Kit Klarenberg·The Grayzone
Leaked emails expose how British military-intel officials deliberately provoked riots among occupied Ireland’s Catholic and Protestant communities, which they then exploited to justify repression. In private diatribes, veterans of occupied Ireland who later became MI6 officers still obsess over “keeping Northern Ireland British” and mock the death of Bobby Sands.
Leaked emails reviewed by The Grayzone offer an extraordinary insight into the covert activities of prominent British military and intelligence veterans posted to occupied Ireland during the 1980s. Still possessed of enduring contempt for Catholics and visceral hatred for prominent Irish Republican freedom fighters, these men believe to this day that their patriotic duty remains to “keep Northern Ireland British.”
Several British veterans of the so-called Troubles have found employment at a private spying firm called Hakluyt, which has been referred to as a “rest home for spies.” Founded by longtime MI6 officers, including the former spy who inspired Ian Fleming’s James Bond character, the firm has been plausibly accused of serving as a cutout for the agency.
Keith Craig is another MI6 journeyman who joined Hakluyt, serving as its CEO for ten years. While public details on Craig’s time in the British Army are scarce, the leaked Hakluyt communications place him on the frontline of the Troubles as part of the military’s elite Black Watch unit.
The leaks contain several revealing exchanges between Craig and Pablo Miller, a veteran MI6 officer suspected to have served as the handler for the now-missing Russian turncoat Sergei Skripal. At the time of the Skripal poisoning affair, Miller maintained an address in Salisbury, UK, not far from the Skripals’ home, and worked for Orbis Business Intelligence, the private firm established by Christopher Steele, his former MI6 colleague and the author of the fabrication-filled “Steele Dossier.” (The British government placed Miller’s name under a D Notice immediately after Skripal’s alleged poisoning, preventing the country’s press from mentioning him directly).
In leaked emails, Miller and his Hakluyt colleagues unite around their vitriolic resentment of Irish Catholics, and delight in rehashing the schemes they hatched to push the local Republican population toward violence during the Troubles. These twisted machinations included placing a sandwich on the tombstone of the martyred hunger striker Bobby Sands.
A sandwich on Bobby Sands’ grave had “the desired effect”
In emails to longstanding military and intelligence friends and collaborators, the MI6 vet and Hakluyt leader Keith Craig wistfully recalled a morbid intrigue that occurred while he was posted to the Catholic heartland of West Belfast in March 1983, around the anniversary of the 1981 hunger strike.
Led by Bobby Sands, Irish Republican prisoners starved themselves for prolonged periods in protest of inhumane conditions and persistent torture. Craig reported how Black Watch fighters “much-anticipated” Catholic rioting in support of the hunger strikers, but were disappointed when it failed to materialize.
“The locals were in fact remarkably well-behaved,” Craig lamented.
In a cynical attempt to bring local anger to a boiling point, a Black Watch night patrol taunted the Republican population by placing a bacon sandwich on Bobby Sands’ grave. This “had the desired effect and we were on riot duty for a week,” he recalled.
The leaked admission that British occupiers deliberately instigated riots raise new questions about the August 9, 1983 murder of Thomas ‘Kidso’ Reilly in Belfast by a British soldier who opened fire on the apparently innocent 22-year-old. “He done nothing,” an eyewitness remarked. “He was walking up that road and he was shot.”
The killing of Reilly, a road manager for an array of famous bands, brought crowds of infuriated Catholics into the streets. As the protests grew, British soldiers opened fire on them with plastic bullets, further exacerbating their anger. It now appears clear the British military had every intention of provoking violence to justify its occupation.
In 1984, Reilly’s killer, Ian Thain, became the first British soldier to be convicted of murder in occupied Ireland during the Troubles. Despite receiving a life sentence, he was quickly released and returned to frontline military duty.
MI6 veterans “threw a party” to celebrate Bobby Sands’ death
Since 1968, British military-intelligence operatives have killed hundreds of Catholic civilians with near-total impunity. Keith Craig and his associates at Hakluyt are nonetheless proud of their time in Ulster, and reserve murderous venom for Bobby Sands to this day.
In March 2020, Craig emailed British Army and MI6 associates a photo of a well-known plaque commemorating Sands in Rosslea, a Catholic village in Ulster bordering the Republic of Ireland. An ad for a weight loss business was emblazoned above the plaque.
Among the recipients of the mocking photo was Pablo Miller.
In a separate leaked email, Miller recalled how his Royal Tank Regiment squadron “threw a party” to celebrate Sands’ death. A banner was hung above the squadron’s bar, which read “Bobby Sands DIY.” Miller boasted how “our Fenians joined in enthusiastically,” using a derogatory term for Catholics of Irish descent in the unit. The grim celebration was reportedly “all very non-sectarian.”
In another leaked email, Miller referred to his habit of singing Protestant songs, “taunting the Fenians, so lustily in my misspent youth.”
In a separate exchange, Keith Craig proclaimed that the motto of Black Watch was “nae [no] poofs [homosexuals] nae blacks nae Fenians.” He nostalgically described the elite special forces unit as, “just enlightened chaps from the back streets of Dundee.”
Black Watch formed a core part of Britain’s active military engagement in occupied Ireland 1969 – 2007, London’s longest in history. The unit was hated by Catholics, and a frequent target of armed Irish Republican groups.
Miller’s casual anti-Irish racism is all the more striking given he himself is a practicing Catholic. In a leaked self-authored account of his service, Miller romantically describes life in the RTR in occupied Ireland, during the late 1980s. As operations manager, he coordinated with the Royal Ulster Constabulary and Ulster Defence Regiment, while ensuring patrolling British forces remained safe from attack. He considered Republican “terrorism” to be “the greatest threat to the British constitution in the second half of the 20th century.”
Miller felt he had “earned the professional respect” of his RUC and UDR counterparts, and established “close” personal relations with some of them. It is uncertain how many “part-time” UDR operatives he met were also members of the Ulster Defence Association (UDA).
The UDA acted as an anti-Catholic death squad throughout the Troubles, in close coordination with the British Army and MI5. Many of its weapons were sourced from UDR barracks, and the Regiment’s soldiers frequently moonlighted in the UDA, committing “terrorist acts.”
From 1970 – 1997, the UDA killed at least 400 people, most of them Catholic civilians. The full scale of its crimes, and the true extent of its collusion with the British Army and intelligence services, will never be known. Convicted UDA terrorists participated in UDR operations throughout this time, and vice versa.
Among the UDA’s most prominent victims was Pat Finucane, a Belfast lawyer executed at home in front of his family in February 1989 for the crime of representing Irish Republican hunger strikers in court.
Prime Minister David Cameron admitted to “shocking levels of collusion” in Finucane’s execution in 2011, however, he rejected requests by the victim’s family for a full inquiry. “There are people in buildings all around here who won’t let it happen,” Cameron explained in private, referencing his office’s proximity to the headquarters of the Ministry of Defence, MI5 and MI6.
It is for this reason that so many shocking crimes perpetrated by Protestant paramilitary groups in collaboration with British intelligence remain unsolved.
Miller waxes nostalgic about fight to “keep Northern Ireland British”
In private accounts of his involvement in the Troubles, Pablo Miller defended Britain’s dirty war on Irish Catholics. “No state – least of all a liberal democracy – can afford to tolerate with equanimity an existential threat to its constitutional order,” he asserted. Miller went on to express pride in his “small role in helping to defeat Republican terrorism, keep Northern Ireland British and protect the integrity of the British constitution.”
“It may sound a bit pompous or portentous, but Northern Ireland, as part of the United Kingdom, remains very important to me personally,” he continued. “The British Army lost a lot of chaps – and of course it cost even more Northern Irish lives – defending our constitutional order. So I would be a bit miffed, to say the least, if we were ever to return to those times again.”
Read Pablo Miller’s reflections on his time as a patriotic British Army tank regiment soldier in occupied Northern Ireland in full here.
Kit Klarenberg is an investigative journalist exploring the role of intelligence services in shaping politics and perceptions.
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