Peter Montgomery

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    The Mystery of the Missing Mountbatten Diaries

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    By Andrew Lownie. In 2015 I started researching my biography ‘The Mountbattens: Their Lives and Loves’. Little did I know then that six years later it would have locked me into a marathon legal battle with the Government and Southampton University. My quest was to find out what had happened to the personal diaries  of the 1st Earl and Countess Mountbatten of Burma – Dickie and Edwina (who died in 1979 and 1960 respectively) – and the letters they wrote to each other. They had been extensively quoted in their official biographies by Philip Ziegler and Janet Morgan and published respectively in 1985 and 1991, but were nowhere to be found in the inventories of their papers at Southampton University. Dickie Mountbatten, an uncle of Prince Philip, had been Chief of Combined Operations and Supreme Allied Commander in South East Asia during the Second World War, and later Viceroy of India, First Sea Lord and Chief of the Defence Staff. But what interested me was his marriage. Both he and his wife were bisexual and had numerous affairs. His close relationships included the actress Shirley MacLaine; hers the conductor Sir Malcolm Sargent and India’s long-serving Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. The relationship with Nehru had huge ramifications for the perception of the couple’s impartiality over Indian Independence. Some of the early diaries up to 1934 have been released and from them I could see Mountbatten was scrupulous in describing who he met and where he went. There have long been rumours of his involvement in the Kincora scandal and, as the diaries run up to his death, I was  interested to see when he had visited Belfast, when he was at Classiebawn alone except for staff, which house parties he had attended, how often he saw Peter Montgomery  etc. There have long been rumours of his involvement in the Kincora scandal and, as the diaries run up to his death, I was  interested to see when he had visited Belfast, when he was at Classiebawn alone except for staff, which house parties he had attended, how often he saw Peter Montgomery  etc. The Broadlands Trust, a Mountbatten family trust, had sold the couple’s papers to Southampton, along with collections relating to the family’s ancestors, in 2011 , for almost £4.5 million, to save them being sold privately at auction and the collection broken up. The papers were bought after a huge fund-raising campaign with public monies, including almost £2 million from the Heritage Lottery Fund as well as the ‘Acceptance in Lieu’ tax scheme, which stressed their historical importance and the importance of them being “freely available to all”. Southampton’s fundraising claimed “this to be the most important archive to emerge in the last 30 years, only the Churchill Papers could be seen as comparable in terms of a loss to the nation if these were not secured”. Imagine my surprise to be told by the archivists at the University they could not help me  on the diaries or letters and had no contact details for the Mountbatten family. I wrote to the present Countess Mountbatten and  to the trustees  of the Broadlands Trust. Silence. Eventually I was told that the diaries and letters had been closed in 2011 under a “Ministerial Direction”, under authority delegated by the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport to the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council. I put in Freedom of Information (FOI) requests to the Cabinet Office, the University, the Heritage Lottery Fund, the Treasury, and the Department of Culture. No one seemed to know anything about such a Direction; even now, none of them has identified the name or status of the person who signed it. At the Cabinet Office’s suggestion, for swifter access, I also sought to focus on the diaries for one year – 1947. In June 2018, Southampton University disclosed that, shortly after its acquisition of the Mountbatten archive, a senior archivist had taken the initiative in procuring the Cabinet Office’s confirmation that the diaries and letters were “closed”. After my request, the archivist then approached the Cabinet Office with a view to its authorising his editing of the 1947 diaries for publication. 1947 was the year in which India and Pakistan gained their independence. Within weeks, the Cabinet Office held a series of meetings to facilitate the request. This is the very material that I have been struggling to access for years. From November 2018 I wrote several times to the then-Vice-Chancellor, Sir Christopher Snowden, the Chairman of the Council, Rear-Admiral Philip Greenish, and his deputy, Dame Judith Macgregor, a former High Commissioner to South Africa, about the University’s failure to comply either with FOI Act or with the ICO. No response. Eventually, after many letters, emails and calls, Sir Christopher replied, saying he was investigating and had asked for “a report be  made to me and that a response be provided to you as a matter of urgency”. Two and a half years later I have heard nothing further. Indeed responses from both the University and the Cabinet Office to requests for information have been evasive and cursory; they have repeatedly missed statutory, regulatory and self-imposed deadlines for responding, and ignored correspondence from me, my lawyers and the ICO – to the extent the ICO was forced to take the unusual step of issuing an Information Notice and then the unprecedented step of commencing High Court proceedings for contempt to compel the University to respond. This decision was significantly delayed because the University failed to respond to the ICO’s investigation for over a year. It only did so after the ICO was forced to take the contempt of court proceedings. The ICO branded the University’s delay as “completely unacceptable” and in court filings complained about its “persistent, wholesale and unexplained failure to comply with the information notice…In effect, the (University) continues to flout its statutory duty under the Freedom of Information Act 2000″. In December 2019 the ICO finally ordered the University to release all the

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    Keeler Concealer: the British Establishment’s severe embarrassment at the depth of the Soviet Union’s penetration of MI5 and MI6.

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    By David Burke The BBC’s lavish Christine Keeler drama concealed her claim that the Director-General of MI5 was a Soviet mole and ignored what she knew about the infidelities of Prince Philip. The real story is one of treachery, depravity, judicial corruption and the sexual abuse of children by VIPs such as Lord Mountbatten. The six-part BBC drama, ‘The Trial of Christine Keeler’,  has just come to an end. It was meant to be an accurate and comprehenisve portrayal of the notorious Profumo Affair during which a teenager, Christine Keeler, slept with Captain Eugene Ivanov, a Russian naval attaché at the Soviet Embassy in London, while also having a relationship with the much older John Profumo, the high-flying Conservative MP who was Secretary of State for War. Profumo, who met Keeler in July 1961, dramatically denied a relationship with her in the House of Commons but later admitted he had lied and, in June 1963, resigned in disgrace. Stephen Ward, the artist and society osteopath who had introduced Keeler to Profumo, was subsequently put on trial for living off the immoral earnings of prostitutes. He took an overdose of medication before the jury returned a verdict against him and died shortly thereafter. He was found guilty on two charges. 1. THE WIMPOLE MEWS SPY RING. The puzzle that lies at the heart of the BBC’s production is that it ignored the most significant claim Keeler made about the affair: that Sir Roger Hollis was a Soviet mole who was part of a network consisting of Stephen Ward and Sir Anthony Blunt. Hollis served as the Director-General of MI5, 1956 – 1965. Blunt was a KGB mole who penetrated MI5 during WW2. Keeler made the claim in her book, Secrets and Lies (2001). Keeler says she told Lord Denning about D-G Hollis in 1963 while the latter was carrying out his controversial inquiry into the affair and that he made notes of what she said. Hence, there is one straightforward way to resolve the question of D-G Hollis’ loyalty: declassify Denning’s files. Clearly, Keeler could not have known that D-G Hollis was a suspected Soviet mole until the 1980s when this allegation emerged into the public domain, except from her observation of him at Ward’s residence at Wimpole Mews where she had lived with Ward for a while. She said she was witness to a string of meetings between D-G Hollis and Ward at the address. There is a way to resolve the question of D-G Hollis’ loyalty: declassify Denning’s files. 2. THE TRUE DEPTH OF THE KGB’S PENETRATION OF MI5 AND MI6 MAY BE UNFATHOMABLE. Anthony Blunt joined MI5 at the start of WW2 and supplied the Soviets with classified and sensitive secrets throughout the conflict. The perceived wisdom is that he cut all links with Moscow after he retired from MI5 after the war ended and became the Surveyor of the King’s Pictures at Buckingham Palace. Keeler’s revelations, however, indicate that he was still an active Soviet agent as late as the early 1960s. Blunt eventually confessed his role as a Soviet agent and hence there is no doubt about his duplicity. If D-G Hollis was yet another traitor, it means that he had over a decade to plant and promote fellow conspirators up the ranks and turn a blind eye to Soviet operations directed against Britain and her colonies. (MI5 is responsible for the security of UK and her colonies; MI6 spies on foreign soil.) The British media has been obsessed with the hunt for the so-called ‘Fifth Man’ inside the Cambridge Spy Ring for decades. For many years D-G Hollis was viewed as a serious candidate for that perch. The Cambridge Ring consisted of Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Blunt and Donald Maclean. British commentators now generally agree that a man called John Cairncross was the Fifth Man. Yet, there is no logical reason to believe there were only five high level traitors inside the Establishment or that Cambridge was the only campus visited by Soviet talent scouts. If Keeler’s revelations about D-G Hollis are reliable, there is a strong possibility that MI5 was nothing less than a burgeoning nest of traitors. Indeed, D-G Hollis was only one of an array of suspects. A slew of books have been published which make out cases against a variety of suspects including the man D-G Hollis appointed as his deputy, Graham Mitchell. Another senior MI5 officer, Guy Liddell, was also put under the microscope as was Lord Victor Rothschild who served in MI5 during WW2. There is no logical reason to believe there were only five high level traitors inside the Establishment or that Cambridge was the only campus visited by Soviet talent scouts. 3. AND THEN THERE WERE THE BLACKMAIL TARGETS Aside from ideologically motivated traitors, the KGB used blackmail to recruit reluctant informants. Incredible as it may seem, the FBI suspected Lord Mountbatten – who held a senior position in the Admiralty and had access to NATO secrets – was a traitor and monitored his private life. They learnt that he was a paedophile with a ‘lust for boys’. The Provisional IRA, who monitored and attempted to assassinate Sir Maurice Oldfield of MI6 in the mid-1970s, learnt he was a homosexual. If they knew, is it likely the KGB did not? In 2016 MI6 told the Hart Inquiry in Northern Ireland that Oldfield had a ‘relationship’ with the man who ran the notorious Kincora Boys’ Home in Belfast where sex abuse was rampant. If the Soviets knew even a fraction of this, why did they not destroy his career by exposing him? Instead, did they coerce him into spilling MI6 secrets? MI5 carried out an investigation into the possibility he had been blackmailed in 1980 and concluded he had not. Was Oldfield’s reputed successor as Deputy Chief of MI6, Sir Peter Hayman, another of their blackmail targets? Hayman was a notorious paedophile with a conviction for gross indecency in a public lavatory. One of his victims was

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    SECOND UPDATE: Kincora boy abused by Mountbatten committed suicide months later. By David Burke.

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    This article was updated on 20 December 2019 with additional information about the ongoing refusal of the Gardai to release the log of a visit by the Warden of Kincora Boys’ Home to Mountbatten’s home in the Republic of Ireland (See section 2) and further evidence of a link between Mountbatten and the abuse of boys at Portora Royal School (See section 13). It has long been rumoured in Britain that Lord Louis Mountbatten was a paedophile. A book now on sale has dug up impressive new evidence confirming what Irish sources – including the Provisional IRA – have known for decades  about his sexual predilections. So impressive is the new evidence that mainstream British media outlets such as The Mail on Sunday,   The Sunday Times  and The Sun  are covering the story. The book contains sensational new information about Kincora Boys’ Home in Belfast. Curiously, while the British media are happy to report on Mountbatten’s abuse of boys generally, the sections in the book about Kincora are being ignored. The book is called The Mountbattens: their Lives & Loves, and is written by Andrew Lownie. The author is a respected and serious historian who was once a Conservative Party Westminster election candidate. He is still friendly with many Tory MPs including one recently retired Cabinet minister. Lownie is also author of a book on Guy Burgess entitled Stalin’s Englishman which had many interesting Irish angles to it. 1. LOWNIE WAS DENIED ACCESS TO CERTAIN IRISH STATE FILES ON MOUNTBATTEN  During his research for the biography, Lownie tried to gain access to certain Irish State files including Garda files about Mountbatten only to be rebuffed.  They may contain some interesting material. A Deputy Garda Commissioner who is now dead told Village  a number of years ago that he had heard disturbing rumours about Mountbatten sexual activities before he was killed. Another Garda intelligence source says that he had heard stories that while Mountbatten had been living in India, he had had access to a 14 year old boy. If Garda Intelligence, led by Larry Wren, the Head of C3 during the 1970s, knew anything about Mountbatten’s predilections, or the presence of cars with Northern Ireland registration plates, or of teenage boys visiting his property at Classiebawn in the company of older men,  he did nothing about any of it. The Gardai had a security at Mountbatten’s estate and must have noted the registration plates of visitors. This means that the Gardai should have logs for August 1977 which noted the arrival of the car belonging to Joe Mains, the Warden of the notorious Kincora Boys’ Home because he trafficked at least two boys to Classiebawn that month. If the logs still exist, will Garda Commissioner Drew Harris (ex-RUC and ex-PSNI link man to MI5) see to it that they are released and prove once and for all that an Anglo-Irish Vice Ring ring existed and it involved Joe Mains? While the Kincora scandal was exposed in 1980, it was not until 1982 that allegations about MI5 and MI6 involvement in the affair began to appear in the press. Wren became Garda Commissioner in early 1983. He had developed exceptionally close links with British Intelligence during his tenure at C3. If the logs of cars visiting Classiebawn prove to be missing, an inquiry should be held to see if they were destroyed under Wren’s watch. For further information about Wren’s strange career at C3 please visit  https://villagemagazine.ie/index.php/2019/06/16570/ ‎ Hopefully the car registration logs still exists. Will the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) in London which is probing the existence of VIP child sex abuse request Drew Harris and the Irish Government to release the relevant logs for August 1977, and indeed for all of the summers Mountbatten stayed at Classiebawn? Mountbatten’s movements were of enormous importance to the Gardai in the 1970s. Typically, the first they would hear about his pending arrival in the country was a frantic call from MI5 in London to alert them that he had boarded the Hollyhead car ferry en route to Dublin. Mountbatten’s reputation inside the Garda was that of a man who was reckless about his safety. He often gave them a security headache. On one occasion he managed to disembark before the Gardai could reach the ferry and provide him with an escort. However, on this occasion his car broke down and they rushed to his aid inland. His vehicle was towed back to Garda HQ at the Phoenix Park in Dublin where it was repaired by the fleet service department. While the repairs were taking place, Mountbatten was given a tour of the HQ which had originally been built as a Royal Irish Constabulary complex. The Gardai who dealt with him found him to have been ‘a most charming man’. 2.UPDATE: LOGS NOT MISSING BUT DISCLOSURE CONTINUES TO BE DENIED BY THE GARDAI  Since this story first appeared, the Gardai have persisted in their refusal to allow Andrew Lownie gain access to their Classiebawn car registration logs. They emailed Lownie on 7 October 2019 stating that files ‘generated during the course of a criminal investigation’ are considered confidential and hence they would not be releasing them. It is significant that they did not deny that the logs still exist. Lownie responded to this by writing back pointing out that the logs he was looking for related to August 1977, i.e. two years prior to Mountbatten’s assassination. There could have been no investigation of a ‘criminal’ nature in 1977 to an assassination that did not take place until 1979. The head of the Irish police, Garda Commissioner Drew Harris is a former RUC Special Branch officer who worked extensively with MI5. To date, he has not intervened to have the logs of Mains’ visit  in August of 1977 extracted from the main file, copied and sent to Lownie. Instead, on 7 November the Gardai reverted to Lownie saying: ‘I wish to inform you that all such security logs form part of the Garda Investigation File, and for the reasons outlined in email

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    THE DUP SKELETONS IN THERESA MAY’S CLOSET

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    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

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    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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