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TONY
BLAIR "had the intelligence services give every
member of the Cabinet a briefing on Iraq in order
to bind his colleagues into supporting the war."
Thus said Andrew Rawnsley in The Observer on
Sunday.
He
didn't elaborate, assuming readers would understand
that while Cabinet Ministers might challenge the Premier,
there's no way they'd break ranks once brought into
the intelligence loop.When it comes to intelligence
matters, the official truth is what the spooks say
it is. This is key to understanding how the Stakeknife
affair will be resolved. Or, if governments have their
way, not. Even when seemingly at loggerheads, governments
understand one another on this.
One
of the few laughs in this saga came when Bertie Ahern
told the Dail that he would demand answers from Blair
but, sigh, sure he was never done asking Blair about
the misdeeds of Brit spooks in Ireland but was never
left any the wiser. Any more than the rest of us are
the wiser for probing the machinations of Irish spooks
in Ireland. I recall many years ago using an interview
with the Tanaiste to press the case of Nicky Kelly,
jailed for the 1976 Sallins mail train robbery.
The
Tanaiste had, in Opposition, voiced concern about
the case. But, I was told, he realised now his concern
had been misplaced. Kelly had done it allright. The
Tanaiste had used his position to put it directly
to the most senior security official in the State:
Was Kelly guilty? And had been told unequivocally,
Yes. So, that was that. Protestations were brushed
aside. "You can't go any higher." To go
higher would have meant challenging the integrity
of the security services themselves. Which would be
to invite an appalling vista.
Secret
papers from 1972 reveal the underlying camaraderie
of governments in such matters. Just before Christmas
1972, MI6 operative John Wyman was charged in Dublin
with inducing the private secretary to the head of
the Garda Special Branch to pass on information which
the Republic's Government assessed as being "of
a critical nature."
It
was a fraught period for Anglo-Irish relations, at
the tail-end of the worst year of the Troubles. Three
weeks earlier, on December 2, two people had been
killed and more than a hundred injured in bomb blasts
in Dublin just as the draconian Offences Against the
State (Amendment) Bill was being debated in the Dail.
Opposition to the Bill instantly collapsed. It was
widely speculated that British intelligence agents
had had a hand in the deed. For days, the air around
Leinster House trembled with outrage and feelings
of foreboding.
Two
days after Wyman's arrest, however, in a "top
secret and personal" signal to Prime Minister
Ted Heath at Chequers, Cabinet Secretary Robert Armstrong
reported on a Downing Street meeting with Irish Ambassador
Donal O'Sullivan: "For public relations reasons
(Lynch's) Government would have to oppose bail: but
the strength with which they would do so was another
matter. You had expressed concern about the effects
of a long sentence. He had the impression that this
was unlikely: indeed... there might be no sentence
at all."
At
the Special Criminal Court two months later, Wyman
was sentenced to three months and immediately released.
"I
asked the Ambassador specifically whether we could
take it that there was no intention that the contacts
between the British and Irish security forces and
other agencies... should be reduced or interfered
with. The Ambassador assured me that this was the
case... Lynch was very anxious that his own relationship
with the Prime Minister should not in any way suffer
as a result of this incident." Nor will Ahern
press Blair too officiously for the truth about Stakeknife.
History tells us that we learn the truth about the
spooks not through demands for inquiries nor by engaging
the support of friendly governments but when the regimes
which front for the spooks are finally overthrown.
Go
figure.
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