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Approved For Release 2000/08/07 : CIA-RDP96-00788R000100330001-5 VICTIMS OF THE 'DIRTY WAR' of SIS and army headquarters intelligence staff. On 10 January 1975, in a remote mountain- side farmhouse in County Monaghan, a mile south of the Irish border, a leading republican, John Francis Green, was murdered. Careful planning and good intelligence was evident in his killing, for he had only visited the farm at short notice. The killers waited until Green was alone and then burst in on him, emptying the contents of two pistols into him. Soon afterwards, Captain Nairac called routinely on Holroyd at the Army’s Mahon Road camp in Portadown. The subject of Gréen’s death came up — Green, aged 27, a local republican hero after an escape from internment in Long Kesh in 1973, had by 1975 become the IRA commander in North Armagh. After an SAS sergeant major left the room, Nairac said that he had killed Green. When Holroyd expressed disbelief, Nairac produced a colour Polaroid of Green’s bloodsoaked body, taken soon after his death. Green was pictured from the waist up, lying on his back. With some reluctance, Nairac allowed Holroyd to keep the picture. It remained in Holroyd’s photo album until 1982, when it was handed over.to Super- intendent Caskey of the RUC. Who took the Polaroid picture is still a mystery. Nairac implied that he had done so. RUC detectives investigating the case suggested to Captain Holroyd in 1983 that the picture had been taken by the Irish Police. Buta very senior Garda source says that.no Garda officer in the area had either the equipment or any official reason to take such a picture. He said that the morning after the crime, a fully equipped Garda photographic team travelled up from Dublin, and took pictures using standard (black and white) film. Nairac told Holroyd that he and two other men had done the killing. He then described in detail how they had crossed the border during the evening and driven down a country road. Green was at first in the company of farmer Gerry Carville — whose house had long been an IRA ‘safe house’. But the old farmer, said Nairac, had left at a set time, known to the killers. One man stayed with the car, while the other two crept up a lane to the isolated farm and watched Green through an uncurtained window. They kicked down the door and shot him repeatedly, emptying one of the guns into his body as he lay dying. Nairac’s account of the killing, as provided to Holroyd, is chillingly exact. Irish police investi- gations produced reports of an unknown vehicle in the area at the time of the killing — a white Mercedes or Audi — which eyewitnesses ...continued thought contained three men. Farmer Gerry Carville has told us that for more than a month he had left his farm at the same time each evening to tend a neighbour’s cow. In the last month it has been revealed that, at the time, there were two well-placed informers working for British security inside IRA circles in the nearby town of Castleblayney. Garda investigation of the killing confirmed many aspects of Nairac’s account. The room in which John Francis Green was shot was indeed uncurtained at the time. The front door frame was kicked in, and still bears the cracks. Forensic experts, whose reports we have also seen, later established that two guns were used ‘go shoot Green; one is thought to be a Luger, the ‘other a Spanish-made Star automatic pistol. , AT FIRST, the Garda in the Republic suspected that other local IRA elements might have killed Green. Green had recently been asking questions about the proceeds of a series of bank robberies in Northern Ireland. The Royal Ulster Constabulary continues to put forward a theory that Green was killed by a deranged northern Protestant, called Elliott, who believed that his brother had been killed on Carville’s farm — and who had come with a - second, unknown man to kill Carville, not Green. But we have established from a confidential police source that the RUC obtained evidence in 1975 conclusively linking the Green killing to a series of notorious murders carried out by persons closely linked to the Protestant extremist paramilitary organisation, the Ulster Volunteer Force. The link is the cartridges from the Star automatic pistol found at the scene of the killing. With the secret help of the Garda, these were tested by a scientist attached to the RUC forensic staff, Norman Tulip, and found to be identical with cartridges left at the scene of four sectarian murders, committed ‘between 1973 and 1976. These included perhaps the most notorious killing of the 1970s — the slaughter in July 1975 of members of the Catholic Miami Showband. Robert Nairac, like many other army personnel in Northern Ireland (including Holroyd), obtained and sometimes carried personal ‘unattributable’ weapons. The serial numbers and firing characteristics of such guns were not officially recorded. During the trial of Nairac’s killers in 1977, his then commanding officer told the Dublin Court that a ‘personal pistol’, apart from his official issue Browning automatic, had“been found in Nairac’s room after his death. The Caskey Report, it is believed, does not suggest that Holroyd is wrong in his 57 SPECIAL EDITION -- TERRORISM -- 26 JUNE 1984 recollections, but quotes other Army officers instead in an attempt to show that Nairac was a braggard, inventing his participation in the Green murder. Some RUC officers have also tried to raise doubts as to whether Nairac was ever a member of the SAS. Holroyd says that he has come under intense pressure from the RUC to withdraw his murder accusation against Nairac. He refuses to do so. Obtaining evidence affecting Nairac’s story has been difficult, because of the death or dis- appearance of almost everyone involved. Elliott, the RUC’s supposed suspect, was himself killed in 1979, Captain Ball left the 3 Army to become a British government security 4 adviser, and has since reportedly died inatraffic accident. Nairac and Ball’s SAS company sergeant major is said by the RUC to be ‘untraceable’. Craig Smellie, in 1974 the Secret Service ‘controller’ at the Army HQat Lisburn, left to become SIS Chief of Station in Athens, and has also since died. Nairac himself left the SAS in 1976, but stayed on in Northern Ireland as a military intelligence liaison officer in Bessbrook and was killed in 1977. His death means that the final story of the Green assassin- ation may never be told. But the Army has a clear case to answer. Intelligence disaster Another of Holroyd’s accounts concerns a plan | to discover the IRA's major escape route from Belfast for wounded and wanted men. The plan | went wrong, resulting in two, and possibly five, deaths. Sergeant Tony Poole of the Intelligence } Corps, who worked as a ‘Field Intelligence ' NCO’ at the RUC station at Dungannon, set up the plan in 1974 and explained it to Holroyd. Poole planned to use a Catholic youth, who had recently been questioned by the Army, as his infiltrator. The hope was that he might finish up at an IRA training camp in the Republic. But Poole’s choice of agent was ludicrous. The operation quickly went wrong and his operative, Columba McVeigh, a woolly-headed 17 year old, went to jail for four months. In February 1975, an innocent Protestant man, ] was killed almost certainly as,a result of the bungled operation. Three Catholics are believed to have then been shot in turn in a ‘tit for tat’ revenge killing. . . During .the summer of 1974, Poole told Holroyd that McVeigh, was to be ‘set up’ on a charge of possessing ammunition.; He would carefully be allowed to avoid arrest and would ask the IRA to get him out. Poole and his colleagues were particularly keen to compromise a priest, who was.then working ina CONTINUED NEXT PAGE Approved For Release 2000/08/07 : CIA-RDP96-00788R000100330001-5