Burke The Puppet Masters

How MI6 Masterminded Ireland's Deepest State Crisis
1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-78117-866-9
Verlag: Mercier Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 352 Seiten

David Burke uncovers the clandestine activities of Patrick Crinnion, a Garda intelligence officer who secretly served MI6 during the early years of the Troubles. As the Garda Síochána launched a manhunt for the Chief-of-Staff of the IRA, Crinnion found himself playing a crucial role in the effort to track him down.  Before his disappearance, Crinnion's actions exposed a web of secrets including those of another British spy in the Irish police, damaging intelligence leaks, gunrunning by Irish politicians, and a cover-up related to the murder of a Garda.  Burke reveals MI6's shady dealings, from attempts to smear Irish politicians to plans for using criminals as assassins and the secret surveillance of a key IRA member.  Crinnion fled into exile. The Puppet Masters not only reveals what became of him but also provides an insightful look into a turbulent period marked by covert operations, betrayal, and the power struggle that shaped modern Irish history.

David Burke, a practising barrister, writes on many issues for Village Magazine. He is the author of Deception and Lies: The Hidden History of the Arms Crisis 1970, Kitson's Irish War and An Enemy of The Crown.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Burke, David

Leseproben

1
The Man from Mensa

Joseph Crinnion and Mary Hogan were married in October 1933 in Monkstown, Co. Dublin. Joseph, a carpenter, lived in Dun Laoghaire. The couple welcomed their first child, Patrick, to the world on 15 November 1934. He was born at the family home at Mill Lane Shanganagh, Co. Dublin. Another boy, Peter, followed on 12 February 1939, and a daughter, Phyllis, after that.1

The Crinnions went to work for Mervyn and Sybil Wingfield and, later, his son Mervyn Patrick, the viscounts of Powerscourt, Enniskerry. Mary served as a housekeeper at their magnificent family home. It was originally a thirteenth-century castle, part of the estate of Phelim O’Toole. In 1603, King James I of England granted a lease of the property for twenty-one years to Sir Richard Wingfield, to punish O’Toole for his disloyalty to the crown. The Wingfields murdered O’Toole in the Killing Hollow, near Powerscourt, in May of 1603. The property remained in the Wingfield family for the next four centuries.

Patrick Crinnion grew up in more humble surroundings. The Wingfield family owned a row of cottages on the Boghall Road, Bray, County Wicklow, in which loyal and trusted servants of the family, such as the Crinnions, were allowed to reside.2

The Powerscourts went into a decline in the late 1920s and, by the early 1930s, Mervyn was talking about having to sell the estate. The family was saved by Patrick’s marriage to the poet Sheila Claude Beddington.

Mervyn and Sybil died in 1947, almost simultaneously, a double blow that meant that their son Patrick faced dual death duties which took their toll on the wealth of the family.3

Crinnion’s parents continued to work for the Wingfields. By the 1950s, the mansion had become a ‘sombre’ place. ‘There were no visitors, nobody went out in the evenings, and the gates were locked at half past ten.’4

On the positive side, the Wingfields were good employers, certainly to the Crinnions. Patrick Crinnion’s father Joseph predeceased his mother, Mary. She spent her retirement years in a pleasant apartment on the second floor of a Georgian house on Vevay Road which the Wingfields kept for their former servants.

Crinnion, a bright student, was educated at the local national school. He went on to become a member of Mensa. The latter is an organisation recognising those who achieve a 98% score in a supervised IQ examination or other approved intelligence test. Mensa boasts many policemen within its elite membership and, in 1955, Crinnion chose a career in An Garda Síochána. Aged twenty, he commenced his service on 10 May of that year. One of his early tasks, while stationed at Donnybrook garda station, was to protect the home of the then Taoiseach, John A. Costello, at 20 Herbert Park in Ballsbridge.

Nancy Lattimore lived in a mews house on Morehampton Lane, Ballsbridge, with her parents. She met Crinnion one day while he was on guard duty at Herbert Park and they became friends.5 Soon, they were dating. Such was his acceptance by her family that Nancy’s mother now found herself preparing meals for Crinnion when he came off duty. The Lattimores had a military background. One of Nancy’s family had served in the British army during the First World War and had been gassed in the trenches. Although he survived, he never got over the ordeal. Two of Nancy’s brothers joined the British army. One of them, Seamus, rose to become a major. Patrick Crinnion trotted after Seamus like a besotted pup.

One night, shortly after joining the force, Crinnion was walking beside the wall of a school on his beat in Dublin when he noticed a bundle of old newspapers on the footpath. When he prodded them with his boot, bank notes spilled out. Crinnion could have trousered the money but gathered it up and brought it back to his desk sergeant in Donnybrook. The rule was that if no one came looking for money, the finder could claim it after a year. No one staked a claim. When he went to collect the cash, he was told that since he had been on duty the night he stumbled across the notes, they belonged to the Exchequer.

The money meant a lot to Crinnion. He was outraged that the cash was not returned to him. He approached John A. Costello, whom he had befriended while on protection duty outside his house in Donnybrook, about the matter. The passage of time did not dampen his indignation. In 1973, Crinnion wrote to John’s son, Declan Costello, the then attorney-general, recalling how:

… although I know you cannot picture me now, during the I.R.A Border Campaign of 1956/62, I spent about a year on duty outside your home on Herbert Park protecting your father who was then An Taoiseach. It was while on this duty that I met the girl from nearby who is now my wife. As well, in a matter where I found a hoard of money which the State sought to retain, usurping my rights as a citizen, your father took an interest and I brought the then Commissioner [Daniel Costigan]6 to court in a civil action which although it failed on a technicality satisfied honour.7

Crinnion was a non-smoker and teetotal. His potential was recognised quickly by his superiors and he was assigned to the special detective unit (SDU) at the end of the 1950s. To aid his finances, he worked many hours overtime, including VIP protection assignments.

With his career moving in the right direction, Patrick purchased a property in his sole name on Rathmore Avenue, on the Lower Kilmacud Road in Stillorgan, Co. Dublin, on 28 August 1959. He and Nancy were married on 12 September 1959.

Crinnion became a part of the garda intelligence machine that extinguished the flickering embers of the IRA’s Border Campaign of 1956–62, an offensive that never caught fire.

In a memorandum prepared in 1973, Crinnion recalled how, when:

married first I was working on shift [duty and] in order to get to the [Dublin] Castle [the HQ of the SDU] at say 5.45 a.m. on my bike, allowing for windy weather or punctures, I had to set my new alarm clock for a 4.30 a.m. early rise, put on the kettle, wash and shave and have a bit of breakfast, pick up my lunch and leave the house no later than 5.05 a.m. for the [cycle] journey a minimum of 30 minutes and during the winter, in the frost and ice, time was critical to me. At that early hour in the morning and at that time there was no radio station on for me to check the time as I had my cup of tea in the kitchen. The money situation was not good either and I confess I had no watch either.

In the late 1950s a brilliant piece of sleuthing and deduction brought Crinnion to the attention of one of the leading figures of garda intelligence, Patrick Carroll, the officer who commanded C3, the brain centre of garda intelligence at the Phoenix Park. Later, Carroll was promoted to oversee all of the departments in C division, and eventually rose to become garda commissioner, 1967–68. In one of his 1973 memoranda, Crinnion recounted how Carroll:

met me once while he was Chief Supt. C3 and I was a D/Gda. in SDU. He summoned me to his office to explain how I had reached a conclusion in a certain case where scurrilous anonymous documents, directed against political office holders were being distributed in the West of Ireland. He may recall that from sheer interest, although not specifically allotted the case; I had shown the culprit to be a particular person. The case had reached a dead end in the routine investigation and as was the custom then in SDU, the file was read [out] to the men, in case anybody might recall or know something to go further.

The young man impressed Carroll. The meeting proved to be Crinnion’s big break. According to one of Crinnion’s 1973 memoranda, in late December 1960, he was assigned to C3, and entered a world of deception and lies. The department was based at the Phoenix Park, whereas the SDU was spread out across the country with a HQ at Dublin Castle. C3 collected, analysed and co-ordinated the streams of intelligence which flowed into it from the various SDU divisions dotted across the country. Crinnion continued to work at C3 for the rest of his career as a garda. His role ‘was to utilise my special knowledge of [subversive organisations] for the benefit of the State’.

This provided him with the opportunity to peer inside the inner workings of the IRA. During the Border Campaign the IRA had been determined to shield their command and coordination network from the gardaí and the RUC. Crinnion recalled in a memorandum in 1973 how a phone tap revealed that ‘in the last two years’ of the conflict:

the controlling contact for all the ASU (Active Service Units) along the Border was [a] woman here in Dublin, who knew personally at least one man in each unit. This gave her a check on the authenticity of any caller . . .

Crinnion, however, had a haughty streak. In a letter he wrote to Garda Commissioner Patrick Malone, who had been his superior at C3 in the late 1960s and early 1970s, he described his work at C3 as ‘not just first class but exceptional’.8 He spoke of his irritation at ‘inexperienced officers’ whom he believed should not have been ‘left to gain experience [in garda intelligence] in a hit and miss fashion’.9 He criticised the fact that some of them had ‘never previously worked exclusively on Special Branch...