allan continued about the UVF’s de-
proscription (re-legalisation), with the call to
Allan from UVF leader Ken Gibson on 17 May, the
morning of the Dublin and Monaghan bombings.
In the aftershock, Garda and Irish diplomatic
requests for intelligence-sharing were rebuffed,
and the UVF was, incredibly, de-proscribed on
23 May. Urwin notes Allan requesting the
“opportunity to comment on possible arrest
lists”, suggesting any proper investigation of the
massacre was doomed from the start.
Throughout the strike, the gingerness of the
northern authorities in dealing with their bellig
-
erent loyalist allies is striking – even as the UWC
blocked off all roads in and out of Stormont, forc-
ing the Secretary of State and Brian Faulkner to
be helicoptered in, thanks to police and military
reluctance to remove the barricades.
Citing Colin Wallace, Urwin argues that the
authorities quickly learned who perpetrated the
bombings in the South. Later known as the
Glenanne gang, it was a loose well-trained para-
military group combining mid-Ulster UVF, RUC,
UDR and intelligence elements, operating out of
James Mitchell’s farm buildings in rural Armagh
and now credited with 120 murders on both sides
of the border.
The mind still shimmers at some of the notes
of meetings back at Stormont: UDA man David
Payne “hovered in a rather crazy way by Mr
Allan”, or “ribald discussions of [UVF killer John]
McKeague’s proclivities” (paedophilia). And the
loyalists seemed to get what they wanted. Sun
-
ningdale collapsed on 28 May, and in August
1974 various organisations that had formed the
UWC met Merlyn Rees and senior NIO officials to
demand a “Third Force” that would deliver con-
trol over all security to “Ulstermen”. Within a
month, Rees announced the expansion of the
RUC (from 4,500 to 6,000 members) and RUC
Reserve (from 2,000 to 4,000, with educational
entry-qualifications lowered) and two full-time
UDR batallions were formed less than 18 months
later.
Urwin’s final ‘case-history’ is the RUC raid
which found a substantial little arms cache at the
UDA HQ in Belfast on 26 May, 1981, at the height
of the IRA/INLA hungerstrikes. She pores
through the “flurry of internal memos” between
NIO civil servants: the usual denials and
downplaying of UDA murders, as Secretary of
State Humphrey Atkins fretted over the failure to
make arrests, in light of UDA commander Andy
Tyrie’s public admissions of terrorism. RUC Chief
Constable Sir John Hermon stiffly resisted sug-
gestions he proscribe the UDA, until at least the
hungerstrikes had blown over and the UDA had
developed a political wing, to hive off the “rump
of hard men”, ie the UFF, so authorities could
open up political contacts with the UDA. Hermon
feared that government failure to recognise the
UDA as a political organisation could meant
more violence against ‘republicans’, while local
MI5 head Harold Doyne-Ditmas worried more
about the optics of “encouraging” the UDA than
the realities of their murderous campaigns. Not
one recommended the UDA’s proscription.
In April 1982, a further RUC raid on UDA HQ
unearthed a vast tranche of intelligence files/
photographs of IRA suspects, magistrates and
RUC. Six men were arrested and charged with
holding information useful to terrorists and,
finally, with possession of firearms with intent
to endanger life: they all pleaded “not guilty”.
Then it emerged that an earlier raid in 1977 had
found documents relating to lawyers and prison
wardens, police/army lists, PIRA, Official IRA
and UVF members; even “moderate Protes
-
tants”; maps of Republican areas and
bomb-making manuals. Despite the arms find,
the RUC soon realised that the thousands of doc-
uments seized had been entirely updated since
1977, most likely by intelligence services. In April
1983 charges were dropped against all except
Tyrie. When tried in 1986, he was acquitted
within an hour. Urwin notes that the relevant
declassified file at Kew contains only one official
document which passingly refers to the arrests;
the rest have been retained by the censor.
Urwin is a long-time researcher and
campaigner for the Dublin and Monaghan bomb-
ing victims and families; and in 1996 she
co-founded Justice for the Forgotten (JFF) to also
represent those who suffered from other such
outrages such as at Dublin, Dundalk, Castle-
blayney and Belturbet. JFF merged in 2010 with
the Pat Finucane Centre (PFC), and the latter’s
offices in Derry and Armagh.
Urwin’s Armagh colleague, Ann Cadwallader,
began building on the research into collusion
between security services and loyalists by her
co-worker there, Alan Brecknell whose father
Trevor was killed in the Glennane gang’s attack
on Donnelly’s Bar. The family took a successful
case to the European Court of Human Rights in
2007, asserting that the inadequate RUC inves
-
tigation of collusion by security forces in the
attack contravened the European Convention’s
Article 2 – the right to life clause. The result was
Cadwallader’s best-selling, unchallenged 2013
book, 'Lethal Allies', which is pretty much all
about the Glenanne gang.
Cadwallader, a former BBC journalist and
Northern editor for the Irish Press and INN, quit
journalism for PFC to research the book, which
takes one by the ear into the careers of serial kill-
ers like Robin Jackson, and his links to the
Glenanne gang and patterned attacks, never
properly investigated or brought to justice, of
seed-and-breed sectarian slaughters of young
couples – as in the case of the pregnant Marian
Bowen, slain with her two brothers. A gripping if
horrific book it plots a maze of connections
between the murders, as UVF paramilitaries
worked hand-in-glove with serving RUC and UDR
officers. In one shocking chapter, she tracks
their involvement in the Dublin and Monaghan
bombings.
Excavating old cases from witness state-
ments, pathologists’ records and recent
Historical Enquiries Team (HET) reports, she sin-
gles out HET’s conclusion in the case of Sean
Farmer and Colm McCartney, two Catholic men
murdered in August 1975. In 2011 the HET team
found that “indisputable evidence of security
forces’ involvement with loyalist paramilitaries
in one case, followed by significant evidence of
further co-operation just weeks later, should
have run alarm bells all the way to the top of gov-
ernment; nothing was done; the murderous
cycle continued”.
In 2013, Urwin wrote an extraordinary (online)
Spinwatch paper, 'Counter-gangs: a history of
undercover military units in Northern Ireland
1971-76' which prefaced by outlining how, after
WWII, the British state fought up to 50 major
colonial counter-insurgency campaigns, battling
with rebels using covert, undercover methods of
“low intensity operations”. These theatres of
war, often against non-state actors and subver-
sive groups, included in Palestine and Cyprus,
as well as in little-reported wars in Malaya,
Oman and Aden and in particular in Kenya where
General Sir Frank Kitson won a Military Cross for
his innovatively divisive and slaughterous
Ian Cobain rebuts
David Cameron’s 2014
characterisation of the
British as “a peaceful
people”, reminding us that
for over 100 years, not
one has passed without
British military operations
somewhere in the world
NEWS
December - January 2017 2 7
campaign against the Mau Mau. Kitson was
posted to Northern Ireland as commander of 39
Brigade in Belfast in 1970, importing techniques
he perfected in Kenya and Malaya: psychologi-
cal warfare as introduced in Lisburn by the IPU;
and pseudo-gangs, first as joint RUC/Army
patrols, before the hand-picked MRF teams
began their 18-month campaign. They ‘turned’
IRA defectors into useful ‘Freds’ before the PR
disaster of the bogus mobile Four Square Laun-
dry and the Gemini Massage Parlour closed
them down. Again, Urwin plots a clear evidential
trail.
Cadwallader amplified this imperial angle in
her 'From Dhofar to Armagh' chapter of 'Lethal
Allies', which expands on British post-WWII
counterinsurgency campaigns, citing the Army’s
own classification of them as successful (7),
draws (1) or failures (5) with the rest either
“ongoing or uncategorisable”. She also explores
the careers of a number of senior military offic-
ers who graduated from such campaigns to
Northern Ireland, and the limitations of operat-
ing in that fashion in what was, after all, the
United Kingdom (as Michael Mates, former Tory
Minister of State at the NIO has admitted).
Such cordite-scented memories of “end-of-
Empire” days are taken up in another new book
'The History Thieves' by the conscientious,
investigative Guardian author and journalist, Ian
Cobain, who rebuts David Cameron’s 2014
characterisation of the British as “a peaceful
people”, as Cameron prepared for yet another
military action in Iraq, this time against ISIS.
Cobain reminds us that for over 100 years, not
one has passed without British military opera-
tions somewhere in the world – something which
cannot be said for the Americans, Russians,
French or anyone else. “Between 1918 and 1939,
British forces were fighting in Iraq, Sudan, Ire-
land, Palestine and Aden”; and after WWII “in
Eritrea, Palestine, French Indochina, Dutch East
Indies, Malaya, Egypt, China and Oman.
Between 1949 and 1970, the British initiated 34
foreign military interventions. Later came the
Falklands, Iraq – four times – Bosnia, Kosovo,
Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, Libya and, of course,
Operation Banner, the 38-year military deploy-
ment to Northern Ireland”.
Fittingly, Cobain’s prism is the deep British
culture of secrecy, from the thirteenth-century
Privy Council to the first Official Secrets Act in
1889 and the explosion of legislation since. Per
-
haps necessary due to the obsessive imperial
habit of record-keeping, it reaches its peak in
Cobain’s account of bonfires of colonial records
from the rapid evacuation of Delhi in 1947,
through Malayan independence in 1957 (a large
truckload driven from Kuala Lumpur to “the
navy’s splendid incinerator” in Singapore). In
1961, the colonial office laid down rules that no
documents should be given to successor
regimes that might embarrass HMG or compro-
mise its intelligence sources. Operation Legacy
devised a “parallel registry” system, whereby
only British civil servants “of European descent”
would collect all “sensitive” documents so that
when independence came, they could be
destroyed or “migrated” to the UK. Any docu-
ments left behind would have to give the
impression of completeness, either by creating
false documents or making sure no references
to them remained in the other files.
This purging continued virtually worldwide: in
British Guiana, Aden, Malta, North Borneo,
Belize, the West Indies, Kenya and Uganda;
involving colonial officials, MI5, Special Branch,
the army, navy and air force. Officials in Kenya
were told documents could be “packed in
weighted crates and dumped in very deep and
current-free waters at maximum practicable dis-
tance from the coast”.
Most of these “migrated archives” returned to
Hanslope Park, a country estate the UK, where
the Foreign Office’s ‘Special Collections’ occupy
15 miles of floor-to-ceiling shelving, groaning
with records from the 1600s to the northern Trou-
bles - which files, Cobain claims, officially don’t
exist. Cobain rightly asserts that Operation
Legacy was a deliberate attempt to distort future
history.
But that is the inevitable future of the coloni
-
alist.
