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Note: The below items were forwarded to the Smithwick Tribunal in addition to the listed material supplied to other parties above. For explanation, see introductory letter dated Thursday 5 August 2010, item one in this section, to Mr. Justice Peter Smithwick.

 

 

(www.stakeknife.eu)

 

Twitter: @seankellyis

 

(5)

 

*

 

MR. JUSTICE PETER SMITHWICK (Enclosures)

 

CONTENTS:

 

a) – The Sunday Times, 08.08.1999 – Relevant points highlighted.

 

b) – The Sunday Times, 20.02.2000 – Relevant points highlighted.

 

c) – The Sunday Times, 14.05.2000 – Relevant points highlighted.

 

d) – The Sunday Times, 10.09.2000 – Relevant points highlighted.

 

 

Note: Terms Bloody Sunday Inquiry, Saville Inquiry, Saville Tribunal, are interchangeable.

 

(Emphasis, where used, is mine.)

 

 

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(A)

 

The Sunday Times, 08.08.1999

 

RELEVANT POINTS (Liam Clarke interviewing Martin Ingram):

 

 

Page 1 - “MI5 ‘operated network of Garda agents’” By Liam Clarke. A claim by Martin Ingram that MI5 operated Garda agents. A front page eye-catcher to catch media attention and set the stall for pages 6 and 7. This by a “whistleblower” whose left hand is often at odds with his right hand but who has the power of bi-location and is an open house to MI5 secrets.

 

PP 6-7 – “The British spy at the heart of the IRA” By Liam Clarke. 1) Birth of the “Steak Knife” name (which would change into “Stakeknife”). 2) Claim that a FRU handler “skillfully” infiltrated Frank Hegarty, an informer who would later be murdered by the IRA, into the Derry IRA quartermaster’s department. 3) Mr. Ingram would claim he retrospectively read reports on the 30 January 1972 Derry civil rights march that would become known as Bloody Sunday. 4) From this alleged reading and doing a project he would assert an insight into the events of Bloody Sunday.

 

The Sunday Times, 8 August 1999. Page 1.


The Sunday Times, 8 August 1999. Page 6.


The Sunday Times, 8 August 1999. Page 7.


 

(B)

 

The Sunday Times, 20.02.2000

 

RELEVANT POINTS (Liam Clarke interviewing Martin Ingram):

 

P. 2: “Army agent offers to give Bloody Sunday evidence.” By Liam Clarke. Claimed retrospective research by Martin Ingram into IRA/OIRA positions on the 30 January 1972 civil rights march in Derry, which would become known as Bloody Sunday, advanced one step further. The “British Army whistleblower” says he wants to give evidence to the Bloody Sunday Inquiry, “if he is allowed to testify anonymously at Lord Saville’s public inquiry, which opens next month.” In this he has the backing of The Sunday Times and the director of Liberty, John Wadham.

 

There is a remarkable contradiction between this newspaper report and Ingram’s claims at the Saville Tribunal when he gave evidence on Monday 12 May 2003 (contained on pages 152-157 of Inquiry transcript), and in the “Martin Ingram” section that follows this document.

 

In his tribunal evidence Ingram acts out the part of a reluctant witness: he is there under compulsion. A game is played with Mr. Glasgow QC, counsel for many of the soldiers involved in the shootings, saying: “Now, given personal circumstances of which the Inquiry are well aware, I was reluctant to be actually here today…” After more fencing, he was forthcoming. “However, I was persuaded by the Inquiry, on the foot of some legal action that if I did not – that is why I am here today, sir.”

 

The picture that he was there under duress is a script change from the above Sunday Times report (20.02.00). I quote the pertinent paragraphs.

 

Page two headlines: “Army agent offers to give Bloody Sunday evidence.”

 

Paragraph two reads: “Ingram has offered to cast fresh light on the shooting dead of 13 civil-rights marchers by the Parachute Regiment on Bloody Sunday in 1972 if he is allowed to testify anonymously at Lord Saville’s public inquiry, which opens next month.”

 

Paragraph five – “Ingram said last night: ‘I am willing to help with these inquiries. I believe that it is part of the healing process in Northern Ireland for the truth to come out and I will have things to say about what I know of the IRA as well as the army – but I do not want to be jailed for doing so.’”

 

Paragraph six – “The offer to help has been made through John Wadham, director of Liberty, who is Ingram’s solicitor. Wadham, one of Britain’s leading civil rights experts, said: ‘Martin has shown courage in coming forward to expose wrongdoing and should not be turned into the villain.’”

 

Paragraph twelve “Last night Wadham said: ‘Journalists who try to investigate wrongdoing by the state should not be subject to this treatment. I will now be contacting Lord Saville’s and John Stevens’ inquiry to offer my client’s services to them, provided he is not prosecuted for coming forward.”

 

However, when Ingram’s evidence was given to the Tribunal, it was denied its full measure of publicity and scrutiny, drowned out by the Stakeknife revelations, also an Ingram product, which fortuitously exploded off the blocks at the same time.

 

Part of a wider operation of deception, which will be elaborated on in later sections of this compilation.

 

The trouble with Ingram’s evidence was that other FRU soldiers appeared not to know of or believe in the existence of the files he is said to have read and the project he is said to have written. In that and elsewhere in evidence to the Tribunal, Ingram appears to have been skating on thin ice.

 

If the writers of the Bloody Sunday Inquiry Report, when it was published, were not impressed with Ingram’s evidence, they were not unduly harsh to an old soldier who they must have recognised was doing a nixer.

 

Note:

 

It would be said in time that Jane Winters, director of British Irish Rights Watch, gave support to Martin Ingram, speaking on his behalf as John Wadham of Liberty had once done.

 

The Sunday Times reports of 08.08.99 and 20.02.00 are well written classics of their kind. Out of unspoken considerations, I go no further.

 

The Sunday Times, 20 February 2000. Page 2.


 

(C)

 

The Sunday Times, 14.05.2000

 

RELEVANT POINTS:

 

Page 14 – “CENSORED” – By John Ware. It concerns the “gagging” of The Sunday Times and its journalist Liam Clarke from making known information supplied by Martin Ingram, a former crown servant. Does one cease to be a “crown servant” when working undercover?

 

A good example of the game called chasing the mirage.

 

I observe the gagging order was not so draconian that John Ware could not write about it and The Sunday Times publish it.

 

Ingram’s bogus disclosure received a welcome at The Sunday Times, as it did at the top end of major rights groups. Offers to The Sunday Times of real state sensitive disclosure doesn’t get an acknowledgement, less still encouragement to forward particulars, as I and (surely) others know well.

 

The same applies to John Ware, Liberty, British Irish Rights Watch and many others, individuals and organizations, whom I have approached over the years. How come these people and organizations can tell when a real gagging order applies, for example, to me, and will not acknowledge or pursue enquiry? Yet they will accept bogus disclosure, lies, on behalf of state interests. Why the prescience on the former and the blindness on the latter?

 

Why accept disinformation from MI5, because that is who Martin Ingram represents at a classic remove, and not genuine state sensitive disclosure from a lowly citizen?

 

The David’s fighting the Goliath of state. “John Wadham, Ingram’s lawyer, is the director of the civil rights group Liberty. ‘The authorities need to be investigating the revelations made by whistleblowers like Ingram and journalists like Clarke rather than attempting to use the Official Secrets Act to silence them,’ he said.”

 

Observe in The Sunday Times report the rubbish on “Steak Knife” (as the invisible man was then known) and how “Ingram has undertaken never to unmask him.” While  the legal games were being played out with The Sunday Times and Liam Clarke, some with fortuitous timing, Martin Ingram was put offside in the Republic of Ireland, where he not only co-wrote a book on Stakeknife, but also disclosed the supposed identity of the man behind the supposed codeword.

 

Given a modicum of investigative pursuit, most of the claims made by Ingram and his ilk would fall by the wayside. But by then it would be old news. In time, much of what these people write is stood on it head.

 

Yet the lies and legal games still rise and fall in tune to the baton of state need. They play the game one way by being offside, and another way by being onside. At least Ingram can go to his local now.

 

His job done in Ireland, the “whistleblower” returned home a decoratively richer man, but still on call and subject to due process MI5/MoD style.

 

No rest for the wicked, they say.

 

Page 18 Editorial. A master class in humbug. (See below.)

 

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Note: The Sunday Times has a history of flying the flag for intelligence agencies in matters of state interests. Its performance on behalf of the national interest, as some would have it, after the shooting dead of an IRA team in Gibraltar in March 1988 is a case in point. Some of its reporting on the SAS ambush of the IRA team, and matters relating thereto, was so biased it received peer opprobrium.

 

The Sunday Times, 14 May 2000. Page 14.


Editorial. The Sunday Times, 14 May 2000. Page 18.


 

(D)

 

The Sunday Times, 10.09.2000

 

RELEVANT POINTS:

 

(Brigadier Kerr/FRU/Sir John Stevens/Pat Finucane/Stakeknife/Ingram)

 

Page 1 – “Brigadier heads 30 men facing arrest” – By Liam Clarke. Another eclectic array of journalistic claims that would end up going nowhere.

 

Page 8 – “Army’s web of Ulster intrigue torn apart” – By Liam Clarke. Yet again an eclectic array of journalistic tit-bits, some of it fatuous. It seems that anything given by a security source to a newspaper is deemed fit to publish. Disclosure by Martin Ingram continues to find space in The Sunday Times. So much for the “gagging” order.

 

Two paragraphs from page eight are worth quoting.

 

“This arm of the Met, 20 detectives under Commander Hugh Orde and Detective Inspector Rick Turner, has depended heavily on the co-operation of a former soldier they believe to be Ingram.

 

“At the same time, however, a Metropolitan police Special Branch team headed by Detective Inspector Alan Learner is working in the opposite direction, trying to gather evidence to charge Ingram and a Sunday Times journalist with breaching the Official Secrets Act. The Ministry of Defence, whose complaint resulted in the Special Branch investigation, has issued gagging orders against The Sunday Times and a former member of the FRU to halt further revelations.”

 

It is balderdash. But don’t stop there. Read on for yet more of the same on “Steak Knife”. I quote:

”As the [Stevens] inquiry progresses it comes ever closer to the most sensitive of all the secrets of the Troubles, the long term moles placed by British military intelligence in the IRA. The key figure is a man known to his handlers as Steak Knife, an agent since the early 1970s who is so highly placed that an entire office and a fleet of vehicles is devoted to handling him.

 

“Steak Knife, whose identity has never been disclosed by Ingram, is paid £60,000 tax-free a year plus bonus; compared with the £10,000 which [Brian] Nelson received for infiltrating the UDA and taking control of its intelligence gathering.”

 

I can visualize one of the fleet of vehicles devoted to “Steak Knife”. A logo of a t-bone steak, cooked rare, a knife slicing through the flesh, blood seeping onto the plate… as it pursues a rendezvous with the “jewel in the crown” of British agents in the IRA.

 

There was in truth no fleet of vehicles, no designated office, no teams of collators and handlers waiting round-the-clock for his telephone calls. The notion that anybody could sustain such a belief is theatrical. Yet, Liam Clarke and other big name security professionals ran with it.

 

And no mention of  the supposed Stakeknife office being underground and named the “rat hole”, that would become a feature of the story from 2003.

 

What does it say?

 

Page 16 Editorial. A tirade against Geoff Hoon, Minister for Defence, and the British government. It’s not the government but MI5 using agents and government ministers’ for national security ends. The editorial is duty dressed up as pious concern. A Punch and Judy show.

 

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Note: The above newspaper report was written in September 2000. Ten years on nothing has changed – the circus continues: Martin Ingram and court games, cul-de-sac investigations, and so on. All part of the magic roundabout. Headlines today. In the dustbin tomorrow.

 

In matters to do with “national security” there is no justice. Anybody who says otherwise is without personal experience. I am 30 years on the road and still my case is not publicly known, individuals apart. My web compilation is generally not accessible to an Internet search engine.

 

So much for openness and accountability in the “Free West”.

 

While others have received tribute and gongs, I observe that John Stalker has not received a knighthood, less still a peerage. An unscientific juxtaposition, to be sure – but does it make a point?

 

The Sunday Times, 10 September 2000. Page 1.


The Sunday Times, 10 September 2000. Page 8.


Editorial, The Sunday Times, 10 September 2000. Page 16.

                                                                                                END

 

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