Monthly Archives: April 2018

‘I, Dolours’ – The Backstory

By Ed Moloney

The origins of this film on the life of the late Dolours Price – directed by Maurice Sweeney and produced by New Decade TV – lie in an interview that she gave to the Belfast daily, The Irish News in February 2010, in which she spoke, for the first time publicly, about her part in the saga of the IRA ‘disappeared’.

That interview set in motion a cascade of crises that culminated in an agreement between herself and myself in which she made a promise not to reveal any more about the ‘disappeared’. In return she would record her story on tape and video and it would not see daylight until she died. That way the truth could eventually be told without causing harm to herself.

The journey to that agreement was a long and complicated one, so for the purpose of brevity I will tell the story in bullet points:

  • For around three or four years I was the director of the Boston College Oral History Archive which was established in 2001 to collect and record interviews with participants in the Northern Ireland Troubles, primarily Republican and Loyalist activists;
  • I had been a journalist in Belfast until 2001, most recently for the Dublin-based Sunday Tribune. That year I moved to New York. In 2003, Penguin published my study of the IRA’s journey to the peace process, a book called ‘A Secret History of the IRA’;
  • Dolours Price was one of several former IRA members who I spoke to for the book. Amongst other things, she confirmed the existence and role of ‘the Unknowns’ and told me about the ‘disappeared’.
  • When the Boston archive was set up, Dolours Price agreed to give a series of interviews about her life and times in the Provisional IRA. Both myself and the researcher knew that she had been involved with ‘the Unknowns’, in taking people away to be ‘disappeared;
  • Before the interviews began Dolours was given the opportunity to exclude subjects she did not wish to speak about at all or fully in her interviews, matters that she did not want her family to know about. She chose ‘the disappeared’ as one of those subjects.
  • In 2009, I was asked to write a book based upon interviews given to the archive by Brendan Hughes, a former Belfast commander of the IRA, a hunger striker and a onetime close friend of Gerry Adams. RTE and the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland also accepted a proposal to make a documentary based on the book
  • In late 2009 we approached Dolours Price in Belfast for an interview and she agreed. She and Brendan Hughes had been close comrades. Shortly afterwards I was contacted by a family member who told me that Dolours had been ill with PTSD. I was asked not to interview her and immediately agreed. There the matter would have ended but for events;
  • I have always believed that one event in particular pushed Dolours Price over the edge. In late 2009, the Belfast daily, The Irish News reported that the IRA had lied when it had admitted ’disappearing’ people during the Troubles. A list of victims prepared by the organisation, the paper reported, was incomplete. Missing was Joe Lynskey, the IRA’s chief of intelligence in Belfast and the first ‘disappeared’ victim to be driven across the Irish Border by Dolours Price;
  • Joe Lynskey was a friend of Dolours Price. He believed utterly in the IRA, believed he had been rightly sentenced to death and went willingly with Dolours across the Border. He could have escaped but didn’t. I think the reminder of all that disturbed her intensely and led to the next fateful step;
  • In February 2009, Dolours Price gave an interview about the ‘disappeared’ to The Irish News reporter who had broken the Lynskey story, but her family intervened with the editor to reduce the harm.
  • I visited her in hospital that day only to learn that she had scheduled another interview, this time with The Guardian. Her family didn’t seem to know about this. I knew the journalist; he was good at his job. Nothing, it seemed, was going to stop her from telling her story to the world;
  • It was clear that a major effort would have to be made to stop her from a course that would be disastrous for her and her family;
  • So, I made the proposal that has led to this film. She could sit down and tell her story on tape and video; it would then be stored away until her death. Only then would the world hear what she had to say about that period – and I told her that if she predeceased me, and I was able, I would ensure that her story was told. She agreed;
  • Although subsequently she gave interviews to CBS and The Sunday Telegraph, Dolours Price never revealed publicly the full, untold story of the ‘disappeared’ which is disclosed in this documentary. She kept her word. And I have now kept mine;
  • The result is this film, ‘I, Dolours’.

‘I, Dolours’ – First Review

From Documentary Culture:

Review: ‘I, Dolours’
Hot Docs 2018
By Chelsea Phillips-Carr • Published April 26th, 20180 Comments

I, Dolours
(Ireland, 82 minutes)
Dir: Maurice Sweeney
Programme: International Spectrum. (World Premiere)

In 2010, former Irish Republican Army member Dolours Price gave a series of interviews, under the agreement that they could only be released after her death. Most famous for her involvement in the bombing of London’s Old Bailey in 1973, an attack which injured hundreds of people and killed one, Dolours’ story is expanded upon in Maurice Sweeney’s documentary, where reenactments illustrate her words as she details her childhood, radical experiences, incarceration, and beyond.

With such controversial subject matter, I, Dolours has all the appeal of being let in on a secret. Intimately, we gain access to forbidden knowledge, the indulgence of gossip being grounded by the severity of real events. Dolours is an engaging speaker, and her passion comes through as she recounts her upbringing within a staunchly republican family, as well as her determination and commitment to fight for the rights of her people.

But Sweeney’s doc takes an impartial perspective. The film allows Dolours to discuss her life as she sees it. We hear what drove her to acts of terrorism, and how she could justify violence, rationalizing her radicalism. We also watch, with great sympathy, as she is put into prison, taking on a 200-day hunger strike, which is extended by force-feeding. Simultaneously, we receive the facts of the violence she participated in, especially the “disappearing” of other IRA members deemed to be traitors or informers. In particular is the killing of Jean McConville, a widowed mother of ten. Archival footage of her bewildered children is horrifying to contemplate especially after hearing Dolours’ description of personally driving the condemned woman to the place where she would be executed.

There is discomfort in this whiplash of perspectives. In showing both sides bluntly, I, Dolours is able to depict “The Troubles” in Northern Ireland as an incredibly complex set of issues. The film shows understanding and compassion towards Dolours’ republicanism, and never portrays Britain as faultless in the conflict. It equally shows the violence of the IRA (towards innocent people, towards their own people), and does not allow these acts to be justified by the greater struggle for Irish independence. In this way, I, Dolours is able to handle a loaded issue with respect, treating its source with dignity but without falling into reverence, exploring the history without accepting it.

‘The New Yorker’ Magazine On ‘I, Dolours’…….

This piece can be accessed on The New Yorker website here, otherwise readers without access can scroll below to read it:

In December, 1972, a woman named Jean McConville was taken from her home in Belfast, Northern Ireland, by a gang of masked intruders, and never seen again. McConville was a widow, and a mother of ten; her children were home when she was abducted, and they screamed and clung to her legs. Her disappearance became known as one of the most notorious atrocities of the Troubles, the bloody, three-decade conflict that ravaged Northern Ireland. It was also, on a more basic level, a murder mystery. The McConville children were distributed to orphanages, and, growing up, they never knew what had happened to their mother. But it was long rumored that she had been killed by the Irish Republican Army, and, in 1999, the I.R.A. acknowledged that this was true. In a new documentary film, “I, Dolours,” which will be shown for the first time this weekend, at the Hot Docs festival in Toronto, a former I.R.A. member, Dolours Price, describes in unprecedented detail the operation to kidnap, murder, and secretly bury Jean McConville.

Price grew up in Belfast, in a staunchly Irish Republican family. As a young woman at the outset of the Troubles, she joined a secretive I.R.A. unit, the Unknowns, and performed dangerous operations, including an audacious bombing of the Old Bailey in London, in 1973. But after the Good Friday Agreement, which ostensibly brought an end to the Troubles in 1998, Price grew deeply disillusioned. She broke the I.R.A.’s code of silence and acknowledged, in press interviews, that she had played a role in McConville’s abduction: she said that she had driven McConville from Belfast across the border to Dundalk, in the Republic of Ireland, where another I.R.A. team executed her. Price also asserted that Gerry Adams, the Irish Republican politician who had helped engineer the peace agreement, was the person who gave her orders. Adams, who still maintains that he was never in the I.R.A., has strenuously denied this. (I wrote an article about this controversy in 2015, and am working on a book about the murder and its aftermath, “Say Nothing,” which will be published next year.)

In 2010, Dolours Price agreed to speak at length about her I.R.A. career with the Bronx-based journalist Ed Moloney—on the condition that he not release the interview until after her death. They met in Dublin, where Price was living, and Moloney conducted a long videotaped interview. Price was not well at the time: she had struggled with alcohol and prescription pills, and been diagnosed with P.T.S.D.; she was being treated at a local psychiatric hospital. But in the interview she is composed, sober, and coherent. Price died in 2013, from a fatal overdose of prescription pills. As its title would suggest, “I, Dolours” is a testament: the only narration is Price’s voice. The film’s director, Maurice Sweeney, intersperses footage of Price during the interview—a pale woman with penetrating blue eyes, her hair short and platinum blond—with a series of evocative reënactments.

The members of the Unknowns were selected to the secret unit because they “could be trusted with very specific jobs, obeying orders without question,” Price says. The unit was run by a man named Pat McClure, she continues. But McClure “reported back to the officer commanding in Belfast—who would have been Gerry Adams.” One of Price’s responsibilities was transporting people who had been marked for death out of Northern Ireland and across the border to the Republic of Ireland, where they would be killed. In one chilling section of the film, she recounts driving two I.R.A. men, Seamus Wright and Kevin McKee, to their deaths. They had both committed what was regarded as the ultimate sin in the I.R.A.: becoming British informers. After they confessed, Wright and McKee were told that their lives would be spared, so they joined Price for that final ride without resistance, believing that they were going for a brief holiday in the south. “Ultimately, I believe they were shot,” Price says, adding, “We believed that informers were the lowest form of human life.” (The bodies of Wright and McKee were discovered, buried in an Irish bog, in 2015.)

When Moloney asks Price about Jean McConville, she insists that McConville, too, was an informer. The I.R.A. has maintained for decades that McConville was murdered because she had been supplying information to the British Army. The children of Jean McConville—who today are parents and grandparents themselves—have angrily challenged this assertion, pointing out that Jean was a widowed mother of ten who would have had no access to sensitive information, much less the time to pass it along. A report by the Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland, from 2006, also found no evidence that McConville was an informer.

But Price insists that she was. In the film, she repeats an old story about how the I.R.A. had discovered a radio transmitter in McConville’s apartment, which she allegedly used to pass information to her handlers in the British Army. But Price also tells a new story: she says that several I.R.A. members were hauled into a barracks on Hastings Street, “to be identified by a person concealed behind a blanket.” The blanket had a slit in it, so that an informer could peer through and supply the authorities with the names of suspected paramilitary members. But the blanket “stopped short of her feet,” Price says—and the suspects realized that the person hiding on the other side was McConville, because they “recognized the slippers.” When she was interrogated by the I.R.A., McConville confessed, Price maintains, saying that she had agreed to help the British “for money.” (Whether the I.R.A. tortured McConville before extracting such a confession Price does not say.)

“Our first contact with her was to just pick her up,” Price says. Three members of the Unknowns—Price, Pat McClure, and a third—escorted McConville after her abduction in Belfast. McConville was not fearful for her life, Price notes, because they told her that she was not going to be killed but rather relocated by a charitable group, the Legion of Mary. McConville asked if her children could join her, and it was only at that moment, Price insists, that she realized that the widow whom she was transporting to her death had kids. Even so, she brought McConville to Dundalk, and handed her over to the local I.R.A. unit.

Until the release of this documentary, that was the extent of Price’s involvement in the McConville case, so far as the public was aware: she drove McConville across the border and turned her over to the people who would end her life. But, in the film, Price reveals that her culpability did not end there. “They didn’t want to do it,” she says, of the local I.R.A. men. “They couldn’t bring themselves to execute her. Probably because she was a woman.”

“So you guys had to do it?” Moloney asks.

“There had been a grave dug by the Dundalk unit,” Price says. So she crossed the border again, back into the south, along with Pat McClure and the third member of the Unknowns. I.R.A. members don’t think of themselves as terrorists, preferring the word “volunteer,” a term that encapsulates a sense of romantic sacrifice: combatants like Price were willing to volunteer everything—even their own lives—for the cause of a united Ireland. But, of course, they were willing to volunteer the lives of others, too, and, as Price describes the murder of Jean McConville, she slips into the third person. It is clear in the film that she is acknowledging her own responsibility, yet she recounts the act as though it was carried out by someone else. McConville “was taken by the three volunteers to the grave, and shot in the back of the head by one of the volunteers,” Price tells Moloney. She does not say, in the film, which of the three fired the fatal shot. But she suggests that, in the manner of a firing squad, they deliberately assumed a shared responsibility. There was a single pistol, which they passed around. “The other two volunteers each fired a shot so that no one would say that they for certain had been the person to kill her,” Price says. This was a comforting fiction: after McConville’s bones were discovered, in 2003, by a man walking along a beach in Louth, a coroner ruled that the cause of death was a single gunshot wound to the head, and only one bullet was recovered with the bones. If the other two did fire shots, they missed. “She was left in the grave,” Price says. “The local unit buried her.”

Pat McClure, the I.R.A. member present at the execution, is no longer alive. He moved to Connecticut in the nineteen-eighties, and died there in 1986. In “I, Dolours,” Price does not identify the third I.R.A. member, who may or may not be alive. But the authorities in Northern Ireland have arrested and subsequently released numerous people in connection with the McConville case—among them Gerry Adams, who was questioned for four days and then released without charges, in 2014. Only one person has been charged in association with McConville’s murder: a former I.R.A. official named Ivor Bell, who, the state alleges, played a role in aiding and abetting the operation. But Bell, who is in his eighties, has been diagnosed with dementia, and may never stand trial.

Moloney’s full interview with Price was turned over to the Police Service of Northern Ireland in 2013, as part of a court proceeding involving an oral-history archive at Boston College. (Moloney had deposited the Price interview at the university, in the assumption that doing so would keep it safe, not knowing that the university might one day turn it over to detectives in Belfast.)

“Do the disappeared haunt you?” Moloney asks Price, in the film.

“Yes,” she replies. “I think back on those who I had responsibility for driving away. I’m not a deeply religious person, but I would say a prayer for them.” Moloney asks if she regards such forced disappearances as a war crime, and Price responds, “I think it’s a war crime. Yes.”

Trump A Germophobe? I Don’t Think So………

According to former FBI chief James Comey, Donald Trump’s response to the claim that he entertained Russian prostitutes in his Moscow hotel room so they could pee on the bed once occupied by Barrack Obama and his wife, Michelle was that this could not have happened because he is a germophobe. He could never allow himself to be so close to other people’s germs.

But yesterday in the White House what did he do but pluck a piece of dandruff from French president Emmanuel Macron’s jacket lapel. That is a darned sight closer to another person’s germs than being in the same room as a Russian prostitute’s urine.

As America Swoons Over Comey, A Revealing Chapter In The FBI Story……

One of the unintended consequences of the Trump presidency, or rather the lengthy and complex probes into the President’s alleged misdemeanors, has been the elevation of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) into a sort of national savior whose two shining knights, Robert Mueller and Jim Comey, both former FBI heads, are struggling manfully to rescue America from a disaster so expansive and boundless it has yet to be named.

Such a stark contrast to the FBI of old, the FBI of J Edgar Hoover’s filing cabinet and Cointelpro, of the hounding of Martin Luther King and countless dirty tricks would be hard to find. But that is what we are told.

Those days have gone, standards are higher, the agency has cleaned up its act, Hoover is dead and gone. Mueller and Comey are the proof. The people now love the FBI, or at least a lot of them do, especially those on the American ‘left’.

Maybe, but I was prompted to wonder about this when I listened to David Remnick’s interview with James Comey, whose account of his life in the FBI and of his dealings with Trump, is sailing up the bestseller’s list.

Comey revealed to The New Yorker editor that in the course of one of their chats, he and Obama had disagreed about the meaning and extent of ‘mass incarceration’, the term widely used in the US to mean the overwhelmingly disproportionate jailing of Black men and the parallel over-targeting of that community by America’s law and order agencies.

Obama argued that ‘mass’ was the correct term since such a large slice of one community had evidently been targeted with devastating consequences for the entire Black community.

Comey disagreed. The fact that so many Black men were jailed was a coincidence. They were involved in crime, got  caught and paid the price.

I suspect that Obama, a bit like Remnick, was too polite to call this out for the bullshit it was, but I couldn’t help but feel that in Comey’s assertion could be detected the essence of the racist soul of J Edgar Hoover.

Institutions are like human beings. They have a spirit which is passed on to their successors, rather like DNA, but time and social change do serve to dilute and even transform. I have no doubt therefore that no-one in the FBI would these days propose a new Cointelpro, or if they did that they would think they could get away with it, but I also suspect it would take longer than half a century for an agency to entirely expunge the pneuma of someone as baleful as Hoover.

By chance, or not, the excellent New York Review of Books (NYRB) chose this week to re-run a January 1972 memoir by a disillusioned former FBI agent by the name of Robert Wall, whose recollections of life as a special agent in Hoover’s heyday are such as to send shivers up the spine. Has all he writes about really been cleansed from the floors, chiseled from the cracks and scoured off the walls?

You can read it here, on the NYRB website, or below if you cannot access it – remember it when Mueller and/or Comey are smothered in garlands of praise:

Special Agent for the FBI | by Robert Wall


I

In May of 1965, after serving as a naval officer for several years, I arrived in Washington, D.C., to begin my training for the position of Special Agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I was both naive and apolitical. I thought of myself as an intense idealist and was convinced that the FBI was an organization in which personal integrity was highly valued. To me the organization was above all a protector of the innocent public and only secondarily the relentless pursuer of wrongdoers. In short, I was an ideal candidate for the job. I would not question; I would simply learn to do as I was told, content to believe that the FBI would never direct me wrong.

This belief managed to survive my first two years in the bureau, during which I worked on criminal investigations and government job applications. It was when I was assigned to work in Internal Security in Washington, D. C., that I began to have my first serious doubts about the integrity of the organization, its motives, and its goals.

The Washington Field Office is the operating arm of the FBI in Washington, D.C. Like other field offices, we reported to the bureau’s Washington headquarters, but our office was one of the largest. Assigned to the office were between five and six hundred agents, broken up into squads of from a handful to fifty or sixty. Two squads worked only on applications for government jobs and five or six handled criminal investigations. In addition, there were nine squads assigned to do “security” work. One of those nine was charged with investigating all of the various individuals and organizations that allegedly threatened the national security or that advocated the overthrow of the United States government by force or violence.

It was to this squad that I was assigned in May, 1967, shortly before my second anniversary as an agent. I looked forward to the assignment because anything would have looked good to me after a few months spent investigating applicants for government jobs. But I realized that all my FBI experience until then had in no way prepared me for work in security. During the training course for new agents which I had undergone in 1965, instruction on “security” meant listening to stories of the bureau’s great accomplishments, e.g., the capture of the Nazi espionage teams that landed in Florida and New England during World War II, and, of course, the apprehension of Colonel Rudolph Abel. We learned also that the bureau had been able to break up the Ku Klux Klan and the Communist Party.

But nothing in this training was meant to define how the FBI views national security or threats to it. We were told instead that only a handful of experienced and carefully picked agents, the “cream of the crop,” were selected to work in this most difficult and challenging field. Furthermore, information about the security work of the FBI was supplied on a “need to know” basis only, and there was no immediate need to tell us much more.

Later, in September, 1967, I was sent to the FBI National Academy in Quantico, Virginia, for a two week in-service training in “Basic Security.” But this consisted mainly of an elaborate rehash of the noninformation we had received during new agents training. Nonetheless, I was eager to learn more about the work of the squad and the men assigned to it.

The heyday of this squad was during the late Forties and early Fifties when those who were called Communists, pinkos, reds, Commie symps, fellow travelers, and sundry other names were being “discovered” and routed from all levels of American society. By the time I arrived on the scene the squad was jokingly referred to by some as “the graveyard,” owing to the advanced age of some of the agents and the motionless manner in which they conducted their investigations now that their prime had passed. Of the dozen or so agents on the squad, all were near or past their twentieth year of service in the bureau. Most of them had spent the better part of their careers on the squad as “red chasers.”

Each of the older agents would willingly relate how he had shared in the FBI’s successful smashing of the Communist Party. The stories most often had the flavor of back fence gossip, for they concerned not some insidious plot to overthrow the government, but rather the clandestine love affairs of various Party members.

One agent told me that he spent twelve years of his bureau service in “lookouts.” A lookout is a place where an agent can sit (sometimes stand, kneel, lie, or squat, but usually sit) unobserved and look out to see what the person under investigation is doing. One of these lookouts which he recalled fondly was in a hotel room across an airshaft from a room rented by a Communist Party “angel” in a downtown Washington, D.C., hotel. In fact this agent had spent some years of his life peering across the airshaft at his wholly innocuous subject. The blinds in the room he watched were never closed. He liked to tell of the lively sexual activities he had seen. He seemed to think that, in the absence of other evidence, they confirmed that something subversive was taking place.

Another agent told of months spent watching the suburban home of a suspected “Commie” where the only information of value obtained was that after the suspect left for work in the morning his wife would signal to her lover, who lived two streets away, by switching on the back porch light. The lover would then jump in his car and race over for a morning visit. The agent’s report indicated the time elapsed from the moment when the porch light went on until the lover arrived panting at the door, and then the length of his stay. The lover was not known to be a member of the Party, but was suspected of being a sympathizer, which may have been the justification used by the agents to account for the time they spent watching that particular house.

By 1967, the Communist Party in Washington, D.C., had only three members remaining. The main function of the squad then was to verify the residence and employment of the persons who once had been subjects of FBI investigation and who were still considered dangerous enough to keep track of, even though they were no longer active with the Party or any other subversive group, for that matter. Every three, six, nine, or twelve months the files on these persons would be reopened and assigned to an agent on the squad who would make certain that the individual still lived at the same address and worked at the same job.

To accomplish this task, the agent could use several methods. He could personally observe the subject at his home and follow him to work. Or he could request the agents handling one of the three remaining informants familiar with former Party members to ask the informants about the man in question. The latter method was usually chosen since it would eliminate any real work for the agent. After the informant had reported, the case could then be closed again. In closing the case, the agent could either certify that the subject was still worthy of the bureau’s attention or try to give him a lower priority, thereby lengthening the interval before the file had to be reopened. It was simpler and required much less paperwork to certify that the subject still needed watching. Thus the investigations of hundreds of perfectly harmless people continued on through the years.

II

By 1967, the antiwar movement was growing from its lean beginnings to a movement of national significance. The response of the bureau was consistent with its history. It determined that the movement was a part of the larger Communist conspiracy to overthrow the United States government. Having decided this, the bureau set about to investigate the movement to show the existence of the conspiracy.

Proof sufficient to satisfy the bureau was readily available. For example, it was noted that among the thirty-five to forty thousand persons who took part in the march on the Pentagon in October, 1967, approximately twenty persons who had once been named as members, suspected members, or sympathizers of the Communist Party were reported to be in the crowd. A few among them had actually assisted in organizing the march. Although the bureau always insists that it neither draws conclusions nor makes recommendations from the facts that it gathers, the FBI report on the march on the Pentagon was leaked to the press and its impact was obvious: the thousands who marched to protest the war in Southeast Asia were publicly labeled as mere pawns in a Communist master plan to spread dissent throughout the nation. They had been duped into giving aid and comfort to the enemy and demoralizing our fighting men.

Had the bureau believed its own propaganda, it would have investigated only the “Communist agitators” in the antiwar movement. Instead we were directed to investigate all the leaders in all the local peace groups and to determine among other things the source of any money used to finance the movement. From there it was a simple step to the investigation of anyone connected to the peace movement in any way. The number of investigations was limited only by the time available and the problem of distinguishing the organizers and leaders of mass rallies from the passive followers.

To deal with the peace movement the FBI followed its usual practice of planting informants. It was easy to recruit young people to infiltrate the antiwar organizations and other groups in the so-called “New Left” since large numbers of volunteers were needed to hand out leaflets, run mimeo machines, answer phones, stuff envelopes, and similar chores connected with political organizing. All one of our FBI informants needed to do was walk into the office and state briefly that he was opposed to the war and wished to volunteer his services. He would seldom be challenged to prove his allegiance to the movement. Then, with little additional effort, he had access to mailing lists, names of contributors, copies of leaflets and handbills, and was able to report in detail on any organizational meetings that might take place.

Since an organization gave an informant a convenient base from which to operate, the bureau tried to place informants in all the organizations likely to participate in any mass march or demonstration. Then if a coalition of groups was formed to plan a large rally, at least one informant would, we hoped, be among those selected to represent a group when the coalition met to plan its activities. Frequently this was the case.

The informants were always directed to look especially for any indication that violence was being planned by any group or individual within a group. This was the rationale by which the bureau justified its infiltration of these political organizations, although during my three years working on radical groups I never found any evidence that would lead to a conviction for criminal violence.

But the bureau also had an active counterintelligence program which was titled “Cointelpro—New Left.” This program was designed to develop means to thwart and undermine the activities of any organization that fell into the category of “New Left.” A frequent tactic was to leak stories to the press and television shortly before any mass march or rally. This was easy enough to do. Agents in our offices would write often fanciful press releases warning that violence was expected on the day of the rally, or that the organizers of the march were in contact with Hanoi, or that some known Communists were active in organizing the march. Our superiors in the Internal Security Division at FBI headquarters would then pass on the information to conservative newspapers, which published it immediately. The purpose of such stories was not only to influence the general public but to scare away those whose commitment was weak and thereby reduce the number of persons who might otherwise attend.

Another purpose of the program was to create dissent among the various groups involved in the new left to prevent them from working together. In one case we addressed a letter to the leaders of the National Mobilization Committee (NMC) which said that the blacks of Washington, D. C., would not support the upcoming rally of the NMC unless a twenty thousand dollar “security bond” was paid to a black organization in Washington. At the same time we instructed some informants we had placed in the black organization to suggest the idea of a security bond informally to leaders of the organization. The letter we composed was approved by the bureau’s counterintelligence desk and was signed with the forged signature of a leader of the black group. Later, through informants in the NMC, we learned that the letter had caused a great deal of confusion and had a significant effect on the planning for the march.

I should stress that such “counterintelligence” activities were carried on frequently, although some were quite absurd. For example, some of the agents in our office tried to confuse peace demonstrations by such collegiate tactics as handing out leaflets giving misleading information about the time and place when the marchers were supposed to meet.

The FBI claims to be a nonpolitical organization and asserts that it is not a national police force. But in its intelligence and counterintelligence work on the new left it was engaging in activity that clearly was political. Moreover, in trying to suppress and discourage a broad-based national political movement, it acted as a national political police.

III

The FBI has always been divided about college campuses. It wants to know what is happening on the campus, yet it is afraid of being charged with interfering with academic freedom. When the antiwar students began challenging the legitimacy of the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC), the propriety of secret military research projects in colleges and universities, and the legality and morality of the draft, they turned their campuses into centers of political activity.

The bureau’s first response to this student activism had a cautious note. We were instructed to investigate to determine who was responsible for the demonstrations and uprisings on the campuses, on the theory that they were organized by outside agitators traveling around the country, but not to conduct investigations on campus. We were told to plant informants in violence-prone student groups but not to use students themselves as informants. Then as campus activity increased we got the green light to recruit students again but were warned to choose only those who were “mature” and reliable. Those students selected were to be admonished strongly that the bureau was not interested in “legitimate campus activity” (a term as definable as “New Left”).

I was understandably somewhat anxious when in November, 1967, I was assigned the case titled “Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).” Here was the organization that the bureau had singled out among all the other young activist groups for special attention. I was told that I had to prepare a comprehensive report on all SDS activities in the Washington, D. C., area in less than a month. Every campus SDS chapter was to be identified, as were the names and backgrounds of all officers of the various groups, the number of members in each chapter, the activities of each group, including especially any activity where violence or destruction of property took place.

The agent previously assigned to the case assured me that a brief letter to the bureau would suffice since there was no significant SDS activity in Washington, D. C., a fact that he had dutifully reported three times in the preceding year. (This particular agent was at the time moving up the ladder of bureau success to a supervisory position and I felt certain that his astute handling of the SDS case was largely responsible.)

With very little effort I was able to learn that there were already four campus SDS chapters in the city and an SDS regional office had just been set up. Realizing that it would be impossible in the time remaining to compile all the information demanded by the bureau, I chose to imitate my predecessor and reported that there was no significant SDS activity in the Washington, D. C., area. Shortly thereafter, when the squad was beefed up, I arranged to have the SDS case reassigned to one of the newcomers.

The bureau’s ambivalence regarding campus unrest was apparent when the Washington Field Office received a request from then Assistant Director William Sullivan to analyze the activity on campuses, point out the causes, and recommend the appropriate FBI policy for dealing with student movements. Since our squad was closest to the problem, the job of preparing the position paper was turned over to us. Our squad supervisor elected to assign the task to an older agent who had recently been assigned to the squad This agent had little experience with college matters but had as yet been assigned few cases and had more time available. He also had a reputation for being able to “write well,” that is, to say what the bureau wanted to hear in the language to which it was accustomed.

When I learned of the choice I was disturbed. The agent chosen, if described by a friend, would have been called an extreme conservative. In the banter of the office I had hung the label “fascist pig” on him. He in turn called me the “Father Groppi” of the office, or “Grop” for short. I knew that he saw a conspiracy in every campus demonstration and felt that swifter police action was the first and best answer to any problem of disruption by college students. So I knew what tack he would take.

At this point I was still naïve enough to believe that the bureau was amenable to change and I saw this paper as an opportunity to “affect the bureau from within.” So I went to my supervisor and asked for his permission to take over the assignment of preparing the paper for Sullivan. He refused because, in his words, “You’re too young to place the SDS in proper historical perspective with the old guard Communist organizations.” Undismayed, I “borrowed” the rough draft of my colleague’s paper and proceeded to draft a reply and counterproposal. In essence I contended that university administrators needed to re-evaluate the role of the university in our society and take the initiative away from radical agitators by instituting needed changes before the demand for these changes became the rallying point for student discontent.

I concluded that if university administrators could recognize the issues behind the student uprisings, meet with student representatives, and be willing to compromise, they would generally be able to avert destructive confrontation. I recommended that the bureau keep its hands off the universities, even those that had already suffered disruption, because the FBI had no legal justification to intrude; any intrusion would, moreover, be taken by students as an indication of attempted repression by federal authorities.

When I dropped my paper on the supervisor’s desk, he handled the situation with the skill of a diplomat. Rather than choose between the papers, he gave both to a third agent to prepare a compromise paper to be presented to Sullivan, setting out the principal points on both sides of the issue. He promised also that I would have the opportunity to make an oral presentation to Sullivan at a later date.

About two weeks later, I returned to the office unexpectedly in mid-morning to discover that a meeting with Sullivan had been arranged at 1 P.M. that day. Angry at what appeared to be an attempt to keep me out, I went to the Coordinating Security Supervisor (my supervisor’s supervisor) who had originally received the request from Sullivan that set the whole paper-writing flurry in motion. In his smooth Dixie manner he assured me that no slight had been intended. I had not been invited to the meeting merely because of an administrative oversight. Certainly I’d be allowed to have my say.

It seemed obvious to me then that they did not want me to attend the meeting but they didn’t want to be too obvious about it. So I spent some time preparing an oral argument while I awaited the one o’clock meeting. At 12:45, just as I was bringing my shoes to a new luster, my phone rang. The Coordinating Supervisor on the other end advised me that unfortunately Mr. Sullivan’s office had only four chairs for visitors and since I had been the last to request a part in the presentation and would be the fifth person, there was no choice but to exclude me. He tried to calm me with lavish praise for my initiative and willingness to tackle difficult problems, but he managed only a hollow laugh when I suggested that I’d accept standing room.

I was certain that my exclusion was just another example of how people on the lower levels of a bureaucracy act as a buffer for those higher up the ladder. They decided what the man at the top wanted to hear and they gave him just that. They had heard and read Mr. Hoover’s statements that the SDS was a subversive group that traveled about the country seeking to destroy the institutions of higher learning and they could not make a presentation that deviated from that line.

The final result was an order directing intensified investigations of student agitators and expanded “informant penetration” of campus SDS groups. Predictably, the informants reported the names of hundreds of students who had done no more than say they were interested in SDS or had dropped in at a meeting. Our Washington squad alone opened dozens of cases on freshmen college students who attended orientation sessions sponsored by SDS on Washington, D. C., campuses. Soon we had so many new cases that we had to request additional agents to handle this new “threat to national security.”

IV

While we were investigating antiwar groups and student activists, the squad also handled what were called “Racial Matters.” This category was an absurdly and frighteningly broad one. Investigations on almost anything done by or for black people could be opened simply by labeling it a Racial Matter. Here, for example, are some of the “cases” we investigated:

—A group of teen-agers from the ghetto areas of Washington, D. C., who marched to the city council chambers and demanded restoration of funds for summer jobs for ghetto youth.

—Two busloads of steelworkers who picketed the Department of Labor to protest discriminatory practices at the Bethlehem Steel Sparrow’s Point (near Baltimore) plant.

—A group of high-school students who staged a protest in their school cafeteria complaining that the food was not fit for human consumption.

—Two members of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) who opened a bookstore on 14th Street in northwest Washington. The FBI quickly responded with an investigation titled “Drum and Spear Bookstore, Racial Matter.”

When the poor people’s march was organized to dramatize the plight of the poor in our nation and a camp was set up near the Washington Monument, this was a Racial Matter. More logically perhaps, investigations of the Ku Klux Klan, the American Nazi Party, and similar groups were also Racial Matters.

Clearly the bureau had no rational criterion for opening these investigations. The only consistent pattern that I found was that if an individual or group is black and does something to gain attention it is likely to be investigated.

Our guide to Racial Matters at the field office was the early edition of the Washington Post. A typical news item would read: “Police arrested six persons early this morning when a crowd gathered as detectives of the Metropolitan Police Department were attempting to arrest a suspected narcotics peddler at the corner of 14th and U Streets, N.W. Some rocks and bottles were allegedly thrown at police,” etc. Inevitably, when such a story appeared, we would receive a call from the supervisor of the Racial Desk in bureau headquarters asking what we knew about the incident. It was his firm conviction that incidents of this type were a manifestation of the conspiracy by blacks to take over their community by driving out the police.

So that we would not be embarrassed when the supervisor called, it became standard practice for one of the early arrivers in the office to scan the paper for articles like the one above. He would clip the item, call the precinct to verify the names of the persons arrested, and then paraphrase the news item in a teletype message to bureau headquarters, advising them that we were following the incident and would report any further developments. A month or two later, the agent to whom the case was assigned would close it with a letter stating that the incident was apparently spontaneous and not part of a conspiracy, and giving an estimate of the damages, the names of those arrested, and the background of those who already had records in FBI files.

Often the supervisor on the Racial Desk at the bureau would request specific information about a case under investigation by the field office. The agent to whom the Drum and Spear Bookstore case was assigned received such a request. For months he had been investigating the bookstore, watching its operations, checking out its owners, looking into its bank records, trying to ascertain the source of its funds. He had found nothing connected with crime, conspiracy, or evil doings. Now he was instructed to go to the bookstore and purchase a copy of the “Little Red Book” containing the quotations of Chairman Mao Tse-tung. It was pointless to ask what purpose the purchase of this particular book would serve. It was obvious to us that the supervisor felt that the bookstore, by selling this book, was somehow implicated in the Oriental branch of the Communist conspiracy.

The agent dutifully made his way to the Drum and Spear where he learned that they had sold their last copy of the book. Rather than order a copy to be mailed to the supervisor, a cheeky solution which he admitted considering, he returned downtown, bought a copy at Brentano’s, and duly passed it on to the bureau supervisor, just as if it had come from the Drum and Spear. Thereafter, the written description of the Drum and Spear contained the note that radical literature including the “Little Red Book” of Mao Tse-tung was obtainable there.

As I worked on Racial Matters in Washington (a city whose black population comprises more than 70 percent of the total), the appalling racism of the FBI on every level became glaringly apparent to me. It seemed that every politically dissident black man was a candidate for investigation. Perhaps this racism was no worse than in other branches of government, but it was extremely discouraging to find it so firmly entrenched in an organization of supposedly educated, professional men charged with responsibility for investigating violations of the civil rights laws.

The documents stolen from the Media. Pennsylvania, office of the FBI demonstrate the endemic racism of the bureau. In one memo that J. Edgar Hoover directed to all offices of the FBI, he ordered that “all black student unions and similar organizations organized to project the demands of black students, which are not presently under investigation, are to be subjects of discreet preliminary inquiries, limited to established sources and carefully conducted to avoid criticism, to determine the size, aims, purposes, activities, leadership, key activists, and extremist interest or influence in these groups.” The stated purpose for these investigations was that these groups are the “target for influence and control by violence prone Black Panther Party (BPP) and other extremists.”

Only the fact that the organizations to be investigated were black could explain the horrendous abuse of logic that the bureau used to justify this invasion of campuses throughout the country. J. Edgar Hoover had publicly announced that the small and largely ineffectual Black Panther Party was the greatest single threat to the security of the country. Having itself created the threat, the bureau set out to neutralize it. Even if Hoover could have seriously documented his charges against the Panthers, which he never did, it was absurd to investigate hundreds of people whose only connection with the Black Panther Party was that the party was trying to influence them. Hoover might similarly have justified an FBI investigation of every member of a “working class” union because the Communist Party directed its propaganda and organizing effort at workers, or an investigation of every college student organization because the SDS sought to influence and control students.

Nor was this assault on the black student unions an isolated incident. I could cite many similar ones, for example the FBI’s interest in the Smithsonian Institute when it opened an annex in the largely black Anacostia section of Washington, D.C. One of the annex’s first events was a program for Black History Week centered on the life and contributions of Frederick Douglass. The FBI actually paid informants to attend the program and report the contents of the speeches given during it.

In the case of Stokely Carmichael the FBI was particularly determined and vicious. When he moved to Washington, D. C., in December, 1967, our squad kept him under surveillance twenty-four hours a day, following him about the city from lookouts and cars, and on foot. The investigation became even more intense a few days after Martin Luther King was assassinated. When blacks in Washington, D. C., as well as in many other cities, outraged by the murder, rioted for a day and a half, in the Washington Field Office a fifty-man special squad was assembled to get Carmichael for inciting to riot. We were directed to gather evidence showing that Carmichael had plotted, planned, and directed the rioting, burning, and pillage that took place in Washington, D.C. Fifty agents spent their full time for over a month on this one case.

One man, who later admitted that he had “been mistaken and perhaps exaggerated a bit,” claimed that Carmichael had a pistol which he fired into the air and then told the crowd to go home and get guns. A great many others stated firmly that Carmichael had urged the crowd not to dishonor Dr. King’s memory by rioting and had politely asked shop owners to close their shops in his memory. Lacking any substantial evidence on which to base a charge, the bureau nevertheless submitted voluminous reports on the minute by minute activities of Carmichael that were heavily weighted to imply that he had actually incited the mobs. Had Carmichael not decided to leave this country and go to Africa, the FBI, I am confident, would eventually have found something with which to bring an indictment against him.

Quite by accident I learned that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) was aiding in the hunt for something with which to pin a charge on so-called “Black Militants.” In early 1969 I was checking the background of a former member of SNCC, a man I had been investigating for almost two years. On three occasions I tried to close the case because I could find no indication that the subject was doing anything that would warrant an FBI investigation. Each time permission was refused; his status as a former member of SNCC being sufficient justification for going on with the investigation. I learned that the IRS had requested his arrest record from the Identification Division of the FBI. When I went to the IRS I found it had secretly set up a special squad of men to investigate the tax records of a list of “known militants and activists,” and that the FBI was supplying the names of the persons for the IRS to include in this list. After talking to several IRS officials I was sent to a locked sound-proofed room in the basement of the IRS headquarters in Washington where I found a file on my subject, among hundreds of others piled on a long table.

V

There are hardly any limits on the bureau’s activities in compiling political information, particularly about the new left. A case in point is the Institute for Policy Studies, an organization set up by dissenting officials in Kennedy’s administration to carry out independent studies in international and domestic questions. The Institute caught my attention shortly after I began investigating the new left. Reports from FBI informants showed that many of the leaders and spokesmen of antiwar and civil rights organizations called at the Institute when they visited Washington.

I reasoned that if there were a conspiracy that linked all these groups the Institute was the logical place to look for it. I drafted a memo to that effect and requested that a case on the Institute be opened and assigned to me. My supervisor quickly agreed: he was then trying to increase the case load of the squad to justify a request for an increase in manpower.

Most of the information about the Institute’s work is easily available and I was soon able to accumulate a vast dossier on it including biographical sketches of its founders, sources of its financial support, a general idea of its day to day operation, and a pile of scholarly studies published by it. After analyzing this data I concluded that the Institute was not the secret mastermind of any conspiracy to overthrow the government but simply what I described in my report as a “think-tank of the Left,” where a wide variety of current and former government officials, lawyers, journalists, radicals, and others were holding seminars, doing research, writing reports, etc. I closed the investigation. To do otherwise, incidentally, would have meant a mound of paperwork that would have occupied me full time for months.

About a year later another agent newly assigned to the squad came to see me with the closed file of the Institute and asked whether I thought the case ought to be reopened. This agent, like so many others, had strong right-wing views and could not believe that the Institute was merely sponsoring seminars and doing the other work I had described. It seemed necessary to him to think that a grand new left conspiracy existed. In spite of my opposition, he had the case reopened and began a full-scale investigation of the Institute. He began monitoring the checking account of the Institute to determine where its money was going. He asked for telephone company records and compiled a list of the Institute’s long distance telephone calls. He attempted to place informants in the Institute as student interns and gathered every available paper published by it. Individual investigations were then opened on the people who worked for or received money from the Institute.

When I left the bureau in April, 1970, the case on the Institute was still being investigated with gusto, and a huge collection of papers and reports on it had accumulated. So far as I have been able to determine, the FBI has found no evidence whatever of any illegal activity by the IPS, but the Institute continues to be investigated.

My experience has shown me that the FBI in its pursuit of blacks, the antiwar movement, and college activists was not an impartial, disinterested finder of fact but rather a relentless guardian of orthodoxy, a police force which sought to cause harm to movements that boldly questioned the policies of the government. It engaged in these activities not simply because of the political prejudices of the director and his staff, but, to a large extent, to justify its own existence. Each attack on any outspoken critic of American institutions was intended to show the FBI as the indispensable protector of the public. To each slanderous name-calling or alarmist leak to the press, Hoover added a soft-spoken if tendentious appeal to Congress for more money and additional personnel. Enemies of the public were created to justify the bureau’s role as defender of the “National Security” against domestic foes who sought, according to Hoover’s propaganda, to subvert the country.

This is not to say that an effective federal investigative agency is not needed to deal with crimes or that the FBI itself has not done efficient and honest criminal work (although it has for years been reluctant to act vigorously against organized crime). But my years in the FBI convinced me that most of what the bureau does in matters of internal security consists of investigations and rumor mongering that are foolish, pointless, and time-wasting so far as protection of the public from violation of criminal laws is concerned; while the agency is all too effective in harassing legitimate political activity. At the same time, all of the investigations I have referred to here have resulted in adding more names and dossiers to the millions in the FBI’s files. The FBI is thus creating a proliferating store of secret police files on innocent people, often based on bizarre allegations and dubious information, and sometimes on nothing at all.

What I saw and did as an agent for the FBI exposed for me the wisdom of the old question: Who will watch the watchers? I have no easy answer to it.

A Brief Comment On Those INLA Brothels

My readers would surely have noticed this report on alleged INLA involvement in brothel-keeping in the Belfast area. There have been expressions of both surprise and anger at the idea that republicans could be running such sordid establishments.

This is where the growing years and still active memory come in useful. There is absolutely nothing new in members of the INLA’s political tradition running whorehouses and therefore there should be nothing shocking either.

Back in the mid to late 1970’s the INLA’s political precursors, the Official IRA ran massage parlours in various parts of Belfast. In fact they ran some of them, especially those in so-called neutral areas like the University district, along with the UVF, sharing the spoils and goodness knows what else, e.g. blackmail intel on customers and so on.

The Loyalists had their own separate networks of course – a ‘secretary’ at the UDA’s headquarters on the Newtownards Road at one point was said to have been capable of creating rapture with a few spoonfuls of baby oil – and some believe that even the British Army got in on the act, setting up a massage parlour in North Belfast as an intelligence/blackmail source.

At the time of the November 1972, Four Square Laundry ambush, the IRA claimed to have raided the parlour where two undercover soldiers were killed. The brothel, on the Antrim Road was called the Gemini Health Studios.

The IRA claims were denied by the military and journalist Kevin Myers reported that he had visited the premises not long after the alleged shooting but found no evidence of a gun attack.

Anyway, the point of all this is that if the INLA has been running brothels they are only observing a long and sordid tradition.

‘Why Sinn Fein Is Love-Bombing Fine Gael’

Not all my readers have the wherewithal to buy The Sunday Times or to pay its  internet subscription; others baulk at putting money into Rupert Murdoch’s pocket.

So for their benefit here is an interesting article in today’s Irish edition of the ST which examines the game of under-the-table footsie being played by Sinn Fein and Fine Gael re becoming coalition partners after the next general election in the South.

A coalition of SF and FG makes sense for both. SF’s natural partners, Fianna Fail have, under Micheal Martin, realised that the consequences could be fatal if they did partner with SF, even sans Gerry Adams. Sinn Fein would set out to infiltrate and subvert FF and believe me, they have the skills and people to do that.

The now-almost non-existent SDLP sets a worrying precedent for any party contemplating a partnership with with the Shinners. Their political clothes were stolen almost entirely by SF; once the dominant Nationalist voice in the North, the SDLP is now a pale shadow of its former self, a fate FF risks.

So as long as Martin rules the roost there will not be a FF-SF coalition.

Fine Gael, on the other hand, are not in competition with Sinn Fein in the way Fianna Fail is, no reason to fear SF in the way Micheal Martin does. Without Gerry Adams at the helm, the smell of rotten cabbage has also faded; Mary Lou has none of the same baggage and the Dundrum-born convent school grad could almost pass for a Fine Gaeler herself.

Sinn Fein has also shown itself to be remarkably flexible over ideological matters, one day left of centre, another in the center or on the right. Accomodating themselves with Fine Gael’s brand of conservatism may not be the obstacle many believe it should be.

The other question is for how long the current ‘confidence and supply’ arrangement between Fine Gael and Fianna Fail can last. The two are essentially rivals to be the dominant party in a coalition, not partners. It always looked an uncomfortable and perforce temporary arrangement which carried the risk of blurring important distinctions between the parties.

Anyway here is the Sunday Times on the latest tea leaves swirling at the bottom of the saucer:

Publication Logo
The Sunday Times (London)
April 15, 2018


WHY SINN FEIN IS LOVE-BOMBING LEO;
As the party attacks Fianna Fail rather than Fine Gael, is coalition possible, ask Justine McCarthy and Stephen O’Brien

She has called him smarmy. He said she reminded him of the French right-winger Marine Le Pen. Yet a perceptible warmth has crept into Dail exchanges between Leo Varadkar and Mary Lou McDonald since they became leaders of their respective parties.

The taoiseach hailed McDonald’s elevation during her first Dail appearance as Sinn Fein leader in February. “I know what it feels like to be elected to the leadership of a party one has worked in for decades,” he said. “Becoming president of her party must be a very proud moment for her, her family and supporters.”

McDonald thanked him and later offered to visit Varadkar’s Dublin West constituency to campaign with him for the abortion referendum. Watching from the stalls, some in Fianna Fail think the love-in is designed to sideline them from involvement in forming the next government.

Sinn Fein’s apparent courting of Fine Gael gathered pace when Eoin Ó Broin, its housing spokesman, published a document last weekend criticising the record of Fianna Fail, the main opposition party, rather than the policies of the Fine Gael-led government. On Wednesday, Louise O’Reilly, Sinn Fein’s health spokeswoman, challenged Stephen Donnelly, her Fianna Fail opposite number, to say how he would fix the health service and blamed his party’s support for the government for facilitating bad policy.

The newfound amity between Fine Gael and Sinn Fein in their approach to Brexit and the Stormont talks has not gone unnoticed across the Irish Sea either. On Monday, David Davis, Britain’s Brexit minister, claimed Sinn Fein was exerting a “strong influence” on Varadkar’s approach to negotiations.

The nudge-nudge and wink-wink came to a head on Wednesday when Jim Daly, a junior health minister, intimated in an interview with Hot Press magazine that the once unthinkable scenario of a Fine Gael-Sinn Fein coalition could no longer be ruled out.

Later, Varadkar’s spokesman told journalists that Daly did not speak for the government. Coalition with Sinn Fein was “not a consideration anybody in government is working towards”, he said, adding that a future confidence and supply agreement with McDonald’s party was “not a consideration”.

The next day, Varadkar said: “My view is that my party and Sinn Fein are incompatible. They’re a eurosceptic, high-tax, sectarian party – we’re not.

They want to increase VAT, which would drive up the cost of living. They don’t want to give any tax breaks to middle-income people. They’re eurosceptic or eurocritical at a time when we need allies around Europe, and [have] a nationalistic approach when I think we should be internationalistic.”

While his comments elicited a rebuke from McDonald for what she called the taoiseach’s “knee-jerk” reaction and “bizarre outburst”, it was remarkable that he had not alluded to Sinn Fein’s historic ties with the IRA. For previous Fine Gael leaders, Sinn Fein’s past had been a cultural and ideological barrier to any potential partnership, whereas Varadkar concentrated on policy differences – a matter that proved surmountable in negotiating the 2016 confidence and supply arrangement with Fianna Fail.

There has been a detectable appetite for cabinet seats in Sinn Fein since delegates voted at its ard fheis last November to dispense with the party’s long-held refusal to enter into a coalition government in Dublin. McDonald has said: “There’s a sense among our activists that we can’t indefinitely ask the people who vote for us and put their faith in us to wait, hold on, next time, next time.”

In contrast, Fianna Fail delegates voted overwhelmingly at their ard fheis in October to rule out coalition with Sinn Fein. Micheál Martin, the Fianna Fail leader, said he voted for the motion, calling Sinn Fein “undemocratic”. He has been critical of Sinn Fein’s record in relation to the IRA.

It appears that Sinn Fein’s new disposition towards Fine Gael will continue when the Dail returns from its two-week “Easter holidays” on Tuesday afternoon.

Asked about recent hints that Sinn Fein planned to table a motion of no confidence in housing minister Eoghan Murphy, a senior party source said: “The issue for us is that, if you bring this forward before the [abortion] referendum, you could end up toppling the government before it is held, depending on what Fianna Fail do, of course.

“Micheál Martin has said he is going to support them to the next budget but we are very mindful that we have the repeal referendum coming up. It is an issue that we will clarify [in the coming weeks]”.

CIA’s Man In Libya Opens Door For The Agency – But Stroke Fells Him

Regular readers of thebrokenelbow.com will know that I have taken an ongoing interest in events in Libya, post-the disastrous Clinton intervention, and in particular have followed the career of former Gaddafi ally turned CIA asset, General Khalifa Hefter or Hafter who has slowly emerged as Libya’s new strongman.

Declan Walsh has an interesting piece tonight in The New York Times, reproduced below, which reveals that Hefter has allowed the CIA to open an office in the eastern capital, Benghazi, a sign of his burgeoning political strength.

At the same time his physical strength appears to be waning. The 75-year old former Gaddafi confederate is rumoured to have suffered a stroke recently and is undergoing treatment at a Paris hospital. Just as things were going well in Libya for the agency – ‘Our Man In Tripoli’ and all that – it looks as if the CIA may have to start looking elsewhere for a candidate.

Here is Declan Walsh’s piece:

nytimes.com

A Libyan Strongman Looks to Washington, but a Health Crisis Looms

Declan Walsh

In Benghazi’s devastated downtown, ex-fighters warmed themselves over a bonfire made from broken furniture. The forces of Gen. Khalifa Hifter routed the last Islamist militias from Benghazi in December. Declan Walsh/The New York Times

BENGHAZI, Libya — Pulverized buildings daubed with the names of fallen fighters line the ghostly seafront in Benghazi, Libya’s second largest city. Land mines and booby-trapped bodies are scattered across the rubble. At night, men huddle over bonfires piled with broken furniture.

This picture of devastation is what victory looks like for Gen. Khalifa Hifter, the military strongman whose forces routed the last Islamist militias from Benghazi in December. After three years of grinding combat, and with the help of foreign allies, General Hifter now controls most of eastern Libya and has become the most powerful if polarizing figure in a fractured landscape.

Now, as he aims to consolidate and expand his power, he is looking to woo the Trump administration. In December, he hired a firm of Washington lobbyists to burnish his image as a potential future leader of his country, and to counter critics who denounce him as a crude warlord.

He has already allowed the C.I.A. to establish a base in Benghazi — a low-key American return to the city after Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens was killed there in 2012 — and a handful of American Special Forces operators are present at an air base near the city, American officials said.

The nomination of the C.I.A. director Mike Pompeo as secretary of state could further align General Hifter with the United States. Mr. Pompeo, whose confirmation hearing took place Thursday, and Mr. Hifter, a onetime C.I.A. asset, are avowedly hostile to all forms of political Islam.

But General Hifter’s ascent has been called into question with news that the 75-year-old commander had been airlifted to a hospital in Paris, where French news media reported that he was being treated for a stroke. After initial denials, his aides privately conceded on Thursday that he had undergone emergency medical treatment. But they offered no specifics about his condition or his whereabouts.

The mystery plunged Libya’s chaotic politics into greater-than-usual levels of speculation. If restoring some order to eastern Libya after the fall of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi depended on the force of General Hifter’s personality, there were fears of a descent into violent feuding if he were suddenly out of the picture.

“There was a time last year when Hifter was the man of the hour — people were speculating he could make it to Tripoli,” said Frederic Wehrey, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the author of “The Burning Shores: Inside the Battle for the New Libya.” “Then things cooled off a bit, and cracks appeared in his coalition. And now nobody’s sure what will come next.”

Gen. Khalifa Hifter brought together an array of militias under the banner of his Libyan National Army. Esam Omran Al-Fetori/Reuters

Foreign Friends

Amid the competing militias ranging in post-Qaddafi Libya, General Hifter rose to power with the help of foreign firepower and a canny ability to play allies off one another. Warplanes deployed by the United Arab Emirates and Egypt pummeled his enemies and helped him capture oil terminals. French paramilitaries fought on his front lines in Benghazi, where three were killed in 2016. Saudi Arabia provided funding.

And to the discomfort of American officials, Russian special forces commandos last year delivered ammunition and intelligence to General Hifter from their bases in western Egypt, a former American intelligence official said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss classified information.

For much of his life, General Hifter was tied to the United States.

In the late 1980s, as a senior Libyan army officer living in exile in Chad, he led a C.I.A.-backed effort to oust Colonel Qaddafi. The plot failed and General Hifter ended up in suburban Virginia, where he lived for two decades, eventually becoming a naturalized American citizen, the former official said.

But after he returned to Libya in 2011 with brash ambitions of seizing power, American officials kept him at arms length.

Since 2015, American policy has backed the rival United Nations-backed government in Tripoli, a notoriously weak administration, which barely controls a single district of the capital but which remains the main Western hope for a political solution in Libya. The unity government’s prime minister, Fayez Serraj, met with President Trump in the White House in December.

In the past year, though, as General Hifter’s troops racked up major victories — advancing across Benghazi and seizing Libya’s biggest oil terminal — European leaders started to openly court him.

Last summer, he traveled to Paris at the invitation of President Emmanuel Macron, met Italy’s defense minister in Rome, and welcomed the British foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, to his fortified hilltop headquarters outside Benghazi.

General Hifter presents himself to the West as an unflinching warrior against political Islam in the mold of Egypt’s president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who is a former general. Critics say that approach strengthens his enemies, though, by forcing moderate and extremist Islamist groups together.

Although the septuagenarian commander has styled himself as a great military leader, with a fondness for pomp and titles, experts say his true skill is in forging alliances. His Libyan National Army is, in fact, a coalition of militias and regular army units.

Benghazi’s downtown as seen through a window of the former royal palace. The palace was on the front lines of a three-year battle for control of the city. Declan Walsh/The New York Times

Since last year he has used those skills to extend his influence into the deserts of southern Libya, a vast and largely lawless area where he has forged a number of tribal alliances, and which in recent years has become the main focus of American counterterrorism efforts. The United States has carried out nine missile strikes in southern Libya, mostly targeting Islamic State militants, since Mr. Trump took office.

But even before his recent health problems, Libya experts warned that General Hifter may not have been as strong as he pretended, and that the forces that helped him rise to prominence in the east could also be his undoing.

A Shaky Coalition

In January, twin car bombings killed 35 people as outside a mosque in eastern Benghazi. Islamist militants were suspected. Hours later, one of General Hifter’s top commanders dragged 10 blindfolded Islamist prisoners onto a street and, as a camera recorded his actions, shot each one in the head with a rifle.

The commander, Mahmoud al-Werfalli, was already wanted by the International Criminal Court in The Hague for his alleged role in previous summary executions. But when General Hifter detained Mr. Werfalli, promising to bring him to a military trial, armed supporters burned tires in the streets and shut down major roads.

General Hifter was forced to back down. The commander of the Benghazi special forces brigade, Wanis Bukhamada, defused the protests by promising that Mr. Werfalli would not be sent to the international court. “This is a matter for the Libyan courts,” he said. Libyan courts, such as they are, have yet to take up the case.

That was the second challenge to General Hifter’s authority. In November, a tribal commander, Faraj Gaaim, was detained after he demanded on television that General Hifter step down.

Tribal opponents grumble that General Hifter’s army is dominated by his Furjan clan, and that his sons act as his enforcers. For Benghazi residents, the complaint is that the religious militants who helped him seize Benghazi are now exerting a disproportionate influence on daily life in the city.

In the past year hard-line preachers have taken over many mosques, and conservative officials have shut down music concerts and tried to stop women from traveling while unaccompanied.

“It’s like a bargain with the devil,” said Naseim Omeish, 25, a development official. “They get control of the mosques so they can consolidate their power. But that can go wrong.”

The former United States consulate in Benghazi, where Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens was killed in September 2012. Now occupied by its landlord, the house has been refurbished as a private residence. Declan Walsh/The New York Times

A Reluctant Democrat

Western efforts to bring General Hifter to the negotiating table have come to naught. In Paris last summer, he signed an agreement with Tripoli to hold elections by the end of 2018, but that now seems a distant possibility.

In interviews, General Hifter has shown little enthusiasm for a free vote. “Today’s Libya is not ripe for democracy,” he told the French magazine Jeune Afrique last month. “Perhaps future generations will succeed.”

Many critics, especially in western Libya, see that as further proof that he is little more than a reconstituted version of Colonel Qaddafi, relishing power for power’s sake and riding roughshod over basic freedoms and human rights. A United Nations report published this week highlighted torture, arbitrary detention and other abuses at jails run by General Hifter, as well as at those run by rival militias in the west.

Supporters say that, after seven years of chaos, a Qaddafi- or Sisi-style strongman may be exactly what Libya needs. “Believe me, I lost my faith in elections,” said Amal Bugaighis, a lawyer and civil society activist in Benghazi. “Maybe in five or ten years time. But for now we need someone strong in charge.”

In recent months, General Hifter participated in talks with military officials from western Libya, mediated by Egypt, over proposals to forge a united national army.

But that is now on hold, as all eyes in Libya turn to the French hospital where he is undergoing treatment. A wild range of rumors circulated in Libya on Thursday, ranging from accounts that he was recovering well from his treatment, to those suggesting he had in fact died.

His spokesman said in a tweet on Wednesday that “all the news” about General Hifter’s health was false. “Marshal Hifter is in excellent health, and he is following his daily general command duties,” the spokesman said.

Were General Hifter to become incapacitated, one strong possibility is that the coalition that he so carefully assembled to take control of Benghazi would come apart at the seams, riven by strains and lacking a natural successor, said Mr. Wehrey, the analyst.

“For all Hifter’s faults, he was the glue binding it all together,” he said. “There’s no comparable figure to fill his shoes.”

Danny Morrison Lets Cat Out Of Bag – Gerry Adams Was ‘Brownie’……

Let this be a warning to you all. You should always read what Danny Morrison writes, even though, as those who have perused the pages of ‘West Belfast’ know to their cost, it might seem like an awful lot to ask.

Thanks to C.D.C. Armstrong writing in today’s News Letter for pointing out something which passed by everyone else, buried not too deeply in a piece Danny Morrison wrote in The Irish Times on February 9th to coincide with Gerry Adams’ ‘retirement’ as leader of Sinn Fein.

Here it is:

I have known Gerry Adams 46 years. In 1975, as editor of Republican News, I asked him would he write a weekly column from Long Kesh, which he did under the pen man (sic) Brownie.

The significance of this lies in an article written by ‘Brownie’ and published in the Danny Morrison-edited Republican News back in May 1976, part of which reads as follows:

Rightly or wrongly, I’m an IRA volunteer and rightly or wrongly, I take a course of action as a means of bringing about a situation in which I believe the people of my country will prosper.

To put it mildly Morrison’s Irish Times’ article flies in the face of all the denials emanating from Adams and Morrison back in the 1990’s that Brownie was Adams and that this quote in particular amounted to an admission of IRA membership by the SF padrone.

When that quote emerged publicly in the 1990’s there was a furious counter offensive by the Provos, the highlight of which was the appearance of Adams’ faithful umbrella stand, Richard McAuley to admit responsibility. He had written those words that week, not Gerry, he claimed.

This was awful nonsense, which most Provos immediately knew, although they mostly kept silent. At that time, May 1976, Long Kesh was bitterly divided. One camp was led by the OC, David Morley who gave his support to Ruairi O Bradaigh and Daithi O Conaill in Dublin. Ranged against Morley were the militant, and militarist, Cage Eleven dissidents led by Adams/Bell/Hughes.

Richard McAuley was in the Morley camp in those days, although he may not care to be reminded of that, and there was no way he would have volunteered or have been asked to substitute for Adams that week or indeed any week.

Which leaves just Adams as the sole candidate for the Brownie job, just as Danny suggested in The Irish Times.

But what, one wonders, was Danny thinking of when he wrote this?

Trump’s America (continued)

April 10, 2018
By Jacob Rosenberg

On Fox and Friends, which US president Donald Trump has called “the most influential show in news,” the hosts discussed a thousand-person “caravan” of migrants traveling toward the United States to escape gang violence and poverty in Central America; and Trump said that women in the group were being “raped at levels nobody has seen before” and that he would deploy 2,000 to 4,000 National Guard troops to the US-Mexico border to stop the migrants from seeking asylum. Trump announced a tariff worth $50 billion on 1,300 Chinese goods, China proposed $50 billion worth of tariffs on American products, and Trump said he was considering raising the value of his tariffs by $100 billion. “We’ll see how this works out,” said Trump’s economic adviser. It was reported that Environmental Protection Agency head Scott Pruitt spent millions of taxpayer dollars to employ a 20-person security detail, reassigned or demoted EPA employees if they questioned the agency’s spending, attempted to use sirens to get through traffic, and rented a condo for $50 a night from the wife of a lobbyist for the only liquefied-natural-gas exporter in the United States. A fire broke out on the 50th floor of Trump Tower, killing one person.

In Syria, medical groups reported that at least 70 people suffocated in Douma from a chemical attack. During protests in Gaza, Israeli forces shot and killed a Palestinian photojournalist who was wearing a vest that bore the word “press.” A former president of Brazil, who was leading in the polls for the country’s upcoming presidential election, turned himself in to authorities to begin a 12-year sentence after being found guilty of helping a construction company acquire contracts from the state-run oil industry; a former president of South Korea was sentenced to 24 years in prison for using her position to fundraise for companies that paid for her shaman’s daughter’s equestrian lessons; and a South Carolina congressman pulled out a loaded .38-caliber Smith and Wesson handgun during a “coffee with constituents” meeting and said he was “not going to be a Gabby Giffords.”

Researchers found that one in three low-income American families struggles to afford diapers, and parts of California flooded when a plume of water vapor from the tropics caused snowmelt and heavy rain. A Tallahassee city commissioner said he had used almost all of the funds from his state senate campaign to pay an attorney to represent him in an FBI investigation of public corruption so that he could “clear his name” and “remain a viable candidate”; the FBI raided the office of one of Trump’s lawyers, who admitted to paying off an adult-film star with whom Trump allegedly had an affair; the ex-fiancée of a former Republican presidential campaign adviser accused her partner of forcing her to sign a five-page contract to be his “slave and property,” requiring her to wear a collar and always be naked; and the singer Cardi B released her first album, Invasion of Privacy.