Spies and their sources: wrong man was singled out

IN his column (Irish Examiner, June 3), Ryle Dwyer states that in my book, Michael Collins’s Intelligence War, I alleged Robert Barton was ‘Bob’, the unwitting source of so much information accumulated by the top British spy in Ireland during 1920 and 1921.

I did no such thing.

On the contrary, I argued exactly the opposite and, on page 234, explicitly rejected the possibility that Barton could have been the source because he was imprisoned on the Isle of Wight at the relevant time.