Lifting the Veil: Major Fred Holroyd, ‘The Troubles’ and Whistle-Blowing
For thirty years, I have been researching the
case of the Military Intelligence Officer, Maj. Fred Holroyd, who served in
Northern Ireland during the blackest period of the Troubles. I have recently
been testing the various claims made by Holroyd against document releases both
in Ireland and the UK, the results of official enquiries and new research into
the period of “Dirty Tricks”. In the process, I have seen aspects of the
life-time ordeal that many whistle-blowers endure: a study enriched by the
analysis of whistle-blowing by Professor C. Fred Alford, who offers a model and
account that leads to a greater understanding of the nature of the
organisations within which people in the security and intelligence services work.
Holroyd’s experiences of the “secret” or “dual” state also beg questions about
the type of political society of which these agencies play an increasingly
significant part: questions studied by the relatively new area of para-politics
and answered, I suggest, by the controversial German philosopher and
political theorist, Carl Schmitt.
I will briefly consider Holroyd’s overall career in
Northern Ireland as a military intelligence liaison officer with the RUC and
his operations in co-operation with MI6. More specifically I consider key
operations which led to his whistle-blowing role and in the process reveals
after forty years of official secrecy, the identity and circumstances of the
death of a senior Military Intelligence officer at the heart of the
intelligence war; I also outline a new evidence on cross-border relations
between the UK and Ireland that helps to explain why Holroyd’s whistle-blowing
was seen as such a potential threat.
Studying such cases naturally raises questions about
researching controversial and secret subjects when whistle-blowers are
generally faced by antagonism not only from the State but also within the
research community and the media. It also provides – in the Snowden era - a
useful case study of the whistle-blower and what their actions and attempts at
vindication tell us about contemporary society and the role of organisations,
such as the Army and secret agencies, in what Alford terms, the “destruction of
the moralised individual”. The aim of organisations is, Alford argues and
Holroyd’s experience confirms, to transform the act of whistle-blowing from an
issue “of policy and principle into an act of private disobedience and
psychological disturbance”.
One of the reasons why whistle-blowers are often ostracised
is because they have “seen behind the veil” and the public tends to shy away
from what they reveal about how society is really organised. Holroyd’s
experience of the counter- terrorism war in Northern Ireland begs the question
of who actually was running the covert war and where was the political control of
it.
Dr Stephen Dorril is author of ‘MI6: Fifty Years of SpecialOperations’ and a paper for the International Journal of Press/Politics,
‘Russia Accuses Fleet Street: Journalists and MI6 during the Cold War’. His
history of MI6 and the European stay-behind units will be published next year.
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