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Approved For Release 2000/08/07 : CIA-RDP96-00788R000100330001-5 about other operations he may have carried out for the Army or RUC. But he has confirmed that there was more than one kidnap plan, and that Eamonn McGurgan, as well as Seamus Grew, ‘may have been’ a target. The RUC’s Caskey Report on Captain Holroyd’s allegations is believed to attempt to dismiss the kidnap plot accusation. Last year, Superintendent Caskey claimed to Captain Holroyd that O’Hara had denied being paid by the Army. But during last week’s Diverse Report (Channel 4) on the Holroyd revelations, Mr O’ Hara — blacked out to prevent his face being seen — acknowledged that his orders had come from the ‘English’ — as he had told the Garda in 1974, Boobytraps Fred Holroyd first heard about the ‘Case of the self-exploding motorcyclist’, as intelligence staff at the 3rd Brigade Headquarters called the lethal results of a secret Army sabotage mission, early in October 1974. Major Delius, the Brigade’s explosives expert, Captain Peter Maynard, and other intelligence officers were celebrating the case by passing round a large sweet jar of white mints. They were, says Holroyd, ‘like public schoolboys playing James Bond’, celebrating in a ‘tuck-room’ atmosphere. Forty miles away near the border at Newry, a 35 year-old man had been blown to death on 5 October. Eugene McQuaid, a mechanic from Newry, married with five children, had been riding southwards on his motorcycle when it suddenly exploded — distrjburing parts of the motorbike and his body across the main Dublin-Belfast road. McQuaid was not believed either by intelli- gence staff or his family to have belonged to the IRA. But he was ‘doing a turn’ for a family friend who was in the IRA, Holroyd says. On his bike were strapped three home-made rocket launchers, known to the Army as ‘bombards’, and to the IRA as mobile mines. McQuaid is believed to have agreed to pick up the bombards from the Republic and bring them across the border to Newry. (According to a secret Army report on ‘Future Terrorist Trends’, which leaked in 1979, the Provisional IRA had begun using bombards to attack armoured vehicles in September 1974. They could have a range of up to 800 feet.) The bombards were discovered by the British Army. Rather than allowing the secret arms cache to be seized by the Garda, however, the Brigade staff had arranged for one of their team to cross the border to examine and sabotage the bombards. He sawed off safety pins inside the rocket bodies, making them unsuitable and likely to explode on rough handling. The aim of SPECIAL EDITION -- TERRORISM -- 26 JUNE 1984 BOOBY TRAPS AND BANK RAIDS...Continued Sa EE AR RALDO. .. Continued this sabotage was another ‘kill’ against the IRA — an ‘own goal’. After picking up the bombards, McQuaid was (unknown to him) under surveillance. The watchers may have expected him to be killed as he loaded the rockets. But he set off towards Newry — now a live bomb ona public road; and alethal hazard to the public as well as to himself. A roadblock was set up to intercept him, with an Army team kept well back from the area for its own safety. On reaching the roadblock, McQuaid turned and fled back towards the Republic. At that point one of the sabotaged bombards, fixed below his petrol tank, exploded. McQuaid died about 100 yards from Donnelly’s garage, just north of the border on the main Belfast-Dublin road. An eyewitness at this spot heard the explosion and came out of a house in which he was working. McQuaid’s severed head, still in a motorcycle helmet, lay at the foot ofa tree, a small trickle of blood coming from his nose. Other parts of his body and bike were hanging from the tree, and scattered across the pavement and a nearby field. Army officers arrived on the scene extremely quickly, confirming Holroyd’s report that the check- point had caused the motorcyclist to turn round and try to retreat across the border. One officer came up to the tree where McQuaid’s head lay, and picked up a handful of guts. ‘That’s an end of another of you fucking bastards’, he said. The eye-witnesses evidence of the Army’s grim satisfaction at the incident confirms Holroyd’s recollections — as did the coroner’s report, which ascribed his death to the sudden explosion of one of the rockets he was carrying. The Army had in fact in effect summarily executed Eugene McQuaid without trial, recklessly putting many innocent lives at great Tisk. Sabotage and bank raids Captain Holroyd frequently operated on behalf of SIS, the Secret Intelligence Service. Holroyd worked directly for Northern Ireland’s SIS chief, whose special department at Army HQ at Lisburn is disguised as the ‘Political Secretariat’. Ar the time, it was headed by Craig Smellie, who left in 1975 to run the SIS station in Athens. Soon afier they first met, Smellie asked Holroyd ifhe would be interested in robbing a bank. He did not explain why — or where — SIS might want banks robbed. Holroyd refused and could only think, then or later, of two reasons why SIS wanted banks robbed — either they were short of money in their ‘unattributable’ funds which they used to pay for agents and secret operations; or the Littlejohn brothers, who were then robbing banks in Eire and working for British intelligence at the same time, might have been thought to need closed SIS supervision. Holroyd, like other intelligence officers in the province, periodically used ‘unattributable’ funds for secret operations. They could be released by a few senior officers at the Northern Ireland Army HQ, including Smellie. During 1974, Holroyd met Smellie at Lisburn about once a month. From an agent in the Provisional IRA, Holrovd and his Special Branch colleagues learned that an active local IRA man in Lurgan was planning to kill a policeman the following Sunday. Holroyd knew where the rifle and ammunition to be used were hidden — inside a graveyard to the north of the Kilwilkie housing esrare in Lurgan, one of the most dangerous Catholic ‘hard areas’ in the county and virtually an Army ‘no go’ area. Rather than removing the weapons, or arresting anyone taking them, Smellie suggested that he would arrange ‘to give the chap a bit of a surprise’. He asked Holroyd to bring him the top bullets from the clip of ammunition. He would arrange for the rounds to be doctored. Holrovd and Sergeant Dearsley retrieved the rounds and took them to Smellie. Two days later, Holroyd collected the doctored rounds. They had been filled with powerful explosive, instead of normal powder. When the trigger was pulled, the would-be-killer would blow his own head off. But this SIS plan was never put into effect. The commander of the 3rd Brigade, Brigadier Wallis-King, resented SIS operating independ- ently in his area and forbade Holroyd to plant the doctored bullets. So Holroyd and Dearsley made a further secret trip into Kilwilkie, and sabotaged the rifle’s firing mechanism. The doctored round stayed in Holroyd’s office. When Dearsley left Northern Ireland late in 1974, Fred Holroyd was asked by Smellie to take over running his agents, both north and south. Holroyd was specifically instructed to pass the information from most of these agents directly to SIS on special ‘Military Intelligence Source Reports’. In a series of specially made tape recordings, Holroyd was briefed by Dearsley about his new agents, how to contact them, and their foibles and requirements. The agents included three Gardai (Irish police), one of whom had been allocated a code-name. One of the more exotic of the agents also transferred to Holroyd was a Catholic woman from Lurgan who provided information on IRA activities in return for sexual favours from the Army. Every few weeks, on Holroyd’s request, a sergeant from the local army company would muster volunteers from the unmarried men in his unit to come and provide unusual service for Queen and Country. 7 NEXT WEEK: Forgery, train derailment, death threats, burglary, how the SAS really operate — and how Protestant killers have been protected from justice. Approved For Release 2000/08/07 : cia-Hbp96-00788R000100330001-5