Spies and spooks – the same old story

Posted by Jim on November 13, 2015

By Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams (for Leargas)

As long as Britain has been involved in Ireland it has bought or cajoled
or intimidated some people into acting as their eyes and ears, their
spies and spooks, and advocates. Some of these do so because it suits
their own politics and prejudices. But the end result is that citizens
die and freedom is denied.

These strategies are not unique to Ireland or indeed to the British.
They are as old as wars. However, in the most recent period of conflict
their use became an indispensible part of Britain’s counter insurgency
strategy in Ireland. As I have recorded in these columns before the
foremost counter-insurgency strategist was the British Army’s Frank
Kitson. When he arrived in Belfast in 1970 he set about restructuring
the RUC and British Army approach based on his experiences in post
second world war British colonial wars.

The British Army brought with it the techniques of torture; of
counter-gangs; of propaganda, and of media and political manipulation.
The key objective for Kitson, and for others in the British intelligence
and security services, was to reshape the government, the law, the
judiciary and the media to defeat Irish republicanism. It didn’t matter
how this was done or what the consequences were.

Kitson who served in many of Britain’s counter-insurgency campaigns
wrote: ‘The fundamental concept is the working of the triumvirate,
civil, military and police, as a joint and integrated organisation from
the highest to the lowest level of policy making, planning and
administration.’

For example Kitson rationalised the use of death squads and the
corruption of justice: ‘Everything done by a government and its agents
in combating insurgency must be legitimate. But this does not mean that
the government must work within exactly the same set of laws during an
emergency as existed beforehand. The law should be used as just another
weapon in the government’s arsenal, in which case it becomes little more
than a propaganda cover for the disposal of unwanted members of the
public.’

Of course, he wasn’t the first to apply these arguments. The stories of
spooks and spies, of agents and informers working for the British state
during the centuries of Ireland’s long struggle for freedom are legion.
An informer called Owen O’Connally gave information to the British
during the 1641 rebellion that led to the arrest and executions of two
of the leaders, Lord Maguire and Colonel McMahon. Money was his reward.

The 1798 rebellion by the United Irish movement was bedevilled with
informers. Many are named in the history of that period. Men like
Leonard McNally and Samuel Turner and Thomas Reynolds were informers. In
his ‘History of the Irish Rebellion of 1798’ WH Maxwell writes: ‘The
prisons were crowded with persons denounced by those infamous informers,
Armstrong and Reynolds, Dutton and Newell, with a list of subordinate
villains acting under the direction of police agents, themselves steeped
deeper in iniquity than the perjured wretches they suborned … Numbers,
innocent in most cases, through the instrumentality of those bad men,
were brought hourly to the scaffold.’

In later years agents and informers remained an integral part of
Britain’s colonial class in Ireland in their efforts to subvert the
Young Irelanders; the Fenians; the Land League and Charles Stewart
Parnell.

It was the evidence of Pierce Nagle, who met Chief Inspector Mallon each
week in Dublin Castle that led to the arrest of the Fenian leaders
O’Donovan Rossa, John O’Leary and others. It was also at this time that
the Special Branch was established. Mayo man Michael Davitt, leader of
the Land League, recorded some of the actions of the spies and spooks at
work against the tens of thousands seeking land reform. In his book,
‘The Informer’s’ by Andrew Boyd writes: ‘Davitt accused the British
government of employing terrorists to lure young Irishmen in political
crime and them have them arrested, imprisoned and even hanged’.

The Tan War saw the use of agents and informers increase enormously as
the British sought to defeat the IRA. For its part the IRA dealt with
such spies ruthlessly. Michael Collins execution of 14 British agents on
the morning of Sunday November 21st is one of the best remembered
actions of that period. But there were hundreds of others killed as
informers. One occasion two IRA volunteers brought one man out onto a
river and drowned him rather than shoot him.

In the most recent decades of conflict the application by MI5 and the
RUC Special Branch and British Military intelligence of evolving and
increasingly complex technologies to listen, record, monitor, track and
trap their enemy became an essential element in all of this. Recent
court cases show that this is still going on.

Forty years ago these same organisations were involved in the
establishment of armed loyalist paramilitary groups which they then
supplied with information and weapons to kill Irish citizens and foment
sectarian strife.

The recent publication by the British Secretary of State Theresa
Villiers of the MI5 report into allegations of paramilitarism but
specially the IRA, is an example of how the use by Britain of agent
provocateurs, and of spies and spooks continues. The political
exploitation of this report to attack Sinn Fein, especially by some
elements of the Dublin based media, is also evidence of the deep desire
on the part of some to use any excuse to criticise republicans. They are
unconcerned about the bone fides of the authors.

So, the fact that MI5 has been involved in the murder of countless
hundreds of Irish citizens, including those murdered by the
Dublin-Monaghan bombs, and has no credibility as an independent source,
is deemed irrelevant.

One contemporary example of this emerged within days of the publication
of the panel report. The Public Prosecution Service in Belfast revealed
that it was initiating a major investigation into the role of an MI5
agent – named Stakeknife – and his alleged involvement in the murders of
between 24 and 40 people. Critically this investigation will also
examine the roles of all of those in the RUC Special Branch and MI5 who
were involved in running Stakeknife.

But Stakeknife was not alone. MI5 and other British security agencies
ran hundreds of agents. Whether it was people like Mark Haddock, a
loyalist serial killer in north Belfast, or those who murdered human
rights lawyer Pat Finucane, MI5, British Military Intelligence and the
RUC colluded in the murder of citizens.

Today there are still some in those organisations who believe that the
peace process was wrong. That it was possible to defeat the IRA. And who
resent deeply the growth and popularity of Sinn Fein.

In my view the report from Theresa Villiers was and is primarily aimed
at undermining the political institutions and the Good Friday Agreement.
It is regrettable but not surprising that elements of the Irish
political establishment and sections of the Irish media are willing to
exploit this specious report to attack Sinn Fein.