The Green Ribbon Books

The Hidden Hand: Britain, America and Cold War Secret Intelligence

Richard J. Aldrich
John Murray (Publishers) Ltd.
2001

The crucial role of intelligence to the Anglo-American special relationship has long been recognised. In this book, historian Richard Aldrich provides a profound new insight into the nature of that relationship in the first two decades of the cold war.

Intelligence liaison has often been portrayed as a polite variation of espionage, and Aldrich shows the extent this was true even between these closest of allies.

At the start of the cold war both states considered covert action to undermine the Eastern bloc. However, their interests diverged after the first Soviet atom bomb tests in 1949.

The Squad and the Intelligence Operations of Michael Collins

T Ryle Dwyer
Mercier Press
2005

Historian T. Ryle Dwyer has written several studies of Michael Collins and the War of Independence. In this book, he re-examines the subject in the light of new material from the Bureau of Military History.

Dwyer stitches together these first-hand acccounts from members of 'the squad' into a coherent narrative of Collins' activities as the IRA's director of intelligence.

One thing this reader found striking was how closely Collins methods conformed to the theories of US military strategist John Boyd, which emphasise cutting an opponent off from their environment, and paralysing their ability to make effective decisions.

Unfinished Business: State Killings and the Quest for Truth

Bill Rolston
Beyond the Pale
2000

One in ten of those killed during the Troubles in Northern Ireland was killed by the state.This book tells some of the stories behind that statistic.

22 chapters are each devoted to a single incident, beginning with Bloody Sunday in 1972, and ending with the case of Robert Hamill, who was murdered by loyalists in 1997 while nearby RUC officers refused to intervene.

Each chapter contains a substantial account of the case, alongside interviews with relatives of the victims and campaigners. Three further chapters include extended interviews with human rights campaigners Fr Raymond Murray, Clara Reilly of Relatives for Justice, and Fr Denis Faul.

Unfinished Business is an extremely valuable record of the cases it documents, but above all it is powerful testimony to the often untold story of how ordinary familes have fought for the truth about the deaths of their loved ones.

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The Green Flag: A History of Irish Nationalism

Robert Kee
Weidenfeld and Nicolson 1972
Penguin 2000

A widely read history of Irish nationalism, that has been published both as an omnibus, and as three separate volumes: The Most Distressful Country, the Bold Fenian Men and Ourselves Alone.

In the opening chapters, Kee surveys the Medieval and early modern background to Irish history. The bulk of the book, however, consists of a sustained narrative of the years from the rise of the United Irishmen in the late Eighteenth Century to the Civil War of 1922-23, an eventful period which included the Act of Union, the struggle first for Catholic emancipation, and then for Home Rule, the Great Famine and the Land War, the emergence of the Fenians, the War of Independence and the Anglo-Irish Treaty that created the modern Irish state.

Kee concludes with an epilogue which considers events up to the time of writing, during the earliest and most intense years of the Northern Troubles. It's clear thoughout that his sympathy is with constitutional nationalism and the Home Rule movement, rather than with the republican tradition. Nevertheless, The Green Flag is an obvious choice for anyone looking for a well-written narrative history of the period.

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The Dublin and Monaghan Bombings

Don Mullan
Wolfhound Press
2000

At 5.30pm on May 17, 1974, three car-bombs exploded in the centre of Dublin. 90 minutes later, another bomb exploded in Monaghan Town. Between them, the attacks killed 33 people, one of the worst death-tolls of the Troubles.

The bombings occured at a crucial political moment, in the midst of the Ulster Workers Strike which brought down the Sunningdale Agreement, the last attempt at power-sharing between the two communities in the North of Ireland for decades. A veil of silence soon descended over the episode, in spite of widespread suspicions that British intelligence had assisted loyalist paramilitaries in carrying out the attacks.

In this meticulously researched book, Don Mullan provides the accounts of eyewitnesses, survivors and the bereaved, and documents the struggle to uncover the truth about the bombings.

Spycatcher: The Candid Autobiography of a Senior Intelligence Officer

Peter Wright
1987

The MI5 website specifically denies one of the most eye-catching allegations in Peter Wright's notorious insider exposé of the service - that MI5 officers were plotting to bring down Prime Minister Harold Wilson.

Ironically, that must be one the best-attested claims in the book. Writers like David Leigh, Robin Ramsay and Stephen Dorril have documented extensive evidence, independent of Wright, that this is exactly what was happening.

Neither Leigh not Ramsay and Dorril believe that Wright was telling the whole truth in Spycatcher. They conclude that his involvement in the Wilson episode was much deeper than he lets on.

The one thing that everyone is agreed on, therefore, is that Wright was not a particularly trustworthy witness. Nevertheless, there is a great deal of interesting material in the book.

MI6: Inside the Covert World of Her Majesty's Secret Intelligence Service

Stephen Dorril
Fourth Estate 2000
Touchstone 2002

A magisterial study of Britain's foreign intelligence service, the SIS, better known as MI6.

Although Dorril covers operations around the world and up to the 1990s, the key focus for more than half the book is on Europe and the early Cold War.

During Word War II, MI6's prestige rested more on its control of the Bletchley Park code-breaking programme than on recruiting agents in Europe, where its thunder was stolen by the rival Special Operations Executive.

MI6 absorbed SOE after the Second World War, acquiring in the process some expertise in political warfare as opposed to intelligence-gathering. One of the most intriguing aspects of this, MI6 involvement in the Gladio stay-behind networks, is touched on but largely left for another volume, which will certainly be very interesting if it appears.

The Wilson Plot: The Astounding Truth about the Spycatchers who dabbled in Treason

David Leigh
Heinemann
1988

One of Britain's top investigative journalists describes how elements of MI5 and the CIA turned on the British Prime Minister.

The story has its roots its in the cold war paranoia engendered by the Cambridge spy ring, a brilliant Soviet coup that penetrated right to the heart of western intelligence. When KGB defector Anatoly Golitsyn claimed that Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell had been murdered by the KGB to make way for Harold Wilson, senior counterintelligence officers such as James Angleton of the CIA and Peter Wright of MI5 were prepared to believe him.

This helped pave the way for a covert campaign against Wilson that would climax during his second government in the mid-1970s. Although, this campaign would be revealed in Wright's book Spycatcher, Leigh argues that Wright concealed his own role. Leigh had access to a number of Wright's unpublished manuscripts, a source he prefers to the ghostwritten Spycatcher.

Making a Killing: How Corporations use Armed Force to do Business

Madelaine Drohan
Randam House Canada 2003
Lyons Press edition 2004

Canada's stock exchanges are global centre for resource industries. As a result, financial journalist Madelaine Drohan found herself acquiring an expertise in a subject more exotic than the usual balance sheets and trading reports - the use of armed force by private corporations.

In 1998, Drohan was invited to war-torn Angola by Diamondworks. The company's majority shareholder Tony Buckingham, was a British former special forces officer with links to South African mercenary firm Executive Outcomes, which, Drohan learned, he hired out to weak African governments in exchange for mineral concessions.

The Nationalists of Northern Ireland 1918-1973

Enda Staunton
The Columba Press
2001

A huge number of books have been written about the Northern Ireland troubles. There are far fewer covering the first half century of the northern state's existence.

Of those few, Enda Staunton's study of the political history of northern nationalists is among the most important.

Staunton begins with the 1918 election in which Sinn Fein swept the board throughout Ireland including much of the North. In the Belfast constituency of the Falls, however, Eamonn De Valera was to be defeated by Home Ruler Joe Devlin.

This event underlined the internal differences within nationalism, both between North and South, and within the North Itself.

Devlin would later describe the creation of a separate northern Parliament as 'the greatest and last of all calamities.'