[…] 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 […]
[…] the spy-watchers have become anti-terrorists. The brochure tells us that an astonishing 70% of MI5’s resources are now devoted to terrorism. So that’s the end of the IRA then, right? Probably not; in any case, with or without the IRA, if 70% of MI5’s resources are engaged in ‘anti-terrorism’, it means expanding the number […]
[…] was a Republican from a fiercely Nationalist family. He was generally recognised as a shadowy paramilitary activist by the security forces. He had identified himself with the IRA in South Armagh in the early 1970s, but in later years he was involved with the INLA. He was questioned on a variety of occasions by […]
[…] him. A more sinister person whom Riley was close to was a man called Pat Jordan,(5) who now serving a long sentence for being a spotter for IRA bombers.(6) Jordan wrote to Searchlight from prison recently. Searchlight ignored his letter, having no interest in communicating with terrorists or their helpers, but I wonder what […]
[…] and the state. Secondly, the end of the CP in Britain would have been bad news to MI5 in the Whitehall budget struggle. Nowadays they’ve got the IRA to frighten the politicians with. In the late 50s, if the CPGB had folded, who would they have had as a credible threat? MI5 needed the […]
[…] about to be announced. The authorities (in fact, the ‘leakers’) were also keen to spin that the terrorists (bar the use of video) were analogous to the IRA (again, in order to get the Iraq insurgents to be seen as enemies of the people on terms the people would understand). The real conclusion, which […]
[…] 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 […]
