IRA has good historical reasons to be obsessed with spies in the camp
These people have been ever ready to believe that anyone was a spy — even Michael Collins.
Such people are ready tools for the dirty tricksters to seed disharmony in IRA ranks.
It is hard to conceive that British Intelligence would allow Martin Ingram — who has already supposedly outed Stakeknife as Freddie Scappaticci — to betray Martin McGuinness less than two months after the murder of Denis Donaldson. If McGuinness was a spy, he was one of the best the British ever recruited in this country, and it would be incalculably damaging if they allowed their own organisation to betray him.
Michael Collins did get the better of British Intelligence in 1920, but they had uncovered most of his agents by mid-1921. The British had a phenomenal intelligence record throughout the bulk of the 20th century.
Their intelligence coups in World War I were exceeded only by their feats in World War II when they managed to secure an Enigma machine and break many of the German codes throughout the war.
Their biggest contribution to the defeat of fascism was in the field of intelligence. Could a people who were so good then be so bloody sloppy now in relation to Northern Ireland, or is this just part of another dirty trick? Denis Donaldson spying for the IRA at Stormont was used as an excuse to help frustrate the implementation of the Good Friday Agreement, but then it transpired that he was not spying for the IRA at all, but for the British.
Before anyone starts ranting about British treachery, we should take a look at it ourselves. Seán O’Callaghan admitted that he was providing the Special Branch with inside information from the mid-1970s until the mid-1980s when he fled the country. He was one of the people who informed about the Marita Ann gun-running.
Of course, James ‘Whitey’ Bulger, the man who organised the American side of things, also betrayed the whole operation to the FBI. He telephoned the FBI as soon as the Valhalla sailed from Gloucester, Massachusetts, with the guns that were transferred to the Marita Ann off the Kerry coast. Bulger was using the IRA and FBI for his own twisted purposes. He had essentially taken over the drug trade in the New England area, with the help and protection of the FBI. He had been furnishing information on his competitors so that they would be arrested and he could take over their turf. He also thereby boosted the careers of his FBI associates.
Once Bulger had gained control of the drug scene, he needed to facilitate his FBI people with other information, and this was where the IRA came in handy with the gunrunning operation. In return for such information his ‘handler’ in the FBI was able to protect him by warning him when anybody was giving information about his activities.
John McIntyre, who organised the actual shipments of the guns to the Marita Ann, began to provide information on Bulger on his return to the US. Bulger quickly learned of this and had McIntyre ‘eliminated’ on November 30, 1984. McIntyre was one of more than a dozen people who were murdered after they began to give information on Bulger, who is now No 2 on the FBI’s most wanted list. Osama bin Laden is No 1.
The IRA suspected that there was an informant on this side of Atlantic. Seán Corcoran, a low-level operator in Cork, informed the Special Branch that O’Callaghan was talking to a garda.
Like McIntyre, Corcoran was promptly murdered.
O’Callaghan later telephoned a journalist and gave him a detailed description of how he supposedly killed Corcoran. The interview was not off-the-record, so the journalist had his solicitor notify the gardaí that he was prepared to provide the information, but they never even interviewed him. Why not?
Too many questions about the whole thing have been left unanswered. Surely the Special Branch had an obligation to inform O’Callaghan that somebody had twigged that he had a garda contact, but did they tell him the name of their informant? Was Seán Corcoran sacrificed in an effort to protect O’Callaghan?
There was a great deal of hype about Molly Childers, mother of former President Erskine Childers, supposedly being a British spy, following the publication of Michael Foy’s recent book.
One of his reasons for suggesting it was Molly was because she was extremely close to a Sinn Féin leader she called ‘Bob’ who kept her informed about events such as de Valera’s arrest in June 1921.
“Bob told me the news and he had the wind up to a degree,” the spy wrote. “He thought this would have a very bad effect on their show. I have never seen Bob quite so exasperated over anything before.”
The author went into detail about the close relationship between Bob Barton and the Childers.
BARTON, who later signed the 1921 Treaty, was a double first cousin of Erskine Childers, the father of the late President. Barton’s mother and Childers’ father were brother and sister, as were Barton’s father and Childers’s mother. The two boys actually shared a couple of names each, as their full names were Robert Erskine Childers and Robert Childers Barton. Childers’s parents died when he was very young, so he was reared by Barton’s parents. The two boys were virtually brothers, and Barton was best man when Erskine married Molly. There could be no doubt that the two were close, but Bob Barton could not possibly have been exasperated about de Valera’s arrest because the Long Fellow was released before Barton could have learned of the arrest. He was in Portland prison in England at the time. Barton could not have been Molly’s source so this was a bottle of smoke, but the opportunity to depict the mother of a former president as a spy was apparently too good for publicity to ignore.
IRA paranoia about spies came to the boil in 1942 when chief of staff Stephen Hayes was kidnapped, tortured and forced to write out a confession that he was a supposed informant.
He dragged out the confession to make an escape and sought the protection of the gardaí.
The IRA had reached its nadir, poisoned by in-fighting in this period. Seán McCaughey, who took over as chief of staff, was promptly arrested and jailed along with Hayes. McCaughey died on a hunger and thirst strike in 1946, while Hayes died of old age.
Is the McGuinness story another effort to sow dissension within so-called republican ranks by generating another Hayes affair? We can be sure that somebody has a much bigger picture in view than mere publicity.
Intelligence operatives seem to be exploiting the media for their own purposes. No evidence whatever has been produced to suggest that McGuinness was agent ‘J119’.
What is the aim of the story— to have somebody kill McGuinness, like they killed Denis Donaldson in April? The Sunday World, which led with the McGuinness story, did not do the media any favours by disclosing Donaldson’s hiding place in Donegal.
Surely a man’s life should count for more than the mercenary considerations of circulation. Exposing his hiding place and his subsequent murder was not in the public interest. It was a reprehensible act.
