1. The British agent in Leinster House.
The Joint Support Group (JSG) ran British agents in the Republic of Ireland for British military and civilian intelligence agencies during the Troubles.
A former British military intelligence agent known by the pseudonym, Sam Rosenfeld, has alleged that a senior Irish government figure has served as an agent of British intelligence. Rosenfeld was recruited by the JSG and, he claims, had some direct dealings with the Irish agent.
The JSG carried out its duties on behalf of MI5.
Rosenfeld says he was once brought inside Leinster House by the Irish official. Rosenfeld told the Irish News this week that:
‘I will tell you what they (British intelligence) are super, super, super, sensitive about, they have somebody still working, and I am assuming there’s many still working in the Irish Republic, but one of them holds a very senior position in the Irish government.’
Rosenfeld added that he recently
“looked and they are now even in a (more) senior position than they were previously and they still work for the British government, i.e., the army.
2. An 18 year gagging injunction.
Rosenfeld is presently involved in litigation against the British state, some of it relating to the activities of Peter Keeley, a British agent in the IRA responsible for many crimes including murder.
Rosenfeld was bound by a gagging injunction for 18 years. He eventually managed to get it lifted. The British state would not have fought to keep it in place for nearly two decades unless they knew Rosenfeld was the keeper of some very significant secrets.
He is due to publish an exposé entitled: ‘The Book of Secrets’.
Samuel Rosenfeld’s twitter feed can be reached via this link:
https://twitter.com/SamjLondon/status/1606255430358949888?t=Iy7v30lp4m8j_3g9QSEKEg&s=08
3. Garda Commissioner Drew Harris is hopelessly conflicted.
While he was Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar introduced a practice whereby government ministers were obliged to place their mobile phones in pidgeon holes before they attended Cabinet meetings. This demonstrated a realistic grasp of the threat posed by Britain’s GCHQ cyber snoops. One therefore presumes that he and his successor would be more than a little curious to find out if a British agent was lurking in nearby shadows.
The British establishment resented Varadkar intensely over Brexit. The hostility they reserved for him was reminiscent of the animosity they displayed towards Charles Haughey, another politician who stood up to them. The Sunday Express newspaper – a tool of the British Establishment – was rumoured in media circles to have been on the verge of reporting certain aspects of Varadkar’s private life in late 2022, but in the event, pulled its punches.
To whom can the government turn to investigate the allegation of a spy?
Garda intelligence should be his first port of call.
But who is in overall charge of Garda intelligence?
The answer to the latter question is, of course, Garda Commissioner Drew Harris.
Garda Commissioner Harris is, unfortunately, hopelessly conflicted in any potential inquiry which the government may order to identify the Leinster House agent, or to detect the more general machinations of British intelligence operatives in Dublin. Before Harris took over the force, he was in the RUC/PSNI; more significantly, he served as a liaison between the RUC’s Special Branch and MI5. MI5 worked hand-in-glove with the JSG.
When Harris appeared at the Smithwick Tribunal in Dublin, he was a serving PSNI officer. He confirmed to the tribunal, under oath, that he had consulted with the ‘Security Service’, i.e., MI5, before he testified.
Harris was appointed in 2018 by Varadkar and his then minister for justice, Charlie Flanagan. At the time, Flanagan said he did not think there was a conflict between Harris being bound to the UK Official Secrets Act and to the Irish Official Secrets Act.
4. G2, Irish Military Intelligence.
If an investigation is ordered by the government to find out what the alleged Leinster House agent has been doing for the last few decades, Drew Harris will have to absent himself from it entirely due to his conflict of interest.
The government faces a choice: {i} do nothing and risk letting some of the EU’s secret Brexit and Protocol strategies flow to London, or, {ii} appoint someone other than Drew Harris to root out the Leinster House agent: {iii} ask France or Germany for assistance.
If the government was to choose option {ii}, G2 (Irish military intelligence) would be ideal for the task. G2 has been keeping an eye on British spies for decades.
5. France and Germany have skin in the game.
It is no exaggeration to say that Ireland’s committment to the integrity of the EU is at stake. At the very least, Dublin needs to assure Brussels that its confidential negotiations with us are secure.
It is highly likely that operatives of France’s Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre-Espionnage (SDECE) and Germany’s Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) are already making their own discrete inquiries in Dublin.
Both the SDECE and BND have long and unhappy relations with British intelligence. They would take great pleasure in shutting down a Leinster House agent.
In the past, the SDECE has spied on anti-EU activists based in Ireland. French operatives are reputed to have broken into the office of one high profile Irish activist to probe his US connections.
6. Media assets.
The national media in the Republic has shown no interest in the Joint Support Group, MI5 and the alleged Leinster House agent thus far. This does not represent a break with tradition. On the contrary, it is consistent with decades of journalistic inaction whereby key figures have displayed a reluctance to probe the activities of British intelligence. In the main, this was because British operations were presumed to have been directed at the IRA. The present situation is, however, something altogether different.
Two of the most influential figures in the Irish media were British assets, one in the Independent group, the other in the Irish Times.
One of them was a former MI5 officer.
The other sent confidential reports via a courier to the MI6 Head of Station in Lisburn, a man called Craig Smellie. The individual was a known detractor of Charles Haughey. He was also involved in attempts to corrupt Irish public affairs via bribes, including offers of money to politicians. On at least one occasion, he attempted to supply funds to Fine Gael. This happened while Garret FitzGerald was leader of the party.
7. Target Neil Blaney TD, former government minister.
Espionage against the Irish government has been going on for decades. I touched upon elements of this in my 2022 book, An Enemy of the Crown, the British Secret Service campaign against Charles Haughey.
Haughey was not the only victim of British secret service dirty tricks, less well known is that Neil Blaney, a former Fianna Fail government minister, was another.
The British Establishment did not like Blaney, and he did not like them much either. In Enemy of the Crown, I explained that Blaney was convinced that a deal had been hatched at a meeting between the British ambassador, John Peck, and Taoiseach Jack Lynch, on 5 May 1970, (i.e. during the height of the Arms Crisis). ‘I think the British government pressed [Lynch] to do it [sack him and Haughey from cabinet]’, Blaney asserted in public.
While Blaney had been arrested in 1970 alongside Haughey, Capt. Jim Kelly and the other Arms Trial defendants, the evidence against Blaney was wafer thin and the charges against him were dropped at a very early stage.
By 1971 Blaney was every bit as much a threat to the leadership of Fianna Fail by Jack Lynch as was Haughey. The Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) in London was watching Irish political affairs closely. (The JIC co-ordinates all of the activities of the various branches of British Intelligence.) The JIC was concerned that if Lynch was toppled by Blaney and Haughey, Lynch’s successor would be ‘either less effective or less accommodating’ towards London.
Ambassador Peck had little time for Blaney. He had come across him during the ‘yearly butter wrangle’ when London set a limit to the amount of butter that was to be imported from Denmark, Ireland and New Zealand. In 1970, Blaney as Minister for Agriculture led the negotiations. According to Peck:
‘Of course it all ended in agreement, and there was the usual government lunch at Lancaster House, to which I was invited as Ambassador-designate. There I had my first and last conversation with Neil Blaney. He was pleasant but he struck me as a bit dour – in fact he conformed exactly to my mental picture of a typical Northern Irishman, which indeed he is, from Donegal.’
8. The Information Research Department.
In May 1971, Blaney became the target of a manoeuvre which bears the fingerprints of British dirty tricks, particularly those of Ambassador Peck, who also happened to be the former head of the deeply sinister Information Research Department (IRD). The IRD was Britain’s black propaganda department. It engaged in smear campaigns. (In the 1970s it forged a bank account to vilify John Hume of the SDLP. For details about that scandal, click on the next paragraph which is a link to the story:
9. An ‘authoritative source in the Irish government’.
The operation against Blaney was designed to blacken Blaney’s name in Washington.
The first stage of the scheme was designed to deceive the senior staff at the American embassy in Dublin.
At least one senior official working for the Irish government was involved in the anti-Blaney operation.
There were two key figures at the US embassy in 1971, the ambassador, John Moore, and his ‘political officer’, Virgil Randolph III. If the latter wasn’t a CIA officer, he was certainly fishing in the same waters as the spooks from Langley.
In May 1971, Randolph III was contacted by ‘an authoritative source in the Irish government’ who gave him a very peculiar view of what was allegedly afoot in Ireland. The Irish official contended – deceitfully – that there were three separate wings of the IRA on the island: the Officials who were ‘under Communist influence’; the Provisionals; and a 100 strong underground army he called ‘Blaney’s Private IRA’. The notion that Blaney ran such an organisation is so farcical that it does not merit a rebuttal. Nonetheless, the Irish ‘government’ official was sufficiently convincing to persuade Randolph III that there was a third wing of the IRA and it was controlled by Blaney.
10. Washington is told about Blaney’s alleged private army.
On 18 May 1981, Randolph III sent a daft eight-page confidential assessment of the IRA to Washington. It was drawn up in coordination with the US consul general in Belfast. He provided a description of the events that had led up to the fracture in the IRA. He stated that he understood:
‘from an authoritative source in the Irish government that in the autumn of 1969 the Irish Minister for Agriculture, the unreconstructed Donegal man and powerful Fianna Fáil politician Neil Blaney, began beefing up his own political machine in the Republic and in Northern Ireland, ostensibly to further the Fianna Fáil interest but actually to further his own … Prime Minister Lynch, unable to curb Blaney’s free-wheeling activities, which involved the diversion of Irish government and Fianna Fáil party funds to his supporters, waited for an opportunity to quash Blaney and his “Private IRA”.’
Under the sub-heading, ‘the Gun-Running Plot’, Randolph III had more bunkum to impart, namely that:
‘It now seems established that during the spring of 1970 Neil Blaney sought to give muscle to his political ambitions by arranging for the illegal importation into Ireland of a substantial quantity of arms and ammunition for delivery to his Republican friends on both sides of the border. Despite the failure of the attempt to smuggle arms to Blaney’s ‘Private IRA’, a quantity of guns and ammunition as well as money (some apparently from Irish government appropriations for ‘Northern relief ’), seem to have trickled into Northern Ireland during 1970, mostly into the hands of the IRA ‘Provisionals’.
For the avoidance of any confusion, Randolph III was claiming that Blaney’s IRA was a wholly separate organisation to that of the Officials and Provisionals. He described how, in January 1971:
‘a responsible Irish government official’ [had estimated the] ‘combined active membership of both IRA groups [i.e. Officials and Provisionals] in the Republic at about 1300, with an additional half that number operating in Northern Ireland. These figures exclude Neil Blaney’s “Private IRA”, which may number a hundred men or so.’
Randolph III referred to Ruairí Ó Brádaigh, a co-founder of the Provisional IRA, by his English name, Rory Brady. According to the American:
‘Brady’s Provisionals are … having nothing to do with Neil Blaney’s … current efforts to found a new 32-County Republican Party (whose real aim is to oust Lynch from the leadership of Fianna Fáil) … Since it is doubtful that the new Republican Party will get off the ground, Blaney’s “Private IRA” may eventually drift back into Fianna Fáil.’
Since Blaney’s IRA did not exist, the prediction that it would ‘drift back into Fianna Fáil’ provided a convenient escape hatch through which this source could escape with his credibility intact when – as was inevitable – this fantasy wing of the IRA failed to engage in any sort of activity.
It must have disturbed the recipients of the report in Washington, who were relying upon Randolph III’s analysis, to hear that a mainstream European political party was prepared to absorb gunmen into its ranks. Randolph III had more gobbledygook for his readers:
‘In this connection, it should be noted that Fianna Fáil has very carefully avoided any confrontation with the IRA ‘Provisionals’ and the ‘Officials’ as well. In fact, the Lynch government has turned a blind eye at clandestine ‘Provisional’ IRA training activities in the Republic.’
11. The likely agenda of the ‘government official’ responsible for the hoax.
The ‘government official’ responsible for this hoax was most likely a Department of Justice official. Why would a ‘government’ official pedal these ludicrous yarns to the American embassy?
What was his agenda?
It is hardly fanciful to suggest that he was a British agent who was handed a script by the dirty trick experts at the Dublin Embassy and instructed to relay its content to the American embassy to blacken the name of Blaney in Washington. The dirty trick experts were the ambassador and his ‘information officer’, a man called Peter Evans.
Blaney was the victim of other – particularly vicious – smears which I outline in Enemy of the Crown, namely ones relating to the murder of a Garda officer. I set out my reasons for believing that the British embassy was behind these slurs too.
Blaney’s star shone brightly after the Arms Crisis and its sequel, the Arms Trials, but it fizzled out amid bouts of internal feuding that convulsed Fianna Fáil during 1971.
Blaney lacked patience – some would say he had a temper – and did not suffer those he considered fools lightly. Compared to Haughey, he lacked people skills. The friction between Blaney and the party hierarchy resulted in his expulsion from the party during the first half of 1972. He would never return to the fold. On 24 August 1972, David Blatherwick sent a confidential report to the FCO in London and Frank Steele, a senior MI6 officer in Belfast, among others. It stated that while the Arms Crisis was:
‘now part of the past and seems likely to be treated as such in the Republic … Mr Blaney’s political career in Fianna Fáil has collapsed. Mr Haughey is still doing good deeds in the political wilderness.’
Henceforth, and with Blaney essentially not in contention for a leadership role in Fianna Fáil anymore, MI6 and the IRD’s attention would focus sharply on Charles Haughey. Similar dirty tricks were deployed involving co-operative Irish civil servants.
12. The ‘Shadow’
My own view is that there is one outstanding candidate – who has long since passed away – who fits the bill for the ‘government official’.
I will call him the ‘Shadow’.
The ‘Shadow’ continued to work with the British well into the 1980s and played a decisive role in the so-called GUBU events.
David Burke is the author of: –
‘Deception & Lies, the Hidden History of the Arms Crisis 1970’, and;
‘Kitson’s Irish War, Mastermind of the Dirty War in Ireland’ which examines the role of counter-insurgency dirty tricks in Northern Ireland in the early 1970s, and;
‘An Enemy of the Crown, the British Secret Service Campaign against Charles Haughey’, which was published on 30 September 2022.
These books can be purchased here:
https://www.mercierpress.ie/irish-books/kitson-s-irish-war/
https://www.mercierpress.ie/irish-books/an-enemy-of-the-crown/