The Green Ribbon

The DCIs: Britain’s intelligence chiefs in the Northern Ireland Troubles (Working Draft)

The new year is a good time to think about the best way of using my Patreon. While some of the posts there give a good flavour of my research, I've been thinking for some time about following the example of writers like Kevin Carson, who post the full working draft of their books online.

Over the past year, I have narrowed the focus of my draft book to tell the story of British intelligence in Ireland through profiles of individual intelligence chiefs. I've now reached the point where I have a full timeline of office-holders for the period I want to cover, and full profiles of some of them.

Be warned, however, that there is a lot of work still to do, and some parts of the text are a mass of unassimilated notes, while others still need to be fully referenced. At the moment, the profiles on Herbert, Rowley, Cradock, Doyne-Ditmas, and Deverell are most complete. There is a lot of unassimiliated material in relation to Eastwood, Payne, and Ranson. There is relatively little at the moment in relation to Parker, Ferneyhough and Knight, but I have made some progress here in recent months and should be able to update these shortly.

In every case, I have been able to link names appearing in Northern Ireland Office files, to those of known intelligence officers in other sources, most importantly the 1980s MI5 order of battle included in Stephen Dorril's The Silent Conspiracy.

With all of the above caveats, the current draft is now avallable to my Patreon subscribers here. Look out for future updates.

Spicer threatens to sue Craig Murray

It's about time that I broke radio silence on here, and this certainly merits it.

Former diplomat Craig Murray is having another run-in with Schillings, the lawyers who briefly managed to get his website taken down on behalf of Uzbek oligarch Alisher Usmanov.

Now they are attempting to block the publication of my new book in the interests of mercenary commander Tim Spicer, one of those who has made a fortune from the Iraq War. It is sad but perhaps predictable that private profits from the illegal Iraq war, in which hundreds of thousands of innocent people have died, are providing the funding to try to silence my book.

The Road to Samarkand sounds as if it will be very interesting.

Among the incidents I cover in my new book are the murder of Peter McBride, the Aegis Trophy Video, the Papua New Guinea coup, the Equatorial Guinea plot, Executive Outcomes' murder of civilians in Angola and the Arms to Africa affair. I do hope that other bloggers will generate another Streisand effect through blogging on these subjects.

Great Hatred, Little Room by Jonathan Powell

My review of Jonathan Powell's account of the peace process, Great Hatred, Little Room, is now online over at OurKingdom.

Update 11 April: David Frum points us to a review by Dean Godson in the Spectator. Godson's more critical view is in line with the terms of the debate described in my OK piece.

Irish events in London: Ruan O'Donnell on the Border campaign

A couple of events in London next week worth noting. Firstly, The Connolly Association brings us details of a talk by historian Ruan O'Donnell at Hammersmith Irish Centre on Wednesday:

Date: 14 November (Wednesday)

Time: 7pm, Irish Centre, Hammersmith, London

Speaker: Ruan O'Donnell; chair: Peter Berresford Ellis.

Further details tel. 0044 (0)207 8333022

A LEADING authority on the United Irish movement and the Irish rebellions against British rule of 1798 and 1803, the radical Irish historian Ruan O'Donnell has been turning his attention to more recent times - in particular the IRA's Border Campaign of the late 1950s and early 1960s. The meeting at the Hammersmith Irish Centre on 14 November will provide a fascinating foretaste of his forthcoming book on the subject

Meeting organised by the Four Provinces Bookshop.

The Irish Democrat's John Murphy has an intriguing description of O'Donnell's thesis:

when De Valera and Fianna Fail returned to power in 1951, they fell totally silent on the northern injustices they had previously been so vocal on, and Britain's responsibility for their continuance. The Fine Gael-led coalition which also held office in the 1950s said nothing about them either. The reason was the Cold War. If Ireland had sought to raise the misdeeds of the northern unionist regime at the United Nations or in other international forums at the time, the Russians would have supported it. America and Ireland's vocal Cold Warriors would in turn have been furious.

More than meets the eye?

The latest issue of Private Eye features two very interesting stories that, in subtly, contrasting ways, raise the issue of covert political manipulation by intelligence agencies.

On page 6, the HP sauce column tells us that Gordon Brown is currently reading Who Paid the Piper? by Frances Stonor Saunders, a study of 'CIA secret funding and manipulation of intellectuals and writers in the cold war.'

Stonor Saunders told the Eye she was 'dumbfounded' to learn that Gordon Brown was using the book, which she intended as an exposé, as a source of ideas for the war on terror.

The second story 'Whistleblowing in the Wind' on page 7 concerns a Foreign Office diplomat who is currently waiting to hear whether he will face charges under the Official Secrets Act, after leaking documents about government relations with organisations connected to the Muslim Brotherhood.

Licensed to Kill: Robert Young Pelton on the Aegis contract

I've just got hold of a copy of Robert Young Pelton's  Licensed to Kill: Hired Guns in the War on Terror. Although, I have yet to read the whole thing, I can say there is some excellent journalism in this book, including the best account yet of how Aegis Defence Services got the largest security contract in Iraq.

As Spicer explained to me during the interview, he found the RFP (request for proposal) while surfing the Internet looking for work opportunities in Iraq. However, multiple sources with intimate knowledge of Aegis's bid have alleged to me that PMO (Project Management Office) security chief Brigadier General Anthony Hunter-Choat and Brigadier General James Ellery helped formulate the specifications for the RFP with Aegis in mind. Some security insiders claim that Spicer had a personal relationship with the two brigadiers from their days as contemporaries in the British military, but others are of the opinion that the awarding of the Aegis contract arose from a wish to have more British companies profitting off the reconstruction. Not surprisingly, Spicer vehemently denies all insinuations and charges, and claims, "it is a standard U.S. tender issued by the northern region. They wrote the spec." (Robert Young Pelton, Licensed to Kill, p277)

Book Review: The Wonga Coup, by Adam Roberts

In March 2004, Zimbabwean police impounded a jet carrying 64 mercenaries, led by former SAS officer Simon Mann. The event marked the unravelling of an extraordinary plot, backed by wealthy investors, to overthrow the Government of Equatorial Guinea, a tiny oil-rich nation in West Africa.

The Wonga Coup, by Adam Roberts is the first book to tell the story of the conspiracy, and the subsequent fallout.

If this sounds like the plot of a Frederick Forsyth novel, that’s because it is. Roberts reveals that Forsyth’s bestseller The Dogs of War , is based on the thriller writer’s real-life involvement with a failed 1973 coup attempt in Equatorial Guinea.

The IRB and English republicanism

I took the opportunity while in Ireland last week to visit the excellent An Cafe Liteartha in Dingle and pick up a copy of the new book on The IRB by Owen McGee.

From what I've read so far, the book certainly lives up to its very positive reviews. There is one passage in particular I think is worth highlighting here. It concerns the IRB's response to Isaac Butt's proposal for a federal United Kingdom.

Butt's idea was unworkable because the creation of a federal government for the United Kingdom would have necessitated drafting a written (republican) constitution, while the entire British system of government, the monarchy's role therein and its professed status as an empire, was totally dependent, legally speaking, on the unwritten nature of the British constitution. His idea might have appealed to English or Irish republicans but few others. 

Hobson choice

"It is, indeed, a nemesis of Imperialism that the arts and crafts of tyranny, acquired and exercised in our unfree Empire, should be turned against our liberties at home." John A. Hobson

I have been looking for a decent tagline for the Green Ribbon for some time now, and I'm still not sure I've found one.

Until I can come up with something that expresses the same idea a bit more snappily, I've decided to use the above quote from John A Hobson, an English liberal thinker of the late 19th/early 20th Century, which I think captures many of the themes of this blog. [Update: I have now dropped this idea in response to Alex's comments below]

Hobson was an old school free trader who opposed Britain's turn to imperial expansion as its industrial supremacy was challenged by the United States and Germany. In some ways, the US could be said to be in a similar position today as regards China.

Hobson's 1902 book, Imperialism, A Study, is one of the most influential on the subject, and is available online.

My quote above comes from the chapter on The Political Significance of Imperialism. Hobson's critique of the Liberal Party of his own day is strikingly relevant to New Labour's adventurism of today. I have excerpted some of his particularly apposite comments at length below.

2005: Blogged has arrived

I have just received my copy of 2005: Blogged, Tim Worstall's anthology of the best of the year's British and Irish blogging.

The Green Ribbon has sneaked in on page 93 thanks to this post which was originally nominated for the BritBlog Roundup back in March by Gareth from the CEP.