SAOIRSE32

**Reference to a current yet erroneous Washingtom Post article about this sent me looking for more details

An Phoblacht
30 Sept 2004

On 2 October 1972, 32 years ago, IRA Volunteers struck a significant blow to the heart of the British Army’s undercover Military Reconnaissance Force (MRF) in Belfast.

Under the control of General Sir Harry Tuzo, the main work of the MRF — a forerunner of the Force Research Unit (FRU) — was to gather, collate and analyse intelligence on the republicans and on the IRA in particular.

The most devious example of an MRF undercover operation was the Four Square Laundry. The Four Square did business as a real laundry. Laundry vans are usually big, so there was a good excuse to have a vehicle capable of holding several men and their equipment. The van toured nationalist areas of Belfast, soliciting custom at a cheaper rate than other laundries and making collections and deliveries. The washing was sent out to another laundry under contract to the British Army.

Using this cover, intelligence was accumulated in a number of ways. The laundry staff, consisting of a driver and a woman, would chat with locals and obtain apparently insignificant bits of information, which could be of great importance when placed together later. Meanwhile, two SAS soldiers hidden under the roof of the van photographed the occupants, houses and vehicles of known republicans.

Once back from their tour, laundry lists were compared with previous ones. A difference in the size of a man’s shirt could indicate the presence of a second man staying in a house. A woman whose husband was in jail or had been killed, giving a man’s clothes for laundering, could inadvertently give away the presence of an IRA Volunteer on the run. The clothes were also scientifically analysed for traces of blood, gun oil, gunpowder and explosives.

The Four Square Laundry was simple, yet highly sophisticated, and it took several months for the IRA’s Intelligence Department, with the help of a double agent, to unmask it. At 11.15am on 2 October 1972, a green Morris laundry van — bearing in large white letters the words ‘Four Square’ — approached the Twinbrook area of Belfast. As it drove through Juniper Park, it was ambushed by Volunteers of a special intelligence unit of the IRA, who machine-gunned the van, killing two British Intelligence Officers lying under the roof in a compartment specially designed as an observation post. The driver, Sapper Stuart, who was on loan from his parent regiment to the SAS, was also killed.

The female member of the operation, belonging to the Women’s Royal Army Corps (WRAC), ran screaming into a local’s house claiming that loyalist gunmen were trying to kill her. The residents of the house, not knowing her true identity, gave her brandy and a sedative until a plain-clothes RUC member came to collect her. Eighteen months later, she became the first WRAC to receive the military medal for an undercover operation in Ireland.

Within hours of the attack on the laundry van, the IRA shot dead two other MRF members who were operating a massage parlour — the Gemini Health Studios on the Antrim Road. The following day, the British, realising that their covert operations were blown, admitted to the death of the van driver and the aim of their operation. They failed, however, to disclose that not one but five MRF/SAS soldiers had been executed by the IRA on this October day in Belfast.

BBC
05 Oct 2008

Gardai investigating the death of Paul Quinn have arrested a man in Cavan town early on Sunday morning.

The man in his 20s is currently being detained at Monaghan Garda Station under Section 30 of the Offences Against the State Act.

South Armagh man Paul Quinn, 21, was beaten to death near Castleblayney in County Monaghan last October.

A number of people have been arrested previously, but all have subsequently been released without charge.

Mr Quinn’s family said he was killed by the IRA after he defied an order to leave the country. Sinn Fein denies any republican involvement.

Breaking News.ie
04 Oct 2008

The North has taken huge steps towards delivering the peaceful and just society dreamed of by the civil rights movement, President Mary McAleese said today.

She also called on unionist and republican political leaders to continue to build on the achievements of the Good Friday and St Andrews political agreements.

At a conference in Derry to mark the civil rights campaign of the 1960s, she recalled the impact of anti-Catholic discrimination.

Mrs McAleese recalled how those demanding reform were inspired by the black civil rights campaign in the US led by Martin Luther King.

“The early champions of cvil rights came from right across the traditional religious and political divide,” said McAleese.

“They believed that only when Northern Ireland and indeed Ireland, was freed from the politics of sectarianism would its truest and best potential be revealed.

“They believed in non-violence, in peaceful protest, in the politics of persuasion.”

“Today the institutions and structures of the Good Friday and St Andrews Agreements and the framework of human rights legislation which underpins them, provide a sound basis for that equality of citizenship and for relationships of mutual respect and good neighbourliness within Northern Ireland, between North and South and between Ireland and Britain.”

The President said perseverance could anchor that progress.

“We know the cost of failure for it is long since written on the tombstones of the dead and the hearts of the injured, the bereaved and the despairing,” she added.

McAleese noted that in a speech in Washington last year, First Minister Peter Robinson quoted America’s civil war history to note that: “A house divided against itself, cannot stand”.

McAleese said: “Though to some it did not appear so, back in 1968 the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association was about the business of ending wasteful sectarian divisions that had made Northern Ireland a house divided against itself.”

The President wished Robinson and Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness well in their work to secure a new future.

McAleese said: “When we consider the extent of change already achieved, of sacrifices and compromises made on all sides, we take courage and hope.”

Henry McDonald talks to ex-terrorist Sam ‘Skelly’ McCrory about his conversion from homophobic paramilitary hitman to gay rights campaigner

Henry McDonald
Guardian
Sunday October 5 2008

Shaven-headed and tattooed all over with skinhead emblems and the symbols of Ulster loyalism, Sam ‘Skelly’ McCrory was once regarded as one of the most dangerous terrorists in Western Europe.

From Left: Sam McCrory, Johnny Adair, unknown person sniffing glue, Donald Hodgen, carrying flag [Image and caption source]

He was the last commander of Ulster Defence Association inmates in the Maze prison and the closest confidant of Johnny ‘Mad Dog’ Adair, who called him his ‘top operator’. McCrory was also one of two UDA leaders chosen to meet Mo Mowlam 10 years ago in her talks in the Maze aimed at salvaging the loyalist ceasefires.

But now McCrory has become the first paramilitary to publicly out himself as a gay man. The 43-year-old has swapped a life dominated by direct involvement in UDA assassination squads in Northern Ireland for one of gay activism in Scotland.

In his first interview, McCrory has also claimed he was the unlikely inspiration for a novel written by one of his former foes - ex-Sinn Fein publicity director Danny Morrison.

‘Even before I joined the UDA, I used to pretend I was homophobic. I went along with the crowd who were then close to the National Front. I hated Catholics, blacks, Jews and gays - even though I was gay myself. I was hiding my true self.’

Speaking last week from exiled loyalist leader Adair’s flat in Troon, west Scotland, McCrory insisted that a real-life incident involving him helped inspire Danny Morrison’s novel On the Back of the Swallow.

‘The first serious love of my life was Harry Cowan, who wrote me a letter from Scotland to Crumlin Road jail where I was being held on remand in the early Nineties on hijacking charges.

‘A screw [prison officer] stole Harry’s letter to me and posted it under a Provo prisoner’s cell. The idea was to cause a mix among the republican and loyalist inmates, to provoke the IRA men into slagging me about my gay lover in Scotland.

‘Danny Morrison has a story in his book about being in a prison and a letter that other prisoners find. Morrison writes sympathetically about this prisoner who is ridiculed for being gay. That was based on a true incident involving me and a letter from Harry. In the real-life incident the Provo read out Harry’s words to me and that kept the tension going. Morrison was in jail at the same time and must have heard about the story of the letter.’

The incident in the Victorian jail occurred in early 1991 and months after his release McCrory was back in custody. McCrory admitted he and a UDA ‘C’ Company assassination squad were on their way to kill the then IRA commander of Belfast and his girlfriend, also a leading IRA figure in the city.

Although McCrory said his life has radically changed since, he insisted he had no regrets over what he did for the loyalist cause in the past.

‘I was proud of what I did and I did it because we were under attack by violent republicanism. The war now is over. I have no problem with Sinn Fein being purely political and even being in government. It’s all for the sake of peace and my war is long, long over. I don’t even give Northern Ireland a thought now, not because I don’t care, because there is no trouble over there.’

McCrory revealed that at the height of his career as one of Adair’s most trusted gunmen he was having a secret affair with a male RUC officer in Holywood, Co Down.

‘I used to lie to the rest of C Company that I was having a relationship with a policewoman. Only Johnny knew it was a man. The lads used to ask me “Who’s that policewoman you are shagging?” I couldn’t tell them it was a man, it was such a macho, homophobic culture.’

He denied that he used the relationship to obtain intelligence about republican suspects. ‘I never asked him for any information even though he knew who I was and what I was up to.’

The ex-loyalist gunman said the peace process had allowed him to be himself. He now attends Gay Pride rallies across Britain from Glasgow to Brighton, regularly visits Manchester’s Gay Village and marches in gay rights demonstrations across the country. Asked if he would march side by side with Irish republican gay rights activists, he said: ‘I’ve already done that. In fact I once met a gay guy here from a republican area in Belfast. It wasn’t until we were back in my hotel room he realised who I was. He panicked but I put him right and told him not to worry.

‘My past is the past and I make no apology for it. I don’t try to hide it in the gay community here in Scotland or anywhere else. They knew I was a loyalist political prisoner in the Maze.’

Why had he decided to go public both about his sexuality and his career in the notorious UDA ‘C’ Company?

‘There has been that much shit written about me over the last 10 years it was time to tell my side of the story. I have been beaten over the head about my sexuality in private whispers from enemies in the UDA so it was time to go public about all those things.’

When the UDA divided in late 2002 and early 2003 over Adair’s attempt to seize control of the organisation, McCrory sided with his old teenage pal whom he had known since they were members of the skinhead band Offensive Weapon in the early 1980s. He has helped Adair out in his Scottish exile but is adamant the one-time loyalist icon should not settle back in Northern Ireland. Both men remain under a UDA death sentence if they return for good to their former stronghold on Belfast’s Shankill Road.

On Troon beach, with a gale blowing in across the Irish Sea and dark clouds gathering over Ailsa Craig, the giant rock visible along the horizon of this part of the Ayrshire coast, McCrory and Adair walked together. As they ambled on the sea front they reminisced about their past lives as skinheads turned terrorists who brought Northern Ireland to the brink of civil war in 1993.

McCrory is about to star in a Channel 5 documentary series presented by Football Factory actor Danny Dyer. Later as they walked along Troon’s promenade with a slimmed down Adair complaining about the autumnal chill, McCrory reflected on the TV film of his life, turned to his old ‘C’ Company comrade and added: ‘It was a lot of fun.’