Intelligence

The spy who left peace out in cold - twice

The spy who left peace out in cold - twice - Britain - Times Online

By David Sharrock, Daniel McGrory and Sean O'Neill
Our correspondents investigate a murky world where politics collide with brutal realities
DENIS DONALDSON will be remembered as the British agent at the heart of the republican movement who nearly toppled the Northern Ireland peace process not once, but twice.

As Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern, his Irish counterpart, unveiled their final plan this week to restore the Province’s political structures, they must have reflected on the cruel irony that a man at the centre of the IRA spy-ring allegations which brought down Ulster’s power-sharing executive 2½ years ago could yet, in death, scupper the prospect of restoring those same institutions.

Mr Ahern is on record as calling the “Stormontgate” affair “as bizarre as it gets, for who would have thought that an informer in the pay of the British Government could turn out to be the instrument for the undoing of all that Mr Blair has worked so diligently for throughout his prime ministership?”

But was Mr Donaldson’s exposure, set in motion by the uncovering of an IRA intelligence-gathering operation inside the Northern Ireland Office, a matter of conspiracy or cock-up?

Like a torch beam in a dark forest, the Donaldson affair has briefly sent shafts of light into the blackest recesses of the “dirty war” that has been waged down the decades in Northern Ireland.

It is a complex, murky world in which there appear to be no clear answers and where the imperatives of political deal-making collide, sometimes with catastrophic results, with the brutal realities of intelligence-gathering.

The facts are few. Irish police have established how Mr Donaldson died but have no clear lead, although they suspect Republicans were responsible.

Mr Donaldson was hit by four blasts from a shotgun as he tried to keep his killer out of his primitive cottage in Co Donegal.

The assassin or an accomplice initially threw a stone that smashed a front window, presumably to draw him outside. Mr Donaldson had no intention of revealing himself. He tried to bolt the front door or to put his weight against it. The gunman fired the first two shotgun blasts through the door and as Mr Donaldson staggered back towards the rear room, the killer reloaded, leaving the spent cartridges on the ground, and entered the cottage.

There was no back door and the 56-year-old victim, trapped and wounded, put his right hand over his face in a vain attempt to shield himself. The third and fourth shots, one to the body and the other to the head, killed him.

The attacker apparently fled immediately, without ejecting the other cartridges, and escaped from the remote wooded district, possibly with the aid of an accomplice. Nobody saw or heard the shots and because the murder weapon was a shotgun there is no trail for forensic scientists to follow.

The suspects are legion. As an informer and a British agent, in the eyes of the IRA Mr Donaldson automatically sentenced himself to death. If the organisation’s ruling Army Council did not pass the sentence or approve the killing, because of its commitment last summer to ending its activities, that would still leave any number of its members, past or present, with the incentive to carry out an unsanctioned murder. The sad and brutal truth is that in republican circles there will be few tears shed.

A second possibility is that the IRA is showing early signs of fracturing into factions as it lapses into inactivity and that mavericks carried out the killing to make a point to the leadership, knowing that Mr Donaldson’s unpopularity would make it impossible to punish them.

A third possibility is that the IRA approved and carried out the murder at leadership level, as a lesson to others thinking of selling secrets, and is lying. In the past it denied certain murders, including those of police officers and postmen, and later admitted them, claiming that they were unsanctioned.

After the murder of Robert McCartney in January last year it denied involvement but later, under pressure from the dead man’s sisters, went back on that and offered to shoot the perpetrators. It still denies carrying out the £26.5 million raid on the Northern Bank, though police on both sides of the Irish border say the IRA did it.

Another theory is that dissident republicans from the breakaway groups the Real IRA or Continuity IRA killed Mr Donaldson with the motive of wrecking the prospects of a political settlement.

But the counter-argument is that for those who parted company with the Provisionals, the continuing presence of Mr Donaldson was a reminder of how rotten the IRA had become; he achieved a certain “recruiting sergeant” status for those who disagree with Sinn Fein’s strategy.

Not surprisingly, the theory that Sinn Fein has been promoting is that the “securocrats” killed Mr Donaldson — the very people to whom he was carrying the republican movement’s secrets.

It is a view endorsed by Mr Donaldson’s family, who said yesterday that they believed the IRA’s denial of involvement, adding: “The difficult situation which our family has been put in is the direct result of the activities of the Special Branch and British intelligence agencies.”

This theory has the attraction of deterring other would-be informers from taking the shilling and of shifting the blame for everything that has gone wrong in the peace process to the “dark forces” of the British Establishment. The problem with this explanation is that the evidence of a Stormont IRA spy ring lies in documents that Northern Ireland police were led to, not by Mr Donaldson, but by another informer.

According to Brian Rowan, a former BBC security editor, who has written extensively on the subject, the source who uncovered the spy ring was a man who approached the police offering information, motivated by a falling out with a senior Sinn Fein figure.

“The informer is not a significant republican figure but he was able to identify the house that was being used to hide the Stormontgate documents,” Mr Rowan said.

This was just months after the IRA had carried out a daring raid on Castlereagh police station on St Patrick’s Day 2002, escaping with a bulging file of sensitive material. After that, Operation Torsion was launched, a bugging and surveillance operation whose targets included the IRA’s director of intelligence.

Instead of simply seizing the documents, Special Branch decided to try to catch the IRA chief with them in his possession, thus getting revenge for Castlereagh. The police even managed to remove the documents and a computer from the house where they were being hidden, make copies and return them with bugging devices attached so that their movement could be monitored. According to Mr Rowan’s sources, Mr Donaldson’s house was “the end of the chain” for hiding the documents but they were there “for a very short time”.

Furthermore, Mr Donaldson had not told his handler about them. “If he had, we would have let it (the bag containing the documents) make another move (to another location),” Mr Rowan’s source said. “Does anybody really believe that Special Branch would risk such a high-level source?”

As the trial preparations proceeded for Mr Donaldson and two others charged in relation to Stormontgate their legal teams pushed for disclosure on Operation Torsion.

But Special Branch had much to lose by revealing those details: the informer who identified a house where the Stormontgate documents were being held, and Mr Donaldson, who had not revealed that the documents were in his house but who had provided valuable political intelligence over many years.

It was in these circumstances that all charges were finally dropped last December, leading to Mr Donaldson’s triumphant appearance on the steps of Stormont, flanked by Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, to claim that “securocrats” had destroyed the power-sharing executive.

“It came as a complete shock to everyone when he was exposed,” a republican source said. “Nobody had any suspicions about Denis — he just wasn’t seen as that sort of character, “He was an administrator and an awful lot of stuff went through him. From a Brit point of view he was useful because although he wouldn’t know any of the big secrets, he knew all of the wee ones.”

As the clock ticks towards Tony Blair’s November deadline it is yet possible that the Denis Donaldson mystery influences the course of politics. If it is established that the IRA did murder him, an act which it has performed on countless occasions in the past in the case of other informers, it is certain that the Unionists will use it as a justification for not sharing power with Sinn Fein.

There is one other legacy which Mr Donaldson and Stormontgate bequeathed to the peace process: as a sop to Unionists after it and the IRA’s Castlereagh raid, the International Monitoring Commission was established to test the ceasefires’ validity.

Sinn Fein hates the commission, which reported this year that while the IRA was moving in the right direction, it was still involved in serious crime and spying and had retained weapons. Its further reports will play a vital role in judging if republicans have passed the democratic test before Unionists will be ready to sit down with them in government.

WHERE DEATH HIDES IN THE SHADOWS
# Pat Finucane, a Belfast solicitor, was shot 14 times by the loyalist Ulster Defence Association/Ulster Freedom Fighters. His wife was wounded and their three children witnessed the attack in February 1989. The UFF claimed that Mr Finucane was an IRA officer, which his family deny, saying that he defended republican suspects. There are allegations that members of the security forces collaborated with loyalist paramilitaries.

# Brian Nelson was a former British army agent at the centre of alleged security force collusion with loyalist paramilitaries. He died in April 2003 of a brain haemorrhage. Nelson, who operated as the intelligence chief of the UDA, was recruited by British military intelligence at the height of the Troubles.

# The unmasking of a top-level mole in the IRA — named as Freddie Scappaticci — reopened claims that the security services ordered the murder of republican sympathisers to protect their informer. On October 9, 1987, Francisco Notarantonio, a pensioner, was shot dead by loyalist gunmen at his home in West Belfast. They appeared to believe that Mr Notarantonio, an old friend of Gerry Adams’s father, was a top IRA figure. Mr Notarantonio had been in the IRA in the 1940s but for decades was a taxi driver. His family deny that he knew about “Stakeknife”. His handlers are alleged to have let their prized informer carry out IRA killings so that he would not be discovered, so saving many more lives. In May 2003 Freddie Scappaticci denied that he was “Stakeknife”.

# Governors of Northern Ireland’s Maze prison were warned two months before the murder of the loyalist godfather Billy Wright that republican terrorists were planning to kill him in jail – but did nothing. Wright was shot dead by three Irish National Liberation Army activists on December 27, 1997. The hit team had been housed in the same H-block as Wright, the leader of the Loyalist Volunteer Force. No guards were on the watchtower overlooking the yard in which Wright was shot and a security camera was out of action.

# Rosemary Nelson, a human rights lawyer, claimed that she had been threatened many times by RUC officers for her work in defending republican suspects. In 1998 Param Curamaswamy, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Independence of Judges and Lawyers, said in his annual report he believed that her life could be in danger. He made recommendations to the British Government that were not acted upon. Mrs Nelson was killed by a car bomb in March 1999. The loyalist Red Hand Defenders claimed responsibility.

May 30, 2006 at 11:40 PM in IRA | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home