Madam, – The suggestion by Christopher Andrews, author of The Defence of the Realm, as reported by Mark Hennessy (World News, October 16th) that MI5 (Britain’s domestic intelligence agency) “knew more about Nairobi than it did about Belfast at the start of the Troubles” is hard to accept.
Our geographic proximity alone, not to mention history, would have guaranteed attention. Consider too that the only insurgent group active within the United Kingdom, having ended its armed campaign a brief six years prior to the start of the Troubles, was widely known to have adopted a Marxist analysis sympathetic to the USSR.
Would even the most incompetent group of intelligence gatherers have overlooked all this at the height of the Cold War? A more plausible explanation is that MI5’s supposed blindness supports a disingenuous assertion that the British state’s response to the outbreak of trouble in the North was one of benign blundering.
A convenient fable designed to justify London's failure to deal adequately with the consequence of Stormont's years of mismanagement, or as the then home secretary James Callaghan is reputed to have advised the cabinet, "Talk Green and act Orange". (See History Ireland, Jul/Aug 2009).