The Informer

Kenneth Lennon was on the run when he wandered into Ronnie Scott's jazz club in London's Soho district one night earlier this month. He also was drunk. George Melly, a blues singer and former film critic for the Sunday Observer, had never seen him before, but Lennon insisted on buying Melly a brandy. "He seemed pretty frightened," Melly recalls, "but the fear was covered with drink, and drink had given him a certain courage."

Lennon told Melly that he had been an informer for Scotland Yard's Special Branch and had been responsible for sending to prison some friends who were sympathizers of the Irish Republican Army. "I am not getting protection," he muttered. "There are two lots after me, both lots." Melly suggested he tell his story to the National Council for Civil Liberties (N.C.C.L.), and Lennon left with what seemed at the time to be characteristic barroom bravado. Says Melly: "He told me that if I read in the papers that he had been found face down in a puddle, or maybe it was a ditch, I would know he was speaking the truth."

Four days later, Lennon's body was found in a Surrey ditch; he had been shot twice in the back of the head. Police said it looked like an I.R.A. execution. Before he died, Lennon had taken Melly's advice and gone to the N.C.C.L. For six hours the disheveled, unshaven Ulsterman spilled out an incredible story of how he had been blackmailed into becoming an informer on the I.R.A. for British intelligence. He was clearly afraid for his life, recalled Larry Grant, the council's senior legal officer, and feared not only that the vengeful I.R.A. would hunt him down but that "the Special Branch might try to kill him and make it look as though it were an Irish job."

The council's release of Lennon's 17-page statement last week touched off new demands for a full parliamentary inquiry into British counterterrorist methods. A month ago, Kenneth Littlejohn, 32, a convicted bank robber, escaped from Dublin's Mountjoy prison. He set off a public clamor by claiming in a series of interviews that he had been hired by British intelligence to infiltrate the I.R.A. and stir up trouble in the Irish Republic, thereby forcing Dublin to crack down on terrorist sanctuaries. Littlejohn, who is still at large, said that he had been ordered by the British to commit the bank robbery. He added that he had worked with an assassination squad in an unsuccessful attempt to murder Sean MacStiofain, chief of the extremist and sometimes murderous Provisional I.R.A.

Egg Them On. A native of Newry in County Down, Lennon, 30, told the N.C.C.L. that he had been approached by two Scotland Yard detectives one day last April when he was leaving a London hospital where his wife was being treated for a brain tumor. The detectives knew about his wife's illness ("All the boys at the Yard are sympathetic," said one). They also knew that his sister Bernadette was active in politics in Newry, and showed him photos of a 1969 civil rights demonstration in Ulster during which Lennon had helped to throw metal crowd-control barricades into a canal.

After the detectives threatened to arrest both him and his sister, Lennon agreed to work as an undercover agent for $50 a month. He was told to get into the branch of Sinn Fein (the I.R. A.'s political arm) in Luton, a north London industrial suburb. More specifically, he was to do his drinking at a pub called The Foresters, where he met several Irish militants. "I was told to get in on everything they were up to," Lennon recalled. "I cannot remember the exact words [the detectives] used, but one of them said that I should egg them on."

Eventually, Lennon helped form a unit with four I.R.A. sympathizers. "It was a unit of nothing specifically," Lennon said. "This was not an official branch of the military wing of the I.R.A. No one in Ireland was aware that there was a group of this nature in Luton. We had no real plan, although we decided to organize to get weapons. We managed to get some old shotguns. They were bloody antiques."

He reported regularly by phone to his contact, Scotland Yard Detective Inspector Ron Wicken. Said Lennon: "He was kept aware at every stage of the group's activities." One such activity was an abortive payroll heist at a sewage works, which went awry when the payroll messenger did not show up. Later the group planned to raise money for the cause by staging another payroll robbery at a construction site. One of the unit's members, Pat O'Brien, was on holiday in Ireland, and Lennon was ordered by Wicken to steer clear of the caper. The three other members of the unit walked into a trap and were arrested before the heist could take place. In December all were found guilty of plotting the robbery and sentenced to ten years in prison.

"I was told to lie low for a couple of weeks and carry on as normal, which I did," Lennon related. When O'Brien, 18, returned from Ireland, he "said he was thinking about how he could get them out. He was only a young kid and a bit of a romantic." Inspector Wicken was taken with the idea, on the theory that this might widen the net: "He told me to play along with it." In January Lennon and O'Brien drove to Birmingham to reconnoiter the Winson Green prison, where one of the prisoners was held. "I told Pat to get out and take a photo. I sat in the van."

Good Show. Both were arrested on the spot and charged with plotting to arrange an escape from the prison. When Lennon made contact with the Special Branch, he was told: "Don't worry, the proper strings will be pulled." With the help of Lennon's evidence, which he said was doctored by the police to make a stronger government case, O'Brien was sentenced to three years hi prison. Lennon was acquitted--and he was publicly praised by the prosecutor for being "frank and honest" with the police. If the I.R.A. was not already onto Lennon, those words could have sealed his fate.

When he returned to London, Lennon had drinks in a bar with Wicken and another detective. "Good show, well done," he was told. They suggested that he go back to Luton and bluff it out and, as his next assignment, that he try to get close to the national secretary of Sinn Fein in Britain. But by now Kenneth Lennon had decided he wanted out. Anguished over his betrayal of his friends, he spent that sleepless night drinking, talking to George Melly, and wandering the streets. The next day he went to the N.C.C.L.--and soon after to his death.

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