Fred Holroyd - Involvement With Ken Livingstone MP

Involvement With Ken Livingstone MP

Labour Member of Parliament in the UK, Ken Livingstone, formerly Head of the Greater London Council, latterly Mayor of London, took up the case of Fred Holroyd, and used his maiden speech to highlight Holroyd's allegations.

"During my election campaign in Brent, East, there was an unusual public meeting. An individual was invited to it who has never been a Socialist, who will never be prepared to vote Labour and who thinks that the Tory party is the natural governing party of Britain.

He was invited to share a platform with myself and some of the relative's of those who have been subjected to miscarriages of justice by the British courts over issues of bombing here in Britain. We invited Mr. Fred Holroyd. For those who do not know, Mr. Holroyd served in Northern Ireland with distinction. As I said, he is no Socialist. He comes from a military family. He went to a Yorkshire grammar school. His whole objective in life was to serve in the British Army. He believed in it totally. He enlisted as a private in the gunners, and 3 years later he was commissioned into the Royal Corps of Transport. He volunteered for the Special Military Intelligence unit in Northern Ireland when the present troubles began, and he was trained at the Joint Services School of Intelligence. Once his training was finished, he was stationed in Portadown, where, for two and a half years, he ran a series of intelligence operations.

When he was recruited as an MI6 officer, he said of them that they were not disagreeable; their ethics were reasonable; they were seeking a political solution. His complaint, which eventually led to his removal from the Army and an attempt to discredit him, which has been largely successful, was made when the MI6 operation was taken over by MI5 in 1975 - by many of the same people who are dealt with in Peter Wright's book (Spycatcher), and many of the same people who are alleged to have been practicing treason against the elected Labour Government of the time. He said that once the MI5 took over the reasonable ethics of MI6 were pushed aside by operatives in the intelligence world who supported the views of Mr. Kitson and the policies and tactics of subverting the subverters. I recommend Brigadier Kitson's words to those who are not aware of them. His attitude was to create a counter-terror group, to have agents provocateur, to infiltrate and to run a dirty tricks campaign in an attempt to discredit the IRA.

Mr. Holroyd continued to believe that what he was doing was in the best interests of the British state until early in 1975, when Captain Robert Nairac, who, as many hon. Members will know, was later murdered by the IRA, went into his office, fresh from a cross-border operation -- something that of course is completely illegal -- and showed him the colour photographs that had been taken by Captain Nairac's team. Captain Nairac had crossed the border with some volunteers from the UVF. He had assassinated John Francis Green, an active member of the IRA who was living south of the border. As an agent of the British Government operating across the border as an assassin he had brought back photographs as proof of that operation.

When Captain Nairac showed the photographs, Mr. Holroyd started to object, not because he objected to an active member of IRA being assassinated in a highly illegal cross-border raid but because he realised that once the British state started to perpetrate such methods there was no way that eventually Britain would not alienate vast sections of the community and eventually lose the struggle for the hearts and minds of the Irish people.

Holroyd then started to object to the use of such illegal methods by MI5 officers. He was immediately shuffled to one side by the expedient method of being taken to a mental hospital and being declared basically unfit for duty. During the month he spend in the British mental hospital, the three tests that were administered to him were completely successfully passed.

...What is particularly disturbing is that what looked at the time like a random act of maniacal violence and sectarian killing now begins to take on a much more sinister stance. It begins to emerge that Captain Robert Nairac is quite likely the person who organised the killing of the three Miami showband musicians. The evidence for that allegation is forensic and members of the UVF are prepared to say that they were members of the UVF gang who actually undertook the murder of the Miami showband musicians. The evidence is quite clear. The same gun that was used by Captain Nairac on his cross-border trip to assassinate John Francis Green was used in the Miami showband massacre".

Livingstone also asked a series of questions in the parliament session about Holroyd's treatment following his allegations of collusion between British Army Intelligence and Loyalist paramilitaries.