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I present four pictures and would ask readers to look at them carefully and contemplate their implications:


The above picture shows the late Reverend Ian Paisley and leading DUP politician Peter Robinson in the company of UDA killer Kenny McClinton (wearing a dark coat at the far left of the picture, by Ian Paisley’s right arm). McClinton was convicted of two sectarian murders in the 1970s. In March 1977, McClinton murdered Catholic civilian Daniel Carville whilst Carville was driving his son near the Loyalist Shankill Road area on St Patrick's Day. Mr Carville’s lethal wounds were sustained in his back as he shielded his son. Two months later (May 1977) McClinton boarded a bus and shot dead bus driver Harry Bradshaw, a Protestant mistaken for a Catholic.

The wider background to the murder of the bus driver was an attempted joint UDA/DUP regional strike which sought to counteract what these groups saw as political appeasement of the Irish. The strike had begun on the 3rd of May 1977 and lasted ten days. Mr Bradshaw was one of many Protestants who refused to join the strike. It has been claimed that the UDA wrote to Mr Bradshaw’s widow to apologise for the murder as they believed her husband to be a Catholic. A ten pound note is also said to have been included with the UDA’s letter. The UDA/DUP strike was a failure precisely because of people like Harry Bradshaw who was killed near the end of the failed protest. According to the definitive book on Troubles’ victims Lost Lives, Mr Bradshaw’s widow said: “I can’t blame Mr Paisley for what has happened, but I can’t say he’s free from blame either.” – see Lost Lives, Harry Bradshaw, May 10th 1977 .

The above picture of Kenny McClinton and the two DUP leaders was taken at a 1997 ‘Concerned Protestants’ rally in Portadown, which was organised by supporters of the notorious loyalist killer Billy Wright who had been imprisoned in March 1997 for threatening a woman and her family. The more general protest being made by the ‘Concerned Protestants’ group was that the Protestant way of life in Northern Ireland was under threat from anti-Protestant forces. Likewise, most of the founders of ‘Concerned Protestants’ were supporters of Billy Wright’s Loyalist Volunteer Force – a breakaway loyalist paramilitary group largely made up of UVF members who disagreed with the peace process. Kenny McClinton had a close relationship with Billy Wright and was said to act as a Pastor to the LVF. Both McClinton and Wright argued for the establishment of a Calvinist state in Northern Ireland.

Given that ‘Pastor’ McClinton continued to maintain a highly public political profile on his release from prison despite the pain this caused to his victims’ families, we will ignore his claims of having found religion and being 'Born Again' and simply note, what I view as, the imprudence of the two senior DUP figures in being in any way associated with Kenny McClinton.

Now look at the second picture:



This is a picture of former DUP MP for mid Ulster Willie McCrea shaking hands with sectarian mass murderer and religious fundamentalist Billy Wright in September 1996. This was at a rally, again in Portadown, where McCrea appeared on a platform alongside Wright to denounce those pro-peace process elements within Unionism and Loyalism who had criticised Wright for his hard line stance, criticism which extended to death threats. Billy Wright was imprisoned a short time after this rally for making the threats referred to above.

It's only fair to point out that both Ian Paisley and Peter Robinson subsequently made huge efforts to move their support base away from an entrenched sectarian position, and they are to be applauded for this. I believe this shows a measure of regret on their parts for previously held DUP positions, but the pictures above show that the DUP has questions to answer, both past and present, over its dealings and interactions with loyalist paramilitaries. This, therefore, is one of the challenges, not just for Theresa May and the Tory Party, but also for English Democracy.

Now the third picture:



This a Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) call for witnesses to come forward after the murder of UDA member Colin Horner on Sunday the 28th of May this year. Mr Horner was gunned down in front of his son by a rival UDA faction.

The dogs in the street know that the UDA has not decommissioned its weapons and is not only involved in murders, widespread intimidation and racketeering but also has links with the drugs trade. This will be news to a lot of people in England, as will the fact that a new generation of DUP members regularly appear at local Northern Ireland occasions alongside leading members of the UDA and make no apology for so doing.

We can, to conclude, look at one such UDA/DUP occasion:



The Irish News on Arlene Foster’s picture pose with UDA commander and armed robber Dee Stitt - "no regrets" says Foster

The new King and Queenmaker of English politics, the DUP’s Arlene Foster, appeared alongside prominent UDA commander Dee Stitt in September 2016 during the announcement of large scale Stormont funding for ‘Charter NI’, an employment project in East Belfast. News that Stitt was CEO of Charter NI was greeted with widespread astonishment. Stitt has served a five year prison sentence for an armed UDA robbery in the 1990s. In October 2016, Dee Stitt described a controversial UDA linked flute band in his area (the North Down Defenders) as ‘Homeland Security’. I quote from reports of Stitt's comments at the time: “North Down Defenders is our homeland security. It says it in its name. We’re here to defend North Down – from anybody.” The DUP was moved to criticise Dee Stitt after these comments, but this simply serves to highlight the DUP's problem.

To be clear, the Good Friday Agreement encourages the reintegration of former political combatants into society and this includes financial support, but with the proviso that those combatants have no paramilitary role. As things stand, the UDA does not pass that test.

Irish nationalism dismissed the DUP from joint-office in the Northern Ireland executive because of a financial corruption scandal involving what we might call a ‘Cash for Unionist Ash’ heating finance scandal (still not properly explained); anti-Irish bigotry (the public ridicule of Irish speakers and Sinn Féin voters in particular), and its clearly homophobic and anti-equality agenda.

In other words, the DUP was kicked out of office in the North of Ireland and asked to come back when it shows a more serious commitment to the equality and democracy ethos, which lies at the heart of the international treaty that is the Good Friday Agreement. There is a huge irony in the fact that the DUP is not seen as good enough in Ireland but may be good enough for a badly wounded Tory Party in England, on the highly dubious basis of 'any intolerant port in a storm'.

The DUP has no mandate and no support in England and the only way that Theresa May can retain any shred of credibility in her courting of the DUP so as to cling to office is to insist that they join the rest of the 21st Century by implementing the GFA agreements already made with regard to parity of esteem for all and a firm pledge to actively pressure the UDA into finally giving up its illegal activities. This would entail the opposite of throwing money at the UDA and being involved in controversial, insensitive and ill-advised joint photo-ops.

Should Theresa May decline to pressure the DUP on equal rights, and agree on a government, and associated Queen’s Speech, that falls far short of that, she will not only be offending the clear will of the English electorate, she and her government will be in irrevocable breach of the Good Friday Agreement,which asserts the following:

‘ ... the principles of full respect for, and equality of, civil, political, social and cultural rights, of freedom from discrimination for all citizens, and of parity of esteem and of just and equal treatment for the identity, ethos and aspirations of both communities;’

see this excellent article:
http://ukandeu.ac.uk/northern-ireland-and-rigorous-impartiality-untangling-a-constitutional-mess/







@Paul Larkin
Carraic
Gaoth Dobhair
Mí an Mheithimh/June 2017]]> General http://www.fadooda.com/index.php?itemid=801 Fri, 16 Jun 2017 17:00:05 +0100 http://www.fadooda.com/index.php?itemid=787 Panorama 'Stakeknife' film shows how we've been side-tracked away from prolific loyalist killers acting for the State.



John Ware is a veteran BBC Panorama reporter who has done important work on, amongst other things, the Dark State sponsored murder of solicitor Pat Finucane (my view of it). Recently Ware and the Panorama team broadcast a film on the 'Stakeknife' affair “The Spy in the IRA"
See http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08l636g
From what I understand, the FRU Spooks, who discovered a license to print money by attaching the word 'Stakeknife' to anything they possibly could, were not happy with Ware's programme. I can well understand their displeasure. For in this programme and associated newspaper comment, John Ware (who has excellent contacts within the UK security forces) says the following:
1)
Fred Scappaticci was stood down from the IRA in January 1990 and had no active role in the IRA after that.
2)
The majority of alleged 'touts' * who passed through Scappaticci's hands were in fact informers and 'Stakeknife' is directly linked to the deaths of 18 of them. (This number is far less than has been trumpeted for years.)

I should state that John Ware almost certainly doesn't agree with my overall analysis of the 'Stakeknife sting' presented here, but there is no doubt that point one above completely destroys much of what has been said about Fred Scappaticci. For we can now be absolutely clear that Fred Scappaticci was not in the IRA from the start of 1990 onward. I have already given evidence of this, but Panorama has put this beyond any doubt for those who chose not to listen to myself or Danny Morrison.

John Ware states that all but one of Stakeknife's victims were shot in the 1980s and, in my view, he poses the hardest question for the State's officers:

"There surely has to have come a point at some stage during that decade when it dawned on Stakeknife's handlers that they were acquiescing in, tolerating, colluding in - call it what you like - his involvement in preparing fellow agents/informers for death as the price of keeping him in place."

See - http://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/exposed-the-murky-world-of-spying-during-the-troubles-1.3043818



Peter Keeley (Kevin Fulton) and Ian Hurst (Martin Ingram) 'Stakeknife' dissemblers

As many Cic Saor readers are aware, my concern is how, much of the media, simply ran highly questionable 'Stakeknife' stories given to them by two FRU Spooks without apparently checking them properly. -
some media outlets even describing them as "whistle-blowers".

Understandably perhaps, John Ware doesn't probe a dishevelled Ian Hurst too deeply about his Stakeknife narrative, but the overall effect of Panorama is to undermine Stakeknife's nemesis.

For the fact is that Fred Scappaticci's removal from the IRA in January 1990, completely cuts the psyops legs from under Hurst and Keeley, or Martin Ingram and Kevin Fulton to give them their News International pseudonyms (strangely then used by the security forces).


Danny Morrison - victim of an intelligence sting that put him in prison

John Ware correctly points out that the IRA became extremely wary of Scappaticci after the Sandy Lynch affair when, in January 1990, Danny Morrison was lured to a house and arrested for conspiracy to murder Lynch. Morrison has since received compensation for his arrest and imprisonment and his conviction has been quashed. Scappaticci was involved in the Lynch plot and was stood down from the IRA during the swift inquiry that followed. In fact, 'Stakenife' himself told us this.



As I have already done elsewhere, John Ware refers to Scappaticci's own words to the Cook Report television team in August 1993, which makes clear he'd not been in the IRA for several years. I've said it. The IRA has said it. John Ware has said it and Fred Scappaticci himself has said it. Look:

I am no longer at the heart of things - Fred Scappaticci. August. 1993.

Fred Scappaticci was secretly recorded by the Cook Report in the car park of the Culloden Hotel, Belfast on the 26th of August 1993. His voice was disguised by an actor in the subsequent broadcast. The original recording was later released and, according to those who knew him, it is clearly Scappaticci. At the very beginning of the recording he says:

"... if we want to be straight here. I was at the heart of things for a long time, right. I am no longer at the heart of things. right, haven't been for two or three years. but I know what I'm talking about ... "

The above recording took place in August 1993 and 'Scap' says he's been out of things for two or three years. What part of this is hard to understand?


'Stakeknife' was stood down from the IRA in January 1990

How is it then that the media has simply swallowed the casual mendacity of Ian Hurst and Peter Keeley who have claimed a string of victims of Stakeknife after January 1990?

The vast majority of Stakeknife's victims were informers

This brings me to point two above, which marks the important fact that 'Stakeknife's' victims (what John Ware calls his 'directly linked' victims) were not only far fewer in number than has always been suggested, nearly all of them were IRA combatants or active supporters of the IRA. (That of course does not ease the pain of the families of each individual regardless of the circumstances.)

The news-reading public has a short memory but the role of journalists is to be a citizen memory bank and I well remember the initial wall of 'Stakeknife' sound and fury generated by Hurst and Keeley and whoever it was within the Dark State who stood behind them. This false furore screamed that Stakeknife's role had been to take out perfectly loyal and effective members of the IRA.

John Ware has now confirmed my argument that this thesis is rubbish. For a start, Ware brings the number of Stakeknife victims down from 35 (in some wild reports far more) to 18, and says more or less every one of them was an informer. In other words, they were combatants and IRA supporters who for a variety of reasons, including entrapment and personal problems, chose to work for the State. This is that Ware says:
1)
"Not all were registered agents such as Hegarty, but the majority provided information to the security forces."
http://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/exposed-the-murky-world-of-spying-during-the-troubles-1.3043818
2)
"During a decade at the centre of the IRA's internal security, Scappaticci has been directly linked to 18 killings."
http://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/how-and-why-did-scappaticci-survive-the-ira-s-wrath-1.3049139

(It bears noting in passing that confirmation Scappaticci was out of the IRA by 1990 and that his victims were almost all informers destroys the dissident republican theory that 'Stakeknife' was able to change the course of IRA actions and strategy for the benefit of British Intelligence. The peace process didn't get properly going before the 1990s.)


General Sir John Wilsey

Much has been made of General Sir John Wilsey's description of 'Stakeknife' as the British army's "Golden Egg" in a telephone conversation with Ian Hurst, but nobody has mentioned the fact that, in the same conversation, Wilsey had to ask who Scappaticci was, and then said:

01:53 S1: Well, this is all teenager stuff, isn't it? I mean, Fred Scappaticci...

Moreover, in his book 'Ulster Tales', Wilsey says that Scappaticci's pseudonym was "Kerbstone" and indicates in the telephone conversation that Scappaticci became 'Stakeknife' at a much later date:

16:24 S1: Well, you have to remember that the military background was such that we knew we had this source, take note, and it was the golden egg. It was the one thing that was terribly important to the army. So we never ever, ever mention the words "Steak Knife", or whatever he subsequently became. I think it was 2001 or something like that


UVF commander Robin (the Jackal) Jackson makes
Fred Scappaticci seem a halfpenny Stakeknife

With the above evidence, and to put things in their most gruesome context, there are far more lethal Dark State assassins who have carried out hundreds of murders of innocent non-combatants - Robin Jackson and Billy Wright to name the most prominent - yet here we are still talking about 'Stakeknife' since 1999.

In fact we are now in a £55 million plus 'Operation Kenova' inquiry about 'Stakeknife'.

Senior figures from RUC Special Branch now regularly appear on TV to discuss the Troubles and are simply never asked about Robin Jackson (the 'Jackal') or Billy Wright ('King Rat'). Nor are questions raised about the RUC's relationship with the heads of the UDA and the handing over of secret intelligence to them - this includes all the Brigade staff of the UDA/UFF. This is precisely what happened with the murders of James Craig, Terence McDaid and Pat Finucane to name but a few.

The 'Jackal' and 'King Rat' were responsible for the sectarian murders of very many innocent people, including the Dublin and Monaghan and Miami Showband atrocities (Jackson), and the appalling sectarian murders of pensioner Roseanne Mallon and many other Catholics (Wright).

The Stakeknife Sting

I believe that Fred Scappaticci was recycled by a section of British Intelligence to effectively re-place him in the IRA long after his sell-by date and to create a constant barrage of 'Stakeknife' media comment. The effect of this has been to remove all talk of, in my view, far more significant state killers who were in our midst and the RUC Special Branch and MI5 teams that were handling them. This is exactly what has happened.

It doesn't take an Einstein to work out that the very same people in the UK intelligence structure that were running the 'Jackal' and 'King Rat' would be keen for us to obsess endlessly about the Belfast bricklayer Fred Scappaticci.

For Hurst and Keeley it was simply a question of making money - just as their former comrades in the FRU allege. Damaging the republican movement was simply an attractive byproduct for them. Those within the Dark State opposed to the peace process, meanwhile, saw a chance to disrupt progress to an agreed United Ireland, and this plan nearly worked. Even as it is, a lot of damage, confusion, trauma and turmoil was created. Nor was this confusion simply confined to republicans. Other sections of the State and the prosecuting authorities,and also the Irish government were clearly equally thrown by the 'Stakeknife' saga.

It should also be noted that the relatives of informers who may have been victims of Stakeknife were plunged into a new nightmare by Hurst and Keeley's fake stories. A despicable act in my view.

Ian Hurst now works as a UK government approved 'tracer' and debt collector who, amongst other things, sells electoral roll details to third parties. Peter Keeley lives in an MI5 protected flat in London and has been set up with a photography business.

The 'Jackal' and 'King Rat', meanwhile, have been vanished for good.


King Rat - Billy Wright

Just keep screaming 'Stakeknife' everybody ...




Paul Larkin
Carraic
Gaoth Dobhair
Mí AIbreáin 2017



*NB - Nothing I say in the above article assumes the right of any paramilitary group to murder any alleged informer, but in reporting a Dirty War (fought by all sides), we have no choice but to try and report the dirty facts. However, one expects a different code of behaviour from state officers, whose duty is to protect its citizens compared to that of a ruthless guerrilla army like the IRA.

All victims and their families - be they totally innocent or combatants, paramilitary or UK State - have a right to the truth,but that can only be achieved by a broad based Truth Commission and not by focusing on one aspect of The Troubles to the exclusion of all else.]]> General http://www.fadooda.com/index.php?itemid=787 Mon, 24 Apr 2017 15:52:22 +0100 http://www.fadooda.com/index.php?itemid=770 http://www.fadooda.com/index.php?itemid=761
the new chairman of the PFC, Tony Brown, wrote to me on behalf of the PFC Tuesday of this week to acknowledge my ‘vital role’ over many years in exposing collusion and praising my television programmes on collusion. Tony also expresses his 'regret' at what took place. Both Tony and the PFC people involved in drawing up this statement are to be applauded, regardless of our past differences.

I give the two key quotes below, and make no apology for highlighting these quotes from a longer letter from the PFC, as these quotes represent the core of what I have requested from the PFC for three years. The issue of free speech has been raised several times in this debate and in exactly the same vein I, of course, decide what is important to me. Nobody else.

Statement from Tony Brown, chairman of the Pat Finucane Centre 8th of November, 2016
"I want to reiterate that we are clear within the PFC as to the vital role that you have played over many years in researching and highlighting collusion. Your documentaries within BBC and RTE are testimony to this."

"It is genuinely regrettable that this situation has developed and the PFC had and has no intention of traducing the work of an individual who has worked to expose collusion."

Yours,
Tony Brown,
Chairman
PFC

This very welcome statement from Tony Brown to whom I’m grateful (fear uasal, le Gaeilge den chéad scoth ), brings this completely unnecessary dispute to an end. What I have asked for from the PFC for the last three years is a vindication of my journalism and integrity and an acknowledgement of the central importance of my work with regard to exposing collusion. I now have that.

It is a matter of record that the programmes the PFC praises so highly form the basis of my book on collusion A Very British Jihad. However, I'm quite happy, as always, to discuss the merits and content of my book on collusion with Stuart Ross or anyone else for that matter, but of course for this to happen a dialogue is required.

What happened was the reverse of dialogue when Stuart Ross backed Adrian Guelke’s untenable assertion that there was no collusion in the UDA attempt on his life in September 1991. In blithely accepting Guelke’s account of what happened and failing to contact me, or discuss this with me subsequently, Stuart Ross, whom I had never heard of nor met, used Guelke’s false assertion to attack not only my book but my journalistic integrity. See here - https://cedarlounge.wordpress.com/2013/11/27/reviewing-collusion/

This defamatory wrong has now been righted by Tony Brown and the PFC.

Perhaps understandably Tony's letter to me does not mention, at all, Adrian Guelke ridiculous ‘no collusion’ claims, or Stuart Ross’s support for them, It is therefore in itself ‘selective’, but we will not be churlish. Stuart Ross made a mistake. We all make mistakes - this author, the Pat Finucane Centre, everybody. With Tony Brown's expression of regret at what happened, Stuart Ross’s mistake is forgiven. However I have recommended to the PFC that they draw up a code of conduct for their board members with regard to public statements and clarity over what they are saying and on whose behalf.

A large number of people contacted the Pat Finucane Centre over the last three years to defend me and my integrity and I wish to thank them deeply. (It’s at moments like this when you find out about the real steadfastness and loyalty of people.) Most will not wish to be named publicly but I specifically wish to thank certain collusion victims; in particular Miami Showband Attack survivor Stephen Travers who understands more than anyone the importance of references in ‘A Very British Jihad’ to the Int. Cell at 3 Brigade Lurgan/Portadown. Various legal officers gave me their support and have received my thanks. Seán ‘Collusion Ireland’ Osborne from Belfast gave very public support and he knows how much that means to me. My old friend and mentor Tim Pat Coogan lent his support and stood ready to intervene and I have been made aware that certain people in Derry City made personal approaches to the people involved. Former republican activists also gave direct support and advice.

Finally, I owe deep thanks also to veteran Irish American activist and commentator Michael Cummings who has been publicising ‘A Very British Jihad’ in the United States recently and has been staunch in his support of me.

Buíchas ó chroí do chách.






@Paul Larkin
Carraic
Gaoth Dobhair
Mí na Samhna 2016 ]]> General http://www.fadooda.com/index.php?itemid=770 Fri, 11 Nov 2016 09:17:38 +0000 http://www.fadooda.com/index.php?itemid=761 A Very British Jihad as ‘easily dismissed’ and consisting of ‘foolish innuendos’. Mr Ross did this by supportively echoing and quoting the sentiments of Queens University academic Adrian Guelke in his 2004 review of my book in Fortnight magazine. Mr Ross continues to this day to disseminate this surprising and unwarranted slur on my journalism, but at the same time imperiously ignores myself and others who have pointed out how (factually) wrong both he and Adrian Guelke are. Thus I have no choice but to go public, as it were, on this issue

I wish to make some introductory points:
1) The Pat Finucane Centre
What follows is not an attack on the work of the Pat Finucane Centre. The focus is solely on its board member Stuart Ross, though I do have a question as to why the chairman of the PFC board, Robin Percival, has backed Mr Ross even when collusion victims, and others, contacted the PFC to protest on this issue.
2) My record on collusion
It is a matter of record that I too have done some service to the cause of exposing collusion and have had a price to pay for that. I will not have that reputation traduced, even if the person doing the traducing is on the board of the PFC. In fact especially if that person is on the board of the PFC.
3) Private emails
It is an extreme exception for me to publish private mails from anyone (and I mean anyone), but given that the integrity of my journalism has been gratuitously attacked in the manner described below, and over a long period of time from such a surprising source, I’m left with no option. In private emails to me in 2001 (see below) Adrian Guelke says the exact opposite of what he went on to say in his 2004 Fortnight review.
4) Apartheid South Africa and loyalist State agents
The question of collusion between what was the South African Apartheid secret services and loyalists who were also agents of the British secret services goes to the heart of the State’s collusion with loyalists in Ireland. Without the State sponsored South Africa connection, pro-British death squads in Ireland could never have unleashed their sectarian ‘Jihad’ in the late 1980s and 199os. It is also for this very important reason that Stuart Ross’s ill-informed assault on my work needs to be exposed as the nonsense it is.
5) Adrian Guelke
Queens University academic Adrian Guelke is clearly an establishment figure in Northern Irish society but he is a respected scholar in the field of international relations and conflict-societies. The fact that he got it so wrong (or perhaps strangely changed his mind as we shall discover) on collusion generally, and my journalism in particular, doesn’t remove my belief that he is essentially a decent man and I am the first to applaud his consistent opposition to Apartheid as a younger man.

----
Long standing Cic Saor readers who already know about my work on collusion will forgive the preamble. It is necessary for a new raft of readers I’ve gained, very few of whom have seen my films on collusion.


Paul Larkin receives the European Journalist of the Year award from former Uachtarán na hÉireann Patrick Hillery (RIP)

I don’t walk around telling people I won the European Journalist of the Year award in 1997 or that this award also included the award for the film-documentaries sub-section. This is easily checkable. As is the fact that in June 2003 I had the great honour of being invited by the Justice For the Forgotten group to speak at a large meeting on the 1974 Dublin and Monaghan bombings. This ‘Truth In The Open’ meeting was at the Gresham Hotel in Dublin. Here I sat on a panel that also included the then MEP Patricia McKenna and also included Colin Wallace and Fred Holroyd. Both Wallace and Fred Holroyd will be happy to confirm that it was I, more than most journalists in Ireland, who fought against the smear campaign that was waged against them. Now their accounts of the UK State’s pseudo gangs and State terrorism in our country are widely accepted, but that wasn’t the case when I worked in the BBC and RTÉ in the 1980s and 1990s. There were no collusion support groups back then and trying to raise collusion was a lonely, sometimes dangerous place.



Readers will note from the above flyer for the Gresham Hotel meeting that Paul O’Connor of the Pat Finucane Centre chaired the meeting. Introducing me to the large audience, Paul O’Connor described me as someone who had made a series of ground-breaking films on collusion for the BBC and that in 1995 I’d made a film for RTÉ – Friendly Forces - which had thrown new light on the State sponsored bombing of Dublin and Monaghan in 1974. These bomb attacks claimed the lives of 33 people and maimed and devastated the lives of hundreds more. My RTÉ film showed clearly that the UK State, via the operations of an ‘Int’ cell based in Lurgan/Portadown (and cooperating with members of the RUC, UDR and UVF) was responsible for these atrocities. In other words I highlighted what has become known as the Glenanne Gang as far back as 1995.



Also at this 2003 Gresham meeting, Paul O’Connor mentioned that I was the author of a forthcoming book called A Very British Jihad. This book is now out of print. In other words, it sold out its print run of three thousand copies, despite attempts by the media to ignore it to death. I’m very proud of A Very British Jihad and the book is a central reason why I am returning to this otherwise dormant blogsite; namely to defend both the book’s, and my own, integrity. The book is a remarkable achievement on a number of levels. First of all, collusion victims, and in particular the victims of Brian Nelson and the Dublin and Monaghan bombs, contacted me to thank me for my work. Then there was the fact that the book was sold, in the main, by word of mouth amongst the plain people of Ireland. I am not a man of means. I was born in a slum in Salford, which Manchester is near. Nor do I ingratiate myself with posh people or political parties who can guarantee TV and radio exposure and/or column space in newspapers. The only media outlets that have regularly covered my work on collusion are our Irish language broadcasters Radio na Gaeltachta and TG4. Mo sheacht beannacht orthu.


Brian Nelson's diary, or jail journal, laid the 'Jihad' bare

There are two other important elements to my Jihad book – one is Brian Nelson’s diary, or so called jail journal. It was, and still is, my firm view that details from the diary were being cherry-picked to suit certain agendas that broadly sought to downplay collusion and focus on particular issues. Of course I too have an agenda. That was to publish and disseminate as much of the contents of the diary as possible and as widely as possible, both in my book and amongst tribunals (Barron and Smithwick), officers of the Ombudsman’s office, researchers, collusion activists and lawyers. As far as I am aware no other collusion book and no other collusion writer has revealed the core of what Nelson said. It is priceless journalism in my view. A view clearly shared by many.


The Vlakplaas house of horror

Secondly and just as importantly I have spent a long time dealing with South Africa and the former Apartheid State’s links to UK spy agencies and pro-British death squads in Ireland. My expertise in this area is acknowledged in South Africa itself. In the 1990s I was interviewed by lawyers from South Africa working for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission who were seeking information in those very same areas. The internationally renowned lawyer Brian Currin helped to arrange this meeting. Much of my work focussed on a gang of Apartheid police goons who worked out of a rural farmstead called ‘Vlakplaas’ about twenty miles west of Pretoria. I will never ever forget finally being able to film at the Vlakplaas police terror centre in 2002. I shiver here as I write about it. At Vlakplass, ANC and/or Umkhonto We Sizwe (MK) members, and also Askari who went back to the ANC (or who fell out of favour with the Vlakplaas units) were regularly interrogated and tortured by the secret police members based there as they also enjoyed a brai or barbecue on lazy Sunday afternoons. It brought terrible resonances for me of the Shankill Butchers. Some of the murders that took place at Vlakplaas were truly unspeakable and it is no accident that its commander in the 1990s, Eugene de Kock, was nicknamed Prime Evil
See here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_de_Kock

Now meet Ulster loyalist and British agent Charlie Simpson



As far as I l know, I was the first to reveal (in 1993) that when Brian Nelson went to South Africa to begin the arrangements for illegal arms importation (a trip also involving mid Ulster UVF figures based in SA) Nelson was met in Durban by yet another British agent, Charles (Charlie) Simpson. Committed, long term Ulster loyalist Simpson was a South African military intelligence ‘asset’, but he was also working for the British secret services
This is just one of the extracts from Brian Nelson’s diary where Nelson describes the key role played by Simpson in securing a South African arms deal for loyalist death squads.

One evening during the second week of my stay there we were strolling along when Simpson said to me ‘A fella from the Bureau of Information was asking me if you could manage to get a Shorts blowpipe, (he said) they’d be really interested in getting their hands on one and if you did they would be willing a trade of an arms exchange.

Nelson diary extract page 190 A Very British Jihad

The media and unfortunately even collusion experts have completely vanished Simpson, not only from the Nelson narrative but also from the wider collusion context. However, Charlie Simpson is just as important a State agent as Nelson himself. It must be said that Simpson will argue that, in all he did, he was simply following orders from British Intelligence and indeed I agree with this sentiment to the extent that it is the higher up spooks and securocrats I have always wished to focus on and not the likes of Simpson in isolation. (It's my belief that the collusion movement has failed utterly in this respect.)

Charlie Simpson was a former member of TARA who was picked out by MI5 for use in first ‘Rhodesia’ and then South Africa. He would have had an immediate rapport with Apartheid police and military because he served with the white regime’s notorious Selous Scouts against majority rule in what is now Zimbabwe. There is not space here to go into Simpson’s career but he was a crucial link man, not just with the SA arms manufacturer Armscor, but also between the Vlakplaas killers and loyalist death squads. One notorious Apartheid hitman in particular, Leon Flores, worked closely with Simpson. South African intelligence documents I have seen place Simpson and Flores as working together from at least 1991. I made a film for the BBC about Leon Flores and Charlie Simpson – Spies Stings and Double Crosses. This was broadcast in July 1993.


My film on the Dirk Coetzee hit with reporter Jeremy Adams (Leon Flores is pictured far right)

It was Vlakplaas hitman Flores who targeted none other than Adrian Guelke, using loyalist paramilitaries, in September 1991 because of Guelke’s opposition to Apartheid. Guelke was shot by the UFF at his Belfast home in September 1991. Leon Flores then went on to target former Vlakplaas commander Dirk Coetzee in April 1992 for his betrayal of the Apartheid regime after he defected to the ANC. Coetzee survived an assassination plot, again to be carried out by loyalists commissioned by Charlie Simpson and Leon Flores, in April 1992. Two serious murder attempts by Flores using loyalist killers as proxies in the space of six months. It is beyond doubt that Charlie Simpson was Flores’ liaison point for loyalist paramilitaries.

Flores’ activities were part of a worldwide stratagem by the Apartheid State to assassinate its most vocal critics. This assassination campaign was called Project Echoes and was run by the greatly feared Civil Cooperation Bureau. The CCB was nothing more or less than an Apartheid death squad and Leon Flores was one of its key agents. In Irish terms, the CCB strategy was to smear its targets with a pro-IRA tag. But don’t just take my word and research for the close links between Leon Flores and Charlie Simpson. Go to South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s website, for example here:
http://www.justice.gov.za/trc/amntrans%5C1999/9911151210_pre_991115pt.htm

And read the following Statement from Leon Flores’ former commander at Vlakplaas, Eugene de Kock, in relation to the murder bid on Dirk Coetzee in London in April 1992:

MR DE KOCK: The contact with Flores was Simpson and he contacted Flores - or let me put it this way. I met Simpson one night here in Pretoria and the task was not to kill Coetzee, it was to gather information about him. There weren't any tasks given, there wasn't a written report or a verbal report on it, but Flores later came and said that Simpson said that they had certain expenditures, him and others, and that he did follow Coetzee and did surveillance on him and that they had certain expenses, and that the amount from rand to pound was between R10 000 and R12 000.

De Kock has subsequently admitted that he gave Leon Flores the order to kill Dirk Coetzee. However, it’s also important to note that at no stage did the UFF, certainly at leadership level, believe, they were shooting Adrian Guelke because he was a republican, their claim of being tricked and the subsequent idea of a mistake was just a flag of convenience. Nobody would seriously suggest that Ulster loyalists, with a promise of weapons and training from the SA State, would have refused to shoot Adrian Guelke. Certainly they would have asked for a good cover story and that’s exactly what they got from Leon Flores in the form of a fake document purporting to show that Guelke was an IRA supporter.

So given all the work I’ve done in exposing not only Brian Nelson and Charlie Simpson but also their clear links (via Charlie Simpson) to the Apartheid State and the likes of Leon Flores, where does Adrian Guelke (and the PFC’s Stuart Ross behind him) get the idea that all of the clear detail above is somehow made up?


Queens University academic Adrian Guelke

In 2001, as part of my research for A Very British Jihad, I interviewed Adrian Guelke at his Queens University office in Belfast and also engaged in correspondence with him. The result of this was that Guelke quite rightly stressed that his anti-Apartheid activities were the reason for the SA regime taking a hostile interest in him. But he also told me that Brian Nelson’s sister had personally told him that her brother had received information on him from the Apartheid State. Thus Guelke himself was giving another indicator of loyalist/State awareness (via Brian Nelson) of the Project Echoes conspiracy. However in correspondence with me during August 2001, Guelke (whilst admitting that Leon Flores pointed out his house in 1991) asked me to remove his references to Brian Nelson’s sister:

Adrian Guelke mail to author 3rd of August 2001

Incidentally when Brian Nelson's sister referred to the Department of Information being my problem, I thought that it was a reference to this episode (a row over a newspaper article PL) rather than being a reference to the CCB. However, on reflection this seems somewhat far-fetched, so as it isn't clear what she was referring to I think it might be best to leave this reference out.

Guelke is clearly wrong here to say that it wasn’t clear what Brian Nelson’s sister was referring to and obviously I refused to remove the Nelson reference. It is of crucial importance where collusion is concerned. Brian Nelson was in jail by 1990 but his jail journal makes clear that he was informed of possible targets involving allegedly pro-ANC targets in Ireland. Adrian Guelke was never an ANC member but the secret Apartheid State clearly wanted him dead and used its connections with loyalist State agents to try and bring that about.

Guelke went on to attack A Very British Jihad in Fortnight magazine in 2004, stating that his shooting hardly demonstrates the intimate level of collusion that I wished to suggest. Guelke also said that much of my work (not just my book) contains foolish innuendoes about prominent people. It is this surprising and groundless critique that Stuart Ross of the Pat Finucane Centre has echoed for the past three years. I replied to Guelke in Fortnight the following month stating, as shown above, that it was Guelke himself that had linked Brian Nelson to his shooting and I of course referred to the clear involvement of another loyalist and State agent in his shooting, Charlie Simpson. Stuart Ross of course makes no mention of my demolition of Guelke’s arguments, but quite simply I argued that anyone who disputes Leon Flore’s relationship with Ulster loyalist killers who were also State agents is being disingenuous. There are many academics and journalists in Ireland who can’t bear to look collusion in the face and I believe Adrian Guelke is one of them. But what of PFC member Stuart Ross?

Now we get to the heart of the matter.


Death dealer Leon Flores (left) cannot be wished away, nor his link to Charlie Simpson

It is extremely important to note that Guelke was made aware by me in 2001 that the Apartheid hitman who targeted Adrian Guelke (Leon Flores) was assisted by, amongst others, Ulster loyalist and State agent Charlie Simpson. In his correspondence with me on the 3rd of August 2001, Guelke admits he had no knowledge of Simpson’s involvement:

Adrian Guelke mail to author 3rd of August 2001

I was also totally unaware that Simpson had anything to do with my case specifically.

The Flores/Simpson link is made abundantly clear in A Very British Jihad but it would take no more than five minutes to discover this on the internet. So to make things easier for both Guelke and his cheerleader Stuart Ross of the Pat Finucane Centre, lets look at a cross examination of one of Leon Flores’ comrades from Vlakplass Willie Nortje over the targeting of Dirk Coetzee using Ulster loyalists, with Charlie Simpson as the middle man:
See - http://www.justice.gov.za/trc/amntrans%5C1999/9911151210_pre_991117pt.htm

MR LAX: Just one small aspect on this question of Mr Flores. You said that you met with Simpson and Flores at Flores' house one evening.
MR NORTJE: Yes.
MR LAX: And I didn't catch the full extent of your evidence in relation to that incident and I just wanted to re-canvass it with you please. What exactly did you pick up from Simpson on that night in relation to their discussion? What was his task?
MR NORTJE: You must just remember that we knew he (Simpson PL) was an MI6 agent. Mr de Kock handled him with care, he also did not trust him so he wouldn't have told him directly what we wanted, but after the discussion and after we left, there was talk about the fact that he had contacts with this group in Ireland who did this type of work and that is the assassination of a person, so that was still the beginning of the process, so far as I can remember, they just talked about it.
MR LAX: Let me just stop you there. Who spoke about this? Did Mr de Kock speak about this?
MR NORTJE: Mr de Kock talked about it. Flores was present, Simpson was present and myself but it was never said directly and this is my recollection, it was never said that we are going to kill Dirk, we talked about the possibility.

The reference to Simpson’s MI6 link in the above exchange should be noted. Note also that it is Charlie Simpson who is arranging loyalist murder squads for Leon Flores. Though they were wary, the Vlakplaas killers clearly believed that a section at least of British intelligence was willing to help them attack their opponents in Ireland using Ulster loyalists who were also agents of the State. In return the loyalist would get missile technology, as Simpson promised, so as to break the arms embargo in place at the time. What is it that is not clear about collusion here?

If there is one thing that stands out in the above testimony and in all the relevant SA Truth And Reconciliation evidence that I’ve seen it is that Charlie Simpson and Leon Flores knew each other intimately. Bearing in mind that I also spoke with Leon Flores several times and interviewed him at length for my BBC film.

Adrian Guelke says my book A Very British Jihad is rubbish (I paraphrase), full of innuendo and easily dismissed and Stuart Ross of the PFC agrees with him, but Guelke himself admits that he was not aware of a possible connection between Leon Flores and Charlie Simpson with regard to his shooting. Moreover, in a subsequent email to me Guelke makes an even greater admission. In fact he says the exact opposite of what he says in his 2004 Fortnight attack.

Adrian Guelke mail to author 4th of August 2001.

Thank you very much for your message. I appreciate that you know much more about Simpson's role, relevance and his relationship with Flores than I ever will.

What’s this? That very same Adrian Guelke saying that the ‘foolish’ Paul Larkin knows more than he ever will about an Apartheid hitman (Leon Flores) and loyalist State agent (Charlie Simpson)? But there’s more. In the same email Guelke accepts the obvious link between HIS shooting in September 1991 and the murder attempt on Dirk Coetzee six months later. And it is as I have always said - that when Flores was eventually deported from Britain in April 1992, after the hit on Dirk Coetzee, British police made a direct link to the Guelke shooting. It is none other than Adrian Guelke that confirms this:

Adrian Guelke mail to author 4th of August 2001

In July 1992 the Independent published the story of the expulsion of Flores and Du Randt from the UK in April over the stalking of Dirk Coetzee and mentioned my shooting in the story so the implication was fairly obvious.
In January 1993 when I took up a senior post at the University of the Witwatersrand a journalist from the Weekly Mail and Guardian came to interview me about my new job. By coincidence he knew about my case from other stories he had been doing. Thus he told me that he had recently spoken to Flores who had told the journalist that the British police had accused him (Flores) of involvement in my shooting after they found newspaper cuttings about the shooting in his pocket. I was in SA in 1993, 1994 and 1995 so I missed your Spotlight programme about Simpson and Flores though I was later shown it by Jeremy Adams. As you might imagine the interview with Flores was the bit that had by far the most impact on me. While I was in South Africa Flores regularly featured in the media in relation to the horror show connected with Eugene de Kock.

Here is the paragraph in the UK Independent article which not only clearly links loyalist killers and Apartheid goons but also makes a direct link, as Guelke points out, between his shooting and the murder plot against Dirk Coetzee:



The article can be read in full here
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/agents-on-mission-to-kill-south-african-intelligence-operators-who-plotted-with-ulster-loyalists-to-1533272.html

One should note that this single paragraph also links the Nelson/Simpson arms importation in 1985 to the sensational arrest of DUP members and sanctions busting arms suppliers in Paris in 1989.

One wouldn't expect the UK Independent newspaper to ask in 1992 how loyalist death squads were able to obtain so much lethal armoury when at least two agents of the UK state were involved with Armscor and these same Apartheid killers over a number of years, but one would have thought this question would have occurred to Adrian Guelke and subsequently to Stuart Ross. No collusion? The evidence is there for all to see, if one cares to study it properly instead of engaging in platitudes.

So how do we square what Guelke admits in 2001 about the link between loyalist State agent Charlie Simpson and Vlakplaas killer Leon Flores and his shooting with what he says in his attack on me in Fortnight in 2004:

my case hardly demonstrates the intimate level of collusion that he wishes to suggest existed among the Loyalists, elements of the security forces and the apartheid regime

Let us be clear about the above email from Adrian Guelke to me. It is not me that’s making a link between his shooting and the murder attempt on Dirk Coetzee and then the clear collaboration between Flores and loyalist State agent Charlie Simpson but Adrian Guelke himself. Yet two years later that same Adrian Guelke accuses me of having no evidence about collusion!

Furthermore, the suggestion that two State agents Brian Nelson and Charlie Simpson are involved in targeting, or assisting the targeting, of a particular victim picked out by Apartheid goons and that the secret State won’t be aware of this is clearly not tenable. Moreover we already know that these two same State agents were a key part of the South African arms importation that led to such devastating attacks in the 1990s. Yet according to Guelke in Fortnight, I have presented no evidence of collusion and it’s all innuendo.

Deary me.

Stuart Ross of the Pat Finucane Centre

When I wrote A Very British Jihad I was of course prepared for harsh criticism from right-wingers and those who seek to deny collusion. However, given my previous fraternal ties with the Pat Finucane Centre I never believed I’d see the day when one of its board members would publicly attack my decades of work by saying it was easily dismissed and dismissible and quote none other than collusion denier Adrian Guelke as his authority for so doing. But PFC board member Stuart Ross (and speaking as a PFC board member), did precisely this in November 2013 when making a completely needless reference to my book in a review of Anne Cadwallder’s Lethal Allies.

Ross’s article attacking me, ‘Reviewing Collusion, can be read here:
https://cedarlounge.wordpress.com/2013/11/27/reviewing-collusion/

Ross simply takes Adrian Guelke’s suddenly altered view that my work can be easily dismissed. This is what Stuart Ross says:

Anne Cadwallader’s Lethal Allies also takes on the controversial issue of collusion in Ireland; her work isn’t so easily dismissible or dismissed.

Stuart Ross made no effort to contact me to verify what Guelke was saying; he has clearly not read A Very British Jihad (or hadn’t when he wrote his review); nor does he refer to my demolition of Guelke in the following issue of Fortnight. Needless to say I was astonished at what a member of the board of the PFC was saying and wrote to him immediately pointing out these very facts and also the fact that it was none other than Paul O’Connor of the PFC who had announced my book at the Gresham Hotel meeting referred to above.


The plain people of Ireland know the score

Moreover, I pointed out that I had given Anne Cadwallader (whom I have known for years) all assistance I could when she was writing her book. In January 2011 for example, Anne wrote to me looking for information on RUC/UVF quartermaster James Mitchell, the very same James Mitchell who was deliberately allowed to hold a huge arsenal for the Mid Ulster UVF right from the 70s to the 90s, storing munitions for the Dublin and Monaghan attacks and the Loughinisland atrocity amongst many others. A lethal coach and horses in other words to any collusion deniers arguments. Here is Anne’s mail to me:

On page 312 of “A Very British Jihad”, you make reference to a second conviction against George Mitchell, for holding guns in November 1979 alongside David Jameson and George McKeown. Can you confirm this conviction and say if there is a reference to it published anywhere? We were not aware of it and it is REALLY important.

Of course I was happy to provide the information Anne Cadwallader and the PFC needed and would do so again. I explained all this to Stuart Ross and the Chairman of the board of the Pat Finucane Centre, Robin Percival, but all these points have been ignored. I mean I haven’t received a single reply from them. If I may say so this is nothing short of blind arrogance and a denial of my rights.

The PFC did issue a Statement on Facebook a week after the Stuart Ross attack (I believe written by Paul O’Connor):

WE are happy to clarify that was not the PFC's intention to cast aspersions on Paul's book. The intention was to 'review' the 'review' which is where the reference to Jihad first arose. PFC

Of course, it was good to get some sort of defence of A Very British Jihad from the PFC but the above statement does not explain (or apologise for) the fact that one of its board members (Stuart Ross) gratuitously attacked my book quoting ‘no collusion’ Adrian Guelke as the authority for that attack.

At the end of the day, and as the positive person I am, I decided to put it down to a very unpleasant (not to say shocking) experience, move on and feel the affection of those who have always supported my work. Then in March/April 2016 I got a mail from an Irish American commentator Michael John Cummings. Completely off his own bat, Mike Cummings has been very kindly publicising both A Very British Jihad and then subsequently Lethal Allies in the United States. I’ve never met Mike and our correspondence arose purely via his interest in my book on collusion. In his quite recent mail, Mike showed me correspondence which included Stuart Ross’s 2013 attack on my book, and clearly demonstrates that Stuart Ross continues to disseminate this utter rubbish about Guelke and my journalism (this time in the United States) some three years later.

Enough is enough.

Given that he continues to disseminate his ill-advised paean to Adrian Guelke and both he and Robin Percival continue to ignore protests from me and others, I am now publicly calling on Stuart Ross and Robin Percival to either provide the evidence that there was no collusion in the UFF shooting of Adrian Guelke and that collusion was not as widespread as I claim, or admit that it was wrong to use Guelke to attack my book. Asserting the truth about the activities of loyalist State agents in South Africa is just as important as any other aspect of collusion and I have been to the fore in this work.

One other very easily checkable fact about me is that I take dismissive arrogance neither from ‘prominent people’ nor from people who ‘diss’ me and then run away when challenged. That’s one of the few benefits that comes from my being brought up in a slum. I am a fighter and my integrity as a journalist and writer will be asserted.

If my now public call for an answer to my questions is still ignored, both I and the many people who support me will take this issue to the next stage.






@Paul Larkin
Gaoth Dobhair
Mí Mheán Fómhair 2016]]> General http://www.fadooda.com/index.php?itemid=761 Fri, 23 Sep 2016 13:35:21 +0100 http://www.fadooda.com/index.php?itemid=755
4.156
The 1990 intelligence concluded by reporting that Robin Jackson had possession of some of the weapons from Mitchell’s farm, including ten ‘AK’ assault rifles (likely to have been a reference to VZ58 rifles), ammunition and an RPG launcher, and subsequently distributed two of the rifles and the RPG launcher to Person Y, the ‘Brigadier’ of East Belfast UVF.
4.157
This supports intelligence from February 1989 that Lurgan UVF had a large number of weapons from the 1987 loyalist shipment in a deep hide under the control of Robin Jackson.

P50 Ombudsman’s report
The significance of these two paragraphs not only lies in the specific fact that the VZ58 assault rifle referred to above was used in the Loughinisland atrocity but also in the even more profound fact that a veteran sectarian assassin and state agent (Robin ‘The Jackal’ Jackson) remained at the centre of a web of sectarian killings that stretch from the Dublin and Monaghan bombs slaughter in 1974 (in which 34 people were killed and scores maimed) to the Heights Bar attack in June 1994 and even beyond that.

It is a source of disbelief to me that the Ombudsman and his team, whilst otherwise performing an outstanding service to the Irish people with this report, failed to examine Robin Jackson’s role as an agent of the State’s covert forces. The fact that the Irish media has also ignored this central revelation in the report simply makes things worse. For the two paragraphs above are the final piece in Collusion’s sectarian jigsaw.

Part of the reason why the above paragraphs are so profound is that the Ombudsman directly links ‘The Jackal’ with former RUC man James Mitchell’s state-protected arms dump, which supplied sectarian death squads with munitions right throughout the same 30 year period – 1974 to 1994.

Here is one of those former death squad operatives (himself a former Special Branch officer), describing the use of Mitchell’s farm and Robin Jackson’s key role in the 1970s:

(i) the Dublin and Monaghan bombings. I believe that 33 people were killed and scores seriously injured in these two bombings, which occurred on the same day. The explosives for both attacks had been provided by Captain John Irwin, an Intelligence Officer in the UDR. The bombs had been assembled at the farmhouse in Glenanne, which was owned by the RUC Officer James Mitchell. The main organizer of both attacks had been a Loyalist paramilitary and UDR Captain Billy Hanna from Lurgan, Co. Armagh. The bombs had been transported in cars with Robin Jackson, Billy Hanna and David Payne taking part in the Dublin attack and Stuart Young taking responsibility for the one in Monaghan.

Statement of former RUC SPG officer John Weir

John Weir’s description of The Jackal’s key role and that of Mitchell’s farm has never been disputed and is supported by other intelligence sources from that time in the 1970s. It is now doubly vindicated. Here we are in 2016 with a carefully researched official report that tells us these same two people were central to the murder paradigm in 1994.

If the Ombudsman had simply looked at Robin Jackson’s role in the Miami Showband atrocity in July 1975 and the prior British Army arranged murder in County Monaghan of John Francis Green, he would have discovered for himself how ‘The Jackal’ and his gang (stretching across both the UVF and UFF) was a state protected species. For it is a matter of record that the Luger pistol Jackson used in both killings carried his fingerprints and that he was warned about this by RUC Special Branch. This oversight by the Ombudsman is all the more surprising because a 2011 police ‘legacy’ report into the Showband attack confirmed that very point.

Once Robin Jackson’s state protected status is taken on board, his control of these lethal weapons (imported by other state agents) from South Africa and the fact that Jackson and Mitchell were tipped off by Special Branch about imminent police seizure of these weapons becomes even more revelatory:

4.155
Information was received by police in 1988 that within two hours of Person E’s arrest at Mahon Road, the remaining firearms were removed in a farming vehicle from Mitchell’s farm to another location. The 1990 information reported that James Mitchell had been warned that police intended to search his farm, as a result of which the individuals involved loaded the remaining weapons into the farming vehicle, which Mr Mitchell drove to a safe location at Markethill.

P50 Ombudsman’s report

Here we have a Police Ombudsman’s report in 2016 showing that undoubted state asset and serial UVF killer Robin Jackson was in 1988 holding a lethal arsenal that was not only subsequently responsible for the Loughinisland massacre but a string of attacks that lead to 70 or more deaths and innumerable moments of terror and destruction. The Ombudsman is clear that the Loughinisland weapons came from the arms cache that was 'allowed' (my emphasis) to fall into the hands of 'the Jackal':

4.195
I am satisfied that the VZ58 rifle and ammunition used at the Heights Bar, and the Browning type pistol recovered with it, were imported into Northern Ireland in the same loyalist arms shipment as the firearms and explosives recovered at Mahon Road on 8 January 1988 and Flush Road on 4 February 1988.

Given the fateful ‘tip off’ referred to above (one of several he refers to) and that the Ombudsman shows the imported weapons had been tracked from their original shipping point to James Mitchell’s farm, there can be no other conclusion from his report but that a powerful element within the covert state took a decision to allow ‘Ulster Resistance’ to proceed with its mass murder campaign at a key moment just prior to an imminent IRA ceasefire in August 1994. How can the UK government say they were unaware of the location of these weapons when their own intelligence reports and their own man was holding them?

In classic counter insurgency parlance this is termed a ‘Strategy of Tension’.

The high level spooks who took that catastrophic decision should now be held accountable and the true role of Robin Jackson should finally be officially acknowledged.




@Paul Larkin
Gaoth Dobhair
Mí an Mheithimh 2016]]> General http://www.fadooda.com/index.php?itemid=755 Mon, 13 Jun 2016 08:15:29 +0100 http://www.fadooda.com/index.php?itemid=750 And the fat man say I don't want to hear your voice
And the thin man say I don't want to hear your voice
And they're cursing me, and they won't let me be
And there's nothing to say, and there's nothing to do
Stop whispering. Start shouting.*



There is nothing in comparison to being embraced by your own people

THE END OF CIC SAOR AS WE KNOW IT

In relative terms, my announcement in June - http://www.fadooda.com/index.php?itemid=722 that I was stepping back from front-line political blogging on this Cic Saor site provoked a surprisingly strong reaction; with people asking how I could "walk away" just at the point when my arguments about the British state's collusion with pro-unionist death squads have gone mainstream. I even got mails from the USA asking me to reconsider. But I'm pressing ahead with my intention, and from this blog onwards Cic Saor will be renamed, at some point, and no longer contain references to spooks (state intelligence spies), state collusion with death squads or psyops propaganda and the apparent wholesale swallowing of same by sections of a gullible media. I will return to some of these themes and the characters they have thrown up, like the reprobates referred to below, but this will be as an element of my fiction writing.
To put it bluntly, I've done my job, played my historical role with regard to spook and collusion exposure and I've had enough. I need to get a more fully rounded cultural life and I explain exactly why in the closing paragraph. I apologise for the length of this blog, but the need for expansiveness in this leave taking will become obvious and I would appreciate it if as many readers as possible share its contents with others.

There were two reasons for initiating this blog in 2005, over a decade of high-end political blogging - though there have always been artistic or aesthetic contributions, especially at the start. The first imperative, as some long term Cic Saor readers will recall, was to break the silence regarding Britain's Dirty War in Ireland. Now that the notion of collusion is broadly accepted, it needs to be remembered how people like me, who initially tried to raise this issue, were smeared with the easy calumny of "Provo", or "conspiracy theorist".

(For the record I am an anarcho-syndicalist. I don't believe either in the idea of a workers state (which is effectively Sinn Féin's position), or that this projected state withers away as classic Marxism argues. Freedom, if it comes at all, comes from the ground upwards and is based on very localised initiatives. That said, I support a broad left front and believe that Sinn Féin should, and would be, an important part of that alliance. For another record (for those who haven't noticed), I am a Manchester Irish Roman Catholic.)

I should also stress that it is the determined activities of the families of collusion victims, in my view, who have done most to change the narrative towards the path of truth. Not me and certainly not the mainstream media. That in itself says a lot.


Eason initially refused to stock A Very British Jihad

The second imperative in beginning this blog was to give publicity for my book A Very British Jihad (2004) about that same Dirty War, bearing in mind that Eason booksellers initially refused to stock the book. This decision by Eason was important because they are the main book distributors in Ireland. It also meant that we were in the ridiculous situation where Eason were carrying "soft focus" books on loyalist assassins Billy Wright and Michael Stone but refusing to carry one of the most important books ever written on the Troubles by an award winning Irish journalist. Gradually, after enough people complained, Eason began stocking the book but by then AVBJ was well on the way to being sold out. It is now out of print, after a print run of 2500 books - a testimony to my work, this blog and then the readers who encouraged others to buy it, and to complain about not being able to buy it.



A Very British Jihad still sells several copies a month on Kindle and can be purchased here - http://www.amazon.co.uk/Very-British-Jihad-Paul-Larkin-ebook/dp/B004JKNQEY/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1444633019&sr=8-1&keywords=kindle+a+very+british+jihad

Those who are relatively new to Cic Saor, or who have come across this site by accident recently, might wonder at my temerity in boldly pronouncing the importance of the book and thereby claiming some credit at least for the final acceptance of the orchestrated state collusion argument, but that's exactly what I am doing.

A Very British Jihad laid out the whole State/Unionist violence paradigm from the late 1960s onwards when Ian Paisley and his Bible Belt followers set up the Ulster Protestant Volunteers (closely linked to the UVF) with the blessing of MI5 and RUC Special Branch. The RTÉ programme on collusion earlier this year (the first one since my 1995 film for RTÉ) broadly followed the same details and decade by decade trajectory as my book, despite going soft on the RUC especially with the extraordinary failure to ask a former senior Special Branch officer (Raymond White) about serial assassin and RUC agent Robin Jackson - the infamous and seemingly untouchable 'Jackal'.

But, as many readers have noted, AVBJ is not simply a book about collusion. It goes much further and analyses the wider political context in which modern day collusion in Ireland started - Cold War global paranoia politics (USA versus the then Soviet Union), closely linked to the arms trade and suppression of left wing uprisings the world over. Any reader who ever doubted the spectre of right wing, partly psyops based, military interventions such as the one we suffered in slow motion here in Ireland, or say in Spain, Greece or Argentina, need only look at the hysterical reaction on the part of some British military figures to Jeremy Corbyn's election as leader of the Labour Party; or say the threats made to Catalonia from within the Spanish military as that country edges closer to independence.


RUC agent and 'King Rat', Billy Wright - Not a religious Jihad? Somebody should have told Billy Wright that.

As far as I'm aware, no other book on collusion has looked at it from a left wing international perspective, explaining how it fits into a global reactionary pattern. But of course, the book also stressed the specific localised nature of death squad operations here. What happened in the North of Ireland in the late 1960s (as radical movements for change erupted all over the world), was that the virulently anti-Irish covert security agencies of the British state gave a carte blanch of terror to the most sectarian (i.e. anti-Catholic) element of Northern Irish society - the ruthless killers loyal to an archaic Crown and Bible who were (ironically) usually grouped around a range of drinking dens, or within the police/army auxiliaries across the North's Bible Belt. It was this wholly stupid and reckless policy that made it a religious Jihad. The DUP and its support base has always played an important role in that policy, particularly in places like Portadown, Lurgan and Ballymena. No other book about the Troubles has asked such serious questions of the DUP. No other book has revealed so much about loyalist killer and British agent Brian Nelson and his activities in linking loyalist death squads with Britain's covert agencies. No other book has delved quite so intimately into the mind set and Modus Operandi (not to mention the drug dealing) of RUC agent Billy Wright and his gang - the so called "Rat Pack"; the same gang that murdered my friend and colleague Martin O'Hagan because he got too close to their secrets.

All my assertions were backed up by evidence taken from court papers, secret intelligence files and of course Brian Nelson's diary. The book was also the product of my own research as a journalist working for BBC Northern Ireland and the films I made for its Spotlight programme, and also the film I made for RTÉ about the Dublin and Monaghan bombs - the horrific conclusion to the 1974 coup that happened here in Ireland. A Very British Jihad is now used as a source text for legal teams investigating collusion cases. It is a matter of record that, on the basis of my evidence in the book, I was interviewed by Judge Henry Barron (now deceased) and his team with regard to the Dublin and Monaghan bombs and also by officers from the Ombudsman's Office in the North on several occasions and in several different regards. Specific elements from the book have also been picked up developed right up to the present day, such as my work on what came to be known as 'the Glenanne Gang'.


The Miami Showband Massacre - also victims of the Glenanne Gang

On page 290 of A Very British Jihad, for example, I revealed facts about RUC man and UVF member James Mitchell whose farm lay near the Armagh village of Glenanne - hence the name of the gang. These facts about Mitchell had either been deliberately ignored or never researched by the media, missed or forgotten. However, anyone who bothered to spend some time, like I did in the early 2000s, looking properly at this police officer's "career" would have soon discovered that in the 1970s, he was effectively the Mid Ulster UVF's quartermaster-in-chief, with the full knowledge and cooperation of the state's covert agencies. Here is the key passage on Mitchell:

On November 23rd 1973, UDR instructor (Billy) Hanna was charged with possessing ammunition and two six volt batteries wired together. Between November 1979 and November 1980, nine men from the Armagh area were charged with similar paramilitary offences one of whom was James Mitchell. Reserve RUC man James Mitchell was convicted of possession of a pistol, armed robbery and hijacking in November 1979. This is the very same Mitchell who is named in John Weir's famous collusion statement. All nine men were active members of the UVF and at least half of them were members of the security forces, including the UDR. One UDR member David Jameson, who received a four year prison term, came from a prominent UVF family in Portadown. There was, in other words, a substantial UDR and RUC resource for bomb and gun attacks on Irish nationalist targets.

Source A Very British Jihad Page 290 (see also Page 312 on mistakes in Barron Report into the Dublin and Monaghan bombs.)



(Paul O’Connor of the Pat Finucane Centre introduces me as an author and expert on collusion at this meeting in 2003.)

The significance of the passage quoted above lies in the fact that RUC man Mitchell is clearly shown to be a highly active, indeed pro-active, and willing member of the UVF and not just for the purpose of storing armaments. Moreover, my book showed that the security forces were well aware that his farm was used as an RV (rendezvous) and/or logistics point for atrocities such as the Miami Showband massacre and the Dublin and Monaghan bombs to name but a few. Readers of AVBJ understood the significance of what I was saying but the media completely ignored it until my old friend Anne Cadwallader contacted me about James Mitchell some seven years after AVBJ was published. By this stage, Anne was working as a case officer for the Pat Finucane Centre and she picked up on the significance of my reference to Mitchell's UVF convictions. In January 2011 Anne wrote to me on behalf of PFC director Paul O'Connor asking for exact details of Mitchell's court convictions and saying that the PFC "were not aware of it" and that it was "really important", which of course it is. Though her initial inquiry was on behalf of Paul O'Connor, Anne was to subsequently use and vastly develop this information as part of her outstanding book Lethal Allies, which focusses heavily on the Glenanne Gang. I am delighted that I was able to help in whatever small way I could.


Former Uachtarán na hÉireann (President of Ireland now deceased) Patrick Hillery presents the author with the European Journalist of the Year Award, 1997,

In short, and taking all of the above into account A Very British Jihad has made its mark. Likewise, this Cic Saor blog has helped to assert the integrity of my journalism and circumvent the censorship of an Irish Commentariat (in trying to ignore me and my work to death) , which laughably calls itself "liberal". As the Glaswegian author James Kelman famously put it -

These bastards think they own the language. They already own the courts. They own everything. They want to block your stories, and they will, if you let them.

IAN HURST AND PETER KEELEY - FOR THE VERY LAST TIME

There remains one issue before I close this political blog forever. I refer to it because it's an issue that I have also successfully dealt with and exposed, even whilst no longer working as a full time journalist. Let the following serve as the rest of the explanation for my now "walking away".


Lowly FRU spooks Peter Keeley and Ian Hurst
(A macabre spook version of Laurel and Hardy, elevated by the media to 'intelligence officers' and 'whistle-blowers'.)

An extremely important event in the collusion narrative happened this week with the quashing of convictions against several people (who have already served substantial jail time) previously convicted of conspiring to defraud a drinks factory in Derry (St Brendan's Liqueur Company). Look at this report here - http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-foyle-west-34356254.

Appeal judges pronounced the convictions unsafe, broadly because of the failure of the prosecution to reveal the presence of an informer and possible provocateur within the ranks of the alleged conspirators at the original trial in October 2000. That spy, who has a long career as a provocateur, is none other than Peter Keeley, or to give him his Sunday Times invented name "Kevin Fulton". The appeal judges were clear that had Keeley's role been revealed from the start there may not even have been an attempt to prosecute:

If disclosed, it would have raised issues around entrapment which could have given rise to a real possibility that the prosecution would have been stayed or relevant evidence excluded.

It's important to note that Keeley, shall we say, involved himself with the above accused in the late 1990s. The very period when he first appeared on the scene as a spook "Stakeknife" rentaquote. In fact not long before his spook sidekick Ian Hurst (the pair are inextricably linked) began telling a nodding media that he "read a Stakeknife file" in 1987 prior to the murder in Belfast of pensioner Francisco Notarantonio in October 1987. The media did not let the fact that Hurst was not even in Ireland in the run up to Francisco's murder and that he has never served with the FRU in Belfast get in the way of a good spook story. Quite how did Hurst remonstrate with Belfast FRU people over Francisco, as he claims in his Stakeknife book, when by his own subsequent admission he was either in Belize, or the UK at the time?

Hurst compounded these straightforward lies by producing a long list of Stakeknife victims, at least half of which could not possibly be true. The media and even certain rights groups promptly published this list as a proven fact in 2003 and an expanded version in 2004.

It is now clear, and partly because of this blog, that it was not just some alleged defrauders from Derry that were entrapped in the late 90s and early 2000s. We were in the midst of a surreal spook version of 'Emperor’s New Clothes' fable, where an ex brothel keeper (Keeley) and glorified debt collector (Hurst) easily convinced members of the Commentariat that they wore dazzling raiments and could spin pure bullshit into the golden copy (stories) they so desperately wanted to be true. The perpetrators of collusion thereby became collusion’s chief investigators. I take my hat off to the UK’s Star Chamber (MI5 and the Security Department of the NIO) for effecting such a brilliant ‘reverse pass’. Or what is called 'disruption' in the spook trade.


Peter Keeley/Kevin Fulton - the "Unsung Hero" of the media

Anyone who needs further proof of the symbiotic relationship between Keeley and Hurst need look no further than Keeley's own 2006 book on his so called "war" in which he styles himself an "unsung hero" (itself an insult). Ian Hurst wrote the foreword to the book in which he refers to meeting Keeley in 1999:

Foreword by Martin Ingram (Ian Hurst) states on XIII,

Initially, I have to admit to feeling sceptical about meeting this murderer. Even today, we continue to disagree about the politics of Northern Ireland. That said, Fulton has never lied to me. He has never exaggerated or diminished his own role in any terrorist operations. I am also happy to record that I like Kevin Fulton as an individual

So Hurst is telling us in 2006 that he knew everything about Keeley and his “terrorist operations”. You will search the internet in vain for any description by Hurst of Keeley’s terrorist campaign but the "murderer" tag used by Hurst is presumably a reference to Keeley's apparently self-confessed murder of republican activist Eoin Morley in Newry in April 1990. Hurst tells us he knows about many more. How do we know? Only the police and the courts can establish these grave facts beyond reasonable doubt. The coterie (dwindling it must be said) of journalists who regularly quote this pair of charlatans never ask them. Or if they do, they don't publish the answers.


FRU hitman Ian Hurst (circled) in Enniskillen - according to the media this didn't happen

But then, who did Hurst himself target for entrapment and murder? Subterfuge and assassination was the FRU's s stock in trade. Or are we supposed to pretend that Hurst was not involved in this whilst he served in Enniskillen/West Det FRU in the late 1980s? This also involved illegal cross border work. No targets ever mentioned. No superiors named as committing specific crimes, yet as recently as the Smithwick Tribunal (December 2013) the mainstream media was describing both Hurst and Keeley as "whistle-blowers" when in fact their "revelations" have overwhelmingly and demonstrably concerned Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness.

The legal confirmation this week that Keeley was once more involved as a police spy, this time in a fraud case, and that he was almost certainly engaged in entrapment sets the seal on the media's failure to report this 'disinformation duo' either with the requisite rigour or full accuracy. Keeley even admits in his "hero" book above that he was involved in the St Brendan's "caper". It was that very admission which eventually led to the quashing of the convictions as far as I understand it.



The final conclusion of the 20 million Euro Smithwick Tribunal effectively rests on the word of this same provocateur Peter Keeley, who amongst many other things, told Smithwick of his part in yet another sting operation involving the sale of a million Viagra tablets supposedly stolen by the IRA from the Pfizer drugs company. It gets worse. Head of security at Pfizer Ireland Conor Hanlon told the tribunal in April 2012 that Pfizer had never lost a million tablets through theft and informed the Tribunal that only the component powder was made in Ireland and it was shipped to either Germany or France for final production processes. Literally and metaphorically a cock and bull story.

"Whistle-blowers"? Intelligence Officers? The media has cried time without number. Ye Gods. It's a macabre Laurel and Hardy show. A Swiftian farce where corrupt Lilliputs can reduce the media to a gibbering laughingstock by simply humming their Stakeknife mantra and putting their hand out for more money. Money being the prime motivation for both of them.

Cic Saor readers will understand that I want to finally cleanse myself of this Dreck and devote the rest of my life to uplifting and edifying things like literature, poetry, the philosophy of ordinary language and decent things that reassert human dignity. I've been submitting myself to this torture since 1988 in fairness. Some of you will be aware that I mainly work as a literary translator and that my first novel will be published next year. Such work takes me far away from the sleazy, sordid world inhabited by the likes of Hurst and Keeley.

I will take some time now to decide what to do with this blog site. I’m not certain what its final form will be, but I envisage some kind of forum for cultural and literary discourse.

Míle buíochas do chách as a bheith I mo chomhluadar ar an dturas seo - Many thanks to all of you for accompanying me on this journey. There are a small number of people I should specifically and personally thank for their invaluable help all down the Cic Saor years (one of them a lawyer). But it's unwise to name them. They know who they are.





The author and his favourite poet - the Bard of Salford, John Cooper Clarke.

Time for poetry, art and the praise of human empathy. Time to get clean and to write many more books.





Paul Larkin
Gaoth Dobhair
Mí Deireadh Fomhair 2015




* Though the lyrics are entirely apposite, Radiohead have no connection whatsoever with this blog. I understand that the word used in the first line was "fat" but that this was regarded by corporates as too un-PC for the USA!]]> General http://www.fadooda.com/index.php?itemid=750 Mon, 12 Oct 2015 12:31:10 +0100 http://www.fadooda.com/index.php?itemid=742
Mo chara Eddie Holt - my friend Eddie Holt -
Suaimhneas Dé ar a anam - RIP


In the proud and fond memory of my friend and journalistic comrade Eddie Holt who passed away on June 23rd, I reproduce his review in the Irish Times of my book A Very British Jihad , which was published in his weekly column in 2004.
I do this because Eddie would have wanted it, knowing as he does that the book rankles with all those who are well aware they said and did nothing about British state collusion with pro-unionist death squads in our country. What Eddie rightly identified in his review, is that my book stated clearly that the decision to train, and arm rabidly anti-Catholic loyalist paramilitaries was not only a reckless act but also a sectarian and anti-Irish one. Eddie also correctly noted that my description of my encounters with notorious killer and Special Branch agent Billy Wright was a key part of the book.

Now of course its safe to talk about collusion and certain journalists can nod their heads and tell us they knew all along. But back in 2004, working class journalists with a left-republican outlook like myself and Eddie were despised by the 'glitterati'. Eddie of course was shafted by the same Irish Times that now praises him, as he made clear in his last column in 2007.

The article can still be accessed here:

http://www.irishtimes.com/news/refusing-to-say-nothing-1.1307695

Refusing to say nothing


"It's almost 30 years since Seamus Heaney's poem Whatever You Say, Say Nothing was published. The poem opens "just after an encounter/ With an English journalist in search of 'views/ On the Irish thing'." It includes the defining and justly celebrated description of the North as a "land of password, handgrip, wink and nod/ Of open minds as open as a trap".
In the North, Northern Ireland, the Six Counties, Ulster - that part of Ireland or of the United Kingdom - that cannot even be named to everybody's satisfaction, language is notoriously explosive. Heaney's poem, in which "tongues lie coiled" records "That Norman, Ken and Sidney signalled Prod/ And Seamus (call me Sean) was sure-fire Pape".
The poem also has the voice of native wisdom to remind us that "'Religion's never mentioned here', of course." Religion is too deep, too dangerous, perhaps too defining. Consequently politics and journalism have dismissed it as irrelevant in the secular, modern world. Even journalism's labels for the competing sides changed to reflect the view that religion shouldn't be mentioned.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, "Catholics" and "Protestants" were routinely used to describe both sides of the split. Gradually, these became "nationalists" and "unionists" and, in intensified forms (often with a class basis), "republicans" and "loyalists". Yet, "nationalists", "unionists", "republicans" and "loyalists" are really inadequate and arbitrary descriptors.
After all, those deemed "nationalists" want union with the rest of Ireland and those termed "unionists" are really British nationalists. There are people, though few in number, who wish to remain loyal to the link with Britain yet would prefer to see Britain a republic. Are such people "republican unionists", "unionist republicans", "republican loyalists" or "loyalist republicans"? Or might such descriptions designate a person who wants to be loyal to Dublin so long as it remains the capital of a republic? How about Irish nationalists who might wish to see the restoration of an Irish monarchy? On it goes, and the point is that such descriptions are intelligible only because of the convention of their usage, not because of any inherent meanings of the words.
Remember that the most ferociously "anti-Irish Catholic" of all British rulers was Oliver Cromwell, an English Protestant republican who slaughtered thousands of Irish Catholic royalists who were loyal to the British crown. Mixing religion, politics and nationalism gets so knotty, it's easy to understand why saying nothing is the safest and often the wisest option.
Yet total refusal is dangerous too, building up layers of containment which can make an explosion more devastating. Nonetheless, as people - suspiciously, it's usually those most used to wealth - insist it's vulgar to talk about money, it's generally insisted that it's coarse to talk about religion in relation to the place which cannot satisfactorily be named.
However, Paul Larkin, an award-winning, Manchester-born journalist "of Dublin and northern Irish stock" (to many, even that lowercase "n" can be considered to betray sympathies) has written a book that confronts, head-on, the religious dimension to the Northern conflict. His book is titled A Very British Jihad - Collusion, Conspiracy and Cover-up in Northern Ireland.
Clearly, the word "Jihad", meaning "a holy war", is intended to startle. Qualified by the adjective "British", it can seem preposterous. After all, Britain tells us daily that it is opposing a threatening jihad. If Chris Mullin's A Very British Coup, published in 1982 and made into an excellent TV drama seven years later was audacious, then substituting "Jihad" for "Coup" is simply insolent.
Or is it? Larkin's thesis is that "in the name of a religion and a British monarch" the "British state" and "Ulster loyalism" together "unleashed a holy war or Jihad" against "one section of the community only - Irish Catholics and nationalists". He argues that Frank Kitson, "the guru of British military strategy in the 1970s", was Cromwellian in his disdain for Irish Catholics. These are extremely blunt claims about the unnameable place wherein whatever you say, you should say nothing. Moreover, they are being made by an English Catholic journalist with decidedly un-English views on the "Irish thing". In the "land of password, handgrip, wink and nod", a book of extended journalism is not supposed to level such charges.
Yet this book, overwritten in parts, is superb in others (notably the author's reports of terrifying encounters with Billy Wright). The idea that "Protestants are bad people and Catholics good" is "clearly preposterous", says Larkin, who acknowledges "the terrible suffering of the Protestant community". Even so, he will face the wrath of reviewers who confuse linguistic convention with reality.
The conflict in the unnameable place echoes the regionally unequal religious wars of 17th-century Europe. Three centuries on, journalism, while it has recorded that conflict, has also buried some of its fundamental nature. Larkin's book not only disobeys Seamus Heaney's poem; it helps to rescue journalism from itself. As such it is, ironically, a penetrating form of Reformation."







@Paul Larkin
Carraic
Mí Iúil 2015]]> General http://www.fadooda.com/index.php?itemid=742 Sat, 25 Jul 2015 15:20:03 +0100 http://www.fadooda.com/index.php?itemid=736 Irish Times. Ireland's alleged 'paper of record' has refused to my publish letter; so I am now publishing it below.

Ms Battersby's, in my opinion, well argued review of Paul Murray's new novel can be read here:
http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/the-mark-and-the-void-by-paul-murray-review-1.2277627

Disclaimer:
Some months ago (long before the row referred to in the letter below erupted), I submitted a novel I’ve recently translated from Danish to English (‘Terminal Innocence’ by Klaus Rifbjerg) to Eileen Battersby for consideration as a review item. I have no idea whether Ms Battersby is indeed going to publish a review of my translation, but I do know that were she to carry out such a review of my work, it would be scrupulously honest, insightful and well argued. This is her stock in trade and her passion as I have gleaned from reading countless reviews from her hand. Furthermore, if such a review proved to be wholly negative, it would not change my views on the (sacred and ancient) role of arts critics and how, in my view, Eileen Battersby has been hung out to dry by her own newspaper.

A critic has every right to criticise a book or other work of art, if such criticism is based on a well-informed appraisal of the relevant work and gives convincing examples of where the work may be faulty. Ms Battersby does just that in relation to Paul Murray’s new novel.

I say this as someone whose own work has been subject to no little scrutiny – both highly positive and very negative.


My letter to the Irish Times:

Sunday, 19 July 2015

Regarding Eileen Battersby

From Paul Larkin – Literary translator and film maker



Sir

If there is a precedent for a newspaper of record conducting a public humiliation of one of its own correspondents in the way the Irish Times has with Eileen Battersby I am not aware of it. It surely cannot be an accident that following Ms Battersby’s negative review of Paul Murray’s latest novel (Sat. July 11), we have seen what amounts to three separate Irish Times put-downs of her, in my view, succinctly argued piece on Murray’s work. Clearly an editorial decision was made to publish a roundup of reviewers talking about literary reviewing a week later, which facilitated attacks on Eileen Battersby and her ‘scathing’ (damaging) views, as the IT itself puts it. This roundup includes a contribution from a personal friend of Paul Murray’s, John Boyne, who himself wrote an excoriating review of a novel only last year, but who writes ad hominem, describing Ms Battersby as OTT, and her review as 'vicious'. The phrase physician heal thyself comes to mind. Has this type of roundup following a poor review ever happened before? A roundup, furthermore, that is then followed by a high profile and highly favourable feature on Paul Murray (Arminta Wallace Sat. Jul 18th) in which the question of his alleged portrayal of Brian Lenihan is softly massaged. The Lenihan portrayal, one might say cruel depiction if proven, is of course a key note in Battersby’s review. As a literary translator and journalist I have had cause to appreciate Eileen Battersby’s work down the years and the IT’s own reaction to her review smacks of a Dublin 4 set collectively spitting out its literary dummy.

Paul Larkin etc

NB
Since this letter was sent to and rejected by the Irish Times, Arminta Wallace followed up her soft focus article referred to above with an ‘evening of conversation’ with Paul Murray on Tuesday the 21st July at the Long Room Hub,. Trinity College.



Also in a tweet to my twitter account @brehonisbest last night, author John Boyne @john_boyne pointed out the following in reference to his contribution to the Irish Times' round-up of reviewers (referred to above): "In fairness, I admit that PM (Paul Murray) is a friend & that I regret my 'excoriating' review. Also, I say that I generally admire Eileen."

Readers can see the full text of John's contribution here -
http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/reviewing-irish-books-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly-truth-1.2287224

(The fact remains however that Eileen Battersby has been undermined by her own newspaper in a very public fashion.)







@Paul Larkin
Carraic
Gaoth Dobhair
Mí Iúil 2015]]> General http://www.fadooda.com/index.php?itemid=736 Thu, 23 Jul 2015 17:05:16 +0100 http://www.fadooda.com/index.php?itemid=722
Adams and McGuinness - the clear targets of spook 'whistleblowers'

I can understand why BBC Northern Ireland’s investigative strand Spotlight (a programme for which I worked as a producer/director for years) declined to identify the “someone posing as a journalist” who secretly taped General Sir John Wilsey. This was featured this week in an investigation into the grim murder of an alleged IRA informer Caroline Moreland in 1994. The programme makes a questionable claim that the seemingly ubiquitous British agent Fred Scappaticci (the alleged 'Stakeknife') was involved in this killing.
Wilsey was the former CLF (Commander Land Forces) for Northern Ireland’s British army regiments and thus had some insight into how the FRU was running its agents here - though the FRU answered to MI5. The man posing as a journalist who made the recording of Wilsey that Spotlight wouldn’t name is our old friend and psysops dissembler Ian Hurst.

The sole reason Hurst was not named in this programme is because of my work in exposing Hurst as the charlatan he is. Hurst’s motive in taping John Wilsey was not only to prove that the so called ‘Stakeknife’ was Fred Scappaticci but also to try and entrap Wilsey into placing Scappaticci in Dundalk and running Garda Eoin Corrigan in 1989 (impossible) and then linking that to Martin McGuinness. Hurst needed this as he had no real evidence to give to the Smithwick Tribunal, as was subsequently shown. He failed in both regards in this covert operation.

Yes you read that correctly.

Leaving aside Fred Scappaticci's (in my view) undoubted role as an agent, the spook term 'Stakeknife' was first placed into public discourse in the early 2000s and, ironically, it's Hurst’s surreptitious recording that gives more credence to the theory that ‘Stakeknife’ is very much a modern day psyops construct. For if you read the full transcript of the Wilsey tape recording, you discover that John Wilsey says that the term 'Stakeknife' was not used until 2001:

“It was the one thing that was terribly important to the army. So we never ever, ever mention the words "Steak Knife", or whatever he subsequently became. I think it was 2001 or something like that.”

This is important and fits in with what Major David Moyles has indicated (Moyles was one of Fred Scappaticci’s main FRU handlers speaking as Witness 82 at the Smithwick Tribunal) – viz: that he was not aware of 'Stakeknife' whilst serving with the FRU and running Scappaticci. Much of what Moyles said was in-camera and has not been fully reported, but Moyles completely demolished Hurst’s overall evidence, to the extent that the final report publicly described Hurst as ‘lying’.

I believe my former colleagues in Spotlight to be diligent and principled journalists but I also believe that standards have slipped since I worked in the North during the Troubles. In the late 80s and 1990s we always engaged ourselves in a double or even a treble or quadruple think to check how we were being played when constructing a story. How was the IRA, the RUC or British army trying to manipulate us? That wariness seems to have gone, at least where reporting potential psyops material is concerned. To my knowledge, not one journalist has stopped to ask why the term 'Stakeknife' was never heard during the war and only surfaced long after the final IRA ceasefire in 1997. Why at the very least was the IRA's continued assertion that Scappaticci was stood down in 1990 not referred to in the programme? I have been told this not only by senior IRA sources but also by key IRA figures who left the movement in disagreement over the peace process. If this is true, then obviously it not only rules Scappaticci out of the Moreland killing, but also a large number of other such murders that have been attached to his name.

It’s quite clear to me that the media has been duped by the 'Stakeknife sting' – generated by proven dissemblers like Hurst at the bidding or encouragement of anti-peace process elements further up the spook chain. In his discredited testimony to the Bloody Sunday Tribunal and at Smithwick, Hurst’s real and undoubted target was Martin McGuinness. In 2006 who is Hurst’s and his spook sidekick Peter Keeley’s target when they touted a fake document around various media agencies? – yes you've guessed it, Martin McGuinness. In the hair trigger atmosphere of 2006, this forgery was a potential death sentence. Hurst also targeted Gerry Adams with his fake doctored bullets story, which I have already conclusively disproven.

The thrust of the dark side of British Intelligence has been to grudgingly accept the peace process but to attempt to procure the removal of the enemy leadership that fought them to a standstill in that (mutual) sordid Dirty War that was The Troubles.

If journalists are going to make a leap of logic that blames Martin McGuinness for the deaths of all informers and IRA actions in general, then they must also, logically, blame and publicly name RUC, FRU and NIO chiefs who sent so many other people to their deaths by dint of their overall executive fiat. If they don’t do this, they have by definition become not only partial but also patsies in a psyops game that seeks to continue that same Dirty War. In effect with this approach to reporting the intelligence game, the media is mirroring the crude and anti-peace process spook message that the irredentist Irish were the bad guys and that an amnesty applies to the security forces because they were the good guys.

We need to get beyond the psyops and the trumpeting of ridiculous figures like Hurst and get to a Truth Process that can heal everyone. But for that to happen we need clear analysis. What we've had so far is fifteen years of 'Stakeknife' sound and fury and that really is not good enough.

Sinn Féin and the IRA

I might say as a postscript to the above that the attitude of the mainstream republican movement to these psyops stories is as surprising as it is wrong and inadequate. I was in Belfast last week and in several places was able to listen first hand to people who clearly still believe, for example the story of the doctored bullets or the fake MI6 document linked to McGuinness. These stories have become embedded amongst the people and have spread a cynicism about the peace process which was the long-term intention. Sinn Féin has always been in a primary position to rebut these stories but has simply turned its gaze away - southwards.

Close your eyes and it will go away.

I support Sinn Féin as I do left wing TDs (MPs) like Clare Daly as part of my view that Ireland needs a left coalition, but my point in having worked to expose these false spook tales has nothing to do with Sinn Féin and everything to do with a peace process I care deeply about.

I'm coming to the end of my front-line Troubles journalism and I will formally announce this in coming weeks. I've proved what I set out to prove in terms of collusion and spook psyops stories - at least to my own satisfaction. With this blog, I've also broken through an establishment and middle class exclusion ring that hoped to ignore me to death. In England such exclusion (I mean censorship) is open and unapologetic. In Ireland it is smiling and 'sleekit'.

The common people however have always stood by me and that's where I'm happiest.



Time to move on to to more translations, novels and poetry and finally cleanse myself of the spook dross I've been dealing with for so long.







@Paul Larkin
Carraic
Gaoth Dobhair
Mí an Mheithimh 2015]]> General http://www.fadooda.com/index.php?itemid=722 Fri, 12 Jun 2015 12:20:22 +0100 http://www.fadooda.com/index.php?itemid=714
Taking my journalist’s hat off for a moment, as a socialist and someone who has an acknowledged record in exposing the British state’s secret and illegal campaign of violence in Ireland, I would personally be opposed to the idea of any Irish socialist shaking the hand of the titular commander of the Parachute Regiment – Prince Charles of England who visits Ireland today. This is particularly the case because of my close connections to Ballymurphy in West Belfast and Derry city – both of which suffered grievously at the hands of a clearly orchestrated infliction of mass murder, perpetrated by that same Parachute Regiment within the space of six months of each other. Here I am, of course, referring to the Ballymurphy and Bloody Sunday massacres of innocent civilians in 1971 and early 1972 respectively.
But there is a caveat to my objection. If it transpires that this clearly prior-agreed handshake is more than just a symbolic act of reconciliation and especially if it leads to an acknowledgement of what the Para assaults actually were – massacres - and the establishment of a fully independent inquiry, then I think a handshake will have been worthwhile. I doubt, however, that the English administration will allow the chief of the Paras to go that far. We will see.

There is, however, one other just as important aspect to this handshake, which is worth highlighting – it completely collapses and exposes a remarkable campaign over the last few years to declare Sinn Féin in general and Gerry Adams in particular as “toxic”. The evidence is there for all to see that not only (as you would expect) Independent Newspapers and its columnists have raged against Sinn Féin, but also the Irish Commentariat as a whole, alleged Irish liberals, holier than thou “revolutionary” Irish republicans, backwoods Christian fundamentalists and veteran Sinn Féin baiters in the North have all sung from the same anti-Adams hymn sheet.

Put simply, the Queen of England’s signal to Sinn Féin and the IRA in her 2012 visit to Ireland (including the remarkable and inclusive homage to Ireland’s fallen at the Garden of Remembrance), and now her son’s acknowledgement of the IRA leadership that blew up his uncle and other relatives, is – “You were a worthy adversary with a just cause that involved centuries long conflict. That conflict is now over. Shake on it.”

Indeed, if reports emanating from London today are accurate, as they seem to be, the English monarch was pro-active in insisting that her son Charles should parley with Gerry Adams today, and it was the Southern Irish establishment that fought ferociously to prevent such a (for them) nightmare scenario. See this excellent report in the Belfast Telegraph for example:
http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/republic-of-ireland/queen-insisted-on-prince-charles-meeting-sinn-fein-chief-gerry-adams-during-ireland-visit-31233382.html

In other words, the English (at the highest symbolic level for them) have completely contradicted and cut the journalistic legs from under the Dublin 4 set (including an RTÉ is that is still in Section 31 land) and their Northern counterparts who have continually argued that Adams is “toxic” beyond the pale of respectability and that the IRA’s campaign was baseless and without honour.

Whether these pro-Unionist drones like it or not, the world will look on and see a former guerilla leader being acknowledged by the next king of England (possibly) and former sworn adversary.

Obviously, from the English side (the MI6, 'Star Chamber' side), the hope is that the more Sinn Féin is embraced into the capitalist fold, the more it will forget all those silly ideas about a decent, indeed exhilarating, life for everybody via a fundamental redistribution of wealth and resources. Irish people meanwhile hope (almost against hope) that SF will retain its radical edge come what may. It’s a question of trust.

But for the purposes of this blog, let it be said that in poll after poll, the plain people of Ireland have ignored the rantings of their media 'betters' and plumped for Sinn Féin. In England meanwhile, the House of Windsor has slapped down Ireland’s pro-Unionist media elite and insisted that Sinn Féin and the IRA have a superior status.

Whatever about that handshake, the censorship game is up.





@Paul Larkin
Carraic
Gaoth Dobhair
Mí Bealtaine 2015]]> General http://www.fadooda.com/index.php?itemid=714 Tue, 19 May 2015 12:10:51 +0100