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Lord Saville Of Newdigate |
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
(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.)
*
(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
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.)
*
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.
*
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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