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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
McGuinness was agent for MI6, former officer claims - Britain - Times Online
By David Sharrock, Ireland Correspondent
Mick Smith weblog
A FORMER army intelligence officer’s claims that Martin McGuinness, Sinn Fein’s chief negotiator and a former Provisional IRA chief-of-staff, was a British agent were dismissed by his party yesterday.
The Sunday World, a tabloid newspaper based in Dublin, quoted a former member of the Army’s controversial Force Research Unit, running paramilitary agents in Northern Ireland, as saying: “McGuinness was working for MI6.”
A number of other Irish newspapers made the same allegation but did not name Mr McGuinness, referring instead to “a senior member of the Provisional IRA and Sinn Fein” and “a leading Sinn Fein member”.
All the newspaper allegations, however, were based on the transcript of an alleged conversation between an MI6 handler and an agent known as “J118”. The provenance of the transcript document was explained by only one newspaper, the Sunday Tribune, which said that the intelligence officer, who uses the pseudonym Martin Ingram, was “circulating” it.
The document records a brief conversation which, according to Mr Ingram, alludes to an imminent Provisional IRA attack, which took place on the Coshquin checkpoint on the Irish border between Londonderry and Donegal on October 24, 1990.
Five soldiers and Patsy Gillespie, a civilian who was forced to drive a van containing a bomb, died in the explosion. According to the reports, the MI6 agent encouraged his handler to “push this along as quickly as possible”.
Mr Ingram told the Sunday World: “It has been confirmed to me that J118 is Martin McGuinness. The most significant thing for me . . . is the fact that McGuinness’s handler is the driving force between the human bomb campaign.”
Mr McGuinness refused to comment on the reports yesterday, but a Sinn Fein spokesman dismissed them out of hand. “We have heard this all before,” he said. “It is rubbish. It is nonsense. Anybody with half a wit will treat it with the contempt it rightly deserves.”
Two years ago Mr Ingram claimed that Freddie Scapp- aticci, a Belfast republican, had been an army agent at the highest levels within the IRA who was codenamed Stakeknife. Mr Scappaticci denied the allegation before fleeing his home in the west of the city.
Last month Denis Donaldson, a senior Sinn Fein member and convicted IRA bomber, was murdered in Co Donegal after admitting last year that he had worked as a spy for British Intelligence and Special Branch for more than 20 years.
May 30, 2006 at 11:37 PM in MI6 | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
I was no secret agent for MI6, says McGuinness - Britain - Times Online
By David Sharrock, Ireland Correspondent
ACCUSATIONS that Martin McGuinness was an MI6 agent were part of a plot within Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) to prevent political progress in Northern Ireland, the Sinn Fein MP said yesterday.
In his first comments since a Dublin Sunday newspaper named him as a British agent, Mr McGuinness told reporters at Stormont that the allegations were “hooey” and that he was “a million per cent” certain that nothing would ever be proved against him.
The former Stormont Education Minister and Provisional IRA commander sounded at moments as if his voice was about to break with emotion as he rejected the accusations.
The claims were based on the verification, by a former Army intelligence officer, of an alleged transcript of a conversation between an IRA member and his MI6 handler.
Mr McGuinness was flanked by fellow Sinn Fein members of the Northern Ireland Assembly. But a notable absence was Gerry Adams, the party’s president. Mr McGuinness said: “I am a million per cent confident no one will ever produce anything against me. I have worked all of my adult life as an Irish republican.
“Many of my comrades have been killed. Many IRA volunteers have been killed and I, of course, knew many of them as many of you well know.
“Under no circumstances will I ever be concerned about anybody throwing anything up at me which will strike against me. It is not even a remote possibility.”
The allegations against Mr McGuinness were made by a former army intelligence officer who uses the pseudonym Martin Ingram.
The former member of the Army’s controversial Force Research Unit, that ran agents inside paramilitary groups, is credited with exposing Freddie Scappaticci, a senior Belfast republican, as an agent whose codename was Stakeknife, and who operated at the heart of the Provisional IRA.
Mr Scappaticci denied the allegations but later fled his West Belfast home. Mr Ingram’s claim, which was published in the Sunday World, also followed hard on the unmasking by the Sinn Fein leader, Gerry Adams, last December, of the party’s head of administration at Stormont, Denis Donaldson, as a spy. Donaldson admitted that he had spied for British Intelligence and Special Branch in a confession broadcast on Irish television and then went into hiding. Last month he was murdered at his hideaway, a remote cottage in Glenties, Co Donegal.
Mr McGuinness added: “The allegations are a load of rubbish. They are total and absolute nonsense and they are hooey of the worst kind.
“Now you would need to have nerves of steel to be part of a Sinn Fein leadership which has had to take the sort of muck and abuse thrown at us over the course of many years, but we are in positions of leadership. If you don’t like the heat, you get out of the kitchen. We have never jumped out of the kitchen. We will stay in this process to the bitter end.”
He said that he had known for some time that elements within the DUP were behind attempts to spread claims that he was working for British intelligence.
He said that Willie McCrea, the DUP MP for South Antrim, had “raised these unfounded allegations” in the House of Commons in February. “No one paid them any attention.”
He added: “I have to say given all that we went through in 2004, it was quite clear then that there were elements within the DUP who were out to sabotage any prospect of an agreement between Sinn Fein and the DUP.
“Here we are at a very critical stage of the process and elements of the DUP are doing their damnedest to try and undermine the prospect of trying to get these institutions up.”
May 30, 2006 at 11:34 PM in MI6 | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
y Wayne Madsen
May 27, 2006
Wayne Madsen Report - 2006-05-23
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WASHINGTON, D.C. -- WMR has obtained a confidential "France Only" report of the French intelligence service, Direction Generale de la Securite Exterieure (DGSE), that states that the CIA and Britain's MI-6 maintained effective control of an important Al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan as late as 1995, fully two years after the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, an attack that was launched with the help of Sudanese intelligence officers loyal to Osama Bin Laden. The CIA and MI6 permitted control of training operations at Darunta, an "Arab Afghan" base located near the camp of Osama Bin Laden and used to manufacture explosives and chemical weapons and train in their use, to pass to the control of Ibn Cheikh, a Libyan leader of Al Qaeda.
The DGSE report, dated January 9, 2001, is classified "Defense Confidential" and "National (French) Use Only" states, "Besides the Maghreb enclave, the training at Darunta, which, for approximately 2 months, mainly involved the manufacture and the use of the explosives by terrorists. This training, initially provided at the camp of Khalden, in Paktia, was transferred during 1995, on the order of Ibn Cheikh, to Darunta, in order to slide [the training] from the control of the security services of certain countries, in particular the United States and the United Kingdom."
The report continues by stating that in 1998, the training was expanded to include the use of C-4 plastic explosives and different types of detonators (electric, acid, etc.). Training also included the use of homemade explosives (like improvised explosive devices killing so many in Iraq today) and poisons such as arsenic, cyanide, gas, diamond powder, nicotine, and ricin. After Al Qaeda took control of Darunta from the CIA and MI6, the camp was used to train Al Qaeda operatives to launch a series of deadly attacks, including the November 19, 1995 attack on the Egyptian embassy in Islamabad, the 1998 attacks on the US embassy in Nairobi, the abortive Dec. 31, 1999 "Millennium" attack on Los Angeles International Airport by Algerian Ahmed Ressam, and the attack on the USS Cole.
In 1995, James Woolsey left as CIA Director and was replaced by John Deutch. Deutch's deputy was George Tenet, who previously served in Bill Clinton's National Security Council. The National Security Adviser was Tony Lake. The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) was chaired by Larry Combest of Lubbock, Texas and 1995 was the year Porter Goss joined the CIA oversight committee. On November 12, 2002, only a week after winning his 10th term, Combest suddenly announced his resignation from the House. Goss took over the HPSCI gavel from Combest in 1997, after serving only two years on the committee. In 1995, the Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence was Arlen Specter, a person whose fingerprints, like those of Goss, have been all over shady intelligence operations since the early 1960s. CIA intelligence analyst Michael Scheuer formed the CIA's Bin Laden Unit in 1996.
Two significant items emerge from the DGSE report. One is the fact that the CIA and MI6 were dealing with a Libyan Al Qaeda member at the same time Libyan leader Muammar el Qaddafi had declared war on Al Qaeda. Unlike the United States, Libya issued an Interpol arrest warrant for Bin Laden on March 16, 1998. With this treasure trove of proof of U.S. (and British) support for Al Qaeda, Qaddafi had the U.S. and the neo-cons over the barrel. It is not surprising, therefore, that the Bush administration now considers Qaddafi (once branded as terrorist number one) to be a good friend.
The other item is the training of Ahmed Ressam at Darunta. Bill Clinton's National Security Adviser Sandy Berger was charged with removing classified documents from the National Archives concerning the Ressam bombing plot. The question remains -- what were in these documents and did they have anything to do with the CIA's fingerprints on the Darunta camp?
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Centre for Research on Globalization.
May 27, 2006 at 08:06 PM in MI6 | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
ePolitix.com - Shake-up follows London terror reports
Reviews of the events surrounding the July 7 bombings have prompted a series of changes to Britain's intelligence mechanisms.
A report from the intelligence and security committee, drawn up from MPs and peers, suggested there had been misjudgements over the threat posed by 'home-grown' terrorists.
And the government's official analysis concluded that the four suicide bombers - Mohammad Sidique Khan, Hasib Hussain, Shehzad Tanweer and Jermaine Lindsay - carried out their attacks on a budget of less than £8,000.
Home secretary John Reid said that there needed to be an "effective and adequately resourced law enforcement and intelligence effort" to deal with the problem.
Meanwhile, MI5 director general Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller announced that her organisation is halting work on serious crime issues to focus on the terrorist threat.
She said "we are now faced by an unprecedented level of priority casework on international terrorism and I have decided, with the home secretary's agreement, that we need to withdraw from serious crime casework".
"The resources freed up will help to reinforce our work on international terrorism," Dame Eliza added.
According to data on the MI5 website, serious crime accounted for 2.5 per cent of the organisation's resources in December 2005.
Reid has also accepted the need to shake-up the warning system for assessing the terrorist threat.
The home secretary said the government would introduce a "simpler, more flexible and proportionate system" for assessing and categorising threat levels.
The intelligence and security committee report called for reforms, and former home secretary David Blunkett has also expressed his doubts over the way it functions.
The alert was dropped a level just a month before the July attacks, a move Blunkett said he would have objected to.
"When I was home secretary, with the information and advice I was given, I would not have countenanced, I would have said to MI5 'I don't believe this is the correct thing to do'," he told the BBC.
"With the hindsight I have now, I wouldn't do it, but with the advice and information that might may have been available to MI5 and Special Branch at the time, they may have taken an entirely different view.
"The problem we have is that the home secretary isn't in charge of operational matters and you have to be very certain of your facts and very secure and confident in your belief to actually say to them 'I'm terribly sorry but I'm challenging you not to do this'."
May 11, 2006 at 12:00 PM in MI5 | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
Telegraph | News | Fighting falls to a minority of regiments
By Thomas Harding, Defence Correspondent
(Filed: 08/05/2006)
A minority of regiments is conducting the majority of military operations, according to figure obtained by The Daily Telegraph, exposing serious flaws in Army operational planning.
Almost half of the 40 infantry battalions and most light cavalry regiments have taken on the burden of tours to Iraq, Afghanistan and the Balkans, while others have hardly been abroad.
In particular, the five Guards regiments, which perform ceremonial duties at Buckingham Palace, have barely fought abroad in the past five years, while other regiments have been in near constant action.
The figures also show that the Ministry of Defence has severely breached its guidelines on giving battalions enough rest between operations.
Military chiefs are worried that, as some infantry regiments go into conflict zones at least once a year, experienced troops are not spending enough time with their families and that some are leaving the Army as a result.
The Tories have accused the ministry of "fudging" its figures and misleading the public into believing that there has been enough rest between operations.
On average, infantry troops have been on operations every 15 months and some units have had only four months rest between expeditions, all in breach of the military's "harmony guideline" of 24 months.
The SAS, logistics regiments, Royal Engineers and medics have all been on almost continuous operations since the September 11 terrorist attacks, leading to worries of burn-out.
By contrast, the Coldstream Guards have made one tour of Iraq. The Grenadiers made a short tour of Northern Ireland, followed by three years off then a four-month tour of Bosnia early last year - although some are deploying to Iraq this month.
Liam Fox, the shadow defence minister, said the figures revealed "the alarming pressures" being put on front-line troops and criticised the Government for breaking the guidelines.
"With some units spending barely a few months out of theatre, the strain upon them and their families must be having a detrimental effect," Dr Fox said.
"It is vital that they have a proper amount of time to rest, re-train and see their families before embarking on further operations. This is further evidence of overstretch in the Armed Forces."
A senior Whitehall official admitted that the "point was recognised" that the "spread of the burden" fell on some regiments and said the matter would be addressed under the Future Infantry Structure programme.
But the Tories have described the figures as "dire" for some units. For example, the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, now 5 Bn the Royal Regiment of Scotland, served in Northern Ireland until late 2003, had a four-month rest then went to Iraq for six months in 2004.
Eight months later they were in Bosnia for a six-month tour. They are now on standby to deploy to Northern Ireland if an emergency occurs or could be dispatched to Afghanistan late in the summer.
The Royal Regiment of Wales has barely paused for breath, serving on seven deployments in as many years.
For some cavalry units the figures are worse, including the Household Cavalry, which Prince Harry will join this year as a troop commander. Elements of the Armoured Reconnaissance Regiment have had a total of only six months off between serving in Bosnia in October 2001 and Iraq at the end of 2004.
Last month's annual Army Continuous Attitude Survey, which questions troops about their views of the military, found that two thirds of soldiers were dissatisfied with the large amount of time they were having to spend away from home.
"Certainly quite a few battalions are doing more of the workload than others and we are nowhere near the harmony guidelines," a senior officer said yesterday.
"We are getting to the point now where, if another medium-scale deployment - say to Darfur, in Sudan - was needed, it is highly unlikely that we could fulfil it."
The Ministry of Defence admitted that it had broken its own rules. But it said it hoped that, with the "draw-down" of troops in Northern Ireland over the next year, possibly followed by a recall of some soldiers from Iraq and the Balkans, the pressure would be eased.
A spokesman said: "The current scale of deployments is judged by the Chiefs of Staff to be manageable and the Armed Forces remain ready to take on any future operations that may arise."
May 8, 2006 at 12:24 AM in UK | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home