Was Gerry Adams the SAS Informer Who Set Up Loughgall?

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[00:00:00]On a Monday morning in May, 1987, 3 days after Loughgall, Gerry Adams put on a dark suit and carried the coffin of Patrick Kelly through the small Tyrone village of Galbally.

[00:00:13]The cortege was 300 yards long. The mourners sang the national anthem. The press cameras were kept back.

[00:00:22]By the side of the road stood a man in plain clothes whose name has never been published taking photographs.

[00:00:30]Adams was 38, the elected MP for Belfast West, and depending on which source you believe, the man who 4 days earlier had ordered Patrick Kelly's death.

[00:00:43]Or the man who had been informed of it the moment the East Tyrone Brigade left the safe house in Killyman.

[00:00:51]This is not a prosecution. It is a case file.

[00:00:55]The thesis of this video is a question the audience has been asking for 2 weeks in the comment threads of three Loughgall videos.

[00:01:05]The question is whether Gerry Adams, in early May 1987, knew that the eight men he would shortly bury were going to die.

[00:01:15]It is a question that the British government has declined to answer for 38 years.

[00:01:21]It is a question on which the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland holds files that are sealed indefinitely.

[00:01:29]It is a question on which intelligence historians, working in the open record, have not closed the case either.

[00:01:38]What follows is what is on the record.

[00:01:41]The viewer is asked to do what the British state will not, which is to weigh the documents.

[00:01:48]The documented strategic dispute begins in the summer of 1986.

[00:01:54]Jim Lynagh, 31, from the town of Monaghan, was the senior strategist of the IRA's East Tyrone Brigade.

[00:02:04]Patrick Kelly, 30, from Carrickfergus, by way of Dungannon, was the Brigade's officer commanding.

[00:02:12]Liner had been a political prisoner in the Maze.

[00:02:15]He had studied Mao Zedong in the H blocks.

[00:02:19]He had emerged in 1986 with a doctrine he wanted the rest of the IRA to adopt.

[00:02:25]The systematic destruction of isolated rural RUC stations, the creation of what he called liberated zones, the conversion of East Tyrone from a contested zone into a territory the British could not garrison.

[00:02:43]His operational partner inside the Brigade, Pauric McCearney from Tyrone, had been part of the 1983 Maze escape.

[00:02:51]McCearney had spent the previous 3 years rebuilding the East Tyrone unit into the most active operational column in the entire IRA.

[00:03:02]Between 1985 and the spring of 1987, the Brigade had burned out 12 police stations across Tyrone and Armagh.

[00:03:12]They were, in volume of attacks per quarter, the most lethal active service unit in the organization.

[00:03:19]That was the operational picture.

[00:03:22]The political picture was different.

[00:03:25]By the autumn of 1986, the IRA Army Council was preparing for what it knew would be the most consequential vote in the organization's modern history.

[00:03:36]Adams, then president of Sinn Féin, then 38, had built an alliance through the autumn to drop abstentionism, the rule that Sinn Féin elected members would not take their seats in Dublin.

[00:03:49]The political track Adams was offering was the parallel armed and political strategy that would eventually become the peace process.

[00:03:58]Liner and McKearney did not want it.

[00:04:01]They believed the political track was a betrayal.

[00:04:04]They believed the military campaign needed to be accelerated, not laddered against a negotiating posture.

[00:04:11]Ed Moloney in A Secret History of the IRA, his 2002 reconstruction of the period from internal IRA sources, documents the dispute with precision.

[00:04:23]Liner and McKearney, he writes, openly challenged the leadership at internal meetings.

[00:04:29]They discussed the possibility of forming a more militant faction.

[00:04:34]At the IRA Army Convention of October 1986, Liner and Patrick Kelly were among the minority of delegates who voted against Adams' strategic shift.

[00:04:45]At the Sinn Féin Ard Fheis in Dublin's Mansion House on the 1st and 2nd of November of that year, abstentionism was dropped by a vote of 429 to 161.

[00:04:58]10 votes more than the 2/3 majority Adams needed.

[00:05:02]Ruairí Ó Brádaigh walked out and formed Republican Sinn Féin.

[00:05:07]Liner did not walk out. He went back to Tyrone.

[00:05:12]The figure standing between Adams and the Tyrone hardliners in the autumn of 1986 was Kevin McKenna, the IRA Chief of Staff.

[00:05:22]McKenna was a Tyrone man himself, from the same county as Liner, McKearney, and Kelly.

[00:05:28]He had grown up in the parish next to theirs.

[00:05:31]He could, in theory, have sided with the hardline faction.

[00:05:35]He did not.

[00:05:37]By the autumn of 1986, McKenna had become a firm Adams supporter.

[00:05:42]He had concluded, by his own subsequent reasoning to internal IRA forums that Linus' Maoist liberated zones doctrine was operationally too ambitious.

[00:05:55]The East Tyrone Brigade did not have the manpower to hold a single rural barracks against a determined British response, let alone five of them in a campaign cycle.

[00:06:07]McKenna scaled the doctrine back.

[00:06:09]He approved attacks on the rebuilding contractors and the rebuilt stations.

[00:06:15]He did not approve the permanent flying column.

[00:06:18]He drew the doctrinal line that Liner on the operational side then repeatedly tested.

[00:06:25]What was the relationship between the man who had won that vote and the men who had lost it?

[00:06:31]That is the question on which the whole of this case file turns.

[00:06:36]In December 2017, the Irish National Archives in Dublin released the Department of Foreign Affairs file for the year 1987.

[00:06:47]Inside the file was a record of a conversation between Father Denis Faul, the Dungannon priest and Long Kesh chaplain, and a DFA official dated approximately 3 months after the Loughgall ambush. Faul reported a rumor that was circulating in Tyrone.

[00:07:06]The rumor was that the IRA team had been set up by Gerry Adams himself.

[00:07:12]Two of the gang, Faul said, Jim Liner and Pauric McCarney had threatened to execute Adams shortly before the Loughgall event.

[00:07:21]They had disliked Adams' political policy. They had been leaning toward Republican Sinn Fein.

[00:07:28]That is the rumor that the priest reported.

[00:07:31]It is the first time the Adams set up Loughgall thesis surfaces in an official state record.

[00:07:38]It is hearsay. It comes from a man who had fallen out badly with Adams's leadership during the 1981 hunger strikes.

[00:07:47]Ed Moloney himself, the journalist who has done more than any other to document the period, has been clear.

[00:07:55]Fall and the Provisional leadership were by 1987 at daggers drawn.

[00:08:01]But the rumor did not stay in the DFA file.

[00:08:04]Tom King, the British Secretary of State for Northern Ireland from 1985 to 1989, has said publicly, decades later, "I heard reports it was a setup by Gerry Adams, but never saw evidence it was true."

[00:08:21]That is the cleanest qualified denial in the public record from a cabinet-level actor.

[00:08:28]King did not know it was true. He had been told. The reports had reached him.

[00:08:34]What the ambush itself looked like in operational terms has been the subject of a 38-year argument.

[00:08:42]On the 8th of May 1987, an eight-man unit of the East Tyrone Brigade moved on Loughgall RUC station.

[00:08:52]They hijacked a JCB digger from a farm on the Lislasley Road 2 miles west of the village.

[00:08:59]They loaded its bucket with 200 kg of Semtex, assembled in Ardboe, ferried by boat across Lough Neagh to Maghery, then trucked the final miles to the brigade staging point.

[00:09:13]They hijacked a blue Toyota Hiace from a Dungannon business for the assault team.

[00:09:19]They drove into Loughgall just before 7:00 in the evening. Declan Arthurs, 21 years old from Galbally, was in the digger. Patrick Kelly was in the van.

[00:09:30]McElnea was in the van. McCartney was in the van. Eugene Kelly, Tony Gormley, Seamus Donelly, and Gerard O'Callaghan were in the van.

[00:09:41]All eight of the most lethal active service members of the brigade had committed to a single operation at a single rural police station in a single window.

[00:09:53]The British knew.

[00:09:55]24 soldiers from the Special Air Service were already in position.

[00:10:00]The kill zone was a triangle around the station. Operators inside the building, fire teams in the church graveyard, a cordon along the road to the north.

[00:10:13]Belt-fed general-purpose machine guns covered the approach.

[00:10:18]The BBC documentary Spotlight on the Troubles, broadcast in October 2019, established that the security forces had known about the planned attack for 10 days before it took place.

[00:10:31]10 days.

[00:10:33]Reporter Jennifer O'Leary obtained the executive summary of the unpublished Stalker and Samson reports of the 1980s.

[00:10:42]The reports into the Northern Ireland shoot-to-kill allegations. And the language of the summary is direct.

[00:10:50]The summary describes a massive cover-up by the guardians of the law. One in which police officers were instructed to lie to detectives and prosecutors. And in which senior police and MI5 officers destroyed evidence. All in the name of protecting an informer and other intelligence sources.

[00:11:12]That is the British state's own internal language about what was protected at Loughgall.

[00:11:19]The question that has divided the historiography is whether the informer was inside the unit, above the unit, or both.

[00:11:29]Mark Urban in Big Boys Rules, his 1992 study of the SAS in Northern Ireland, the founding text of the field, attributed the foreknowledge to a human source.

[00:11:42]Later research has shifted the picture.

[00:11:45]A listening device, by current scholarly consensus, had been planted in the home of Gerard Hart, the mid-Tyrone IRA commander, whose responsibility was internal security across the brigade.

[00:11:59]The Det 14 Intelligence Company monitored the bug.

[00:12:03]Telephone intercepts of compromising ASU calls reached RUC Special Branch.

[00:12:10]Long-running technical surveillance of the explosives storage hide in Ardboe ran in parallel.

[00:12:16]What this picture is consistent with is a layered British intelligence operation that did not require a single source inside the leadership.

[00:12:25]What this picture does not exclude is a source inside the leadership in addition to all of it.

[00:12:32]Both pictures are open in the documentary record.

[00:12:35]What the technical picture cannot, on its own, explain is the timing precision.

[00:12:41]Reconnaissance had begun weeks earlier.

[00:12:44]The SAS had been moved into the village in the small hours of the 8th of May in the dark while the cooks at the RUC station were beginning the day's first kettle.

[00:12:54]The cordon teams had been briefed on what color of vehicle to expect, what color of overall, what direction the JCB would come from.

[00:13:04]A bug at Gerard Hart's house tells you a plan exists.

[00:13:09]It does not always tell you the precise hour and direction the plan will execute on.

[00:13:15]To know to within the hour on the 8th of May that the column would converge on the village, that is a different level of intelligence.

[00:13:25]It is the level of intelligence that in 2019, Sir John Boutcher's Operation Conover investigation began to map.

[00:13:34]It is the level that the Stalker Samson redactions in the British state's own internal language refer to as protecting an informer plural and other intelligence sources.

[00:13:48]The plural matters.

[00:13:50]There was more than one.

[00:13:52]The plural is what makes the audience theory durable.

[00:13:56]The plural is also what makes any single name accusation against any single individual impossible to fairly anchor.

[00:14:06]The men in the Citroen van that pulled up to Loughgall RUC station did not survive the next 90 seconds.

[00:14:14]The JCB exploded. The Toyota took 1,200 rounds. Arthur's, the driver, was shot 80 yards up the road. Donnelly fell on a football field. Five of the eight died inside the van or on the road around it.

[00:14:31]A white Citroen GS carrying two mechanic brothers, Anthony and Oliver Hughes, who had finished a job repairing a lorry at a Mr. John Guy's house in Loughgall, came around the bend behind.

[00:14:44]They were wearing dark blue boiler suits, the same color the ASU was wearing.

[00:14:50]The cordon team opened fire from behind.

[00:14:53]Anthony Hughes, 36, was hit 15 times and killed at the wheel.

[00:14:59]Oliver was hit 14 times and survived.

[00:15:03]Three days later, the funerals began.

[00:15:07]Patrick Kelly was buried at Edendork, a Catholic cemetery near Dungannon.

[00:15:12]The funeral was, by all accounts in the local press, one of the largest in Tyrone during the Troubles.

[00:15:19]Adams gave the oration. The corteges through the Tyrone villages were the longest Republican processions Northern Ireland had seen since the 1981 hunger strikes.

[00:15:31]They ran through Galbally where Declan Arthurs and Seamus Donaghy and Tony Gormley and Eugene Kelly had grown up.

[00:15:39]Four of the dead from a single small village.

[00:15:43]They ran through Cappagh, the East Tyrone Brigade's heartland, the village whose name had been on every operations map in the brigade for a decade.

[00:15:53]Adams and Martin McGuinness were photographed as pallbearers at the funerals.

[00:15:59]The press cameras were kept back from the immediate cortege.

[00:16:03]What ran in the Saturday papers and the Alta A Sunday News was footage the Republican Movement itself supplied.

[00:16:11]McKerny's funeral followed Patrick Kelly's the same day.

[00:16:15]From McKerny's graveside, Adams was driven across the border to Latlurcan Cemetery in Monaghan town where Jim Lynagh, the man who in October had voted against him at the Army Convention, was to be buried. The funeral was delayed by half an hour to allow Adams to arrive.

[00:16:35]He delivered the oration.

[00:16:37]The exact words have been reproduced in the period Republican press.

[00:16:43]"Anyone who does business with the British, the free state establishment, or the SDLP," Adams said standing over Lynagh's coffin, "are fools because they have all sold out on the Irish people."

[00:16:59]What does it mean to deliver that line over the grave of a man you had been at strategic odds with for the entirety of the previous 12 months?

[00:17:10]On the public record reading, it is the line of a Sinn Féin president performing Republican unity for a press gallery.

[00:17:19]It is what a movement leader is supposed to say at a movement funeral.

[00:17:24]On the audience reading, the reading that has surfaced in the comment threads, it is the line of a man covering a fact pattern.

[00:17:33]The case file does not adjudicate between those readings.

[00:17:38]The case file notes the line was said.

[00:17:41]It notes who said it and to whom and in front of which cameras.

[00:17:47]The press cameras were kept back.

[00:17:49]The Republican movement provided the funeral footage that subsequently ran on UTV.

[00:17:56]The Saturday papers ran photographs of Adams as pallbearer and Adams at the graveside.

[00:18:02]The 2017 disclosures did not stop with the fall file.

[00:18:08]Across the same year in the broader open press, a cluster of British intelligence sources fed a sequence of stories about a long-running senior informant network at the top of the Provisional IRA.

[00:18:23]The framing was not specific.

[00:18:25]Adams was not named in print as a particular agent.

[00:18:29]Adams has never been named in print in a court-admissible document in any classified leak made public as a particular agent.

[00:18:39]What has been named is a system.

[00:18:42]The Stalker and Samson reports describe the system.

[00:18:47]The Operation Kenova interim report, published in March 2024, describes the system.

[00:18:55]Sir John Boutcher's £35 million investigation into the agent code-named Stakeknife, the FRU's senior man inside the IRA's internal security unit, Freddie Scappaticci, describes the system.

[00:19:11]Scappaticci was tasked by IRA Chief of Staff Kevin McKenna with the post-Loughgall investigation into who had informed.

[00:19:21]The entire IRA's own forensic effort to identify its informer was being run by the British Army's most senior agent in the organization.

[00:19:32]Ignatius Heart, brother of Gerard Heart, told Spotlight Stakeknife was getting the full information and that was being relayed back to his handlers.

[00:19:44]Anthony McIntyre, the former PIR man who interviewed the Belfast project tapes, said of Scappaticci on the same program that he was a figure through whom everything had to go through.

[00:19:58]This is the moment in the case file where the audience theory and the documented record converge.

[00:20:05]The British state, through Stakeknife, was reading the IRA's own internal investigation of itself.

[00:20:13]Whatever Scappaticci's investigators concluded about Loughgall went back to British handlers.

[00:20:19]If there was a senior leadership source, and the Stalker Samson language about protecting an informer and other intelligence sources suggests there were multiple sources, that source's name passed through the same filter.

[00:20:35]The British state would have known.

[00:20:38]The British state has decided not to confirm.

[00:20:42]The British state will not confirm.

[00:20:46]The Boston College tapes are the documentary record the comment threads keep returning to.

[00:20:52]Between 2001 and 2006, the journalist Ed Moloney and the former IRA man Anthony McIntyre conducted an oral history project at Boston College, recording roughly 50 interviews with Republican and loyalist veterans of the conflict.

[00:21:10]The participants understood the tapes would not be released until after their deaths.

[00:21:15]The arrangement broke down in 2011 when the PSNI subpoenaed the recordings of Brendan Hughes, the legendary D company commander known as the Dark, and Dolours Price, the Old Bailey bomber who had been part of the Unknowns.

[00:21:32]Hughes had died in February 2008. Price would die in January 2013.

[00:21:39]Maloney published Hughes' interviews with his consent as Voices from the Grave in 2010.

[00:21:47]Hughes told MacIntyre on tape, "In 1973, Gerry was OC of Belfast Brigade. I was operations officer.

[00:21:57]We met every day, planned what operations were going to take place."

[00:22:02]Hughes named Adams as having ordered the 1972 disappearance of Jean McConville.

[00:22:09]Price, separately, said in 2010 that Adams had been her IRA officer commanding.

[00:22:17]She made the same allegation about McConville.

[00:22:20]Adams has categorically denied all of it.

[00:22:24]What the tapes do not establish is anything specific about Lough Gall.

[00:22:29]The Hughes tapes concern the Belfast Brigade of the early 1970s.

[00:22:34]The Price tapes concern the Unknowns, the disappearances, the 1973 Old Bailey bombing.

[00:22:42]Neither set publicly contains evidence about the East Tyrone Brigade in 1987.

[00:22:49]What the tapes establish is the position Adams occupied.

[00:22:54]They establish that Adams was, in the testimony of two senior IRA figures who knew him operationally, the man at the center of the organization's leadership.

[00:23:06]They do not establish and they cannot establish that Adams was the informer at The Boston College tapes in the Ivor Bell prosecution that followed McConville's case in 2019 were ruled by the court to be unreliable as stand-alone criminal evidence.

[00:23:26]They are testimony, not proof.

[00:23:29]This distinction has to hold the weight of everything that follows.

[00:23:34]The comment threads under three Loughgall videos have been making it for 2 weeks.

[00:23:40]The tapes prove Adams was the man.

[00:23:43]The tapes do not prove Adams was the informer.

[00:23:47]The leap from one to the other is the leap the audience is asking the channel to make. The channel is not going to make it.

[00:23:55]The reason it is not going to make it is that the leap is not in the documents.

[00:24:00]It is in the inference between the documents.

[00:24:03]The inference may turn out to have been correct. The inference may turn out to have been wrong.

[00:24:10]The British government in 2026 has not given the public the documents that would resolve it.

[00:24:17]The lateral pattern is harder to read.

[00:24:20]After Loughgall, the East Tyrone Brigade was systematically eliminated.

[00:24:25]16 months after the ambush on the 30th of August 1988, Gerard Hart, the man who had been tasked with the internal investigation, was killed by the SAS at Drumnakilly along with his brother Martin and his brother-in-law Brian Mullen.

[00:24:43]The information Hart had gathered during his investigation was on the documentary record in the hands of Scappaticci and through Scappaticci in the hands of the FRU. Some of the people whose details surfaced in that investigation were later targeted by loyalists.

[00:25:02]Liam Ryan was shot dead in his bar at Moortown in December 1989 along with the civilian Michael Devlin.

[00:25:11]The Mid-Ulster UVF under Billy Wright then under the LVF banner from 1996 took up the pattern through the 1990s.

[00:25:21]The Stevens inquiries and the de Silva report of December 2012 found that during the 1980s 85% of the intelligence the loyalists used to target people in Northern Ireland came from the security forces.

[00:25:38]That is a state on state finding.

[00:25:42]The de Silva number is not a theory.

[00:25:45]The Billy Wright element of the audience theory is the thinnest part of the case file.

[00:25:51]Wright did target Catholic families in Mid-Ulster.

[00:25:55]He did by his own boast run an operation at Cappagh in 1991 that he called probably our best.

[00:26:04]Security sources have stated in the open press that Wright himself was a police informer.

[00:26:10]What the audience theory wants to argue that Wright targeted the families of Adams' specific internal enemies on coordinated direction from a British intelligence ecosystem that wanted those enemies eliminated is supported by the de Silva number at the systemic level but is not documented at the named target level.

[00:26:35]The case file flags the lateral pattern.

[00:26:38]The case file does not prosecute on it.

[00:26:42]There is also the counter record.

[00:26:45]In May 2014 during a 36-hour PSNI interrogation in Antrim in connection with the Jean McConville case.

[00:26:55]Adams was confronted by detectives with the accusation that he himself had been turned by British Special Branch during his 1972 detention at Palace Barracks, Belfast, and had become an MI5 agent.

[00:27:11]Adams disclosed the accusation in an article he wrote himself in his own voice the following month.

[00:27:19]His exact words, "They claimed I was turned by Special Branch during interrogation in Belfast's Palace Barracks in 1972, and that I became an MI5 agent."

[00:27:32]Adams did not in that disclosure explicitly deny the accusation. He simply reported what had been said.

[00:27:41]The journalist Suzanne Breen at the time noted the conspicuous absence of any rebuttal.

[00:27:48]On the other reading, the accusation was absurd enough that Adams considered it beneath dignifying.

[00:27:55]Both readings are open.

[00:27:57]There is also what the operational record will not support.

[00:28:01]The case for Adams as the Lough Gall source has to clear several documentary bars.

[00:28:08]It has to establish that Adams, then president of Sinn Féin and an Army Council figure on Maloney's reading, had granular operational visibility into a Tyrone Brigade operation.

[00:28:21]The brigades in the IRA's late 1980s structure had substantial autonomy.

[00:28:28]East Tyrone in particular had a doctrinal independence Adams had spent the previous year trying to contain politically.

[00:28:36]The notion that the Army Council president would, in May 1987, have known the exact week the JCB would be hijacked, from which farm, with how much Semtex, against which station, is a notion the documentary record does not establish.

[00:28:55]Steakknife in the Internal Security Unit would have known it.

[00:28:59]The bug at Gerard Hearts would have caught it.

[00:29:02]Adams from Belfast would not necessarily have been told.

[00:29:07]The audience theory requires that he was.

[00:29:10]The documentary record is silent on that requirement.

[00:29:15]Anthony McIntyre, the man who interviewed Brendan Hughes for the Belfast project, the man who of any of the available Republican commentators would have the strongest reasons to surface anything that emerged on tape against Adams, has written publicly on the question.

[00:29:31]McIntyre distinguishes between suspecting someone of an act and proving them guilty of one.

[00:29:38]He has not closed the Loughgall question.

[00:29:41]He has said the evidence available to him does not allow the closure. McIntyre is a Republican critic of Adams. His position is not endorsement. It is the discipline of a former PIRA volunteer and lead Belfast project interviewer applied to the question itself.

[00:30:00]The verdict that does exist in the public record is a Dublin libel verdict.

[00:30:06]On the 30th of May 2025, a Dublin jury found that the BBC had defamed Adams in its 2016 Spotlight program alleging he had sanctioned the murder of Denis Donaldson, the Sinn Féin official who had confessed to being a long-running MI5 agent in 2005, and who had been shot dead at a cottage in Donegal in April 2006.

[00:30:33]The 2016 Spotlight program had relied on an anonymous source it called Martin, who claimed to have been a paid British agent inside the IRA and who had attributed the Donaldson sanction to Adams personally.

[00:30:50]The Dublin jury rejected the BBC's public interest defense. Adams was awarded damages.

[00:30:57]The verdict does not adjudicate any of the other accusations in the case file.

[00:31:02]It does establish that in May 2025, the Irish legal system found that an Adams as in former killer story carried by the BBC sourced from an anonymous self-described British agent was defamation.

[00:31:18]The British government has not published the human source files that would settle the Adams question.

[00:31:25]The PSNI has not opened them.

[00:31:28]The PIRA's surviving leadership has stayed quiet about Loughgall in a way it has not stayed quiet about other operations.

[00:31:37]The men who were inside the Citroen van that pulled up to Loughgall RUC station did not survive the next 90 seconds.

[00:31:46]The man who carried their coffins is still alive.

[00:31:50]He has answered the question every time it has been put to him.

[00:31:53]He has answered the same way.

[00:31:56]The question is now 38 years old.

[00:31:59]Either the documents will outlive the man or they will not exist.

[00:32:04]exist.