So who told British intelligence about Bowyer Bell’s documentary film, ‘The Secret Army‘ and the incriminating scenes of a young Martin McGuinness helping to assemble a car bomb and handling a revolver and bullets?

Ever since the BBC Spotlight ‘Secret History‘ team reported that, according to Leo Gildin, the budget director for the film and executive producer, a section of British intelligence – whether MI5 or MI6 is not clear – had viewed the film, which then failed to make a single sale, guesswork has centred on Bowyer Bell, who is said to have had CIA associations.

Equally torrid has been the speculation that British intelligence then used the scenes to blackmail McGuinness into working for them, which if true would mean that the British had a spy at the very top of the IRA for much of the Troubles.

McGuinness was Chief of Staff between 1978 and 1982, and Northern Commander from the mid-1980’s to almost the end of the IRA’s campaign in the early 1990’s. If he was a spy, then he was in an ideal place to keep the British abreast of political and military developments inside the organisation.

But Bowyer Bell was not the only member of the production team who had links to the murky world of espionage and agent handling.

The film’s director and co-writer was an Israeli journalist who had been a member of an armed Jewish group in the years leading up to the establishment of the Israeli state which then formed the core of Mossad, Israel’s legendary spy agency.

Zwy Herbert Aldouby was also under FBI surveillance in the 1960’s when he was working in the United States, allegedly researching a documentary film on the so-called ‘St Louis’ incident in 1939, when 900 Jewish refugees were denied entry to the US. They were forced to return to Germany where most of them perished at the hands of the Nazis.

The FBI report, compiled in March 1961 and marked ‘Confidential’, was put together by agent Willard Wharton from the El Paso, Texas office who described the ‘character’ of the report as ‘Internal Security – Israel’.

A section of the FBI report on Zwy Aldouby, director and co-writer of ‘The Secret Army’

The report, which was declassified in 2005 with the approval of the CIA, consists of an five-page long interview with an elderly Jewish lady who was herself interviewed by Aldouby about the ‘St Louis’ incident. Why the FBI would go to such trouble tracking an Israeli writer is not clear, unless they suspected this was a cover for more nefarious activity.

Aldouby also wrote or co-wrote two books dealing with Israeli intelligence operations. One told the story of Eli Cohen, the Syrian-born Mossad spy who infiltrated the higher echelons of the Syrian political establishment before a Soviet technical operation detected his radio signals. He was then publicly hanged in central Damascus by the Syrian regime and his body left on the scaffold in a public display for six hours.

Netflix recently screened a film drama of the Eli Cohen story called ‘The Spy‘, starring Sacha Baron Cohen as the doomed agent.

Aldouby’s other book, written along with two other authors, told the story of Mossad’s success in tracking down Adolf Eichmann to Argentina and bringing him back to Israel for trial and execution. Eichmann was the key architect of ‘The Final Solution‘ which saw six million Jews, gypsies and disabled people exterminated in death camps.

The book was first published by Viking Press in New York in 1960 and a press release issued by Viking had this to say about Aldouby and his co-author Ephraim Katz:

(They) are two Israeli journalists who have served as foreign correspondents throughout Europe. Aldouby speaks eight languages, Katz five. Both speak Arabic, which made their services invaluable during Israel’s struggle for independence, when they served in the underground, in the Palmach (commandos) and later in the Israel Defense Forces as officers.

The Palmach (which translates as ‘storm troops’) had a conflicting role in the birth of the Israeli state. In the early days of its existence it co-operated and fought alongside British forces in what was then Palestine against German attempts to destabilise the Middle East.

It was created by the Hagganah, the underground army of the Jewish community in Palestine but once the German threat receded and the Second World War ended, the Palmach soon joined other Jewish groups in militarily opposing the British Mandate in Palestine.

Military commanders of the Palmach during this time included future Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin and the legendary military leader, Moshe Dayan.

But the Palmach are better known for undertaking daring intelligence operations on behalf of the fledgling Israeli state. Known to have in its ranks Jews who had been born in Arab countries and who, like Zwy Aldouby, were fluent in Arabic, the Palmach sent a team to Beirut to spy for Israel not long after the creation of the Jewish state.

They were members of what was known as ‘the Arab Section’ which had been conceived and jointly created by British military intelligence and the Palmach in an effort to counter Nazi infiltration of Arab communities during the war. But once the war ended the ‘Arab Section’ became an arm of Palmach intelligence.

According to Matti Friedman in his recently published book ‘Spies of No Country – Secret Lives at the Birth of Israel‘:

…these men went undercover in Beirut, where they spent the next two years operating out of a newsstand, collecting intelligence and sending messages back to Israel via a radio whose antenna was disguised as a clothesline. Of the dozen spies in the Arab Section at the war’s outbreak, five were caught and executed. But in the end, the Arab Section would emerge as the nucleus of the Mossad, Israel’s vaunted intelligence agency.

So, Zwy Aldouby, short, swarthy and fluent in Arabic, was a member of a Jewish armed group which sent spies into Arab countries and which later formed the basis for the Mossad. We don’t know, however, whether he was in the Arab Section or if he worked secretly in Beirut. If he did, perhaps that is why FBI agent Willard Wharton was assigned to track his movements in the United States.

But what possible interest could Israeli intelligence have in the conflict in Northern Ireland?

The film, ‘A Secret Army’ was made in 1972 and that was the year, according to this unusually frank and detailed 2005 account published in the Sinn Fein paper, An Phoblacht-Republican News, when Joe Cahill and a senior IRA colleague first met Libyan leader, Col Muammar Gaddafi to negotiate the first of many arms shipments.

If Israeli intelligence had got wind of that meeting then the Mossad would certainly have been interested in helping the British undermine and recruit people like Martin McGuinness while frustrating Gaddafi’s ambitions in the region.

Whether Martin McGuinness was an agent is a different matter, however. He was Chief of Staff between February 1978 and July 1982, which were particularly violent years. And to keep him in place, their most prized agent in the IRA, British intelligence would have had to ignore warnings about certain operations for fear of blowing his cover.

There is no doubt that the British might well have allowed their own soldiers to be killed, even the eighteen paratroopers wiped out at Warrenpoint in August 1979, although that would be a terribly heavy blow to absorb. Imperial powers, though, have done worse to their own.

But what about the other deaths on that bloody day, off the Sligo coast when the Queen’s cousin, the heir to the throne’s uncle, Lord Louis Mountbatten was, along with family members and friends, blown to eternity by an IRA then led by their secret agent? Would MI5 have allowed that to happen?

And if the British didn’t use the incriminating scenes to blackmail Martin McGuinness what on earth did they use the information for?

As promised, here is the email exchange between myself and Irish Times‘ editor, Paul O’Neill following his decision to spike a commissioned article from myself dealing with the outcome of the recent Ivor Bell trial. The e-mails are mostly self explanatory:

From: Ed Moloney
Sent: 24 October 2019 19:39
To: Paul O’Neill
Subject: replyDear Paul
As you may remember, a few days ago I rang your office asking for a right to reply to the various articles that had appeared in the times about the boston tapes trial.

I did so because the main writer Gerry Moriarty had never once reached out to talk to me for my viewpoint and the only contact I had with your staff was a late night call from a reporter who seemed to know very little about what is a complex case.

The response to my call to you was a message saying that I should write a piece and liaise with John McManus. This i did and we discussed the piece I planned to write which was based partly on the contrast between the Boston federal judge who had read the entire 201 interviews in the archive and was full of praise for it, and the belfast judge who had read a few paragraphs in two interviews and made a sweeping negative judgement.

John seemed to have no problem with this but now he tells me that the article has been spiked because it too closely resembled a piece which was in the Sunday Business Post. I attach both articles for you below and you can see they are as different as chalk and cheese.  (see below)

So why has my piece really been spiked?

I ask you to reverse this decision. I am a former Northern Editor of this paper and I do have, I believe, residual rights to a certain level of courtesy.

best regards

Ed Moloney

From: Paul O’Neill
Date: October 25, 2019 at 10:08:30 EDT
To: ‘Ed Moloney’
Subject: RE: reply

Ed,

The Irish Times is not responsible for anything said by others about you. Our only responsibility was to report on the Bell proceedings fairly and comprehensively. I am satisfied that we did so.

I have set out my position. I understand that you are angry about the outcome of the case but it is not our role to re-litigate or to provide a platform for one side in any dispute. I note you saw no need to reference named individuals when you wrote in the Business Post.

You continue to have the opportunity to set out for readers of The Irish Times the short-comings you see in the Bell prosecution and the importance of the project you were involved in. I will leave the offer of a letter with you.

Regards,

Paul

From: Me

Re: reply

To: Paul O’Neill

Oct 25, 2019 at 10:41

Paul,

I have never suggested that your paper is or was responsible for what was said about me by others. That would be an absurd thing to say. But you do have a responsibility to fully inform your readers of all the available facts associated with a story, especially when they conflict with the existing narrative. By censoring my article – and that is what you have done – I believe you have failed in that rersponsibility.

best regards

Ed Moloney

Last week, I phoned the editor’s office at The Irish Times to complain about their coverage of the Boston Tapes court case.

The paper had featured a ‘Long Piece’ written by their long serving Northern Editor, Gerry Moriarty detailing the evidence given at the two-week long trial – which was held in camera in accordance with a judicial gagging order.

He also penned several additional pieces including one that chronicled the judge’s criticism of the way the Boston project had worked. His articles amounted to several thousand words altogether.

As the former Director of the Boston College project, I expected to be contacted and asked to comment in some detail.

I did get a call – from a junior reporter, I gathered – but it didn’t come until  9 p.m. Irish time and it had all the appearances of an afterthought rather than something that had been planned.n

The article in the Times that followed included a grand total of seventy-two of my words.

So I decided to phone The Irish Times and ask the editor, Paul O’Neill for the right of reply. He was not in the office, or at least did not come to the phone, but an assistant told me that I would be allowed to reply and to liaise with the Opinion editor, John McManus.

The following is the article that I wrote and submitted to The Irish Times. The editor Paul O’Neill has refused to publish it, despite having commissioned it, offering me instead ‘a letter to the editor’ spot strictly limited to 400 words.

As a former Northern Editor of the paper I had expected that the editor would offer me sufficient space to put my side of the story, both as a courtesy and in recognition of past service.

But as they say in Ireland, eaten bread is soon forgotten. What he offered me is an insult and a disgrace.

Tomorrow I shall publish our email correspondence. In the meantime here is the article that has been banned by The Irish Times:

Boston Tapes
From Ed Moloney
FAO John McManus

Just over a week ago, a Belfast court heard swingeing criticism of the Boston College oral history project when the trial of Ivor Bell on charges connected to the disappearance of Jean McConville collapsed.

After hearing testimony from a Boston College history teacher, Kevin O’Neill, the Belfast judge, John O’Hara criticised the project researcher, Anthony McIntyre saying he was not “in any way a professional or neutral interviewer” and that he was “out to get Gerry Adams”.

He also took aim at myself, saying the taped Bell admission was unreliable as “a direct result of the circumstances in which it was improperly and dishonestly induced by Mr McIntyre working under the auspices of project director Mr Moloney”.

John O’Hara is not the only judge to have pronounced on the quality of the Boston tapes. Seven years ago in Boston, US Federal judge William Young agreed that the tapes relevant to the McConville case in the archive should be handed over to the PSNI, but added:

“This was a bona fide academic exercise of considerable intellectual merit…..[These materials] are of interest – valid academic interests. They’re of interest to the historian, sociologist, the student of religion, the student of youth movements, academics who are interested in insurgency and counter-insurgency, in terrorism and counter-terrorism. They’re of interest to those who study the history of religions.”

So how could two men, both learned in the law, come to such wildly differing judgements about the same body of work?

Well one answer may be that the judge in Belfast read only fragments of two interviews by Ivor Bell, whereas Judge Young read every single one of the 201 interviews, given by 26 interviewees, that make up the republican part of the archive.

When, in late 2012, Boston College officials could not identify interviews relevant to the PSNI subpoenas, Judge Young had taken the entire archive home and read the interviews from cover to cover over the Christmas vacation.

As for Kevin O’Neill, I had barred him at the very outset from any further access to the tapes when, in my hearing, he repeated criticism of myself, whose recently published book, ‘A Secret History of the IRA’ had provoked Sinn Fein outrage.

My principal concern was for the safety of Anthony McIntyre, whose life would be in danger had his work become known in Belfast. I do not think Kevin would have said or done anything to harm McIntyre, but an incautious word in the wrong place could have had bad consequences.

Until the trial, Kevin had read only one very early interview which I had asked Boston College to review so as to assess McIntyre’s interviewing skills. By definition it fell below required standard.

As for anti-Adams’ bias let me say this. The Sinn Fein leader had by then been denying for many years that he had ever been in the IRA. I knew from my own interactions with him that this was not true but I am a journalist not an activist. It was important to discover from former comrades what their view was.

Even so, of the twenty-six Republicans interviewed, whose number included Official IRA and INLA veterans, only three spoke in depth about Gerry Adams and they had all been very close to him, especially in the Troubles’ early years. They were Brendan Hughes, Dolours Price and Ivor Bell, all admirers of Adams’, his close friend, and fans of his tactical skills before they turned against him.

Common sense demanded that they be interviewed about their former friend. There was no obsession with Gerry Adams, merely good practice.

On the issue of confidentiality, it took many years before we discovered what had happened. It had been clear for some time following the serving of subpoenas that the guarantee was deficient, but how was this possible?

Our point of contact had always been Bob O’Neill, the college librarian who was in charge of a multi-million dollar budget and had amassed an impressive collection of Irish art, photos, diaries and memoirs.

To myself and McIntyre he said that the library would refuse to take in interviews if there were any ‘legal repercussions’ for the participants. To the UVF/Red Hand Commando interviewer, Wilson McArthur he gave ‘an ironclad’ guarantee of legal protection for the interviews. (O’Neill now suffers from memory loss and could not give evidence at the Bell trial)

To be sure, my own contract gave protection ‘to the extent that American law allows’ but O’Neill, who was, it should be remembered, speaking on behalf of one of America’s leading universities, kept assuring us that in the land of the First Amendment and a Bill of Rights the interviews would, under American law, be safe.

Hindsight, they say, is twenty-twenty vision and I should have checked out his assurances but at the time I can honestly say that none of us could have imagined or foretold what then happened.

The truth of what really happened was ferreted out by the US magazine The Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE) in late 2014.

The test would come when the individual donor contracts were prepared. These would set out the conditions of the interview for the participants, that the tapes and transcripts would remain the property of the interviewees but would stay at the college until death, when ownership reverted to BC.

I showed the CHE the email I had sent O’Neill, which asked him to submit the draft to the university’s legal counsel for approval. That would be the real acid test. If there was a limit to the guarantee the counsel would insist it be inserted.

He emailed back: ‘I am working on the contract to be signed by the interviewee and I’ll run this by…..university counsel’.

He later told me that the lawyer had given the thumbs up and we were in business.

But, years later, he admitted to The Chronicle of Higher Education, that he had never gone near the college lawyer.

We had embarked on the project on the basis of a lie.

(ends)

When every reviewer with access to a computer praises a movie, take that as a warning sign, and a signal that the various writers have decided their careers can only be damaged if they don’t join the galloping herd.

So when a single reviewer has the courage, temerity or stupidity to buck the trend it’s worth paying attention to. That’s why I recommend people read this article in Slate magazine by Bill Tonelli. He knows something about which he writes, which is more than can be said for most reviewers.

Here it is: https://slate.com/culture/2019/08/the-irishman-scorsese-netflix-movie-true-story-lies.html

This is the first of several articles I plan to devote to the Ivor Bell trial and its aftermath in the coming days.

This article revolves around one question, from which others proliferate: why was Ivor Bell acquitted?

The given reason for the ‘not guilty’ verdict can be found in the criticism of the Boston oral history archive made by the judge, which was that either the interviewer, Anthony McIntyre was less than professional in his questioning or that the guarantee of confidentiality that I negotiated was at fault.

I will deal in much greater detail with the issue of confidentiality in a later posting but first a word or two in explanation about Anthony McIntyre’s interviewing technique.

Conventional oral history projects involve professional interviewers with little or no connection to their subjects sitting down and asking questions of their subjects. The key here is that interviewer and interviewee would in most cases be strangers to each other, bound together only for the few hours the interview took to complete.

That is the ideal version of oral history. It was not possible to replicate that for this project for the simple reason that former members of the Provisional and Official IRA’s, the INLA, the UVF and Red Hand Commandos would not reveal their innermost thoughts, recollections and secrets to a stranger. The reason for that is obvious – the absence of trust.

They would only do so to one of their own, or someone who was as close to one of their own as made no difference. This is the feature that defined the Boston College project and made it different and special from normal oral history ventures. In that respect what we put together was far from being a conventional oral history research.

And so Anthony McIntyre, a former IRA prisoner with a First Class Honours degree in politics and a PhD in the same subject – based on a thesis dealing with the IRA – and Wilson McArthur, another Honours graduate in politics with family ties to the Loyalist paramilitary world, were chosen as interviewers. They were academically qualified and likely to evoke trust in the people they talked to.

What followed from that was a level of intimacy, familiarity and conversational informality that would be out of bounds in any other oral history project – but the consequence was that interviewees felt freer to speak more fully and honestly about their paramilitary lives.

Unlike the judge or the ‘expert’ witness on whose testimony he so heavily relied, I have read all of Ivor Bell’s interviews. they stretch back to the involvement of the Belfast IRA in the 1956-62 campaign, the 1969 split, the creation of the Provisional IRA, the early campaign of violence, internment, the importance of Adams’ influence, the takeover of the IRA by Northerners, the re-organisation of the IRA, the post-hunger strike IRA and finally his break with Adams as the organisation began the journey to the peace process.

It is a story told in unprecedented detail, a document of immeasurable historical value and none of it would have been possible without McIntyre’s unconventional approach.

That defining difference was never understood nor appreciated by the court – nor even explained as far as I can tell – but it allowed the judge, guided by a hostile witness (hostile to myself and McIntyre), to deem the interviewing technique unprofessional and biased.

What was never factored into all this was that Anthony McIntyre was interviewing people who were friends, former colleagues and even comrades – that made for a very different interviewing style. Purists, and  Judge John O’Hara, chose to condemn the technique and that led directly to the acquittal of Ivor Bell. But we knew it could happen no other way.

Ivor Bell’s acquittal meant that Gerry Adams was off the hook. Had Bell been convicted then, by extension, Adams would also be deemed guilty; demands for his arrest from Unionists would have quickly followed (and possibly from Jean McConville’s family) and, at a time of Brexit-induced crisis, the republican part of the peace process would have been pitched into potentially fatal calamity.

So to save Adams and the peace process, Ivor Bell had to be acquitted. And so he was. But in the process other reputations needed to be trashed.

A couple of puzzling questions remain unanswered out of all this (questions unasked by the media).

What was the purpose of the gagging order? Why was it necessary to keep the trial a secret from the world not just as it happened but in the weeks leading up to it? One consequence was that media coverage concentrated on the final day when the judge took complete control of proceedings? But were there other reasons?

Finally, the most intriguing, unanswered question of all. Why did the judge take the final decision away from the jury, dismiss them and deliver his verdict and judgement without their assistance? What, one wonders, would a jury have thought of the evidence?

We may just have witnessed one of the most political, no-jury trials of the Troubles.

Many thanks to DE for alerting me to this: https://quiscustodietipsoscustodesblog.wordpress.com/2017/02/05/the-curious-case-of-the-rat-the-pig-and-the-weasel/amp/

The defence witness Kevin O’Neill, whose testimony was cited by the presiding judge at the Belfast trial of Ivor Bell as evidence of a lack of professionalism in the compiling of interviews for the Boston College oral history archive, based his opinion on his reading of just one interview conducted by Anthony McIntyre at the very start of the project.

The archive in total contained over 200 interviews in the republican section while about half that number was devoted to Loyalists. The Ivor Bell section of the archive alone contained over forty interviews which stretched back to the 1956-62 IRA campaign all the way through to Bell’s court martial in the mid-1980’s, following an unsuccessful putsch he had led against Gerry Adams by organising an IRA Convention intended to displace the Adams’ leadership.

He was found guilty of treason and was sentenced to death; the sentence was subsequently suspended although never removed.

A teacher in the history department, O’Neill was one of a number of Boston College academics who had been asked by senior staff to critique Anthony McIntyre’s interviewing technique not long after the project had begun.

This was McIntyre’s first foray into oral history, there were rough edges that needed to be smoothed out and the exercise was designed to help improve his performance.

In his testimony to Bell’s trial, conducted via video link from Boston, O’Neill claimed McIntyre’s interviews were ‘a model of how not to do oral history’, but he failed to make it clear that his exposure to the archive and to interviews by McIntyre was limited to a single interview conducted at the very start of the project when McIntyre was learning the ropes.

He had never read any of Bell’s interviews for instance and until the trial was completely unaware of what had been revealed and alleged by Bell. Meanwhile his antipathy to the Republican part of the project was so well known to other staff members at the college that this writer avoided his company when visiting Boston College.

In short, he was no expert witness.

Statement by Ed Moloney:

First of all, I would like to welcome the acquittal of Ivor Bell on charges connected to the murder and disappearance of Jean McConville. This marks the end of a nearly six-year ordeal for him and his family, during which his health has deteriorated seriously.

I now call on the authorities to drop all charges against others awaiting legal proceedings arising from the PSNI’s seizure of tapes from the Boston College archive. It is time to draw a line under this ill-conceived chapter in the North’s sorry history.

In the end Ivor Bell’s hearing – I hesitate to use the word trial – was held in secret and even the fact that it was a secret hearing kept hidden from the general public by an edict issued from the judge’s bench. Sadly, the media in Northern Ireland decided not to defy this ban on free speech, nor even to tell their readers and viewers that it was in place.

The motives of those who decided to pursue the Boston College archive have equally gone unexamined. Ostensibly, the PSNI moved against the archive in an attempt to secure justice for the family of Jean McConville, whose disappearance and killing by the IRA had been shamefully ignored for many years by the same forces of law and order.

But I have always suspected that a hidden motive for the action against the archive was to discourage others from following in our path with the result that interested parties involved in the Troubles – State and non-State – would lose control of the narrative of the past and would be denied their monopoly on the telling of our troubled past.

Killing off the Boston archive caused the stillbirth of many other attempts to launch independent excursions into the story of our 30-year Troubles. Allied to this effort, and a warning to others, has come a concerted effort to disparage the reputation and motives of those involved in the project. Others tempted to follow in our path were thus made aware of what could be said about them or done to them.

In that regard I note that one of the Crown witnesses, Kevin O’Neill, an academic from Boston College who replaced the indisposed college librarian, Bob O’Neill, told the court that the project, “was now held up as a model of how not to do oral history”.

If Dr O’Neill felt that way when he was asked by his superiors at the college at the outset of the project to examine and critique some of early interviews conducted by Dr Anthony McIntyre, then he kept his views very much to himself, despite his well known reservations about putting Sinn Fein, the IRA and its leadership under the microscope.

As for those who accused the Boston archive at the Bell hearing and outside it of political bias let me remind them that running in parallel with the Republican archive was one devoted to the UVF and Red Hand Commandos and, alas for only a short while, an archive devoted to the RUC.

At one point Boston College’s ambitions ran to an archive on the British Army and both the US State Department and the Northern Ireland Office saw in our work a possible model for dealing with one element of the past. That was until the PSNI and possibly others in the security world decided otherwise.

Those who have been lavish in their criticism of the Boston archive have said little or nothing about the reality that without our efforts, the family of Jean McConville would still know little or nothing about what happened to their mother or who was involved in ordering or carrying out her disappearance.

If the McConville family had been reliant on the PSNI or other intelligence agencies for information about their mother’s final days, they would be in for a long wait.

Finally, I wish to say a few words in defence of my republican researcher, Dr Anthony McIntyre. ‘Mackers’, as we all know him, is a hugely talented researcher and commentator and a man not known for keeping his views on many matters to himself.

Those in the media tempted to join in the disgraceful disparagement of him exhibited by certain lawyers at the Bell hearing should remember how often they have called at his door for interviews and how often they are admitted and provided with all they need.

This was a difficult project for any researcher and inevitably there were teething problems. But these were overcome and Mackers conducted sometimes lengthy series of interviews with nearly thirty republicans of various hues, the professional quality of which is evidenced by the fact that his work has provided the basis for one best-selling book and a prize-winning television documentary.

We had only one governing rule while the project was underway. That was to seek out the truth. Those who we knew dealt in lies and deceit were ignored. If we are to be criticised for that then we embrace that gladly.

ends

For instance, who was the guy involved in Pat Finucane’s killing who hanged himself? And why did he do it? Why are we learning about this key detail only now, thirty years afterwards? You have a responsibility to tell the full truth, the full story.

Here is what retired RUC cop Alan Simpson wrote about the Pat Finucane killing in the Belfast Telegraph. What he writes is a tease, like a high class stripper he only hints at what lies beneath the beguiling bulges, leaving the reader gasping for more. But the audience won’t leave the theatre until all is revealed.

Alan Simpson: An RUC detective colleague told me the Finucane murder would follow me to my grave… I don’t believe we’ve heard the last of it yet

October 8 2019 

When I joined the RUC in 1970, Northern Ireland had just experienced almost two years of civil unrest, but, like many, I felt it was but another episode in the troubled history of Ireland and would soon pass. How wrong I was.

Little did I realise that 30 years of bitter violence lay ahead, which would result in almost 3,700 deaths, with thousands more injured.

I was at the coal-face of anti-terror policing during most of those terrible years and it began for me when I was posted as a probationer constable to Tennent Street in north Belfast. The station was responsible for policing the Shankill, Ardoyne and Oldpark areas.

The reality of my posting was to prove that the Troubles were far from over as, during my first two years of uniformed service, I was the first officer at the scene of 12 sectarian murders. Most of these victims had been shot, but others had been savagely beaten to death.

The faces of these unfortunates were like something from a horror movie. It was clear that the hatred some people had for each other ran much deeper than I could ever have imagined.

In late 1972, I was accepted into the CID and gradually worked my way up the ladder, ending my service as a detective superintendent and deputy head of the CID for Belfast. At that stage, I had attended approximately 100 murder scenes and had faced down some of the most notorious terrorists, ranging from Martin Meehan of the IRA to Lenny Murphy, leader of the Shankill Butcher gang. I thought I had seen and heard everything.

But I was totally unprepared for the phone call I received at home on the evening of Sunday, February 12, 1989, informing me that leading solicitor Pat Finucane had been shot dead at his home.

I had known Mr Finucane from my many days at Belfast Crown Court and while it would have been unwise for him to be seen speaking to me in the crowded foyer, occasionally I would meet him in an isolated corridor and he would give me a friendly nod.

On arriving at the scene, it was cordoned off and I was led to the kitchen of the house by the local CID duty officer, where I saw Mr Finucane lying on his back. His face was a mass of bullet holes and powder burns and this indicated that the killer had stood over him and pumped bullets into his head from a distance not greater than 18 inches.

We also noted two bullet holes in the glass kitchen door; the gunman had downed his victim by first firing two shots through the door and into Mr Finucane’s body.

Several spent 9mm cartridges littered the floor, so the likely weapon was a Browning automatic. This was undoubtedly the work of a very professional assassin from either the UFF or UVF.

Geraldine Finucane, the victim’s wife, had been shot in the foot and was in hospital, but the rest of the family had isolated themselves from us by staying in the front lounge behind a closed door.

I had the scene photographed, videotaped and expertly examined by forensic scientists, in addition to Professor Marshall, the State Pathologist, after which we placed Mr Finucane in a body-bag and had him removed to the mortuary.

I then went to the nearby Antrim Road RUC station, where I summoned extra detectives to work on the case and set up an incident room.

Many observers have written about the case and I am correctly presented as the senior investigating officer, but this was just another killing to add to the list of murder investigations then under supervision by me.

However, I did realise that the murder of Mr Finucane was causing a political storm and hitting the news headlines worldwide, so, in reality, I dedicated myself more to his case.

Two days after the murder, I was surprised to receive a phone call from RUC HQ, advising me that the head of the CID for Northern Ireland, Assistant Chief Constable Wilfred Monahan, was on his way to visit the Finucane incident room. He stayed for about 15 minutes and I saw him back down to his car.

Before getting in, he turned to me and said, “Alan, if I were you, I wouldn’t get too deeply involved in this one.” He then closed his car door and was driven off.

I was quite stunned by his advice and not a little confused. Was he saying I had a lot of murders on my hands and Mr Finucane was a republican sympathiser unworthy of too much police time? Or was there some deeper meaning?

I returned to the incident room and continued with the investigation full steam ahead, but the following day I received another unexpected visitor from RUC HQ in the form of a Special Branch detective chief superintendent, who was deputy head of Special Branch for Northern Ireland. I thought he was going to offer me some vital information, but I simply briefed him and he left.

Almost from the moment I arrived at the scene of the murder of Pat Finucane, I sensed that there was a great deal of hostility towards the RUC from the family. I wasn’t in the least surprised as it was widely known they held strong republican views.

However, as the days wore on, the Press began to report that the family suspected some form of state involvement in the killing. It was not an idea that I took onboard easily, as I didn’t believe any state agency would be so stupid as to arrange such a killing. The ramifications for that, if true, would be disastrous and far-reaching.

My investigation ran for about six weeks and, as with so many other cases, it had to be shelved until some new information came to light.

The next significant event for me in the Pat Finucane case was the inquest into his killing, which was heard in September 1990. I was the sole police officer in attendance and, as anticipated, the courtroom was filled with members of the Finucane family and representatives from the world’s media.

After the formal evidence had been presented, such as the post-mortem examination report, I was called to the witness stand.

Junior barrister Seamus Treacy (now Lord Justice Treacy) represented the Finucane family. He cross-examined me at length and there was undoubtedly a suggestion of collusion in his questions.

I fielded his examination as best I could, but more in the interests of the reputation of the RUC, as by then I had a distinct unease about the whole case.

In short, I had a nagging feeling that there had, indeed, been dirty work afoot by the intelligence services.

I was starting to believe that I had given them too much credit by believing they would not be so stupid as to murder Pat Finucane by proxy — ie using a loyalist terror gang to carry out their dirty work.

The following year, the case was cracked wide open by two of the best detectives I had ever worked with: Detective Sergeant Johnston Brown and Detective Constable Trevor McIlwrath.

A well-known UFF assassin, Ken Barrett, had approached them, offering to give evidence and they had cleverly pulled him onto the punch by getting him to boast about his killings. These included the murder of Pat Finucane.

In due course, Barrett was convicted of the murder and sentenced to life imprisonment, but under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement he served only two years.

It was also established that UFF man William Stobie had provided the weapons for the murder. He was shot dead by the organisation, as they feared he would give evidence against them. A third man involved in the killing hanged himself from the goalposts of Glencairn playing fields.

One of the many things that stick in my mind from the Finucane case is that a close colleague told me it was a case that would follow me to my grave.

I don’t believe we’ve heard the last of it yet.

** Retired RUC Detective Superintendent Alan Simpson is the author of Duplicity and Deception (Brandon Books)

Interesting piece from about two years ago that appeared in Spinwatch. Tom Griffin writes that Clifford Smyth was accused by the DUP of passing insider party intel to the Northern Ireland Office. In fact he was passing DUP secrets to MI5.