Early on the morning of the last day of August, Trevor Birney, a documentary-film producer, was awoken by a banging on the door of his home in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Birney’s wife looked out the window to see who it was, and announced that the driveway was full of police cars. Some two dozen armed policemen had assembled, and, as Birney let them in and they filed into his home, he thought, This is about the film.
Last year, Birney produced an investigative documentary, “No Stone Unturned,” directed by the Academy Award-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney. The film explored a subject that has vexed Northern Ireland. During the decades-long violent conflict known as the Troubles, some thirty-six hundred people were killed, many of them in paramilitary attacks. But some of those attacks, it now emerges, were abetted, to one degree or another, by the British state.
“No Stone Unturned” focusses on one atrocity in particular: on June 18, 1994, a crowd of locals gathered at a small bar in the village of Loughinisland, in County Down. Ireland was playing Italy in the World Cup that night, and the patrons cheered as they watched the match. Outside, a car pulled up. The driver stayed behind the wheel while two armed men entered the bar, and one opened fire with an assault rifle, killing six of the spectators. The victims, all of whom were Catholic, were shot in the back. The attack appeared to be sectarian, and a terrorist group, the Ulster Volunteer Force, or U.V.F., took credit for it. The police vowed to find the perpetrators, promising the victims’ families that they would “leave no stone unturned.”
But, according to Gibney’s film, what followed could at best be characterized as rank incompetence and callous disregard—and at worst as a systematic coverup. Key suspects were not promptly interviewed. Critical evidence was not exploited, and, in some instances, was destroyed. In a series of interviews with the family members of the dead, and with ex-cops and government investigators who are appalled by the shoddiness of the police work, Gibney captures what appears to have been a gross miscarriage of justice.
But he does more than that. Gibney interviews a longtime Belfast journalist named Barry McCaffrey, who is also a co-producer of the film. In 2011, McCaffrey received an anonymous delivery in the mail: a draft of an unpublished report by the office of the Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland, which was investigating the Loughinisland case at that time. The draft included the names of three primary suspects in the case, and Gibney and his colleagues chose to reveal them in the film. The filmmakers also obtained a copy of a letter that the wife of one of the men had sent anonymously to a local politician shortly after the murders, in which she named the same three suspects, and identified her husband as the shooter.
You might suppose that, after “No Stone Unturned” opened last year, the Police Service of Northern Ireland would have questioned the suspects. In fact, numerous people had been arrested and questioned by the police in the months and years after the attack, including the three men whom Gibney identified. (The alleged shooter was questioned twice.) But no one was ever charged in the case. Reportedly, two of the men had previously denied any involvement; the whereabouts of the third man are apparently unknown. None of the three men named publicly contested the charges made in the film. Even so, the police took no further action, and Gibney, Birney, and McCaffrey think that they know why.
Throughout the Troubles, the British security services recruited paramilitaries to work as informants and double agents. Many of these people, in their paramilitary day jobs, were engaged in the most loathsome criminal behavior. Often, the state knew about this activity, but did nothing about it. In fact, in an unsavory paradox, the more inclined an agent was to commit atrocities, the more effective was his cover. As a former British military-intelligence officer once explained, a preconception among some paramilitaries was that “if you are dirty—that is, if you have killed—then you cannot be an agent.” But numerous assets of the British Crown did commit murder, in some cases many murders, and this raises profound questions about the complicity (and the potential legal liability) of the government in such killings.
In the case of Loughinisland, “No Stone Unturned” suggests that the security forces may have known in advance that the massacre was going to happen, that they may have had prior knowledge of—and turned a blind eye to—a clandestine arms shipment from South Africa that supplied the assault rifle used in the attack, and that, in the immediate aftermath of the incident, they almost certainly knew who the suspects were and where to find them. But the police protected them, the film implies, because at least one of them was working as an agent for the British government.
I should disclose here that I am working on an unrelated project with Gibney, and that I have written a book about the Troubles that will soon be published, which explores some of these issues. But, if you are inclined to dismiss a tale of perfidious intrigue like the one outlined above as a conspiracy theory, let me assure you that, during the Troubles, such conduct on the part of the British security forces was common. In 2012, Prime Minister David Cameron acknowledged that there had been “shocking levels of collusion” between the state and paramilitary groups. And, as the film shows, a final Police Ombudsman’s report on the Loughinisland attack, published in 2016, found that, while there was no evidence to indicate that authorities had prior knowledge of it, collusion was “a significant feature” of the murders, and that police informants were involved in both the procurement of the weapons and, possibly, in the attack itself.
The published report does not name any suspects, but perhaps the best evidence that Gibney and his colleagues were onto something came this past August, when the police raided Trevor Birney’s house. They searched every room and seized a computer, cell phones, and U.S.B. drives. At the same time, a second contingent of police went to Barry McCaffrey’s home, also in Belfast, and a third raided the offices of Birney’s production company and copied a computer server that contained years of sensitive reporting. Birney and McCaffrey estimate that, in total, as many as a hundred officers took part in the operation—a show of force that seems hard to account for, unless the objective was intimidation. Birney was arrested in front of his children and taken to a police station, along with McCaffrey, who was also arrested. They were held by the police and questioned for fourteen hours.
Their ostensible crime was the “theft” of a government document—the draft Ombudsman’s report identifying the suspects, which had been anonymously sent to McCaffrey. The filmmakers were also informed that they may have violated Britain’s Official Secrets Act, an offense which, in the event that they were convicted, could mean years in prison. Neither Birney nor McCaffrey was charged, and they were released on the condition that they return for further questioning on November 30th.
Gibney was informed that he, too, is a “suspect” in the case, and could potentially be subject to arrest if he entered the United Kingdom. (He has hired a British lawyer and is negotiating to meet authorities for questioning voluntarily.) It is not clear why the arrests took place nearly a year after the release of “No Stone Unturned,” but Birney suggested to me that the Police Service of Northern Ireland is seeking to strong-arm the filmmakers into giving up a source (although McCaffrey says that he has no idea who sent him the document). Birney added, “There may be another element pushing this”: British intelligence. When the police approached a judge, in order to secure the search warrants to pursue Birney and McCaffrey, the judge asked whether this was not “an exercise in shooting a crow to warn other crows about landing in the farmer’s field.” In other words, the security services may be endeavoring, with these arrests, to forestall further investigations into complicity in other episodes from the Troubles.
It has become commonplace to observe that these are perilous times for journalism, and for journalists. President Trump has set the tone, calling members of the press “the enemy of the people.” In June, five people were slaughtered in the Annapolis newsroom of the Capital Gazette. Earlier this month, the journalist Jamal Khashoggi was reportedly murdered and dismembered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, apparently by agents of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The United Kingdom prides itself on being a liberal democracy, but, to Alex Gibney, the reaction to “No Stone Unturned” feels dismayingly in keeping with our times: when confronted with a film that identified prime suspects in a massacre of unarmed British citizens, the authorities made no apparent effort to further question those suspects—and arrested the filmmakers instead.
