Did British Intelligence Infiltrate Sinn Féin?

On recent revelations surrounding Martin McGuinness

In my opinion, there is no question that Martin McGuinness and Gerry Adams will be remembered as two of the most consequential figures in Irish history. The double act were part of a group of young nationalist radicals who emerged at the beginning of the Troubles to lead the Provisional IRA, but history will remember them most for their political work, where they led the Republican movement away from violence and toward embracing peaceful political activism as the means of achieving their goal of a united Ireland, a long process which culminated in McGuinness, representing Sinn Féin, becoming the deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland in a power sharing agreement alongside the hardliner Unionist Ian Paisley.

McGuinness and Paisley

But could McGuinness, who, as much as anyone symbolised the uncomfortable blending of militant nationalist movements and establishment politics in Northern Ireland, himself have been a double agent for British intelligence? This week, the BBC broadcast a documentary — The Secret War — on a 1972 film of the same name made on the IRA, by a team led by American academic J Bowyer Bell. Bell was regarded as an expert on the Northern Irish conflict, and it is speculated in the same documentary that he was working for the CIA gathering intelligence during his time in Ireland.

Bowyer Bell did in fact work for both the CIA and the US Department of Defense. What’s more, Bell chose as his director a man named Zwy Aldouby, an Israeli former “Nazi hunter” and Haganah member who later worked for the Israeli intelligence services. The BBC documentary includes a statement from former CIA deputy director Richard Kerr speculating that Aldouby was working for Mossad at the time of the documentary, as well as this from his son:

"At that point, Gaddafi was selling or giving arms to terrorists that were attacking Israel, and Gaddafi was also giving arms to the IRA, and Israel at this point was in a very precarious state," Ilan Aldouby, the son of Aldouby, told the BBC. "So my father, if he worked with or collaborated with the Mossad or Israeli intelligence, it would be a clear fit."

Alboudy (left) pictured filming the documentary

The original footage from Bell and Alboudy’s documentary includes a young Martin McGuinness, then second in command of the IRA in his native Derry, handling guns and preparing a car bomb that would eventually injure 26 people in Derry.

Remarkably, this was the first time this footage had appeared on British or Irish television screens, and the maker of this documentary spent five years tracking down the film reels. How could this be?

Incriminating footage of McGuinness from the 1972 documentary The Secret Army

The worldwide rights to the film were bought by a company which mysteriously never released a copy:

The Guardian:

Bell was eying TV networks and a theatrical release. He was to be disappointed. Walter Cronkite’s CBS Evening News show ran some clips, but otherwise networks shunned the film and it largely disappeared from public view.

“I showed it to Viacom; they loved it,” Leon Gildin, a co-producer, told MacIntyre. “They offered me a contract for worldwide rights. What happened after that? Viacom took the worldwide rights and never sold a copy.”

Bell believed British intelligence persuaded authorities to stifle his film.

This obviously raises the question: if British Intelligence had seen the film, which clearly incriminated McGuinness and other IRA commanders in Derry, why did they leave him a free man? And why would they keep this footage hidden for so long? Is this evidence that McGuinness was being protected by the British state?

A history of allegations

This is not the first time suggestions of McGuinness being some kind of asset for British intelligence has surfaced. Ian Hurst was a British intelligence officer who worked for the Force Research Unit, a covert military intelligence unit established in 1982 to gather intel on terrorist group in Northern Ireland. The FRU’s greatest success came from its infiltration of the IRA, and its finest achievement on this front was the success of its agent “Stakeknife”, a spy who successfully infiltrated the IRA's Internal Security Unit, which was responsible for the IRA’s own counter-intelligence.

Hurst outed Freddie Scappaticci as Stakeknife, much to the bewilderment of IRA members familiar with Scappaticci, who considered his loyalty beyond question. It may be interesting then to revisit another allegation made by Hurst claimed there was another high profile double agent in the IRA: Martin McGuinness.

Hurst alleged that McGuinness was the man behind “Agent J118”, a high ranking MI6 Agent within the IRA. Hurst (under the pseudonym ‘Martin Ingram‘) wrote this in 2006:

The thing is I had suspicions about McGuinness being an agent at that stage, but I didn't see the proof until about two years ago. That's when I was given the transcript of Agent J118 talking to his handlers.

It's true the document doesn't name McGuinness as Agent J118, but my sources have confirmed that's him. I trust my sources, because the information fits.

We're back to relying on sources, but from what I'm being told by republicans, they are investigating McGuinness and consider it a genuine document. And the document is only one strand of it. The fact is that Martin McGuinness is a protected species.

The journalist who first published Hurst’s allegations has come to believe the document Hurst viewed was a forgery, but Hurst makes a number of other arguments which support his allegation that McGuinness was a “protected species”:

• The government presented McGuinness as a military hawk who demanded tangible results from the peace process, but he had no military credentials and Derry became less troublesome for the security services under his leadership.

• McGuinness was never interned or convicted of any terrorism offences, despite his leadership position in the IRA being an open secret.

• In the so-called “supergrass trials”, agents were willing to give evidence against McGuinness, but police did not proceed.

• Loyalist paramilitaries never attacked McGuinness. Hurst says plans for these attacks were “frustrated by security forces.”

• As part of “Operation Taurus” the police believed they had sufficient evidence to prosecute McGuinness for his connections to terrorism, but it was dropped under political pressure.

Even if the document Hurst viewed was forged, him going public with his allegation led to a number of others doing the same, and taken together, there seems to be a credible case.

Last year, a former high ranking IRA member Richard O’Rawe published a book Stakeknife’s Dirty War, where he claimed it was now common among former IRA members to suspect McGuinness was an informant. O’Rawe counts it as particularly damning that McGuinness promoted an informant named Frank Hegarty to the position of quartermaster:

This guy, Hegarty, had been in the IRA and was dismissed because he was going with a UDR man’s wife, and he was a suspected tout.

Then he came back and McGuinness absolutely embraced him, which he should never have done. The IRA in Derry were going fucking spare that this guy was back in play. Hegarty went from being a private to virtually top of the tree in terms of the IRA staff structure.

Another who worked for Britain’s Force Research Unit was Willie Carlin, who successfully infiltrated the Republican movement in McGuiness’s Derry and became very close to McGuinness personally. In his 2019 memoir, Carlin wrote of an incident which shocked him: he encountered McGuinness at what he knew was an MI5 safehouse:

The covert world, however, was never far away and my meetings with MI5 contacts were becoming more frequent, especially since I had a new handler who called himself ‘Ben’. The location of our conversations had also changed. Before they were held in car parks and picnic areas, but now we had a house at our disposal in a spot outside Limavady on the road to Castlerock

…

I was on my way to meet him on the Antrim coast one lunchtime and as usual turned right to head up the coast road out of Limavady, which went straight past the house. As I drove up the road, a red Peugeot came out of the gates of the house and headed back into Limavady, coming straight towards me. 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. I quickly looked the other way in the hope that the driver (whom I couldn’t place) didn’t recognise me. As I drove towards Carnlough I could feel my right foot shaking on the accelerator and sweat running down the back of my shirt. A little further on, I stopped at a layby and got out to catch my breath. What the hell was Martin McGuinness doing coming out of an MI5 house?

Carlin also claimed it was his former MI5 handler that approached him to ask he testify to the Saville Inquiry against the claims of another agent, that McGuinness had fired the first shots on Bloody Sunday. Hurst also testified at that inquiry in McGuinness’s defence, writing that

During that testimony, the inquiry kept reminding me not to name any agents. A policeman was sitting about three feet away from me. I'm sure they were afraid I was going to identify McGuinness at that stage.

In fairness, Carlin himself claimed he did not believe McGuinness himself was an agent, but that the British protected him because they knew he “was a man they could do business with.” It’s certainly not implausible that though McGuinness was never an informant, the British state calculated it would be in their interest to keep him and Gerry Adams as the leadership of the Republican movement, especially by the 1990s when it was clear they were moving that movement away from armed conflict to a political settlement.

Toby Harnden, a journalist in Northern Ireland and the author of the very popular Bandit Country: The IRA & South Armagh, also wrote a lengthy meditation on McGuinness’s loyalties after his death in 2017. This is worth quoting at length:

Despite his military record McGuinness had long been a proponent of negotiations. Sean MacStiofain, the Provisional IRA’s first chief of staff, claimed to Anthony McIntyre, a former IRA man who served 18 years in jail, that McGuinness was lobbying for a ceasefire as far back as 1972.

A declassified British military document carried an account of a meeting in May 1973 between two of the most senior British Army officers involved in the Troubles during which the existence of a source, apparently named “Brocolli”.

General Sir Frank King, who commanded British troops in Northern Ireland from February 1973 and August 1975 and General Sir David Fraser, Vice Chief of the General Staff, were apparently concerned about “the problem” of the source’s protection.

Brian Keenan, the veteran IRA leader who died of cancer in 2008, suspected that McGuinness had set him up for arrest at a roadblock in 1979. Keenan was wanted at the time and was suspicious that McGuinness had flagged him down shortly beforehand, alerting the security forces to the car he was in.

In his powerful book A Secret History of the IRA, Ed Moloney, a veteran journalist with unrivalled Provisional contacts, laid out details of the charmed life that McGuinness led while he promoted men suspected of being informers and IRA operations that he oversaw were infiltrated.

Eight IRA men were killed in an SAS ambush at Loughgall, Co Armagh, in 1987, the biggest death toll for the organisation in any single incident since 1921. Those who perished were regarded as being among the most militant members of the IRA, whose East Tyrone Brigade was adamantly opposed to the talks strategy being drawn up by Adams and McGuinness.

Somehow the IRA plan to blow up an RUC station had been completely compromised, although it’s possible that it was electronic surveillance rather than treachery that led to the SAS operation.

The previous year, the IRA’s Northern Command had been given the power to vet planned attacks to avoid them conflicting with Sinn Fein’s political plans. The head of Northern Command was none other than McGuinness.

Harnden notes that the IRA had been neutralised in McGuiness’s Derry — once a hotspot of activity — long before anywhere else. He notes that Derry’s IRA was riddled with informants and, as mentioned earlier, these were often promoted to positions of prominence by McGuinness.

He also notes that the “human bomb” attack on the Coshquin checkpoint in Derry in 1990, in which a Catholic canteen worker was forced by the IRA to drive a truck full of explosives to a British army checkpoint, where it was detonated with him still inside, did much to turn people on the nationalist side against continuing the strategy of armed conflict, especially after

An IRA statement authorised by McGuinness, who had approved the operation, Gillespie was described as having deserved death because he had been “a part of the British war machine”.

The circumstantial evidence builds a strong case for McGuinness being involved in actions which seemed to thwart the feasibility of the IRA’s armed campaign, while himself living a charmed life, safe from the British state. Like Carlin though, Harnden concludes he was most likely being protected as a useful political partner in the peace process, rather than as an agent:

The most plausible theory perhaps is that while he was never in the pay of the British, he — along with Adams — was regarded as an “agent of influence” by MI5 and MI6, a force for encouraging the Provisionals to move towards politics.

After all, the pair had been involved in political talks with British officials and MI6 at Cheyne Walk, in London’s Chelsea, in 1972. As the Troubles wore on, it seemed increasingly that they were being protected by the British government for fear of them being supplanted by more militaristic figures.

Whichever version of this is most likely — McGuinness being an active informant for the British state or simply being protected from afar as someone useful to its aims — there now seems strong evidence that he was considered some kind of asset. The revelation of a 1972 documentary which very clearly incriminates McGuinness, and which was ignored and even suppressed by British intelligence, makes the allegations of him being a direct asset more plausible. By the 1980s it was clear Adams and McGuinness were leading the Republican movement toward peaceful politics, but could the British have forecast that the young commander was destined for this role while preparing bombs in 1972?

What would it mean?

We may never know the truth about McGuinness’s connections or lack thereof to the British intelligence, but the legacy of his political career is inescapable. Sinn Féin have been in a historic power-sharing government with Unionists in the North since the end of the Troubles, and are now the most popular party in the South. Adams and McGuinness can take almost full credit for moving the Republican movement to fully embrace electoral politics over armed struggle, and to recognise the legitimacy of a Northern Irish state.

These kinds of allegations are especially troubling for Sinn Féin then. Since the end of the Troubles, Sinn Féin have had to retcon the justification for the armed struggle waged by the Provisional IRA. The basis for that struggle, and the continued rejection of power sharing proposals for Northern Ireland, had been the inviolability of the political unity of the island of Ireland. There is no way to read Sinn Féin’s embrace of power sharing and recognition of the institutions of a Northern Irish state within the United Kingdom except as abandoning the fundamental principle on which their struggle had been based. Therefore, they have rewrote the conflict to primarily be about civil rights, about a minority resisting repression and striving for full recognition, with armed struggle being the extreme and unfortunate last resort of a people who had every other avenue of reform blocked.

In this telling of events, it was only ever the British imperial entity, not the Unionist minority, that was the obstacle to their goals. Once this state relented and allowed power sharing, the entry of Republicans into establishment politics and a state with full equal civil rights for all, the justification for armed struggle receded. If it turns out then, that the British state had in fact always supported the same goals of Adams and McGuinness, and that they were happy to have Sinn Féin governing the statelet so long as they could be rid of it as a security concern, then the story of these two figures is not one of nationalist political leaders forcing the mighty British to their knees and receiving historic concessions, but simply moving the Republican movement to its own historic compromise which was perfectly in line with the aims of the British state.

In short, the revelation of McGuinness as an asset for the British state would not only undermine one of Sinn Féin’s greatest icons, but their whole basis for legitimacy as the inheritors of Ireland’s radical Republican past.