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Tag: Martin McGuinness
Martin McGuinness (The Fisherman) left safe house linked to MI5
“As for Martin McGuinness informing on his comrades, there was never any evidence that he ever did, though the British state counter-insurgency certainly started to orbit McGuinness from the late 1970s and early 1980s” – Willie Carlin
FORMER British agent Willie Carlin has claimed that he saw Martin McGuinness leaving a safe house in Co Derry linked to MI5 in the 1980s. Mr Carlin makes the claim in his book Thatcher’s Spy: My Life as an MI5 Agent Inside Sinn Féin. However, he says that despite what he saw, he does not believe Mr McGuinness worked for British intelligence. Mr Carlin worked as an MI5 and British army agent inside Sinn Féin for more than a decade before his cover was blown in 1985. In his new book he reveals how he supplied information about the party’s political direction to the security service and later the British army’s FRU Force Research Unit.
It has previously been reported that Mr McGuinness had contact with MI6 officer Michael Oatley (who also attended his funeral) as part of a secret back channel between the British government and the IRA. Now Mr Carlin has claimed that he saw the future deputy first minister leaving a house used by British intelligence in 1980. He said he himself had previously used the house near Limavady in Co Derry when meeting a handler known as ‘Ben’. It later emerged that ‘Ben’ was Michael Bettaney, who was jailed in 1984 for passing sensitive documents to the Soviet embassy in London and was seeking to work for them.
Mr Carlin claims that while in jail in England his former handler revealed his activities to IRA prisoners. In the book he says how he he was making his way to meet ‘Ben’ in Carnlough, Co Antrim, when he drove past the ‘spook’ safe house he had previously visited. “As I drove up the road a red Peugeot came out of the gates of the house and headed back to Limavady, coming straight towards me,” he wrote. “I had the shock of my life, for there in the passenger seat was Martin McGuinness, bent forward as if he was reading or looking at something on his knee.” Stunned, he said he wondered “what the hell Martin McGuinness doing coming of an MI5 house” as he carried on his journey.
Several weeks later Mr Carlin was to have an anxious encounter after ‘Ben’ turned up outside the Sinn Féin man’s house in Derry. “One afternoon after seeing Ben I was heading back to Derry to attend a meeting on Cable Street when I spotted Ben sitting in a car outside Martin McGuinness’s house,” he wrote. “Ben had often told me that if he could meet McGuinness he could ‘put him wise’ and let him know what was really going on ‘behind his back’.” Mr Carlin recalls how he feared that the MI5 man may be spotted by locals and if interrogated could reveal his role as a spy. He then approached the handler and urged him to leave the area.
“Listen Ben’, I said with some urgency, ‘you’re sticking out here like a sore thumb and it won’t be long before someone arrives and will challenge you’,” he wrote. “So, for f***k sake get out of here before you get us both killed’. “That seemed to sober him up a bit because he started his engine and left.” Later in the book Mr Carlin says that despite what he saw, and claims subsequently made by former FRU handler Ian Hurst, he does not believe
Mr McGuinness worked for British intelligence. “As for Martin McGuinness informing on his comrades, there was never any evidence that he ever did, though the British state counter-insurgency certainly started to orbit McGuinness from the late 1970s and early 1980s,”he wrote. “I think the British became aware sooner than the public imagined that there was a man they could do business with.” Mr Carlin said that later in 1980 he decided to part company with MI5 over his distrust of his handler.
With many thanks to: The Irish News and Connla Young for the original story
Follow these links to find out more: https://www.politicalirish.com/threads/j118-informer-mcguinness-craves-more-foreign-oppression-of-ireland-again.10678/
(2)-: https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Document:Is_Martin_McGuinness_a_British_Agent%3F
Skilled journalists shine Spotlight on the darkest secrets of our sad past
THERE’S an old proverb about the road to hell being paved with good intentions.
And friends of mine have occasionally tried to explain away unionism’s vice-like grip on the first 50 years of the North of Ireland by quoting it. They claim the unionist government which oversaw the North of Ireland always planned to do better, but never quite got there. There’s no doubt that in 1921 after the partition of Ireland was complete, unionist leaders had a chance to create a northern state where few Catholics would have opted to join the newly-formed 26 County Free State.
But religious bigotry at the heart of at the heart of the Stormont regime meant that opportunity was passed over. And instead unionism firmly pulled the shutters down tight. It viewed every Catholic citizen with suspicion. Unionist Party leaders ignored the parting advice of Sir Edward Carson – the public face of unionism – to be kind to the minority. And although not publicly acknowledged, some unionist establishment figures even gave the green light to loyalist gunmen to wage a war of attrition against Catholics. Pogroms were terrifying and real, with hundreds losing their lives as the contrived state of the North of Ireland became a political reality. A semi-secret plan was hatched where police officers like the infamous DI Nixon were allowed to run their own murder gangs. Their intention was to grind Catholics into submission and force them to accept that they now lived in a place where only those loyal to Britain ruled the roost. Rejecting unionist offers of top police jobs abroad. Nixon eventually quit the RUC to become an Independent Unionist MP.
EXPOSE
And until the day he died, he repeatedly threatened to expose fellow unionist politicians’ involvement in violence at the foundation of the state. Eventually many Catholics accepted their diminished status and kept their heads down. Occasional IRA attacks in the north and in England posed no threat to the northern state. But the 1947 Education Act – forced on unionist by the British government – created an articulate Catholic middle class no longer willing to accept the status quo.
In 1967, along with other interested groups – including the remnants of the Irish Republican Movement – these people formed the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association. The organisation had the stated aim of replacing unionist discrimination in jobs, housing and voting rights with British liberal values. It was well received in Ireland and also in the rest of the UK, where people were shocked to learn that the North of Ireland citizens hadn’t the same rights as them. The North of Ireland Prime Minister Captain Terence O’Neill (who the unionist claimed was a Lundy) – steeped in the unionist landed gentry – knew in his heart that if the union was to survive, then things needed to change. But a rabble-rousing fundamentalist preacher called Ian Paisley – who led his own Free Presbyterian Church – had other ideas. He had an ability to tap into ancient Protestant fears and suspicions. And he helped form a series of new loyalist paramilitary organisations opposed to any reforms proposed by O’Neill. Paisley was following in the footsteps of his close friend and hero DI Nixon, a police officer turned politician who had terrorised Catholics at the foundation of the state. Much of Paisley’s involvement with the reconstituted Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) was denied because the authorities feared the clergyman’s Svengali-like powers. But this week – in the first of a new seven part series of TV programmes to mark the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the Troubles – Paisley’s real role in the violence is exposed.
Spotlight on the Troubles: A Secret History goes out simultaneously on BBC Northern and BBC4 on Tuesday night. Using first-hand testimony of individuals who were around at the time, reporter Darragh McIntyre reveals how Ian Paisley personally financed the UVF bombing of a water pipe line at the Silent Valley Reservoir near Kilkeel in April 1969. Paisley and his cohorts attempted to give the impression that the explosion, coming as it did months before serious violence erupted on the streets of Derry and Belfast, was the work of the practically moribund IRA. But a retired senior British Army officer, drafted in to examine the aftermath of the bomb, told MacIntyre his suspensions were raised as soon as he saw the bomb site. “This just didn’t have the look of an IRA bomb,” he said. And he went on to claim that a senior RUC officer in Killkeel showed him intelligence reports which revealed the entire operation had been financed by Paisley.
As Paisley’s UVF mates were bombing the place, a young butcher’s apprentice by the name of Martin McGuinness was about to quit his job to assume the role of 2nd in Command of the Provisional IRA in Derry.
In newly emerged footage, McGuinness is filmed overseeing an IRA bomb being loaded into the boot of a car. McGuinness sits in the passenger seat and, minutes later, it is transported to Derry city centre and detonated. And in another remarkable clip, McGuinness instructs children on how to load bullets into a revolver.
It is almost beyond belief that 3,500 deaths later, these two men were sworn into office as the First Minister and Deputy First Minister in a new devolved administration at Stormont. But they also became close personal friends.
ASTONISHING
In an astonishing revelation near the end of the first programme, MacIntyre reveals written details of a top secret report by Sir Michael Carver, the most senior officer in the British Army. In the report, Carver advises the British government to consider an alternative strategy which doesn’t demand maintaining the North of Ireland border by military means, (what Brexit will mean).I.e. British withdrawal.
Spotlight editor Jeremy Adams say he’s proud his talented team of investigative reporters consisting of McIntyre, Jennifer O’Leary and Mandy McAuley, have been able to uncover new findings relating to the history of the Troubles. “This past has shaped our present and it’s vitally important that truths continue to be told,” he said. I’m in no doubt that this body of work from the awarding-winning BBC Spotlight team will become the definitive television history of the Troubles. This series of programmes – which uncovers much previously unknown material – is informative, revealing, shocking and at times very, very moving. It was an enormous undertaking for the reporters and filmmakers involved, but once again, BBC Spotlight comes through with flying colours. Don’t miss it.
With many thanks to the: Sunday World 
and Hugh Jordan for the original story
Follow these links to find out more: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-11313364
(3)-: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-49348633
Now we know who pulls SF’s strings and if they didn’t sanction murder, they certainly turned few blind eyes – BelfastTelegraph.co.uk
Martin (J118) McGuinness refuses to say if he murdered anyone whilst he was a member of the PIRA
TALKS WILL BE SUCCESSFUL SAYS (J118) McGUINNESS
THE ongoing political talks will be successful “against the odds”, Sinn Féin’s Martin McGuinness told a meeting of his party last night.
He said the devolved institutions “are worth saving and I believe the vast majority of people share that view”. But he said the parties must agree to protect the most vulnerable and ensure Stormont (the big house on the hill) has “a workable budget so that public services are delivered to the standard the public expect and deserve”. The deputy first minister also called on the British government to accept they are part of the negotiations and are “not some kind of neutral arbitrator”. He also hit out at the government’s legislation on dealing with the legacy of the Troubles and said it is “in clear breach of the Stormont House Agreement”.
“The legislation proposed by Theresa Villiers and her cabinet colleagues has more to do with covering up the role of the British state as a central player in the conflict and its collusion with unionist death squads,” he said. He said that the executive had succeeded in blocking the worst of the Conservative government’s cuts, including the introduction of water charges. He said lower student fees, free prescriptions and lower rates bills were “rarely highlighted successes of the executive and local parties working together”. The Mid Ulster assembly member warned that a return to direct rule will result in an “unrestrained onslaught on public services and the most vulnerable in our society”. Ms Villiers repeatedly warned that if the parties cannot agree a deal on welfare reforms, the British government will take back welfare powers as a “last resort”. Mr McGuinness said as well as welfare cuts previously announced, new cuts to tax credits in April will affect 120,000 families in the north.
<strong>With many thanks to: Claire Simpson, for the origional story, The Irish News.
The decommissioning of the Provisional IRA, 10 years on
Masked flag-bearer appeals conviction
‘This classically is a case which calls for an answer from the person who knows whether he was on that march or not – Sir Declan Morgan.
A DERRY man given a suspended jail sentence for being the masked flag bearer in a republican parade was never properly identified, the Court of Appeal has heard. Lawyers for Patrick John McDaid argued that experts in facial mapping and image comparison techniques were not certain he had been the man pictured in a balaclava.
McDaid is seeking to overturn his conviction for managing a meeting in support of a proscribed organisation. The 43-year-old, then of Beechwood Avenue in Derry, was sentenced in May to 16 months in prison, suspended for three years, after a judge decided he was ‘Man X’ carrying an Irish tricolour at the front of the march. A seven-strong, masked colour party had headed a parade close to republican graves in the City Cemetery in Derry on Easter Sunday 2011. The commemoration, organised by the 32 County Sovereignty Movement (32 CSM), involved a speech being made on behalf of the Real IRA and Oglaigh na hEireann (ONH).
As well as the photographs and facial mapping evidence, the judge in the non-jury trail in Belfast Crown Court heard how police later seized a document which purported to be minutes of a meeting to organise the march. It included the reference: ‘Colour party – McDaid to get people sorted’. But judges in the Court of Appeal were told on Tuesday that nothing more than a surname was found. Kieran Mallon QC, for McDaid, also challenged the strength of the evidence from an expert who noted striking similarities in the lips and eyes of his client and Man X. “It’s our contention there was not established any form of meaningful identification,” he said. “On balance he cannot say the accused and Mr X were one and the same person, primarily because there was no statistical database against which he could test an individual with that type of eye colour or lip shape.” Lord Chief Justice Declan Morgan, sitting with Lords Justice Girvan and Coghlin, drew his attention to two other strands of the prosecution case: McDaids name being on the organising document and his participation in previous events. Mr Mallon accepted there would have been clear suspicions, but contended this fell short of proof. Sir Declan then alluded to McDaid’s failure to give any evidence at trial. “This classically is a case which calls for an answer from the person who knows whether he was on that march or not,” he said. Judgment in the appeal was reserved.
With thanks to: The Irish News
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- Face mapping ‘identifies masked man’ (bbc.co.uk)
- Masked dissident and defendant the same, court is told (belfasttelegraph.co.uk)
- ‘Republican parade masked flag bearer never properly identified’ – court hears (belfasttelegraph.co.uk)
POLICE XMAS PARTY FLEE BOMB
Senior officers were targets of ONH device
THE rebel IRA were trying to murder cops with a fireball bomb carried into Belfast city centre on Friday night. The sports bag bomb, packed with inflammable material according to police on Saturday, was abandoned short of its target, according to our sources.
Sources in Belfast’s Ardoyne, where the incendiary device originated, say the bomb, which partially exploded, was meant to mimic the IRA fire bomb attack on the La Mon House Hotel in February 1978 which murdered 12 people. The Sunday World learned on Saturday that a posse of top police officers – up to a dozen strong, were out for their Christmas ‘do’ just 100 metres from where the lethal firebomb in a Slazenger sports bag was left.
Revellers
One source said: “They got an emergency call just minutes before a squad of police rushed in to evacuate the whole of the St Anne’s Square pub/restaurant area in the heart of Cathedral Quarter, packed with pre-Christmas party revellers. “They immediately left the premises. But they were the targets. The dissident bombers knew who they were, and where they were.” In fact, the explosive sports bag was abandoned just 100 metres from where the police officers were sitting down for a meal and a drink. On Saturday, the PSNI staged a hastily convened press conference where it was stated that the bomb which partially exploded could have killed anyone nearby. Dissident republican group, Oglaigh na hEireann, later said they were responsible. Police said the explosion at Exchange Street West at about a quarter to seven on Friday night could have caused multiple deaths. The bomb went off as the area was being cleared. No-one was injured in the attack. Police said the bomb was fully functional and consisted of explosives and flammable liquid. It was in a sports bag and was left on a street about 150 metres away from the spot identified in a warning call made to a newspaper office. That was also just round the corner from where the off-duty police officers were having their Christmas party.
Even when they evacuated the restaurant they were in, they would have walked straight into the abandoned bomb. About 1,000 people were affected by the alert in Cathedral Quarter, which is one of the main entertainment venues in Belfast. On Saturday First Minister Peter Robinson said this was an “attack on democracy”. “We are witnessing the work of a mindless minority who are intent on taking the heart out of the city and wreaking havoc on the lives and businesses of the people of Belfast and Northern Ireland,” he said. Deputy First Minister (J116) Martin McGuinness (The Fisherman) said the bombers showed “a complete disregard for life”. “Their actions have done nothing to move our society forward but, instead, have caused distress to local residents, disruption to Christmas revellers and loss of revenue for surrounding businesses,” he said. At Saturday’s Press conference at the PSNI’s Brooklyn HQ in Belfast, Detective Chief Inspector Justyn Galloway said: “This device was fully functional. It could have injured or killed members of the public and it has similarities to previous devices used by dissident republicans. “I would like to make a direct appeal to people who were in the area on Friday night and ask them did they see a male wearing a black hoidie carrying a black Slazenger bag in and around 6pm. “If they saw this person or anybody acting suspiciously I would appeal to them to come forward to detectives. “We are working very hard to keep Belfast safe and we will continue to do that but we need the community to be vigilant. We want them to go about their normal businness and support the premises in the town but be vigilant and if they see anything suspicious in the town don’t hesitate to lift the phone and tell us.” On Saturday and Saturday night it was ‘business as usual’ in Cathedral Quarter.
Support
Dermot and Catherine Regan, owners of the Potted Hen restaurant close to the scene of the eexplosion said they were grateful for public support. “Thankfully no one was injured and there was no physical damage to the area. We are back to normal service from lunchtime on Sunday and will be contacting everyone who had booked for last night and whose evening entertainment was ruined,” they said. And Storming Shame Fein Sports and Culture Minister Caral Ni Chilin certainly voted with her feet. She visited the Cathedral Quarter in an unofficial capacity on Saturday evening, had a drink in a bar there, and when asked if she was giving a vote of confidence to the area after the Friday night bomb fright, said: “That’s why I’m here.”
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- Bomb explosion in Belfast as Christmas revellers evacuated from city centre (theguardian.com)
- Belfast City Centre Bomb Fully Exploded, Say Police (belfastdaily.co.uk)
- PSNI hunt man after Belfast explosion (irishtimes.com)
- Video: Police hunt suspect over dissident republican Belfast city centre bomb (belfasttelegraph.co.uk)
- Dissident republicans claim responsibility for Belfast bomb (upi.com)
LOYALISTS ATTACK POLICE AND NATIONALIST HOMES
Petrol bombs and blast bombs thrown
LOYALISTS threw blast bombs and petrol bombs at police and attacked nationalist homes in east Belfast during a fourth night of rioting.
Despite appeals for calm from police and politicians a pipe bomb was thrown at officers in north Belfast and loyalist rioters attacked police in south Belfast last night. Police fired at least one baton round and used water connon on rioters on lower Newtownards Road in the east of the city after attacks on homes in the nationalist Short Strand area. Masked men threw four blast bombs from the loyalist Pitt Park area at police on lower Newtownards Road. Noone was injured. Up to 50 rioters threw stones stones and other missiles at police in the Glenmachan Street and Broadway areas of South Belfast. In North Belfast hundreds of loyalists, many wearing Orange regalia, blocked Twaddell Avenue for several hours and up to three bands walked up the road playing The Sash. Loyalists threw petrol bombs and missiles at police near the Mount Vernon estate and a vehicle was set alight. Loyalist protesters blocked roads in the Corcrain area of Portadown, Co Armagh, including a junction with the nationalist Garvaghy Road.
In Derry officers seized 20 paint bombs during a whiteline protest by loyalists on the main Glendermott and Limavady Roads. Paint was thrown at two Protestant churches in Derry erarlier yesterday, an attack condemned by Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness. Early yesterday evening police narrowly escaped serious injury after a pipe bomb expolded close to officers in north Belfast. The device was thrown from the nationalist Brompton Park area of Ardoyne at police on Crumlin Road at about 5pm yesterday. Noone was injured in the attack, which was swiftly condemned by nationalist and unionist politicians. A seven-year-old was on the street at the time of the attack, Sinn Fein MLA Gerry Kelly said. Superintendent Emma Bond said the bomb could have badly injured officers. “We consider ourselves extremely fortunate that we are not dealing with a much more serious incident and that all the officers were able to walk away from the situation unharmed,” she said. Loyalists held demonstrations across Belfast and other towns last night in protest at the Parades Commission’s decision to block Orangemen and bands from parading past Ardoyne shops on the evening of the Twelfth. Protests were held on Shankill Road in West Belfast, Sandy Row and Castlereagh Street in east Belfast as well as in Dondonald and Antrim.
With many thanks to : Claire Simpson and Connia Young, The Irish News.
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- Flames of Hate !!! – What a Weekend of Violence Means ! (seachranaidhe1.wordpress.com)
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