By Tony Fox

Excited reports have emerged that the body of Captain Robert Nairac is about to be discovered south of the Irish border. He was given a George Cross medal by Margaret Thatcher after his execution by the IRA on May 15, 1977. Over the years since gory details have emerged of what he did in his four tours of duty for the M16/M15 in collusion with the Glenanne Gang, who organised assassinations and bombings including the Dublin/Monaghan bombings (I witnessed the one in South Leinster Street in 1974), the Miami Showband massacre, and many other atrocities.

Ken Livingstone, in his maiden speech in the House of Commons in August 1987, concluded, “There is something rotten at the heart of the British security services, and we will not have a safe democracy until it is exposed in its entirety and dealt with”. Former M15-6 operatives Fred Holroyd, Colin Wallace and former RUC Special Patrol Group member John Weir concurred, according to the Wikipedia entry on Robert Nairac. The 1993 Yorkshire Television documentary Hidden Hand, tells more of the gruesome story. [1]

MI6 operative Fred Holroyd said Nairac admitted involvement in the assassination of IRA member John Francis Green on 10 January 1975 to him. Holroyd claimed in a New Statesman article written by Duncan Campbell that Nairac had boasted about Green’s death and showed him a colour Polaroid photograph of Green’s corpse taken directly after his assassination.[2]

Fred Holroyd and John Weir also linked Nairac to the Miami Showband killings. Martin Dillon, however, in his book The Dirty War, maintained that Nairac was not involved in either attack. Geoff Knupfer of the Independent Commission for the Location of Victims’ Remains states Nairac was in Derry at the time of the Green killing and in either London or Scotland at the time of the Miami killing. Knupfer might have added Timbuktu to his list.

Another Account

The account of what happened to Nairac is that he went to a republican pub, the Three Steps in South Armagh, was set upon by Republicans as he was leaving, who overpowered him and took him south of the border and killed him. Details of torture and whether he gave any information during this are contested but nevertheless the account is he was executed and buried in a field, which is now being excavated from Monday 26 August. As we go to press no body has been found.

I was given an alternative account by local Sinn Fein supporters in Kilburn at the time of the killing, who are sadly no longer with us. Nairac, they said, had begun his career as a state spy around the building industry, working for Irish subcontractors and drinking in the Old Bell, then a strong Sinn Fein supporting pub under the governor Packey Owen. He was a Catholic, but suspicions arose despite the good Irish accent he affected. When he came half drunk with one of his M15 handlers with a very English accent they were severely beaten and that finished the Kilburn operation.

He then went to Northern Ireland to assist the British state in its ‘dirty war’, under the name Danny McErlean. He worked with community groups connected with the Official IRA, the ‘stickies’ as they were known, to gather information for the assassinations in his four tours of duty. Word spread from Kilburn on who Danny really was. He did go to the Three Steps in Dromintee, on that fateful night and spotted the IRA at the exit and knew they had come for him. He jumped up on the stage and began belting out the Irish rebel song The Boys of the Old Brigade in that accent. He got the whole crowd joining in and the IRA men moved off the door. He then made his escape bid but only made it as far as his car door.

What happened to the body? According to the SF account he what taken to the meat and bone factory in Ardee, Co Louth, near Dundalk, now called APB Foods and his corpse was shredded. The van carrying the remains passed an incoming Garda patrol car, acting on a tip-off that his body was there. Maybe they did dump the remains in that field they are searching but their DNA forensic team would have to be very good to find him.

  Or maybe this is just a good story invented by the local Sinn Fein supporters in Kilburn to have a laugh. Either way no tears for this M15 -M16 organiser of the dirty war, unlike the desperate attempts of Alister Kerr sand others to sanitise the record of the killer who did his best for Queen and Empire. The British working class will face the same enemy when it rises in revolution, and that is the most important lesson of this whole sorry tale.

Notes

[1] Wikipedia, Robert Nairac, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Nairac

[2] Rolston, Bill and Gilmartin, Mairead: Unfinished business: state killings and the quest for truth. Beyond the Pale Publications, p. 34. ISBN 1-900960-09-5 ▲