Irish Spies Betray Blair and Bush leaving a trail from Belfast to Middle East terroristsThe North Ireland Executive has been suspended for the fourth time since devolution in the aftershock set off by the disclosure of a spy ring which operated out of the Stormont offices of the Irish Republican Army’s political wing for two and a half years. The October 5 police raid that smashed the ring lodged in the home of Ulster democracy touched off a multi-pronged undercover manhunt in Britain, Northern Ireland, Eire, Cyprus and Lebanon, as well as Northern Iraq. Its targets are Irish, Palestinian, Cypriot, Greek, Lebanese and Iraqi agents or go-betweens, who may have bought or mediated the transfer of security secrets stolen by members of the IRA spy ring. The raid caused the breakdown of the province’s fragile interim power-sharing agreement between Unionists and the IRA’s political wing, Sinn Fein, amid bitter recriminations from Unionist leaders.
It also brought a vast haul of thousands of secret documents purloined by the network, largely for sale or barter with foreign terrorist groups with whom Irish republican extremists have been long associated. The spies got hold of transcripts of confidential telephone conversations on secure lines between Tony Blair and President Bush, sending them to Belfast by means of ring members that included British civil servants and Irish Catholic politicians.
Their activities were not confined to top-secret briefing materials laid before Blair on the political and military situation in Northern Ireland. They also went after intelligence memos and encrypted messages passing between the British and American leaders in their exchanges on military and intelligence preparations for the Afghan War, the campaign against Iraq, the post-Taliban situation in Kabul and highly sensitive data pertaining to the global war on terror, including anti-al Qaeda tactics.
The recovered documents cover a period running from April 1, 2000, five months before the 9/11 attacks in New York and Washington, up until October 4, 2002. The Irish spy ring therefore operated undisturbed for 30 months at least, up until the security-police raid at the home of Ulster democracy.
Immediately after that raid, the British prime minister made a grim report to President Bush who, thereupon sent a special CIA team to London for an initial independent assessment of the damage to American security interests. Our sources add that last week’s London trip by the American Homeland Minister, Tom Ridge, was also connected with the affair. It came on the heels of several discreet rounds of inquiries by the CIA director George Tenet in London, Belfast and Dublin.
The most urgent purpose of the parallel probes is to track down the recipients of the secret documents. It is believed that some materials reached interested parties in the Middle East. Thus far, two such parties have been identified as Palestinian agents based in Cyprus and Lebanon and Greek Cypriot agents who work the region. Both groups have longstanding ties both with the IRA and with Lebanese and Palestinians associated with Iraq and al Qaeda operatives in Lebanon and the Persian Gulf.
Those three arrests are just the beginning. The IRA is suspected of running a network of spies in many areas of government, some employed in unobtrusive jobs as clerks, clerks and chauffeurs. British and American agents need to lay hands on many more informants in and outside Ireland and the UK to be able to evaluate the amount of damage wrought by the Stormont Ring.
