IRD Archives - Village Magazine

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An appalling vista: disturbing indications of Kitson's foreknowledge of a third massacre of innocent civilians. Tragedy took fifteen lives including two children. By David Burke.

by admin 2 October, 2022 0 Comments

New evidence has emerged about the UVF’s bombing of McGurk’s Bar in Belfast in December 1971. The explosion caused the entire structure of the premises to collapse, killing fifteen Catholic civilians – including two children – and wounding seventeen more. It was the deadliest attack in Belfast during the Troubles. Brigadier (later General Sir) Frank Kitson commanded the British Army in Belfast 1970-72. He was a counter-insurgency guru who created havoc on the island before he was drummed out of it by William Whitelaw, the first British secretary of state for Northern Ireland. One of the conscious choices Kitson made while still in Ireland was to take on the IRA but not Loyalist terrorist gangs such as the UVF. This coincided neatly with the policy of the British government of Edward Heath which decided to intern members of the IRA but not Loyalist paramilitaries. On these grounds alone, the British state became indirectly responsible – through inaction – for the crimes of the UVF, including the McGurk tragedy. Worse still, there are indications that Kitson may have exploited elements of the UVF as a proxy assassination apparatus for the British state in Belfast. 1. Redaction of Evidence The sliver of new information about the massacre was recorded in a log by the 2nd Battalion Royal Regiment of Fusiliers (2RRF) approximately forty-two minutes after the bombing. It relates to the proprietor of the bar, Patrick McGurk, and the nearby Gem Bar. Britain’s Information Commissioner’s Office has upheld a decision by Britain’s National Archives to withhold a section of the log from the families of the victims of the massacre. The Archive acted in consultation with the British Ministry of Defence (MoD). The 2RRF log reveals: Owner of pub a moderate RC [Roman Catholic] unlikely to have allowed people to use it as a mtg [meeting] place. Bar close to Gem Bar which is a [REDACTED]. 2. The Gem Bar The information relating to the Gem Bar remains withheld even though the venue no longer exists. When they were making their case for a full declassification of the log, the families of the victims of the attack presented archival evidence to the Information Commissioner’s Office that the Gem Bar was: The original target of the bombers; Known as an Official IRA bar; Recorded in British Army files as the local HQ of the Official IRA; Under British Army surveillance; And that the premises had been targeted by 2 RRF two nights before the bombing during which 2 RRF arrested and questioned six customers from the Gem Bar raid. Put simply, the perceived connections between the Gem and the Official IRA was a known fact and therefore any information pointing in that direction was not going to endanger anyone, especially as the pub has long since closed. Moreover, former known members of both wings of the IRA walk about Belfast without any concern for their safety. Some of them have published books about their paramilitary careers, others have been interviewed on the record by the press, radio and TV Despite this reality, the log remains redacted. 3. Reaction of the families Ciarán MacAirt is a grandson of two of the victims of the McGurk’s Bar Massacre and has been fighting for sight of the information – all of it – for five years. He said: After 50 long years fighting the British state’s lies, our families are outraged but unsurprised that it is withholding evidence relating to the mass murder of our loved ones in McGurk’s Bar. The British state has lied to us from the moment the bomb exploded up to this very day. Police Service Northern Ireland and the Office of the Police Ombudsman either failed to find this evidence or found it and buried it again as it has been left to the families to expose the truth about the McGurk’s Bar Massacre and its cover-up by the British state. Nevertheless, even when we discover new evidence, the British authorities withhold it from us and deny us access to the truth. In the meantime, many of our older family members are infirm or have gone to their graves without any justice. A video about the attack can be accessed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQRLFnBxoWQ 4. The shape of an extremely disturbing state of affairs. The redaction is deeply disturbing. There is no good explanation for it. Why do the MoD censors want the redacted words withheld from public scrutiny, even after more than fifty years? The shape of an extremely disturbing state of affairs involving dirty tricks, collusive murder and black propaganda is swimming into focus. The following scenario is one that offers an explanation for what happened in 1971, and why the British State still feels it necessary to redact the document. 5. Kitson and the IRD Brigadier Frank Kitson was involved in a black propaganda operation that swung into action shortly after the bombing. He was almost certainly aided and abetted by Hugh Mooney who worked for the Information Research Department (IRD) of the Foreign Office. Mooney had been sent to Belfast to destabilise the IRA through the deployment of psychological operations (PsyOps). Kitson, who commanded the British Army in Belfast and its environs, was a meticulous planner who became deeply engaged in propaganda operations during his two years in Belfast. He was also the British army’s foremost counterinsurgency expert having honed and developed his skills in Kenya, Malaya, Oman and Cyprus. His infamous treatise about counterinsurgency, ‘Low Intensity Operations’ was published in 1971. One of the hallmarks of Kitson and Hugh Mooney was the meticulous manner in which they planned their operations in Ireland, invariably well in advance of their deployment. The black propaganda operation that swung into action after the bombing of McGurk’s Bar was up and running a little over four hours after the attack. The operation was a sophisticated affair, one that involved the coordination of senior British Army officers (including Kitson and his superior Lt. General Sir Harold Tuzo, General Officer Commanding Northern Ireland), the

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Traduced (updated version): John Hume was the victim of a campaign of character assassination perpetrated by the British Secret Service, MI6, and was placed under MI5 surveillance in Dublin with the assistance of the Gardaí.

by admin 3 August, 2020 0 Comments

By David Burke. UPDATE: See also Just declassified UK memo on John Hume reveals interest of PM John Major’s top civil servants in “possible press stories regarding John Hume’s private life”. John Hume was the victim of a campaign of character assassination in the early 1970s perpetrated by British spies. It was spearheaded by an individual called Hugh Mooney, a graduate of Trinity College Dublin, who once worked as a sub-editor for the Irish Times. Mooney belonged to the ‘Special Editorial Unit’ (SEU) of the Information Research Department (IRD). It was responsible for the production of black propaganda. Mooney’s boss was the IRD’s Special Operations Adviser, Hans Welser, a veteran of the WW2 Political Warfare Executive. The IRD was part of the Foreign Office and worked closely with the British Secret Service, MI6, which is also attached to the Foreign Office. The IRD operated from a building in London called Riverbank House. Although Mooney worked at Army HQ Northern Ireland under the cover title of ‘Information Adviser to the GOC’, official documents show that in 1972 he was reporting to the Director and Co-ordinator of Intelligence (DCI) at Stormont – not to the GOC. This means that his activities were known about at a very high level. Prior to his attack on Hume, Mooney had worked in Bermuda where his colonial and racist side had come to the fore, a story for another day. Mooney and his associates sought to depict John Hume: as part of a communist conspiracy to turn Ireland into Europe’s Cuba; as a supporter of the IRA; as a fundraiser for the IRA; as a thief who stole charitable donations; as a man for whom a warrant had been issued for his arrest in 1972. There may have been other smears which have not yet been detected. Unintentionally, Her Majesty’s spies and their colleagues in the British Army also made his task of achieving peace extraordinarily difficult at key moments in his career, such as those of Bloody Sunday in January 1972 in his native Derry. Rogue elements inside MI5 also plotted with the Ulster Workers’ Council (UWC) to tear down the 1974 Power-Sharing Executive of which Hume was minister for commerce. This left Hume without a reliable source of income for a number of years and could have forced him to abandon politics for a job outside of it. Throughout his career he was placed under surveillance, something that was tantamount to treating him as a subversive. In the 1980s the Gardai in the Republic of Ireland helped MI5 bug some of his conversations. A house where his deputy leader, Seamus Mallon, stayed in 1983 was also bugged by the Gardai. In the 1990s MI5 opposed his discussions with Gerry Adams. Hume was a towering political figure of immense courage, foresight and integrity. Boris Johnson has paid him a lavish tribute, praising his “strong sense of social justice” and saying that without him “there would have been no Belfast or Good Friday Agreement”. Despite Johnson’s fine words, the Tories did their best to stand in Hume’s way during the 1970s, 80s and 90s. In fact it is not an exaggeration to say that they made his life hell. HEATH IN THE 1970s: Ted Heath served as Tory prime minister, 1970-1974. He sent his black propaganda operatives to Ireland to conduct dirty trick campaigns in the early 1970s. It was they who ran the smear campaign against Hume. Ironically, it is Heath’s legacy which is in now in tatters while Hume’s has never soared higher. Heath’s reputation was destroyed by a report published by the Wiltshire Police in 2017 about his abuse of boys, one as young as 14. THATCHER IN THE 1980s: Margaret Thatcher, Tory PM, 1979-90, let MI5 (attached to the Home Office) spy on Hume in gross violation of his human rights. Some of this surveillance was carried out in the Burlington Hotel in the Republic of Ireland with the assistance of the Republic’s special branch. The first steps of the peace process were taken in the middle of Thatcher’s premiership in 1986 when a back channel was opened between Gerry Adams and Charles Haughey via Fr. Alex Reid. Haughey ‘s Northern Ireland adviser Martin Mansergh was a pivotal figure in the process. Thatcher’s battery of spies do not appear to have had any inkling of what was afoot. Had Thatcher discovered this development, it is – to put it mildly – likely she would have denounced it. The Haughey-Adams process was so secret that even John Hume did not know about it when he entered the process later and expressed disbelief when he finally discovered this fact. MAJOR IN THE 1990s: Thatcher’s successor at 10 Downing Street, John Major, PM 1990-97, was not supportive of the next phase of the process which became known as ‘Hume-Adams’. In 1993 and 1994 key elements of the press in the Republic denounced Hume’s dialogue with Adams, in particular Conor Cruise O’Brien who wrote for Ireland’s Sunday Independent. O’Brien was close to a number of dubious intelligence figures such as Dame Daphne Park, a self-confessed MI6 dirty tricks expert and David Astor, one of MI6’s most important assets in the media. O’Brien knew them through the British-Irish Association (BIA) which Astor had helped set up in the 1970s, and which Park co-chaired in the 1980s. It was Astor who appointed O’Brien as editor of The Observer. Haughey considered the BIA a British Intelligence front and forbade Fianna Fail figures (such as Brian Lenihan) from attending it. How much O’Brien was influenced by his friends in the British Establishment is an imponderable. Major, who had an exceptionally close relationship with his spymasters, was not supportive of what Hume, Adams and Dublin were trying to achieve either. Eventually, Bill Clinton had to intervene to twist Major’s arm and move the process forward. Still, MI5 tried to derail it. Haughey’s successor as taoiseach, Albert Reynolds, 1992-94, became so concerned about the hostility of MI5 that he told Major

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The reason MI5 gave Putin a free hand to meddle with Brexit.

by admin 22 July, 2020 0 Comments

A report from the Intelligence and Security Committee (ICI) about Russian interference with British democracy has just been released. ‘In brief’, it declares: “Russian influence in the UK is ‘the new normal’, and there are a lot of Russians with very close links to Putin who are well integrated into the UK business and social scene, and accepted because of their wealth”. Worse still: “This level of integration… means that any measures now being taken by the government are not preventative but rather constitute damage limitation”. Significantly, the report reveals that the various intelligence and security ‘Agencies’ which include MI5, the UK’s internal intelligence service, felt the issue of Russian interference in British politics was too much of a “hot potato” to investigate. According to the report, the spies: “appeared determined to distance themselves from any suggestion that they might have a prominent role in relation to the democratic process itself, noting the caution which had to be applied in relation to intrusive powers in the context of democratic process.” The ‘Agencies’ then attempted to suggest that other government departments were responsible. According to the report they: “informed us that the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) holds primary responsibility for disinformation campaigns, and that the Electoral Commission has responsibility for the overall security of democratic processes.” (Paragraph 31 page 18) This led to MI5 and the others to take “their eye off the ball”. In addition, they were allegedly too absorbed by monitoring Islamic militants to do anything about the threat from Moscow. There is a lot more – a hell of a lot more – to this than meets the eye. MI5 has actually perpetrated crimes against Britain which were far worse than anything the ICI report or the UK media is now placing at the feet of the Russians. Infamously, MI5 officers like Peter Wright tried to topple the Labour government of Harold Wilson. Moreover, MI5, MI6 and a little known – and now defunct – black propaganda department called the Information Research Department (IRD), spent decades meddling with British, European and Irish political affairs. See Her Majesty’s Smearmeisters: how MI5 and MI6 vilified Haughey, Hume and Paisley See also Licence to deceive.http://deceive Books have been written about the MI5 plots against Wilson. A useful summary of it can be found at https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2006/mar/15/comment.labour1 MI5 and to a lesser extent MI6 had to stomach years of harsh criticism in the 1980s as a result of ‘Spycatcher’, the book written by Peter Wright, a senior former MI5 officer, and revelations of Colin Wallace, a psychological operations officer with the British Army in Northern Ireland. Both of these men exposed intelligence agency treachery against the British government. Put simply, MI5’s treacherous history has made it reluctant to do its job in the present era in case it might put a foot wrong and attract criticism that it is following in Peter Wright’s cloven footsteps. Put simply, MI5’s treacherous history has made it reluctant to do its job in the present era in case it might put a foot wrong and attract criticism that it is following in Peter Wright’s cloven footsteps. If the Russians swung the Brexit vote, it would mean that the UK left the EU due – in part – to MI5 fears about it shameful past. But did the Russians actually swing the Brexit vote? It is certainly a possibility in circumstances where the Brexit victory was achieved by a whisker. Predictably, Boris Johnson rejects the notion. “Remainers have seized on this report to try to give the impression that the Russian interference was somehow responsible for Brexit. The people of this country didn’t vote to leave the EU because of pressure from Russia or Russian interference,” Johnson said. “They voted because they wanted to take back control of our money, of our trade policy, of our laws.” It is probably better to let the contentious issue of the victory for Brexit in the context of Russian interference as an issue for debate and focus instead on something more concrete: the failure of MI5 to even attempt to prevent it. Dame Stella Rimmington, a former director-general of MI5, is typical of those who have created this mess. Rather than face up to MI5’s perfidious past, condemn it and then consign it to the history books, she has denied all wrongdoing. But then Rimmington, now a successful spy fiction author, is a dab hand at transforming fact into fiction – whether at a conscious or sub-conscious level is best left to the experts. More specifically, she asserts that no one in MI5 ever lifted a finger to thwart the Labour PM Harold Wilson. This, despite the fact back that no less a figure than Lord John Hunt, the mighty and all-powerful Cabinet Secretary, 1973-79, acknowledged that it had indeed happened. In August 1996 Hunt told a Channel 4 documentary that, “There is no doubt at all that a few, a very few, malcontents in MI5, people who should not have been there in the first place, a lot of them like Peter Wright who were right-wing, malicious and had serious personal grudges, gave vent to these and spread damaging malicious stories about that Labour government.” See also Dial MI5 for Murder There are other lamentable reasons for MI5’s failure to protect British democracy during Brexit. MI5 is meant to devote all of its energies to legitimate purposes such as the protection of Britain from terrorism, hostile cyber punks (in tandem with the technoboffins at GCHQ) and other malefactors. Instead, MI5 has diverted some of its precious energy on reprehensible and entirely wasteful endeavours. MI5 routinely opens the post of whistle blowers like Fred Holroyd, a former military intelligence officer. Holroyd exposed a litany of MI5 dirty tricks in Ireland in the 1980s such as the control by MI5 of the loyalist gang which murdered hundreds of people including the 33 slaughtered during the Dublin and Monaghan bomb massacres in 1974. To date, MI5 interferes with

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The dark side of the media

by Joseph de Búrca 26 March, 2018 0 Comments

The British media is aghast at revelations that a man called David Floyd was a Soviet spy. Floyd worked for the Foreign Office in the 1950s and was assigned to a string of Eastern European embassies. He confessed his treachery shortly after the defection of Guy Burgess and Donald McClean to Moscow. Rather than admit to the Americans that yet another British official was a traitor, the British establishment hushed Floyd’s treachery up and MI5 set about finding a job for him. Malcom Muggeridge, the Deputy Editor of the Daily Telegraph, obliged – by providing a post for him at his paper. Muggeridge was an ex-MI6 officer, as was his editor, Sir Colin Coote. Floyd spent three decades at The Daily Telegraph where he reported on communist affairs and became known as ‘Pink’ Floyd. It is likely that having repented, he was obliged to do the bidding of MI5 (home Office) and MI6 (Foreign Office) to keep his post at the Telegraph. As such he joined the ranks of a legion of British journalists and broadcasters who have secretly worked for the various branches of British intelligence. The World is your lobster Lobster, a radical underground British publication, printed a special edition entitled ‘A Who’s Who of the British Secret State’ in the late 1980s pinpointing hundreds of British spies, a huge number of whom had worked at the Dublin Embassy and the Northern Ireland Office. Lobster’s research was based on published materials and can only have brushed against the tip of the intelligence-media iceberg. To its credit, it named about ten Daily Telegraph hacks including David Floyd. Lobster reported that Floyd had disseminated propaganda prepared by the Information Research Department (IRD), which was attached to the Foreign Office, during his time as a specialist on Soviet affairs at the Telegraph and also at the Daily Mail, a fact that the mainstream British media is now ignoring. Overall, the Lobster special edition gave an insight into the disturbing depth of the media iceberg. In particular, it listed more than 30 individuals with strong connections to the British intelligence community who had worked for the BBC. The corruption of the BBC as an independent body stretched from head to toe. One of MI6’s most senior officers, Dame Daphne Park, (the ‘Dragon Lady’) sat on the BBC’s Board of Governors. While in MI6 she had acted as an adviser and ‘sounding board’ to the Chief of MI6, Sir Maurice Oldfield, on Irish affairs. Her father came from Belfast. At a lower level, MI5 had a team based in room 105 at the BBC’s HQ in London. They vetted journalists seeking entry to the corporation and promotion for those already employed by it. They also monitored the activities of broadcasters and producers. Don’t expect MI5 to divulge the content of the files they accumulated on the likes of Jimmy Savile, Russell Harty or the other paedophiles at the Beeb to the Independent Inquiry Into Child Sex Abuse in London or to anyone else. Did all of this result in the BBC serving as an instrument of the intelligence community? Unfortunately, the answer to that question is an emphatic ‘yes’. The BBC’s now acknowledged role in assisting the CIA and MI6 topple the government of Iran in 1953 has become a severe embarrassment to it. The reverberations of that operation are still being felt in Iran today where no one trusts anyone from the BBC. This fact has been ignored by the British media in its ongoing coverage of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, formerly of the BBC World Service trust who is currently serving a term of imprisonment for allegedly attempting to undermine the present Iranian administration. The BBC’s toxic relationship with MI6 has done a lot more than bring it into disrepute. In 1983 Amnesty International declared that the “government-instigated killings in Indonesia … rank among the most massive violations of Human Rights since the Second World War. A conservative estimate of the number of people killed in Indonesia is 500,000”. The BBC helped create an atmosphere conducive to the slaughter. The British Ambassador to the Republic of Ireland from 1966 to 1970 was Andrew Gilchrist. His last post before Dublin was as Ambassador to Indonesia. At the time the British Government of Harold McMillan was involved in a conspiracy to manipulate events in Indonesia. In 1965 Gilchrist informed the Foreign Office that a “little shooting in Indonesia would be an essential preliminary to effective change”. Gilchrist proceeded to work hand in glove with the IRD. Together they planted stories in the media claiming that communists were planning to slaughter the citizens of Jakarta. There was no truth in the allegation which was beamed into Indonesia by the BBC and helped provide justication for the massacre that followed. Commenting on Gilchrist’s propaganda success via the BBC, Norman Reddaway of the IRD commented: “I wondered whether this was the first time in history that an Ambassador had been able to address the people of his country of work almost at will and virtually instantaneously”. Network television MI5 and MI6 were like two giant octopi with tentacles which reached into every pore of the media. Frank Steele, the former head of MI6’s Belfast Station, became the Chairman of network television after his ‘retirement’ from MI6. Steele was a real charmer. He once told Peter Taylor of the BBC that some good had come of the Bloody Sunday massacre in Derry in 1972. The militant Loyalists, were “cock-a-hoop”, that the “Brits” had finally got “tough”, he opined; also that “it did us quite a lot of good with the more bloody-minded of the Protestant community. The good thing that came out of it was that it enabled Direct Rule to be brought in”. Irish Times The tentacles reached over to Ireland where Major Thomas McDowell, a former officer in the British Army, and Chief executive and Chairman of the Irish Times during much of the troubles was an ex-MI5 officer. Declassified UK files reveal that the Major, born in Belfast in 1923, dubbed his