The Broken Elbow

His name is Ian Hurst although for a long time this former intelligence officer in the British Army’s Force Research Unit (FRU) called himself ‘Martin Ingram’ whenever he met the media. A chirpy Mancunian who served with the FRU in Derry, he broke with the military and gradually emerged in public with secrets to tell, angered by what he believed was the shameful way an agent he ran in the IRA had been treated.

The Derry IRA’s quarter master’s department included in its ranks one Frank Hegarty, whose career in the IRA had been controversial. He had been expelled some years before by Ivor Bell, then the chief of staff, when it was discovered that he had been having an affair with the wife of a soldier in the Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR) and had failed to tell his superiors. And so it was that eyebrows were raised when the news filtered through that Hegarty was back, a move that had been arranged by Martin McGuinness.

Hegarty’s exposure as a spy and death at the hands of the Internal Security Department – the IRA’s spycatchers – led to more internal speculation about McGuinness’ true loyalties. The Belfast-based veteran IRA leader, Brian Keenan was one who did not keep those doubts to himself. The pair had never got on and Keenan blamed McGuinness for facilitating his arrest in Northern Ireland and subsequent deportation to a London court where he received a lengthy sentence for IRA bombings in England in the early 1970’s.

At the same time it was part of daily politics in the Provos to gut and slander rivals and potential rivals. It could be a very bitchy organisation, but it was dangerous bitchiness.

Hegarty was the Derry Quarter .Master and so he was alerted to the arrival of boxes of modern automatic rifles which had recently been smuggled from Libya, a gift from that country’s complicated leader, Col Gaddafi. Hegarty’s job was to prepare safe dumps for such weapons. But he was also working for the British Army’s Force Research Unit (FRU) which led the military’s intelligence battle with the IRA and so the British were privy to every movement of IRA weaponry in his area of responsibility. Hegarty would later tell the IRA that his handlers ultimate aim was to install him as the IRA’s Quarter Master General.

The guns were supposed to be hidden in a safe dump, but safe it certainly was not. Via Hegarty the FRU learned of the weapons shipment and told their political masters who duly informed Dublin. Since the weapons were destined for a safe dump somewhere in Co Donegal, the Dublin government had to be informed. And since the weapons were moving from a dump in Dublin’s jurisdiction, Taoiseach Garret Fitzgerald had first dibs and sought an operation to interdict the weapons, thereby inflicting a very public blow on the IRA.

But the operation came at a high cost to the British. The finger of suspicion, pointed by Southern IRA leaders, moved immediately in the direction of Hegarty and so the Derry QM ran for the hills, thereby confirming the doubts. Ever since, the British have blamed Garret Fitzgerald for squandering a potentially priceless agent at the very heart of the IRA.

Hegarty fled and was moved to a safe house somewhere across the Irish Sea, but apparently was in regular telephonic contact with his family back in Derry. The only way to explain why FRU agent Martin Ingram/Ian Hurst subsequently behaved in the way he did, breaking the omerta rule and threatening to expose the spy at the very heart of the IRA, is anger at the way he believes his agent, Frank Hegarty was betrayed by the FRU, or whoever pulled their strings.

So it was that an apparently homesick Hegarty would phone his mother’s home, apparently quite regularly, until one day it was Martin McGuinness at the other end. It would be more than astonishing if someone from British intelligence was not listening in as well but whatever about that, the upshot was that Hegarty was tricked by McGuinness’ false assurances of his safety, returned to Ireland and walked straight into his grave. Well actually not quite straight. He was taken away for questioning so he might have lived for a few more days, but not more than that. What the FRU’s reaction was to all this remains a mystery. Was Hegarty a lamb manoeuvred to slaughter, and if so, why? What efforts were made to ensure that Hegarty would not put himself in such obvious danger?

No-one was more angered by, and suspicious of Hegarty’s fate than his FRU handler Ian Hurst/Martin Ingram who slowly but surely, with the deftness of a skilled tradesman, and the patience of a trout fly fisherman, eased the full story out, or as much of it as he can safely tell and this after years of harassment from government agencies and lawyers. Many questions remain to be answered to be sure, but the essence of what happened or at least is suspected to have happened, is now known and it smells.

This is how we know that Hegarty was allowed to walk himself back to death. The question still hanging unanswered in the air quite simply is: was he sacrificed and if so, why?

Can I be so bold as to suggest that it was not Scap who was silencing people but those who appointed and kept him on as a senior figure in the so-called ‘nutting squad’?

Kenova: Statement released following death of Frederick Scappaticci

Kenova lead, former Chief Constable Jon Boutcher said: “We were made aware last week of the passing of Frederick Scappaticci. We are working through the implications of his death with regards to our ongoing casework, which will be progressed in consultation with victims, bereaved families, advocacy support groups and a wide range of statutory and non-statutory partners.

“The very nature of historical investigations will mean a higher likelihood that old age may catch up with those affected, be they perpetrators, witnesses, victims, family members, or those who simply lived through those times, before matters are concluded. We remain committed to providing families with the truth of what happened to their loved ones and continue to actively pursue criminal charges against several individuals. We will publish an interim report on Kenova’s findings this year.

“We also recognise that people may now feel more able to talk to the Kenova team following the death of Mr Scappaticci, who had long accused by many of being involved in the kidnap, murder and torture of potential PIRA informants during The Troubles. I appeal to anyone with information that might help those impacted by the events we are investigating to contact us in confidence to help families understand what happened during these difficult times.”

ENDS

And what was that secret? It was which animal he most liked to fuck. Now, we’ll never know. Shit!

When the late Cathleen Knowles, who was Secretary of Sinn Fein until the 1986 split with RSF, asked Rita O’Hare why she was planning to go with the Adams’ leadership after Sinn Fein dropped abstentionism in Dail Eireann and agreed to take seats in Leinster House, Rita’s reply was simple.”Because they’re my people”.

The unspoken truth embedded in that answer is that the Provos were a different sort of IRA than we had ever known. To be sure they paid lip service to the same ideals and goals as did the traditionalists, especially ‘Brits Out’ and the demand for unification; and they believed in the use of armed force. But what really bugged the Provos, what acted as their recruiting sergeants, what made them both powerful and different, were the Unionists and their hard-line cousins, the Loyalists.

The reality of British rule in the North was not the Union Jack fluttering over Dublin Castle but Orange parades strutting their supremacy through Catholic streets, and discrimination in jobs and housing. Most Catholics kept their heads down in these early years of the Northern state and while there was an IRA active in the North, it was careful not to push things too far, knowing that support was conditional in their communities.

These were the years when, in the main, the Catholics voted Nationalist and the IRA was a tiny minority, to be shunned if one wanted to keep a job outside the ghetto. I remember the late Dolours Price telling me that in those days it would be a feat to fill two single-decker buses of supporters to the annual pilgrimage to Wolfe Tone’s grave in Bodenstown. What’s that? Perhaps fifty or seventy-five people. Republicans also tended to marry fellow republicans, evidence of a reluctance on the part of non-republicans to associate too closely.

So the need to defend their areas and then to emasculate Unionism was the real, if unspoken, unacknowledged priority of the people who many years later led and directed the Provisional IRA after August 1969; Brits Out and a 32 County Republic were secondary aims. But that’s also why, fundamentally, we have a peace process and the absorption of the Provos into constitutional politics.

And that’s what Rita O’Hare really meant when she told Cathleen Knowles in 1986 that she was going with her people.

I have to say that I always found Rita good company and a fundamentally decent person, fun to be with. She was also undeniably brave. On one occasion she tried to smuggle a stick of gelignite into Portlaoise jail, apparently to facilitate a jailbreak. There is really only one place a woman can secrete such a thing and hope to get away with it, and that is inside her body. Think about it. Now, you need balls, for that!

People in New York, as well as Dublin, Dundalk and Belfast will all have stories to tell about Des Mackin. Seems he has now attracted the attention of The Irish Times, about which you can read here and here; maybe someone might now care to take a look at hotel ownership North of the Border……now there’s a story

We had all been expecting Henry McDonald’s death for some time, but even so, the end of life for someone that you liked and have known for many years, and was in the prime of life, still comes as an unwelcome shock. He rang me late last year to tell me of the fateful cancer diagnosis, that he had at best just a few months left of life but we continued our conversations as if maybe it would not happen. We often talked of, or rather emailed about soccer, he of his beloved but, like himself, seemingly doomed Everton and me of Spurs, like his team, cursed by poor management and overshadowed by better financed and led local rivals.

We had other things in common, notably a fascination with the Troubles and in particular the journey undertaken by the Provos, one which saw them ending at a place eerily similar to his and my starting point, a place familiar to anyone who had been persuaded that left-wing, anti-sectarian politics offered the best way forward and that ideas were more powerful weapons than guns could ever be.

We also had this in common:

In 1973, I joined the Republican Clubs in the Markets, a natural progression, it seemed, from the civil rights agitation in which, as a student at QUB, I had been involved, and there met his mother who was a fierce devotee of the cause; perhaps it was her inherited DNA that charted his life’s course. By the autumn of that year I was penniless, in debt to the bank and with no prospect, on a teacher’s meagre salary, of ever knowing anything but penury.

Col Gaddafi saved my life. He had expelled the British Council from Libya not long after his 1969 revolution and sent to Ireland for English teachers, offering salaries that were a multiple of the wages paid by Larne tech college. Within weeks, I waved farewell to Belfast (temporarily) and the Mellowes-McCann Republican Club (permanently) and boarded a plane to North Africa, a language laboratory on the University of Tripoli campus, subsidised food (fillet mignon was the same price as mince meat), sun-soaked Mediterranean beaches and a light work load. Not long afterwards my crippling debt had become a bad memory.

When I returned to Belfast it was with a determination that my life, at least politically, would take a different direction. A year or so after I landed in Tripoli, the Officials had split when internal differences over armed struggle and the national question had become irreconcilable and a long, bloody feud had claimed too many lives to count. Not only had the political activity of a few years before become life-threateningly dangerous but it was also now pretty pointless, at least to my mind.

Henry, meanwhile, followed in his mother’s footsteps and unlike myself was still addicted to the kool-aid, at least for some long time. I hesitated interrogating him about those early, pre-journalism years but I knew something then of his political journey.

I first met him at UTV’s headquarters in the early 1980’s where myself and others had been asked to discuss possible community-based TV programme ideas.

I had started writing, along with a group of talented and diverse writers for the Belfast Bulletin, a leftish and occasional publication which covered issues like the De Lorean car company and Roy Mason’s economic and security policies. Henry had been invited to the meeting, UTV told us, as a representative of a Dublin-based film company called Iskra, which had the same name as the Bolshevik publication founded by Lenin in pre-revolutionary Russia. You can read the fascinating story of the Irish Iskra and its links to the Workers Party here.

Henry also appeared to maintain links with East Germany and here below, is a photo of a very young looking Henry, with a group of, I assume, Belfast comrades somewhere in the GDR. He looks so young he might still be at school. The guy on the far right has a T-shirt with the letters ‘GDR’ printed on the chest:

On this internet site, Henry writes of his experience in East Germany:

‘Actually I was in East Berlin as a 17-year-old callow young communist in 1981. I was in a communist youth group working with the East German FDJ. We lived in an international tented village and our neighbours in the camp including comrades from Cuba, Mongolia and Vietnam as well eurocommunist parties from Spain and Italy.

‘I remember playing badminton one morning before we went to work with a former Vietnamese soldier who spoke French. He had a scar under his eye and he explained it was from a wound during clashes with the Chinese in the war two years earlier. Work, by the way, was digging up old kilometre stones on the Moscow to Berlin railway and replacing with new shiny plastic ones. Ideology was the attraction back then although there was a lot of hedonistic fun too.’

None of this means that Henry’s later journalism was fatally tainted but to understand why a journalist wrote what he or she wrote, it helps to know where they came from. We should all expect and even welcome the same scrutiny.

RIP Henry.

From Ed Moloney and James Kinchin-White

Almost from the get-go, the case of the IRA’s disappearance and murder of widowed mother-of-ten Jean McConville in December 1972 has been dominated by the IRA’s claim – first made by former Belfast Brigade commander Brendan Hughes – that the evidence that she was spying for the British Army was a radio the Divis Flats widow allegedly used to communicate with her British Army handlers.

In interviews with Ed Moloney, Hughes, a one time confidante of Gerry Adams, could not recall the name of the radio but said that an IRA patrol, alerted by remarks allegedly made by one of her children, searched her Divis Flats apartment where they found and confiscated the device. In Hughes’ account, she then admitted working for the British but because of her family situation – she had recently been widowed and had eight of her ten children to raise at home – he let her go with a stern warning.

However, according to Dolours Price, a member of a secret IRA unit called ‘the unknowns’, Jean McConville later returned to her spying ways and was identified as the person behind a blanket as IRA suspects were paraded in front of her in Hasting St police/army barracks in Divis Street. What gave her away, Price later told reporters, were her distinctive carpet slippers which she wore day and night and which had been visible because the blanket had not fully covered her feet.

In December 1972, the IRA took her away from her children, and spirited her across the Border to Co Louth where she was shot dead and her remains buried on the beach at Carlingford Lough. The operation was handled by ‘the unknowns’, a secret unit set up by then Belfast IRA commander Gerry Adams which reported back to him.

Despite the claims from former IRA members about Jean McConville’s secret life, little in the way of independent evidence has emerged subsequently to substantiate the organisation’s claim that the widowed mother could have been furnished with a radio to help keep her in touch with her handlers.

Until now, that is.

The War Diary of the 1st Battalion, The Gloucester Regiment for the period December 7th, 1971 to April 13, 1972 was recently accessed at the British National Archives at Kew. The Gloucesters were stationed during that time in the lower Falls Road area, which took in the Divis Flats complex, where on January 5th, 1972 two sections of the regiment’s ‘A’ Company were deployed after an IRA suspect, whose name is blanked in the report, was spotted in the area. Parts of the Diary have been blacked out and a review of their possible release not scheduled until 2059.

IRA snipers opened up as the British troops approached Divis Tower, the tallest building in the complex, killing Pte Keith Bryan but his colleagues pressed on, searching an apartment at 14 Massarene Walk and a bar called the Glen Geen.

In the apartment, soldiers discovered a sawn off shotgun and over 400 rounds of ammunition. The Glen Geen hid more weapons and ammunition: a Thompson machine gun, two shotguns, a Webley revolver and a variety of ammunition magazines.

The War Diary also lists the following items among the IRA’s hidden armoury: over 800 rounds of assorted ammunition, three feet of Cordtex (a detonating cord) and a ‘stornaphone’ (slightly misspelt).

So, what was a stornophone doing in an IRA arms dump?

At this point in the Troubles, the stornophone was becoming the radio of choice for all sections of the North’s security apparatus; soldiers guarding the ‘Ulster ’71 Festival’, called to mark the 50th birthday of the Northern Ireland state in 1971 had been issued with the radio, it had been used by troops in Derry on Bloody Sunday in January 1972, as was acknowledged in the Saville report, and there are multiple photographs available of troops with the radio during 1972. It was small and light, a vast improvement on the heavy, shoulder-borne radio carried by troops in the very early days of the Troubles and it was ideal for intelligence work, being small, simple to operate, easy to hide and effective. There is even one photo on the Gloucester’s own regimental website of a soldier using the radio in Divis Flats.

So, how did a Stornophone make its way into an IRA arms dump in Divis Flats? It is, of course, possible that one of the radios was acquired by the IRA in the same way it came by most of its war equipment, via arms dealers or foreign sympathisers, or perhaps a clumsy soldier dropped his and it made its way eventually to the IRA. But it is also just as possible that the Stornophone discovered in the Glen Geen bar was the same radio Brendan Hughes claimed was found by the IRA in Jean McConville’s flat.

Here are the relevant documents, first the page in the Gloucester’s War Diary and then a blow up of the important paragraphs:

Recently declassified US government documents shed some intriguing light on the role of the CIA and Lee Harvey Oswald in the assassination of JFK. You can read about them here…..

It can be found in the current (Sunday) edition of The New York Times written by, of all people, Thomas Friedman, who is not known for his criticism of the Israeli state.You can read it here….

Courtesy of Consortium News magazine. The same people involved in those black arts, the Foreign Office’s Information Research Department (IRD), were active in Belfast in the early 70’s. You can read it here.