It has taken how long? Several months at least but finally a journalist covering the Brexit story, in this case John Campbell of the BBC, has gone to the trouble to actually read the Good Friday Agreement (GFA) to check whether Leo Varadkar is correct in stating that a hard Border would offend the GFA.

And his conclusion, as readers of thebrokenelbow.com will know full well, is that GFA says nothing – nada – about the nature of the Border, ‘hard’, ‘soft’ or middling and all those politicians, from Varadkar to Mary Lou have either been pulling the wool over our eyes or have themselves failed to complete the simplest of due diligence.

As for the hacks, it takes about 30 minutes to read the GFA so one can readily understand why so many journalists have failed to read the document at the heart of this controversy. I mean, that’s half an hour that could be better spent fiddling one’s expenses.

Anyway here is the BBC article:

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar, the Irish prime minister, has told the Irish Parliament that the UK and Ireland must honour the Good Friday Agreement and honour their commitment not to have a hard border.

After Brexit, the border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic would become the only land border between the UK and the European Union. If there wasn’t a deep enough trade deal between the UK and the EU, it would likely mean checks on goods which cross it.

That’s where the backstop comes in – an insurance policy to avoid new inspections or infrastructure at the border – after Brexit.

It’s a key part of Theresa May’s Withdrawal Agreement – but a major reason why it suffered an historic defeat in the Commons.

She’s under pressure to change it, but all sides say this can’t come at the expense of Ireland’s historic peace accord.

What is the Good Friday Agreement?

Also known as the Belfast Agreement, it is the deal that is widely seen as marking the effective end of Northern Ireland’s “Troubles”.

It established a devolved power-sharing administration, and created new institutions for cross-border cooperation and structures for improved relations between the British and Irish governments.

It was approved by referendums in Northern Ireland and Ireland in 1998 and was subsequently incorporated into British and Irish constitutional law and other areas of legislation.

What does the Good Friday Agreement say about a hard border?

A lot less than you might think. The only place in which it alludes to infrastructure at the border is in the section on security.

During the Troubles there were heavily fortified army barracks, police stations and watchtowers along the border. They were frequently attacked by Republican paramilitaries.

Part of the peace deal involved the UK government agreeing to a process of removing those installations in what became known as “demilitarisation”.

The agreement states that “the development of a peaceful environment… can and should mean a normalisation of security arrangements and practices.”

The government committed to “as early a return as possible to normal security arrangements in Northern Ireland, consistent with the level of threat”.

That included “the removal of security installations”. That is as far as the text goes.

There is no explicit commitment to never harden the border, and there is nothing about customs posts or regulatory controls.

What about commitments in the agreement made by the two governments?

The agreement contains a commitment by the British and Irish governments to develop “close cooperation between their countries as friendly neighbours and as partners in the European Union” – of course, there was no inkling back in 1998 that the UK would vote to leave the EU 18 years later.

But there are no specific commitments about what that should involve in regard to the border.

The cross-border strand of the agreement lays out 12 areas of cooperation, which are overseen by the North-South Ministerial Council (NSMC).

It could be argued that a hard border would make that strand of the agreement more difficult to operate.

Additionally, a section on economic issues states that, pending devolution, the British government should progress a regional development strategy that tackles “the problems of a divided society and social cohesion in urban, rural and border areas”.

It could be argued that a hard border would conflict with the spirit of that part of the agreement but again there is no specific prohibition.

Has this been legally tested?

No. The Good Friday Agreement featured in some of the Article 50 litigation, including the Gina Miller case, but the issue of a hard border was not addressed.

In his ruling in a 2016 case at Belfast High Court, Mr Justice Maguire suggested it was premature to assess how Brexit would affect the peace accord.

He said: “While the wind of change may be about to blow, the precise direction in which it will blow cannot yet be determined so there is a level of uncertainty, as is evident from discussion about, for example, how Northern Ireland’s land boundary with Ireland will be affected by actual withdrawal by the United Kingdom from the EU.”

What has the Irish government been saying?

Leo Varadkar has asserted that if there’s a no-deal Brexit, the UK would still have to accept full regulatory and customs alignment in Northern Ireland as part of its obligations under the Good Friday Agreement.

Irish ministers have tended to focus more on the “spirit” argument rather than making specific legal claims.

For example, last year Foreign Minister Simon Coveney wrote that the agreement had removed “physical and emotional” barriers between communities in Ireland.

He described “the genius” of the agreement as providing a framework for “all of the relationships on our two islands – between communities in Northern Ireland, between north and south on the island of Ireland, and across the Irish Sea.”

What exactly is the ‘spirit’ of the Agreement?

That is open to interpretation but is widely understood to be a spirit of non-violence, consent and partnership.

Theresa May’s 2018 White Paper on the future relationship with the EU (the Chequers plan) spoke of the need to honour “the letter and the spirit” of the Agreement.

However it doesn’t elaborate on what that “spirit” might be.

After Donald Trump released a statement recognizing Juan Guaidó, the opposition leader in Venezuela, as the country’s legitimate president following Nicolás Maduro’s inauguration, the US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, appointed Elliott Abrams, who, as part of the Reagan Administration, sought funding for the contras in Nicaragua through donations from the sultan of Brunei and illegal arms sales to Iran, as special envoy to Venezuela. “This crisis in Venezuela is deep and difficult and dangerous, and I can’t wait to get to work on it,” said Abrams. On Friday, after missing a second paycheck because of the government shutdown, a significant percentage of air-traffic controllers at facilities in Virginia and Florida called in sick, which caused flights to LaGuardia Airport to be temporarily suspended, and caused significant delays at other major airports in the Northeast, which prompted the head of the flight attendants’ union to announce that a strike in solidarity with TSA agents, air-traffic controllers, and customs agents was imminent, and argue that the lack of compensation for these workers had a “catastrophic” impact on flight safety. In the White House Rose Garden, Trump declared that the government would reopen, even though he had failed to secure any funding for a border wall, and threatened a second shutdown on February 15 if he did not get “a fair deal from Congress” for a forthcoming proposal on increased border security. “As everyone knows, I have a very powerful alternative, but I’m not going to use it at this time,” said Trump. Ann Coulter, author of In Trump We Trust: E Pluribus Awesome! and Resistance Is Futile!: How the Trump-Hating Left Lost Its Collective Mind, reacted to the president’s speech by tweeting, “Good news for George Herbert Walker Bush: As of today, he is no longer the biggest wimp ever to serve as President of the United States.” The National Nuclear Security Administration announced that it has begun manufacturing, per the order of Trump’s 2018 nuclear posture review, new, low-yield Trident warheads, which are estimated to be one third as powerful as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Staff of Comet Ping Pong, a pizzeria that is believed by internet conspiracy theorists to be the center of a Democrat-run pedophilia ring, extinguished an arson fire, and Roger Stone, who has a tattoo of Richard Nixon’s face on his back and is the cofounder of the Black, Manafort, and Stone lobbying firm, was arrested by furloughed FBI agents for obstruction of justice, threatening to kill a witness, and lying under oath to Congress about hacked Democratic National Committee emails.

In an interview, Jean Wyllys, a winner of Brazilian Big Brother and Brazil’s first and only openly gay congressman, revealed that he has resigned from office and will not return to the country because of death threats; President Jair Bolsonaro, who campaigned against an antihomophobia unit in schools, tweeted a thumbs-up emoji shortly after the announcement, but has not issued an official statement. Japan’s Supreme Court upheld a law that requires all trans people seeking to change their legal gender to be sterilized, and a district court judge in Polk County, Iowa, declared unconstitutional a law that bans abortion after a heartbeat can be detected. A 21-year-old man shot five women dead at a SunTrust Bank in Sebring, Florida. The vice president of the United Arab Emirates and the ruler of Dubai gave all Gender Balance Index awards, including “best personality supporting gender balance,” to men, but “recognized the efforts” of one woman in a press release about the prizes.

A record number of private jets flew to the World Economic Forum’s meeting in Davos, Switzerland, a record number of donors attended a private event in California held by the Koch brothers, and the most expensive home in the United States sold for $238 million. Quoting Frederick Douglass, Charles Koch said that he would “unite with anybody to do right.” A family was kicked off a Detroit-bound plane because other passengers complained about their smell. A three-year-old in North Carolina said a bear helped him survive two days in below-freezing temperatures, and Tokyo has begun offering vouchers for soba noodles and tempura in exchange for boarding subways before rush hour. An Indiana boy called 9-1-1 for help with his math homework, and a new study revealed that Canadians don’t know basic facts about the Holocaust, such as where it took place. Montreal’s Festival of Snow was suspended because of winter weather.—Violet Lucca

Those predicting the renewal of the Troubles in the wake of a so-called ‘hard’ Border may be guilty of gilding the lily if not outright dissembling, but in one respect they are right: Fleet Street is back in full ‘IRA will kill us in our beds’ mode, as if the GFA never happened, Slab is still directing mayhem from South Armagh, decommissioning was a Tony Blair wet dream and Gerry Adams still bestrides the Army Council like a menacing, poisonous spider.

First prize from this weekend’s selection of ‘Street of Shame’ horrors goes to the man from The Daily Mail, one Nic North, for this piece which conjures up the irresistible image of Provo OAP’s desperately trying to remember exactly where they buried the one Armalite to escape Brian Keenan’s cement mixer – but conceding defeat to Alzheimers:

Second prize to Sean O’Neill of The Times whose imagination surpasses his arithmetical skills. First of all I wonder if there are even 700 officers in all of MI5 but if there are, and they were all sent to Belfast, that would work out, by my estimation, as one spook for every dissident on MI5’s books. That’s just not playing fair:

Third prize goes to Nick Somerlad and Oliver Milne of The Sunday Mirror for this piece which echoes The Daily Mail’s first prize-winning article (see above). That’s a real throwback to the good old days of the Europa Hotel bar, when Fleet Street’s best, usually with a helpful nudge from the amiable fellow from Thiepval Barracks, would combine to file the same story: ‘I mean boss, it must be right. We’ve heard the Mail are running something very similar!’:

Finally, fourth prize to Andrew Gilligan of The Sunday Times. A lifetime’s free subscription to ‘thebrokenelbow.com‘, to any of my readers who can translate the following intro to his piece into clear and lucid English:

‘Republicans are gearing up for violence as a key part of the EU deal threatens to bring about the outcome it was meant to prevent’.

Huh?

By ‘outcome’, I presume he means a renewal, or something like it, of the IRA’s campaign of violence. Leaving aside the nonsensical idea that the Troubles ever had anything to do with whether the Border was ‘hard’ or ‘soft’, he seems to be saying that Teresa May’s rejection of a ‘soft’ Border and preference for a ‘hard’ one, was meant to placate hard line neo-Provos – which is exactly the opposite of what Leo Varadkar and his colleagues maintain.

On the other hand he may be trying to say that the Good Friday Agreement (GFA) had something to say about the nature of the Border which Europe is now threatening to undermine. If so, he is entirely wrong, not least because the GFA has nothing at all to say about a ‘hard’ or ‘soft’ Irish Border. Nothing. Not a word.

The ‘soft’, controls-free Irish land Border, was instituted by Europe in 1993, before the IRA ceasefire and before anyone had heard of the Good Friday Agreement, much less Teresa May:

As the Western powers conspire to arrange a coup d’etat in Venezuela – recognising Juan Guaido, the head of the National Assembly, as the country’s leader and calling for the elected president, Nicolas Maduro to stand down – Greg Grandin explains the background to the crisis in this review, published in the current edition of the London Review of Books, of Hugo Chavez’ autobiography.

Hugo Chavez

• Chávez: My First Life by Hugo Chávez and Ignacio Ramonet, translated by Ann Wright
  Verso, 544 pp, £30.00, August 2016, ISBN 978 1 78478 383 9

But Venezuela was the first. In 1992 Hugo Chávez, a career army officer, had helped lead a military revolt. The revolt failed and landed him in jail even as it catapulted him to hero status. He was seen by many, especially among the growing number of impoverished Venezuelans, as an outsider who could put an end to the political classes’ bacchanal of corruption, scandal and debt. Released from prison in 1994, Chávez won the presidency in a landslide vote in 1998. He hadn’t yet publicly declared himself a socialist. But Venezuela’s traditional rulers, of both main parties, saw his embrace of Bolivarianismo – after Simón Bolívar, to signal a vague programme of domestic reform and anti-imperialism – as a threat. The country’s old elite may have lost control of the executive with Chávez’s election, but the civil service, judiciary, bureaucracy and state oil industry, along with some sectors of the military, remained intact and autonomous, serving as vectors of reaction. For the first five years of his tenure, Chávez was forced into rearguard action. In April 2002, he survived a Washington-blessed coup; he was returned to office after two days, largely thanks to the protests of thousands of his supporters. A few months later, the country’s business elite, in an effort to pre-empt Chavista efforts to use profits from oil exports to fund social programmes, called an owners’ strike, and petroleum production was shut down. GDP fell by an estimated 27 per cent and Chávez’s popularity plummeted. But by early 2003 the strike had unravelled and Chávez was able to put oil money into his ambitious health, education and housing initiatives. The opposition’s last real bid to oust Chávez was a recall vote in August 2004. Having regained his standing, Chávez won that election with 58 per cent of the vote. In the regional elections that followed, his hodgepodge coalition of leftist parties took 20 out of 22 state governorships and 270 out of 337 municipalities. Two years later, in 2006, Chávez was re-elected again, carrying every state with more than 62 per cent of the national vote.

A handful of the 2002 coup plotters spent some time in jail. A few opted for exile. But there was no large-scale round-up of enemies of the state, even though the bid to overthrow a democratically elected president resulted in a number of deaths. Still, once his government was stabilised, Chávez worked to neutralise his adversaries’ institutional power. He stacked the Supreme Court and began to rein in the corporate media, which had cheered on the putsch and served as a rallying point for the opposition. In 2007, the government, asserting its right to regulate the national airwaves, declined to renew the broadcasting licence of Radio Caracas Televisión, forcing it off the air and prompting a strong rebuke from Human Rights Watch and the US State Department. In subsequent years, Chávez came to adopt all the attributes political scientists associate with authoritarianism. He sacrificed institutional checks and balances for political expediency, demonised his opponents both at home and in Washington with colourful bombast, was buoyed at rallies by emotional call-and-response repartee with his red-shirted supporters, and governed as if he were running an extended political campaign.

In this sense, Chávez could be placed squarely within Latin America’s long populist tradition. What made him unique, and his long rule so unusual for a populist, is that he never deviated. Throughout the 20th century, every significant Latin American politician who won office by mobilising class grievances was quick to move to the corporatist right. Getúlio Vargas, within five years of becoming Brazil’s president in 1930, eliminated the considerable left wing of his coalition, consolidating his power to create something approximating a fascist state. After his 1946 election, Juan Perón, in Argentina, acted even more quickly against the explosion of working-class demands that had powered his rise. After his ill-fated return from Spanish exile in 1973, Perón threw in his lot with the death squads, supporting a murder campaign against his own rank and file. In Peru in 1990, Alberto Fujimori used his outsider status to ride a wave of voter anger to the presidency, where he immediately proceeded to impose a punishing neoliberal austerity programme and construct a repressive surveillance state. In contrast, Chávez, over the course of his 14 years in office, until cancer ended his life in 2013, never cracked down, in any sustained way, on his rank and file. Even as Chavismo, electorally and institutionally, became increasingly heavy-handed, its relationship to social movements remained remarkably democratic.

Chávez’s base was varied and heterodox, one of what political scientists in the 1990s had celebrated as ‘new social movements’, distinct from traditional trade and peasant unions. It included urban and rural homesteaders, community media and cultural associations, peasant leagues, unions, Christian communities associated with the remnants of liberation theology, economic and environmental justice activists and workplace co-operatives. During his time in office, Chávez proposed one organisational scheme after another – Bolivarian Circles, community councils, communes etc – to try to harness and co-ordinate this diversity. But through it all, he never seriously tried to integrate these movements into the state or a single party, much less subordinate them. After his 2006 re-election, he did encourage the establishment of the Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela (PSUV), which in its ideal form might have functioned like Mexico’s Partido Revolucionario Institucional, uniting various elite and popular revolutionary factions. More than a decade after its creation, however, the PSUV is mostly a ramshackle vehicle for party bureaucrats, and the social movements that powered Chavismo remain largely outside its structure.

On his inauguration in 1999, Chávez enjoyed a significant amount of political and moral legitimacy but very little formal administrative hegemony, and he never really tried to establish it. Once he got control of oil revenues, his government chose to run its various social welfare and development initiatives through a dizzying array of new organisations called misiones, set up to bypass the existing bureaucracy. There were missions in healthcare, housing and education. Misión Vivienda granted rights and titles to public housing residents, while a different mission helped legalise squats. Childcare, land reform and indigenous rights each had its own mission. There were missions aimed at helping people return to the countryside, so as to slow down migration to the cities, and to help expedite the citizenship of Colombian immigrants. There was no social problem – neonatal health, indigenous discrimination, illiteracy – that couldn’t, it seemed, be addressed by decreeing yet another new mission. Combined, all these organisations were meant to encourage civic involvement and create a culture of participatory, or ‘protagonist’, democracy.

At every step of the way, Chávez distinguished his redistribution programmes from those of his predecessors. In My First Life, a series of interviews conducted with Ignacio Ramonet between 2008 and 2011, Chávez dismisses the oil handouts of the 1970s as amounting to little more than a ‘couple of concrete blocks, a sheet of corrugated iron, a bag of food, a couple of cents. Populism.’ Chavismo, in contrast, was an anarchic free-for-all of thousands of bottom-up rank-and-file organisations, communal councils, co-operatives, peasant unions and community media outlets.

The social gains of Chavismo at its apex, from around 2005 to Chávez’s final re-election in 2012, were spectacular: greater employment, improved nutrition, increased literacy and life expectancy, more and better housing. But the system of petroleum-funded independent missions created new sources of waste, while at the same time letting the state bureaucracy rot. Chávez attacked his opponents in his speeches, and beat them at the polls in more than a dozen elections. But he also let them get rich. Oil revenue gave him a luxury no other Latin American populist enjoyed: the ability to defer indefinitely the need to repress anybody in order to appease private investors. So, unlike Vargas or Perón, he never did. As long as oil prices stayed high, the state could satisfy all constituencies. Among the elite, hatred of Chávez was intractable. Their vision for Venezuela was that of a liberalised economy governed not by hectoring lectures on Bolivarian virtue but by the laws of free trade, with well-stocked malls, easy credit, functioning ATM machines, good restaurants, affordable domestic help and quick flights to Miami. They never accepted Chávez’s legitimacy, or the validity of the elections he and his followers kept winning. But for the most part, the bourgeoisie was left alone to accumulate more wealth – despite perceptions, the private sector expanded during the Chávez years – and bureaucrats and military officers were free to skim. All this while rank-and-file social movements believed they were building the revolution. Today Venezuela is gripped by a crisis of extraordinary proportions, as all that Chávez helped create is collapsing. To understand how Venezuela got to this point – to understand Chávez’s spectacular rise and his country’s equally spectacular breakdown – it helps to know something about where he came from. And it helps to know something about the country’s oil.

Chávez was born in 1954, in Sabaneta, a village in the llanos, a vast savannah that rises into the Andes to the south. Oil, which was first discovered in Venezuela in 1914 and has intoxicated the country’s politics ever since, is found elsewhere, around the Caribbean’s Lake Maracaibo in the north, or east along the tropical Orinoco River. In My First Life, Ramonet describes Sabaneta as Chávez’s ‘own intimate Macondo’, and the village does seem to have been as far removed from national concerns and the world’s disquiets as Gabriel García Márquez’s fictional settlement was. There are other echoes of One Hundred Years of Solitude in Ramonet’s questions and Chávez’s answers, especially when they concern Chávez’s early years. There is a lush backyard filled with tropical fruit, which Chávez would boil down into sweets and hawk on his town’s dirt streets; there is magical technology, like the cinema and street lights; there are Arab merchants, strong women and mostly absent men. And Chávez relates a lineage of Amerindian, African and Spanish descent even more baroque than the genealogy found on the frontispiece of García Márquez’s novel.

Chávez came of age in the flush 1960s. ‘Saudi Venezuela’ was ‘overflowing with oil’. As most of the rest of Latin America succumbed to Cold War radicalisation and repression, Venezuela remained an exception, held up by US political scientists as a model of stable governance and equitable development. Between 1959 and 1998, the two main parties – Copei, made up of Christian democrats, and Acción Democrática, a party of social democrats – used petroleum profits to fuel what was for a time an effective patronage system. When Chávez was about 12, his extensive family – father, mother, grandmother, uncle and many brothers – moved to Barinas, a sleepy provincial city, where they took up residence in a ‘social housing estate’, complete with ‘tarmacked streets, running water, electricity’, financed by a ‘workers’ bank’, capitalised with petroleum revenue. ‘For us this meant climbing the social ladder,’ Chávez says. ‘I started getting used to it.’ Many of the men of Barinas travelled to Lake Maracaibo to work oil rigs, sending back their income to their families. Chávez’s father, a steadfast Christian democrat, drew a state salary teaching at a rural school. His older brother, Adán, who would later influence Hugo’s politics, became a ‘hippy’ activist while at university, making contact with the various New Left organisations trying to crack the duopoly.

Chávez was shaped through and through by a welfare state made possible by oil. ‘I was a very happy child,’ he says. Class resentment was not the source of his fusillades against Venezuela’s oligarchy. ‘I was poor,’ Chávez says. But he was fed, clothed, housed, schooled, tended to by doctors and encouraged. He passed his youth in an idyll made possible by petroleum, ‘selling fruit, flying kites made of old newspapers, fishing in the river with my father, playing ball’. Provincial children of a similar social class in oil-importing countries which were even poorer, such as Colombia next door, or in Central America or the Caribbean, had considerably less favourable life chances. Even so, Chávez only occasionally mentions oil as he narrates his early years. The commodity chain that for more than a century has made all other commodity chains possible remains a faraway abstraction. The llanos, to use Ramonet’s allusion, was a Macondo without a plantation. Unlike Macondo’s bananas, oil, at least in Chávez’s early life, isn’t a destroyer of community. It provided the jobs and financed the social assistance that made towns that were far away from the boom, like Sabaneta and Barinas, seem timeless. The timelessness was largely a mirage, made possible because the petroleum economy channelled the excess population out of the countryside while sending back wage remittances and revenue in the form of public services. Low population density mitigated the class stratification and extreme wretchedness found elsewhere in Venezuela, especially in its overcrowded cities, allowing those llaneros who stayed behind to reproduce the rhythms of traditional life. The circus ‘came every October’, Chávez remembers. ‘I was really happy. My grandmother let me buy a ticket out of the sweets’ sales. I loved the trapeze artists.’

Chávez had to venture out of the grasslands to find a world more directly dictated by oil. At the age of 17, he enlisted in the army and travelled to Caracas to begin classes at Venezuela’s elite military academy. He was stunned when he first caught sight of the geography of the city, which was ‘literally enclosed by a gigantic belt of poverty cascading down the hillsides’. All the many manifestations of the nation’s power and wealth pulsed below, in the asphalt and cement flatlands of the city proper: the oil traders and money movers in the business district, the cadets parading at the military academy he would soon attend, planes taking off and landing at La Carlota air force base, the activity around his future home, Miraflores, the presidential palace, and the constant movement of construction workers putting up ever increasing numbers of luxury offices and residences. No matter how bad the economy, the cranes in Caracas are never still. ‘Later,’ Chávez says, ‘I understood,’ and he gives Ramonet a brief course on what is known as the ‘oil curse’: as petroleum came to dominate the national economy, surging revenues increased the value of the currency until it was cheaper to import the food and goods that had previously been made and grown at home. Farms were abandoned, cities sprawled and the welfare system created by the two-party state could hardly keep up. ‘I was shocked when I discovered the mass of poverty,’ Chávez tells Ramonet. ‘I never dreamed such unfathomable poverty could exist in Venezuela, one of the richest countries on the continent. I soon started wondering what kind of democracy this was, to so impoverish the majority and enrich a minority. It seemed to me unjust.’

It’s difficult now to imagine, at a time when the world sits on the brink of an oil-induced climate catastrophe, but Chávez came of political age at a time when many believed that petroleum might provide a progressive solution to global problems. Precocious but apolitical when he started as a cadet in 1971, Chávez graduated as a committed revolutionary four years later. During that period, the price of a barrel of Venezuelan oil had soared from $2.93 to $14.06, with state oil revenue increasing from about $1.4 billion to $9 billion. In 1975, Chávez’s final year at the academy, the country’s president, the social democrat Carlos Andrés Pérez, nationalised Exxon, Shell and Mobil’s Venezuelan holdings, creating the state oil company Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA). Pérez followed up with a speech to the UN in which he argued that oil profits should be used to reform the global political economy. ‘The construction of a New International Economic Order,’ he said, ‘is required as a desideratum of peace.’ Much has been made of the idea of ‘carbon democracy’, the term coined by the political scientist Timothy Mitchell to explain his thesis that what we know as modern mass democracy was made possible by cheap, plentiful oil. But equally vital in the 1970s was ‘carbon solidarity’, the idea that weaker nations might use oil as leverage against the strong.

A year earlier, in 1974, the UN General Assembly had adopted the founding document of this would-be new order, the Charter of Economic Rights and Duties of States. These included the right of governments to nationalise industries and to bargain collectively in order to fix the price of basic commodities, a global tariff structure that gave preferential treatment to poor countries, and a transfer of technology and scientific knowledge from developed to less developed nations. The call for a New International Economic Order – the NIEO – was a worldwide phenomenon, thanks to postwar decolonisation and the rise of the Non-Aligned Movement. But its intellectual origins are found in Bolivarianism, the Latin American ideal according to which political sovereignty is meaningless without economic sovereignty. Venezuela was key in turning this regional understanding into an accepted part of international law and it was an influential founding member of Opec, the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries, in 1960. In 1969 one of its top diplomats, Manuel Pérez Guerrero, became the director of the UN’s Council on Trade and Development, which produced many of the legal justifications for the NIEO.

‘That’s cheap, give me two’ is a phrase associated with the oil boom of the 1970s and early 1980s, when well-to-do Venezuelans were spending freely on imports. But it could also apply to the luxury of being able to afford both American-style consumption and Bolivarian solidarity, both NIEO idealism and corruption. In 1974, the Venezuelan Congress extended ‘special powers’ to President Pérez, giving him complete discretion to legislate and spend. He nationalised industries, limited foreign influence in banking and commerce, and launched a massive programme of state-controlled industrialisation. Money flowed lavishly and unaccountably to projects that were often wishful, wasteful and venal. ‘Anyone who had the tiniest bit of power began stealing shamelessly,’ Chávez tells Ramonet. Pérez, he says, ‘presided over the greatest wave of corruption in living memory… The rich got even richer and amassed colossal fortunes, while the poor received mere crumbs from the oil money table.’ At the same time, however, Pérez was pledging to put Venezuela’s oil at the ‘service of Latin America, at the service of humanity’, in order to wipe out the ‘last traces of colonialism’ and turn socialism into a ‘planetary reality’. Venezuela’s foreign policy during these boom years called for debt relief, nuclear disarmament, an end to the arms race, access to the sea for landlocked Bolivia, lifting the US embargo on Cuba, and the creation of a Latin American Economic System that would function free of Washington’s interference. Pérez proposed using Opec as an ‘instrument of negotiation for the construction of the New International Economic Order’.

None of these things happened. Opec was both a product of NIEO thinking and inimical to it. For decades, developing nations had argued that political sovereignty required control over the resources within their borders. Opec understood this argument, but then undercut it, dividing the tenuous unity of the Third World into two tiers: oil exporters and oil importers. With every rise in the price of oil, oil-importing countries had to borrow more to meet their energy needs. With every petrodollar placed in New York banks, the value of the US currency increased, and with it the value of the dollar-denominated debt that poor countries owed to those banks. A central demand of NIEO reformers, then, was to socialise petrodollars, to use them to capitalise a public fund – a ‘South Bank’, perhaps administered by the IMF or Opec – that would help the vast majority of non-oil-producing nations by subsidising their energy needs; it would also act as a buffer against the price fluctuations of other commodities.

Middle Eastern oil producers balked. Saudi Arabia and pre-Revolutionary Iran paid lip service to the NIEO but refused to back it up with petroleum power. They neither allowed their prized commodity to be used as a bargaining chip to increase the price of other natural resources nor permitted the creation of an oil-capitalised public bank. Instead, Riyadh and Tehran provided a pittance to Opec’s ‘special fund’ and the IMF’s ‘oil facility’, while cutting side deals with Washington and using the bulk of their petrodollars to purchase billions of dollars in arms and depositing the rest in private banks.​＊ Venezuela tried to go it alone. In the early 1980s, Pérez’s successor, Luis Herrera Campíns, continued to distribute millions of petrodollars to Latin America and the Caribbean’s poorest countries, including El Salvador, Guatemala, Panama, Honduras and the Dominican Republic. For a time, this support helped keep alive the remnants of the New Left in the region, subsidising Jamaica under its social democratic prime minister Michael Manley, and Nicaragua after the Sandinista revolution in 1979. But by 1983 oil prices had collapsed and Venezuela’s two-party system had begun its long unravelling.

Chávez, then, is best understood as an heir to the ideals of the NIEO, and its quixotic effort to use oil to broker reform. By the time of his inauguration in early 1999, petroleum prices were at a historic low and Venezuela was close to pulling out of Opec altogether. The state oil company, PDVSA, was by now in the hands of a cohort of technocratic managers who had effectively turned it into a booking agency, extending easy licences to international oil companies to work various fields, opening the company up to foreign capital and investing its revenue abroad to keep it out of the hands of the public bursar. Their ultimate goal for PDVSA was to depoliticise oil by defining it as a pure commodity governed only by the law of international supply and demand, killing, once and for all, the Bolivarian ideal.

Chávez knew that the best way to gain control over oil revenue was to restore the effectiveness of Opec. In early 2001, his first oil minister, Alí Rodríguez Araque, became Opec’s general secretary, and he managed to achieve a level of unity among oil-exporting nations not seen since the early 1970s. Opec nations not only agreed to a production cut, but agreed to give Rodríguez unprecedented authority to decide targets for future output as he deemed necessary, without having to consult the organisation as a whole. Mexico, not a member of Opec, committed to adhering to Opec quotas too. Oil prices began to rise, helping Chávez take control of PDVSA and beat back efforts to oust him.

In the years after 2006, with help from progressive governments in Brazil and Argentina, Chávez put his efforts into re-creating the 1970s ethos of Third World solidarity. Like Pérez before him, he sponsored international organisations, including the Unión de Naciones Suramericanas, the Alianza Bolivariana para los Pueblos de Nuestra América, Petrosur and Banco del Sur, all in the interest of furthering Latin American integration outside the influence of Washington. Venezuela’s establishment of the transnational news network Telesur in 2005, along with Chávez’s constant efforts to build up alternative ‘community’ media at the expense of corporate news outlets, closely followed recommendations issued under the auspices of Unesco in the late 1970s. As a corollary to the NIEO, the ‘new world information order’ was meant to break the monopoly that First World wire agencies had on news and that corporate networks had on culture (in the 1970s, Pérez had to give up plans to establish a national public TV and radio network as a result of a backlash by private broadcasters).

Chávez also resurrected mechanisms by which Venezuela could distribute oil to poor countries while remaining faithful to Opec’s quotas and prices. These included the creation of a credit and barter system and the extension of long-term, extremely low-interest loans to finance the purchase of oil. Within a year of its founding in mid-2005, Petrocaribe, one of the organisations set up to administer this system, had extended a billion dollars in financing, matching the loans offered by the Washington-based Inter-American Development Bank. Chávez’s repoliticisation of oil caused fury in the US: it was a relic of a world that US neoconservatives and neoliberals alike thought they had left behind with the end of the Cold War. The administrations of both George W. Bush and Barack Obama pressured countries not to enter into deals with Petrocaribe. In 2006, for instance, the State Department lobbied Haiti not to take a 25-year line of credit, financed at 1 per cent interest, to buy Venezuelan diesel and unleaded fuel, even though, as the US embassy in Port-au-Prince acknowledged, the deal would save Haiti a hundred million dollars a year and protect its vulnerable economy from spikes in energy cost. At one point, Venezuela was even sending fuel aid to the Bronx and Boston.

My First Life ends on the threshold of Chávez’s Bolivarian Revolution, with his 1998 election. As an interviewer, Ramonet takes his time, returning again and again to certain topics, drawing out details about some of the best-known episodes in Chávez’s story, for example looking into the question of how he kept his movement active while he was in jail. In prison, Chávez’s wide reading included The Challenge to the South, a report issued by a commission that included many Third World economists and politicians from the 1970s, Pérez among them. Chaired by Julius Nyerere, who had been Tanzania’s president during the heyday of radical development, the commission was intended to keep the NIEO critique alive in the face of the neoliberal onslaught. The report made it clear that they didn’t hold out much hope of success. But Chávez relit the flame. ‘I always carry [the report] with me even now,’ Chávez tells Ramonet. ‘I reread it and take notes. Twenty years on, its extraordinary proposals are more valid than ever.’ Chávez says it is what inspired him to promote all those international institutions – Telesur, Banco del Sur, Petrosur, Unasur – to give power and voice to the ‘South’.

My First Life resembles a similar set of discussions Ramonet had with Fidel Castro, when Castro was in his eighties, just before illness forced him to hand over power to his brother. Published in English in 2007 as My Life, Castro’s interviews are introspective, ironic and often mournful. My First Life is more didactic. Death, it turned out, was near, though Chávez didn’t even know he was ill. He holds forth on his rise, in conversations that took place at the height of his popularity, with no hint that it might all be for nothing.

Chávez died on 5 March 2013, and oil prices, as if liberated from some obligation, collapsed. Venezuela’s economy began to spiral out of control. Just five years ago, the country was ahead of schedule to meet many of the UN’s Millennium Development Goals. Poverty, inequality, illiteracy, child mortality rates and malnutrition had all been impressively reduced. Now, the news is of infant deaths skyrocketing, of Venezuelans going hungry and many fleeing, either overland to Colombia or by boat to Curaçao. Diseases the country hadn’t seen in decades are back, diphtheria among them. Vaccination rates have fallen, hospitals lack gloves and syringes, cancer and HIV patients are buying their medicine on the black market, and filthy operating rooms could double as sets for horror movies. The ‘oil curse’ Chávez warned about but kept at bay has returned with a vengeance: abundant access to dollars during the boom years increased dependence on imported goods, which are now either unaffordable or unavailable. Price controls contribute to the suppression of domestic industry, as factories that recently hummed, often thanks to a government subsidy, sit idle. A fixed currency, artificially overvalued by a government committed to making payments on its high international debt, encourages a black market in US dollars that has caused spiralling inflation and depreciation.

The unity that Chávez managed to achieve within Opec is gone, largely due to competition from natural gas. Mexico’s state oil company, Petróleos Mexicanos, is currently being privatised, much in the way that PDVSA was before Chávez halted the process. Petrocaribe hobbles on, though the Dominican Republic and Jamaica have recently pulled out. After Haiti’s devastating earthquake in 2010, Chávez announced that Venezuela would write off Haiti’s entire Petrocaribe bill, which was approaching $400 million. ‘Haiti has no debt with Venezuela. On the contrary, it is Venezuela that has a historic debt with Haiti,’ Chávez said, meaning the support Haiti gave to Simón Bolívar in his fight against Spain two centuries ago. But after Caracas sent a significant amount of free fuel to help with reconstruction, regular Petrocaribe financing started again – and debt, however low the interest and however long the terms, is still debt. Today, Haiti owes Venezuela more than a billion dollars, which Caracas has no capacity to forgive. PDVSA is indebted and practically bankrupted.

Politically, Venezuela is deadlocked. Chávez’s long-time ally, Nicolás Maduro, who comes from a working-class trade-union family, won the presidency in April 2013 by a margin of 1.5 per cent, not a hair’s breadth but close enough to allow the opposition once again to launch a campaign of destabilisation. With no evidence, the opposition cried fraud and called for demonstrations, which turned violent. Eight Chavistas were murdered. A few months later, in 2014, lethal street protests resulted in the deaths of more than forty people, the majority Chavistas or government employees. Three years of economic crisis have served to deepen ongoing inequalities. As they queue up for hours at government shops waiting for basic necessities, poor people in marginal hillside neighbourhoods can see the cranes that remain busily at work in the city’s posher districts; investors, benefiting from an overvalued currency, are driving a luxury building boom like the one Chávez described seeing when he first visited Caracas in the early 1970s.

A new round of demonstrations and counter-demonstrations is currently underway, resulting, so far, in another sixty or so killings, of protesters on both sides. The violence in Venezuela is now self-propelling. The opposition, still led largely by the economic and political elites, is divided between ‘moderates’, many of whom have adopted the social rights language of Chavismo, and right-wing ‘ultras’, who believe they are waging an end-times struggle. Anti-government leaders can’t call off their protests, no matter how violent they become, since that would risk diluting their power. A return to calm might create a scenario where the moderates negotiate a deal that doesn’t encompass Chavismo’s total extirpation (the only acceptable outcome for the ultras). Confrontational street demonstrations have to be kept going in order to retain their force. Protesters target the repressive agents of the state, shooting bullets and hurling rocks and Molotov cocktails at security forces, hoping to provoke a violent response, which will then be covered by international news outlets. But they also focus on the state’s redistributive facilities, destroying health clinics and disrupting food redistribution centres. A month ago, a house in Barinas in which the Chávez family had once lived was set alight. The objective is clear: to cut off both the right (the repressive) and the left (the social and symbolic) hands of the state, rendering it incapable.

For his part, Maduro retains some support, on the streets, in government and within the military. His poll numbers are low, though not significantly worse than those of the presidents of Brazil and Colombia. He possesses, however, few of his predecessor’s resources, lacking not just oil revenue but Chávez’s surplus of charisma, humour and political skill. Maduro, unable to end the crisis, has increasingly sided with the privileged classes against the masses; his security forces are regularly dispatched into barrios to repress militants under the guise of fighting crime. Having lost its majority in Congress, the government, fearing it can’t win at the polls the way Chávez did, cancelled gubernatorial elections that had been set for December last year (though they now appear to be on again). Maduro has convened an assembly to write a new constitution, supposedly with the objective of institutionalising the power of social movements, though it is unlikely to lessen the country’s polarisation.

Marches and countermarches are usually a signal that history is on the move, that change, of some kind, is coming. But Venezuela is in stasis. Negotiations between the government and its opponents are announced, and then called off. The Vatican says it will mediate and the Organisation of American states says it will intervene, but nothing happens. Both sides, it seems, are waiting, tremulously, for the barrios populares, filled with working-class people, to render their verdict. Anti-government forces have called on them to join their protests, and have even encouraged them to loot and riot. These calls, for the most part, have gone unanswered. As the historian Alejandro Velasco has pointed out, Chávez acknowledged these people on a primal level, recognising them as citizens with legitimate demands and fundamental rights. In exchange, they turned out again and again on the streets and at the polls to defend the Bolivarian revolution. In contrast, anti-government forces want them as shock troops to break the deadlock. Maduro may have lost their goodwill, but social gains won in the heyday of Chavismo – schools, food distribution centres, health clinics, daycare – are still functioning, however stressed, in these neighbourhoods, and while their residents may not be actively supporting the government, they aren’t yet ready to overthrow it. Meanwhile Chávez, in death as in life, continues to transcend the polarisation. According to a recent poll, 79 per cent picked him as the best president the country has ever had. A slightly smaller but still large majority say he was Venezuela’s most democratic and efficient leader.

United States:

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UK & Ireland:

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‘I, Dolours’ can now be accessed on iTunes and will soon be available on other Video On Demand (VOD) sites on both sides of the Atlantic. I will post those as soon as they are available. Those who missed the cinema screenings can now watch ‘I, Dolours’ from the comfort of their own armchairs:

You can see it all in glorious technicolour here! His mendacity is boundless……

By James Kinchin-White and Ed Moloney

The British government has released quite a few files to the Kew archive on the case of Ranger Louis Hammond, the Belfast-born British soldier who defected to the IRA and was then recruited as an agent by the MRF, first as a so-called ‘Fred’ and then as a leading participant in an ambitious and successful psyop designed to undermine and sully the IRA leadership in Belfast.

The files shed very little light on the truth of the case, not enough to make a definitive judgement on the true role that he played: whether he was, as he claimed, a double agent who stayed loyal to the IRA even while on the MRF’s books or if, in the wake of the exposure of other MRF agents, he decided to throw his lot in with the British.

The only thing that can be said with certainty is that Hammond was lucky to come out of the affair alive. He agreed to participate in the British psyop, confirming to two Sunday Times’ journalists an allegation that IRA chiefs had siphoned off the proceeds of robberies to enrich themselves, was effectively identified in the article that they published and was then abducted, interrogated and shot by the IRA.

The IRA seems to have had few doubts about whose side he was now on. Lured to a house in the Markets district of Belfast and questioned for three days, Hammond was shot three times in the head and once in the stomach, then dumped on a nearby street. Miraculously he survived the wounds but was left partially paralysed and blind in one eye.

The key questions remain unanswered in any of the documents released by Kew: what made Hammond participate in the British pysop? Did the IRA’s disappearing of fellow MRF agents at this time, Seamus Wright and Kevin McKee, scare him into throwing in his lot with the British? Or did British military intelligence persuade him to change sides, and if so how?

We don’t know where Louis Hammond is these days or even if he is still alive. What we do know is that he played a key role in one of the most successful dirty tricks operations of the Troubles, one that labeled the IRA’s leaders as criminal ‘Godfathers’, providing the British with a damaging propaganda bonanza to use at home and abroad.

An undated photo of Louis Hammond

The best part of half a century separates today from the events that surrounded Louis Hammond and there are very few people alive today who met or knew him.

One former soldier who did know Hammond has, however, written about his contact with the MRF/IRA spy and his recollection, rather than the Kew documents, forms the bulk of this posting.

Harry Beaves, who was born in Wiltshire, England, had joined the British Army, as had Hammond, as a teenager and had enlisted in the Royal Artillery. During the summer of 1972, in the wake of Operation Motorman, he was stationed in Casement Park in Andersonstown, the headquarters of the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) in the city. The stadium had been taken over by the military following Motorman.

Beaves met Louis Hammond at a time when the MRF was sending its IRA agents out on patrols with regular military units to identify fellow IRA members. The double agents were dubbed ‘Freds’, apparently after a popular English newspaper cartoon dog called ‘Fred Basset’.

Last year Beaves published an account of his life in the British Army. Called ‘Down Among The Weeds‘, he devoted part of one chapter to his dealings with the MRF’s ‘Freds’, and all of another to the story of Louis Hammond.

What follows are the extracts that deal with the MRF, the ‘Freds’ and Louis Hammond. After that we have isolated three sets of documents that add to the story.

One is the British Army logsheets that record Louis Hammond’s arrest in Belfast, some three months after he had deserted his British Army unit.

A second document is the central part of a British government paper explaining the Hammond affair to the then Northern Ireland Secretary, William Whitelaw. The author is not named and the document is not dated.

It is clear from that paper that there was an extraordinary – some might say disturbing – level of co-operation between The Sunday Times and the British military authorities in the preparation of the interview with, and article detailing Louis Hammond’s alleged knowledge of corruption in the IRA.

The document makes it clear that The Sunday Times passed on the full text of its reporters’ interview with Hammond to the military and the implication is that this was the quid pro quo for receiving the story about IRA corruption from the British Army.

This aspect of the affair raises one of two key questions: aside from Hammond, who was under the control of British military intelligence, what other source(s) did the Times have to validate the story about IRA corruption? Or was Hammond their sole source?

The other question is this: why did The Sunday Times effectively name Hammond as their source by identifying his rank and unit (intelligence officer for E Coy)? The paper must have known this was tantamount to a death sentence.

The third document provides confirmation that the British Army did have a psyops policy, aimed mostly at influencing media coverage of the Troubles, which was given the cover name ‘Information Policy’.

Finally, an outside intelligence expert – from Britain’s closest ally, the United States – gives his assessment of the Louis Hammond affair.

But first, Harry Beaves’ introduction to Louis Hammond, as one of the MRF’s ‘Freds’.

Louis Hammond – Part One:

The Fred Basset informers were run by the Military Reaction Force (MRF), an intelligence-gathering unit made up of soldiers from all regiments and corps. It was a highly sensitive organisation based at Palace Barracks, Holywood and one of their tasks was recruiting and running a network of informers and agents.

‘Fred Bassets’ had proved very successful for N Battery, who most often took them on patrol in vehicles. The informer with an escort from the Intelligence Service and a Patrol Commander from the Battery would travel in a Saracen, looking out through the weapon slits. ‘Fred’ would point out wanted men to the Patrol Commander as the vehicle passed by. He would radio the description to a snatch squad in a second vehicle who would get out at top speed and apprehend the suspect who would be thrown in the second vehicle and taken away for questioning. It was a very effective technique and netted many on the ‘wanted’ list who would have passed by a normal patrol unidentified. The IRA became used to the method as two armoured vehicles cruising slowly through the housing estates raised their suspicion so, frequently, the wanted men would be running before the snatch squad had de-bussed. On occasions a suspect would loiter on the street as bait for the two vehicles and when the snatch squad pursued him, he would lead them into an ambush. By the time 28 Battery arrived vehicle patrols with Fred Basset were infrequent as they had outrun their effectiveness and were very risky.

Despite this we made several Fred Basset mobile patrols, but with limited success, so we began taking informers on foot patrol, an even more dangerous tactic. All intelligence operations are highly sensitive and cloaked in secrecy. In this case security was particularly important, not just because an informer would be a high-value target for the IRA should they discover him, but also, because having betrayed one side, it was always possible an informer could do so again and set us up for ambush by the Provos. The cover of darkness was essential for us to be able to move safely on foot with Fred Basset. Fred and his ‘handler’ would arrive from Palace Barracks by military vehicle and disembark in Casement Park, close to the entrance to the stand, only after the main gate had been closed. They would be ushered into the Int Office and be seen by as few people as possible. Fred would wear a combat jacket and beret, usually above his jeans and Doc Martens. His handler would be in uniform with a sub-machine gun.

The patrol was never less than eight men strong, usually staggered on both sides of the road. The Patrol Commander would be number one, number two would be on the opposite side of the road and Fred with his handler by his side would be at number three, behind the Patrol Commander. When the Patrol Commander met an approaching pedestrian he would greet him and, in a polite and friendly manner, ask him his name. He would then repeat the name in a clear voice as if to confirm it. Fred and his handler would by now be well hidden behind a wall or hedge. If the person was clear, Fred would whistle twice and we would let the person continue on his way. If he was a suspect Fred would give one long whistle. The Patrol Commander would then tell the suspect we would like to take him back for further checks and call up on the radio. From then on it was vital that everything happened at top speed so that there was no risk of compromise to Fred Basset.

When a Fred Basset patrol was out two vehicles were kept in Casement Park ready, engines running, with a section of soldiers on board. When the call was received they would crash out, the first vehicle picking up the suspect; the second, Fred Basset and his handler. They would be taken to 19 Regiment’s Int Cell at MPH where Fred would tell exactly who the suspect was and what he knew about him and questioning would begin. The patrol would return to the stadium on foot. Patrols like this were incredibly risky; the biggest danger was attracting a crowd who might create a disturbance or riot that could put the informer at risk. Fortunately we always managed to avoid this and used Fred Basset to great effect.

We had several different informers with different handlers during our time, but one was particularly successful. He was short and slim with very blue eyes, a typical sparky little Irish lad with a minder who was a tall, silent officer in the infantry. We were supposed to have no social contact in order to minimise any chance of compromise, but I always pulled Fred’s leg about his long dark hair. I got the impression he lived close by, but outside Andersonstown, and he seemed to know enough about military things to suggest he had been a soldier. I worked with him more than any other Fred Basset and he laid the finger on an enormous number of suspects for us, but as the weeks went on he became less good-humoured and more nervous and jumpy. His hair was cut short and he even began wearing camouflage cream on his face (another hint of military experience). I thought perhaps he was beginning to think that the IRA was getting close to him and as I said ‘Farewell’ after another successful patrol he replied, ‘You’ll soon be seeing less of me I hope.’ His silent minder added, ‘Yes, he’s not far off retirement.’ But there was another patrol, then just one more and another… Each time Fred arrived looking more pale and nervous. In any other circumstance I would have felt sorry for him, but I could only worry that if he reached the tipping point he might just set us up for an ambush by the IRA. Then one day I realised we hadn’t seen him for a while. Fred Basset patrols continued, but with different informers. I just hoped and assumed the highly successful old Fred was now enjoying his pension and not lying anonymously in a bog, a victim of IRA retribution.

I was, however, wrong on both counts. Our ‘favourite Fred’ was involved in very much more and is part of another remarkable tale……..

Harry Beaves, went on MRF ‘Fred’ patrols with Louis Hammond

Louis Hammond – Part Two:

Over the years, whenever I found information about people or events relating to my Northern Ireland tour in 1972 I added it to my scrapbook and diary.

In April 1973 I was enjoying a bachelor Sunday morning, reading the papers, when my eye was taken by a headline about an IRA informer who had been found shot in Belfast. The story in the Sunday Times was written by Chris Ryder and Paul Eddy and as I read it I became convinced it was our favourite ‘Fred Basset’, so I added the story to my scrapbook.

I also had a cutting from the Sunday Times by the same two journalists dated 13th May 1973, this time about the alleged misappropriation of the proceeds of robberies, by members of the IRA. The article particularly interested me because it involved E Company who operated in Riverdale and it named Tommy Gorman as one of those involved, which supported our opinion that many of the IRA ‘heroes’ were as much thugs and criminals as political idealists.

I re-read the articles when I was preparing Chapter 20 of this book and checked facts on the internet. I found myself following a fascinating trail of intrigue surrounding the activities of a shadowy organisation known as the Military Reaction Force (MRF), an informer named Louis Hammond and an elaborate sting operation by British intelligence. My internet research led me to read Martin Dillon’s book The Dirty War which tells the story behind the two newspaper cuttings. Dillon includes in his book a photograph of Louis Hammond who I can positively recognise as our favourite ‘Fred’.

The MRF was a covert intelligence-gathering unit of the British Army, based at Palace Barracks, Holywood between 1971 and 1973, conducting plain-clothes patrols around the city, running agents and debriefing informants. The ‘Fred Basset’ informer network was one of their operations. The MRF was always controversial and although it contributed much valuable information to the intelligence picture there is little in the open about those who served in the unit or the events with which they were involved. Today the MRF is a largely discredited organisation, mainly because much of what it did is believed to have fallen well outside the British Army’s Rules of Engagement at that time.

I knew four senior NCOs from 19 Regiment who returned to Ireland and served with the MRF after our 1972 tour. The first, who I knew particularly well, told me that he had worked with Louis Hammond during that time. He also confirmed in broad detail that the MRF had operated hit squads, essentially assassinating known IRA offenders, the kind of unlawful activity of which they have often been accused. The second of the SNCOs from 19 Regiment was returned to unit not long after his arrival as, I believe, he was involved in an incident which threatened the security of the whole organisation. The other two stayed on and did several tours of duty with the MRF or other covert units until, eventually, they just ‘disappeared’ from the Army organisation and probably became formally employed in one of the national intelligence gathering bodies, probably MI5.

Louis Hammond’s story is full of controversy and contradiction. There is the British Military version, the Provisional IRA version and areas in between that have been clouded by misinformation and disinformation. This is what I have been able to piece together.

Louis Hammond was born in 1954, grew up in Andersonstown and joined the British Army in 1970, serving with the Royal Irish Rangers. When he was sent home on leave in 1972 he failed to return and was posted ‘absent’, as is the normal practice. Some months later he was picked up on one of the barricades protecting the Republican ‘no-go’ areas. He was arrested and faced a lengthy spell in prison not just as a deserter, but also as an IRA activist. Instead he was told that nothing more would be said, provided he gave British Military Intelligence information about the IRA in his area. He seemed happy to do what was asked and, once he had accepted and become an informer, there was no turning back. One of the newspaper articles by Ryder and Eddy gave him credit for putting a huge number of wanted IRA men behind bars and seriously reducing the effectiveness of the IRA in West Belfast. It is fair to assume that it was his activities on Fred Basset patrols with units like 28 Battery that achieved this.

* * *

The Four Square Laundry was one of the well-known operations mounted by the MRF. ‘Four Square’ offered a laundry service to the Catholic estates with energetic promotions undercutting the local opposition. A box-bodied van would visit twice a week to collect and deliver laundry, driven by a young man, accompanied by a young woman. Both were plain-clothes soldiers. In the void above the cab of the laundry van a third soldier was concealed so that he could take photographs through slits in the vehicle. Clothes collected by the Four Square Laundry vehicles were taken back and forensically checked for traces of explosives, as well as blood or firearms residue, then processed through the standard military laundry service. They were also compared with previous laundry loads from the same house –the sudden presence of different-sized clothes could indicate that the house was harbouring an IRA member, for example. It had become an extremely valuable intelligence-gathering operation.

The IRA had become suspicious of one of the ‘Freds’ named Seamus Wright and apprehended him for questioning. Wright tried to buy his life by giving the IRA information on the MRF and also naming Kevin McKee, another ‘Fred’. When questioned by the IRA, McKee revealed the activities of the Four Square Laundry and other MRF operations. On 2nd October 1972 a Four Square Laundry van was ambushed in the Twinbrooks estate and the plain-clothes military driver was killed. Twinbrooks was the responsibility of 5 Battery and, despite bordering 28 Battery’s Riverdale area, had been relatively quiet until then.

The time at which the Four Square Laundry was ambushed coincides roughly with the time in my log when we noticed that our favourite ‘Fred Basset’ had his hair cut short and was becoming very jumpy. Despite the constraints, occasional conversations with him and his handler did happen and I remember the handler telling me how untrustworthy the ‘Freds’ were and how one had tried to set him up with the IRA. On another occasion I remember Louis Hammond talking about how another ‘Fred’ had been discovered by the MRF trying to pass information to the IRA and had since disappeared, I believe this was Seamus Wright.

All of this fits loosely with stories I have read of that time. I suspect Louis Hammond felt very vulnerable lest he was betrayed by someone else in the informer network, which would help to explain his nervous state during his last patrols with us. He probably outlived his usefulness as an informer and, if he was not ‘retired’, I suspect that he was stood down for a while and probably sent to a safe house in England while the dust settled.

Kevin McKee and Seamus Wright had hoped to buy their lives by becoming double agents for the IRA, but they were never seen again. They IRA have admitted that they were executed as informers in accordance with IRA rules, it is said, by Jim Bryson and Thomas Tolan (both now dead), but their bodies have not been found. They are listed among the ‘Disappeared of Northern Ireland’, those who are believed to have been abducted, killed and buried in unmarked graves by Republican paramilitaries. Their story was told on the BBC4 documentary The Disappeared by Darragh MacIntyre on 5th November 2013.

Afternote. The bodies of Wright and McKee were found in a bog in County Meath in June 2015, forty-three years after their disappearance.

* * *

In his book The Dirty War Martin Dillon claims, in a fascinating story, that Ryder and Eddy’s article in the Sunday Times on 13th May 1973 concerning the misappropriation of robbery money was a clever and very successful psy-ops operation on the part of the British Intelligence Services.

The IRA had historically committed robberies to obtain money to buy weapons and otherwise fund their activities and it had long been suspected by both the IRA and the security forces that not all of the stolen money was being handed to the IRA hierarchy. The security forces had helped increase suspicion within the IRA by, on occasions, by deliberately inflating the sums stolen when issuing press releases on robberies.

The sting itself claimed that a secret document, purported to be from a senior IRA member being held in Long Kesh, had been intercepted by the security forces. It was addressed to the IRA’s Belfast Commander, Seamus Twomey, and named IRA members who had been misappropriating funds. The security forces leaked details of the document to the two journalists, Chris Ryder and Paul Eddy.

Chris Ryder, pictured at around the time the Louis Hammond stories were published

Now Louis Hammond comes into the story. Ryder and Eddy had been approached separately by Hammond who told them that he had once been the Intelligence Officer of E Company in Riverdale, but was at that time acting as a British informer. They spoke to Hammond several times, initially seeking information on Wright and McKee and the MRF. When they pressed him for information on IRA embezzlement Hammond corroborated the facts contained in the alleged intercepted document, claiming that he was doing so because he had become disillusioned by what had been going on. The suspicion is that Hammond was brought out of retirement as a ‘Fred’ and deliberately used by the security forces to feed Ryder and Eddy information to support the sting operation concerning the misappropriated robbery proceeds.

Such information from Hammond, an IRA insider, seemed to confirm the credibility of the story so Ryder and Eddy went ahead and published the article in the Sunday Times quoting as their source an unnamed ‘former Intelligence Officer from E Company’. From this the IRA were in no doubt who had betrayed them and the article led to the eventual shooting of Hammond.

The Sunday Times article told that in 1971– 72 there were 1,368 armed robberies in Ulster, the majority of these committed by E and F Companies of Belfast’s 1st Battalion, who specialised in staging bank robberies to raise funds for the IRA. It was alleged that at least £ 150,000 had been siphoned off by senior members of the 1st Battalion. The article named seven prominent members of the IRA who were being accused of misappropriating IRA funds. In consequence, the Provisionals’ High Command suspended military activities by E (Riverdale) and F Companies because of these financial irregularities.

Co-author of the article on Louis Hammond, Paul Eddy. A former Sunday Times ‘Insight’ reporter, he turned to fiction writing later in life. He died in 2009.

The publication of the article in the Sunday Times caused chaos within the ranks of the Provisional IRA and caused immense damage to the organisation. There was enough truth in the story to fuel the suspicions and make the additional ‘embroidery’ and downright lies so plausible that the accusations could not be ignored. However, few of the accusations could be substantiated as the original document was purported to have been smuggled out of Long Kesh and intercepted by the security forces before it reached its destination, so, probably, only the author knew the contents and the author himself (if he existed) was unknown. There was paranoia within the IRA over who the author might be and what the actual contents were. The hierarchy suspended a large part of the Provisionals’ active membership for some time whilst investigations were made. Distrust and suspicion were so strong that it resulted in a split between the ‘old guard’, who were close to accepting a negotiated political settlement, and a group (including Adams and McGuinness) who were willing to pursue a protracted war in which the military and political campaigns were fought side by side. Key to the whole operation had been Louis Hammond, our favourite ‘Fred Basset’.

At some stage Hammond was taken back to Liverpool by one of the Senior NCOs with whom I had served in 19 Regiment and told to lay low, but he was homesick and could not settle. The IRA had been watching out for Hammond and picked him up when he returned to his father’s house in Belfast. Hammond’s bullet-ridden body was found in an alley near the Ormeau Road. He was shot several times in the head and in the body, but miraculously survived. In the book Stakeknife: Britain’s Secret Agents in Ireland, Greg Harkin and Martin Ingram claim that his attacker was Brendon Davidson, himself an IRA informer who was subsequently murdered by Protestant paramilitaries. Gerry Adams was a pall bearer at Davidson’s funeral.

Brendan Davison’s funeral – Freddie Scappaticci on the left (with moustache) and Davison in the coffin were both IRA informers

Hammond’s name appears in a number of publications on the Troubles, but, except for his activities as a ‘Fred’ his true role is unclear. From these stories, I believe the following is likely: he and the IRA claim that he was a double agent passing information to the IRA. At the time when Wright and McKee were informing the IRA of the Four Square Laundry etc, it is probable that Hammond was interviewed by the IRA. He may or may not have offered information, but he did not feel under threat from them and when he was ‘pensioned off’ by the British security services, he felt relatively safe from both the British and the IRA.

Unfortunately, he had outlived his usefulness for the British because, through his association with Wright and McKee, he could no longer be trusted. When he was used to support the embezzlement sting the British saw him as expendable. British intelligence would have known that revealing in the press that information had come from a ‘former Intelligence Officer from E Company’ identified Hammond to the IRA and effectively signed his death warrant.

The story of my connection with Louis Hammond had an interesting postscript. In 1975 I was part of the Royal Artillery force serving in Oman during the Dhofar Campaign, deployed for weeks on end in Observation Posts in the jebel about two miles north of RAF Salalah. One lunchtime a group of officers were in the bar of the Officers’ Mess of RAF Salalah seriously ‘re-hydrating’ after a particularly difficult and dangerous spell of operations. One of them, a tall slim man wearing the uniform of a Captain in the Sultan’s Armed Forces, seemed strangely familiar. We exchanged glances and a few minutes later he walked up to me, a bottle of Heineken in his hand.

‘We’ve met before,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ I replied.

‘Casement Park ’72. We were always pleased to go out with you.’

It was Fred Basset’s silent minder, then serving on secondment to the Sultan’s Armed Forces. He returned to his friends and I was buoyed by the compliment, wishing he was free to answer my many questions, in particular, about Louis Hammond, of whom, at the time, I knew nothing.

Some weeks later he was involved in the Shershitti Caves operation, one of the major concluding conflicts of the Dhofar campaign. He showed great bravery rescuing several men under intense enemy fire and was awarded a Sultan’s award for bravery.

A remarkable person. The same man features as one of the lead characters in Ranulph Fiennes’s book The Feather Men, which was made into the film Killer Elite, starring Robert de Niro.

The Arrest of Louis Hammond:

In the early hours of May 13th, 1972, Louis Hammond, along with five other local men, was manning a barricade set up in the Slievegallion area of Andersonstown.

Loyalists were beginning to launch forays into Andersonstown at that time, but there had also been incursions by other, unknown gunmen and some shootings. It was only later that it emerged that these other incidents were carried out by motorised MRF patrols (see here).

The barricades had been erected to protect local people but that night a British Army patrol surrounded the Slievegallion barrier and arrested six vigilantes manning it. The troops also discovered a ‘brand new’ Armalite rifle dumped behind a nearby hedge, one of the first of those weapons to be smuggled into Belfast from the United States.

A message confirming the arrests and weapon find was recorded in the log sheet compiled by the military’s Belfast headquarters and a copy sent to the Thiepval Barracks HQ of the British Army in Lisburn, just west of Belfast. The names and addresses of those arrested was also sent to HQNI, including that of Louis Hammond.

Six hours later a further message was sent to HQNI stating that Hammond had deserted from the Royal Irish Rangers three-and-a-half months before.

The third log sheet below (see Serial 61) also records that a copy of this message was forwarded to ‘Int’, i.e. military intelligence. The presumption must be that this was the point at which Louis Hammond’s fateful career with the MRF effectively began.

The British Army’s Psyops Policy:

An Intelligence Assessment of the Louis Hammond affair.

In September 1999, a US Navy Intelligence officer by the name of Mark L Bowlin published his Masters degree thesis on British intelligence operations in Northern Ireland. Titled ‘BRITISH INTELLIGENCE AND THE IRA: THE SECRET WAR IN NORTHERN IRELAND, 1969-1988’, Bowlin devoted a section to the Louis Hammond affair. The thesis can be accessed here. The relevant section reads:

The articles by Eddy and Ryder proved very damaging to the IRA and helped establish the reputation of the Provisionals as racketeers and gangsters. The interesting thing about the case of Louis Hammond and this aspect of the British sting was that although the participation of the IRA in criminal activities has been well established, it appears that the embezzlement of IRA funds (at least this incident) was fabricated by British intelligence. This was facilitated by the British practice of creatively reporting on the amount of money stolen from banks robbed by the IRA. Every time the IRA robbed a bank to fund their operations, the British announced to the press that an amount slightly higher was taken than actually was. Desmond Hamill wrote that frequently the effects of this policy could be seen immediately, “Very often the Army found that soon afterwards, sometimes even the next day, there would be a number of kneecappings. It was not good for IRA recruiting.” Neither was the incident involving the hapless Louis Hammond.

Assessing the former operation first, British intelligence formed a lasting public image of the IRA as gangsters and common criminals, yet it is important to remember that that image is not entirely a British concoction. The IRA funded its operations through bank robberies, protection rackets and a whole range of illicit businesses, yet the British were successful in painting a portrait of criminals that were so corrupt that they would steal from the cause as well as for it.

Moreover, the MRF portrayed Louis Hammond, and the media furthered the portrayal, as a loyal Republican whistleblower who was nearly killed by his own for speaking “the truth.” To the IRA and their sympathizers, it is one thing to rob a bank to fund IRA operations, but it is something else altogether to steal from the movement.

The Embezzlement Sting was a clever operation that brought confusion to the ranks of the enemies of British intelligence, yet it was not without cost. Undoubtedly, Louis Hammond was not a choirboy. He was a deserter from the British Army and was an active member of a terrorist organization.

Nevertheless, Hammond paid a pretty dear price for his participation in the Sting, more so, one would argue, than had his British handlers. There is a strong argument that the war in Ulster was what is referred to there as a “big boys’ game” and that Hammond knew the risks. He could have opted to serve his time in prison instead. Yet his was a fate that was common to the Freds. Tony Geraghty wrote of the ex-terrorists, “It was a lethal, complex and bewildering game of cat and mouse and not many of the Freds survived to enjoy the freedom promised them after MRF service.

Another disturbing aspect of the Embezzlement Sting was the manipulation of the media. This was not the first nor the last time that the media was used by the British intelligence services. It is not against the law in the United Kingdom for the government to lie to the press, but the net result of having repeatedly done so was that the credibility of the government was always in question. In a long war, such as the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the government’s campaign to win the hearts and minds of the people is made infinitely more complex when government officials are rightfully viewed as inveterate liars and official statements as propaganda.

And finally that report on the Louis Hammond affair prepared for Willie Whitelaw: