The new year is a good time to think about the best way of using my Patreon. While some of the posts there give a good flavour of my research, I've been thinking for some time about following the example of writers like Kevin Carson, who post the full working draft of their books online.
Over the past year, I have narrowed the focus of my draft book to tell the story of British intelligence in Ireland through profiles of individual intelligence chiefs. I've now reached the point where I have a full timeline of office-holders for the period I want to cover, and full profiles of some of them.
Be warned, however, that there is a lot of work still to do, and some parts of the text are a mass of unassimilated notes, while others still need to be fully referenced. At the moment, the profiles on Herbert, Rowley, Cradock, Doyne-Ditmas, and Deverell are most complete. There is a lot of unassimiliated material in relation to Eastwood, Payne, and Ranson. There is relatively little at the moment in relation to Parker, Ferneyhough and Knight, but I have made some progress here in recent months and should be able to update these shortly.
In every case, I have been able to link names appearing in Northern Ireland Office files, to those of known intelligence officers in other sources, most importantly the 1980s MI5 order of battle included in Stephen Dorril's The Silent Conspiracy.
With all of the above caveats, the current draft is now avallable to my Patreon subscribers here. Look out for future updates.
Leave a Reply