Monthly Archives: November 2018

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By James Kinchin-White and Ed Moloney

‘I can be a bad bastard if I feel like it. It’s my job’…….Intelligence Officer code-named ‘Kent’, the Gloucester Regiment, circa April 29, 1973

There is little doubt that most people inclined to be sceptical about the claim that Jean McConville worked as an informer against the IRA, are unconvinced because they have difficulty accepting that the British Army would stoop so low as to put the life of a widow with ten children in mortal danger.

Which raises the question of how low the British Army was actually prepared to stoop in its intelligence war against the Provos, especially in the early years of the Troubles when there was a premium on accurate information about the IRA and its activities.

In other words was the military’s intelligence war in Northern Ireland fought in accordance with a moral code of any sort? Were some potential informers off limits – like Jean McConville – or were there no limits?

Well, to judge from the following document plucked from the shelves of the British government’s own archives at Kew, Surrey, the answer is that more or less any vulnerable target with even a minimal amount of access to the IRA was fair game and that in the process of recruiting them as agents, the military was prepared to stoop pretty darned low.

The document, a so-called ‘loose minute’ distributed to political, military and intelligence heads in Belfast on May 1st, 1973, describes the recruitment of a 17/18 year old boy as an informer by soldiers from the intelligence unit of the Gloucester Regiment, then based in the lower Falls/Divis Flats area of West Belfast.

Soldiers from the Gloucestershire Regiment

The recruitment effort backfired badly and the UK media got to know about it, causing consternation in military, political and intelligence circles in Belfast.

The boy, a hotel worker named as William Shields, was arrested in the lower Falls in the early hours of Sunday, April 29th, 1973 and then taken to Hastings Street Army base where he was blackmailed by the Gloucesters into becoming an agent.

The soldiers ‘extracted’ an admission from Shields that he was having sex with the wife of a Provisional IRA internee and that he was ‘living with the woman’. The Gloucester’s Battalion Intelligence Officer then got the boy to sign a letter to the OC of the local IRA admitting all this, and was then pressured to become an informer, on the basis that if he refused, the letter to the IRA would be delivered, with predictable consequences for young Shields.

Afterwards, Shields had the good sense to go to the then West Belfast MP, Gerry Fitt for help. Fitt, according to the British document, witnessed Shields phoning his handler in the Gloucester’s, thereby confirming the boy’s story. The West Belfast MP then got on the phone and informed the handler that he intended to raise the matter in the House of Commons.

Gerry Fitt, then West Belfast MP – listened in to phone call to Gloucester’s Intel Officer and threatened to raise boy’s case in parliament

Gerry Fitt had alerted two Fleet Street reporters, Simon Hoggart of The Guardian and Robert Fisk of The Times who duly wrote up the story. Hoggart was present when Shields and Fitt phoned the Gloucester’s handler and his story, which led the back page of The Guardian on May 2nd, 1973, is reproduced below. Fisk also wrote about the incident but his article could not be located.

After Fitt’s phone conversation, the proverbial hit the fan, leading to the involvement of the then NI Secretary, William Whitelaw who was told by an unnamed official that:

‘…..the press line was that this was a piece of over-enthusiasm at a junior level’.

In other words, nothing to do with the Gloucester’s command. The blame would be carried by junior officers.

Simon Hoggart’s account is worth reading (see below), not least because he was a respected reporter, but also he had details in his account conspicuously absent, or at significant variance from the official report of young Shields’ attempted recruitment circulated, inter alia, to Willie Whitelaw’s office.

The late Simon Hoggart – wrote up the story for The Guardian

According to Hoggart, the boy was only 16, not 17 or 18 as the British document claims and was thus virtually still a child; the boy was also tricked into signing a forged admission of having sex with the IRA internee’s wife (which he denied had happened to Hoggart and Fitt), and the Gloucester’s Intelligence handler, who went by the code name ‘Kent’, threatened to give ‘dozens of copies’ of the boy’s alleged admission to the IRA, effectively delivering a death threat to the youngster.

The handler also told the boy, according to the account given to Hoggart:

‘I can be a bad bastard if I feel like it. It’s my job’.

So this under-age, innocent young lad was tricked, terrified and blackmailed into becoming a British Army agent and despatched down a path which, but for the intervention of Gerry Fitt and a couple of journalists, might very well have ended with his death.

As to what conclusions one can come to about whether Jean McConville’s own very evident vulnerability would have deterred someone like “Kent’ from considering her a candidate for recruitment, the reader can make up his or her own mind.

It is interesting to note that this was the Gloucester’s second recent tour in the lower Falls/Divis Flats area. They had first served a three month tour in that district between December 7th, 1971 and April 13th, 1972, about a year before the incident described above.

The regiment’s War Diary for that tour has been embargoed until 2059. Most other regimental War Diaries during the years of the Troubles have not been embargoed and some can even be purchased on eBay. Why is that?

A soldier in the First Gloucesters Regiment uses a Stornophone-type radio in one of the corridors in Divis Flats in April 1972 – the First Gloucester’s War Diary of their tour in Divis from Dec 1971 to April 1972 has been embargoed until 2059

When barrister Peter Sefton was studying for his Honours degree in law at Queen’s University Belfast between 1967 and 1971, some of his classmates were members of the RUC, ranging in rank from Constable to Head Constable (station chief) and when chatting with them, some raised a shared gripe.

Their working lives had been transformed, they said, when they were issued with small, hand-held radios, so that when they were out on foot patrol, their bosses could keep in touch with them and vice-versa.

But instead of making their lives easier, a common complaint was that no longer could they wander off, undetected, to a lady friend’s house, for instance, to while away a happy hour or so, out of the reach, so to speak, of their superiors. The radios meant that the boss was always tracking their movements.

Peter can’t remember precisely when the radios were introduced, just that it was some time between 1967 and 1970, the year before he graduated. Why 1970? Well that was when he wrote an essay about life in the RUC in which he mentioned the radios. Remarkably, he kept the essay and this weekend he sent me a copy of  the relevant page which I have reproduced below.

Peter’s testimony provides compelling evidence that some time between 1967 and 1970, the RUC had been issued with portable radios of the sort allegedly provided to Jean McConville, who was accused of being an informer by the IRA, murdered and her remains buried in a secret grave in late 1972.

Peter has another reason to be believed in this matter. His father, James Sefton was an RUC Reservist, so policing was in the family – although the connection meant that the family was to be shattered by an unimaginable horror.

Both his parents were killed in an IRA booby-trap car bomb in June 1990; his father, who had retired by then and could not by any standard be described as ‘a legitimate target’, died instantly in the blast, which occurred outside their North Belfast home. His wife, Ellen, Peter’s mother, succumbed later in hospital.

For years, Peter has been campaigning for the truth behind his parents’ murder. Peter suspects British intelligence had foreknowledge of the plot to kill his parents because at least one informer was privy to the plans for the attack. Implicit in this belief is the suspicion that the agent’s handlers approved his parents’ murder.

Peter emailed me after the last posting on this blog dealing with the RUC’s acquisition of portable radios, some of which, according to a British Army document, had been loaned to the 3rd Batt Royal Anglian Regiment in the summer of 1972, then stationed in the lower Falls area.

He had something significant to add to the story.

The security forces’ use of portable radios is central to the allegation by the IRA in Divis at the time, that Jean McConville was working for the British Army. The late Brendan Hughes said one was found in an IRA search of her apartment, after which she admitted to being an agent.

A recent book, ‘Say Nothing‘, quotes a former RUC Special Branch officer as saying that such radios were not in use at the time of her abduction, in December 1972 and therefore the IRA claim was false. You can read about the controversy, here and here.

Peter Sefton’s testimony, based on a contemporary document, not only challenges that Special Branch assertion, it raises questions about why the RUC’s successors are so intent on challenging the plausibility of the ‘radio story’ in the McConville saga.

First the text of Peter’s email, followed by the page from his 1970 essay:

Ed
Belated happy Thanksgiving.

Re your articles on radios, I’m sure that the RUC were issued with “pocket radios” somewhere between 1967 and 1970. I know this for two reasons. In the Law Faculty we had a number of RUC officers getting their law degree whilst still serving. They ranged from constables to Head Constables. Some were disheartened at the introduction of the two way radio because, of an evening it had been their habit to rest a while in a house, perhaps that of a lady. Now the station was constantly in touch.
Additionally , I wrote an essay about the history of the RUC. I wrote it in 1970 and I recorded that the pocket/two-way radio was already in use.

I attach a copy of the relevant page. God knows why I could still find it.

Regards

P

o

By James Kinchin-White and Ed Moloney

In his new book about the disappearing of Jean McConville, ‘Say Nothing‘, American writer and New Yorker journalist, Patrick Radden Keefe writes that a former RUC Special Branch officer told him that hand-held radios of the sort the late IRA leader, Brendan Hughes maintained was found in the Divis Flats apartment of Jean McConville in late 1972, were not in use by either branch of the security forces at the time.

In other words, since neither the British Army nor the RUC had access to such devices at the time, Jean McConville could not have have used one in her capacity as an alleged agent of the British military.

Jean McConville’s possession of the radio is a key part of the IRA allegation that she was a British army spy and the RUC claim to Keefe that such a device was not in use at the time serves to significantly undermine it.

If the radio was not in service in 1972, as Keefe’s RUC officer claimed, then the IRA must be suspected of inventing the story and McConville was thus innocent of the charge against her. It must mean that some other motive, ranging from base sectarianism (Jean McConville was an East Belfast Protestant) to local unpopularity, was the reason for her death.

As Keefe wrote:

‘There was also mystery relating to the detail of the radio itself. Some former police officers, like Trevor Campbell, maintained that neither the army or the police were using hand-held radios to communicate in those days, much less to communicate with informants’.

If, on the other hand, the radio was in service, it adds credibility to the IRA claim against Jean McConville. By no means does it prove she was a spy, merely that she could have been.

So the existence, or otherwise, of such a radio and its use by the security forces circa 1972 is crucial to the McConville narrative.

There is a plethora of evidence, much of it published on this blog, that the British military was using such radios – either Stornophones or the Pye Pocketfones which replaced them – between 1971 and late 1972, important elements of which Keefe either ignored or failed to detect. You can read that part of the story here.

But now evidence has been unearthed from the British government’s own archives at Kew, Surrey showing that the RUC was also using hand-held radios at this time.

The evidence comes in an end of tour report by the 3rd Battalion, Royal Anglian Regiment which was based in the lower Falls and Divis Flats area between 12th April 1972 and August 3rd 1972.

The report was prepared for the British Army’s top brass and, significantly, was embargoed until 2017, an interdiction of some forty-five years. Normally, reports are embargoed for twenty years but there are exceptions, usually made, it is assumed, because the contents are still so sensitive.

For instance, War Diaries from 39 Brigade, i.e. Belfast, at the time when Brigadier Frank Kitson ran military operations, are embargoed for 100 years. Kitson is believed to have founded the controversial Mobile Reaction Force (MRF) unit during his time in NI.

In a section describing the system of radio communications used by the Royal Anglians, the report has this to say, in paragraph 83 (e):

Pye Pocketfone RUC – limited number of sets for Bn and Coys Ops rooms for monitoring of local RUC Divisional nets.

Translated into plain language, this paragraph is saying that the RUC gave the Royal Anglians some of their own Pye Pocketfones so that they could communicate with senior RUC personnel.

The reason for this is that the British Army Pocketfones and the RUC Pocketfones were built to different specifications and operated on different frequency ranges; to make communication with the police possible, the Anglians needed RUC models. And so they were loaned some by the police.

Ergo, RUC personnel were using hand-held radios in 1972; Trevor Campbell was wrong and for reasons only he can explain, gave Patrick Keefe misleading information. What those reasons are is a different matter, but the affair does raise troubling questions.

(Interestingly, the report reveals that the Pye radios were issued to the Royal Anglians mid-tour, circa early July 1972, suggesting this was when they replaced the Stornophone as standard issue.)

Beneath the following extract, the reader can see other evidence for this report’s bona fides along with an interesting photograph of a violent episode in the Divis area during the Royal Anglians’ tour of duty. It lasted for four days and was called the ‘Divis Battle’.

The Divis Battle

Canadian blogger Ian Welsh can always be counted on to spot an angle on a story that has passed by nearly everyone else. Here he has spotted a clause in Teresa May’s Brexit deal which will, if approved by the British parliament, copper-fasten neo-liberal economics in the UK and make any attempt by a Corbyn government to roll it back nigh impossible, without a greater break with the European powers:

A number of people have been asking where and when can they see ‘I, Dolours’. It was screened in sixteen cinemas in all four provinces during the summer but not since then.

However, RTE, which partially funded the production, have the right to screen the documentary on television. When, or even if that happens, I cannot at this moment say. But I would be surprised if the national broadcaster did not exercise its right to show the film.

When we have a firm date, I will be sure to let readers of this blog know in good time.

Congratulations to Kate McCullough who was Director of Photography on ‘I, Dolours’, for winning best docudrama prize at the prestigious Energacamerimage festival, held this year in Bydgoszcz, Poland.

You can read the full story here.

Am in Dublin en route to a screening of ‘I, Dolours’, at the Foyle film festival in Derry and the Brexit story in London is totally dominating the headlines in Ireland.

Teresa May’s future as British prime minister is the subject of intense speculation and Michael Gove is at its centre. It is conventional wisdom that if he joins those who have resigned from May’s Cabinet in protest at her Brexit deal, then she is toast.

Apparently he has turned down May’s offer of replacing the former Brexit Secretary, someone called Raab who quit the Cabinet in protest, saying that he would only take the job if she gave him a free hand to renegotiate the deal she struck with Brussels. Predictably that was a non-starter.

Before Gove became an elected politician he was a leader writer for The Times newspaper and one day, not long after the first IRA ceasefire in 1994, I got a phone call ffrom him.

I didn’t know much about the guy then and it was only later that I learned that he was a signed-up, fervent neo-conservative. You’ll remember the neo-cons, dear reader, they were the people who, amongst a cornucopia of other horrors, brought us the Iraq war, the destruction of Libya and, in their wake, those nice people from ISIS.

The neo-cons saw left-wing, terrorist plots everywhere. And so it was with the Irish peace process.

Gove proceeded to bounce the neocon analysis off my good self. It ran something like this: it was all a sham; Gerry Adams and his friends intended to gull everyone into a false sense of security and donning a new respectable face to present to the world, the IRA’s political wing, Sinn Fein would gobble up the SDLP and dominate Nationalist politics in NI.

Once that was done and there was no longer a genuine, moderate Nationalist party to hamper the Provos, the IRA would resume its war and a disenchanted and demoralised British government would collapse and Irish unity, in defiance of Unionism, would be achieved.

What did I think, he asked?

My regular readers will guess at my response but when Gove realised he was speaking to the wrong man, he got quite shirty.

As we all know, Gove’s prognosis was wildly, wildly wrong. To be fair to him he has recently changed tack somewhat – but considering that the IRA had given up all the weapons it was supposed to use in Gove’s, post-SDLP demise offensive, he really didn’t have much choice.

But what to make of a political system in which such an appalling idiot can be made king or queen-maker or destroyer?

Patrick Radden Keefe, the American author of ‘Say Nothing’, a new book about the IRA’s disappearance of Jean McConville, failed to report documented evidence showing that ten months before her murder, handheld radios of a sort the IRA claimed to have found in McConville’s Divis Flats apartment had been issued to units of the British Army in Northern Ireland.

Instead Keefe cited a former RUC Special Branch officer claiming that such radios were not in use by the security forces at this time.

The ignored evidence said that the radios, called Stornophones, were used by British soldiers in Derry at the time of the Bloody Sunday shootings of January 30th, 1972 because they were more effective than conventional military radios in built up areas like the Bogside. This was nearly a year before Jean McConville was killed and disappeared by the IRA.

The use and distribution of Stornophones was recorded in the report of the Saville Tribunal’s inquiry into the deaths of 13 Derry civilians at the hands of the 1st Battalion, The Parachute Regiment during an anti-internment march in the city.

Separate evidence, in the form of a memoir of a tour of duty in Belfast by a former British Army officer published earlier this year, which appears to have been missed by Keefe, shows that by July 1972, Stornophones were issued widely to British units serving in Northern Ireland. This was four months or more before Jean McConville’s disappearance.

I brought the section of the Saville report dealing with Stornophone radios to Keefe’s attention while he was writing and researching the Belfast widow’s death but it failed to make it into his book.

Keefe instead quoted Trevor Campbell, a former RUC Special Branch officer, who maintained that hand-held radios were not in use by the security forces at the time of Jean McConville’s death, least of all to contact informants.

A radio allegedly used by Jean McConville to communicate with her British Army handlers has played a central part in the controversy over whether or not the IRA had evidence suggesting she was spying against the organisation.

In his interviews with Boston College interviewer Anthony McIntyre – published in part in Voices From The Grave – and in confidential interviews with myself for ‘A Secret History of the IRA‘, former IRA Belfast commander, Brendan Hughes claimed that a radio was found in her Divis Flats apartment, and that Jean McConville admitted it was used to communicate with her handler.

Jean McConville – A British Army radio is at the centre of IRA allegations that she was a spy

The IRA decided to let her go with a warning, Hughes said, because of her domestic circumstances, viz. the fact that she was a widow with ten children to look after. Later the IRA changed its mind and she was sentenced to death. She was ferried across the Border, shot dead and buried in a secret grave on the Co Louth coast.

Whether such a radio was in military service in 1972 is thus pivotal to the Jean McConville narrative.

New Yorker writer Patrick Keefe – his book, ‘Say Nothing’, fails to mention evidence in the Bloody Sunday tribunal report that small, hand-held radios were issued to some military units nearly a year before the McConville murder.

If the British Army did not have such a radio in service in 1972 then Jean McConville could not have used one to contact her alleged handler; in such circumstances it is likely the IRA invented the charge against her. But if such a radio was in service, and was suitable in size, weight and ease of use, then it is possible the IRA was telling the truth.

So what are the known facts?

When the British Army first arrived in Northern Ireland in August 1969, it had two radio systems, neither of which were suitable for agent use, especially in a place so heavily built up and lacking in privacy as Divis Flats. Both radio systems were heavy and cumbersome.

One system was made by Pye, an electronics manufacturer based in Cambridge, England which was eventually taken over by the Dutch multinational, Philips. The military radio made by Pye was a hefty, bulky machine which was usually placed in a permanent location, where it was powered from the mains, or on a vehicle.

A smaller version existed but this was the size of ‘a clunky briefcase’. Neither version of the Pye radio would have been suitable for agent use, so they can be dismissed as candidates for Jean McConville’s radio.

The other transmitter used by the British Army was the Larkspur and for many years it was a common sight on the streets of Belfast. The lightest version weighed between 38 and 45 pounds, and was strapped to the back of the unfortunate squaddie assigned the task. A telephone-type transmitter enabled the patrol commander to speak to his base.

The Larkspur needed a lengthy aerial to operate effectively in Belfast because it was really designed for battlefield use in wide, open spaces, meaning it would be hard to hide in a place like Divis. The built up streets of the Bogside in Derry or Divis Flats in Belfast were less than suitable terrain for the Larkspur. A lighter version weighing ten pounds was available but it had a shorter range.

Between its weight and limited capability both versions of the Larkspur can also be ruled out as a candidate for the radio in the Jean McConville case. (All information on these radios was derived from the Saville Report on Bloody Sunday, paragraphs 181.8 to 181.12)

The soldier in the foreground is carrying a Larkspur radio on his back

Thanks to research done by James Kinchin-White and first published on this blog, we were able to show that it was possible that Jean McConville could have had access to a radio small and efficient enough to communicate with someone like an agent handler.

Kinchin-White located a photograph of a member of the Gloucester regiment using a Stornophone radio, a small, hand-held, two-way radio that could easily fit into someone’s pocket. The photograph was found on the Gloucester regimental website and it shows a soldier using the transmitter in Divis Flats in 1971/1972. The Gloucesters were based in the lower Falls Road between December 1971 and April 1972.

A soldier in the Gloucester regiment uses a Stornophone radio in one of the corridors of Divis Flats

But was the Stornophone in regular use by the British Army in Belfast in 1972?

According to a recently published memoir, the answer is yes. Titled ‘Down Among The Weeds‘, Harry Beaves’ memoir partly covers his time as a junior officer in the Royal Artillery based in Casement Park GAA ground in the aftermath of Operation Motorman in July 1972. His book was published at the end of January 2018, some nine months before ‘Say Nothing‘ appeared on the shelves.

Beaves has two sections dealing with use of the Stornophone radio by the military. Here is the first (these extracts are from a Kindle copy and so page numbers cannot be cited):

The delight of Northern Ireland was that we were able to use Stornophone handsets similar to those used by the emergency services. The set was small enough to fit into the breast pocket of a combat jacket and had fixed frequencies that required no tuning, so that each (patrol) commander was able to carry his own radio without the need for a dedicated signaller.

And the second:

We had three means of communication: Stornophone down to each rifle section and up to Regimental Ops, GPO telephone lines (as it was then), and the standard Larkspur military radio sets.

So, by the summer of 1972, months before Jean McConville was abducted, the Stornophone radio was standard British Army issue in Belfast and thanks to the set, patrols were able to communicate directly with their operation rooms at headquarters.

The Stornophone radio

But by late 1972, according to military sources, the Stornophone was phased out and replaced by the Pye Pocketphone, a small radio attached to the soldier’s jacket which was regarded as much more secure from interception than the Stornophone.

The Stornophone operated on fixed frequencies which could be accessed by pressing buttons. Anyone could operate it and if one fell into the IRA’s hands it could be used to listen into British Army communications.

So by late 1972, the military had switched to the much more secure Pye Pocketphone and the Stornophone had ceased to be standard  military issue. This meant that if Jean McConville was using a Stornophone and it was recovered by the IRA, the wider threat to British Army communications would be non-existent. In that sense the Stornophone was an ideal instrument to use to contact an agent by radio.

In ‘Say Nothing‘, Patrick Keefe appears to have been unaware of Harry Beaves’ recollections, even though his book was published months before his own.

Here is some of what Keefe writes about this matter, in a short chapter titled ‘The Mystery Radio’, which quotes a former RUC Special Branch source as denying that Stornophone-type radios were used at the time by the North’s security forces:

There was also a mystery relating to the detail of the radio itself. Some former police officers like Trevor Campbell, maintained that neither the army nor the police were using hand-held radios to communicate in those days, much less to communicate with informants.

Two pieces of evidence exist to contradict Trevor Campbell. One was the photograph unearthed by James Kinchin-White, which Keefe was aware of and wrote about. The second is Harry Beaves’ memoir which appears to have escaped Keefe’s attention, even though it was published some nine months before ‘Say Nothing‘ appeared.

But there is a third, and it comes from an irreproachable source. It appears in paragraph 181.13 of the Saville Report into Bloody Sunday and reads as follows:

We should also record that there is evidence that before Bloody Sunday some of the resident battalions were, at platoon level only, using Stornophone radios in place of Larkspur radios. A number of former soldiers serving in Londonderry recalled having Stornophone radios available on 30th January, 1972. Often nicknamed ‘Stornos’, these radios, like the Pye radios discussed above, were a commercially produced system purchased by the Army. There is little doubt that the use of Stornophone radios was a consequence of the fallibility of Larkspur radios in built-up areas.

To summarise: Saville says the Stornophones were in use by some British Army units in January 1972; James Kinchin-White’s photo shows a regiment in Divis Flats using a Stornophone some time between December 1971 and April 1972; and Harry Beaves’ memoir says Stornophones were standard military issue in July 1972.

In any hierarchy of evidence, most people would put Saville at the top of this list, partly because of the status of the source and partly because it is the earliest confirmation that Stornophones were available to the British military for use in areas where the IRA was active.

There is, however, no mention of Saville in Keefe’s book. But it is not as though he did not know about what the report had to say about Stornophone radios because I brought it to his attention many months before his book was finished.

Not only did I tell Patrick Keefe about this extract from the Saville report, I sent him an email, citing the paragraph number.

Here it is (addresses and non-relevant material have been redacted):

But it never appeared in ‘Say Nothing’.

From James Kinchin-White and Ed Moloney

Well, according to former British Army officer Harry Beaves, writing in his recently published autobiography, ‘Down Among The Weeds‘, which deals mainly with his time in Northern Ireland at the time of Operation Motorman in 1972, the ‘Freds’ were christened ‘Freds’ after a popular cartoon strip at the time called ‘Fred Basset’, based on the life of a family pet and Basset hound.

It probably helped that the cartoon’s creator, Alexander Steel Graham, served in the British Army with the Argyle and Sutherland Highlanders.

According to dogtime.com, the Basset hound was bred to hunt small game such as rabbits but has to be bribed to obey orders – the human version recruited to the MRF was, in some notorious cases, disastrously similar, as shall be revealed in coming posts.