Last Refuge default
ANOTHER EXAMPLE of the ‘special relationship’ between the US and Britain is the revelation – covered in the British media but not, for some reason, in the Irish media – that the US authorities ordered the FBI to destroy incriminating documents they held on the late Lord Mountbatten covering his activities since World War II. Meanwhile, both the British and Irish governments have also ensured there are no files on the assassination of Mountbatten by the IRA.
Author of The Mountbattens: Their Lives & Loves, Andrew Lownie, told the MailOnline in the UK that he had discovered a war-time FBI file that said Mountbatten had a “perversion for young boys”. Lownie requested other files on the British royal but was told they had all been destroyed. When Lownie asked when, he was told: “After you had asked for them.”
Lownie also wrote that the reason for the destruction of the files in 2019 was that the US authorities had received a request from the British government to do so.
In Britain, the law states that the government must lodge all historic records with the National Archive after 20 years. As an historian of some repute, Lownie is most frustrated by the destruction of such records in the US, but closer to home he was even more frustrated.
Interestingly, Lownie also found that no files on Mountbatten’s killing by the IRA in 1979 can be found in either the British or Irish archives. That they cannot be found in the British archives is perhaps logical – given security and/or scandalous sensitivities – but why are the Irish special branch and authorities so secretive? Is this because they, too, developed a ‘special relationship’ with British agents and securocrats during the Troubles and even afterwards, during the peace process?
Writing in the Mail’s new “Royals” section, Lownie pointed out that while An Garda Síochána claimed the killing was still an active investigation, the bomb maker had been convicted, served a sentence and then released in 1998 under the Good Friday agreement.
