Roy Greenslade: the inside story of the Fleet Street editor and the IRA

The IRA weapons dump at a remote spot in the Welsh countryside was thought to be intended for a Christmas bombing campaign on the British mainland.

In the autumn of 1989 the Sunday Times had heard that police were keeping watch on the secret cache but, with the agreement of Scotland Yard, had chosen not to publish details of its existence. The authorities needed more time.

But more than 30 years on there are now questions being asked about whether the information on the weapons dump and other Sunday Times investigations into the IRA stayed within its newsroom.

It emerged last week that one of its most senior executives at the time was secretly supporting the IRA, covertly cheering the terrorist group on from behind the office walls and condoning its bombing campaign that murdered innocent civilians both on the mainland and in Northern Ireland.

In an article, Roy Greenslade revealed that while working at the heart of Fleet Street he had been secretly devoted to the paramilitary cause, and may even have tried to meddle with his own newspaper coverage to try and discredit the British armed forces.

Writing under a pseudonym, Greenslade had contributed articles to a Sinn Féin pamphlet, attacking the British government.

And perhaps most troublingly of all, Greenslade revealed that he had enjoyed close relationships with senior Republican leaders, and even spent his family Christmases with a senior Sinn Féin activist named as a member of the IRA’s Army Council.

“In a sense, I guess I employed what might be called journalistic entryism,” Greenslade wrote in last week’s British Journalism Review. The 74-year-old added that he had been “in complete agreement about the right of the Irish people to engage in armed struggle” – even as the newspapers he worked for denounced the IRA’s terror campaigns.

“I came to accept that the fight between the forces of the state and a group of insurgents was unequal and therefore could not be fought on conventional terms,” Greenslade wrote. “In other words, I supported the use of physical force.”

Greenslade left the Sunday Times in 1990, and after a short stint as editor of the Daily Mirror, spent much of the following 28 years as a media columnist for The Guardian, frequently berating other journalists for perceived ethical misdeeds.

Greenslade was also hired as professor of journalism at City University of London, where students paid £9,000 a year for a course which included his lectures on how journalists should behave. Later he gave evidence to the Leveson Inquiry.

But the journalists who worked under Greenslade are now concerned that he may have been guilty of far worse than hypocrisy.  Instead, they say his admissions raise serious questions about whether intelligence on IRA activities may have found its way to the Republican leadership. Others say Greenslade would have been privy to Government briefings while editing the Daily Mirror in the early 1990s.

David Leppard worked as crime correspondent at the Sunday Times under Greenslade in the late 1980s, reporting weekly on the IRA campaign of bombings and assassinations, and later led the newspaper’s Insight investigations team.

“The entire thing is scandalous. Roy has questions to answer,” Leppard told The Telegraph this week.

“We were getting information, which we were relaying to Roy in advance of publication about police operations, security service information. Much of that information we couldn’t publish because it would compromise active investigations,” he said.

“There always were discussions in the office when Roy was the managing editor about surveillance operations, technical details around IRA mortars engineering, about the type of explosives they were using, about the sources of supply from the Republic and Northern Ireland into the mainland, about police surveillance operations, about current investigations on people who had been arrested, fingerprint analysis on bus tickets, all sorts of stuff.

“Quite frankly, if I had known what I now know, I would have refused to do that job. It would have been potentially compromising my sources, but also national security. Not to be pompous, but people were dying.”

Leppard remembered one instance when reporters got wind of a surveillance operation codenamed Pebble on a suspected IRA arms dump in Pembrokeshire, but kept the information quiet for weeks after Scotland Yard imposed a news blackout. In December 1989 armed police made their move, arresting two IRA operatives and uncovering a cache containing 100lb of Semtex explosives, detonators, and heavy automatic weapons. The head of Scotland Yard’s anti-terrorist branch later said the store was likely intended for a Christmas bombing campaign.

“That was the kind of thing we knew about, but didn’t publish,” Leppard said.

“The fact that police arrested the two men might suggest that the IRA didn’t know they were watching. But we knew that the IRA had a very concentrated and forensic information-gathering exercise about what the police knew about them. They had a counterintelligence department, obviously, counter surveillance techniques. They would have wanted to know the kind of information that we had,” he said.

“Roy is claiming to be some sort of entryist on behalf of the IRA into the media, and I’ve covered a lot of intelligence stories in my life. And we all know an entryist is a double-sided operation where the person infiltrates an organisation and then reports back to the handler.

“Roy had access to highly classified information. And if he wanted to be an agent inside the heart of the British establishment, in order to obtain information about what the security apparatus knew about the IRA, it’s difficult to see a better position to be in.

“I’m extremely alarmed about the prospect that information we may have acquired from the most confidential of all sources might have found its way somehow to the very people that we were investigating.”

Greenslade discussed the period in an interview with the British Museum in 2007, unearthed by The Telegraph.

“Various people in the office had MI5 contacts. And it was quite amusing to watch them all come up with different stories from each MI5 contact, none of whom were ever named to us,” he said.

Less amusingly, in 1983, a 24-year-old journalist named Philip Geddes was killed by an IRA bomb outside Harrods. Christopher Wilson, an author and broadcaster who helped set up a memorial fund in his memory, this week asked whether Greenslade may have information about those connected with terrorist acts.

Greenslade told The Telegraph that he categorically denied passing on any information to the IRA, adding that he never had access to classified state secrets. “I was an intellectual supporter, not a practical one,” he added. 

Indeed, some of Greenslade’s other colleagues at the time – including his former boss – doubt that he passed on any significant information to his associates in the IRA.

Andrew Neil, editor of the Sunday Times from 1983 to 1994 and a staunch unionist, told The Telegraph: “I find it hard to see how he could have had any influence.” The newspaper had a track record of investigating the IRA, naming first Gerry Adams as the IRA’s chief of staff, and then Thomas ‘Slab’ Murphy as its senior organiser in the 1990s, and attracted criticism for its attempts to undermine the TV documentary Death on the Rock over the shooting of an IRA terror cell by the SAS in Gibraltar in 1988.

Greenslade by his own admission tried to interfere with the Sunday Times’s coverage by calling one of his own reporters in a fake Irish accent, relaying a bizarre tip that SAS soldiers had boasted to an airline captain in a hotel bar that they had known the men were unarmed. Greenslade later admitted in the British Museum interview that he had been handed the information by a “Republican contact”, adding: “I did my little bit to try and get at the truth.”

Peter Hounam, the Sunday Times reporter who Greenslade attempted to hoodwink with his fake Irish accent, told the Press Gazette yesterday: “Setting aside my Gibraltar investigation, my concern is now that our wider investigations into the Troubles may have been compromised if, as Roy says, he was so close to paramilitaries.”

But Neil said: “Even if he [Greenslade] called up the IRA, so what? I can’t think of any time involving the IRA or the Irish situation where he had any role.

“We knew he had a Trotskyite view. We didn’t know he was an IRA supporter. He might have had Republican sympathies but he never tried to force them on the paper.”

The greater worry was “Roy’s ability to embellish stories. You could take the guy out of The Sun but never The Sun out of the guy,” said Neil of Greenslade’s move from the tabloid to his broadsheet newspaper, adding: “In the history of British journalism he doesn’t even merit a footnote. Those who worked with him more closely than me, when they saw he had become professor of journalism on ethics, said it was akin to Henry Kissinger winning the peace prize.”

Greenslade explained in his recent article how he was first drawn to the IRA cause in the early 1970s, after a “a quick-fire educational tour” of Belfast and Londonderry while working for The Daily Mail.

Later he met an Irish journalist, Noreen Taylor, who at the time was distributing pamphlets for Clann na hÉireann, an IRA-supporting group for Irish emigrants. Her parents were staunch Catholics who had moved to Glasgow from County Donegal so that her father could find work as a bricklayer during the Troubles. She was “imbued with a Republican spirit,” Greenslade wrote last week.

Taylor was already married to a senior journalist at the Daily Mirror, and Greenslade’s short first stint at the paper – before he returned as editor, and later admitted fixing a £1m Spot the Ball competition – was cut short when her angry husband confronted him in the newsroom.

Soon afterwards on a trip to Ireland, Taylor, now Greenslade’s partner, introduced him to Patrick Doherty, who later became vice chairman of Sinn Féin and was once named in Parliament as a member of the IRA’s Army Council.

“My first kiss of Donegal in June 1971 turned that youthful infatuation into a full-blooded love affair,” Greenslade later wrote of the visit.

“I closed my eyes. I had already fallen for Noreen. I knew I was falling in love with her homeland too.

“Back in Britain days later, I haunted bookshops, reading everything I could find about Ireland – history, politics, topography, literature, mythology, poetry and especially everything about Donegal.

“I searched in vain for an Irish connection. My mother thought there had been talk of my great-grandmother being Irish. If she was, we could find no proof. Did my name offer a clue? In Olde English, I discovered it was grene slaed, which means ‘dweller in the green valley’. Well, in Donegal there were green valleys galore.”

Greenslade’s IRA sympathies grew deeper after the events of Bloody Sunday in January 1972. As he rose through the Fleet Street ranks, however, Greenslade decided to keep his views on Ireland to himself.

“I needed a wage because I was on the verge of taking a mortgage,” he wrote. “Better, then, to button my lip and carry on... to own up to supporting Irish Republicans would result in my losing my job.”

Greenslade moved in with Taylor and her young son and daughter (Hollywood actress Natasha McElhone) and the pair later married. Family Christmases were spent at the Dohertys’ home in Donegal. Eventually, in 1989, the couple decided to buy their own house nearby, but the local police were aware of Greenslade’s IRA connections and did not give the family a warm welcome.

“I have fantastic sympathies with the Irish Republican movement and lots of our friends are drawn from that,” Greenslade said in the British Museum interview.

“Being friendly with the vice president of Sinn Féin, our closest friend there, drew some unwelcome attention from some people. Within the town, it was well known. I don’t think the guards, which is what they call the police in Ireland, were my best friends then.”

Greenslade admitted in last week’s article that while working on Fleet Street he was secretly writing articles for An Phoblacht, Sinn Féin’s media outlet, under the pseudonym George King (‘King George’ reversed).

An Phoblacht used a number of fake bylines, to give the impression of a much larger staff of volunteers and was edited and laid out from Sinn Féin’s headquarters in Parnell Square in Dublin.

One source suggested that Greenslade wrote editorials, not just articles.

“He was Johnny on the Spot as far as events in London went, like the mortar attack on John Major’s cabinet during the first Gulf War, and the Brixton jail escape in 1991,” the source added.

Greenslade has claimed that he and his wife “did not know the level of [Doherty’s] participation” in the IRA despite witnessing police raids on Doherty’s home. Yet he has never made mention of Doherty’s notorious brother Hugh, a member of the Balcombe Street Gang arrested in London during a six-day siege in December 1975, after 35 people had been killed in a campaign of gun and bomb attacks lasting more than a year.

One source claimed that Greenslade’s other associates at the time included Jimmy ‘Mortars’ Monaghan, who reportedly gained his nickname due to his skill in manufacturing homemade mortars and once served as head of the IRA’s engineering section. Greenslade denies this.

Perhaps Greenslade’s most mysterious friendship, however, was with the suspected Hyde Park bomber John Downey. Identified as a suspect a month after the 1982 bombing that killed four British soldiers, Downey had been convicted of IRA membership in May 1974, and was also wanted in connection with a car bomb that killed two UDR members in August 1972.

After police put his face on a wanted poster, Downey was reported to have led a shadowy existence during the 1980s, moving between Republican safe houses. Later he opened an oyster farm near a village in Donegal, close to Greenslade’s home.

During the collapse of Downey’s eventual trial in 2014, it was revealed that Greenslade had stood surety for him when he was granted bail. The journalist bought his oysters from Downey, the court heard.

In last week’s article, Greenslade insisted: “John was, and is, a Donegal neighbour. All I know of him is his dedication to peace.”

Family members of the Hyde Park victims, however, believe Greenslade has questions to answer over his friendship with Downey, and his links to the IRA.

In a letter seen by The Telegraph, the brother of 19-year-old trooper Simon Tipper, who was killed in the attack a fortnight after his wedding, urges Boris Johnson to back a police investigation into Greenslade’s activities.

“Greenslade is, of course, entitled to express his political opinion and support for Irish Republicanism. However, his glorification of and support for terrorist violence is dangerous and it appears to me to be potentially criminal,” Mark Tipper writes.

“I would like to ask for your support to ensure that all necessary and appropriate investigations are carried out into whether, in his position as the editor of a national newspaper and a senior executive on other newspapers including the Sunday Times, Greenslade might have provided material support to the IRA by passing it confidential and sensitive information.”

In a statement issued to The Telegraph, Greenslade said: “I was not privy to any classified information. I was an office-bound executive with no contact personally or by phone with any person from the security services. So, it follows that I didn’t pass any such information to anyone.

“I categorically deny passing any information to the IRA at any time. I didn’t have any information to pass on. I was an intellectual supporter, not a practical one.”

But a Whitehall source signalled tacit support for an investigation into Greenslade last night, suggesting that his activities “cannot be overlooked”.

“Roy Greenslade recently admitting he supported IRA terrorism during the Troubles is abhorrent and an insult to the families of all those who were killed at the hands of the IRA,” the source said.

“The fact he had until relatively recently been teaching media ethics to journalism students is bitterly ironic. His shameful duplicity cannot be overlooked.”

The IRA and The Guardian

After years of furious denials, former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger has finally condemned Roy Greenslade.

In a statement, Rusbridger said Greenslade – who for 28 years used his pages to lecture the rest of Fleet Street on ethics – should have been more honest about his “obnoxious” support for the IRA.

Greenslade ought to have been “frank about his own political beliefs and attachments” when publishing articles on Northern Ireland, he added.

But the idea that Rusbridger was in the dark about Greenslade’s beliefs may come as a surprise to his critics.

More than 20 years ago, an article in The Spectator magazine alleged that there was an “IRA cell” at The Guardian, with Greenslade at its heart.

The piece by Stephen Glover claimed that the paper’s pro-IRA leanings were evident in its editorials, often critical of British government policy.

Other members of the cell allegedly included Georgina Henry, the paper’s deputy editor, who died in 2014. At the time, Rusbridger responded furiously, issuing a long statement denying reported aspects of Greenslade’s friendship with former Sinn Féin vice president Pat Doherty, and insisting that Henry had never written leading articles for the paper.

The Spectator refused to apologise, instead running an interview with Ronan Bennett – Henry’s partner, a former Republican anarchist turned screenwriter and a close friend of Rusbridger’s, who co-wrote a BBC drama with him on genetic engineering in 2000 – conducted by the magazine’s then-editor, Boris Johnson.

When Johnson asked Bennett whether he would turn in the Omagh bombers if he found out who they were, the reply was “No.”

In the intervening years, Greenslade’s columns and blogs frequently appeared to reflect his Republican sympathies, including “BBC programme used anonymous single source to smear Gerry Adams” in 2016, and “The IRA hunger strike and Fleet Street’s graveyard of truth” in 2011.

A Guardian insider said this week that the newspaper regularly hosted “Shinners” – members of Sinn Féin – and that “Martin McGuinness was a regular in the editor’s office” during the Alan Rusbridger years. “It is no secret Shinners were in and out the offices,” the journalist told The Telegraph.

Rusbridger had also been aware of criticism aimed at Greenslade after he openly criticised an alleged IRA rape victim, accusing her of hiding an anti-Sinn Féin bias.

In a 2014 Guardian column, Greenslade questioned the claims made by Máiría Cahill in an award-winning BBC documentary, suggesting that she had “only sought to go public with her sexual abuse allegations after she had turned against the organisation for political reasons”.

The BBC has contacted Greenslade for a response. In a statement this week, The Guardian said it had received a complaint from Cahill and “is investigating this issue”.

“The readers’ editor will also be reviewing other historical Roy Greenslade articles concerning Northern Ireland, to ensure that they meet The Guardian’s editorial standards and are sufficiently transparent,” a spokesman said.

Greenslade insisted that he “did nothing more than the scores of journalists who keep their political views to themselves”.

Read more: My friend was murdered by my boss’s mates in the IRA