Then what, Lomax pressed him, had the murder done for INLA? It was not a murder, but an assassination or execution, he replied, to be seen in the context of the overall struggle against British occupation forces ‘because we have a war against the British military occupation forces. Neave had a responsibility for that.’ Furthermore, ‘Mr Neave was not a civilian, did not act, or never acted like a civilian in regard to the Irish people. Mr Neave was an advocate of torture in Ireland. Mr Neave was an advocate of capital punishment for Irish freedom fighters. The British establishment will have to know that it’s not only their soldiers are at risk, but also the people who direct the actions of those soldiers, and it’s up to the establishment to take responsibility for that position, not ours. Mr Neave was a legitimate target.’ The INLA man also adduced evidence that the killing had had ‘a visible effect’ on the Tory Cabinet, particularly Mrs Thatcher, who relied very much on Neave. ‘We don’t think that just by assassinating Airey Neave that you are going to win the struggle,’ he went on. ‘We would see it more as a protracted struggle … that won’t cease until Britain has granted the Irish people the right to self-determination.’
The INLA man parried questions on the size, composition, weaponry and activities of his organisation, and fell back on the customary IRSP rhetoric about building a democratic socialist republic in Ireland to describe the movement’s political aims. ‘We want power over the wealth that’s created for the working people, and we would have a similar view for the people in Scotland, England and Wales. We think our politics has a relevance.’ If Britain withdrew from Ireland, it would be to the benefit of working people everywhere. Some shadow-boxing over the future of the one million Protestants followed, before the INLA man offered: ‘In a sense it’s up to the British government to decide how long this conflict, this war, is going to last.’ It could end ‘tomorrow’ if the British army specified a date to leave. Lomax finally asked if INLA intended to continue operations in Britain. ‘It’s our – it’s our intention to continue military operations against the British military in the six counties. It is our intention to carry out those operations in England, or wherever the opportunity presents itself.’3
The twelve and a half minute interview created problems at the highest levels in the BBC. It was undoubtedly a scoop, but it also fell into the category of ‘giving publicity to terrorists’ that Neave had inveighed against throughout his time as Shadow Ulster Secretary. A decision went all the way up to Ian Trethowan, the director-general, before the interview was broadcast in the last edition of Tonight on 5 July 1979. The row that followed was slow to ignite. Northern Ireland Secretary Humphrey Atkins complained the next day but then silence descended. A week later, Lady Airey wrote to the Daily Telegraph arguing that the ‘terrorist was given ample scope to besmirch the memory of my husband’. By muddle and mistake, Lady Airey had not been told of the programme before it went out and she was deeply aggrieved. She felt the decision to transmit the interview betrayed the traditional standards of British broadcasting. After her letter, the storm broke. The newspapers declared open season on the BBC and Mrs Thatcher angrily denounced the programme makers. Willie Whitelaw, the Home Secretary, later told Tonight’s editor Roger Bolton: ‘She was desperately affected by Airey Neave’s death, desperately. And in a way this affected her whole thoughts on broadcasting coverage of Northern Ireland. She had a mystical view of what he would do in Ireland, that he had actually been killed by the INLA because they thought he was going to do things in Ireland which would have been so successful it would have done a great deal of damage. I mean, this is much too sophisticated a view for me. The INLA killed Airey Neave because he was a good catch to kill.’4
Soon after the Prime Minister’s outburst, Commander Peter Duffy interviewed Lomax and his team. They gave what information they could, having already warned the INLA interviewee that Special Branch would inevitably come looking for material to aid their enquiries. Their help did not take the search further forward. More weeks passed before Scotland Yard detectives turned up in Armagh to interview men detained in Gough Barracks over a number of killings. These were believed to include the prototype murder of Trooper McAnally. But by the end of August, as the inquest on Neave was delayed yet again, Scotland Yard admitted there had been ‘no new developments’ in the five-month-long enquiry. The stalemate was as exasperating as it was mystifying. In his Sunday Express column on 9 September, the editor John Junor wrote that Special Branch was said to know the names of the assassins. Then why not publish them, with a price of £100,000 on their heads – dead or alive – he asked.
The inquest was finally held in Horseferry Road, Westminster, on 15 October, almost seven months after Neave died. George Berryman, scientific officer at the Royal Arsenal, gave evidence about the ‘highly sophisticated’ bomb. His account of how the bomb exploded corroborated the by now generally accepted story. A very powerful explosive had indeed been used, but on the direction of the coroner he gave no further details, saying ‘it would be wiser’ to disclose no more. Neave’s widow spoke quietly as she recalled the fateful day. He had phoned little more than an hour before his death to say he was going to his tailor’s before they went down to the country. She had heard the explosion from Marsham Street but did not know where it had taken place.
Commander Michael Richards, of ‘H’ District of the Metropolitan Police and a member of the Anti-Terrorist Squad at the time of the killing, assured the court that the police enquiry was ‘still very much in action’. The coroner returned a verdict of unlawful killing. After the thirty-minute hearing, Lady Airey said: ‘I have great confidence in the police. I know they are doing their utmost, and the circumstances are not entirely easy.’ It was almost two years before the story surfaced again, in a bizarre twist implicating a Roman Catholic priest, Father Vincent Ford, who had been sentenced to twelve years in gaol in March 1981 by a special criminal court in Dublin for leading a £56,000 bank raid in Ballina, County Mayo. Father Ford, a staunch republican from Sligo, had been ordained in 1968 and had been a priest in New York State before returning to Ireland where he became deeply involved in republican politics in late 1975. Irish and MI6 agents tracked him as he took up with the IRSP and its military wing, and he became a suspect in the Neave killing. One newspaper went so far as to suggest that British security chiefs believed he may have helped mastermind the assassination. Members of the Anti-Terrorist Squad were detailed to interview him but once more nothing came of it.
The trail went cold again until the late summer of 1982, when great excitement accompanied the arrest of three alleged members of INLA in Paris by French anti-terrorist police. In late August, a ten-strong squad of the elite Groupe d’Intervention de la Gendarmerie Nationale (GIGN) acting on a tip-off raided a flat at 82, Rue Diderot in the Vincennes area of Paris. They were looking for a burly Irishman who went under the pseudonym of James McCabe, and his comrades Stephen King and Mary Reid. McCabe was in fact Michael Plunkett, the heavily bearded founding member of the IRSP and the party’s general secretary for four years. Aged thirty, he had been on the run from the Irish police since the summer of 1979, when he had jumped bail on a charge of possessing bomb-making equipment. He was one of the most important figures in the IRSP, a close associate of Seamus Costello and widely travelled in Europe where he had contacts with German revolutionaries. King, also thirty, from County Tyrone, was on the run too, having jumped bail on an arms possession charge. Mary Reid had joined the IRSP in 1977, moving swiftly on to become education officer and editor of the Starry Plough. All three were Irish citizens. King and Plunkett were arrested and both were so expertly bound, gagged and blindfolded that they imagined an SAS summary execution was at hand. Reid was picked up as she returned to the flat with her ten-year-old son. Police claimed that they found two handguns in the flat, plus a small quantity of pink-coloured explosives of a kind similar to that which had killed Airey Neave.
From here, the story goes back three months to May 1982, when British intellige
nce sent the French police a four-page advisory note about possible European terrorist links between the Irish, Basques and al-Fatah via a Belgian arms dealer. The note made special mention of two other ‘dangerous terrorists’ thought to be in Paris. It named Michael Plunkett as an INLA terrorist, a specialist in arms supplies for the organisation and the author of a series of attacks in West Germany. Two days after Plunkett’s arrest, two senior Scotland Yard detectives went over to Paris to talk to Captain Paul Barril of GIGN. He showed them photographs found in the Rue Diderot flat. The arrests also caused a considerable diplomatic stir: a high-level member of the British embassy in Paris who enjoyed the confidence of Mrs Thatcher contacted the Elysée Palace to congratulate the authorities on the operation. Soon after came a further memorandum to the French police, in the form of a seven-page document from Commander John Wilson of the Special Branch, which was leaked to French journalists. The key part reads: ‘Michael Oliver Plunkett, alias Mike, alias James McCabe, was born on 11 October 1951 in the Republic of Ireland … was introduced to Irish extremism in 1969 when he entered the CP. Was a member of Official Sinn Fein from 1971 to 1974. Later he was a founding member of the IRSP and became a worldwide organiser. This position hides his activities within the INLA. He is the author of articles in the Irish Times and the Starry Plough, official organ of the IRSP, protesting against allegations that the IRSP was responsible for killings and murder in Ulster. His name has been associated with those of confirmed terrorists, among whom—and Vincent Ford, two of the suspects in the Airey Neave murder in London on 30 March 1979, claimed by the INLA. He was also in Holland during the assassination of the British ambassador in 1979, for which he is still a suspect.’5 The blanked-out name is believed to be that of Brendan O’Sullivan, an IRSP member from Killorglin, County Kerry, who had once been questioned by Irish police investigating the kidnapping and ransom of an Irish bank manager in January 1980.
It was not long before news of the Paris arrests found its way into the British papers. On 5 September, the Sunday Telegraph reported that ‘two members of the Irish National Liberation Army arrested by police in France nine days ago were linked [author’s italics] with the murder of Mr Airey Neave, the Conservative MP’. The story, by the paper’s crime correspondent Christopher House, was clearly written with inside information. It named Plunkett and King. It said that Special Branch officers had traced the movements of Plunkett ‘and ten others’ at addresses in northwest London and the Irish Republic before and after the killing. And it claimed that the arrests were ‘potentially the first big breakthrough’ in the continuing hunt for the bombers. The pair had information vital to the investigation. But how to get at them? Under French law, British officers could not demand to question the men. Since they were both Irish nationals, they could not ask for their extradition. Moreover, there was no extradition treaty between France and the Irish Republic, so they could not get them that way either. The only solution lay in a Commission Rogatoire, a diplomatic move involving an application by Scotland Yard to the Director of Public Prosecutions, who would then work through the Foreign Office. This complicated procedure would take at least six weeks and would require the approval of the French government. The Sunday Telegraph disclosed that, despite statements to the contrary, two Special Branch officers did go to Paris, but it was suggested that they were only there for twenty-four hours and that they left ‘empty-handed’.
The ‘Vincennes Three’ were subsequently charged with illegal possession of explosives. Plunkett and King were held in the notorious La Santé prison for many months, but the case against them began to unravel almost immediately. It was suggested that the arms had been planted in the flat by police, and a gendarme in the raiding party later said in a sworn statement that he had been ordered to lie about the affair. Furthermore, contrary to French law, the trio had not been present when the evidence against them was detected. All three were finally released from prison in May 1983 and the charges against them were dropped.
The fact that they had been cleared of these charges did not prevent the Mail on Sunday from naming Plunkett in a story clearly inspired by Scotland Yard. On 24 July 1983, the paper said it had seen the secret Special Branch report prepared by Commander John Wilson which named Neave’s killers as Vincent Ford and Brendan O’Sullivan. Ford was presumably the renegade Irish priest and O’Sullivan the IRSP member. But the paper went on to say that the Yard’s real target was ‘INLA terrorist’ Michael Plunkett, now a free man again. O’Sullivan and Ford were merely ‘persons of terrorist standing’. Scotland Yard described Plunkett as ‘very dangerous’ and the document further quoted Commander Wilson as saying: ‘He is a central figure in Irish extremist affairs, with strong links with the Provisional IRA [sic] and extremists of the left in Germany and Holland.’ However, no attempts were made by Scotland Yard to get their quarry into British jurisdiction. Information from the INLA to the author clears all three of the Rue Diderot suspects. Plunkett is admitted to be a member of the organisation, ‘but more political than military’.6
In 1989, Plunkett, King and Reid successfully sued the French state for wrongful arrest and were awarded the princely sum of one franc. In June 1991, three gendarmes were charged with fabricating evidence to frame the trio and given light sentences that were quashed on appeal. Captain Barril, who was not among those charged, said in evidence to the court that they had raided the Rue Diderot flat after a tip-off from British intelligence that there would be a terrorist attack that weekend. Reid and King returned to live in Ireland. Plunkett fought for political asylum and was allowed to stay in France where in 1994 he was working as a plumber.
To this day, the Neave killing continues to spawn conspiracy theories. As the most high-profile operation of its kind during three decades of terrorism, it still exercises a powerful hold on the imagination. Enoch Powell, the maverick Tory MP who went over to the Ulster Unionists, brought his own unique style to bear on the ‘whodunit’ question. The MP for South Down, anxious about a perceived drift back to the Ulster power-sharing policies of Edward Heath, said in late 1981: ‘I regret that I did not see it all earlier. I now think that the turning point was 1979, and that it came with Airey Neave’s murder.’ Neave’s involvement with Ulster, he concluded, was not simply about a province (however important), ‘but something central to the whole business of foreign policy, and directly related to the pattern of Western alliances’.7 In the spring of that year, Geoffrey Sloane, a research student at Keele University, interviewed Clive Abbott, a senior official at the Northern Ireland Office. Abbott was dismissive of the Conservatives’ pre-1979 policy, crafted by Neave, of returning powers to local government in the province. He suggested that the United States would have to play a discreet role in any final settlement, which could be ‘a confederal Ireland’ in which Dublin would have a say. This inflammatory material came into Powell’s hands, and though ministers played down its significance Abbott did not lose his job: indeed, he was promoted.
Suspicion continued to burn in Powell’s mind, and in January 1984 he claimed in an interview that the CIA had been responsible for a number of political assassinations, including those in 1979 of Airey Neave, Lord Mountbatten, the Queen’s cousin, and the prominent Unionist politician Robert Bradford, a friend of Neave, in November 1981. Powell elaborated on his theory in the Guardian on 12 March, claiming to have inside knowledge from members of the RUC to whom he had spoken. He alleged that the police were convinced of ‘the effective existence of a policy and motivation outside and above the IRA and INLA’ which had led to ‘a series of assassinations which can be distinguished from the run-of-the-mill murders of persons connected with the security forces’. Powell traced the conspiracy to moves begun by Neave’s successor, the elegant Humphrey Atkins, soon after becoming Ulster Secretary to bring together the US, UK and Irish governments for talks on the future of the province. The venue was to be New York. Powell, strongly opposed to the involvement of the USA, had been relieved when the plan was ditched.
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On 18 October 1986, in a speech to Conservative students in Birmingham, Powell returned to his theme. He rejected INLA’s claims to have murdered Neave and insisted that he had met his death at the hands of ‘high contracting parties’ made up of ‘MI6 and their friends’. Neave had to be eliminated, he argued, because he (like Powell) was committed to a programme of integration of Northern Ireland within the United Kingdom. The killing of Neave was designed to shake the government into adopting a course more favourable to the United States, whose aim was to see a united Ireland firmly within the NATO military alliance. The plot to destabilise Ulster had begun twenty years previously, he said. It brought together the Foreign Office, British intelligence and the United States, especially the CIA. None of the Prime Ministers of recent years – Heath, Wilson or Callaghan – knew what was going on. America secured from Britain an undertaking to transfer Northern Ireland out of the United Kingdom into an ‘all-Ireland, presumably confederal’ state. The first objective in this grand plan was to get rid of the Unionist government at Stormont. ‘MI6 and their friends proved equal to the job,’ he asserted. But the Americans took fright ahead of the 1979 election, fearing that Thatcher and Neave would take the process of Northern Ireland integration into the UK so far that it could not be reversed. Washington was alarmed at ‘evidence, or what they thought to be evidence’ that the new leader Mrs Thatcher and aide Airey Neave had no intention of playing ball with the USA’s long-term aims. Accordingly, ‘the road block was cleared by eliminating Airey Neave on the verge of his taking office; and from then onwards events were moved ahead again along the timetabled path’. Powell refused to answer reporters’ questions as to whether he was accusing the Americans of Neave’s murder. Asked if it would have made any difference if the MP had not been killed, he replied, ‘Perhaps not, but those who have assassinated him believed it would have done.’
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