6 September 1920 General Sir Henry Wilson, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, despised Irish republicans. In 1919, he observed in a letter to his predecessor, General Sir William Robertson, that ‘Ireland goes from bad to worse’, recommending that ‘a little blood shedding is needed.’ On 1 September, the following year, he was still deriding…
19 December 1980 On 19 December 1980, an article appeared in the New York Daily News, based on a telephone conversation with Sam Duddy, the press relations officer of the Ulster Defence Association (UDA), the largest Loyalist paramilitary organization in Northern Ireland. The journalist, Michael Daly, expressed his astonishment that it was possible to find the…
18 September 1961 Mounting evidence suggests the involvement of British intelligence services in the assassination of UN secretary general, Dag Hammarskjöld, on 18 September 1961. He was killed along with 15 others, when his DC-6 aircraft, which had taken off from Leopoldville, the capital of Belgian Congo, was downed shortly after midnight on its approach…
12 September 1963 Lieutenant Colonel Johnny Cooper, of the Special Air Service, was part of a British covert military operation in North Yemen. The plan was to draw Egyptian forces stationed there into a war of attrition and thereby undermine the prestige and influence of Nasser’s Egypt, which since the Suez crisis of 1956 had…
31 July 2005 On 31 July 2005, Stephen Vincent, a journalist embedded with UK forces, wrote a damning article in the New York Times, entitled ‘Switched Off in Basra,’ alleging that the police in southern Iraq’s main city were comprised mostly of bloodthirsty fundamentalist armed militias in uniform, who were being equipped and supported by the British. …
27 May 1798 Lieutenant-General Sir John Moore is much praised as a heroic, but relatively humane, figure of the Napoleonic wars. His death in 1809 during the defence of Corruna against the French earned him the status of a national martyr and a memorial by Sir Christopher Wren commemorating his martyrdom still stands in the…
26 May 1981 Today in 1981, the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) raided the headquarters of the loyalist paramilitary Ulster Defence Association (UDA) in Belfast, discovering a large cache of lethal weapons, including a Thompson sub-machine gun, six Sten guns, a revolver and 550 rounds of ammunition. This came just a week after its supreme commander,…
14 January 1947 On this day in 1947, Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin ordered MI6 to sabotage ships in European ports which were taking Jewish refugees to Palestine and to deliberately contaminate their food and water supplies. Other methods to prevent their arrival in the British controlled mandate had been contemplated but the three miles of coastal…
12 February 1981 On 12 February 1981, David Wyatt of MI6 warned the Northern Ireland permanent secretary that ‘UDA/UFF (loyalist) gunmen, with the full blessing of Tyrie (head of the Ulster Defence Association), are going to continue murdering identified Republicans.’ His statement was yet further confirmation of the already overwhelming evidence the government possessed that…
31 January 1973 On 31 January 1973, the Daily Telegraph quoted Ulster Defence Association leader Tommy Herron admitting that ‘it is futile for us to try to stop them,’ referring to murders by Protestant loyalists. He explained that this was because ‘the renewed bombing onslaught by the Republican rebels is a provocation to them (and) they (Protestant…
