Deception and Lies by Burke David

Author:Burke, David [Burke, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Irish Arms Crisis book, Capt. Kelly, David Burke, Deception and Lies, Neil Blaney, Jack Lynch, Arms Crisis of the 1970s, Charles Haughey, IRA gun running, The Hidden History of the Arms Crisis, Guns from Libya, British Foreign Office, Provisional IRA, Charlie Haughey, Arms Tri, dirty tricks campaign
Publisher: Mercier Press
Published: 2020-09-17T21:00:00+00:00

17

‘A PAWN IN A VERY STRANGE GAME’

By 1 May the ice underneath Lynch’s feet was beginning to crack. While he was assuring his cabinet that the matter was ‘closed’, Capt. Kelly was in custody, having been arrested that very morning by Fleming and a colleague. Lynch was not only aware of this, he was about to interview the captain personally in his office at government buildings.

It had taken the gardaí a while to arrest the captain. He, John Kelly and Albert Luykx had flown back to Dublin on Tuesday 21 April. The omens were not auspicious: their passports were inspected on arrival, something Capt. Kelly felt was an ‘unusual procedure’.

Unfortunately for the captain and his colleagues, the new Director of G2, Col ‘Bud’ Delaney, who had taken charge of G2 on 8 April, did not know about the importation operation. According to a G2 report, for two months before Col Hefferon retired ‘Colonel Delaney had been in the Intelligence Section to familiarise himself with its operations’. However, Col Hefferon had not told him ‘of Captain’s Kelly’s activities because it was a matter of great secrecy, in which some Government Ministers and in my mind acting for the Government were involved’. Col Hefferon believed that if anyone should have informed his successor, it should have been ‘the Minister for Defence’.1

On 22 April, Gibbons received a verbal briefing from Col Delaney about Capt. Kelly’s efforts to import arms. Col Delaney clearly still had no idea that Gibbons and the captain had been working hand in glove with each other. Gibbons did not put him straight. Instead, Gibbons donned a mask and let Col Delaney describe what he must have believed was sensational and shocking information: an attempt had been made to import arms for subversive groups on both sides of the border.

The new director also maintained that from November 1969 Capt. Kelly had allegedly ‘ceased to have any contact with the Security Sub-Section and no reports from him are on record in the Intelligence Security Sub-Section’.2 This was a curious allegation as the captain’s handwritten report on the Bailieboro meeting was not only preserved but released by the National Archives decades later. Persisting in the mistaken belief that the arms were destined for the IRA, the colonel argued that the purchase of arms ‘had grave implications for military and state security. Weapons should be purchased only for the forces of the state NOT for illegal groups.’ Such weapons, he continued, could be used not only against the British, ‘but against our own forces’. He feared that if any of the weapons were to be captured, it would be ‘possible to trace their origin’. He also warned that it:

must be accepted that British intelligence, now operating in a big way in Northern Ireland, will get onto it. They have their own international links with European security agencies and with the CIA, so the likelihood of these activities going undetected is small. As well as the intelligence implications there is the political reaction of the British government to be considered.

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