You are certainly correct in your statement about the "high-octane paras," however at that time, 1972, the Brit public and certainly the establishment maintained a level of bigotry about the Irish that was astounding.

As late as 1977, almost 15 years before I lived in NI or thought much about it I was part of a minor experiment. I was at a party in Cambridge with a friend who wanted to prove to me how much the Brits hated the Irish (in a conversation earlier I didn't believe him when he told me that British hatred of the Irish matched the white residents of Mississippi in the 1950s). We went around the room - full of Cambridge educated people of various ages, mainly from upper middle-class or posh backgrounds asking them what they thought of the Irish - not the PIRA, not the republicans of NI, but the Irish, period. The level of vitriol and hatred, along with the characterizations which I can't write here astounded me. It was amazing.

My point is that it was no mistake that the paras were in Derry at that time. It was felt, and I heard this with my own ears from a Brit spook in 1997 (who was pretty mortified at it by then) that this was a conscious attempt to slap the uppity Irish civil rights movement down and associate it with the PIRA. And for many years it worked, aided by papers like the Telegraph and Daily Mail.

I disagree with your point about penetration of the PIRA. There were a number of high profile republicans who were turned over the years, but by and large, in spite of this the Provisional IRA operated in a very successful manner for almost three decades. Your statement about how "They were so effective at this at times that like the Enigma device in WW2 they had to resist operating on all the information for fear of compromising the security of the sources..." is simply incorrect. And please understand, I'm NOT an Irish republican or fellow traveler. Read The Secret History of the IRA by Ed Moloney. Sinn Fein hates the guy and he also is not a sympathizer, but he gives a much more balanced account of how the spook war really worked, based on decades of being a front-line journalist during the troubles.

A couple of notes:

- NI is tiny. 1.6 million population, with the entire island having under 6 million. Everyone knows everyone. The nature of this dirty war was often more personal than folks imagine. There are a couple famous incidents - Loughgall being the most well known, where the SAS knew about the operation in advance and was able to ambush the IRA as it assaulted a police station, but believe me, the IRA did a lot better than the Brit spooks advertise.
- Off and on for over 25 years the IRA and the Brits were talking on the back channel. This was going on from before Bloody Sunday and continued through the hunger strikes right up to the Good Friday Agreement.
- There was a huge - and usually un-noted - division between the PIRA units in the two cities, Belfast and Londonderry/Derry and the Tyrone, Fermanagh, and most especially the South Armagh brigades. The city guys, Gerry Adams is from Belfast, Martin McGuinness is from Derry were more sophisticated and much more willing to consider the end of the armed struggle. The South Armagh Brigade was brutally efficient and was considered the most effective outfit in a military sense and perhaps the least sophisticated politically.
- British intelligence - a black unit called the Force Research Unit (FRU) - colluded with the loyalist paramilitaries, mainly the UFF although also with the UVF, feeding information they had to these guys so they could take out non-PIRA people who the spooks felt contributed to the republican movement. The murder of defense lawyer Pat Finucane is the most famous example but there are dozens more. It was a despicable, criminal operation that certainly helped prolong the war. The perpetrators are probably guilty of war crimes. The investigations around this collusion are ongoing.

MI5 and SAS involvement in the Troubles, up until they were ordered to work to promote the peace process in 1996 were not helpful in ending the troubles. They killed a lot of people, many of the innocent, and probably were a pretty good recruitment tool for the PIRA, especially in the rural counties. If anything, NI is a good example of how secret services can screw things up and prolong the killing and hatred. I knew several MI5 guys when I lived there - one of whom ended up in a pretty high post at the UK consulate in NYC from 1998 on - and most of them were pretty appalled at some of the stuff that their colleagues involved themselves in, especially the collusion with the UFF. Loughgall was a legit operation by the SAS. They obtained information about a PIRA operation and put their own into effect. That's a very different thing than feeding information to the UFF so they can kill innocent Catholics in front of their families. Bad stuff.

As is the case with all civil wars NI was and continues to be extremely complex and labyrinthine. I'd be interested to know what your sources of the level of penetration you claim existed. It's incorrect.

You are certainly correct in your statement about the "high-octane paras," however at that time, 1972, the Brit public and certainly the establishment maintained a level of bigotry about the Irish that was astounding.

As late as 1977, almost 15 years before I lived in NI or thought much about it I was part of a minor experiment. I was at a party in Cambridge with a friend who wanted to prove to me how much the Brits hated the Irish (in a conversation earlier I didn't believe him when he told me that British hatred of the Irish matched the white residents of Mississippi in the 1950s). We went around the room - full of Cambridge educated people of various ages, mainly from upper middle-class or posh backgrounds asking them what they thought of the Irish - not the PIRA, not the republicans of NI, but the Irish, period. The level of vitriol and hatred, along with the characterizations which I can't write here astounded me. It was amazing.

My point is that it was no mistake that the paras were in Derry at that time. It was felt, and I heard this with my own ears from a Brit spook in 1997 (who was pretty mortified at it by then) that this was a conscious attempt to slap the uppity Irish civil rights movement down and associate it with the PIRA. And for many years it worked, aided by papers like the Telegraph and Daily Mail.

I disagree with your point about penetration of the PIRA. There were a number of high profile republicans who were turned over the years, but by and large, in spite of this the Provisional IRA operated in a very successful manner for almost three decades. Your statement about how "They were so effective at this at times that like the Enigma device in WW2 they had to resist operating on all the information for fear of compromising the security of the sources..." is simply incorrect. And please understand, I'm NOT an Irish republican or fellow traveler. Read The Secret History of the IRA by Ed Moloney. Sinn Fein hates the guy and he also is not a sympathizer, but he gives a much more balanced account of how the spook war really worked, based on decades of being a front-line journalist during the troubles.

A couple of notes:

- NI is tiny. 1.6 million population, with the entire island having under 6 million. Everyone knows everyone. The nature of this dirty war was often more personal than folks imagine. There are a couple famous incidents - Loughgall being the most well known, where the SAS knew about the operation in advance and was able to ambush the IRA as it assaulted a police station, but believe me, the IRA did a lot better than the Brit spooks advertise.
- Off and on for over 25 years the IRA and the Brits were talking on the back channel. This was going on from before Bloody Sunday and continued through the hunger strikes right up to the Good Friday Agreement.
- There was a huge - and usually un-noted - division between the PIRA units in the two cities, Belfast and Londonderry/Derry and the Tyrone, Fermanagh, and most especially the South Armagh brigades. The city guys, Gerry Adams is from Belfast, Martin McGuinness is from Derry were more sophisticated and much more willing to consider the end of the armed struggle. The South Armagh Brigade was brutally efficient and was considered the most effective outfit in a military sense and perhaps the least sophisticated politically.
- British intelligence - a black unit called the Force Research Unit (FRU) - colluded with the loyalist paramilitaries, mainly the UFF although also with the UVF, feeding information they had to these guys so they could take out non-PIRA people who the spooks felt contributed to the republican movement. The murder of defense lawyer Pat Finucane is the most famous example but there are dozens more. It was a despicable, criminal operation that certainly helped prolong the war. The perpetrators are probably guilty of war crimes. The investigations around this collusion are ongoing.

MI5 and SAS involvement in the Troubles, up until they were ordered to work to promote the peace process in 1996 were not helpful in ending the troubles. They killed a lot of people, many of the innocent, and probably were a pretty good recruitment tool for the PIRA, especially in the rural counties. If anything, NI is a good example of how secret services can screw things up and prolong the killing and hatred. I knew several MI5 guys when I lived there - one of whom ended up in a pretty high post at the UK consulate in NYC from 1998 on - and most of them were pretty appalled at some of the stuff that their colleagues involved themselves in, especially the collusion with the UFF. Loughgall was a legit operation by the SAS. They obtained information about a PIRA operation and put their own into effect. That's a very different thing than feeding information to the UFF so they can kill innocent Catholics in front of their families. Bad stuff.

As is the case with all civil wars NI was and continues to be extremely complex and labyrinthine. I'd be interested to know what your sources of the level of penetration you claim existed. It's incorrect.

Well, you pose a number of good points the first of which concerns British hostility towards the Irish. You are quite right about that but I find it perfect natural that given the course of British and Irish history particularly with IRA bombings in London that it would be a surprise if they did not detest one another. Deciding who disliked the other more would seem to be a rather ludicrous exercise.

Regarding deep PIRA penetration by British Intelligence Services it seems pretty well documented at least what information has been made public. We know the head of PIRA Internal Security ‘Steak Knife’ Freddie Scapaticci was in fact a British agent and so was Denis Donaldson head of Administration in Connolly House (bugged by the Brits) for the PIRA. Many informers within the IRA were detected and executed to be sure and many were mistakenly killed who were not agents.

Malachi O’Doherty, http://www.jstor.org/pss/25561600, the Irish political columnist generally thinks that the British compromised PIRA security much more than the PIRA was ever willing to admit. He writes and interesting article which seems on the surface impartial and reflects the thoughts of a knowledgeable observer.

The IRA would surely say that British penetration was incidental and of little account. One would be surprised if they did not say that but British intelligence as O’Doherty says seems particularly well informed and confident that the PIRA was going the whole way in the peace process. In an intelligence agency like the hyper-suspicious KGB of old this type of fact alone would have raised some suspicions about Adams and McGuinness.

The important thing is that the IRA was defeated largely by intelligence methods, the fact that they had reached a military dead end, and that terror lost it romance even among the fund raising bar-stool Irish-American community after 9/11. And one shouldn’t forget the unwavering hostility of the Irish government in Dublin who correctly realized that the PIRA was no threat to the British but was a real threat to Irish democracy and economic development. Nobody was more pleased with the surrender of the IRA than the Irish Republic.

Those were the "high-profile" touts (as they call the over there) I was referring to. Donaldson was gay and that's how they got him. Freddie was a pretty bad guy - head of the counter-intelligence unit for the Belfast Brigade. Artfully called the "nutting squad." He pretty much did it for the dough. He decamped to Sicily and hasn't returned to West Belfast.

Thing is, those guys were turned pretty late in the game - in the 90s. Donaldson probably later, when it didn't matter any more. Poor guy was living as a pariah in an isolated cottage in Donegal when some of the splinters - the "realies" or the "continuities" (locally known as the c*&%s) - whacked him. The provos were gonna leave the poor guy alone. Everyone felt really bad about that one because he was a decent guy. He ran the SF office at Storemont, the house of government in NI.

Now, there are rumors that continue on to this day that Gerry Adams is a tout, or that there is another high-profile guy. Others have suggested Gerry Kelly, now a junior minister in the NI government. As a retired member of the South Armagh Brigade said to me when I was working in Portadown on cross-community projects (ha - that worked real well!) in 1997, "Ireland will be united when it doesn't matter any more and nobody gives a shite." And that's pretty much turned out ot be the case.

O’Doherty is a smart guy - I knew him a bit when he worked for Ulster Television - the NI arm of ITV. He's a Catholic who got so disgusted by the IRA during the 80s - a really, really nasty time there; a whole decade of tit-for-tat killings - that he' seen as biased. Ed Moloney's book is the most comprehensive by far. There is also a very good BBC series called Brits, Provos, and Loyalists done by another very good and unbiased reporter named Peter Taylor. I think it's available here on DVD somewhere. It's long and very comprehensive with many, many interviews with the principal players.

Bottom line, there were very very few PIRA operations that the spooks were able to stop or screw up. I promise you that ENIGMA was used much more than any possible data the Brits had about operations gleaned from touts. Their most glaring intelligence failures involved the smuggling of hundreds of Armalites stolen from the US Army one by one on the QE II by crewmen who were PIRA or sympathetic to the cause, and the smuggling of thousands of pounds of Semtex into the ROI from Libya. It's true that other boats were busted at various times, but the original loads gave the provos enough plastique to keep on bombing for a long, long time. Again, the two guys you mention were turned quite late, especially Donaldson.

One correction: The PIRA was out of business as a terrorist organization and as a paramilitary outfit as of the Spring of 1998, 3 1/2 years before 9-11. Their fund-raising efforts through NORAID ended in the late 90s. There were attempts to hijack NORAID in the US by guys like Martin Galvin who was against the Good Friday Agreement (AKA The Belfast Agreement). There is still fund-raising for the splinter groups - the 32 County Sovereignty Committee, The Real IRA, the Continuity IRA, etc., but these are small groups that, although they can do a lot of damage, have almost zero community support in NI and therefore will not be able to gain any traction even though they occasionally manage to murder people, most recently a couple of Brit squadies who came to the gate of their base to pick up a delivered pizza and were shot and killed.

The PIRA wasn't defeated by the "crown forces." It was a nasty, ongoing stalemate. They could have continued blowing off big ones like the one at Canary Warf in February 1996 or central Manchester in June of the same year indefinitely, and the Brits could have kept on finding and killing cells, as they did in London in 1997 before the final PIRA ceasefire. And the loyalist groupings could have continued to kill Catholic taxi drivers and schoolgirls. It was a really nasty stalemate. And everyone except the guys who were getting rich off it - mainly South Armagh guys on the PIRA side who smuggled lots of cigarettes and diesel, and UFF/UVF gangster types in North and East Belfast who ran dope and protection rackets - wanted it to end.

Once the Brits pointed out that they had no strategic need for NI, and Sinn Fein realized that if it got into government in a devolved NI and in the ROI, and with open borders, the Euro zone, etc., it was just a matter of figuring out how to wind things down and make the deal. George Mitrchell did a very good job. Martin McGuinness was able to bring the rank and file IRA membership wioth him, and the thing, shakey as it has been, has worked and I think will continue to work. The late David Ervine, a former UVF killer turned politician was crucial on the loyalist side. McGuinness, Ervine, and others were very brave and took great personal risks to help get NI out of the shit-hole it was in.

Nobody wants it to go back. Belfast is still the armpit of Western Europe (sorry - it's pretty ugly) but it's also a fun wide-open town with lots going on and a high-growth cultural life. About 10% of couples are of mixed heritage and that number is growing very fast.

That said, just last week, right over the New Year holiday they found an abandoned van on the Newry bypass a few miles from the border with a lot of makings of a fertilizer bomb and some triggering devices. So the splinter groups are still out there and are dangerous, although they have no community support and the war is over and won't be starting up again.

And again, I'm not a sympathizer. I was a professional peace worker and cross-community worker in NI. The fact that I'm Jewish helped (my wife is Irish).

Here's the way it worked. I'd be asked "are you a Catholic Jew or a Protestant Jew?" (yuk yuk) and I would answer that I'm a Buddhist Jew.

Again, it's so damn complicated. And small and personal. And it's a classic example of the narcissism of small differences. Everyone looks and dresses the same. The way to tell is by first names: John, George, Nicola or Liam, Patrick, Maeve. It was always scary to be sitting in a charming country pub somewhere and have a couple of guys come over and ask where you went to school. Once they heard my Yank accent it would be OK, but it was another way of finding out which side of the line you were on and it certainly made my local friends nervous, no matter which side of the line they were from.

BTW, are you aware that in 1940 Churchill offered the 6 counties of NI to de Valera and the ROI in exchange for anti-sub bases on the West and South coasts of Ireland?

Dev turned him down. In mid-1940 it didn't look good for the UK, and anyhow, Dev needed NI for domestic political reasons.

There are some very interesting stories about Dev breaking ROI neutrality to help fight the huge fires started by the two German raids on Belfast in the Spring of 1941.

Also there were many fliers interned in the ROI, Brit, and German. The Irish almost always helped smuggle the Brits up to Belfast to get them back into the war. The Germans stayed and many married local girls and took up residence after the war. There is a story, possibly untrue about a couple of Brit pilots who got blown across the Irish sea and had to bail out. They landed in a field and started to walk down a road trying to get their bearings. Soon they came to a cute little village with a pub. They walked into the pub and were shocked to see several Germans in Luftwaffe uniform drinking. The Germans looked at the two RAF guys and said "get the hell out of here - the British pub is down the road on the other side of the street. This is the German pub!"