Broadcaster John Ware’s first experience of Northern Ireland came in 1972 when he was sent to Belfast as a young Worcestershire newspaper reporter to tell the story of young British soldiers.
“It must have been 1972, or early 73, I stayed with the [British] army. Yeah, reporting on the local boys. I actually saw a gun battle,” the 77-year-old recalls.
A year or so later, Ware was back, working with The Sun in Belfast during some of the worst years of the Troubles, before joining Granada TV’s highly rated World in Action programme.
“That was a terrific opportunity because they took investigative journalism really seriously. They were pretty fearless, they had terrific lawyers and they were interested in Northern Ireland.
“I did a Gerry Adams documentary, I did one on [Ian] Paisley, I did a number of gun-running stories from the US. My focus was really on the IRA, on arms trafficking, on the rise of Adams,” he says.
In all the years of the Troubles and its long, tangled aftermath, Ware has lived in a world of secrets – finding them, keeping them and bringing them into the light of day. His latest foray into Northern Ireland’s secrets is his new book Neither Confirm Nor Deny: British Intelligence, Lawless Agent Running and the Suppression of The Truth.
The book tells the story of how the British army, MI5 and the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) ran agents – and the questionable morality surrounding many of the actions taken. In particular, Neither Confirm Nor Deny tells of how agent handlers failed, or did not try to stop, IRA informer Freddie Scappaticci and his Ulster Defence Association counterpart Brian Nelson’s involvement in murder.
It deals with London’s refusal – supported now by the UK’s supreme court – to identify agents, even decades later, something that will continue to have an impact on a society struggling to deal with the past.
Ironically, a conversation with Ware begins not with the book, but rather his decision to break the seal on a 40-year-old conversation during a civil case taken by three IRA bomb victims against former Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams.
The three men dropped their action in the high court in London against Adams in March, with Adams saying the decision brought “to an emphatic end a case that should never have been brought”.
The case had argued that Adams had been a member of the IRA and that he had been a key figure in ordering bombings in England. Adams has always denied IRA membership.
In the witness box, Ware argued that a conversation with long-standing republican Danny Morrison – at a 1983 Sinn Féin ardfheis, minutes after Adams was elected as leader – meant Adams was an IRA member, contrary to Adams’s denials.
“I asked him about what was going to happen to the IRA now that Adams had been elected and was pushing the movement down a political path. Would it mean an easing up of the military and so on,” he told the court.
Ware says Morrison said in reply: “Where do you think we come from?” Given the context of the question, this, Ware argues, means Morrison’s reply meant that Adams had been a member of the IRA.
It’s intolerable, in my view, for people just to collude by silence in allowing the historical record to be falsified as Adams would have it
— John Ware
Morrison remains angry. Firstly, he argues, his 1983 words did not mean what Ware says; secondly, the conversation was off the record; and, thirdly, it was recorded secretly.
In exchanges with The Irish Times, Morrison said he had always understood the conversation had been “off the record”. He said he did not know until the London court case that it had been secretly recorded.
In any event, he insists he never said Adams was an IRA member, and says he was embarrassed among his friends when he was asked during and after the trial if he had done so.
For his part, Ware stands over his evidence, though he acknowledges that his decision to reveal the conversation is an “exceptional breach of my undertakings to Danny Morrison 40-odd years ago”. Revealing a source is generally considered a grave breach of journalistic standards.
The broadcaster acknowledges, too, that others besides Morrison are unhappy – including some journalists who worked alongside him during the Troubles.
“It’s a whiskery, old-fashioned view [that such conversations should be kept secret], a slightly romanticised view; I’m not diminishing the importance of the undertaking, but [a pledge to keep a conversation secret] cannot be absolutely unconditional. It’s intolerable, in my view, for people just to collude by silence in allowing the historical record to be falsified as Adams would have it,” he says. “I don’t have any conscience at all about that.”
The intelligence battle was one of the North’s darkest chapters, Ware argues – one where public protestations by British prime minister Margaret Thatcher and others about “the rule of law” clashed with actions taken away from the microphones.
The moral compromises, and Ware accepts there must be some, are traced back to a 1981 MI5 decision giving intelligence gathering in Northern Ireland primacy over criminal justice.
Hundreds of agents on all sides of the conflict were recruited subsequently by the RUC’s special branch, by the British army’s Force Research Unit, by MI5 itself.
Often, investigations into their conduct were blocked. “Source protection” became everything, the “clear picture” afforded by the agents of the paramilitaries’ structure more valued than stopping individual acts of murder.
For Ware, the story of 20-year-old trainee electrician and IRA member Michael Kearney still shocks. Kearney had joined the IRA in 1978 at a time when his older brother Seamus Kearney, also an IRA member during the Troubles, was in prison.
The younger Kearney was arrested by the RUC within months of joining the proscribed organisation. Interrogated for days in Castlereagh police station, he broke and revealed a small arms hide, along with admitting to a number of crimes and offering to inform, writes Ware, following scores of interviews during his career and for the preparation of his latest book.
Once released, Kearney admitted to the IRA that he had broken. Unknown to him, however, senior Belfast IRA figures had already branded him as “a tout” for an earlier leak, one he could not have had anything to do with.
The conflict is still being slugged out in the courts, because there were so many agents – hundreds and hundreds
— John Ware
Concerned that they were sending a man to his death if they released him without charge, one RUC officer had urged before Kearney was let go that they prosecute him for one of the offences to which he had admitted.
Instead, Ware writes, Kearney’s fate was put to a vote of his four RUC interrogators, who decided by 3:1 to release him, despite knowing the IRA’s paranoia about what any of their people said during questioning, based on his interviews with one of those involved.
Driven by the IRA to Ballinamore, Co Leitrim, Kearney was blamed for the discovery by the British army of a significant store of IRA explosives in the nationalist Short Strand area of Belfast weeks before.
In an attempt to show that he could not be blamed, Kearney told his interrogators that the RUC had boasted to him that they had known all about the Short Strand when they questioned him.
Based on a pictured gradually built up over decades from interviews with those he believes to have close knowledge of the killing, Ware writes that some of Kearney’s IRA interrogators believed he did not deserve to die, arguing that breaking down during a hard RUC interrogation – especially when he had quickly admitted doing it – deserved censure, but not death.
However, senior IRA Belfast brigade figures insisted on execution, which Ware believes is just one example of where a higher-rank informer ensured that someone else died to cover their tracks.
Two days later, Kearney was killed, accepting his death “with remarkable composure”, Ware writes. He did not ask to wear a hood. He did not make a run for it, as others tried.
Instead, he asked for time to say a brief prayer and was shot where he stood in a Co Fermanagh lane.
For Ware, the Kearney killing highlighted the IRA’s brutality, but also how the Troubles had coarsened the moral attitudes of RUC officers.
Though he understands why RUC officers would not “give a rat’s arse” about whether an IRA man should live or not, the callousness of releasing Kearney when they knew his fate “really did shock me”.
“I don’t think I could have done that. I think I’d have looked at a lad of 20 and said, ‘Look, you know, he’s from a republican family … Charge [him]. Lock him up. Don’t put him on the street – because he’ll die.”
Ware says the decision to put intelligence gathering above the rule of law meant that before arrests were made they had to be run past RUC special branch, lest the subject be an agent.
In addition, special branch had “first dibs, if you like, at someone to see if they were potentially persuadable to become an informant”.
Such legacy has poisoned post-Belfast Agreement Northern Ireland, Ware argues: “The conflict is still being slugged out in the courts, because there were so many agents – hundreds and hundreds.”
The lack of a legal authority for agent-running did concern many at the time, with the then head of RUC special branch in Belfast, Ray White, raising it directly with Thatcher.
“Have you got everything you need, Mr White?” she asked during a Belfast visit. White replied: “Well, prime minister, I would welcome detailed guidance and regulation in relation to what we do.”
For the next four years, British officials struggled to draw up rules for England, Scotland and Wales but also for Northern Ireland’s far darker environment.
Ware writes that the gap between Northern Ireland and the rest became evident when one resettled IRA man freely admitted to English detectives that he had killed people, and had sent one IRA member to four days of torture and death.
[ MI5 has ‘blind spot’ over Northern Ireland Troubles, PSNI chief saysOpens in new window ]
Even if he hates the moral quagmire, Ware is far from convinced that running agents can ever be done without compromises. To be useful, agents must know dark secrets. Sometimes, they will be party to them.
Ware concludes: “All f**king wars are dirty. It’s a silly phrase. I wish I’d never used it myself. Clearly, a lot of it was wrong. But would you, or I, have pulled out an agent who could offer incredible intelligence? If you accepted that there was no alternative but to get agents alongside those who were shooting people in the back, or blowing them up, if you were to stop them? What would you have done? These are the judgments of Solomon.”
Neither Confirm Nor Deny: British Intelligence, Lawless Agent Running and the Suppression of The Truth is published by Merrion Press
