‘Lost’ secret documentary links Martin McGuinness, MI6, Mossad and the CIA
An astonishing story involving the CIA, Mossad and the disappearance of a compromising film for halfacentury raises new questions about why Martin McGuinness evaded a long jail term. The scarcely believable story is pieced together in painstaking detail by veteran BBC investigative journalist Darragh MacIntyre in a film for BBC Two.
After five years of work, MacIntyre has established a series of facts that do not in any way prove McGuinness was a British agent – as some republicans believe – but do show he was compromised.
It is unclear whether McGuinness knew the full story himself, but if he did, he would have been vulnerable to pressure.
In 1972, an American academic, J Bowyer Bell, secured the IRA’s agreement to take part in The Secret Army, a flyonthewall documentary about its secretive inner workings.
The footage he recorded showed IRA members making bombs, training in how to handle weapons and detonating bombs in city centres. Unmasked IRA leaders talked openly on camera about the organisation.
As MacIntyre says: “The whole endeavour made very little sense when they knew that intelligence agencies were trying to spy on everything they were doing.”
The existence of the film emerged four years ago, but now far more detail is coming to light.
McGuinness was just 21 in 1972, but already the IRA leader in Co Derry.
In the film, he drove around Free Derry while a frontseat passenger did the talking.
That man, Tony Devine, is still alive, and recalled that he and McGuinness were “like two brothers”.
He said the crew asked McGuinness if he would drive around the area and explain things for the film, to which McGuinness replied: “I’ll only do it if you go with me.”
Devine said: “I think Martin actually asked me to do the talking.”
He told MacIntyre the camera crew “were up our ass no matter where we went”.
They filmed McGuinness showing children guns, loading bullets into a revolver as the wideeyed youngsters peered excitedly through the window of the car.
McGuinness is seen helping to prepare a car bomb, which then explodes in the city centre.
At least 26 people were injured in that attack, part of a twoday blitz that left eight people dead.
Des Long, a former army council member who was present when the Provisional IRA was founded in 1969, was filmed openly instructing IRA volunteers in how to use guns.
Long said Bowyer Bell told him he did not need a mask because “you’ll be shown from the chest down… that was a verbal promise from him, and it meant nothing”.
He said: “The whole thing was just… it should never have been made. I’m sorry to this day that I ever took part in it.”
Why would the IRA take such huge risks? One possible motive is that it thought victory was at hand and became overconfident. Another possibility is the need for money.
Long said the IRA got much of its funding – “hundreds of thousands” – from America.
In the view of Jacob Stern, who composed the soundtrack, “the purpose of the film was to show the legitimate cause of the IRA”.
Stern said the IRA wanted “more favourable opinion in America… and maybe it could raise more money that way”.
Now 88 and living on the edge of an Arizona desert, he said firmly: “I was in sympathy with the IRA.”
From the moment Bowyer Bell collected Stern at Dublin Airport, he was using countersurveillance techniques, telling the composer they were being followed by intelligence agencies, but shaking them off by walking through a shop to another car.
The IRA insisted on controlling the film’s content, telling the filmmakers that if they didn’t comply, they would be shot.
MacIntyre said he had independently confirmed that Bowyer Bell ceded editorial control to the IRA.
The film glamorised the violence in a way that now seems simplistic.
Geraldine Hughes, a 17yearold, described it as “a great honour” to be in an IRA active service unit in Andersonstown, and referred to her activities as something that gave her selfconfidence.
“I found that I am more sure of myself now than I was beforehand,” she said.
However, the most extraordinary element of the story is what happened after the filming was complete.
Bowyer Bell took the reels to London for development. The executive producer, Leon Gildin, said Bowyer Bell and the film’s director later told him British intelligence viewed the material.
He did not blame them for that, assuming they had “no alternative” but to allow the intelligence services to see the reels.
“Had they developed it in Dublin, perhaps no one would have seen it. By virtue of it being developed in London, that’s where British intelligence got their hooks into it,” he said.
Bowyer Bell’s CV from 1991, tracked down by MacIntyre, shows that from 1974 he did work for the CIA, the US Department of Justice, the Department of Defence and the State Department.
He had highlevel security clearances, cleared to Top Secret for the CIA and Department of Defence.
A longstanding friend, Roberto Mitrotti, said bluntly: “Part of him was pretty shitty.”
When asked if he was working for the CIA, he said: “I think he was. He was too smart to be a servant of an American agency. So he might have taken money from them at some point to provide certain services, provided the services were in the abstract.
“But he would never, knowing him, I don’t think he would betray; he would sell, people, human beings in the service of the CIA.
“He was really talking like a CIA agent… he lived it, and he was good at it… he was a character in his own movie.”
Tim Pat Coogan, author of a history of the IRA, said he had no doubt Bowyer Bell was a CIA agent.
“You wouldn’t know what Bowyer Bell told them. Did they think there was going to be a Hollywood bonanza, that money would flow into the coffers?” he said.
However, when Stern was asked if he believed he was inadvertently working with a CIA operative, he said: “Absolutely not.”
Bowyer Bell’s daughter, Becky Waring, also denied he was a spy, but then said: “He probably wouldn’t have told me if he was.
“I remember us all being very excited – Daddy’s going to do a movie. Then we were all waiting for it to be on TV, and it never was. It was a big disappointment.”
Bowyer Bell’s choice of director for the film adds to the intrigue. He selected Zwy Aldouby, a man who appears to have had no experience of filmmaking. The Israeli writer and journalist had been a Nazihunter after World War II.
Aldouby’s son, Illan, said he did not really know who his father was.
When asked if it was possible that his father was part of a conspiracy by intelligence agencies to infiltrate the IRA, he said: “I would say there would be a strong possibility. There is a connection of the IRA and Israel, and that connection is Gaddafi… my father, if he worked with or collaborated with the Mossad or Israeli intelligence, it would be a clear fit.”
Richard Kerr, a former deputy director of the CIA who was monitoring Libya from the 1970s, said it was “almost a certainty” that Aldouby was spying on the IRA and feeding that back to Israel.
The film ultimately did get to America, where it was Gildin’s job to sell it.
Viacom “loved it”, he said, and “immediately offered me a contract for worldwide rights”. But having done so, it “never sold a copy”. Why a company would buy the global rights to a film – preventing anyone else from broadcasting it – but then not sell it adds to the questions around the entire enterprise.
‘The Secret Army’ is on BBC iPlayer