mi6 Archives - Page 5 of 6 - Village Magazine

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Dial MI5 for Murder

by Joseph de Búrca 24 December, 2018 0 Comments

HAS SPOOK-TURNED-THRILLER WRITER DAME STELLA RIMMINGTON FORGOTTEN WHAT IS IN MI5’s TOP SECRET FILES? Dame Stella Rimmington has just published another of her bestselling Liz Carlyle spy yarns The Moscow Sleepers in time for the Christmas market. In it, the redoubtable Liz is set against some very nasty men from Russia. This has all been done ten thousand times in one guise or another. This is all rather a shame because Stella Rimmington, a former Chair of the Judges for the Man Booker Prize, could probably produce a novel of real substance if she really put her mind to it. After all, she was theDirector-General of MI5, December 1991-1994, and spent a career knee deep in all sorts of skulduggery, including snooping on perfectly respectable MPs, trades unionists, civil rights groups and journalists. Since she joined MI5 in the late 1960s and left it in 1996, she must know virtually all of MI5’s most pitch-black secrets, especially those of the Troubles, though you certainly wouldn’t suspect this from her fictional output or her double-whitewashed 2001 memoirs, Open Secret, which may as well be a work of fiction. Rimmington is a dab hand at transforming fact into fiction; whether at a conscious or sub-conscious level is best left to the experts. Incredibly, she believes no one in MI5 ever lifted a finger to thwart the Labour PM Harold Wilson, seen by some in MI5 as a dastardly KGB stooge and traitor. 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.’ THE FORMER TOP SPY WHO DRAWS NO INSPIRATION FROM THE REAL SPY WORLD Unless she was sleep-climbing during her ascent to the top of MI5’s blood-soaked pole, Dame Stella must have heard something along the way about: MI5’s collusion with Loyalists hoods in Northern Ireland such as the Glennane Gang; The MI5-RUC shoot-to-kill scandal that John Stalker, the honest, admirable and principled Deputy Chief Constable of Manchester, investigated in the 1980s, only to be vilified as he edged closer to the truth about MI5’s complicity in the murder of a string of people including Michael Tighe, a 17 year-old with no links to any paramilitary group; The deeply sinister framing of Colin Wallace by Ian Cameron (Wallace wanted to stop MI5-protected child rape at Kincora Boys Home and other dirty tricks) and the pernicious vilification of Fred Holroyd – again perpetrated by Cameron – (Holroyd didn’t want to murder people for MI5); The brutal assassination of the Belfast solicitor Patrick Finucane in 1989 in front of his wife and young children by acknowledged British agents; The setting fire to the offices of that other honest, admirable and principled cop, Sir John Stephens in Belfast in 1990. His office was torched during his investigations of MI5’s exploitation of the UDA as proxy assassins with the aid of Brian Nelson, the Head of the UDA’s Intelligence department; MI5’s network of contacts inside Garda Intelligence; The print journalists in Dublin who were fed stories by HMG’s spooks. Since MI5 co-operated with MI6 in the Republic, Dame Stella must know which journalists had their noses in the trough and who just was rewarded with a pat on the back at meetings of the British-Irish Association or over dinner at the Dublin Embassy; The MI5-Red Hand Commando (RHC) attempt to place a bomb on Charles Haughey’s boat in Dingle harbour in the summer of 1981 when the RHC was led by a serial killing MI5 psychopath called John Dunlop McKeague. Did Stella ever read McKeague’s file? And while we are at it, what about Haughey’s file? Surely Stella she had read it by the time she became D-G at the end of 1991. Haughey didn’t retire as Taoiseach until 11 February 1992. Why hasn’t Stella drawn on any of this remarkable source material for her hitherto run-of-the-mill fiction? Has she forgotten everything in the files? In Open Secret, she wrote – merely in passing it must be stressed that – ‘Loyalist terrorists too had developed their operations and were constantly looking to increase and upgrade their arms and equipment.’ (211) That’s all very fine Stella, but please: what part did Ian Cameron and all the other psychos in MI5 who served in NI play in helping them; in directing them; in covering-up for them? THE CORRUPTION OF THE SOUL Regrettably, like that other spook-turned-author, John Le Carre, formerly of MI5 and MI6, Stella steers well clear of what HMG’s real-life spooks got up to in Ireland in both her fictional and factual outpourings. For his part, Le Carre has managed to convince himself that he has attempted to ‘explore’ Britain’s ‘psyche’ and that in so doing, ‘it’s Secret Service [was] not an unreasonable place to look’. Regrettably, he never set any of his – admittedly brilliant – novels in an Irish setting. Does he not believe the Troubles had an effect on the British ‘psyche’ or were the crimes of HMG’s spooks just too much to deal with? Anthony Cavendish, who served in both MI5 and MI6, certainly wasn’t afraid to confront the truth. He described in his memoirs, Inside Intelligence, how as ‘the years go by, the lies take over from the truth and morality accepts the other demands which are made on an [intelligence] officer to get the job done’ and that ‘theft, deception, lies, mutilation and even murder are considered if and when necessary’. So, just what is the point of promoting Rimmington on the cover of her Liz Carlyle books as the ‘Former Head of MI5’, if she

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The Boy on the Meat Rack

by Joseph de Búrca 18 December, 2018 0 Comments

A Life Derailed, Part 1 of the Story of Alan Kerr; By Joseph de Burca. INTRODUCTION Alan Kerr was sexually abused by three men at Williamson House, a Belfast Corporation Welfare Department care home in Belfast. He was only six years of age when it started. One of his abusers was Eric Witchell, the Office-in-Charge of the home. Witchell was a friend of both Joe Mains, the infamous paedophile and Warden of Kincora Boys’ Home and William McGrath, the Housefather at Kincora. Alan is the younger brother of Richard Kerr who has featured heavily in Village during the last two years. Alan did not realise he had a brother until he met Richard at Williamson House when he was six. He also met his sister at it and learned that he had another brother, and two other sisters; moreover, that both of his parents were still alive. Later, he was moved to Shore House where he was abused by another two men, one of whom may have been Witchell’s friend, William McGrath. Alan eventually fled from institutional care for a life on the streets of Belfast but it was no more than jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire. Having been neglected, groomed and abused throughout his childhood, and finding himself desperate for food and shelter while on the run, he fell into the hands of a network of calculating paedophiles who abused him. At one point in time he was manipulated into working for a while at a brothel off the Lisburn Road where boys as young as 13 were made available to Belfast’s paedophile community. Later again, he was trafficked to Birmingham and thence to London by Billy ‘B’, one of his abusers. Out of desperation and with neither an education nor any sort of a qualification, he would end up being exploited as a ‘rent boy’ at Victoria Station; as a ‘Dilly boy’ on the ‘Meat Rack’ at Piccadilly Circus; and for approximately a year in a brothel in Earl’s Court alongside other boys who were younger than him; possibly even as young as 13 or 14. He also had a bizarre encounter with two members of the Royal Family. Alan’s life in London will be described in the next edition of Village. PART 1: A FOG OF FEAR AT BREFFNI NURSERY 1969-1974. ALAN AGED 0-6 INCARCERATING TODDLERS WHO CRIED AT NIGHT IN A PITCH-BLACK BOILER ROOM Alan Kerr was born on 8 May, 1968, and was taken into care at Breffni Nursery when he was only a few months old, sometime in late 1968 or early 1969. There was a lot of sobbing at night time in Breffni, a care home which catered for infants and pre-school children. Alan recalls how, if a child in the dormitory began to cry out loudly at night, some of the more brutal member of the night staff would put the child in a boiler room, well out of earshot. They were often left for hours alone in the pitch black. Alan often found himself crying because he was surrounded by cold strangers; had no family ‘to love me’; and had to cope with the unrelenting stress of a threatening environment. He too ended up in the boiler room on a number of occasions. He recalls one particular night when two of the night staff marched into the dormitory, hauled him out of bed and carried him to it, then pushed him inside and left him alone in the darkness four hours. PART 2: RAPE AT WILLIAMSON HOUSE 1974-1978. ALAN AGED 6-9 ALAN KERR WAS SEXUALLY ASSAULTED ON HIS FIRST NIGHT AT WILLIAMSON HOUSE. HE WAS ONLY 6 YEARS OLD A caveat must be entered before we proceed any further: Alan Kerr does not have access to his institutional records from Belfast and therefore cannot provide precise dates. Instead, he has done his best from memory. Alan left Breffni Nursery when he was about six, sometime in 1974, or thereabouts, and took up residence at Williamson House for the next two or three years. He describes it as being ‘worse’ than Breffni. ‘Things did happen there which I still can’t talk about.’ Alan would be abused by men who were not members of the staff at Williamson House; yet more proof of an organised child abuse ring operating in NI at this time. Astonishingly, the existing of a network has been dismissed by a series of lightweight inquiries which were no match for the corresponding heavyweight cover-ups organised by the British Establishment and which have lasted for nearly four decades. The most recent example of this was the mistake riddled Hart Report of January 2017, a document that even manages to contradict itself. ‘The abuse began on my first night at Williamson House when a man climbed into my bunk bed. I didn’t understand what was happening.’ The event was so traumatic, Alan manages to black it out most of the time and certainly prefers not to talk about it. Alan’s brother Richard and his sister were at Williamson House. Prior to his arrival, he had no idea that he had any family. He also discovered he had two other sisters and a brother. Alan, Richard and his sister were together for about a year before Richard was shipped out to Kincora Boys Home, perhaps the most concentrated cesspit of child sex abuse in Ireland at that time. Alan’s sister remained with him at Williamson House. He received his first visit – or at least the first visit he can remember – from his parents at the home. One of Alan’s abusers at Williamson House was Eric Witchell. He was a friend of Joe Mains, the Warden of Kincora, and William McGrath, the Housefather at Kincora. Although Witchell’s title was that of Officer-in-Charge, his responsibilities were confined to one of the two buildings at the institution, each of which was administered separately. Alan was not a resident on Witchell’s wing. Nonetheless, Witchell managed to lure

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THE DUP SKELETONS IN THERESA MAY’S CLOSET

by Joseph de Búrca 23 October, 2018 0 Comments

SIR ANTHONY BLUNT, BRITAIN AND MI5’S ARCH TRAITOR, WORMED HIS WAY BACK INTO THE GOOD BOOKS OF BRITISH INTELLIGENCE BY PROVIDING THEM WITH DETAILS OF A PAEDOPHILE NETWORK IN IRELAND OF WHICH HE WAS A MEMBER AND WHICH THEY LATER EXPLOITED FOR BLACKMAIL AND DESTABILISATION PURPOSES. THERESA MAY YET CLINGS TO POWER WITH THE AID OF THE DEMOCRATIC UNIONIST PARTY (DUP), AT LEAST ONE OF WHOSE MOST SENIOR MEMBERS FREQUENTED THE SAME SEEDY PAEDOPHILE UNDERWORLD AS BLUNT IN THE MID AND LATE 1970s. IF THE FULL TRUTH ABOUT THE VENAL ABUSE OF CHILDREN IN CARE IN NORTHERN IRELAND IN THE 1970s WAS TO EMERGE, IT WOULD THROW THE TORY-DUP CONFIDENCE AND SUPPLY ARRANGEMENT INTO TURMOIL. THERESA MAY’S NAIVETY AND LACK OF CURIOSITY, FIRST AS HOME SECRETARY AND NOW AS PRIME MINISTER, HAS ENABLED AN ON-GOING COVER-UP OF THIS FAR-REACHING SCANDAL. INTRODUCTION Last month Village described how Eric Witchell, the paedophile who ran Williamson House for orphans and neglected children in Belfast, was a key figure in the Anglo-Irish Vice Ring. There is as yet no indication that he will be questioned by the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse despite the fact he is one of the most important living witnesses to the existence of a vice ring which supplied children to VIPs abusers. They included Enoch Powell MP and a mysterious ‘refined’ Englishman who was a visitor to Northern Ireland (NI). The victim of the ‘refined’ Englishman is certain he was Sir Anthony Blunt, the infamous MI5 traitor, paedophile and Keeper of the Queen’s Pictures. Blunt was also a regular visitor to Ireland and active, albeit at a low level, in NI politics. He had an extensive circle of friends in Ireland, many of whom were also paedophiles. In Part 1 of this article we will look at aspects of Blunt’s background and some of his more sinister connections to Ireland before turning to the intriguing allegation that he was the ‘refined’ Englishman. In Part 2 we will describe the existence of a group of children who were defiled and broken by Witchell at Williamson House with the result they became sexually compliant playthings before they were sent to Kincora Boys Home where they became fodder in an MI5 blackmail operation. According to one of the victims, the operation revolved around a series of hotels including the Park Avenue and the Europa in Belfast, and the Queen’s Court in Bangor. Independent contemporaneous notes from a British Army psychological operations (PSYOPs) officer confirm the existence of a “prostitution ring supplying boys to hotels in Belfast and Bangor” at the time. The targets of the operation included working-class Loyalists from the UDA, UVF and DUP. We will refer to one of the DUP targets as “The Wife Beater”. He was a man with connections to paramilitaries and was despised by his party leader, Ian Paisley. In Part 3 we will tell the story of ‘Charles’, another of Witchell’s Williamson House victims. In 2017 the Hart Inquiry rejected the notion that a paedophile network had operated in Northern Ireland in the 1970s with official connivance. The Hart Report is littered with factual inaccuracies and has been shredded by commentators. Charles’ account – told here for the first time – undermines it even further. A WORLD OF PAIN Many of the boys who were sent to the hotels to satisfy the venal appetites of the strangers who preyed upon them at them and sometimes in their homes; and those who were abused inside the walls of Williamson House and/or Kincora by familiar staff members, were consigned to a life of depression, ill health, drug and alcohol abuse, isolation and – in a number of cases – suicide. Very few of the victims went on to form stable and lasting relationships or have families. It is now too late for one of them, Clint Massey, who lived a lonely and isolated existence. Towards the end of his life, he grew into a courageous Kincora campaigner. Sadly, he succumbed to cancer earlier this year without ever achieving justice. It was Massey who recalled a lot of “suits” arriving at Kincora, often in the evening. “In those days, there were loads of people over from London. I have always assumed they were senior figures from Whitehall. I certainly heard English accents”, he once revealed. None of the puppet masters in MI5, MI6, the Home Office, the Northern Ireland Office, the Foreign Office or Whitehall, who were responsible for this world of pain, have ever been made to answer for their egregious crimes. THERESA MAY, A PM WHO CAN SEE NO EVIL Theresa May must shoulder the responsibility for the ongoing cover-up of this far-reaching scandal. When she was Home Secretary, she assigned the Kincora Boys Home probe to the Hart Inquiry which was not given the power to compel witnesses. Instead, she should have let the Independent Inquiry into Child Sex Abuse in London, which had such a power, deal with it. MI5 then proceeded to withhold the full truth about its penetration of the DUP from Hart and much more besides. A number of declassified files which were furnished to Hart reveal that the NIO (i.e. MI5) had informers inside the DUP. However, they raise more questions than answers. In particular, how many of MI5’s DUP informers were blackmail victims, i.e. men who were lured to the Park Avenue and the other hotels by Joe Mains, the Warden of Kincora, or his friend and fellow MI5 agent, John McKeague, to defile boys? See Village December 2017 and February 2018 for details about John McKeague’s links to MI5. THE DUP DOG THAT WAGS MAY’S TAIL Some DUP informers who were recruited while they were in their twenties are now in their sixties and early seventies and may still be active in the DUP. It would be a scandal if a single informer – recruited as a result of underage sexual blackmail – remains in the party that is now the tail that wags the British

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Stalin’s Englishman On Trial in Ireland

by Joseph de Búrca 14 June, 2018 0 Comments

The paperback edition of Andrew Lownie’s highly regarded Stalin’s Englishman is now on sale with updates which did not appear in the hardback version. It is a riveting biography of the notorious Eton- and Cambridge-educated British spy and traitor Guy Burgess, bristling with new information based on first-hand sources including hitherto unpublished letters and files. Significantly, a careful reading, between the lines, reveals a lot for the discerning Irish reader about a hidden and deeply murky aspect of the Troubles here. RECUPERATING IN IRELAND, BURGESS-STYLE Burgess was a frequent visitor to these shores. One of his trips landed him in the dock of the District Court. Lownie describes how Burgess had tumbled down two flights of stone steps after a drunken midnight wrestle with a friend called Fred Warner, as the pair was leaving the Romilly Night Club in London in early 1949. Burgess smashed his elbow, slightly cracked his skull and dislocated three ribs. Warner pushed him into a taxi, bleeding profusely, and took him back to his rooms from where he telephoned without avail, every doctor whom he knew by name or repute. He received no reply and he remained there all night, with Burgess groaning on the bed. In the early dawn, he found a doctor who took Burgess off to the Middlesex Hospital. Some rest and recuperation were advised and, after ten days in hospital in London, Burgess went with his mother, with whom he often holidayed, first to Wicklow and then for a few days at the Shelbourne hotel in Dublin. In Dublin Burgess met the writer Terence de Vere White. Lownie’s recalls how de Vere wrote how Burgess was “travelling with his mother, a quiet lady. He took the centre of the stage. He was dark and bright-eyed and was either an old-looking young man or a young-looking middle-aged man, I was not quite certain which . . . He was in the Foreign Office and was taking a rest in Ireland on account of an accident in the Reform Club [sic], where he had fallen and bashed his head on the stairs. As a result of this, he was under doctor’s orders to keep off alcohol and if he disobeyed the rule, the result was a complete blackout, lasting for more than a day. I noticed that he drank tomato juice, which seemed out of character”. ON TRIAL AT THE DISTRICT COURT IN DUBLIN True to his reputation, Burgess was actually drinking incessantly. He and de Vere White parted ways after an hour as Burgess was off to enjoy a play at the Abbey Theatre. Shortly afterwards, on 4 March, de Vere White was contacted by phone and asked if he would give evidence for Burgess in the Dublin District Court. Burgess, he learnt, had been charged with “driving a car while drunk, driving without reasonable consideration, and dangerous driving” two days before, on Grafton Street. “Confronted with the most positive medical evidence of a shaky walk and alcoholic breath, Burgess was invited by the Justice . . . to explain how he reconciled this with his story of complete teetotalism”. He responded “with a most affable air” suggesting his tomato juice might have been doctored and pointed at de Vere White who was forced to give an account of the evening. Burgess’s old friend from Eton, Dermot McGillycuddy, now a lawyer with an office on Kildare Street beside the Oireachtas, was brought in as his defence solicitor and managed to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. The case was dismissed, with the judge describing Burgess as “a man of brilliance who appeared overwrought and nervous…a man of cultivated tastes” – he had been returning from seeing a play at the Abbey Theatre when the accident took place. According to the doctor, a friend of McGillycuddy, who examined Burgess at the police station, “There was no smell of drink which witnesses could detect from his breath. He was smoking continuously, his speech was confused and when witnesses asked him to walk in a line, he was definitely unsteady and limp”. DRUGS FIT FOR A HORSE Burgess continued his excessive proto-rock star lifestyle while in Dublin. The tumble in London had left him with bad headaches and insomnia which he treated with Nembutal to put him to sleep and Benzedrine to wake him up. He managed to secure his supplies from a vet. The dosage was fit for a horse. A friend quoted by Lownie wrote later that, “Drugs, combined with alcohol made him more or less insensible for considerable periods in which, when he was not silent and morose, his speech was rambling and incoherent” to the extent he “seemed, hardly capable of taking in whatever it was one was saying to him”. A LOT TO LEARN ABOUT THE HIDDEN HISTORY OF THE TROUBLES Reading between the lines of Lownie’s book, there is a lot to be gleaned about the dangerous and seedy side of the Troubles. Burgess, of course, was an MI5 and MI6 officer who worked secretly for the Soviet Union as part of the infamous Cambridge Circle of traitors which included Sir Anthony Blunt, Kim Philby, Donald Maclean and John Cairncross. Village has described aspects of the Anglo-Irish paedophile network of which Blunt and Burgess were members on a number of occasions over the last two years. Burgess knew some of the more senior members of the Anglo-Irish Vice Ring. The ring had probably existed in one form or another for generations but was reorganised on a systematic basis after WWII with access to orphanages and care homes in NI for paedophiles. It survived until at least the mid-Troubles, if not long afterwards. The British Establishment is still engaged in an ongoing cover-up of its activities. Survivors are hopeful that at least some of its Irish branches will be put under the microscope by the London-based Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA). The wider ring included friends of Burgess such as his fellow traitor Sir Anthony Blunt; the poet Brian

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Spooks spooked

by Kevin O'Connor 3 June, 2018 0 Comments

The poisoning of a Russian espionage agent and the naming of a politically coercive company in March 2018 proved a rare set-back for two British apparatchiks. Normally regarded as masters of their craft – and tradecraft – Christopher Steele and Alexander Nix were hoist by their own petard in areas of proven expertise, Espionage and Influencing. Steele’s expertise worked for MI6 (SIS – Secret Intelligence Service) where his career followed a predictable trajectory after Cambridge University, where he studied Russian and was President of the Union – to the SIS section of the Foreign Office, thence to the intrigues of 1990s Moscow. Along the way he made a reputation for being reliable and not given to alarmism. His basic espionage training included military skills in fire-arms and physical endurance, disguise and counter-surveillance. As a professional intelligence officer, Steele’s success rate was high in negotiating with, and ‘exfiltrating’ to, European countries defectors from his host’s intelligence services. His own country’s spies thought so highly of him that at a discreet get together with CIA counter-parts he was described as ‘the real James Bond’. By his 40s he had been recalled to the London Russian desk of SIS, supervising a clutch of Russian defectors, among them Alexander Litvinenko, poisoned by the Russian intelligence service, FSB, in tea-rooms off Grosvenor Square, in revenge for working with SIS. More recently another defector, Sergei Skripal, was also targeted and perhaps brain damaged in revenge as a warning to potential other defectors. Steele left SIS to, along with other ex-colleagues, found a business research firm, Orbis, which in turn was hired by US political interests and allegedly produced, via Steele’s former Russian network, a dossier on Trump which became known as the Dirty Dossier, as it included episodes of The Donald cavorting with Russian call-girls who, among other services, urinated on Trump in the hotel bed once occupied by his rival Hilary Clinton. Which seemed the point of the exercise. Though now being handsomely paid by corporate interests, Steele’s past as a skilled agent came back to haunt him when his authorship of the dossier was made public. One of his Russian sources was summarily dragged from a meeting by masked abductors; another source was found dead in his car with a cranial gunshot wound. Steele went to ground with his family, leaving requests with a neighbour to feed the cats … revealing the ‘ordinary life’ many spies inhabit. Weeks later he surfaced in the Orbis offices after, presumably, he had received some kind of assurance from – whoever. No such assurance was forthcoming for Alexander Nix, another achiever who was a co-founder of Cambridge Analytics, ostensibly another business ‘consultancy’ which also dealt in the black arts of power, deception and betrayal. Like Steele, Nix was a high academic achiever. MI6 specifically trained him in and ex-Etonian and Saatchi executive Nigel Oakes in ‘psycho ops’ – developed in the live laboratory of the Northern Ireland conflict, with the aim of inducing paranoia among paramilitaries. With input from security services personnel whose refining of paranoia among Irish paramilitaries had induced self-destruct, Oaks and Nix were plausible in being contracted to win elections by governments floundering in remnants of Empire. In Asia and Africa, Cambridge Analytica plausibly persuaded leaders to give the company vast sums of money and, in some cases, land – in return for mounting psychological campaigns against opponents. In Kenya particularly where politicians were prone to the post-colonial reflex of believing the White Man’s magic was superior to the native version, Cambridge Analytica by its own boasting “wrote speeches [and] honey- trapped – all on camera”. Unable to resist the lure of explaining to a potentially powerful Asian client (full marks to Central Casting) Nix was filmed by a camera left casually in a briefcase at a meeting. The resultant exposure on Channel 4 provoked investigations by the UK authorities, embarrassment for the Conservatives, and for the DUP and UKIP parties which had business relationships with it; and a deeply traumatised Nix being hustled away from reporters by heavies. Steele’s enforced purdah from Orbis and the departure of Nix from Cambridge Analytica seem to point to the enduring tactical importance of using long spoons when supping with devils. Steele can hardly have predicted his dossier on Trump would have generated such a personal backlash as to force his family into hiding to avoid revenge of the type that afflicted his one-time charge, Litvenko. Nix, boaster about the black arts of entrapment, fell foul of an ostensibly wealthy ‘client’ from a Sri Lankan political party seeking guidance. The client was a TV investigations unit, replete with convincing actors, a working camera and sound system. His own methods were used against him to devastating effect. The collateral ruin far exceeded his original success, with Facebook, Twitter and other giants of the digital universe suffering not only losing users and and revenue but attracting legislative penalties sufficient to deter them from making data available to sinister conspirators like Cambridge Analytica. Technology has a price, as Nix and Steele can vouch. Kevin O’Connor

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Some devils got him

by Stephen Kelly 29 March, 2018 0 Comments

The Westminster terrorist attack on 22 March of last year, by lone attacker, Khalid Masood (52), who drove a car into pedestrians and fatally stabbed PC Keith Palmer, is not the first time that terrorists have selected the Palace of Westminster, and its surrounds, to perpetrate an act of violence. 39 years ago, on 30 March 1979, the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) murdered Airey Neave, Conservative MP and Margaret Thatcher’s shadow secretary of state for Northern Ireland, in a devastating car bomb attack. Apart from reaffirming Thatcher’s determination to defeat Republican paramilitaries, Neave’s assassination robbed the Conservative Party of one of its most open-minded, albeit controversial, thinkers on Northern Ireland. By the standards of the day, Neave was a remarkable figure. On the one hand, he was a public figure: war-hero, writer, barrister and politician. He had escaped from Colditz, a Nazi prisoner of war camp during the Second World War; was the author of five semi-autobiographical books; established a practice at the bar; and was Conservative Party MP for Abington, 1953-1979. On the other hand, he was an elusive and secretive individual, retaining close links to the British Secret Intelligence Service throughout his adult life. During the Second World War he worked for MI9, a subsidiary of MI6, later holding the rank of commanding officer of the Intelligence School 9, Territorial Army (TA). Neave’s greatest contribution to political life came in the autumn of his career, following his promotion as shadow secretary of state for Northern Ireland in 1975. Neave’s appointment to Thatcher’s shadow cabinet, in the wake of her election as leader of the Conservative Party in February 1975, had important ramifications for the Conservative Party’s Northern Ireland policy. From the moment he took up his new shadow cabinet portfolio, until his murder by the INLA, Neave’s “first priority”, as he noted in April 1978, was to defeat Republican terrorism. Although often preoccupied by security-related issues, and despite misguided arguments to the contrary, Neave remained committed to finding a workable solution in the hope of ending direct rule in Northern Ireland. As a pragmatist, confronted by the political reality that the mainstream political parties in Northern Ireland could not agree on the terms of devolution, he instead championed reform of local government in Northern Ireland, as an interim measure. By initially supporting the establishment of his so-called ‘Council of State’, subsequently followed by a proposal to create one or more Regional Councils in Northern Ireland, Neave sought to end, as he phrased it in November 1977, `’civil servants’ paradise`’, which existed under direct rule. Unfortunately, Neave’s assassination by the INLA robbed him of the opportunity to implement his proposals to reform local government in Northern Ireland. New archival material from Neave’s personal papers and the National Archives of the UK iliuminate the events of 30 March 1979. Neave commenced his working day, like any other. Following breakfast, he left his at at Westminster Gardens, got into his powder-blue Vauxhall Cavalier saloon, and made the short journey to the houses of Parliament, the Palace of Westminster. His morning was spent preparing for the forthcoming British general election (scheduled for 3 May) and dealing with day-to-day constituency matters. Following lunch, he decided to stop for the day and return home to spend time with his wife Diana. It was in the members’ lobby that Neave held his last conversations, chatting to colleagues before crossing to the members’ exit and taking the lift to the five- floor underground car-park to pick up his car. At 2.58p.m., an enormous explosion engulfed New Palace Yard. Soon after, as Neave’s sole biographer Paul Routledge wrote, smoke was seen billowing from the smouldering wreckage of a Vauxhall car on the ramp leading up from the MP’s underground car-park. It was a “haunting image”, with sheets of headed house of Commons writing paper “blowing gently in the breeze”, recalled Lord Lexden, Neave’s former political advisor on Northern Ireland. Police officers rushed to the scene and came upon an unidentifiable man, dressed in a black coat and striped trousers. Initially, the victim was believed to be Alan Lee Williams, a Labour MP. In fact, in the car lay sixty-three-year-old Neave. Surveying the burning wreckage, the mangled frame of the car and the glassless windows, it was apparent that some type of bomb had exploded. “He’s still alive! Clear the area!”, a policeman shouted. Within minutes, an ambulance crew arrived to find the still unidentified figure, who was breathing, slumped over the steering wheel, his face burned beyond recognition. A doctor, nurse and firefighters soon joined the entourage, before Neave, with his right leg blown off below the knee, was eventually freed after half an hour. He was quickly taken to Westminster Hospital where he underwent emergency surgery. It was too late. Neave died on the operating table. Thatcher received news of Neave’s murder while preparing for a party-political general-election broadcast at BBC headquarters. Her first thought was reportedly: “Please God, don’t let it be Airey”. When it was confirmed that Neave was indeed the victim Thatcher was described as “numb with shock”. Later that day she informed a BBC reporter that “… some devils got him and they must never, never, never be allowed to triumph, they must never prevail”. Following Neave’s murder, attention immediately turned to who had perpetrated this brutal crime. Initially, the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) claimed responsibility. In fact, the real perpetrators were the INLA. Formed in 1975, with a pledge to establish a “republican and socialist” state, the movement had previously been known as the People’s Liberation Army, having sprung up in late 1974, when the Official IRA attacked members of the newly formed Irish Republican Socialist Party (IRSP). At the time of Neave’s death, it was believed that the INLA had approximately 60 active members. The INLA basked in the publicity following Neave’s murder. A spokesperson for the terrorist organisation said that Neave’s assassination “had a tonic effect in Northern Ireland where there had been celebrations in Belfast,

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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

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Careless about Kerr

by Joseph de Búrca 21 December, 2017 10 Comments

The Ulster Freedom Fighters will not be well pleased The Ulster Freedom Fighters (UFF) will not be well pleased to learn that their name has been taken in vain by a distasteful group of conmen hellbent on covering up the existence of a VIP paedophile network in Ireland and the UK. We will refer to these nasty specimens collectively as the “Paedophile Protection League (PPL)”. The UFF’s name was misappropriated by the PPL in an attempt to intimidate the courageous Kincora Boys’ Home survivor Richard Kerr to whom an anonymous threatening letter was sent late last year. Kerr, who lives in Dallas, Texas, was a resident at Williamson House in the early and mid-1970s, and later at Kincora (1975-77). He was abused at both homes. He was later abused in England by various highborn lowlifes, including Sir Peter Hayman, the former Deputy Chief of MI6, who infamously left paedophile material on a London bus whence it was picked up by the police; and a senior and highly influential member of Margaret Thatcher’s Cabinet. Village will identify this minister in due course. Before we turn to the threatening letter a little additional context might assist in explicating the underlying menace of it: Richard Kerr was a close friend of Steven Waring who was also a resident at Kincora. He committed suicide by plunging into the sea from the Belfast-Liverpool Monarch Ferry in 1977 rather than suffer any further abuse. Kerr has been haunted by his death ever since. Like Kerr, Waring had been taken out of Kincora and subjected to vile abuse on both sides of the Irish Sea. In November 2016 Kerr received the following anonymous letter: “DEAR RICHARD, HAVING READ AN ONLINE ARTICLE ABOUT YOU TODAY CONCERNING YOUR BEHAVIOUR IN LONDON IN 2015, A GROUP OF SURVIVORS HAVE RESEARCHED AND DISCUSSED YOUR ALLEGATIONS. IT IS OF MANY UK-BASED SURVIVORS OPINION THAT YOU ARE PLAYING A GAME AND WORKING FOR THE ABUSERS STILL. THERE ARE FIRST HAND ACCOUNTS OF YOUR BEHAVIOUR IN DOLPHIN SQUARE AND IN KINCORA INCLUDING ACCOUNTS OF YOU ACTING AS FACILITATOR FOR ABUSERS. THERE ARE ALSO ALLEGATIONS AND ACCOUNTS OF YOU ACTIVELY TRYING TO DISCREDIT OTHER SURVIVORS INCLUDING THE SUSPICION THAT YOU IN FACT KILLED STEVEN ON THE BOAT, RATHER THAN THE STORY YOU TELL OF HIM COMMITTING SUICIDE. WE DO NOT HAVE ANYONE IN TEXAS TO ACT AGAINST YOU. YOU HAVE BEEN DISCUSSED AT A VERY HIGH LEVEL AND ALTHOUGH THIS IS NOT A THREAT, AS A GROUP WE WOULD LIKE TO INFORM YOU THAT YOU ARE NO LONGER WELCOME IN THE UK OR IN NORTHERN IRELAND AND IF YOU ARE SEEN, ACTIVE SERVICE UNITS OF THE ULSTER FREEDOM FIGHTERS AND THEIR FRIENDS WILL FORCIBLY REMOVE YOU TO AN AIRPORT. YOU ARE OBVIOUSLY A SURVIVOR OF ABUSE SO BY OUR OWN CODE WE CANNOT ORDER ANYTHING MORE; HOWEVER FEELINGS ARE RUNNING SO HIGH ABOUT YOU THAT WE CANNOT GUARANTEE YOUR SAFETY AND WELLBEING IN THE UK OR NORTHERN IRELAND”. The address which exposes the source of the anonymous threatening letter The anonymous letter was posted from south East Anglia. There is, however, little or no mystery about the identity of its true author. Richard Kerr had made a number of trips to Ireland and the UK before he received the letter. During these trips he was – as he puts it himself – “hijacked” by some very unsavoury characters whom he instinctively distrusted and to whom he decided not to provide his address in Texas. This group pretended they were interested in exposing the VIP paedophile ring but in reality wanted to find out what Kerr was going to say about it and discredit him. They made the monumental error of taking Kerr for a fool when in fact they were the amateurs . Instead of providing his own address, Kerr gave them the address of a trusted confidant who lived on the North Central Express Way in Dallas. Yes, you guessed it: the PPL threatening letter was subsequently sent to the confidant. The North Central Express Way address was also provided to the BBC’s ‘Panorama’ programme. However, since the staff at ‘Panorama’ are not known for sending vile threatening letters to child-abuse survivors, the odds must be high that it was sent by the PPL or their allies in MI5/6. In addition, two others were provided with the address, both of whom can be discounted as the author of the letter. Why would the PPL go to such lengths in an effort to intimidate and upset Richard Kerr? Why go to all this trouble if the VIP vice-ring had never existed? The letter is consistent with the fact that it was and is still being protected. Tory blowhards and the Jimmy Savile defence The PPL was behind a spectacularly successful attempt to hoodwink politicians, journalists and the British public generally about the non-existence of the VIP vicering. They achieved this by acting as spin doctors for a troupe of fraudulent witnesses who alleged they had been victims of child sex abuse. The intention all along was to lure genuine victims like Richard Kerr into their orbit and tar them all with the same absurdist brush. Regrettably, the stench emanating from the preposterous false witness ‘Nick’, has tainted all child sex-abuse victims as fantasists or liars. The Wiltshire Police, which investigated Ted Heath’s history as a child molester, have said they intend to prosecute ‘Nick’ for wasting police time. He made a series of claims that were so risible that countless members of the British public became doubtful about other – genuine – witnesses. It is important for MI5’s sake that ‘Nicks’ defence will not be that he was acting on orders from his MI5 handlers at Thames House. After the Wiltshire Police released their findings about Ted Heath’s molestation of children two months ago, an array of bloated Tories stampeded into radio and TV stations across the UK bleating that nothing the Wiltshire Police discovered could possibly be taken seriously because of ‘Nick’ who

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Not just Ted Heath: British Establishment paedophilia and its links to Ireland

by Joseph de Búrca 9 October, 2017 1 Comment

In the wake of last week’s revelations about the inquiry into former British Prime Minister Ted Heath, Joseph de Búrca looks at a scandal which implicated figures on both sides of the Irish Sea.