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Showing posts with label Aaron Edwards. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Aaron Edwards. Show all posts
Aaron Edwards ðŸ”–covers two works in the Dublin Review of Books.

Stakeknife’s Dirty War: The Inside Story of Scappaticci, the IRA’s Nutting Squad, and the British Spooks who ran the War, by Richard O’Rawe, Merrion Press, 254 pp, €18.99, ISBN: 978-1785374470
The Padre: The True Story of the Irish Priest who armed the IRA with Gaddafi’s Money, by Jennifer O’Leary, Merrion Press, 256 pp, €18.99, ISBN: 978-1785374616

In his novel The Human Factor (1978), the wartime MI6 officer turned novelist Graham Greene takes us on an exploration of the motives of those involved in secret intelligence. The plot revolves primarily around a mole hunt for a spy leaking classified information, though what really drives the story forward is the rivalry between different intelligence agencies. Greene’s depiction of a conference held between MI5, which had responsibility for running agents in former British colonies, and MI6, which was meant to deal with threats outside Britain and the Commonwealth, speaks to how intelligence work was akin to what would pass for office politics in normal workplaces. 

Continue reading @  Dublin Review of Books.

A Bodyguard Of Lies

Aaron Edwards ðŸ•µOne of the best placed British agents inside the Provisional Republican Movement is dead.

Willie Carlin pictured in Curzon Street, London, the site of MI5’s former headquarters
(c) Aaron Edwards

Willie Carlin died of complications arising from a Covid-19 infection on Monday 6th February. He is survived by his wife and child from a second marriage.

I first met Willie in 2018 when I interviewed him for my critically acclaimed book, Agents of Influence: Britain’s Secret Intelligence War Against the IRA, published by Merrion Press in 2021.

Willie impressed me.

We connected on a human level. He liked to tell a yarn or two about Derry, a place I had a fondness for after living and working there in 2007-08.

It was our shared interest in Irish history and politics and my fascination with his silent war against the Provisionals that drew me into further conversations and correspondence with him.

I had decided to write a book about Britain’s secret intelligence war against the Provos after sharing a platform with a former senior Intelligence Officer at an event in London in the Spring of 2016. He spoke informatively about the strategy by which Britain had sought to defeat the IRA’s ‘armed struggle’. I wanted to know more and so embarked on a mission to track down former intelligence operatives, agents and their handlers.

“It was never a war of win or lose – that wasn’t the purpose,” a retired senior RUC Special Branch officer told me in an interview. “You don’t set out to eradicate terrorism in a military sense – it is about rendering it incapable of pursuing its violent ideology.”

“And the principal method for achieving this outcome?” I asked.

“The capacity of two or three well-placed agents to have a disproportionate effect well beyond their number ‑ you infected the organisation, triggering paralysis.”

Willie Carlin was key to spreading that infection inside the Provisionals.

For 11 years between his recruitment by MI5 in 1974 and his exfiltration by the British Army’s Force Reconnaissance Unit (FRU) in 1985, Willie Carlin was in the front line of Margaret Thatcher’s war on terrorism.

Willie quickly became a key component of the intelligence attack against the Provisionals, particularly in the wake of the hunger strikes.

His sister’s involvement in Cumann na mBan and his close association with IRA chief Martin McGuinness soon gave him a ringside seat in the secret intelligence war in Ireland. Through his long-term deception, Willie Carlin was partly responsible for setting the Provos on the path to political engagement that ultimately undermined their armed struggle and saw them embrace the ballot box.

I successfully lobbied the British Government for the declassification of secret documents relating to Carlin’s reporting on the Provos.

It took several years for the material to be released.

Later, I obtained a copy of the document where Carlin is described as ‘one of our best placed agents in Northern Ireland.’ There was even a handwritten annotated note by a senior official in Defence Intelligence to Mrs Thatcher informing her that ‘The agent in question was a senior official in Sinn Féin who was compromised by Bettaney’.

Carlin’s handler, Michael Bettaney, was an alcoholic and fantasist who was sent by MI5 to Derry to handle Carlin after Carlin’s original handler was promoted.

Carlin temporarily walked away from MI5 because he harboured ‘serious concerns’ about Bettaney’s fitness for duty. He came back in from the cold after the Provisionals murdered young Protestant mother-of-one Joanne Mathers. Carlin would be handled by the FRU, specialists in operating behind enemy lines, for the remainder of his time as an agent.

Bettaney was later caught in a sting operation passing secrets to the Soviet KGB. It was said that Bettaney had grown disillusioned with his superiors and, some later claimed, converted to Communism.

After his imprisonment for breaching the Official Secrets Act, Bettaney subsequently shared information with an IRA prisoner about Carlin and the Service’s work in Derry that would lead to Carlin’s eventual exfiltration and resettlement.

It always struck me that my conversations with Willie Carlin had rekindled his interest in his career as a spy at the heart of the Republican Movement. He used to refer to this as ‘being in the zone’ and claimed he had come out of the shadows because he believed the time was right to tell his story. He said he wanted to pass on the lessons he had learned in his life for the benefit of posterity.

However, I could see that ‘being in the zone’ had even driven him to question the very foundations upon which he had committed his treachery.

Sometime in 2019 Willie returned to Derry to make peace with his past.

His sister was dying of cancer and the Provos had allegedly given him safe passage.

I cautioned him against such a course of action though he claimed he was ‘in the zone’ and nothing would deter him.

I did not learn of the full truth of his secret mission until I myself returned to Derry on a fact-finding trip in the summer of 2021.

My early meetings with Willie Carlin left me so enthralled by the significance of his contribution to the secret intelligence world in Northern Ireland – and that he had written his memoir – that I introduced him to my Publisher who would eventually publish Willie’s Thatcher’s Spy: My Life as an MI5 Agent within Sinn Féin. The late journalist and former Ireland Editor at the Guardian and Observer, Henry McDonald, was tasked with editing Willie’s manuscript.

I will eventually get around to writing more about Willie Carlin’s role in future blog posts and in other writing. Suffice to say that while he may well have shared some secrets in his extensive interviews with me and in his autobiography, I always got the feeling he was prepared to carry many more to his grave.

Perhaps that was his greatest deception of all?

The Tragic Death of Thatcher’s Spy

Aaron Edwards answers thirteen questions in a Booker's Dozen. 

TPQ: What are you currently reading?

AE: I’ve always half a dozen books on the go. Earlier this year I finished Roy Foster’s excellent short biography of Seamus Heaney. I was never a great fan of Heaney – we had English poets like Wordsworth, Brooke and Sassoon drilled into us at school, instead of Heaney. I read a lot of T.S. Elliot, John Hewitt and Robert Graves at university and came to Ciaran Carson and Heaney late. I’ve also finished re-reading George Orwell’s masterpiece 1984, one of my favourite books, and Eliot Higgins’ We Are Bellingcat. I’m currently reading Simon Akam’s The Changing of the Guard.

TPQ: Best and worst books you have ever read?

AE: This is a tough one. There are so many! I’m a huge fan of Michel Houellebecq – Atomised and The Possibility of an Island really grabbed my imagination when I read them on holiday a few years ago. Houellebecq is the master of escapist storytelling. I tend to read fiction when I’m not teaching or writing. There are far too many bad books to list. I found Emma Cline’s The Girls tough going; the same with much talked about – and, often, little read - contemporary Irish fiction. It makes me wonder just how genuine some literary critics are when they review books.

TPQ: Book most cherished as a child?

AE: I think that was probably one of the Roald Dahl classics - The BFG or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – closely followed by George Orwell’s Animal Farm. I also recall spending a lot of time reading Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, comic books, choose your own adventure books, coffee table books about the Second World War and reference books like encyclopedias and The Guinness Book of World Records. I’ve always had an eclectic reading taste.

TPQ: Favourite Childhood author?

AE: My early teens were dominated by novels by Stephen King. I read and re-read The Shining – there’s something horrifying - yet magical - about it. Jack Torrance’s cabin fever and descent into self-destructive psychosis was captured brilliantly by Stanley Kubrick in his subsequent film adaptation. Looking back, all these years after reading it, The Shining is the perfect allegory for our plague times, much of which have been spent in lockdown and ‘self-isolation’. It reminds us that, as a species, we aren’t too far away from losing touch with reality, whether that’s by being cut off from face-to-face interpersonal relationships or by being sucked into the virtual reality of social media.

TPQ: First book to really own you?

AE: That’s a tie between 1984 or Animal Farm by George Orwell – both are mesmerizing. I own a first edition of 1984, which is one of my most treasured possessions. Although it was published in the aftermath of the Second World War, it still tells us a lot about the world today. Growing up in Northern Ireland, I always saw echoes of ideological delusion, inane sloganeering and the Thought Police around every corner. I often return to Orwell when I see or hear of injustices meted out to those who are courageous enough to stand against the herd. It’s consoling but it’s also an inspirational rallying call – to a kind of cordon sanitaire – against some deeply unpleasant and destructive politics.


TPQ: Favourite male and female author?

AE: George Orwell and Virginia Wolff. I’ve been reading them both since studying A Level English Literature. Amazing.

TPQ: A preference for fact or fiction?

AE: I’ve probably around 1,200 or so books in my personal library – a third are fiction and the rest non-fiction, though, being totally honest, I love the escapism afforded by fiction. I’ve always believed that creative writing liberates us from the straight jacket of reality because its magic relies on how it makes us feel rather than what it makes us think. We might say that true independence of mind comes from the unblocking of our imaginative pores - fiction offers this kind of intellectual exfoliation.

TPQ: Biography, autobiography or memoir that most impressed you?

AE: Christopher Hitchens’ Hitch-22 is my all-time favourite memoir. The Hitch could be spellbinding and was certainly, in my view, one of the most articulate public intellectuals to have ever lived. Beyond that I have always read a lot of biographies and autobiographies, particularly of artists. I studied Art for GCSE and A Level and benefited from having the contemporary Irish artist Graham Gingles as my teacher. Graham taught me a lot about art and introduced me to the work of figurative painters like Francis Bacon and Salvador Dali. I read Michael Peppiatt’s Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma and Ian Gibson’s The Shameful Life of Salvador Dali in 1997-98. They’re probably two of the most accomplished books ever written on both artists. Right now, I’m hoping to move onto William Feaver’s new two-volume biography of Lucian Freud once I finish Akam’s weighty tome.

TPQ: Any author or book you point blank refuse to read?

AE: There are a few books I’ve found impossible to read, despite the hype that accompanies them. Christopher Hitchens once said that “everyone has a book inside them, which is where exactly it should, in most cases, remain.” I do persist with bad books – even badly written ones – but reading for pleasure should be about escaping from reality, not being detained by it.

TPQ: A book to share with somebody so that they would more fully understand you?

AE: That easy - Christopher Hitchens’ Letters to a Young Contrarian!

A Berlin Book Tower in memory
of the Nazi book burning.

TPQ: Last book you gave as a present?

AE: One of my own! In terms of other books, I think it was a rare collection of Pablo Neruda’s poems, published in Spanish and English. At the end of last year, I gave a friend a year’s free subscription to the London Review of Books, which I have really benefited from reading since 2019.

TPQ: Book you would most like to see turned into a movie?

AE: I would probably have to say The Blade Artist by Irvine Welsh. It’s about his character Jim Francis, aka Begbie from Trainspotting fame. Welsh explores how Begbie is forever condemned to repeat the mistakes of the past if he cannot break free from the gravitational pull of the deprived, tough working class estates that produced him. Having spent a lot of time in Edinburgh over many years, visiting family and friends and getting to know the kind of places and people who might inhabit Welsh’s world, I think The Blade Artist captures the nature-nurture debate perfectly.

TPQ: A "must read" you intend getting to before you die?

AE: There are so many books on that list, though I’d have to choose some of the classics. I’d like to read the complete works of JRR Tolkien, CS Lewis and HG Wells. I re-read Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol a few months ago and I’d like to return to his work again this year.

⏩Aaron Edwards' latest book is Agents of Influence: Britain’s Secret Intelligence War Against the IRA.

Booker's Dozen @ Aaron Edwards

Aaron Edwards on completion of a book shares his thoughts on the process of:

Bearing Witness 


 
‘Covering a war means going to places torn by chaos, destruction, and death, and trying to bear witness,’ observed veteran reporter Marie Colvin at a memorial service for fallen journalists in November 2010. ‘It means trying to find the truth in a sandstorm of propaganda when armies, tribes or terrorists clash.’ 

Journalists cover war from different vantage-points. Some, like Colvin, reported while the smell of cordite and burnt flesh still lingered in the air. Others, like Lyra McKee, covered the aftermath, long after the guns had fallen silent. Regardless of their vantage-point, it takes courage to bear witness to the horrors of war; and, as we now know, a few, like Colvin and McKee, have tragically lost their lives as a result.

In Lost, Found, Remembered, we find dispatches from an inquisitive young reporter who grew up amidst the smouldering foxholes of a conflict-ridden society profoundly damaged by decades of violence. Lyra McKee came from an optimistic generation who were told by politicians that they would ‘reap the spoils and prosperity that supposedly came with peace.’ 

Lyra thought differently. She believed her generation of “ceasefire babies” - those born around the time of the 1994 paramilitary ceasefires – had been lied to by politicians. This disappointment lay at the heart of her writing. It seems cruelly ironic in light of the clamour by many of the same politicians to attend her funeral shortly after she was shot and killed that we were all forced to bear witness to their failures.

To be sceptical of the Northern Ireland peace process is a risky business, particularly in a tribal society where you can easily be shunned, exiled, or worse. If you are seen to be standing against the herd, even in a small way, you can provoke a change in their direction. Very quickly a loose, meandering herd can become a focused stampede heading right for you. 

Lyra knew the risks and sometimes heeded warnings of caution in her writing. She had the emotional intelligence to recognise how badly others had been treated whenever they departed from conventional wisdom. But Lyra could also be brave and intuitive in her dispatches. Her hunger for a story shone through, from Tweets to text messages with friends, and, as we see in Lost, Found, Remembered, in the very best of her journalism.

Lyra had a rare talent for investigative reporting. I don’t mean in the sense of her having the best sources, or the most original of stories, or even in the volume of work she generated. What I really mean is her imagination as a writer. This creative impulse is evident in this posthumous collection published by Faber. Lyra painted on a broad canvas. She paid attention to the causes and drivers of conflict, grappling with complex theories like the intergenerational transmission of trauma or the socio-economic effects of a largely negative peace. Her stories were vivid portraits of people deeply affected by war, peace and discrimination.

Lyra was a champion of many causes and she walked proudly in PRIDE in Belfast each year when it was by no means always fashionable to do so. As a gay woman, she wrote about the challenges facing the LGBT community in the conservative backwoods of Northern Ireland. ‘The fight for equality is as much a fight for hearts and minds as it is a courtroom battle,’ she wrote. By standing up for what she believed in, Lyra often invited harsh words from her critics. Yet, despite suffering occasional online bullying and harassment, she remained perpetually optimistic about human nature.

People were capable of amazing feats. Lyra had seen this first-hand. She watched her ‘friends and family members cope with the trauma of what they could not forget.’ In an unpublished story in Lost, Found, Remembered, we find Lyra and a friend search for a missing boy on the Cave Hill overlooking Belfast. This story was part of her investigation into the suicide epidemic gripping Northern Ireland in the 16 years after the Good Friday Agreement. Some 3,709 people took their own lives, bypassing the number who died in armed conflict in the 30 years up until 1998. It is difficult to understand why they did so in such great numbers, though, as Lyra observed, this placed Northern Ireland in the top quarter of the international league table of suicide rates.

As a reporter, Lyra was often reticent about covering stories with a paramilitary theme. Her first book, Angels with Blue Faces, was a re-examination of the cold case murder of 40-year-old South Belfast MP Robert Bradford and another man, 29-year-old Ken Campbell, who were shot dead by the Provisional IRA on 14 November 1981. Lyra uncovered new leads in the killing, including how the RUC’s Special Branch had ‘received information from not one but two agents inside the IRA, telling them an attack was going to happen.’ Lyra even uncovered the names of the alleged perpetrators, who she anonymised in her book. In an essay in Lost, Found, Remembered, she records how:

I’m working on a story that requires me to ask questions about dangerous people. Every day, I wonder if they’re going to find out and do something about it.

One of the men who was involved in the murder of Robert Bradford lived not far from Lyra’s family home in North Belfast. The other gunman is thought to now belong to the same group of militant republicans who murdered Lyra on 18 April 2019.

Lost, Found, Remembered is a tribute to Lyra McKee’s tenacity, her fun-loving spirit and the compulsion she felt in bearing witness to the tragedy of the place she was proud to call home. 

Lyra McKee, 2020, Lost, Found, Remembered. Faber & Faber, 208 pp., £12.99. ISBN-13 : 978-0571351442

⏭ Aaron Edwards is the author of Mad Mitch’s Tribal Law: Aden and the End of Empire and UVF: Behind the Mask. His new book, Agents of Influence: Inside Britain’s Secret Intelligence War Against the IRA, is due to be published by Merrion Press in 2021.

Lost, Found, Remembered

Aaron Edwards writes in the Belfast Telegraph that the deaths of Lord Mountbatten in Sligo and 18 soldiers at Warrenpoint 40 years ago this week marked a watershed in the fight against the Provisional IRA.  

Forty years ago the Provisional IRA carried out two of its most audacious attacks. In Mullaghmore, Co Sligo, they exploded a bomb on the boat of the former UK chief of defence staff and cousin to the Queen, Lord Louis Mountbatten - killing him, two teenage boys and his daughter-in-law's mother. Later that afternoon, at Narrow Water, near Warrenpoint in Co Down, the Provisionals struck again, this time exploding two huge bombs on a military convoy carrying soldiers from the Parachute Regiment.

The pathologist who arrived on the scene shortly after the attack at Narrow Water, Arthur Orr, later told the inquest into the soldiers' deaths that he had "never seen such carnage". For Orr it was "the most distressing incident" he had ever encountered in his 25 years as a coroner.

It later emerged that gardai had stopped and arrested two young men from Crossmaglen, who were riding a motorcycle on the Republic's side of the border near the detonation point in Omeath. At the Smithwick Tribunal, which investigated allegations of collusion between Irish police and the IRA, it was revealed that a forensic report recorded how, even though swabs had been taken from both men, police could not tie the suspects conclusively to the attack and they were released.

No one has ever been brought to account for the murders of the soldiers that day.

Thirty years after the Warrenpoint ambush I met one of the soldiers who survived the massacre, Paul Burns, at the launch of his memoir, A Fighting Spirit. Paul was travelling in a four-tonne truck with seven other paratroopers when the first explosion happened. A massive fireball engulfed the vehicle and he lost a leg in the blast.

"And I do not hear the bang, nor the screams that follow," he wrote. "I do not smell the stench of burning flesh, or witness the confusion. All I know is darkness."

While Paul suffered horrific injuries on that day, he would remain in the Army until 1991 and become a tireless advocate for the British Limbless Ex-Servicemen's Association (now Blesma, The Limbless Veterans).

Paul's story is like so many others I've heard about Warrenpoint. One former soldier, who had been on an earlier tour with the men killed and injured in the attack, recalls hearing the news while he was stationed in an Army camp in Antrim:

"I was in the ops [operations] room at the time and it brought back memories of '73. The IRA had that well planned, with the secondary device."

Another veteran, Parachute Regiment officer David Benest, recalled. "I was on leave. I turned up the day after to a battalion in shock. Soldiers thinking: 'Crikey, that number of people being killed in one incident?'"

Relations between the Army and RUC were badly strained by Warrenpoint. It was said that the General Officer Commanding Sir Timothy Creasey "freaked out" when he heard the news and tried to wrest back control of security operations from the Chief Constable, Sir Kenneth Newman. Recognising the discord within the security forces, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher flew to Northern Ireland to calm tempers.

"The people of the United Kingdom will wage the war against terrorism with relentless determination until it is won," she told reporters.

Thatcher had been personally affected by the Troubles when the INLA assassinated her long-time friend and political mentor, Airey Neave, in 1978. She was renowned for taking an uncompromising public stance; after Warrenpoint she sanctioned an intelligence-led response to IRA violence.

One of the most visible signs of this new approach came when she appointed the recently retired chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, or MI6, Sir Maurice Oldfield as security and intelligence co-ordinator in Northern Ireland. He arrived in Belfast in October 1979.

Former RUC Special Branch officers have admitted to me that intelligence "coverage" was limited in south Armagh prior to Sir Maurice's arrival. One officer even suggested to me that "Oldfield's job was to hold people's hands" through a process of change.

That change was Thatcher's decision to keep the RUC in the lead against the terrorists, with the Army in support under the mantra "policy primacy".

Sir Maurice believed that the best way to deal more effectively with the IRA was to turn its own members against the group. To "start a cancer and watch it spread", as one veteran RUC spymaster put it. In this Sir Maurice had some success.

The "supergrass" trials of the early 1980s were part of his legacy after his retirement from the post; so, too, was the comprehensive infiltration of the Provisionals by agents. The direction given to these moles was to disrupt IRA activity and to help move the group down a political path.

Sir Maurice also believed - as did Thatcher - that the only way to tackle IRA terrorism was to work closely with the authorities in Dublin. The Irish border had long been porous and IRA members and smugglers crossed it with ease, despite the presence of a number of crossings manned by security forces on the northern side.

Interestingly, Omeath, where the Provos responsible for Warrenpoint had detonated their bombs, would become a key hub of IRA activity over the coming years. It was the place where the Provisionals' internal security unit (or "nutting squad") once took suspected "touts" for interrogation. And it was the place where the IRA also kept a major bomb-making factory in the 1980s. These borderlands were synonymous with the political dispute at the heart of the Troubles.

As we remember the 18 soldiers and one civilian killed near Warrenpoint four decades ago, it is also worth keeping in mind how it represents a Pyrrhic victory for the IRA.

Within a decade of the killings the group came under intense pressure from the security forces and had even moved towards secret talks with the British aimed at ending its armed campaign.

Nowadays some republicans have desecrated the poppy wreaths left by the roadside to commemorate the soldiers who died at Narrow Water.

But attempts to dismantle the visible symbols of their past atrocities can never fully eradicate the memories of such evil deeds, nor of militant republicanism's ultimate strategic surrender.

⏭ Dr Aaron Edwards is the author of UVF: Behind The Mask (Merrion Press, 2017). He is currently writing a new book for Merrion on Britain's secret intelligence struggle against the Provisional IRA.

1979 ➖ The Year The Gloves Finally Came Off In The Battle Against The IRA

Ten years on from the passing of David Ervine, a long time PUP leader,  Aaron Edwards, in his blog UVF: Behind The Mask, asks what his life and legacy means for the current generation.

A Tribute To David Ervine

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