[…] army briefing paper titled ‘Army Plain Clothes Patrols in Northern Ireland’. The briefing states: ‘Plainclothes teams, initially joint RUC/army patrols, have operated in Northern Ireland since the IRA bombing campaign in Easter 1971. Later in 1971 the teams were reformed and expanded as Military Reaction Forces (MRFs) without RUC participation. In 1972 the operations […]
[…] disk and maybe it will be useful one day; and I wonder who compiled it and why. But before these MI6 lists, Cryptome published a list of IRA members which included Clare Short MP. Which doesn’t exactly inspire confidence, does it? () Even if I knew the list was genuine though how would […]
[…] Wallace/psy-ops One of the lines Colin Wallace at Information Policy tried to get the media to run about Northern Ireland in 1973/4 was the one about the IRA hiring US Army veterans to do their fighting for them. One such story was planted on Chapman Pincher who ran it in the Express. See Lobster […]
[…] ‘surveillance operations by soldiers in plain clothes ……initiated by Frank Kitson when he commanded the brigade in Belfast, some of them exploiting ex-members or supporters of the IRA, of which I was aware, and for which I had obtained Ministerial approval.’ (Out of Step, Memoirs of a Field Marshall, Michael Carver, Hutchinson London 1989 […]
[…] loyalist killer gangs, the FRU also provided some of their arms, apparently believing that this was the only way to redress the balance of forces after the IRA received arms from Libya. (p. 191) The behaviour of Johnny ‘Mad Dog’ Adair and his gang goes some of the way to illustrate the claims of […]
[…] – if ‘good’ is the right word. In June’s Searchlight this paragraph appeared; ‘Seasoned political observers in Northern Ireland say that the UDA and parts of the IRA are jointly controlling some of their criminal activities and use the same drug traffickers.’ This is classic disinformation (see also ‘IRA Godfathers’ et al, ad nauseam) […]
[…] their wonderful new 250 million building on the Thames. MI5 are on the bureaucratic offensive and were given ‘overall responsibility for agent-running and analysis worldwide against the IRA’ in Spring 1991 (p. 201); and at the beginning of 1992 Home Secretary Kenneth Clarke received a recommendation that MI5 ‘take control of all counter-terrorist operations […]
[…] had attended the 2001 Bilderberg meeting. Off target Back in the 1970s the Army’s psy-ops unit in Northern Ireland once put out a story claiming that the IRA had hired American Vietnam vets to do its killing for them. (‘Paddy’ couldn’t really shoot straight was the subtext.) A new variation on this appeared – […]
[…] a ‘Beirut style’ situation. What led to his transformation into peacemaker? The key, one suspects, is the realisation by the end of the 1980s that the Provisional IRA had been effectively contained by the security forces and were coming under increasingly effective pressure from the loyalist paramilitaries. These two factors led to the Provisionals’ […]
[…] ‘Death on the Rock’, Lisburn, Ballygawley and other bombs) had led, only a month previously, to Mrs Thatcher appealing to the British media to withhold publicity from IRA sympathisers. A spokesman for the IBA said, ‘The fact that After Dark is a live programme means there is no editorial control over remarks Mr Adams […]
