05.01.2006

The tip of the iceberg

Liam O Ruairc comments on the outing of leading Sinn Fein member Denis Donaldson as a spy for the British secret service

"I was a spy.” That was the headline of The Irish News on December 18. Above it was a famous photograph of Bobby Sands (the mural outside Sinn Féin’s office in Belfast is based on that photograph) standing with Denis Donaldson.

Denis Donaldson’s public admission that he had been a spying for more than 20 years on behalf of the British state sent political shockwaves throughout Ireland and beyond. He was a senior member of the Provisional movement with impeccable credentials, belonging to the group of key strategists who planned the evolution of the movement throughout the years. Donaldson was part of a so-called ‘kitchen cabinet’ of advisers within Sinn Féin and the IRA who supported and nurtured Gerry Adams’s peace strategy.

His relationship to Gerry Adams is similar to that of Downing Street chief-of-staff Jonathan Powell to Anthony Blair. According to a “former IRA prisoner”, “To say Denis was just a ‘long-standing member of the party’ is simply untrue. He was not only Adams’s chief-of-staff at Stormont; he was one of his closest aides and allies. He probably knew what colour of toilet paper Gerry wiped his bum with” (quoted by Henry McDonald in The Observer December 18 2005).

More significant than the information he gave to his British handlers was his role in shaping the ‘peace process’ on behalf of the British state. Ed Moloney, author of A secret history of the IRA, said the revelation showed that British intelligence was influencing the core of the Provisional political machine: “The revelation that he has been a spy suggests the British were into the area of agents of influence within Sinn Féin and were perhaps encouraging Sinn Féin and the IRA leadership to go down the path they have gone in the last few years ... It really raises fundamental questions about who was running the Provisional movement in the last few years. Was it the British? Was it the Adams leadership? Or was it the Adams leadership and the British together, both working to a common goal?” (Angelique Chrisafis The Guardian December 20 2005).

According to David Sharrock, “The IRA is riddled with informers and agents because intelligence was king in the battle against the ‘long war’ conceived by Mr Adams and his ‘kitchen cabinet’ - which included Donaldson - back in the 1970s. But the most intriguing question of all arises out of the nature of the work of agents within an organisation like the IRA. They are there not just to pass information to their MI5 or special branch handlers, but also to influence strategy and direction at the highest level” (The Times December 19 2005).

Sharrock went on to recall: “In 1994 Mr Donaldson told me at his west Belfast home about what appeared to be the key to the emerging ‘peace strategy’ of the Provisionals. ‘For too many people the IRA has become the end in itself and no longer the vehicle to achieve the end for which it fights,’ he said. He meant that the ‘armed struggle’ had become an obstacle to reuniting Ireland and ending British sovereignty. Little wonder, then, that unionists are so paranoid or that Irish republicans of a greener, more traditional nature see traitors everywhere - up to and including ‘the Brit agents Adams and McGuinness’ themselves.”

Historian Paul Bew recalls: “This, after all, is historically how Britain achieves peace in Ireland. In 1920-21, the police and army regularly made raids on leading Sinn Féin figures, only to discover that they were under the protection of other parts of the British state. Those arrested were rapidly released even when incriminating material was found; in one famous case, that of Erskine Childers in 1921, a senior British official carried his bags out of jail” (Paul Bew Yorkshire Post December 22).

Donaldson’s work in the US illustrates this. Former Noraid publicity director Martin Galvin raised doubts about Donaldson’s behaviour in the US, but says these were instantly dismissed by the Sinn Féin ard comhairle (executive). Galvin said Donaldson had been sent with the “full endorsement” of a senior Sinn Féin leader whom he refused to name:

“He created trouble, he made bad recommendations about genuine people, he attempted to undermine supporters with traditional republican credentials and he pushed those with reformist politics on the north. I began to notice how he tried to push out people who had hard-core politics and would be more likely to ask questions about strategy and even challenge Sinn Féin policy changes. He would say these people were no good, and he would push forward those who were far more malleable politically. He tried to undermine a very senior Belfast republican living in New York and also the sister of a dead INLA hunger-striker” (The Sunday Tribune December 18 2005 - see also Sean O Driscoll, ‘US republicans find their struggle was run by an informer’ The Irish Times December 24 2005). In a bizarre incident it is even claimed that Donaldson prevented Mickey Rourke from participating in a film project where he would have played Patsy O Hara.

According to former RUC detective Johnston Brown, who served for 30 years in the police force, “The republican movement, just like the loyalist terrorists groups, has been infiltrated by special branch right to the very highest levels. Quite simply, I would be shocked if there was not more important figures than Donaldson inside the republican movement who have been working for special branch and other intelligence agencies like MI5 or the army’s FRU for years.

“The IRA was going nowhere by the time Martin McGuinness communicated to John Major that their war was over but they needed help to stop it. Politically and financially the IRA was on its knees and special branch played a major role in bringing them to that point. The IRA has never been riddled with agents to the same extent as the loyalist UVF, where one in five members is an informer. But the security services put more emphasis on recruiting high-level republicans because, quite simply, the IRA posed the biggest security threat.”

However, Brown is suspicious about the timing of Denis Donaldson’s outing as an informer so soon after the collapse of the Stormont spy-ring case: “Certainly, I think the story that has emerged in the last couple of days is a smokescreen. It is too neat” (The Sunday Life December 18 2005).

It is all too convenient for Sinn Féin to sacrifice Donaldson. It gets them, the DPP, the courts and the government off the hook and puts the political pressure back on the Democratic Unionist Party. But more importantly, Donaldson may only be the tip of the iceberg: “It is widely believed in security and unionist political circles that Donaldson was sacrificed by his British handlers to protect a more important mole who is both a senior Sinn Féin and IRA figure” (Suzanne Breen The Sunday Tribune December 18 2005).

There is speculation among both republicans and the Social Democratic and Labour Party that a far more senior politician in Sinn Féin is in fact the mole, and that Mr Donaldson was being forced to take the rap to protect the party. The SDLP vice-chairman, Eddie Espie, said: “This project of super-collusion happened under Gerry Adams’ watch. Only a few days ago, Gerry Adams was happy to appear alongside Donaldson on the steps of Stormont, presenting him as a ‘victim of securocrats’ and trying to tell everyone to move on from the Stormontgate affair. Now it transpires that Adams was singing the praises of an arch-British agent. The buck stops with him. The only option now open is for Gerry Adams to resign” (The Guardian December 19 2005).

In a recent Last word programme on Today FM (December 19 2005), former British army undercover operative Martin Ingram confirmed to presenter Matt Cooper that there are senior Sinn Féin household names at present working for the British state. Furthermore, a prominent Sinn Fein figure in the south, and two other members of Gerry Adams’ inner circle, have been described by The Sunday Independent as the second, third and fourth moles at the top of the IRA who passed key intelligence to the garda and the police in the north. The high-profile Sinn Féin man in the republic is allegedly a household name and, were his identity to now emerge, it would cause huge political repercussions within the Provisional movement.

According to the paper, this person passed information to garda special branch officers which was then given to the RUC, leading to the most severe blow ever inflicted on the IRA. In May 1987, seven members of the IRA’s East Tyrone unit walked into an ambush in Loughgall. The unit was led by Jim Lynagh who was known to be an opponent to the “unarmed strategy” then being pursued by the IRA and Gerry Adams. It is not clear whether the informant was acting purely for self-gain, because he had been compromised, or whether - as has been suggested by some republicans - he was acting in the full knowledge of the IRA’s leadership which distrusted Lynagh and his entourage. He also passed on information about other IRA operations in East Tyrone, leading to the killing of several IRA men.

The two other figures are from Belfast and have been close to Adams for decades. Both are semi-public but not elected members of Sinn Féin. Only one of the three was jailed for IRA offences, and the other Belfast man is said to have played a mainly political role and to have done little of a ‘military’ nature (see Jim Cusack and Conor Sweeney Sunday Independent December 18 2005). Tom Hartley and Richard Glenholmes have already been warned by the police that they were suspected of being informers and Sinn Féin TD O Caolain has also been branded as such (Liam Clarke The Sunday Times January 1; and Ben Quinn Irish Independent January 2).

The Provisional leadership blames the ‘securocrats’ for trying once again to undermine the ‘peace process’ and cause dissension within its ranks by leaking the names of alleged informers (Colm Heatley Sunday Business Post January 1). However, far from the British “securocrats” moving to undermine Sinn Féin, they are seemingly striving to protect it from serious investigation. As Ed Moloney puts it, “The Sinn Féin conspiracy theory - that the spooks are out to destroy the peace process - suffers from a fundamental flaw. Not only is it rubbish, but the exact opposite is the truth. The peace process represents the wildest fantasies of the security establishment come true and the last thing the spooks want is to see it destroyed. The peace process has enabled MI5 and the Police Service of Northern Ireland special branch to achieve something that very few if any security forces have ever accomplished: to see their enemy defanged by its own leadership and led out of violent revolutionary ways into constitutional politics and a world where the principle of consent overrides the Armalite.

“MI5 and the PSNI know they could never have done this themselves, that they needed people like Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness to do it for them. So why on earth would the spooks want to undermine them, to frustrate them and place obstacles in their way, as the Provo leadership claim they have consistently done - most recently with Stormontgate? To have done so would have been to act fundamentally against their own interests. It just wouldn’t make sense” (The Belfast Telegraph December 21 2005).

Paul Bew concludes that “those whom Sinn Féin named as securocrats gave every sign of being inconvenienced by the Stormontgate affair. It was their job, after all, to deliver the institutions of the Good Friday agreement and to keep Mr Adams locked into the peace process. In that sense, there has been, for many years now, a profound commonality of interest between the British security establishment and Mr Adams” (Yorkshire Post December 22 2005).

Finally, the actions of Donaldson and those of the Provisional leadership to a certain extent complement each other - after all one could say that he ‘touted for peace’: “Martin McGuinness worked as a British minister; Denis Donaldson worked as a British agent. At the risk of oversimplifying, the minister’s job is to shaft republicanism; that of the agent is to shaft republicans. While few outside the ranks of the purists would call McGuinness a rat on this basis, there is no clear blue ideological sea between minister and agent” (Anthony McIntyre The Blanket http://lark.phoblacht.net/am2312059g.html).

“If Denis is a tout, anyone could be one,” declared one west Belfast IRA member. The question is: who’s next? Anthony McIntyre predicts: “The informant problem, the touting problem, will become for Sinn Féin what paedophilia became for the catholic church.” What is clear is that “the Sinn Féin leadership cannot afford another spy scandal. The best way to avoid another one is to complete the peace process journey, do the best deal possible with the DUP and recognise the PSNI. Only then, when they are safely inside the house and the door is locked can Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness breathe easily.”