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Equally, no one has done more to expose the debauchery of MI5, the Security Service, which answers to the Home Office and operates within the UK and across its 14 remaining overseas territories.

Richard Kerr was a victim of child sex abuse perpetrated by multiple offenders, while a resident at Williamson House and Kincora Boys’ Home. He was introduced to a series of British and American paedophiles at the Europa Hotel in Belfast, first when he was brought to the Whip and Saddle bar as a visitor, and later when he was employed as a bell hop at the establishment.

One of his abusers while he was in Kincora was Lord Louis Mountbatten.

Kerr eventually exposed the egregious Kincora Boys’ Home child sex abuse scandal with the assistance of his social workers, two brave ladies, in 1980.

This situation led to considerable controversy. Soon, the public was discussing how MI5 and MI6 had taken advantage of the vice ring surrounding Kincora to gain influence over Loyalist politicians and paramilitary groups. There were accusations that the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) had – and continued to – obstruct justice, and that MI5 had undermined democracy.

Later again, it emerged that the state had taken part in gunrunning with the ‘housefather’ of Kincora, who commanded a paramilitary group called Tara.

No individual has suffered more physical and psychological abuse from the British state than Richard Kerr. He was repeatedly raped by men from the age of eight to further MI5, MI6 and RUC  ‘honey pot’ and ‘kompromat’ operations.

After he went public in 2014, the British Establishment tried to brand him a liar, set out to destroy his character, and tried to silence him.

Andrew Mountbatten Windsor included an equally pathetic ‘denial of liability’ clause in his settlement of £11,000,000 in the action Virginia Giuffre brought against him for rape. The former prince would have the public believe he handed over £11,000,000 to someone he didn’t know, for something he didn’t do.

Chapter 1.

Left in the Care of the State.

RICHARD KERR, THE WITNESS WHO JOINS ALL THE DOTS.

Richard Kerr is the key figure in appreciating the full extent of the Anglo-Irish Vice Ring scandal.

His horrific experience connects the dots among all the key figures and developments involved.

Kerr was born on 12 May 1961 and lived with his family near the Botanic Gardens in Belfast. Kerr fell into the clutches of the Belfast Welfare Department when he was enrolled at Brefne Residential Nursery for a short time. He was transferred to Williamson House on 16 December 1966 and remained there until 1975, when he was 14 and was transferred to Kincora. His brother Alan and a sister also resided at Williamson House.

Williamson House was located in North Belfast. It catered for Catholic and Protestant children.

THE MONK FROM HELL.

Kerr was abused by Eric Witchell from the age of 8, beginning one night after Witchell visited his bed.

Witchell, who hailed from England, was born in 1948. He became a Franciscan at the age of 19. Before his appointment to Williamson House, he had been a housefather in an English boys school attached to the Franciscans.

‘I was on my side, I had a teddy bear. I was biting into that while he had his hand down my backside and fumbled around’.

Full rape commenced later.

Years later, Witchell was jailed for abusing other boys at Williamson House.

Witchell is the first individual Kerr can positively identify as one of his abusers.

Witchell ‘was visiting Williamson House and from my memory he was working part-time. He was living in Liverpool at a church but had his own place in Belfast that he would go to when he would visit Williamson House’.

When Witchell visited Belfast, he stayed at premises owned by the Anglican Franciscans. He may also have had access to a flat in the city.

‘Then Witchell became the head of Williamson House for the Catholics’ side in early 1975 while I was there. Before that he was visiting it and from my memory he was working part-time. He was living in Liverpool at a church, but had his own place in Belfast that he would go to when he would visit Williamson House’.

He became the Officer-in-Charge (OiC) of Williamson House in May of 1975 at the age of 27.

‘Witchell’, he adds, ‘arranged for me to meet him in Liverpool at a church; then he abused me there. I was still in care, living in Belfast’.

‘But please realise there were others who came to Williamson House who abused us’. One of the ‘others’ who abused the children at Williamson House was Dr Morris Fraser. Both Witchell and Fraser are alive, and there is no sign that either of them will ever be prosecuted by the PSNI for their abuse of Kerr

‘My school records from Mount Vernon were destroyed because it contained information indicating that I was being abused at Williamson House. The staff at the school suspected I was being abused but, when asked, I would not answer their questions because I was afraid of my abusers’.

Witchell betrayed the trust bestowed upon him by Belfast’s child welfare authorities but also by the Anglican Franciscan Order of which he was a member. He was, however, a godsend to the likes of Hanley and Cameron.

The Williamson House scandal is worse than the outrage at Kincora insofar as younger children were abused at it.

The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (I1CSA) was set up to investigate allegations of child abuse by VIPs, including Westminster MPs. It was based in London. Although Witchell was one of the most important living witnesses to the existence of a VIP vice ring and lived in London, he was not called as a witness.

Witchell did not appear before the Hart Inquiry either.

WHO PAVED THE WAY FOR WITCHELL TO TAKE OVER WILIAMSON HOUSE?

Witchell secured the post at Williamson House despite the fact that his tutor at the National Children’s Home Training College in England had advised the appointment panel of Belfast’s Welfare Department that at

‘this stage I would have some doubt in commending him to be the Officer- in-Charge… I would commend him to you for employment, but I would not commend him to you for employment as Officer-in-Charge’.

It was fortuitous for MI5 and MI6 that Witchell became Officer-in-Charge despite this because he was the vilest sort of paedophile, someone who was prepared to farm out the children in his care to a wider network of child molesters.

This suited the spies because it enabled them to manufacture blackmail opportunities, ensnare Loyalist politicians, paramilitaries and Orangemen, and force them to do their bidding.

After Witchell became Officer-in-Charge at the home, he moved into an apartment in the attic. It had a TV, sofa, sleeping quarters and a drinks cabinet. This was where he abused the young boys. He would usher his chosen victim upstairs and lock the door behind them.

Physically, he was tall, thin and imposing. He wore glasses and had longish black hair. He was an exceptionally cruel and violent man with an insatiable sexual appetite. His preference was for prepubescent boys, but he assaulted teenage boys, too. His taste ranged from masturbation to anal rape. At least three of his victims would never recover from the assaults he and his associates perpetrated and committed suicide; another two attempted to kill themselves.

THE TRAFFICKERS.

Witchell was protected by a paedophile network which had infiltrated a number of key departments in Northern Ireland.

Councillor Joshua (Joss) Cardwell, a Unionist politician and paedophile,  was Chairman of Belfast Corporation Welfare Committee. It was responsible for Williamson House, Kincora and other homes in Belfast where sexual violence was commonplace.

On another occasion, while still at Kincora, Kerr was trafficked to London, where a Tory MP abused him.

Another Kincora boy, Stephen Waring, was sent to the UK. He committed suicide in 1977 by jumping into the sea at night from the Belfast-Liverpool ferry rather than face any more torment.

Another key figure was the Town Solicitor, John A Young. He was involved in deliberately losing some of the complaints about abuse that were sent to his office in August of 1971.

Williamson House is now long gone. It was closed in October 1983 and knocked to the ground in the mid-1980s. It had consisted of two buildings, numbers 446 and 448 on the Antrim Road. It was originally opened by the Belfast Welfare Authority in 1957. Until 10 March 1976, it was run as two separate units. Thereafter, the two houses were managed as a single home, catering for up to 18 boys and girls, usually aged between 4 and 18. It was not unusual, however, for the older teenagers to leave before they reached 18.

Some of the boys went to Bawnmore, where abuse also took place; some of the girls to boarding schools, one of which was located in Derry. Other unfortunates were consigned to the hell of Kincora.

TRAPPED WITH NO WAY OUT.

According to Bryans, children at a home in Portadown were also abused. The list of care homes in Northern Ireland where abuse is known to have taken place includes:

• Nazareth Lodge Children’s Home in South Belfast;
• Bawnmore Boys Home, Newtownabbey, which was opened by Belfast Welfare Authority;
• Palmerstown Reception and Assessment Centre, Belfast;
• De La Salle Boys’ Home, Rubane House Kircubbin, Co Down (where one of Jean McConville’s sons was abused after the IRA had murdered her);
• Barnardo’s Sharonmore Project;
• Manor House Home, Co Antrim.

Robin Bryans also revealed that boys from Portora Royal, Northern Ireland’s elite public school, located in Enniskillen, were abused by members of the Anglo-Irish Vice Ring. The Portora boys were in demand by abusers such as Lord Louis Mountbatten, whose appetite extended to working-class children, too.

Mountbatten’s connection to the Anglo-Irish Vice Ring merited a thorough investigation by the UK’s so-called ‘Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse’ (IICSA) but was ignored.

The IICSA was established in 2015 to investigate VIP sex abuse and look at how various institutions in England and Wales handled their duty to protect children from sexual abuse.

Another abuser was Dr Morris Fraser, a child psychiatrist. He abused boys in Ireland, the UK and the US. He now lives in Holland. He did not assist the Hart Inquiry, yet another reason for its failure to establish the truth. Child abuse victims who began to behave in a disturbed manner were sent to him. Instead of helping them, he abused them.

THE BOY WITH BLOOD STAINS AND BRUISES

There were plenty of opportunities to save Kerr and his fellow victims, but none were taken. In Kerr’s case, a gym master at his school once noticed blood on his shorts and a bruise on his groin; yet even that didn’t bring his nightmare to an end.

‘My school records from Mt. Vernon were destroyed because they contained information indicating that I was being abused at Williamson House. The staff at the school suspected I was being abused, but when asked, I would not answer their questions because I was afraid of my abusers’.

On another occasion, a member of staff at Williamson House also noted bruising to his groin, which had been inflicted by one of his rapists.

Kerr’s childhood was extinguished by the abuse that engulfed him and would drive him to attempt suicide on a number of occasions.

THE MEN WHO SPIRITED BOYS OUT OF WILLIAMSON HOUSE FOR ABUSE.

Kerr was taken out of Williamson House and supplied to paedophiles at various venues in Northern Ireland and, later, when a resident at Kincora, to some locations in the Republic. A few gave him cheap presents, including ‘large pennies’ and chocolates. It was common for him to receive boxes of Black Magic.

Another boy at the home, E, was also taken out of it and delivered to child rapists. He later committed suicide. On one occasion, both of these boys were taken away together on an appalling abuse marathon which lasted two or three days. A story was later concocted to cover their absence, that they had run away from home.

Kerr recalls that two men, one of whom used the name ‘David’, took him out of Williamson House and ferried him to his abusers. They were in their late 20s or early 30s. Both had Northern Irish accents. They would usually arrive at about 2 o’clock and return him by 10 o’clock when the other children were asleep. They were very cautious about how they approached the home. Williamson House consisted of two buildings. There were two separate driveways leading up to them, with a patch of green grass in the middle. When the kidnappers came to remove their victims, they would proceed up the driveway on the right-hand side and park at the side of the house. This would conceal them from the rest of the complex. In this way, they could spirit their victims away and return them without unduly alerting the rest of the staff who might otherwise have begun to ask awkward questions.

Chapter 2.

The Englishmen

Blunt acquired his taste for ‘rent boys’ from his fellow MI5 traitor Guy Burgess, with whom he once lived. Burgess was addicted to them. While Burgess purported to be socialist, concerned for the downtrodden, he made jokes about the children he exploited from their ranks. On one occasion he wrote a nauseating adaptation of La donna è mobile which he thought was hilarious:

‘Small boys are cheap today, cheaper than yesterday’.

Blunt’s treachery was uncovered by MI5 in 1963. The following year, he agreed to make a confession in return for immunity and the wholesale betrayal of the secrets of everyone he knew. Peter Wright of MI5 was assigned to interrogate him. In return for his co-operation, Blunt was given a pardon, and his treachery was concealed from the public. The pardon was not limited to his treachery; in addition, it afforded him blanket immunity for any crime he had ever committed, something undoubtedly designed to cover his sexual transgressions.

A MARATHON SEVEN-YEAR INTERROGATION.

When Peter Wright sat down with Blunt in 1964, he was determined to smoke out any member of the intelligence community, military, civil service or Parliament who – like Blunt – was homosexual: in short, anyone of importance who might have been susceptible to blackmail by the Soviets. Homosexuality remained a crime in England and Wales until 1967.

Blunt earned a scholarship to Cambridge in 1926, where he made more Irish friends. One of them was Sir Samuel Knox Cunningham, who was slightly younger than him. Cunningham became known as the ‘Boxing Queen’ because of his homosexuality and prowess as a pugilist. He was a heavyweight boxing champion at Cambridge. In later life, he was elected as a Unionist MP. In the 1960s, he represented South Antrim.

Significantly, he served as Parliamentary Private Secretary to Prime Minister Harold MacMillan, 1959-1963, and as such routinely attended Cabinet meetings at 10 Downing Street.

Knox Cunningham often stayed with Blunt while in London and also knew Guy Burgess from their days at Cambridge. He was a rich man and lived on a 70-acre estate at Glencairn Park, and once came within an inch of becoming Grandmaster of the Orange Order.

He chose not to stand in the 1970 general election and was succeeded by his fellow Orangeman and election agent, James Molyneaux, who later led the Unionist Party. Molyneaux was a friend of another high-ranking Orangeman, William McGrath, one of the staff at Kincora who was convicted of child abuse in 1981.

Another of Blunt’s Irish friends was Captain Peter Montgomery, a cousin of ‘Monty’, the famous WWII field marshal. The Captain lived at a magnificent estate in Blessingborne, County Tyrone. The pair first met at Cambridge.

Montgomery became one of Blunt’s earliest lovers, possibly even his first. Montgomery later became Deputy Lord Lieutenant of Tyrone, which meant he was one of a string of personal representatives of the Queen in Ulster. He also became President of the Northern Ireland Arts Council.

Montgomery always kept a room for Blunt at Blessingborne, and Montgomery often stayed with Blunt when he visited London. When Blunt suffered nervous exhaustion in 1943, it was to Ulster and the embrace of Montgomery that he repaired for recuperation.

After Blunt was exposed as an MI5 traitor, Blunt’s signature was found by Sunday Times reporters in the guestbook at Blessingborne.

On a visit I made to Blessingborne with Andrew Lownie, I was shown a photographic book that had belonged to Montgomery which contained a pucture of a happy smiling young Blunt.

Montgomery was also a key figure in the Anglo-Irish Vice Ring. According to the whistleblower Robin Bryans (aka Harbinson), who knew him well, he procured boys from Portora Royal College, Enniskillen, for those in the vice ring with a penchant for well-bred children.

Chapter 3.

Enoch Powell.

ENOCH POWELL AND THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND REVIEW INTO HISTORICAL CHILD SEX ABUSE.

Enoch Powell ran against Ted Heath for the leadership of the Conservative Party in 1966. He left the Conservative Party in 1974 and became the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) MP for South Down. He remained in Westminster as a Unionist MP until 1987.

In 2015, Powell was named in a Church of England review into historical child sexual abuse in the 1980s. One of its spokespersons told the press:

‘The name Enoch Powell was passed to Operation Fernbridge on the instruction of Bishop Paul Butler’.

The information originally came from a cleric who had counselled victims of child sexual abuse in the 1980s.

Powell’s sexual interest in younger men was a long-standing trait. In 1937, having graduated with a double first from Cambridge, Powell became a classics professor at the University of Sydney. He was only 25 and held the post for two years, during which he wrote to his parents about his infatuation with his male students. He told them he was repelled by his female students, while feeling ‘an instant and instinctive affection’ for Australian males between the ages of 17 and 23. This, he added, might be ‘deplored, but it cannot be altered’, and therefore had to be ‘endured – and (alas!) camouflaged’. Somewhere along the line, Powell developed an interest in much younger boys.

After serving as an intelligence officer in World War 2,  Powell entered politics and, in 1950, became a Tory MP, later serving in the Cabinet. In 1966, he ran unsuccessfully for the leadership of the Conservative Party against Ted Heath, who was later found to have been a paedophile with a taste for young boys. Powell’s career declined after his infamous 1968 Rivers of Blood anti-immigration speech. Eventually, Powell relocated to Northern Ireland, where he became a UUP MP in 1974.

One of the lines read as follows:

‘I love the fire/ In youthful limbs that wakes desire…‘

Another of his poems leaves little to the imagination: It describes how he, as an ‘unknowing boy’, was ‘led to sin’.

‘I did not speak, but when I saw you turn

And cross your right leg on your left, and fold

Your hands around your knee, I felt a flow

Of white-hot lava seething up the old

Volcano shaft. That self-same attitude,

Though not of yours, it was which long ago

Fired me, an innocent, unknowing boy

And led me on to sin and on to learn

BELT AND BUCKLE, ENOCH POWELL’S APPETITE FOR SADOMASOCHISM.

By 1968, Powell was visiting Northern Ireland, where he was active in supporting the Unionist cause. His interest was intense, so much so that by 1972 – if not earlier – he was speaking at meetings of the British Army in England. Fred Holroyd, the military intelligence officer and whistleblower who worked for MI6 in Northern Ireland, recalls attending one such meeting in England, where Powell advocated a ‘robust’ approach to defeating the ‘enemies’ of the British Empire. Holroyd encountered Powell again at the Seagoa Hotel in Portadown, where he found Powell personally amiable, but his wife-to-be openly racist. He claims she referred to black people as ‘n***ers’. Powell was elected as the Westminster MP for South Down in October 1974.

A trafficker called ‘David’ and an accomplice came to take Richard Kerr away from Williamson House to be abused by Powell on a summer’s day in either 1973 or 1974, when Powell was 61 or 62. By this stage of his life, sexual abuse by adult males had become ‘normal’ for him.

Kerr was taken to Barry’s Amusements in the seaside resort of Portrush, Co Antrim. Opened in 1926, it became Northern Ireland’s largest theme park. Located in the centre of Portrush, it is a 50-mile drive from Belfast. Kerr was either 12 or 13 at the time of the trip. The group went unnoticed as they mingled with crowds of children laughing and shouting around them. Kerr vividly recalls being taken on the bumper cars. ‘Maybe I am just having a fun day today’, he allowed himself to think for a spell. However, the visit to the arcade was a cynical ploy. The children at Barry’s provided the perfect cover for what was about to happen: the handover to Powell. If the kidnappers had waited at a crossroads or outside a hotel for such a high-profile politician, it might have attracted unwanted attention.

Chapter 4.

Lambs to the Slaughter.

HER MAJESTY’S CHILD BROTHEL AT KINCORA

Kerr was part of a group of 14-year-old residents of Williamson House who were transferred to Kincora Boys’ Home in 1975. Up to this point, Kincora had mainly catered for 16-18-year-olds. Some, if not all, of the Williamson boys had been subjected to horrific abuse, violence and intimidation by Eric Witchell and his associates, so much so that they had become fearful and compliant child-sex puppets.

On the surface, there was no logical reason for the transfer of the new residents. MI5’s boss in Northern Ireland, Ian Cameron, and his colleagues were the beneficiaries of the new arrangement because it allowed them to replenish their ongoing ‘honey trap’ blackmail operations in Belfast, Bangor and elsewhere, with a fresh batch of younger teenagers who were broken, terrified and sexually compliant. In addition, MI5 was in complete control of Kincora, a detached house at a crossroads with a side entrance.

Some of the abusers who exploited Kincora would pull into an adjacent side road with two garages. The garage doors would be raised, and their cars would be parked inside, something they hoped would avoid scrutiny. They would then walk across the road and enter Kincora from the site.

Sickeningly, intelligence figures at the Northern Ireland Office (NIO), such as Peter England and John Imrie, exploited the boys as a sordid perk of their employment. England had worked at the Ministry of Defence before his assignment to the NIO; Imrie at MI5.

Members of this victim group were trafficked to England and Scotland by Mains on the orders of Joss Cardwell, an influential Loyalist politician and friend of senior MPs at Westminster.

One of those who had access to boys from Kincora in London was a high-profile Tory MP and friend of James Molyneaux MP. Another abuser was a famous actor and celebrity who remains very much to the fore in his profession. Not only are both of these men alive, but one of them has a long history of involvement with children’s charities.

Richard Kerr, aged 14, became Kincora’s youngest resident. He was part of a group of boys who were younger than those who normally resided at the home.  The other boys were:  

  − ‘F’, who is still alive;    

− ‘B’, who later shot himself;      

− ‘S’;     

− Steven Waring, who had not been in Williamson House, joined a few months later. He committed suicide in November 1977.  

− Another young boy, ‘D’, would be consigned to the hell of this existence the following year.  He is still alive.

Witchell continued to abuse him. ‘Eric was a good friend of Mains’, and they were often on the phone together.

‘Eric would call Mains, and I would speak to him on the phone when I was in Kincora. He would ask me to come over to Williamson House, and then he would abuse me. His room was on the top floor.’

Kerr had no choice but to submit to Witchell if he wanted to see his sister at Williamson House.

THE KNOWLEDGE AND CONNIVANCE OF MI5, MI6 AND THE RUC.

The abuse of the children at Williamson House, Kincora and elsewhere in Northern Ireland was carried out with the knowledge and connivance of MI5, MI6 and the RUC. At the time of the boys’ transfer, from Williamson House to Kincora, MI5 was the dominant UK intelligence service operating in Northern Ireland. It was commanded by its then Director-General, Sir Michael Hanley. His key officer on the ground in Northern Ireland was Ian Cameron, who was mooted in the media as a contender for the position of Director-General of MI5 in the late 1980s.

Cameron might well have ascended to the top MI5 post but for the Kincora scandal, which erupted in 1980, and for fear that MPs such as the redoubtable Ken Livingstone might have raised the issue in the House of Commons. Livingstone was booed and jeered by Tory MPs when he raised this issue in Parliament.

THE EUROPA HOTEL

Harper Brown, the manager of the Europa Hotel, 1971-84, was a ‘very, very good friend’ of Mains’ and Kerr has no doubt he ‘knew what was going on there’. Kerr’s employment lasted until October 1977.

‘I met Englishmen and Americans at the Europa Hotel, where I was abused. Some of these men arranged for me to meet them in England. I was also taken to Larne many times, where I was abused at the Harbour Inn Hotel. I was also transported to Scotland from Larne and taken to the North of England and London. This happened quite often. I was taken there many times by men who were in the Orange Order. They would come up to Kincora. Two of these men did not abuse me but would take me to meet men who did.’

Kerr knew they were Orangemen from discussions with Mains.

‘When I was in Mains’ room in the late evening, and he was drinking, he would tell me about his membership of the B Specials and the men he knew in the Orange Order. I met one of these men before Kincora, and I met the other two when they came to Kincora. They would take me out to places, become intoxicated, and have conversations about the Orange Order. I remember one of them saying that he was a member of the club behind the West Circular Road. Mains would write down a false address for where I had been to cover up where they would take me.’

Kerr was probably steered in Holden’s direction because of his connections to the murky world of intelligence. Their encounters took place at the Europa hotel.

The Phoenix’s 1983 story revealed that Holden was a ‘Close friend of Howard Smith with whom he served in the U.S.’  Smith, a Foreign Office official, served as London’s contact with the Northern Ireland government, 1971-72, a post from which he oversaw British intelligence operations in Northern Ireland. Smith began his career as a code breaker at Bletchley Park during World War 2. In the late 1940s, he served as a diplomat in Washington. He rose to become the UK’s ambassador to Moscow, 1976-78, and D-G of MI5, 1978-81.

‘Murder in Cairo’ describes how an array of MI6 moles infiltrated the foreign desk of The Sunday Times. Some were recruited by Ian Fleming, a former naval intelligence officer and author of the James Bond novels. Fleming worked for the Kemsley newspaper group, which owned The Sunday Times, 1945-59.

One of Fleming’s recruits was John Slade-Baker who was assigned to Cairo with Holden.

Another Fleming recruit was Donald McCormick, The Sunday Times’s foreign department manager. McCormick once said that ‘half the foreign desk’ at The Sunday Times, were spies. ‘Murder in Cairo’ blames McCormick for pilfering telexes Holden sent to the paper just before his murder. They may have provided clues about Holden’s travel plans and, more importantly, who might have learned about them in advance.

The book reveals that the CIA believed Holden was enlisted as a KGB agent in the 1950s by his lover Leo Silberman, a French Communist. Silberman described Holden as his ‘young pet’.

Mohamed Heikal, an Egyptian minister in the Anwar Sadat regime, confessed that Egyptian spies had murdered Holden. So too did the head of the Cairo police because ‘Holden was working for the KGB’. The hit was requested by the CIA. 

Tony Terry was yet another MI6 spook at The Sunday Times. Papers discovered after his death revealed he knew who killed Holden, but suppressed it because it was too damaging to Britain.

Chapter 5.

Trafficked to Britain.

Joss Cardwell, a paedophile, was also Chairman of Belfast Corporation Welfare Committee. He was also a key figure in the Anglo-Irish Vice Ring.

Cardwell committed suicide in March 1982 after being interviewed by the RUC about Kincora.

THE BASEMENT IN LIVERPOOL WHERE 11-YEAR-OLD BOYS WERE HELD CAPTIVE.

On this occasion, Stephen Waring and Richard Kerr boarded the ferry to Liverpool. In Liverpool, they were met by Michael ‘A’. Kerr was familiar with him from Manchester, where he had been abused at the Rembrandt Hotel. Michael ‘A’ was in the company of a man called Derek.

The group headed to a premises in Liverpool near Lime Street train station. By now, it was well into the morning of the following day. The boys were ushered down a flight of steps into a basement with mattresses strewn across its floor. Approximately five other boys were being held. They were aged between 11 and 13. Kerr and Waring were kept with them for three or four hours.

A DEGRADING TRAIN JOURNEY TO LONDON.

Later that morning, Michael ‘A’ and Steven ‘J’ brought the two Kincora boys to the train station. The other – younger – boys did not travel with them.

Steven ‘J’ served the A-IVR in a number of ways, one of which was to take salacious photographs of the boys ensnared in the vice-ring. Stephen ‘J’ also knew Joe Mains and Eric Witchell.

On this trip, Kerr and Waring reached Manchester with their two escorts, alighting and switching to another train. They were confined inside a first-class compartment on the final leg of the journey, which would take them to London, and were abused by Michael ‘A’ and Steven ‘J’ en route. The abuse was perpetrated in a clandestine manner and was manual.

THE UK TV STAR.

After they reached London, the boys were separated, and Kerr was brought to the Wimpy Bar in Piccadilly Circus. Piccadilly was notorious for the presence of so-called Dilly boys, unfortunate urchins who had been groomed, bullied and manipulated into becoming male prostitutes. Kerr was escorted to the upstairs floor of the Wimpy Bar and placed behind a table. There were two men inside the Wimpy Bar who were running the Dilly Boys at the time. Kerr recalls that one of them was the late Jack Murray, a well-dressed Englishman who smoked cigars and wore glasses. He does not know who the second man was.

The adult gave Kerr £20, and he was then ushered downstairs, put back on the street and told to find his own way back to the Wimpy Bar.

The Spooks.

Although the Six Counties are considered part of the United Kingdom, and therefore fall under the jurisdiction of MI5 (attached to the Home Office), in the very early years of the troubles, Prime Minister Edward Heath ordered MI6 to Northern Ireland. Irish affairs were directed by the deputy chief of MI6 at the time, Maurice Oldfield. In June 1970, Oldfield and his colleagues arranged for William McGrath to obtain a job at Kincora despite the fact he had no qualifications for the job.

Joe Mains and McGrath, the ‘housefather’ of Kincora, were agents of MI6 and, later, MI5. They switched from MI6 to MI5 because MI5 began to dominate operations in Northern Ireland as the Troubles persisted.

McGrath spent at least ten years boasting that he was connected to British intelligence.

Officer G proceeded to describe a ‘relationship’ Oldfield had ‘had with Kincora boys’ home (KBH) in Belfast’.

Nor is there one about a friendship with any of the other staff members at Kincora.

In addition, a partially declassified MI5 telegram makes reference to the fact – as Hart put it – MI5 was ‘aware of allegations that the police suspect’ that Oldfield was involved in the Kincora scandal. Crucially, the part of the MI5 telegram which Hart published revealed that the suspicion was:

‘that Sir M. Oldfield was involved in the Kincora boys home affair in the course of occasional visits to Northern Ireland (associated with his job) between 1974 and 1979.‘

How can this admission of ‘occasional visits’ between 1974 and 1979 be squared with Hart’s conclusion of none at all?

The dates here are sloppy. Oldfield served as Chief of MI6, 1973-78, not 1974-79. He was appointed Security Co-ordinator for Northern Ireland in late 1979 and retired from that post in 1980. He definitely visited Northern Ireland as security co-ordinator, but the period 1979-80 does not fit Hart’s timeframe of ‘between 1974 and 1979’.

SIR PETER HAYMAN, THE DEPUTY CHIEF OF MI6.

The Whip and Saddle Bar.

ENOCH POWELL AT THE WHIP AND SADDLE BAR.

Long before the Kincora scandal erupted, the Whip and Saddle Bar at the Europa Hotel had become notorious as a meeting place for older men who were sexually interested in younger men. The bar was the object of ribald jokes among the international array of journalists who stayed there, including some from the Republic.

Joseph Mains, the Warden of Kincora, supplied Kerr to abusers at the hotel and, in 1977, asked his friend Harper Brown, its manager, to arrange a job for Kerr as a bellhop. As it transpired, Kerr’s real function would be to provide sexual services to men who drank at the Whip and Saddle. Enoch Powell was one of them.

One night at around 10:45 pm, a man approached Kerr while he was behind the concierge’s desk. Powell was with a group of men inside the bar. The man who approached him was a friend of Powell. He ‘definitely did not have a Northern Ireland accident’, Kerr recalls. He told him that he had a ‘gentleman’ he wanted him to meet upstairs. ‘Can you go up to see him?’ the man asked, but it was more an order than a request. He gave him the room number and told him to go up half an hour after the bar had closed. Meanwhile, Powell remained in the bar with his associates.

At the designated time, Kerr went upstairs to the room and found Powell waiting for him in it. He recognised him as the individual who had abused him in Portrush. He says he had the same distinctive accent and smiled a lot. On this occasion, he wanted masturbation and oral sex.

Kerr recalls that after Powell had finished with him, he went into the bathroom to wash the soiled towels ‘to hide evidence’. Powell stayed behind while Kerr returned to the bellhops’ station downstairs. Powell’s friend came up to him not long afterwards, saying, ‘Here’s a tip for you’, and gave him a half-crown.

Powell was playing a dangerous game. Homosexuality was outlawed in Northern Ireland, and many of his constituents would have condemned him for any hint of it. Only heterosexual sex between consenting adults was legal. Powell was acutely aware of these facts. In May 1965, he had co-sponsored an unsuccessful bill on homosexual law reform at Westminster. In 1967, he had voted for the Sexual Offences Act, which had succeeded in decriminalising homosexuality but only in England and Wales. On 13 March 1982, he would give a speech in Ilford calling for the law to be reformed in Northern Ireland (and allowing parents the right to forbid school-teachers to administer corporal punishment to their children, a mercy he had not afforded Kerr in Portrush when he had beaten him).

Kerr moved to London in the early 1980s. One night, while he was watching television, he recognised Powell on the screen at a political rally with Ian Paisley.

THE KINCORA THREAT AND THE HILLSBOROUGH AGREEMENT.

The Anglo-Irish Agreement at Hillsborough was signed on 15 November, 1985.

In early November 1985, Lobby Correspondents in London received an unattributable briefing from Margaret Thatcher’s press office claiming she had ordered the Ministry of Defence to open a fresh inquiry into Kincora. This could only have had a chilling effect on the then-Unionist leadership in NI.

Was Powell trying to find out what Wallace might have learnt about him and might yet pass to the press? As it transpired, Wallace knew nothing about his private life.

Powell was defeated in the June 1987 British general election. He died in 1998.

ENOCH POWELL’S DERANGED VIEWS ABOUT WOMEN.

Powell had bizarre views about women. When asked by broadcaster Michael Cockerell about his time as an undergraduate at Cambridge for a documentary about his life entitled Odd Man Out, he stated, ‘I had no social life as an undergraduate’. When asked about women, he responded, ‘They didn’t exist’. While he was aware of their presence:

‘I wondered what they were doing there because I didn’t think they would approach advanced learning in the same mood or manner as a man would.’

And the reason for this?

‘Because the analytical faculty is underdeveloped in women.’

Powell’s wife Pamela told Cockerell how hopeless he was at remembering women’s faces, even her own. He married her at the age of 39, and the couple went on to have two daughters. ‘We married. We had a three-week honeymoon’ and then, within four weeks, she found herself going to meet him in the Central Lobby of the House of Commons, where a number of women had gathered and ‘watched him go all the way around wondering which one he had married and been on a honeymoon with’.

Powell had several female admirers, including Margaret Thatcher, who said of him, ‘Enoch was the best parliamentarian I ever knew’.

Chapter 8.

Lord Louis Mountbatten.

STEPHEN WARING, THE KINCORA BOY AND VICTIM OF MOUNTBATTEN, WHO COMMITTED SUICIDE.

Joseph Mains trafficked boys to Lord Louis Mountbatten in Co. Sligo in the Republic of Ireland. Mountbatten took his annual holiday there each August. Mountbatten owned Classiebawn, a mock Baronial castle in Sligo.  One of the victims was Stephen Waring. He and Richard Kerr were abused by Mountbatten in August of 1977.

RICHARD KERR AND MOUNTBATTEN.

Richard Kerr accompanied Waring to Classiebawn. He spoke to me at length about it. Later, I introduced him to my friend Andrew Lownie, author of a biography of Mountbatten (published in 2019).

The abuse suffered by Stephen Waring and ‘Sean’ (as Lownie referred to Kerr – at Richard’s request) took place in a building adjacent to Classiebawn Castle.

Kerr told me that he recalled noticing a ‘weird castle’ in the distance as they neared their final destination. This is in fact a very good description of what the building looks like as it is approached. He also recalls that Mountbatten had a butler with a toupée who attended upon them before Mountbatten took Waring away first. He also vividly described his memory of seeing an oar hung on the wall of the room in which he was kept.

‘AMAL’, THE SRI LANKAN BOY LIVING IN ENGLAND WHO WAS TRAFFICKED TO MOUNTBATTEN IN IRELAND.

The FBI interviewed Elizabeth de la Poer Beresford, Baroness Decies. According to the FBI file:

‘She states that in these circles Lord Louis Mountbatten and his wife are considered persons of extremely low morals’.  [Also that he] ‘was known to be a homosexual with a perversion for young boys’.

Her opinion of him was that he was ‘an unfit man to direct any sort of military operations because of this condition’. She stated further that ‘his wife Lady Mountbatten was considered equally erratic’.

The Americans maintained their observation of Mountbatten after World War 2, especially after he became NATO commander of allied forces in the Mediterranean, then Admiral of the fleet, and later Chief of the defence staff.

NORMAN NIELD, MOUNTBATTEN’S PERSONAL DRIVER WHO WAS AWARE HE WAS ABUSING BOYS AGED 8-12.

Norman Nield, a naval rating, was Mountbatten’s personal driver between 1942-43. At the time Mountbatten was living in a large house at Fareham, Hampshire, near Portsmouth. According to Nield, Mountbatten was a ‘boy lover’ and a  ’sexual deviant’ who preyed on young boys to fulfil his bizarre sexual fantasies. An interview Nield gave to an Australian newspaper in 1987 can be read in full here: Mountbatten, the Royal who abused boys aged 8-12.

Mountbatten used brandy and lemonade to help seduce his young victims, Nield claims. ‘On several occasions I had to take it to him in his room at the house when he was with a boy,’ he said. The boys were aged from about 8 to 12.

‘On one occasion I walked in on him and he had a semi-naked boy sitting on his knees. It didn’t really shock me at this stage but L.L. [Lord Louis] was taken by surprise. He ordered me from the room and there was a fuss but next day things were back to normal’.

Nield revealed that the

‘boys [were]  always very quiet and withdrawn [and] never appeared distressed afterwards.

‘L.L. often paid me additional lump sums of money. Sometimes it was 40 pounds and on one occasion I received 100 pounds as hush money’.

MOUNTBATTEN IN SRI LANKA.

Mountbatten spent some of World War 2 in Sri Lanka. An Irish doctor lived at Mountbatten’s lodge in later years. The locals told him of the many boys brought to the residence during Mountbatten’s occupancy of the lodge.

MOUNTBATTEN AND THE UNITED WORLD COLLEGE.

In 1967, Mountbatten became the first president of the United World College (UWC). It emerged from discussions which took place at NATO’s Defence College in Paris during the Cold War.

The UWC opened its first school in Wales in 1962 with the aim of bringing ‘young people from different backgrounds’ together.

After he took over in 1967, Mountbatten expanded it into an international movement. He oversaw the foundation of national committees which selected students and promoted the UWC in other countries. UWC schools soon appeared in Singapore (1971) and Canada (1974). Prince Charles (as he was then) became president in 1978.

It is likely Mountbatten was attracted by the opportunities to meet young male UWC students through his involvement in the movement.

THE GARDA LOGS RELATING TO CLASSIEBAWN, 1977 – NOT 1979.

The Irish government has become complicit in the cover-up of British Royal sexual abuse committed in the Republic of Ireland.

Two brothers visited Classiebawn castle, Co. Sligo, as boys, in the 1970s. The brothers – who were not abused – gave an interview to The Sligo Champion during which they recalled that Classiebawn was protected by the Gardai and there was a ‘checkpoint at the gate’.

The Gardai have refused to release the logs and files they possess relating to the vehicles which visited Mountbatten in 1977.

The files were sought by Andrew Lownie and me.

At the time of the request, the logs were controlled by Garda Commissioner Drew Harris, a former MI5-RUC liaison officer.

The information provided by the brothers, John and Pat Barry, confirmed that the Gardai had a checkpoint at the gate of Classiebawn castle in August 1977.

Garda security appears – by some accounts – to have been downgraded in 1979, shortly before Mountbatten was murdered by the Provisional IRA. Hence, while there might be a question mark about the existence of comprehensive Garda logs from 1979, there are no concerns about August 1977.

The Classiebawn logs are the key to unlocking the sordid Kincora scandal and the abuse of Richard Kerr, ‘Amal’ and Stephen Waring, and possibly other victims.

This abuse took place in the Republic of Ireland.

The Gardai have shown no interest in the information at their fingertips.

As far as can be told, the Government has displayed no curiosity either.

The survivors of child sexual abuse deserve better.

There is no doubt now that the Garda have a record of the registration plates of the vehicles they stopped at the gates.

The existence of the Garda checkpoint was already an established fact, nonetheless, the confirmation by the Barrys is important as they  are living witnesses who can attest to its presence.

The Gardai emailed Lownie on 7 October 2019 stating that files ‘generated during the course of a criminal investigation’ are considered confidential and hence they would not be releasing them. It is significant that they did not deny that the logs still exist.

Lownie responded by pointing out that the logs he was looking for related to August 1977, i.e. two years prior to Mountbatten’s assassination. There could not have been an investigation of a ‘criminal’ nature in 1977 into an assassination that did not take place until 1979.

The Gardai did not – and clearly have no intention of – releasing the logs.

It would now take a very daring – not to mention corrupt – Garda or Department of Justice official, to interfere with the files.

His brother has confirmed the presence of Gardaí at the ‘checkpoint at the gate’.

Joe Mains had nothing to do with Mountbatten’s murder. The Gardaí do not suspect that he, or any guest who was ever permitted passage through the gates of Classiebawn in August 1977, conspired to murder him at any stage. The logs can be released without jeopardising an investigation into the IRA that has long since gone into hibernation.

Kerr came to the attention of the police in October 1977 over an incident involving a car. He had been in the company of some older men who had left it behind, possibly after it had sustained bumper damage. After they departed, Kerr was picked up by the RUC. An investigation into the events of that night threatened to unravel the vice ring.

THE  BOY WITH THE RED HAIR

Kincora Boys’ Home was demolished in 2022. However, one part of the complex, the ‘tool shed’ at the rear of the premises, was taken down and removed decades earlier

It concealed what I fear is the darkest of Kincora’s many black secrets, one that MI5, the RUC – and now – the PSNI, has been covering up for 50 years.

Richard Kerr told me about the shed and the horrors it concealed a number of years ago. He broke down while trying to describe his experience and was unable to finish. He has since received extensive counselling and is now able to reveal a little more about it.

THE ROTATING SAW.

The hut contained a mattress, which was used to cover a table. The mattress could be moved aside to reveal a split table beneath it. There was a mechanism on the side of the table that, when adjusted, caused a rotating saw to rise from below. A tree or a large plank of wood could have been cut on it.

Joseph Mains was in the shed with Kerr. He now decided to terrify him. He did so by warning him that if he did not do as he was bidden and keep quiet about the abuse he was suffering, he would end up like the little boy with ‘the red hair’.

Kerr touched upon this experience – fleetingly – in an affidavit he has shown me, and which is sworn by him. When I say ‘touch upon’, I mean that literally. He is still unable to address the experience without reliving the horror and backing away again. There is a lot more to emerge from this episode.

In the affidavit, he described how he was sexually abused by Joseph Mains, and that he would

‘talk to me and tell me things. He told me about a boy that had died in 1973 who he had been close to’.

More information emerged later. Mains could drink heavily. During one drunken session, he stated that he was not responsible for the boy’s death, but that he had been part of the disposal team after the boy was dismembered on the saw table in the shed.

There is only one child who fits the description of the boy with the ‘red hair’, a 10-year old called Brian McDermott. He disappeared in September of 1973.

Eric Witchell, the sadistic paedophile who abused and tortured so many boys – driving some to suicide – and who was a close friend of Mains, should be interrogated about what he knows about these events.

Joe Mains was never interviewed by the RUC about the boy’s murder, nor was his friend Alan Campbell, the RUC’s chief suspect in the case.

This is because both men were working for Britain’s intelligence services.

CHILD ABUSE WHICH ENDED IN MURDER.

There is one palpable candidate who fits the profile of the boy with the ‘red hair’ mentioned by Mains to the Kincora survivor in the shed at Kincora. His name was Brian McDermott. He was murdered in 1973.

Brian McDermott is one of Belfast’s five missing boys from the Troubles.

Mains was abusing this unfortunate child, according to what he told the Kincora boy in the tool shed at Kincora.

It was the practice of the paedophile network of which Mains was a leading figure to share boys. Mains passed boys to paedophiles such as Alan Campbell, John McKeague, Ken Larmour, William McGrath and Raymond Semple.

ALAN CAMPBELL, SUSPECTED CHILD KILLER.

Alan Campbell was born in Belfast on 7 August 1949, into a staunchly Presbyterian home. He converted to Free Presbyterian Christianity on 19 September 1965, in the Ravenhill Free Presbyterian Church after listening to a sermon by Ian Paisley. He became very close to Paisley for a long time.

Campbell’s grandmother was a British Israelite, a belief to which he subscribed, i.e., that the Protestants of Northern Ireland were one of the Lost Tribes of Israel.

William McGrath was also a British Israelite. McGrath and Paisley were British Israelites, too.

So close was Campbell to Paisley that he served on his Constitution Defence Committee (as did John McKeague, the serial killing leader of the Red Hand Commando). 

Campbell held other rather wacky notions, such as that of ‘Kingdom Identity’. This asserts that Israel, not the church, is the bride of Christ, in contradiction to the Westminster Confession of Faith.

Campbell was a founding member of Tara, the paramilitary organisation led by McGrath.

He was also a founding member of the Protestant Ulster Party (PUP), established by Paisley, which transformed into the DUP.

Campbell opposed interracial sex and marriage. In a lecture in the US, he stated that the races had separate origins and distinct biblical destinies and that black people were the ‘beasts of the field’ referred to in the Bible.  He supported apartheid in South Africa, was critical of Unionist politicians meeting Nelson Mandela and called Desmond Tutu a  ‘little black man’.

Campbell and John McKeague were key figures in the Shankill Defence Association (SDA), the forerunner to the UDA. Both were deeply violent and sadistic men. McKeague was the commander of the Red Hand Commando terror group. He enjoyed torturing and murdering Catholics in Belfast’s ‘romper rooms’. It is more than likely that Campbell joined him in some of these kidnapping and torture sessions.

Author Henry McDonald described Alan Campbell in his books as the ‘Demon Preacher’ and asserted that he was also a British Intelligence asset.

ALAN CAMPBELL AND THE ‘LOST BOYS’ DOCUMENTARY.

The Lost Boys’ documentary has linked the murder of Brian McDermott to the paedophile ring that swirled around Kincora.

The thesis put forward in the documentary is, I believe, 100% correct, namely that members of the Kincora paedophile gang kidnapped five boys.

BBC Northern Ireland commissioned The Lost Boys’. When it realised that the makers had concluded that people involved in the Kincora scandal were identified as the culprits behind the disappearance – and obvious murders – of the boys, they refused to broadcast it. Readers of this article are unlikely to see the documentary on television, at least not in the foreseeable future. It will indeed not be shown on the BBC, which is refusing to broadcast it because it does not align with the egregious Hart Report. Hart determined in his report that MI5 and MI6 had not known that the boys at Kincora were being abused.

Campbell was the chief suspect the RUC had in mind for the McDermott murder.

Campbell was a known abuser who had come to the attention of the RUC previously. On 3 November 1970, Campbell sexually assaulted a Bawnmore home resident at a flat owned by Ken Larmour, in Belfast. Larmour was another paedophile. Campbell appeared at Belfast Magistrate’s Court in May 1971. The case was dismissed after Cllr Margaret Miskimmin of Paisley’s Protestant Unionist party (PUP) gave him an alibi. Miskimmin’s evidence was nothing less that premeditated dishonesty. The RUC discovered later that Campbell had asked Miskimmin to provide him with an alibi. He was never charged with procuring false evidence.

He had another run-in with the police, but his case went missing inside the system.

Ken Larmour was the clerk to the Court. He was also a close friend of Campbell. He let Campbell use his flat to rape boys. Larmour, too, seems to have become a British agent and helped Campbell slip off the hook by manipulating court dates and losing the Campbell file.

Later, documents relating to Campbell’s crimes disappeared in an alleged bombing incident. This type of coincidence beggars belief. It is far more likely that RUC and British intelligence officers used the information to blackmail and recruit Campbell as an agent.

As demonstrated by official documents cited in ‘The Lost Boys’, Campbell threatened to kill at least one boy with a knife if he ever spoke about the sexual abuse Campbell had perpetrated upon him.

Campbell is also a suspect in the murder of the other boys in The Lost Boys’The Lost Boys’ documentary.

He led a charmed life and, after 1971, was never arrested again.

Paisley was fully aware of Campbell’s rape of children and that Miskimmin had lied to save him, and denied both of them membership of the DUP. He was otherwise content to let Campbell continue to abuse children.

Campbell left the Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster, after which he no longer promoted the views of his former friend Ian Paisley, nor his literature.

Brian left for the park at 1 p.m. It was a ten-minute walk from his home. His parents told him to return by 2:30 p.m. for his Sunday lunch. He was due to return to school the following Tuesday.

Brian was the youngest of five children (three boys and two girls). He was described as quiet, timid, and ‘very, very deep’. He was bullied quite a lot at school.

Some of his friends were playing in the park. One of them was walking his dog. He described Brian as being his normal, happy self when he bumped into him. An hour later, Brian was sitting on a swing. A friend asked him if he wanted to play. He seemed unhappy, shook his head and walked off through a gap in a wire fence towards an area of shrubs and trees.

He was never seen again.

When Brian failed to return home, his father, Edward, alerted the RUC.

The RUC searched the area close to his home, including derelict buildings.

Six days later, a witness reported having seen what appeared to be a body in a bag in the nearby River Lagan. A search led to the discovery of a hessian bag with the charred remains of Brian’s body inside it, close to the Annandale embankment. Both of his legs were missing, as well as one of his arms. His body was so severely burned that fingerprints from the hand of the remaining arm had to be used to identify his little body. The fingerprints matched those on his school books, confirming that the child was young McDermott.

COLIN WALLACE

Colin Wallace was a public relations officer serving with the British Army at its HQ at Thiepval barracks, Lisburn, (HQNI). Covertly, he had a second role: he worked for the Army’s psychological operations unit (PSYOPS). The PSYOPS arm was known as the Information Policy Unit (IPU). It was based at HQNI.

Dirty tricks were deployed in 1975 to oust Colin Wallace from his job after he had attempted to draw the media’s attention to a number of issues, including the activities of William McGrath, the paedophile housefather at Kincora Boys’ Home. McGrath, like Campbell and Mains, was a prolific and brutal child rapist.

Wallace was also profoundly concerned about the abduction and murder of Brian McDermott.

THE BRIAN McDERMOTT CHILD MURDER MEMO.

General Peter Leng commanded the British army in Northern Ireland in 1974. He was aware that McGrath and other Loyalist paramilitaries were paedophiles. He asked Col Geoffrey Hutton what would be done about it. Hutton asked Colin Wallace for a memo on the issue. On 8 November 1974, Wallace produced a memo for Hutton (hereafter ‘The Brian McDermott Child Murder Memo’). It highlighted the abuse at Kincora and at other children’s homes. One part of it focused on the horrific murder of Brian McDermott.

Had Wallace’s recommendation been accepted, the Kincora scandal might have erupted in late 1974.

WALLACE’S CLOCKWORK ORANGE NOTES AND A REFERENCE TO ‘A PROSTITUTION RING SUPPLYING BOYS TO HOTELS IN BELFAST AND BANGOR’.

Wallace has other documents which expose what was known in the mid-1970s.

The destruction of the shed at Kincora occurred shortly after the media exposed the scandal. A wealth of potential evidence was destroyed.

CAMPBELL’S SUCCESSFUL CAREER AS A SCHOOL TEACHER, PASTOR AND WRITER.

After his trouble with the RUC in 1971/2, Alan Campbell was never bothered by them again, or their successor body, the PSNI.

He was employed as a religion teacher at a school in Belfast.

He went to South Africa, where he engaged in what he called ‘missionary work’.

He went to America, where he spoke to white supremacist groups, including the Ku Klux Klan.

He wrote a successful booklet entitled ‘Five Things Every Ulster Protestant Needs to Know’. He was a prolific writer and, all told, published about 40 pamphlets.

He was the editor of the ‘Rome Watch’ pamphlet and ran his own church where he acted as a pastor.

CAMPBELL, THE LVF, ORANGE VOLUNTEERS AND PIPE BOMBING THE GAA.

Officers in MI5 and the RUC opposed the peace process in the 1990s because they believed they could yet defeat the IRA. MI5 influenced, if not fully controlled, the Loyalist Volunteer Force (LVF) through its leader, Billy Wright, one of their agents. Campbell was involved with the LVF, too. The LVF opposed the peace process.

Billy Wright and the LVF carried out assassination operations in collusion with MI5.

Campbell was present during the agitation at Drumcree when the Orange Order fought the police in their attempts to march through Nationalist communities despite a marching ban.

After the signing of the Good Friday Agreement (GFA) in 1998, Campbell, now in his early fifties, and others, including DUP politicians, set up the Orange Volunteers, an armed group opposed to the GFA (See Sunday Life: https://x.com/TheSundayLife/status/1708388955970838720?t=xWgSiVXoNLi-5HdeGJ58Mw&s=08

The Orange Volunteers carried out pipe bomb attacks on the GAA targets and the homes of nationalists in Derry and Antrim. Pastor Clifford Peeples and other OV leaders were arrested and convicted. Campbell was left alone by the RUC and MI5.

In his later years, Campbell was sometimes challenged about his role in the abuse of boys. His habit was to turn his back and rush home.

He lived in Fortwilliam Grange, north Belfast, and died a free man in 2017, aged 67. About 40 people attended his funeral in Belfast.

Significantly, Kerr has revealed that ‘John McKeague and other men’ were patrons. McKeague’s group would occupy the ‘red seats in the bar area’. Kerr would be sent to a room to await abuse.

McKeague was born in 1930 and was originally from Bushmills, County Antrim. He came to Belfast after his parents, Isabella and Thomas, moved him and his sisters from Portrush, where they had run a guesthouse.

Over time, McKeague became a sadistic sectarian serial killer with a penchant for torturing victims before finishing them off. He was also obsessed with the Occult, particularly with one of its practitioners, Evan Frederick Moran, the second Viscount Tredegar. Tredegar, who often visited Ireland, was even reputed to have been an enthusiastic and willing plaything for paedophiles at Buckingham Palace while serving there as a pageboy.

Tredegar visited Lord Louis Mountbatten at Classiebawn during some of his yachting holidays.

Author Martin Dillon has written that McKeague was

‘lean, sleazy and snake-like, his eyes slightly sunken. When he spoke, the menace was wrapped in slyness but there was no missing his capacity for sadism’.

McKeague would become close to another UVF member, Lenny Murphy, who later became infamous as the leader of the Shankill Butchers.

RICHARD KERR AND TOMMY ‘TUCKER’ LYTTLE, THE UDA’S WEST BELFAST BRIGADIER.

Lyttle was born in 1939. His son John, who became a journalist, has written that,

‘At first my father had no abiding interest in politics – it wasn’t a job requirement for machinists at Mackie’s foundry in the late Sixties – but his family was something he was fiercely protective of. The one he came from: three sisters, one brother, his adored mother and father, and the one he created and was dead centre of, as only an Irish patriarch can be: three sons, two daughters. My father and mother entered wedlock young – he was 18, Elizabeth Baird was 19 – customary at our end of the social scale. My siblings and I arrived more or less every two years – also customary’.

John Lyttle has also explained that his father was seen by his family as ‘smart, very smart’ – he did well at school and could have gone to grammar school on a scholarship but for a shortage of funds.

Lyttle became involved with the UDA after a bomb atrocity in Belfast on 11 December, 1971. John Lyttle has quoted his sister, Linda, about how their father became involved:

‘’There was an IRA bomb on the Shankill and my Ma and Elaine nearly got blown up. That started me Da off’. She hesitates, then says something that makes perfect sense. ‘Two kids were killed. The first time kids were killed. Me Da took it… personally. Don’t you remember?’‘. But, John Lyttle goes on, ‘I don’t remember. I have forgotten, or buried, much, a mountain of clippings, snapshots and unforgiven images: the gunman with the high-velocity rifle who aimed for someone else and nearly got my Da, the kidnapping that landed him on the front page of the Belfast Telegraph, a pistol to his head, midnight raids by police, various peaks and troughs as palace revolutions repetitively rocked the Ulster Defence Association. Old guard vs young turks, hardliners vs soft centres – they fall out, kill, regroup, splinter, my father somehow surviving each coup. But I instinctively know that what Linda says is true’.

By 1972, Lyttle had become a lieutenant colonel in the UDA’s ‘C’ Company, 2nd Battalion, Shankill Road. In 1973 he ran unsuccessfully for election to the Northern Ireland Assembly. In November 1974 he visited Colonel Ghaddafi in Libya. In 1975 he rose to become the Brigadier of West Belfast Brigade, the UDA’s spokesman and a member of the Inner Council. He had a virtual free hand in running UDA operations in his domain and enjoyed a very high profile.

MURDER INC, THE UDA’s INNER COUNCIL.

The Inner Council came into existence after a meeting on 15 May 1971 in the dining hall of the North Howard Street school, attended by approximately 300 representatives from various Loyalist vigilante groups across NI. The Inner Council would soon organise a network of Loyalist murder gangs.

The UDA was divided into seven brigade areas: North Belfast, East Belfast, South Belfast and West Belfast, South-East Antrim, Londonderry and the Border Counties. The brigades consisted of battalions, companies, platoons and sections. The structure was ruled over by the Inner Council, which was made up of the seven brigadiers and their various ‘staffs’. At one stage it consisted of over 50 people but was later streamlined.

Tommy Lyttle was also a ruthless and violent man. Space does not permit a description of the appalling violence meted out by the UDA to random Catholic victims in the 1970s. Davey Payne established a string of human abattoirs known as ‘romper rooms’ where random Catholics abducted from the streets were tortured and murdered, often for the amusement of drunken UDA men and their girlfriends.

As a senior UDA leader, Lyttle was one of the men who was fully aware of these atrocious murders.

Lyttle’s son knew just how violent his father could be. He has written how when he was a boy, he once searched

‘through the pockets of my father’s overcoat for loose change. We kids are not supposed to, but we do. I plunge my hand in and feel this wet, wringing wet. I drag it out. It’s a handkerchief. With an embroidered ‘T’. The linen is as red as the red hand of Ulster, soaked with blood, saturated with blood, dripping with blood. I squeeze, though I shouldn’t. The red trickles through my fingers. I watch, repelled and exhilarated. My father is in the front room. I hear football match results. He isn’t injured, hasn’t said anything about a nosebleed, a fall. He hasn’t mentioned a friend’s accident. I return the handkerchief, go to the bathroom, wash my hands’.

John Lyttle has also written about an incident when he was ‘nine or ten’:

‘The wee small hours of the morning. I come downstairs. I want a drink of water. In the front room a man is tied to a chair. He’s battered and bruised. My father is there with how many others? Three? Four? I stare until I’m noticed. What do you want?’, my father asks. “A drink of water”. “Get him a drink of water”. I continue to stare until my water is brought. I drink it on the spot. “Not so fast”, my father cautions. I hand the glass back and tread quietly back upstairs and climb into bed beside my brother Bill. By daylight, I’m certain it’s a dream. It must be: I’ve dreamt of it ever since’.

Even if it was a dream, it was exactly what Lyttle got up to in real life.

HER MAJESTY’S CHILD PIMP, TOMMY LYTTLE TRAFFICS RICHARD KERR. 

In September 1976 or thereabouts, Kerr was picked up at Kincora by two men driving a Volkswagen. Since the men used the front compartment boot for storage, they were undoubtedly driving a VW Beetle. Kerr was put in the front passenger seat. He was 15-years-old.

The two men drove to a hotel on the Antrim coastline which overlooked the sea. Kerr recalls that it was like a ‘big old house’ with stone statues of ‘lions or other animals at the front of it with a country road leading up to it’. His driver was called Eddie, and the trip seemed to him to have taken a few hours. After the group reached the hotel, Kerr was left waiting in the lobby while the men went to look for another man. After about 20 minutes, they returned with Lyttle and the group set out in the Volkswagen again for another destination. The men addressed Lyttle as ‘Tommy’ openly in front of Kerr. Indeed, it would have been pointless to try to disguise Lyttle’s identity due to his high profile.

Kerr was supplied with several glass bottles of Coca-Cola that had been spiked. The effect of the liquid – whatever it contained – was to render him drowsy. He soon ‘felt out of it but not fully out of it’ and began to drift ‘out of reality like being hypnotised’.

When they reached their destination – a hotel in the ‘middle of nowhere’ – it was still daytime. There was a field to the rear of it. He recalls seeing ‘cows and sheep’ around it. He believes it may have been near Newtownabbey. Kerr was ushered to a small room where he was handed over to an abuser, a man in his 30s with a Northern Ireland accident who used Northern slang words. Despite his drowsiness, Kerr knew full well what was going to happen to him next. The man asked him to take off his clothes and ‘things like that’. The rape ordeal that ensued lasted between three and five hours with breaks in between during which Kerr was provided with a sandwich and taken out of the room. Sometimes his abusers gave him gifts to assuage their guilt or in a sick attempt to ingratiate themselves with him. This man gave him nothing.

It was dark by the time the nightmare ended. Kerr was then driven back to Kincora. No stops were made on the return journey. They got back to Kincora at approximately 9.30 pm. Kerr re-entered the premises through the front door and went into the TV room. A number of boys were present. William McGrath, the ‘housefather’ was on duty. The Warden, Joe Mains, who lived at Kincora, was also present. Neither of them asked him a single question about where he had been.

TOMMY’S GOON SHOW.

Kincora was a brutal institution. In addition to being passed around to depraved perverts, Kerr was also bullied by some of his fellow residents.

Some of the friction arose because he was allowed out between Thursday and Sunday, although this invariably meant he was subjected to sexual attacks. Kerr must have mentioned this during his road trip with Lyttle, because the UDA brigadier sent down two of his ‘goons’ to intimidate the boys who were making life a misery for him at Kincora.

Both Mains and McGrath were present when the ‘goons’ bounded in but did nothing to stop them. The intruders set about terrorising Kerr’s tormentors. Witnesses to the event are still alive. After the intrusion by the two ‘goons’, even McGrath became wary of Kerr. This says a lot, as McGrath was someone prepared to commit murder. McGrath was close to Davey Payne – the man who had invented the ‘romper room’ system – and once asked him to kill Roy Garland, the former Deputy Leader of Tara. He wanted Garland killed because Garland had begun to talk about McGrath’s abuse of boys in 1973.

THE ENGLISHMAN WITH THE SUEDE FLARES.

Kerr encountered Tommy Lyttle on one further occasion. Once again he was taken from Kincora to a hotel. This time he was escorted by the two ‘goons’ who had barged into Kincora. Their destination was a bar where they linked up with Lyttle. This time Kerr was destined for a man from the North of England whom he had never met before. He described him as a ‘nice person’; someone who was ‘well-dressed’ in a fashionable pair of flared trousers. The flares were made from suede. He remembers this vividly as he got to touch them after the man asked him to remove his trousers as part of the ritual of the abuse of that day.  Afterwards, Lyttle and his ‘goons’ returned him to Kincora.

THE WHIP AND SADDLE BAR AT THE EUROPA HOTEL.

Harper Brown, the manager of the Europa, was a friend of Joe Mains, the Warden of Kincora and let Mains bring boys to the hotel to be abused by VIPs such as Enoch Powell MP and visiting journalists.

Kerr would encounter the UDA ‘goons’ again at the ‘Whip and Saddle’ Bar in the Europa Hotel in Belfast, where Mains often brought him to be abused and later secured him a job through his friend Harper Brown, the then manager of the hotel.

The man with the flared trousers turned up at the hotel on at least one night.

The Whip and Saddle was well known in journalistic circles as a venue frequented by Unionist politicians with a sexual interest in juvenile males. Some of the journalists – including some from the Republic – made ribald jokes about the venue, especially by reference to its name.

Kerr would also meet the UDA ‘goons’ at a Loyalist drinking den in Belfast.

THE GIRTON LODGE HOTEL

Lyttle also socialised at the Girton Lodge hotel, which was a short walk from Kincora Boys’ Home. Richard Kerr was abused by John McKeague, a notorious Loyalist killer, at the Girton on three or four occasions. Kerr would receive a phone call ordering him to go down to it, and would then walk down and arrive in about six minutes. There was a reception area on the ground floor with a small corridor off it, which had rooms. The abuse took place in these rooms. There was also a bath at the venue. Kerr was given alcohol prior to the abuse he suffered at it.

McKeague, Lyttle and their associates would gather at the hotel. There was an area where cars could park out of sight from the road. All the abuse took place on the lower level.

There is no suggestion that Lyttle himself was an abuser. Indeed, no one has ever made any such claim. He presumably mixed with the likes of McKeague for networking and intelligence-gathering purposes, which suited both his UDA and MI5 associates.

Colin Wallace, the PYSOPS officer at British Army HQ NI, was aware of some of what was going on at the Girton and other hotels. Wallace wrote up and submitted this information to his superiors at British Army HQ Northern Ireland in 1974, seeking clearance to disclose it to the press. A second hotel was the Park Avenue, and a third was The Queens Court. One of the reasons General Peter Leng, one of the most senior British Army officers in Northern Ireland in the 1970s, became worried about the Kincora allegations in 1974 was that he had been told that Kincora inmates were being lured into the UDA’s paramilitary activities. He was also aware that the two hotels where allegedly paedophile activities were taking place were used as meeting places by the Leadership of East Belfast UDA. He was also aware that the Girton and Park Avenue were used as meeting places by the East Belfast UDA. Indeed, the UDA had an office approximately three blocks away.

Was Tommy Lyttle one of the sources of information that reached HQ Northern Ireland about these hotels?

In September 1975, Wallace was disciplined for allegedly passing a restricted document to a journalist. During his disciplinary hearing, he wrote to his former boss at Army HQ Northern Ireland, referring to ‘attempts made by the Security Service to discredit various Loyalist politicians, including the Rev Ian Paisley, by linking MPs with Loyalist paramilitary figures involved in homosexual prostitution at children’s homes in Belfast’. Wallace gave copies of these documents to the Hart Inquiry in 2016, but it ignored them. Hart reported in 2017 and concluded that the State did not know about the abuse at Kincora.

Joe Mains was involved in paedophile activities at these hotels too. William McGrath lived very close to it.

TOMMY LYTTLE, A HINT OF REGRET?

John Lyttle, who is gay, has written about the moment when his father ‘sat on my bed, weeping. I had just reiterated the fact of my sexuality, and my reward was deep and sore sobbing’. The revelation would contribute towards a ‘distance’ between father and son.

Tommy Lyttle’s reaction might have been prompted in part by a measure of guilt about the sexual assaults perpetrated by older men on juvenile males, in which he was complicit.

Chapter 12.

The Trip to Venice.

KERR AND DONALD TRUMP’S SLEAZY LAWYER ROY COHN.

Roy Cohn was another of Richard Kerr’s abusers.

Cohn was a cheating, corrupt, tax-dodging, cocaine-snorting New York lawyer. After Donald Trump was elected US President in 2016, Cohn’s career came under the spotlight once more. He was credited with instilling in Trump a ruthless, amoral, and deceitful approach to life.

Cohn once admitted that he would do anything to ensure his clients prevailed in their legal battles. ‘There isn’t anything I would not do, because I believe there is only one answer in an adversarial profession like law, and that is winning.’

Cohn had some alarming connections to the Mafia, CIA and other intelligence services.

The gangster Joseph Bonanno was one of Cohn’s clients. His son Bill told a US TV documentary in 1996 that Cohn had incriminating pictures of FBI boss Edgar J. Hoover in a dress, which he used to blackmail him and prevent federal investigations into his clients. While the allegation about the photograph of Hoover in the dress has gained wide traction, it sounds fanciful. Nonetheless, there may be an element of truth to the story, namely that Hoover, who was gay, may have been subjected to blackmail by the Mafia and Cohn, inter alia, over his relationship with his boyfriend Clyde Tolson.

James Angleton, a towering figure at the CIA, was also reputed to have possessed blackmail material on Hoover.

What is certain is that Hoover failed to deploy the FBI against organised crime, on the basis that he believed it did not exist.

The revelation that Cohn was involved in paedophile rings was made in print in 1992, when John W. De Camp published a book called ‘The Franklin Cover-Up’, in which he described several child abuse rings in the US, including one that supplied children to political VIPs and was run by the CIA. De Camp’s book has never gone out of print. A second edition was published in 1996 and reprinted in 2001, 2005 and 2006.

In the 2006 edition, on page 179, the author described the role of Robert Grey,  a child trafficker from the Watergate era. Grey and a CIA agent called Edwin Wilson were involved in blackmail operations which exploited vulnerable children. According to the former CIA officer and whistleblower, Frank Terpil, CIA blackmailing operations involving paedophiles were intensive in Washington at the time of the Watergate scandal. Wilson ran one of them. Terpil told De Camp that:

Historically, one of Wilson’s [CIA] jobs was to subvert members of both houses [of Congress] by any means necessary … Certain people could be easily coerced by living out their sexual fantasy in the flesh … A remembrance of these occasions [was] permanently recorded via selected cameras… The technicians in charge of filming … [were] TSD [Technical Services Division of the CIA]. The unwitting porn stars advanced in their political careers, some of [whom] may still be in office.

According to De Camp, the blackmail operation was run by Roy Cohn. He quotes the former head of the vice squad for one of America’s biggest cities, who told him that:

 Cohn’s job – say you had an admiral, general, or congressman who did not want to go along with the programme, Cohn’s job was to set them up, then they would go along. Cohn told me that himself.

This revelation helps make sense of Cohn’s exploitation of Richard Kerr. Kincora was part of a paedophile network that MI5 and MI6 exploited for nefarious purposes, including the collection of ‘kompromat’ and blackmail material. MI5, MI6 and the CIA were – and remain – allies. These organisations cooperated in various blackmail operations during the Cold War. Some were designed to control politicians, senior NATO military figures and other VIPs.

All of this raises the strong possibility that the CIA has files on MI5 and MI6 operations that involved the exploitation of children. While there is little to no chance that MI5 and MI6 will ever admit their role in the Kincora scandal, a CIA file may yet emerge to expose the truth.

The horrific Marc Dutroux child murder and sexual abuse scandal in Belgium involved a VIP vice ring which was probably linked to a CIA-MI6-NATO blackmail operation designed to control and reward influential Belgian figures and ensure they supported NATO policy. Similar operations undoubtedly took place in France, Germany and other Western countries.

The publication of De Camp’s book in 1992 also raises the strong possibility that Trump has known about Cohn’s role as a child trafficker for decades. Yet, Trump still sings Cohn’s praise.

One of Cohn’s links to this sordid world was a Texan living in London called Fred Ferguson, who was also a paedophile. Another probable connection was Dr Morris Fraser, a psychiatrist from Northern Ireland. In 1977, Cohn and Ferguson gained access to Richard Kerr, the boy from Northern Ireland, through this sprawling transatlantic paedophile network.

On this particular occasion, Kerr was introduced to some Americans in the bar. One of them did not give his correct name, but was in fact Roy Cohn, perhaps the most famous US lawyer of the second half of the twentieth century and the mentor of the then youthful Donald Trump.

He was there with two other Americans, Fred Ferguson and Daniel S.

Daniel S’s father owned a company in Wichita Falls, Texas, that supplied parts to the oil industry.

Two weeks later, Mains ordered Kerr to take a ferry to Liverpool – presumably on the ‘Ulster Monarch’ – where Ferguson and Daniel S were waiting for him. They took a train to London. Ferguson left Kerr with Daniel S, who took him to the Bonaparte restaurant at the Napoleon Club, on Lancashire Place in London. Kerr was kept in London overnight, or perhaps two nights at a guesthouse.

The traffickers were now joined by two vice-ring enforcers: Mike Anderson, from Manchester and Stephen Jackson.

Ferguson re-joined the group, which ultimately consisted of Kerr, Ferguson, Daniel S, Anderson and Jackson. They headed to the coast by train, presumably to Dover, from where they crossed the Channel by ship. After that, ‘I was put on another train and [we] went through Europe then I ended up in Venice’.

Even though the trafficking of Kerr across Britain and Europe and back again involved four adult males, Anthony Hart, a self-proclaimed ‘lazy’ retired judge, denied the existence of a vice ring of any sort in his execrable 2017 report on Kincora.

Cohn was waiting for Kerr in Venice at the world-renowned Gritti Palace Hotel, at a glass table. Richard Kerr was struck by the marble floor and majestic pillars close to the ballroom. Cohn ‘didn’t talk too much [and] just took me up to the room and we had an encounter’. He learned his correct name later. ‘I believe that I was there three or four days’.

Ferguson also abused Kerr in Venice.

The Americans did not take Kerr to see any of the city’s sights as a treat. He did, of course, get to pass by many of them. The Americans had only one purpose in mind for him: sexual abuse.

The two British enforcers were present to make sure he did not cause any trouble, i.e., he did not run away, talk to strangers or go to the police.

Presumably, the two British enforcers were also brought along to coerce Kerr with physical violence if he refused to submit to Cohn and Ferguson’s sexual demands. However, Kerr had become conditioned to sexual abuse over the previous seven years. He had first been raped in the night while he clutched a child’s toy in his bed in Williamson House.

There were other reasons why Kerr was compliant. At around the time of the trip to Venice, he had been subjected to what amounted to a death threat by Joe Mains.

Kerr was also abused by a string of terrifying and violent men. Foremost among them was John McKeague, the notorious UVF/Red Hand Commando terrorist and serial killer. McKeague was a friend of Mains and a sadistic sexual abuser.

Kerr had also been bullied by older boys at Kincora.

In the event violence was not necessary to force him submit to the demands of Cohn and Ferguson, and he was subjected to days of incessant rape whenever the whim took the Americans.

During the trip to Venice, Kerr was taken through Switzerland, where the travelling party stopped over for approximately four hours.

A photograph of Richard Kerr taken during the stop in Switzerland is reproduced below. It was taken at Thun on the Aarequai, Switzerland. The former Hotel Beau Rivage appears to the left of the lamppost. The large building on the right in the picture was the Thunerhof, now the site of the city administration offices and the Art Museum. (Thank you to Richard Maurer for these details.)

A string of failed official reports into the Kincora scandal can now be discounted, namely {i} Terry Inquiry (failed due to deceit by its author); {ii} Hughes Inquiry (the terms of reference were secretly neutered by Thatcher’s Northern Ireland Secretary James Prior); {iii} the 2017 Hart Inquiry/HIA (led by a ‘lazy’, biased, disdainful and negligent judge who was out of his depth and lacked attention to detail); and {iv} the sterile Jay/IICSA farce which displayed an inexplicable lack of interest in examining evidence relevant to its terms of reference. None of these futile probes talked to Richard Kerr or other key witnesses. Many witnesses refused to cooperate with these inquiries due to well-founded concerns about trust and confidence.

If you were to read the error-strewn Hart Report, you would be led to believe that Kerr was in Kincora throughout 1975-1977 and never set foot in Britain, let alone Venice. In this regard, the reader is directed to the photograph of Kerr in front of Westminster, London, which was also taken while he was meant to have been in care in Belfast.

The Westminster picture was broadcast on television before Hart produced his report. He simply ignored it as it did not suit his perverse agenda, i.e., that the only abuse suffered by Kincora boys was that perpetrated at the home by the three staff members.

Clarence Fred Ferguson is the man in the photographs above and below. The one below was taken in Venice during Richard Kerr’s 1977 trip to the city.

He was born in March 1926, so he was 51 when he went to Venice. He went to Breckenridge High School in Texas and later served in the US Army. He earned a degree in chemical engineering from Texas Tech University. In 1952, he went to work for Marathon Oil Company and relocated to Houston; thereafter, to Michigan, Ohio and Alaska. After becoming Marathon’s UK Engineering Manager, he lived in London.

Perhaps some readers will know more about his private life, especially his friendship with Cohn and his relationship with figures in the Conservative and Labour parties during his time in the UK in the 1970s to 1990s, including whether he made donations to them on behalf of Marathon Oil.

In the 1980s, Ferguson set Kerr up in a flat at 44 Baker Street in London. For the avoidance of confusion, this was after Kerr had left Kincora and was living in London.

On one occasion, Ferguson gave Kerr a cashmere jacket from an Austin Reid outlet near the Piccadilly Hotel in London, which, he explained, was a present from Cohn.

By this stage in his life, Richard had come to see his abusers as ‘sharks’ and ‘dolphins’. He had abandoned any hope of an everyday life and now resolved that, having been thrown into the water, he was going to swim with the ‘dolphins’ rather than the sharks. It is a sad indictment of the world in which he lived that he viewed Ferguson in a benevolent light, as a ‘dolphin’.

Ferguson retired in 1986 and returned to Texas. Richard followed him, having decided Dallas looked like an attractive place to live from the TV soap opera ‘Dallas’, especially the scenes where the Ewings raised horses. Cohn helped make the arrangements for his relocation. Cohn advised Ferguson to secure the help of Richard S. Goldstein’s law office, a New York immigration specialist. Goldstein and his associates were professionals with no connection to the wrongdoing described in this article and were merely providing an expert service in a perfectly proper manner.

Kerr was flown from London to New York City for two weeks to handle the necessary paperwork.

A member of Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet, Leon Brittan, helped Kerr obtain documentation to travel to the US.

After New York, Kerr returned to London, where he was instructed to meet someone at the back of the American Embassy. He then received his immigration papers at the US embassy in London.

Kerr went to live in Dallas. Ferguson and Daniel S became fixtures in Richard’s life. Richard was with Daniel S when he died at the Royal Hospital in Dallas. He never married.

Cohn was a ruthless and amoral lawyer. He graduated from Law School at the age of 20. He was involved in the prosecution of the nuclear spies, Ethel and Julian Rosenberg. After they were convicted, he requested the Court to hand down a death sentence. They were both electrocuted. One of his ploys had been to prosecute Ethel Rosenberg, although he knew she was innocent of espionage. He gambled that he could use her life as a bargaining chip to get her husband to spill the beans on others who were involved in his actions. Cohn knew full well that Ethel Rosenberg was not a Russian spy.

In other words, a perfectly innocent woman was electrocuted due to his machinations. It has since emerged that Cohn also deployed forged documents, perjury and other perversions of justice to secure her false conviction.

Cohn also worked with J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI and was recommended by him to join Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Senate subcommittee, where he participated in aggressive witch hunts of left-wing activists and homosexuals. Indeed, throughout his life, Cohn opposed all civil rights reforms in the area of homosexuality.

His stint with McCarthy ended in ridicule due to his erratic behaviour after his boyfriend was conscripted into the US Army. Cohn next established a lucrative private legal career in his hometown of New York. There, he acted on behalf of Donald Trump. Cohn is on record as having described Trump as ‘a genius’. At one point, he wanted him to become America’s lead nuclear-arms negotiator with the Soviet Union. Many of his aggressive tactics can be discerned in Trump’s political modus operandi, most recently over the war between Russia and Ukraine.

Cohn was also a supporter of Republican leaders, including the future president Ronald Reagan.

Cohn was the lawyer of choice for the Mafia and drug cartels operating in North America.

Cohn’s links to the Mafia enabled Donald Trump to construct Trump Tower out of poured concrete as opposed to building a metal-based structure. Many of Trump’s competitors did not use poured concrete because the industry was controlled by organised crime. Yet in this instance, Cohn’s ties to the gangsters enabled Trump to secure an affordable deal with them.

Cohn denied during television interviews that he was suffering from AIDS and continued to enjoy the company of his male lovers, thereby exposing them to the disease.

The two documentaries mentioned earlier are worth watching to glean an understanding of the man. In the sequence about his sexual habits in ‘Where’s My Roy Cohen’, it is revealed that there ‘were rumours that he was picking up male prostitutes all around [New York] city’.

There is a strong possibility that Cohn was put in contact with Joe Mains, the Warden of Kincora, or at least told about the children available at the home, by Dr Morris Fraser, a member of a number of paedophile rings, including at least one in New York. In addition, Cohn may have known about the existence of the abuse network in Northern Ireland through his connections to the intelligence services (discussed in section 11 of this article). A third possibility is that his friend Fred Ferguson heard about the boys available in Belfast from a member of the Anglo-Irish vice ring in London and organised their trip to Belfast.

In the 1970s, Fraser enjoyed a high profile as a highly respected child psychiatrist in Belfast. He published a book analysing the effect of the Troubles on children, ‘Children in Conflict’. Under the radar, he abused boys in Ireland, the UK and the US.

Fraser was part of an incredibly powerful paedophile network that had many of the children in care in Northern Ireland in its grip. Cllr. Joss Cardwell, a one-time Stormont MP, was chairman of Belfast’s Welfare Department, which ran all the homes in the city and was in a position to place paedophiles into them. No doubt he had counterparts across the North. Cardwell committed suicide after he was interviewed by the police about child abuse.

At a loftier political level, James Molyneaux MP (the Leader of the dominant Official Unionist Party), Enoch Powell MP (one-time contender for leadership of the Tory Party), and a string of other MPs at Westminster were involved. One of the Tory MPs had been a serious contender for the leadership of the Conservative Party as Ted Heath’s star waned. This man held a mesmeric intellectual sway over Margaret Thatcher and served in her cabinet in a department which dealt extensively with children.

The Irish branch of the child vice network could also rely on the Northern Ireland Office (NIO) to intervene if a threat emerged. The officials at the NIO – on the security side – were MI5 and MI6 officers who had control over the Royal Ulster Constabulary and enjoyed multiple links to Loyalist terror groups. These terrorists were engaged in the collusive murder of Irish Republican paramilitaries (IRA and INLA) with the British Army and MI5. In other words, if it ever became necessary to have someone threatened or even murdered, the apparatus was in place at the NIO to achieve this. One of their agents was John McKeague, a terrorist who had plenty of blood on his hands. Ironically, he was murdered by MI5 agents inside the INLA, a Republican paramilitary organisation, after he threatened to spill the beans about what he knew about the vice ring.

Fraser’s role in protecting the vice ring was more subtle. When children who were being abused made complaints or began to behave in a troubled manner, they were sometimes sent to him. Instead of identifying that they were being abused, he would conceal what was going on. Fraser was the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time. Had the Terry, Hughes or Hart inquiries conducted their investigations properly, we might know how many of the victims of child abuse who visited Fraser were denied the appropriate intervention, and, worse again, how many went on to commit suicide.

As a psychiatrist, Fraser knew that suicide was a likely eventual outcome of his behaviour.

Fraser is therefore complicit in the death of a number of his patients.

Fraser even abused the children who attended him as patients. In 1971, when Richard Kerr was about 10 and a resident at Williamson House, he was taken to Fraser’s clinic at the Royal Victoria Hospital along with his sister. On a second visit, he was alone. ‘He asked me to stand up and take my shorts down. For some reason, within a minute, he had some sort of Polaroid camera. He started taking shots. He said not to worry – he’s a doctor. But I felt embarrassed.’

Fraser’s mistake was to abuse children outside of the North. Perhaps the NIO-MI5/6-RUC safety net in Belfast gave him false confidence. He was arrested for child abuse in London in May 1972. Damage limitation became the order of the day. He was given a mere three-year conditional discharge, which let him resume his career uninterrupted.

He was arrested again in New York in May 1973 as part of an eight-man child abuse ring. He pleaded guilty to the abuse of three boys in February 1974 in Suffolk County, New York. Again, he was conditionally discharged and deported. Again, the high contracting parties from MI5 and their associates appear to have stepped in to save him. Fraser should have been, but was not, brought back before a UK court for breaching the terms of his May 1972 three-year conditional discharge.

Fraser now lives in Holland, or did so until recently. He may still have the photographs of the young Richard Kerr in his possession as part of a library of sick child pornography, a pervert like him drools over. His legacy will be that of a child molester who was part of a violent paedophile underworld that destroyed countless lives, some by suicide and the murder of 10-year-old Brian McDermott in 1973.

By 2016, Fraser’s profile was so high that even Judge Hart was unable to ignore his existence. Instead, Hart included what purported to be a commentary about Fraser in his risible 2017 report. It was based on various documentary sources and contained several fundamental factual errors. Dr Niall Meehan of Griffith College has carried out a forensic dissection of Hart’s sloppy analysis of Fraser. He has pointed out that Hart, ‘ignored evidence that from 1971- 73 an accused and then convicted serial child-abuser named Dr Morris Fraser continued to work with vulnerable institutionalised children. The [Hart] Inquiry also refused to examine how and why police protected the internationally-known child psychiatrist from exposure and from professional censure, for a year after he was found guilty of abuse’.

Dr Meehan’s critique of Hart’s ‘error-strewn commentary’ on Fraser can be read at:  https://villagemagazine.ie/stormont-should-correct-hiai-report-to-reflect-police-paedophile-delinquency/

Fraser and the others mentioned above are still alive. Professor Jay of the IICSA did not talk to them either. Overall, she appears to have little or no appreciation of the existence of a VIP Anglo-Irish Vice Ring, let alone its exploitation by the intelligence services of the UK, despite a mountain of available evidence. All of the material in this article, most particularly the photographs and financial statements, could have been made available to her.

Had Professor Jay engaged in the inquiry process appropriately, she would have been provided with financial statements showing the staggering level of funding that Ferguson put Kerr’s way, perhaps with contributions from other members of the vice ring after he went to Dallas. Ferguson also bought him a house and started transferring considerable sums of money into his bank account, perhaps with contributions from other members of the vice ring. The sums dispersed were truly jaw-dropping. Unfortunately, Kerr and his friends gambled it all away virtually. Still, the records of the transfers and deposits exist.

Ferguson continued to fund Kerr up to his death in Texas on 26 August, 1995. All of this is traceable.

Ferguson died a bachelor.

Outlined below are a sample of the financial statements that could have been furnished to Prof Jay for analysis by her forensic accounts:

Ferguson was a wealthy man who never married or had children. He was employed at a senior level by Marathon Oil for most of his working life and accumulated a large amount of stock in the company. The company is still in existence. Its revenue in 2019 was 5.063 billion dollars; 5.902 billion in 2018. Ferguson was clearly a wealthy man, but just how wealthy? In Texas, he gave Richard Kerr staggering sums in the region of $1,169,233 and $1,432,064, among other donations. Was he that rich, or did others contribute? It is quite likely that Ferguson was joined by other wealthy figures who wanted to get Kerr out of the UK and were prepared to finance a new life for him. At the time, panic was rising inside the British Establishment over Kincora, especially at MI5 and Buckingham Palace. The threat to the Palace was acute: journalists in Dublin were inquiring into Lord Mountbatten’s role in the affair with the whistleblower Robin Bryans and would eventually name Mountbatten in ‘Now’ magazine as a member of the Anglo-Irish rape gang. Richard Kerr, for one, certainly believes there was a group that financed his life in the US because of a fear that he would speak publicly about what he knew about Kincora and the various vice rings that overlapped with it.

Cohn’s criminality eventually went too far, and he was disbarred from practising law. His crimes included fraud and theft from his clients.

He continued to deny his homosexuality. He was also dying of AIDS.

After all this, his so-called friends, including Trump, deserted him.    

Trump, however, let another child abuser with political and ‘intelligence’ connections into his life, Jeffrey Epstein.

Chapter 13.

Richard Kerr Exposes Kincora. The State Conceals the True Depth of the scandal.

SOCIAL WORKERS BLOW THE WHISTLE.

Two of Richard Kerr’s social workers became aware of what was going on and tried to get the authorities in Belfast to intervene, but they met a blank wall because of abusers like Joshua Cardwell. He was Chairman of Belfast Corporation’s Welfare Committee, which was responsible for Kincora. He was also a friend of Mains. Another key figure was a legal official who helped suppress the scandal, also an associate of Mains.

Kerr’s social workers – who are still alive – furnished details about the abuse to Peter McKenna of the Irish Independent. It took a while but he eventually exposed the scandal in January 1980. By this time, Kerr had been trafficked to England by Eric Witchell.

Kerr had become a serious threat to the cover-up of the truth about Kincora. One solution would have been to have had him murdered. Howard Smith, the then Director- General of MI5, was – according to UK declassified files – an advocate of political assassination (See Congo CIA. ). John McKeague would have been an ideal choice as a hit man. However, Kerr’s murder would have caused too many waves because he had crossed paths with so many VIPs who hardly wanted the police knocking on their doors. In the end, the conspirators opted to spirit him out of the country.

GEORGE CASKEY.

The RUC covered up the Kincora scandal. The RUC’s chief investigator into Kincora was George Caskey, who was ordered to hide the truth. Yet, he was so repulsed by what he discovered that he leaked information to the BBC Northern Ireland investigative journalist Chris Moore. Caskey told Moore that two senior Northern Ireland Office (NIO) officials, Peter England and John Imrie, abused children at the home.

THE TERRY REPORT

An outside police force was asked to conduct an inquiry into Kincora. Sir George Terry of the Sussex police agreed to do the job. He gave the police, intelligence and security forces a clean bill of health.

He was unable to distinguish between homosexuals and paedophiles.

He implied that boys like Richard Kerr had enjoyed being raped.

According to paragraphs 30 and 31 of Sir George’s report

‘In homosexual offences, however, the victim is usually embarrassed and frequently feels some personal guilt or shame, but in a few cases also shares a measure of sexual satisfaction or pleasure.

‘As a consequence victims of homosexual acts are considerably less likely to make a formal complaint and even less inclined to tell others what had occurred; often even close friends of victims will be unaware of the offences committed because the victims will want to conceal from them ‘their guilty secret’.

The Terry report is still mentioned favourably by commentators who wish to support the British government line that the only abuse perpetrated at Kincora was that of the staff; moreover, that no agency of the British government was aware of what was taking place at the home.

The Terry Report (1983) has resurfaced despite claims that all copies of it had been destroyed. Click the following link for more about Sir George Terry and to download his report: The deceitful Terry Report into Kincora has not disappeared. It was written by the late Sir George Terry, the corrupt former Chief Constable of the Sussex Police. It concerns the squalid Kincora child rape scandal. It was meant to have been destroyed. A copy survives, albeit with some redactions. Throughout the document, Terry equates child rape with what he describes as the ‘crime’ of ‘homosexuality’.

Chapter 14.

The role played by Ian Paisley in the cover-up.

PAISLEY AND VALERIE SHAW.

A lot of people now had a lot to fear. One of those whom the media focused on was Dr Ian Paisley MP, leader of the Democratic Unionist Party. Paisley, who served as First Minister of Northern Ireland (NI) from 2007 to 2008, was aware of the sexual abuse of boys at Kincora Boys’ Home in the 1970s. He later threatened Kerr, warning him to stay silent about Englishmen who abused him.

Paisley was told about Kincora by Valerie Shaw, who served as secretary of the ‘missionary council’ of his church, on 28 October 1973, but must have known all about it far earlier. See also: The DUP, God’s Soldiers. [WebBook]

Shaw denounced Paisley at a press conference in 1982: ‘I approached Dr Paisley on at least seven occasions’, she said.

‘I asked him time and time again what he intended to do about this. My concern all along was very much for the fact that there were young boys under the threat of this man’s corruption’.

The man she was referring to was William McGrath, the ‘Housefather’ at Kincora, and a long-time associate of Paisley. Some of the RUC officers who investigated Kincora came to refer to him as ‘The Beast’. What has now emerged is that Paisley also participated in the cover-up of the scandal in the early 1980s. Many of the residents at Kincora were raped by McGrath, Joseph Mains and Raymond Semple, all of whom were convicted in December 1981. Others got away. These included Paisley’s former bodyguard, John Dunlop McKeague, a sadistic Loyalist paramilitary serial killer. Another was Pastor Willie Mullan, an Evangelical friend of Paisley. Paisley conceded that Valerie Shaw had informed him about McGrath’s reign of terror, although not that he worked at Kincora.

‘Yes, she did say – she made accusations against Mr McGrath – and she based these on the evidence of Mr ‘X’. When I met Mr ‘X’, he would not meet Mr McGrath and I of course did the only thing I could do: I put (sic) Mr McGrath from taking part in an Orange [Order] service in my church. He wasn’t a member of my church, but I took that discipline immediately, and I regret Miss Shaw didn’t go to the police’

Shaw, however, had gone to the RUC but had received no help.

Shaw also informed two senior figures at the Church who warned her Paisley would ‘destroy’ her if she persisted in her campaign.

Shaw’s efforts to engage Paisley lasted a year and a half, after which she left his church in disgust.

Belying the distance Paisley alleged he placed between himself and McGrath, Paisley went on to officiate at the wedding of McGrath’s daughter, Elizabeth, on 22 January 1976. It should be stressed that Ian Paisley was not a child abuser. However, his actions were motivated by other factors, none of which can have been benign.

MR. ‘X’

Mr X was Roy Garland, who had served in Tara, a paramilitary organisation led by McGrath. As part of his mission to expose McGrath, Garland also informed Brian Gemmell, a conscientious British military intelligence officer, about Kincora. The information was passed along the line to Ian Cameron of MI5, who ordered Gemmell to abandon his inquiries. Cameron gave this order because MI5 was blackmailing some of the Kincora abusers and exploiting their heinous behaviour in other ways.

THE RUC PERVERTS THE COURSE OF JUSTICE.

Kerr has revealed how,

‘detectives from the RUC also interviewed me in January of 1980 in Preston, Lancaster. I was taken out of the place and threatened when they got me to the police station. Because of their threats, I was scared to tell them anything. I kept my mouth shut, knowing that the abusers I met were still in contact with me, and the police put me in a cell and made me feel that I was responsible for what happened, as if I was the guilty person’.

Kerr later moved to London where other detectives – this time not from the RUC – visited his home,

‘and did the same thing. They intimidated me and wanted me to not speak any more about what happened. So you can understand why I was scared because they always tried to make me feel I was responsible. I knew too much about what was going on, and the people that were involved – who I became afraid of’.

THE BELL HOP AT THE CUMBERLAND HOTEL

In London, Kerr secured work as a ‘bellhop’ at the Cumberland Hotel near Marble Arch. As pressure mounted around the Kincora scandal in the early 1980s, the people behind the cover-up adopted a carrot-and-stick policy to contain Kerr. As a carrot, his financial security was assured: he could afford to live in Flat Number 1, 44 Baker St, around the corner from Oxford Street. Kerr has documentation which confirms he lived there. There was no conceivable way a teenage ‘bell hop’ from Belfast could have afforded such a desirable residence without considerable financial assistance.

By way of a stick, the intimidation continued: a group of men came to his flat at 44 Baker St. Some were in police uniform, others in civilian clothing. They knocked him to the ground, told him that they were from the British ‘Secret Service’ and that he was to keep quiet about what he knew or they would arrest him as a ‘terrorist’.

The hard-cop-soft-cop routine was also deployed: the next day, he received an apology for the rough treatment he had experienced.

PAISLEY THROWS HIS WEIGHT ABOUT AT THE CUMBERLAND HOTEL.

One evening Kerr was at the bellhops’ station at the Cumberland Hotel when a colleague from the hotel’s café strolled across and told him someone was looking for him. The visitor turned out to be Ian Paisley. Kerr’s recollection of what would unfold is vivid and sharp: Paisley was seated on his own at a table ‘near a glass area’ and was ‘wearing a suit with a hat that was placed on the table’. He also ‘carried a newspaper’ which he ‘placed on the table’. A pair of men sat adjacent to him ‘in professional dress’. While Kerr recognised Paisley, he did not know the others. They would not address him at any point during the encounter. ‘They created space between themselves and others’. As Kerr recalls it:

‘Paisley spoke with them; they were in earshot of our conversation. I was unable to discern if they spoke in an English accent. I do know that they were accompanying Paisley because they joined him after our conversation was complete’.

Paisley asked Kerr ‘to be seated after I was speaking with him standing up’. At the start ‘of the conversation I did not feel intimidated, yet as the meeting continued, I did begin to feel uneasy’, Kerr recalls.

Paisley knew Kerr had been at Kincora and instructed him that if he was questioned by the police, he was not to ‘mention anything about Englishmen at Kincora’. Kerr was dumbfounded and responded, ‘What?’ Paisley repeated the instruction and added that he was ‘not [to] speak of other events that occurred in Belfast’.

‘I nodded my head. No verbal communication was made’. The encounter only lasted about ten minutes. Paisley left with the two men. ‘I then went back to the bell station, slightly disturbed, and I did not respond to another bell boy’s question about the encounter’.

Kerr’s impression of the other men was that they had behaved ‘normally [and] they didn’t appear to be threatening’. Initially, he had not been frightened by them as ‘they did not speak to me ‘. It wasn’t until later that evening, after the meeting [had ended], that I began to feel concerned as to their intentions’.

How did Paisley know that Kerr had been in Kincora?

Who told him Kerr was working at the Cumberland?

Who told Paisley ‘Englishmen’ had abused children at Kincora?

Why was Paisley prepared to help protect English paedophiles?

Who were the men who accompanied him?

The following week, a white envelope arrived at the hotel. It contained black-and-white photographs of Kerr, naked. The manager of the hotel, a Mr Gardner, showed them to Kerr, who was deeply embarrassed and made an excuse that they must have been posted by a jealous ex-girlfriend. Gardiner let Kerr know that he was not pleased but didn’t dismiss him.

Who were the Englishmen Paisley strove to protect?

Clint Massey, another Kincora survivor, revealed in 2015 that

‘there were loads of people over from London. I have always assumed they were senior figures from Whitehall. I certainly heard English accents’.

The whistle-blower Robin Bryans knew a lot of them, including Anthony Blunt of MI5. Another was a ‘decidedly gay-looking’ man called Peter England. Bryans told this author in 1990 that while he knew England ‘very well ’, he ‘didn’t like him much’.

England was a former boyfriend of Sir Samuel Knox Cunningham QC MP and had also had a relationship with the Irish publisher, Charles Monteith, both members of the Anglo-Irish Vice Ring.

Peter England lived in London, had served in the Royal Navy during WWII, and later worked at the Ministry of Defence (MoD). He transferred to the Northern Ireland Office in the 1970s. Declassified files furnished to the Hart Inquiry demonstrate that some of his work involved oversight of the black propaganda activities of the Army and intelligence services. According to Bryans, ‘the main thing to do with covering up for Kincora’ related to England. This analysis makes perfect sense because England: 1) had died in 1978 and therefore could be named without fear of a libel action; 2) had a criminal record: he had been arrested and convicted for obscene behaviour in a London toilet; 3) his exposure would have blown the Kincora cover-up wide apart, for it would have demonstrated knowledge of the scandal at the highest level of the Northern Ireland Office and made a nonsense of the claim that Kincora was an isolated aberration.

The late Merlyn Rees, a former Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, worked with England at the NIO. In his Northern Ireland memoirs, Rees described how England was:

‘a man of wide experience at the [MoD], whose work over the next three years [in Belfast] was to prove invaluable, though the physical stress of the job may have contributed to his tragically early death in 1978’.

Moreover, he said that England

‘was a hard task master, but at the same time he always showed concern for those working in the office’.

Clearly, England showed more ‘concern’ for his staff than for the children he abused. By the time of his death, Bryans recalled that England had let himself go and had become ‘scruffy’.

There is more: on 23 January 2015, the late journalist Liam Clarke reported in The Belfast Telegraph that two RUC officers had told him that a Tory MP had ‘visited Kincora during the 1970s’. Both officers, he reported, were ‘willing to help any inquiry into Kincora either here or in England. They revealed that the MP died before they could arrange to interview him’. There are only two MPs who match this description. One of the officers revealed that the MP had visited Northern Ireland ‘quite regularly…We were told by criminal records in Scotland Yard, London, that he had a conviction many years ago for indecent behaviour or something in a gents’ loo against another boy, but his death meant we never got a chance to question him’.

WHO WERE PAISLEY’S ULTIMATE PUPPET MASTERS?

McGrath had multiple connections to Paisley – as had McKeague. McKeague had converted to the Paisley brand of Free Presbyterianism in 1966 and acted as Paisley’s bodyguard for a time. He was pivotal to the UVF bombing campaign that helped topple Northern Ireland PM Terence O’Neill in 1968. He was also involved in the Ulster Protestant Volunteers, an organisation Paisley helped to set up in the 1960s.

During the 1960s while they were close to Paisley, McGrath and McKeague were involved 1) in the UVF; 2) the anti-O’Neill bomb campaign; 3) arms procurement; and 4) no end of hate crimes, not to mention child abuse.

The Cumberland Hotel incident seems to demonstrate that Paisley had been got at, most likely by incriminating information possessed by McGrath and McKeague. Since they were British assets, it is legitimate to ask: did one or both of them turn the screws on Paisley to get him to intimidate Kerr; moreover, did they do so with the support of Ian Cameron; Sir Howard Smith, D-G of MI5 1979-81; his deputy Sir John Jones (who became D-G, 1981-85); and others in MI5; not to mention Sir Maurice Oldfield and his MI6 cronies?

Chapter 15.

The Hart Inquiry withholds files from Ricard Kerr but not others.

THE TIP OF A CHILLING ICEBERG.

The Hart Inquiry, more properly the Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry (HIA) was established following the Inquiry into Historical Institutional Abuse Act (Northern Ireland) 2013, which received royal assent on 18 January 2013.

The inquiry began its public hearings on 13 January 2014 and concluded its hearings on 8 July 2016. The final report was published on 20 January 2017.

Key Dates

Date	Event
18 January 2013	Royal assent for the Inquiry Act
13 January 2014	Start of public hearings
8 July 2016	Conclusion of hearings
20 January 2017	Publication of the final report

For a while, Richard Kerr cooperated with the Hart Inquiry, to which he was a central witness. However, in the end, he withdrew. His solicitors, KRW Law, said:

‘The State bodies/agencies that are Core Participants to the inquiry appear to have been provided with bundles of documents of up to 16,000 pages. In contrast, Mr Kerr was provided with around 740 pages.

‘It is not clear why the inquiry wishes to conceal these documents from Mr Kerr or his legal representatives. In the context of an inquiry that is investigating allegations that the British security forces and security services knew that abuse was and would be perpetrated on the children in Kincora and covered this up, this is inherently unreasonable’.

Chapter 16.

Threats and Conmen.

THE IICSA IGNORED RICHARD KERR.

There was yet another opportunity to achieve justice for Richard Kerr and many of his fellow victims: the establishment of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (ICCSA).

The IICSA came into being as a response to a plague of child-abuse cases linked to VIPs and the British Establishment, including that of Jimmy Saville. It was established in 2015 by Theresa May in her then-capacity as UK Home Secretary. She pointedly refused to include Kincora within the remit of the IICSA despite being requested to do so by former Kincora victims. Nonetheless, Richard Kerr was a threat to the Establishment because Mountbatten had abused him and therefore was exactly the type of person who should have been of great interest to the IICSA.

After the IICSA was initiated, a range of independent campaigning websites pursued the story, while the mainstream UK media steered away from any meaningful coverage. Instead, the focus of the mainstream media was on reports of personnel changes within the IICSA staff. Meanwhile, elements of the pro-Establishment press, especially the Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail, seized several opportunities to undermine claims about elite complicity in the abuse. They were supported by a handful of Tory Party grandees who spoke out on radio and TV.

Significantly, one of the most prominent figures was a man who had abused Richard Kerr. I believe he was behind the entire Carl Beech and PPL dirty trick operation. (The PPL dirty trick will be described in a moment.) He is a former member of the Monday Club.

THE ULSTER FREEDOM FIGHTERS.

All sorts of attempts were made to get Richard Kerr to keep quiet.

The name of the Ulster Freedom Fighters (UFF) was appropriated by a distasteful group of conmen hellbent on covering up the existence of a VIP paedophile network in Ireland and the UK. I will refer to these nasty specimens collectively as the ‘Paedophile Protection League (PPL)’.

The PPL misappropriated the UFF’s name in an attempt to intimidate Kerr. The PPL sent him an anonymous threatening letter in 2016.

Before we turn to the threatening letter, a brief recap might help clarify the underlying menace: Richard Kerr was a close friend of Steven Waring, who was also a resident at Kincora. He committed suicide by plunging into the sea from the Belfast-Liverpool Monarch Ferry in 1977 rather than suffer any further abuse. Kerr has been haunted by his death ever since. Like Kerr, Waring had been taken out of Kincora and subjected to vile abuse on both sides of the Irish Sea.

In November 2016 Kerr received the following anonymous letter:

‘DEAR RICHARD,

‘HAVING READ AN ONLINE ARTICLE ABOUT YOU TODAY CONCERNING YOUR BEHAVIOUR IN LONDON IN 2015, A GROUP OF SURVIVORS HAVE RESEARCHED AND DISCUSSED YOUR ALLEGATIONS.

‘IT IS OF MANY UK-BASED SURVIVORS OPINION THAT YOU ARE PLAYING A GAME AND WORKING FOR THE ABUSERS STILL.

‘THERE ARE FIRST HAND ACCOUNTS OF YOUR BEHAVIOUR IN DOLPHIN SQUARE AND IN KINCORA INCLUDING ACCOUNTS OF YOU ACTING AS FACILITATOR FOR ABUSERS.

‘THERE ARE ALSO ALLEGATIONS AND ACCOUNTS OF YOU ACTIVELY TRYING TO DISCREDIT OTHER SURVIVORS INCLUDING THE SUSPICION THAT YOU IN FACT KILLED STEVEN ON THE BOAT, RATHER THAN THE STORY YOU TELL OF HIM COMMITTING SUICIDE.

‘WE DO NOT HAVE ANYONE IN TEXAS TO ACT AGAINST YOU.

‘YOU HAVE BEEN DISCUSSED AT A VERY HIGH LEVEL AND ALTHOUGH THIS IS NOT A THREAT, AS A GROUP WE WOULD LIKE TO INFORM YOU THAT YOU ARE NO LONGER WELCOME IN THE UK OR IN NORTHERN IRELAND AND IF YOU ARE SEEN, ACTIVE SERVICE UNITS OF THE ULSTER FREEDOM FIGHTERS AND THEIR FRIENDS WILL FORCIBLY REMOVE YOU TO AN AIRPORT.

‘YOU ARE OBVIOUSLY A SURVIVOR OF ABUSE SO BY OUR OWN CODE WE CANNOT ORDER ANYTHING MORE; HOWEVER FEELINGS ARE RUNNING SO HIGH ABOUT YOU THAT WE CANNOT GUARANTEE YOUR SAFETY AND WELLBEING IN THE UK OR NORTHERN IRELAND’.

THE ADDRESS WHICH EXPOSES THE SOURCE OF THE ANONYMOUS THREATENING LETTER.

The anonymous letter was posted from South East Anglia, not Northern Ireland.

There is no mystery about the true identity of its author.

Richard Kerr had made several trips to Ireland and the UK before he received the letter. During these trips he was – as he puts it himself – ‘hijacked’ by some very unsavoury characters whom he instinctively distrusted and to whom he decided not to provide his address in Texas.

This group pretended they were interested in exposing the VIP paedophile ring, but in reality, they wanted to find out what Kerr was going to say about it and discredit him.

They made the mistake of assuming Kerr was a fool, when in fact they were the amateurs.

Instead of providing his own address, Kerr gave them the address of a trusted confidant who lived on the North Central Expressway in Dallas. Yes, you guessed it: the PPL threatening letter was subsequently sent to the confidant.

The North Central Expressway address was also provided to the BBC’s ‘Panorama’ programme. However, since the staff at ‘Panorama’ are not known for sending vile, threatening letters to child abuse survivors, the odds must be high that it was sent by the PPL.

In addition, two others were provided with the address, both of whom can be discounted as the author of the letter.

Why would the PPL go to such lengths in an effort to intimidate and upset Richard Kerr? Why go to all this trouble if the VIP vice-ring had never existed?

CARL BEECH.

And then there was the hugely successful Carl Beech confidence trick, almost certainly run by the PPL too.

One of the most concerted effort to undermine Richard Kerr at this time was one perpetrated by sinister individuals posing as journalists who attempted to get him to join forces with the now-notorious conman and paedophile Carl  Beech.

The endeavour occurred while Beech was featuring prominently in the mainstream British media as ‘Nick’ and was holding himself out as a victim of VIP child sex abuse when he was nothing of the sort.

Beech was later exposed as a liar and a fraud.

Richard realised from the outset that Beech was a complete fraud and refused to have anything to do with him.

Beech was a plant all along, who was constructed from day one to be exposed as a fraud and taint genuine victims of VIP sex abuse. 

Several years ago, an unknown person or persons gave approximately £100,000 in secret to Beech. Before this, Beech had trouble paying his rent.

Beech made claims that VIPs had sexually abused him. But he was lying.

Beech used the money to purchase a property in Sweden for himself and planned to acquire another for his mother. He opened bank accounts under an assumed name. He may also have acquired travel documents – even a false passport – under one or more of his false identities. He went by the following names: Stephen Anderson, aka Carl Anderson, aka Samuel Karlsson.

There are strong grounds to suspect that Beech was part of a sophisticated plot by surviving members of the A-IVR to convince the public that no VIP abuse had taken place. The allegations Beech made were copied from those of genuine victims. He then added a series of dramatic lies about extreme sadism and murder, all of which were untrue. In due course, the lies were exposed. The intention all along, it appears,  was that Beech would be exposed as a liar.

The British public became convinced that the notion of VIP abuse of children was a fantasy as a result of Beech’s lies. Not a single British journalist entertained the suspicion that the British public was being taken for fools.

Beech was about to disappear to begin his new life when he was arrested and charged with the deliberate telling of lies to the police.

THE JIMMY SAVILE DEFENCE.

After the Wiltshire Police released their findings about Ted Heath’s molestation of children, an array of Tories stampeded into radio and TV stations across the UK, bleating that nothing the Wiltshire Police discovered could possibly be taken seriously because of Carl Beech, who had demonstrated that all child-sex allegations were nothing but wild fantasy

Some Tory grandees spluttered that the Wiltshire Police’s so-called ‘attack’ on Heath was a ‘disgrace’ because Heath was dead and could not defend his reputation. Logically, they could have made the same argument in defence of Sir Jimmy Savile and Sir Cyril Smith MP, both of whom died before the truth about their sordid paedophilia emerged.

SOWING THE SEEDS OF CONFUSION ABOUT THE ENGLISHMAN RICHARD KERR BELIEVES WAS SIR ANTHONY BLUNT.

TThe PPL was also responsible for manipulating and spreading a story that Richard Kerr had some sort of encounter with the arch MI5 traitor, Sir Anthony Blunt, while he was a resident at Kincora. Kerr did indeed encounter an Englishman he believed was Blunt, but not while he was at Kincora. The truth is more depressing: he was abused by this Englishman while he was a much younger child and a resident at Williamson House. The abuse took place in a hotel to which he was driven by two men. Emphatically, Kerr never claimed that Blunt ever visited Kincora.

Who financed the Paedophile Protection League?

The members of the PPL are drawn from either:-

• The remnants of the VIP network (including two senior establishment figures still at Westminster with access to extraordinary wealth); or

• MI5 and/or MI6, which both maintained, protected and exploited the paedophile network for decades; or

• A combination of both.

THE PPL EX-MP

MI5 and MI6 surely know quite a lot about the sleazy former MP who occasionally cropped up in the media, pooh-poohing the existence of a VIP child abuse network and making critical remarks about ‘Nick’.

The ex-MP obviously has a very selective memory because he was at the centre of the VIP network and abused Richard Kerr twice: first when Kerr was trafficked to London from Kincora at the age of 15 or 16, and later while Kerr was living in London. On one occasion, he took Kerr to September’s restaurant in London before abusing him in a small hotel room nearby.

This abuser made contact through a third party, inquiring whether he was going to name him in public. Thus far, Kerr has decided not to name him.

THE SADISTIC TORY MP CHILD RAPIST.

The man who most likely oversaw the Beech deception is a former Tory MP with a penchant for sadistic sex. Richard Kerr was trafficked to London, where the MP abused him. As part of the abuse ritual, the MP took Kerr to a restaurant. Kerr kept a card from the restaurant, the Napoleon Club, now closed. There are photos of Kerr in London at this time.

THE JUDGE WHO RELIED UPON INTERNET REPORTS.

Another dirty trick is to assert that Richard has made a claim when he hasn’t. Judge Anthony Hart was tripped up repeatedly by his reliance on press reports containing errors. Hart even relied upon articles about Richard that appeared on the Internet.

Bizarrely, one of ‘Nick/Beech’s’ allegations was that he too had been abused by Maurice Oldfield.

Kerr decided he would have nothing to do with Hart after a tentative engagement with his inquiry. In light of the multiple errors Hart made in his lamentable report, Kerr has been vindicated.

MORE SMEAR TACTICS

Yet another line of attack was to claim that Richard was making up stories in response to the emergence of information elsewhere. This presupposes that all of the interviews that Kerr gave were intended to be comprehensive biographical accounts of his entire life. Suffice it to say, Kerr has not attempted to provide anyone with a full biographical account of his life. It would probably take a full-blown book of 100,000 words to describe it in a way that would do it justice.

FEAR, TRUST, SUPPRESSION OF TRAUMA AND POST-TRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER.

Another factor in all of this is trust. As Richard Kerr is at pains to explain to anyone who talks to him, a severe symptom of his post-abuse syndrome is a lack of trust in people. This is a symptom common to most abuse survivors. Hence, it should be apparent to any intelligent journalist, writer or researcher who has conducted even the most elementary preparation for an interview with a sex abuse survivor that trust must be built up over time. One figure in the UK who runs a longstanding website concerning intelligence matters attacked Richard simply because he was not given chapter and verse about his life when he made tentative contact with him.

Fear is also a factor in withholding information. Richard encountered brutes like John McKeague, a sadistic Red Hand Commando/UVF terrorist, not to mention the fact that he had been beaten up by RUC and English police officers to shut him up about what he knew about Kincora. McKeague was a vicious serial killer who enjoyed torturing Catholics in UVF ‘romper rooms’.

Yet another factor is the suppression of traumatic memories. Irish legislation makes a specific exception for victims of sex abuse who wish to take legal action later in life. The normal time limits do not apply to sex abuse victims where they are found to have been labouring under a psychological disability which prevented them from taking litigation at an earlier stage in their life. Time only begins to run when they emerge from such a psychological disability. This legislation was based on advice furnished to the Irish government by psychologists and experts in the field of sex abuse trauma. There is similar legislation in other jurisdictions.

THE 2020 YOUTUBE VIDEO DIRTY TRICK – A FAILED ATTEMPT TO SET RICHARD UP FOR A FALL.

Bearing all of the foregoing in mind, in 2020, a video appeared on the Internet that featured photographic material provided to its producers by Richard.

The video can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=am7CZUgrNug&feature=youtu.be

The video was part of a dirty trick which Richard nipped in the bud.

One of the pictures in it is described as that of Lord Louis Mountbatten, with the assertion that it was taken by Richard. Richard does not claim to have taken a picture of Mountbatten. Furthermore, the man in the picture is clearly not Mountbatten. Judge for yourself by reference to the picture taken from the video, which is available on YouTube and reproduced immediately below this paragraph:

Second, there is a reference to Richard having taken a photograph when he was in London aged 14. Richard does not claim to have taken such a picture when he was 14.

Richard did indeed furnish the video producers with a picture of an individual who was part of the Anglo-Irish Vice Ring. The producers describe the picture as ‘blurred’, which it certainly is. However, Richard does not claim that the ‘blurred’ individual in it was ‘well-known’. The photograph is of Mike Anderson, an enforcer from Manchester who served the Anglo-Irish Vice Ring.

Richard has never suggested that Jimmy Carter had him brought to America.

Fourth, the video includes a photograph of Roy Cohn, the notorious New York attorney. Richard does not claim to have taken this photograph. Furthermore, he knows full well what Cohn looks like since Cohn abused him. The picture is freely available on the Internet. Two other people feature in it, one of whom is Donald Trump. The significance of the photograph to Richard is explained in the Cohn story mentioned above.

Had Kerr not nipped the errors in this story in the bud, it might have provided grounds upon which he might have been cross-examined during his High Court action in Belfast. Kerr acted swiftly to demolish the video in an article I wrote for Village magazine.

Chapter 17.

After the publication of the Hart Report, it emerged that Britain’s National Archive was withholding a file on Kincora from publication. Yet, Hart had been given solemn assurances by the UK intelligence, security and political communities that they would provide him with all the relevant files on Kincora for his work. It now appears that this one was not disclosed to him.

What is in it that was so sensitive that it was withheld from Hart?

Alternatively, if it was furnished to Hart, what influence did it have on his deliberations?

Since we do not know what is in the file, we cannot answer these questions.

Hart missed the significance of some important information which was furnished to him. He was supplied with a copy of an interview with Hugh Mooney, a former ‘Information Adviser’ to the General Officer in Command of the British Army in Northern Ireland, which was published in The Sunday Correspondent. In it Mooney stated unambiguously that Colin Wallace, who worked at the British Army’s HQ at Lisburn as a PSYOPS officer, had told him about the abuse at Kincora. ‘I do know he mentioned it. He was dropping it in and feeling his way. He kept pushing it. But I could never understand why. I thought it was totally irrelevant to our concerns. I did get the feeling he was pushing this’. Hugh Mooney left Northern Ireland in December 1973. Hence, Colin Wallace must have told him about the scandal before that date, i.e. seven years before Hart concluded that the British Army knew about the abuse. This was also two years before Richard Kerr entered Kincora. Hugh Mooney did not appear at the Hart Inquiry.

At page 88 of his report Hart stated that,

‘We are satisfied that it was not until 1980 [after the media exposed the Kincora scandal] that MI5, SIS, the MoD and the RUC Special Branch became aware that [William] McGrath [of Kincora] had been sexually abusing residents of Kincora when that became a public allegation’.

Unfortunately, Hart made this finding despite knowing that the Ministry of Defence (MoD) had destroyed all the PSYOPS files at Army HQ in Lisburn in 1981, or at least alleged that it had. Colin Wallace is clear in his memory that a number of the missing files concerned McGrath, his paramilitary organisation Tara and Kincora.

Perhaps the files will turn up one day and cast more light on events intertwined with the life of Richard Kerr.

Richard Kerr still lives in Dallas. He remains close to ‘Amal’, who also lives in Dallas.

Richard’s brother Alan was also the victim of abuse. His story can be found here: The Prince and the Pauper.