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Approved For Release 2000/08/07 : CIA-RDP96-00788R000100330001-5 DIRTY WAR PART II Booby traps and bank raids Former army intelligence officer Fred Holroyd (see _SPECIAL EDITION - tc ona ; rew Wiard/Repors " An | above) reveals to Duncan Campbell more of the inside story of British army ‘dirty tricks’ in Northern Ireland FORMER INTELLIGENCE officer Captain Fred Tiolroyd’s revelations last week in the New Statesman and on Channel 4 have provoked a strong reaction from the Irish government. The Irish Ambassador to Britain, Mr Noel Dorr, said last week that ‘It’s simply not acceptable that there should be security forces of any other state operating within our jurisdiction’. Ambassador Dorr, who appeared with Holroyd on a breakfast television programme, pointed out that it had only been a month since Irish protests about, undercover cross-border RUC activity had been lodged in London. Kidnap plots On more than one occasion, Army officers in Northern Ireland have arranged illegal kidnap plots against people living in the Irish Republic. Captain Holroyd was present when Army staff officers arranged for one such kidnap team to be paid £500 from secret intelligence funds. His evidence implicates at least four Army officers in a plan illegally to kidnap suspects from the Irish Republic. Two of the targets were Eamon McGurgan and Seamus Grew both of whom lived in County Monaghan and were on the local ‘top ten’ list of IRA suspects. The kidnap operations known to Holroyd took place in March 1974. In December 1982, he described the plots in detail to an investigating team from the Royal Ulster Constabulary, led by Superintendent George Caskey. Caskey’s report is now being studied by the Northern Ireland Director of Public Prosecutions. Until the DPP has announced his decision, the Ministry of Defence is refusing to comment on the kidnap charges, or to allow officers to be interviewed. Holroyd first heard from a military intelligence colleague, Sergeant Tony Poole of the Intelligence Corps, that two men from Lisburn, both ex-boxers, had been hired to kidnap Eamonn McGurgan, and bring him across the border. The Army would arrange with a Garda (Irish Police) contact for an area around McGurgan’s home in Castleblayney to be ‘frozen’ — i.e. left completely unpoliced — while the kidnap took place. Although the men concerned were primarily willing to do the job because of their Loyalist political sympathies, they were to be paid £500 by the Army, Holroyd learned. The kidnap victim would be hit over the head, tied up with a sack over his head and dumped at a prearranged spot on the Northern Ireland side of the border. A party of soldiers would then ‘discover’ the victim, and arrest him. But the McGurgan kidnap plan went wrong. On the night the kidnappers set out, a prominent Senator in the Dail (the Dublin Parliament) was murdered in the-same area. It was no longer possible for the Army’s Garda contact to ‘freeze’ police operations. The kidnappers were, reportedly, stopped at a checkpoint by the Irish Army, and the operation failed. Another kidnap operation was mounted about two weeks later, on 29 March 1974, The targets this time were IRA suspect Seamus Grew and Patrick McLoughlin, with whom Grew lived in the border town of Monaghan. The leader of the kidnap team hired by the Army was Jimmy O’ Hara, a Lisburn Protestant and ex-boxer. Earlier this year, O’Hara confirmed to us that he and two friends had indeed been hired by an Army officer to kidnap Grew. The officer supplied maps showing Grew’s house, details ofhis movements, official surveillance photographs and a sketch plan to show them where to dump Grew in Northern Ireland after they had kidnapped him. All these items were seized by the Garda after the three were arrrested. The three men were to receive £500 for their trouble. O'Hara says that the Grew kidnap plot was discussed twice at secret meetings with the Army officer, the first of which was in the Woodlands Hotel, Lisburn, close to where O’Hara then lived. The second meeting took place in Craigavon Area Hospital car park —a short distance from the Army’s 3rd Brigade headquarters in Lurgan, where the kidnap plot had been devised. The Grew plot also went badly wrong. Two of the three men were seen furtively reconnoit- ering outside Grew’s house and were arrested after neighbours called the police. The third, O’Hara himself, was arrested after he went to - TERRORISM -- 26 JUNE 1984 NEW STATESMAN 11 May 1984 Pages 12-14 the police station to demand their release, having been wrongly advised by his Army contact that all the Garda would be helpful. (Indeed, an earlier kidnap plan suggested by the Army to O’Hara had involved the use of a British agent inside the Monaghan Garda, who would arrange to have Grew brought in for questioning. He would then be released at a prearranged time, and kidnapped on his way home.) We have seen the statement which O’Hara made to the Garda after his arrest. In it he repeatedly referred to being given the job by an ‘Army man’ — whom he refused to identify. O’Hara and his collaborators were each sentenced to five years imprisonment in Dublin in June 1974. On appeal, their sentences were increased to seven years. The harsh sentences reflected growing Irish judicial concern about political kidnapping operations. The kidnap strategy was abandoned, at least for a time, by the Army — but may well have been revived in 1976, when Sean McKenna — the son of a Newry man whom the British government were found guilty of torturing in the first days of internment — was abducted across the border from the village of Edentubber, near Dundalk in the Republic. He was arrested in the north, having allegedly ‘stumbled across the border into a patro? — according to an official Army public relations statement. Shortly before Jimmy O’Hara and his colleagues were apprehended in Monaghan, Captain Holroyd was working in the intelli- gence ‘cell’ at 3rd Brigade Headquarters in Lurgan. The staff in the ‘cell’ arranged, in his presence, to have £500 for the kidnap operation urgently collected from Army Headquarters in Lisburn. The money had to be available in Lurgan to pay the kidnappers. The intelligence cell, which comprised the Brigade’s intelligence planners and analysts, was then headed by Major David Delius, a Royal Hussars officer with a brisk public school manner. Major Delius is still in the Army, and has not been permitted by the Ministry of Defence to comment on the allegations against him. Among his colleagues involved in the kidnap plot were two other Captains, who collated intelligence on the local Catholic and Protestant communities, and Sergeant Poole, the Brigade’s ‘Field Intelligence NCO’. Jimmy O’Hara still refuses to identify the Army officer who dealt with him, or the go- between who introduced them. But he has volunteered that he knows the name ‘Poole’. We have also discovered that Mr O’Hara is related by marriage to Mr John Poland, a sergeant in the Armagh RUC — who had been in charge of Poole’s activities on behalf of the RUC Special Branch. O’Hara will not talk CONTINUED NEXT PAGE Approved For Release 2000/08/07 : CIA-RDP96-00788R000100330001-5