MI5's official history part III: The Wilson Plots and the INLA

By 1979, I'd come to a parting of the ways with Army Intelligence. This followed my involvement in fighting against fascists in Brick Lane during ANL Carnival 2. Later, following a spell in police and army cells I was very much a civilian, very much a Trotskyist and very much anti-the-security-forces by the time I was involved in the battle of Digbeth Hall in Birmingham. But it was the open hostility of the armed forces and intelligence community to Labour plus the social and political crimes of Thatcherism that set me on this path.

In 1979. two of the conspirators against Harold Wilson died in the form of Airey Neave and Lord Mountbatten - the latter of whom was to have been figurehead to a military coup plot in 1968. The INLA were deemed to be the most likely culprits in each case but were in disarray following the great train robbery trial of 1977 in the Irish Republic. Dominic McClinchy, when he boasted of his involvement in the Neave killing to Roger Bolton of BBC Television got the details wrong and the mercury tilt mechanism (a favourite of the Special Forces since Aden) was beyond the technical capabilities of the INLA. The Mountbatten murder was eventually accredited to the IRA but they, too, didn't have the resources to murder both Mountbatten (in Sligo) and the paratroopers killed in Warrenpoint (which WAS down to the IRA) on the same day at the same time.

In 1980 another INLA police informant killed the fascist paedophile John McKeague from East Belfast, ahead of disclosures that MI5 were involved in running a child sex ring at the Kincora Boys Home in Belfast. This doesn't feature in Christopher Andrew's whitewash about MI5 any more than the framing of Colin Wallace (hitherto Army Information Policy, Lisburn) on manslaughter charges in Arundel, after he blew the whistle both on Kincora and wider MI5 involvement in the plot to detsbilise Harold Wilson - much of which was concentrated in Northern Ireland. Wallace's conviction was later overturned. Equally, there is nothing in Andrew's book about how Britain's intelligence community contrived to manipulate the dynamic and direction of the 1974 UWC Strike via the Dublin and Monaghan bombings, as a dry run for wider plots against Wilson in Britain itself.

Of course, not all the plots against Wilson originated with MI5 nor can every act of political subterfuge in the 1970s and 1980s be laid at the doors of Curzon Street. What Andrew's book reveals is how Wilson's file was re-named after the right wing figure of Michael Hanley succeeded Sir Roger Hollis as Director General, following the Wright-Pincher smear. This suggests that such plot escelated in the 1970s, as against the 1960s, and also that a culture of "plausible deniability" was being developed at the time. During this period, under the Ambassador's Agreement that defines US bases in Britain as sovereign US territory, the American NSA bugged Wilson's government on MI5's behalf so none of the information had to be handled by the Cabinet Joint Intelligence Committee. Building on an established relationship with the Rhodesian Central Intelligence Organisation in the 1960s, MI5 relied on South Africa's BOSS to carry out certain dirty tricks against the Lib-Lab coalition - especially as regards Jeremy Thorpe's entrapment on conspiracy to murder charges. The real target as always was Wilson.