WHEN SPIES FALL OUT TRUTH TUMBLES OUT

The Phoenix Annual, 2008

HUSH HUSH!!

THE fall-out from Britain’s dirty war in the north has created nearly as much tribunal work as have corrupt politicians. But how about a proper inquiry into US renditions via Shannon?

Funny how the arrival of Barack Obama changed coalition attitudes about the Pentagon’s Atlantic air-bridge and Ireland’s policy on CIA special renditions through Shannon. For years, American clandestine operations in Ireland have been ignored, presumably in the interests of good relations with George Dubya Bush. Internationally-illegal abductions from third countries on aircraft identified in the US media as CIA-operated “Guantanamo Express” carriers were overlooked. The myth was that the government had no evidence that America’s hush-hush warriors were getting up to mischief at Shannon, that the gardai were powerless to investigate a suspected crime -and that there were solid US assurances that all was above board.

This changed as Obama approached the presidential winning post. The Greens, certain of a Democrat victory, leaked details of a hastily-established Cabinet committee, set up to ensure, among other things, “That Garda and airport authorities have powers of search and inspection of aircraft.”

For several years, Goldhawk has been drawing attention to the comings and goings of CIA-operated aircraft at Shannon. The information was as freely available to Goldhawk as it should have been to Irish diplomatic, defence and security authorities. It came from a series of separate investigations by The Washington Post, The New York Times, the LA Times, and also from a group of Quaker-led peace activists in North Carolina, keeping the CIA secret air hub at a small civilian airfield there under surveillance from outside the perimeter fences. Even ignoring Goldhawk and the US media,there was plenty of evidence provided by a European Parliament investigation that CIA aircraft, involved in crimes against international law, had gas-and-go stops in Ireland. And then there were the lengthy Italian judicial proceedings which are continuing. A judge has indicted 22 CIA operatives over the abduction of a Muslim cleric from a Milan street. The missing spies are reported to have returned hurriedly to the US via Shannon. As 2008 comes to an end and world politics are set for change, it is a little late in the day for Irish politicians to claim they didn’t suspect that there was skullduggery at Shannon, or that they believed gardai had no powers to investigate.

The second line of defence for the coalition blind-eye policy towards what the Bush administration and its spooks were doing was that there were assurances from trustworthy US diplomats that nothing underhand was happening. How naive. Spooks tell lies with the ease that pigs grunt. For those who doubt that proposition, Goldhawk presented evidence during the year that the CIA architect of the Shannon renditions programme, Dusty Foggo (see The Phoenix, 17/10/08), was a liar and a crook. He admitted this in a Federal court when he pleaded guilty to one of 28 multi-million dollar corruption charges, plea-bargaining away from a 24¬year sentence and hoping, as the US media predicted, for a mere four years* jail time at his sentence hearing in January 2009.

So much for the defence of Irish blind eye policy on Shannon by pointing to assurances from US persons of integrity. Goldhawk showed Dusty Foggo was the CIA Executive Director, number three in that organisation, behind its politically-appointed Director and Deputy Director. In September. 2008. after he pleaded guilty, The New York Times described him as a “free-wheeling covert logistics officer who organised secret CIA supply lines from the US to Muslim countries through Europe”. In the 11 years he was based in Frankfurt as the top Clandestine Operations Organiser, Dusty was a frequent visitor to Ireland in general and Shannon in particular. What a pity the Garda Special Branch, concentrating their gaze on harmless peace activists, didn’t pay more attention to Dusty and his CIA colleagues – or perhaps they did and, in accordance with government hints, chose to turn a blind eye.

A bigger mystery nearer home centred on the Smithwick Tribunal. This is a long-running investigation headed by sole member Peter Smithwick, former President of the District Court. The Tribunal was set up to examine claims by self-confessed liar and former convict Peter Keeley, famously described by RUC Chief Constable Sir Ronnie Flanagan as a “Walter Mitty”. Using the name Kevin Fulton, the ex-jailbird claimed to know of a plot which resulted in garda members (he named two) helping the IRA ambush to kill two leading RUC officers in the 1980s.

Appearing on BBC, ITN and CNN as a “leading terrorist” and wearing a balaclava to hide his identity, Keeley peddled his yarns for years, assisted by the Northern edition of The Sunday Times, which paid him six¬figure sums for many front-page stories of his imaginary life and exciting times as the leading Provo in South Armagh. Kevin Myers and his Daily Telegraph friend, Toby Harnden, ignored the publicly expressed opinion of Ronnie Flanagan and discreet Garda whispers about Keeley, who was the former manager of The Gentleman’s Club massage parlour on Belfast’s Lisburn Road when The Sunday Times catapulted him to fame.

The problem for Smithwick was that, having become bogged down in a morass of lies, he found it difficult to get out. He has given Keeley legal representation, but Keeley has refused to testify because cross-examination would expose him as a petty criminal from Newry’s Derrybeg estate who drove a Mr Whippy-style ice-cream van, not the important spook who was personally handled by the present Director of MI5.

Despite this, Smithwick has laboured long at his task, assisted by a team of well-paid legal eagles and administrative staff at his private offices in Blackhall Place, up the road from the Law Library. Until earlier this year, when he severed his links with the Tribunal for unexplained reasons, the famous former Garda detective Gerry O’Carroll, of Kerry Babies fame, was Smithwick’s chief investigator. Now a sometime writer (his Garda nickname, The Sheriff, is the title of his autobiography and he writes a column in the Evening Herald) Gerry was employed to take statements from former colleagues. Some indicated the unreliability of Keeley’s claims – pointing to evidence on file at Garda CSB (Crime and Security Branch) which shows Keeley was listed as an “intelligence nuisance” who pestered the RUC with bogus information and had obtained £700 from the Revenue Commissioners Customs Branch.

The biggest riddle about the Smithwick Tribunal is why it has not held a single, working public session. Had it done so, this information could have been revealed in one way or another (probably by lawyers representing gardai) and the expensive exercise wound up, irrespective of any embarrassment to Kevin Myers or The Sunday Times, which has long since distanced itself from Keeley. Estimated costs of the Smithwick Tribunal to date, including legal representation for a number of interested parties, is reported to be in excess of €3.4 million after three and a half years of investigation. Expect soon to have it wound up, if only to save a few million in these straightened times.

When spies fall out, things which were once hush-hush inevitably come into the public eye. Thus a squabble among various British intelligence agencies in 2008 resulted in BBC Panorama in September bringing forward startling new evidence about the Omagh bombing. John Ware, who has had excellent contacts in British intelligence since his days as a Sun reporter in Belfast in 1971, revealed that GCHQ, the electronic spying agency based in Cheltenham (but with listening posts in and over and around various places in Ireland), had monitored mobile phone calls and triangulation-tracked the vehicles involved in the attack by cell-phone identification signals.

So accurate were the Panorama facts -dates, precise times, and code words used -that Gordon Brown ordered his intelligence supremo Sir Peter Gilson to investigate and report to Downing Street within three months. That was one way of distracting attention from a major leak exposing the workings of the GCHQ system, which uses US Rhyolyte satellites to eavesdrop on much of Europe. But the BBC revelations had a wider interest for the Irish. The bombing of Omagh has refused to leave the headlines. Relatives and survivors have been calling for a public inquiry for years amid claims that both Garda intelligence and the British had advance knowledge. Some have claimed, as time progresses and both Dublin and London obstinately refuse open examination of the circumstances, that the real reason for the cover-up is that there was covert counter-insurgency involvement, in other words, the dirty tricks merchants of British intelligence had a hand in things.

Under pressure from relatives and with the support of Police Ombudsman Nuala O’Loan (who found some strange things in the Omagh RUC investigation) Bertie Ahern set up the Nally inquiry. This was a committee of former Government Secretary Dermot Nally, retired Justice Secretary Joe Brosnan and former DPP Eamon Barnes. They produced a report which was kept secret for three years. After much Opposition pressure, an edited version was tabled in the Dail in 2006. This said there was no Garda intelligence fore¬knowledge. Nally made a scathing attack on former Special Branch detective John White, who claimed the opposite, saying he had provided reports to Garda HQ. Nally pointed to White as a person of little reliability – a disgraced detective whose claims came only after his arrest on charges of faking evidence (of which he was acquitted).

But that was before the recent falling out in British intelligence which resulted in the Panorama report. Nally and his fellow investigators may have a quite different view now. But we don’t know – because the report that Michael McDowell put into the public domain in 2006 was a sanitised version, begging the question: Why do these things have to be kept secret so long after the event? Amazingly, former RUC chiefs like Assistant Chief Constable Ray White and Sir Hugh Orde, commenting on the BBC report, want the whole thing to come out in the wash. Perhaps 2009 will bring that public inquiry that so many people want.

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