Friday, February 29, 2008
The Secret War that Brought the Secret to Peace
George Brock reviews Ed Moloney’s new book Paisley, Steve Bruce’s new book Paisley along with the second edition of Ed Moloney’s Secret History of the IRA while also looking at Kenneth Bloomfield’s A Tragedy of Errors, and concludes the real thanks for peace go to the spooks and spies that made it possible. It’s a fascinating read.
By 1987, when Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness were already in secret, deniable communication with London, the securocrats were well enough informed to nudge matters along. Adams’s interest in turning the Provos into a political force was longstanding: he first mentioned it in 1979. But his withdrawal from the pretence that killing could push Britain out of Northern Ireland had to be very gradual. A grim kind of balance between armed force and elections had been achieved with the “ballot box and Armalite” strategy. As Provisional Sinn Féin started to experiment politically in the late 1980s, the IRA also started to rearm. But Adams knew that the Armalite half of the equation was not working: the hit rate might occasionally rise but the failure rate was rising faster. The British knew that Adams knew. For besides Scappaticci, for twenty years they were running one of Adams’s inner circle, Denis Donaldson. Those two were only the stars among a network of spies that must have gone wider.
Adams was meeting internal opposition on both political and paramilitary fronts. One of the most intriguing puzzles to be solved by his biographers is this: when and to what extent was Adams aware that the havoc being wreaked by spies in the IRA was helping his cause? At any rate the British government was in a position to post a devastating warning to his opponents. Nowhere was the opposition inside the IRA likely to be tougher than in Tyrone. In 1987, at Loughgall in East Tyrone, the SAS ambushed and killed an eight-man IRA unit attempting to demolish a police station, killing more “volunteers” in a single incident than at any time since 1921. Up to the year 2000, the IRA in Tyrone had lost fifty-three people; but twenty-eight of those died between 1987 and 1992.
In other words, after Loughgall, they were being killed five times faster. This acceleration could be a coincidence, but that hardly seems possible. Despite appalling headline atrocities, the numbers revealed that the Provisionals were nearly finished everywhere they operated. In the summer of 1988, they killed soldiers at twice their average rate. In 1989, they killed twenty-four; the total halved in each of the next two years.
This sequence of events is important for an understanding of the long last act of the drama. Many accounts of the “peace process” suggest that Adams turned the IRA towards elections; many leave his exact motives for this switch mysterious. Somehow the hard man softened.
Read more: Who really brought peace to Belfast?
Correction, the Paisley book being reviewed is Steve Bruce’s, not Ed Moloney’s - thanks, John (below, #6).
Rusty Nail @ 01:33 PM
Tom Griffith, reading your piece again, I was struck by a question you ask that often echoes around my head reading Ingram, “Fulton” and others. To quote you: “the most startling element of his allegations is the suggestion that MI6 was involved in planning attacks on the British security forces.”
For awhile, notably while there was still a question mark over both whether and when power-sharing would be restored, there was so much of this—the Donaldson revelations, Ingram dinging ‘round the clock, “Fulton” and his trips to NY to build better remote control bombs , etc.— I actually wondered if we were witnessing something of an orchestrated public relations war of attrition —revelations so sure to anger republicans, nationalists, unionists, army veterans, and even the most casual admirer of the rule of law that the whole lot would bellow for a deal on a devolved government.
I still don’t know what to make of it.
Reading through Dean Godson’s obituary of Msgr. Faul more slowly I’m more rather than less puzzled by it—for example, I haven’t a clue what he means by this:
“But too many of the chosen clerical partners of the British state in Ulster were far more Anglophobic and subversive than Faul.”
Why is Godson simultaneously trying to lend credence to contemporary (contemporary to the time of Faul’s death) doubts about McGuinness, and at the same time to present Faul as almost an underutilised agent of the British himself? (And to those who would argue that Faul was an underutilised agent I would remind you of the scrupulously researched pamphlet Faul wrote and researched at the time of the fatal shooting of Majella O’Hare, a great deal of which is easily accessible on line through the CAIN site:
http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/events/other/1976/murray76.htm#contents
Posted by on Mar 01, 2008 @ 01:26 AMSusan
Don’t worry ingram is a figment of his own imagination and an MI5 wet dream
Posted by on Mar 01, 2008 @ 01:45 AMI don’t think you can read too much into this, particularly given the number of people Godson talked to, but Denis Donaldson is mentioned in the acknowledgements of his book on Trimble.
Also, according to an article, I can’t locate right now on The Times website, Bill Lowry was at the launch.Posted by on Mar 01, 2008 @ 02:33 AMMany apologies to all folks here for apparently having awoken van Winkle.
Posted by on Mar 01, 2008 @ 03:49 AMWeren’t the top dogs in the East Tyrone IRA planning on breaking away around the time Loughgall happened?
Posted by on Mar 01, 2008 @ 08:08 AMTom, thanks. I won’t read too much into it, as you say, but that is interesting about Lowry. Remarkable how often a relatively small cast of characters seemed to converge.
I actually agreed with Jim Gibney’s point last week that
“Informers should be seen not just in a military frame but also in a propaganda one.” What I did find specious was when Gibney went on to argue that the propaganda aim was to demoralise republicans and distract them from how swimmingly well everything is going. But clearly when informers are deliberately revealed it does distract the mainstream media from other matters, it puts any remaining informers and/or agents there may be under pressure to cooperate fully to protect their identies, and gives those most resistant to power-sharing with republicans some reassurance, through physical evidence of strings being pulled behind the scenes, that things are not what they seem.So Donaldson’s identity was revealed around the time the O’Loan report on collusion was expected to be finally published, and when clearly the goal of the central gov’t was to see a deal cut and the Assembly restored. A goal, it is important to remember now, that always meant more to the gov’t then to the rank and file of either of the two largest parties, the DUP and SF.
Now again there’s pressure mounting to do a deal on policing and justice to the devolved gov’t. And coincidentally or now it is publically revealed that one of Adams’ drivers was an informer, there was another item Ingram linked indicating in turn one of Thatcher’s driver’s may have been a PIRA agent, and (again coincidentally or no, I’m sure Ingram will supply his own reasons) Ingram is returned to Slugger with a “dinging” in all our ears.
Posted by on Mar 01, 2008 @ 09:32 AMActually, I think the aim of demoralising republicans would be consistent with Roy Godson’s writings on deception:
The double agent’s handlers then have the option of sowing confusion in the adversary’s camp. By co-ordinating the tasking of several double agents, for example, they can add to the adversary’s doubts about the first double agent, that is, blow their own agent to create tension inside the service. If the double-agent handlers play their cards well, they may be able to take advantage of exposing one long-term double agent by using another long-term double-agent or penetration to do the exposing. Dirty Tricks or Trump Cards, p.220
Posted by on Mar 01, 2008 @ 10:32 AMThat’s a good point, Tom. What I meant to post—but realise now I didn’t—was “What I did find specious was when Gibney went on to argue that the propaganda aim was to demoralise republicans in order to distract them from how swimmingly well everything is going.”
Considering how very much the gov’t wanted an internal agreement on policing within republicanism, to clear the way for a deal on devolution, I’m not sure they would have considered the exposure of any further agents above Donaldson at all desirable.
Posted by on Mar 01, 2008 @ 12:42 PMEd Moloney’s book answered many questions for me. It left me, however, with one unanswered one: Ed Maloney himself. Why, I still want to know, does the short biographical blurb at the end of his book cover his life from 1978 only? Since the book itself covers, extensively, IRA-related events in Libya before 1978, shouldn’t Maloney have informed his readers that he himself was working in Libya during those years? Known to his colleagues in Libya as a “Stickie” (Official IRA supporter/member) Maloney ought surely to have informed his readers of his political leanings. The readers could then have made up their mind whether his political affiliation was relevant to the integrity of his book. Deprived of this fact its subsequent revelation can only affect his books integrity negatively.
Posted by on Mar 04, 2008 @ 12:03 PMMinx, you are absolutely correct and I will immediately revise my opinion of his analysis forthwith. I cannot believe how much an impact that bit of forgotten tittle tattle has on his book and its thesis! Thank heavens you are here to put us right. I hope you will be able to stick around and whisper more tidbits and sweet nothings in our ears about other questionable characters so that we will have the straight story and be better equipped to judge (read: discard) what information comes out way. You are a saviour!
Hugs and Kisses
Posted by on Mar 04, 2008 @ 01:05 PM
