Irish police mole helped entire IRA leadership avoid capture in 1974
December 8, 2014 Leave a comment
By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org
The former intelligence director of the Provisional Irish Republican Army has claimed that an informant within the Irish police helped the entire leadership of the militant organization avoid capture during a raid in 1974. The raid was conducted in December of 1974 by Garda Síochána, the police force of the Republic of Ireland, in the village of Feakle, County Claire, in western Ireland. On the day of the raid, the entire leadership of the Provisional IRA was taking part in a secret meeting with Protestant clergy, which had been pursued by the separatist organization following the so-called pub bombings in the English cities of Guildford and Birmingham. The bombings were meant to take the war in Northern Ireland to the British mainland, but were eventually deemed disastrous to the image of the IRA. Nearly 30 people died in the bombings, while hundreds were injured, many of them seriously. The secret meeting between the IRA’s leadership and Protestant clergy was part of a wider negotiation campaign between republican separatists and pro-British loyalists, which eventually led to a ceasefire that lasted until the start of 1975. However, an informant had given the Garda accurate information about the meeting location between the IRA senior command and Protestant clergy, and the agency’s Crime and Security Branch planned to swoop on the meeting and arrest the republican militants. However, in an interview with British newspaper The Guardian, the IRA’s former director of intelligence, Kieran Conway, said the IRA leadership managed to escape arrest thanks to “a tip-off from high-placed figures within the Garda”. Conway joined the IRA in 1970 and became director of its intelligence wing in 1974. He left a year later and joined again in 1981 during the hunger strikes by republican prisoners. He left for good in 1993, in protest against the IRA’s decision to sign the Downing Street Declaration, which formed the basis of the IRA’s eventual decision to decommission its weapons and enter the political process. Conway also told The Guardian that the IRA had the support of “prominent members of the Irish establishment” including mainstream politicians, senior bankers, stockbrokers and journalists. Many of these supporters provided safe houses for members of the IRA in affluent neighborhoods of Irish capital Dublin, he claimed. Conway was speaking to promote his recently published book, called Southside Provisional: From Freedom Fighter to the Four Courts. This is not the first time allegations have surfaced about IRA moles inside the Irish Garda. In 2011, an Irish government investigation unearthed intelligence reports claiming that an informant within the agency helped the IRA plan the killings of a judge and two senior British police officers in the 1980s.
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Reactions to US Senate’s CIA report fall along party lines
December 10, 2014 by intelNews Leave a comment
Almost immediately following the release of the United States Senate Intelligence Committee’s summary-report on the Central Intelligence Agency’s interrogation program, American public figures began to hurriedly fall in line along predictable partisan positions on the subject. The 500-page document, released on Tuesday, represents the publicly available version of a 6,000-page report that dismisses the CIA’s post-9/11 detention and interrogation program as an intelligence failure. It also details instances of systematic use of torture by the Agency and accuses it of lying to Congress and the Executive about the effectiveness of its detention methods. But the published report was boycotted by the Senate Committee’s Republican Party members; consequently, it was authored solely by the group’s Democratic Party members, who currently constitute a majority in the Committee. Its Republican members, led by Senator Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga), released an alternative 160-page minority report that dismisses the majority document as an inaccurate and hastily produced account, which endangers American national security. The Republican-supported minority statement praises the CIA for weakening al-Qaeda in the years after 9/11 and lambasts its critics for “misrepresentations of fact” rooted in “political motivations”. Meanwhile, as senior officials in the administration of US President Barack Obama voiced support for the Senate report, an anonymous group of former senior CIA officials launched a website lambasting it as “the single worst example of Congressional oversight in our many years of government service”. IntelNews understands that the website, entitled “CIA Saved Lives”, is organized by Bill Harlow, the CIA’s public-affairs director from 1997 to 2004, who is close to the Agency’s former Director, George Tenet. Tenet was a trusted advisor of then-US President George W. Bush, and led the CIA during the implementation of the early stages of the post-9/11 interrogation program. The CIA’s own response to the Senate report came in a public press release that acknowledged “serious mistakes” in the interrogation program while defending its alleged effectiveness in weakening of al-Qaeda. Rare examples of public figures that broke party lines were Susan Collins (R-Me), the only Senate Intelligence Committee Republican not to endorse the minority report, and Senator John McCain (R-Az). McCain, who underwent years of torture as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam, said the CIA’s use of torture “stained [America’s] national honor” and had done “much harm and little practical good”.
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