The Russian spy named Murphy practiced Murphy's law

"He clearly was a Russian named Murphy. It was very odd"

So spoke a neighbor of Richard Murphy, the spy who was 'deep undercover' in Montclair New Jersey with his wife Cynthia Murphy.

Except the neighbor immediately recognized a Russian accent when the Irishman Murphy spoke.

Some undercover operative.

This was not From Russia with Love, more like From Russia with Laughs, starring Peter Sellers rather than Sean Connery.

The Montclair 'Irish' couple were as Irish as vodka, as convincing as the Bolshoi doing Riverdance.

We'll probably find out they celebrated St. Patrick's Day with a Cossack dance on the lawn.

Something was odd, so odd that even neighbors noticed right away.

First Cynthia said she was from Canada, then Scandinavia then -- well never mind.

They appeared to gather no more information that Misha back in Moscow could not have gathered from a casual trawl of the Internet.

Richard went back to Moscow in February grabbing a fake Irish passport on the way in Vienna to cover his tracks.

He was unsuccessful in that as well as the FBI had him in their sights all the way.

Inspector Clouseau could probably have kept tabs on them, so poorly were they covering their tracks.

The bumbling spies were straight out of a Pink Panther script.

As Clouseau once remarked "There is a time to laugh and a time not to laugh, and this is not one of them. "

We learnt Richard Murphy rarely left the house, complained bitterly to his bosses about how tough the assignment was, while his wife just go on with it.

She seemed to have a successful career, but a low level money manager in Manhattan is not exactly a job at the center of the Russian/U.S. axis of influence

The real tragedy here is their two little daughters.

Who now will look after them? They have no relatives in America and don't even know who their parent really are.

Amid the farce there is real tragedy for them.

Arrested Russian spies used Irish identities and passports

Members of a Russian spy ring arrested in the United States at the weekend used Irish names and false Irish passports.

One of the spies, American alias Richard Murphy, traveled in February this year to Rome to collect an Irish passport which bore the name Eunan Gerard Doherty and which had been issued in Dublin in July 2001.

He then flew on to Moscow and returned on March 3 with a mysterious laptop which he later tuned over to another Russian agent in New York

In order to get the Irish passport in Rome Murphy was told to would approach a Russian operative and ask, "Excuse me, could we have met in Malta in 1999?"

"Yes indeed,” the answer should be. “I was in La Valetta, but in 2000.”

According to Moscow’s instructions, the stranger then slipped the spy a false Irish passport, for travel on to Russia.

The New York Times reports that "forged passports of several countries" were found among those who were arrested which may very well include Irish ones.

Ten people in all have been arrested with one other person being sought.

Three of those arrested used Irish names, Richard and Cynthia Murphy and Tracey Foley. They worked undercover for the SVR the Russian Republic's successor to the KGB.

The documents also detailed what the FBI called the “Illegals Program,” an ambitious, long-term effort by the S.V.R., the successor to the Soviet K.G.B., to plant Russian spies in the United States to collect information.

The FBI described the "Illegals" as being paired in Russia "so that they can live together and work together in a host country, under the guise of a married couple. Illegals who are placed together and cohabit in the country to which they are assigned will often have children together".

Richard and Cynthia Murphy appeared to be living a typical American middle class life in Montclair ,New Jersey a New York suburb.

The Murphy family had arrived less than 2 years ago and were quickly liked by the neighbors.

However their real purpose according to the FBI was very different.

The Feds displayed an intercepted message from headquarters in Moscow which the couple received.

It read:
"You were sent to the USA for long-term service trip. Your education, bank account, car, house … all these serve one goal: fulfill your mission,"

In one intercepted message, Richard and Cynthia Murphy had to defend buying the house in New Jersey.

"We are under the impression that C.(headquarters) views our ownership of the house as a deviation from the original purpose of our mission here," they said in an intercepted message. "We'd like to assure you that we do remember what it is. From our perspective, purchase of the house was solely a natural progression of our prolonged stay here. It was a convenient way to solve the housing issue, plus to 'do as the Romans do' in a society that values home ownership."

Court documents reveal that Cynthia Murphy had developed very close links with a very well connected New York financier and political contributor who was also very friendly with a key cabinet member.

And there are also allegations of fabricated Canadian passports, Irish and Latino surnames, and fake college diplomas.

Time to welcome the Queen to Ireland

It is time to let the Queen come to Ireland.

Yesterday's announcement that she would touch down on Irish soil sometime in the next 18 months was greeted with a barrage of criticism from Sinn Fein and other Republican groups.

They argued the time is not right as partition is still in place and the Queen remains Commander in Chief of the British Army.

But the reality is that the border has never mattered less and the British Army is essentially off the streets of Northern Ireland.

In their place is a new police force drawn from both communities. There are no longer any physical checkpoints when entering Northern Ireland and unless you were looking for it the actual border has become quite hard to find.

There are cross-border bodies now such as Tourism Ireland handling the work on an all-island basis. Slowly but surely the border is dissolving in front of our eyes.

We give the Queen far too much credit if we cast her as a major figure in all of this.

She is what she has always been, a member of the lucky sperm club, born into nobility and privilege, a figurehead at best an irrelevancy in actual fact.

A trip to Ireland would doubtless bring out all the sycophants and hangers on who gush over everything royal.

The Queen is essentially an OK magazine celebrity now, like a Madonna or a Lady Gaga, someone with a certain entertainment value, but no real clout about anything.

The Irish populace is sufficiently mature to figure all this out, which is why the news of her impending visit hardly raised a hackle apart from Sinn Fein.

Ironically it was an earlier visit by a monarch, Queen Victoria in 1900 that indirectly led to the establishment of Sinn Fein.

Victoria came to try and enlist young Irishmen in the British Army for the Boer War.

Arthur Griffith, later founder of Sinn Fein, bitterly opposed her visit and used the contacts he made then to form Sinn Fein five years later.

There are no such high stakes on this occasion. The visit will be covered like a celebrity wedding amid much oohing and ahhing from the tabloids.

It will show that Ireland is now a mature Republic perfectly at ease with a foreign monarch visiting.

David Cameron's apology for Bloody Sunday is a hundred times more important.

David Cameron apology points way for Pope Benedict and BP

What's in an apology?

David Cameron's apology for Bloody Sunday has struck a deep nerve in Northern Ireland.

Nationalists embraced it, even cheered him in their thousands as they listened to his speech.

The heartfelt nature of the apology, the fact that it came after an exhaustive investigation and Cameron's straightforward declaration that the British Army had done grievous wrong made the apology utterly acceptable.

Contrast it with the Pope Benedict's apology for the rampant child child sex abuse carried out by many Irish priests which he also delivered to the Irish people.

The response was lukewarm to say the least. Unlike Cameron who showed with both words and deed that he was serious, Pope Benedict was clearly attempting a damage limitation exercise rather than directly confronting the massive problem his church had created.

The Irish public saw through that and opinion polls revealed them as very skeptical of the pope's words.

The difference is that most Irish firmly believe that the church is still hiding much of the abuse and are refusing to hold any further inquiries.

The British government on the other hand spent $300 million on an exhaustive investigation and spent 12 years documenting every possible aspect of what happened on Bloody Sunday.

So apologies have to be accompanied by good deeds, what Aristotle called acts of good authority.

Likewise with BP, we see the apology of the chairman for the Louisiana oil spill but no acts of good authority to accept blame or put things right until they were absolutely forced to.

Like Cameron, previous British Prime Minister Tony Blair made a public apology to the Irish people, that time for the Irish Famine and Britain's shameful neglect at the time.

That too was seen as a great act , because Blair had shown with his work on the peace process that he was utterly committed to solving the Irish question.

Strange to say, but the pope and BP could learn a lot from David Cameron and Tony Blair about how to apologize and mean it.

David Cameron shows class on Bloody Sunday apology

The admission by British Prime Minister David Cameron that those killed on Bloody Sunday were innocent of any crime is an extraordinary statement.

It is even more significant than Tony Blair's apology about the Irish Famine and Britain's role in it.

It speaks very well of Cameron, especially as he is a Tory leader, and that party has been very slow to admit any culpability in the past on issues relating to the conduct of British forces in Northern Ireland during the Troubles.

The sight of nationalists in Derry applauding and cheering Cameron's remarks must have made heads spin at the incongruity of it all.

The pity is that Edward Heath the Prime Minister of the day on Bloody Sunday and the Widgery Inquiry that whitewashed the killings did not use the words that Cameron used on Tuesday.

If they had the history of Northern Ireland would have been completely different.

The Bloody Sunday massacre and the cover up were the birthing pangs of the IRA.
That event and internment without trial that preceded it were the midwives of the IRA.

After those killings and the cover up the civil rights movement disappeared effectively replaced by violence in an attempt to get the British Army out.

Remember the British Embassy in Dublin was torched to the ground after Bloody Sunday as the reaction in the Irish Republic was every bit as violent as in Northern Ireland.

The police in Dublin let the embassy burn as they knew if they tried to stop it they would be attacked.

There were mass demonstrations in the U.S. Everywhere Irish blood was up.

Nationalists would never trust the British state again, yet remarkably a year or so earlier they had welcomed British troops into Northern Ireland as their saviors against the Unionist government intent on keeping them down by whatever means possible.

That ended forever that sunny but cold January day back in 1972. What followed was a quarter century of violence, much of which might never have happened if Bloody Sunday had not occurred.

At last a British Prime Minister has set the record straight.

It is better late than never

Beware another British Bloody Sunday cover-up

There will be a firestorm of coverage of the conclusions of the Bloody Sunday inquiry set to be released on Tuesday.

Along with the coverage expect a full effort by apologists for the soldiers to excuse their horrific actions

Already we are seeing the knee-jerk reaction to the report from the powers-that-be in England.

Not since the Peterloo massacre of 150 years earlier had as many civilians been killed on a British street by authorities as were killed on Bloody Sunday in January 1972.

The urge to cover up the slaying of the 14 killed (13 killed, one died later) was quickly acted upon. Now all these years later it appears the truth is coming out.

That truth is not pretty. Paratroopers shot dead the 14 in cold blood.

Some may now be prosecuted for their crimes, according to one leak of the Saville Report which took 12 years and cost $300 million.

Already British government and army figures are desperately trying to downplay the report and cast aspersions on its findings.

The line will be that the soldiers were under enormous pressure and besides the IRA committed many atrocities too.

But the victims of the IRA were never blackened like those killed on Bloody Sunday were.

For decades the effort was made to somehow insist they were armed and dangerous. They were not, they were victims of a well set up paratroop operation aimed at intimidating the nationalist community by killing some of them

The new evidence clearly shows that.

The man, known as Soldier 027, told the inquiry that soldiers in his company had been encouraged to "get some kills" the night before Bloody Sunday, and that was seen as "tantamount to an order."

Soldier 027 spoke at the Saville inquiry of a total brutality among members of 1st Para, which he described as the army's "rottweiler".

He said: "I had the distinct impression that this was a case of some soldiers realizing this was an opportunity to fire their weapon and they did not want to miss the chance.

"There was no justification for a single shot I saw fired … the only threat was a large assembly of people and we were all experienced soldiers who had been through riot situations before."

O27 lives in witness protection now, forced to live a new life because some of his old comrades want to kill him

Then there was General Sir Robert Ford, commander of land forces in Northern Ireland.

Ford wrote a paper on the subject of "rioting". He said that it may be necessary to "shoot the ringleaders" after giving warnings.

That is the harsh reality of the Bloody Sunday killings.

It was open season on nationalists and they were gunned down like dogs.

No efforts to ever whitewash that truth will succeed.

Joe Biden more popular than Obama says Maureen Dowd

It takes Maureen Dowd to finally point out what media people have known for months.

Vice President Joe Biden is more popular than President Obama these days.

Dowd's column this Sunday morning slams Obama and how he treats the media.

Biden on the other hand is praised for his openness and popularity.

"Biden gave a press party at his house recently with a beach theme — complete with Uzi-size squirt guns and water slides. Journalists came with their families, schmoozed with top White House officials like David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel, and watched a dripping wet vice president walk around with his little grandson. One Obama aide remarked that Biden is “the most beloved person in the White House.”

"...the vice president is so lacking in any vengeful feelings for past reporting that left him for dead, I sometimes wonder if he’s really Irish." Dowd writes.

Dowd writes that Obama was always aloof and distrustful of the press despite the fact that most adored him during the campaign.

Now that some in the press have turned against him Dowd says Obama is proving very thin skinned.

" It hurts Obama to be a crybaby about it, and to blame the press and the “old Washington game” for his own communication failures." Dowd writes

Amazing isn't it when you think of it that Biden has become the more popular of the two.

Suddenly Obama's incredible leap from obscurity to the White House is coming back to haunt him when it comes to the long term savvy on how to deal with the press.

In this case it is Irish Uncle Joe who is showing the way.

Sarah Palin no match for Bill Clinton in November

When it comes to political endorsements give me Bill Clinton over Sarah Palin any day.

Yes I know the media is trumpeting Palin as the new Moses who will lead all candidates she supports to the promised land.

She won three out of four races on Tuesday night but in the process, may have made it more difficult for those candidates to win in a general election.

While a Palin endorsement is gold in a Republican primary, especially where Teabaggers are concerned, that same endorsement can be turned into clay by a Democratic opponent.

That is because Sarah Palin is a polarizing figure who does not help draw any middle of the road votes, but merely reinforces a tea party hardline vote.

That can work, but already you can see that Palin's endorsement of Carly Fiorina in California will be used against her by Democrat Barbra Boxer in the general election.

So while Fox News were proclaiming 'you betcha' when asking if Palin's endorsement worked, the jury will still be out to see if she can help deliver office, especially in the California senate race.

Bill Clinton on the other hand needs no introduction at all.

His endorsement of Blanche Lincoln in the Arkansas senate race was the margin of victory for her.

She ran from the right and Clinton helped her overcome a huge move by Labor unions to muscle her out of power.

Clinton works in general elections too.

He recently was a key figure in ensuring that Mark Critz held on to Congressman John Murtha's seat in Pennsylvania when he campaigned there for him throughout the last weekend.

In an ironic twist, candidates are calling Clinton to come rally for them while Obama is being left home in the White House.

That will happen again next week when Clinton takes a plane to Nevada to stump for Senator Harry Reid who is in the battle of his life to get re-elected.

Bill Clinton may be more popular than ever -- the debacle around his wife's campaign now long behind him.

He is still the uber political meister, a man whose impact can never be underestimated.

People now remember the Clinton years with low deficits and low unemployment with nostalgia as the good old days.

Clinton is a proven asset.

Sarah Palin has yet to reach that stratosphere in a general election battle.

Right now the Big Dog is still the beast to ride .

World's greatest Irishman is finally honored

The Museum of Natural History in New York was a splendid setting for an extraordinary event on Tuesday night when over 1,000 New Yorkers came to pay tribute to a remarkable human being-- by some accounts one of the most remarkable on the planet.


Businessman Charles Feeney was finally accepting an accolade in public from his old school Cornell and the great and the good were present.

He has also given $600 million to Cornell, which was the only school to offer him a scholarship when he graduated high school.

Feeney is the Irish American from New Jersey who has given away all his massive fortune, $5 billion at last count, to charity through his philanthropic foundation Atlantic Philanthropies.

He made his fortune by founding Duty Free Shops placed them in almost every airport in the world, and later selling that company.

Along the way, fiercely proud of his Irish heritage, he played a huge role in the Irish peace process, a contribution that was widely noted on the night.

He played a key role in winning a U.S. visa for Gerry Adams and bringing President Clinton to the Irish peace process. In addition he essentially saved Irish university education by injecting massive funds into research and new programs.

One college president, at Trinity College called him " the man who saved Ireland" for his work

All Irish Americans can be truly proud of this extraordinary human being who exemplifies the best of the Irish.

A recent book by Irish journalist Conor O'Clery 'The Billionaire Who Wasn't" finally blew the whistle on the reclusive New Jersey billionaire and all the extraordinary work he has done over the past decades to help allieviate poverty and suffering on this globe.

He remains the greatest philanthropist of the 20th century, bigger than Rockefeller or Gates and he has been widely credited with forcing a revolution in how giving is managed.

His philosophy is "Giving while Living' and his foundation will be wound down by 2019.

Now both Bill Gates and Warren Buffett have followed his example.

Instead of foundations spending small sums every year and retaining their capital, Feeney has made it fashionable to address massive issues head on and spend money now to address them.

The love in the room for Feeney was very evident. This shyest of men got an overwhelming ovation when he stepped to the podium to make his remarks . They were as usually self deprecating and brief.

But he didn't need to say it. He had done it, "by your deeds shall we know you."

I am proud to have known him for the past twenty years as a good and close friend.

He made me even prouder on Tuesday night.

A family secret revealed in 1901 Irish census

The 1901 census has just gone up on line providing an incredible insight into the Ireland so many of our ancestors left.

It’s at http://www.census.nationalarchives.ie

The 1911 census, which went up about a year ago attracted 7 million views and I’m sure this 1901 census will attract as many.

Of the many deeds the Irish government has done to attract interest in Ireland I firmly believe putting the 1911 and 1901 censuses on line will prove to be the most important.

For millions of Irish Americans it allows a sacred moment, a second to touch the past and to see the ancestors or relatives they have only dimly glimpsed through the mists of time.

Alas, there are no censuses available form the previous century, all were either burned or lost. So 1901 will remain the touchstone.

On the 1901 census my wife Debbie, found her great grandfather Martin McGoldrick living on the family farm in Sligo. For some reason the 1911 census seemed to miss his little village.

I could tell by her reaction just how deep and significant moment it was

It is an amazing document that allows us to reach out and touch the past on a given night on a given year in Ireland.

For my own part it was like revisiting a familiar fireside. I had seen the 1911 census count, marveled at the information I had been able to glean, including my first glimpse of my great grandfather and turned to the 1901 census feeling like I was seeing a movie rewound.

It is the 31st of March 1901 and in the Dowd house in Kilcooley, County Kerry, (there was no O’ used back then) seven miles or so west of Dingle there are 13 people living in the three –roomed residence. (the photograph above is of the view from Kilcooley to the Atlantic.)

It is five years before my father is born there.

There is my great grandfather, Ned, 60, hale and hearty and his three sons and one daughter, including Daniel Dowd who my father would be called after.

There too is my grandfather, Michael, married to Kate Kennedy, and they have three very young children, John, Maggie and Mary.

Maggie intrigues me. I had never heard of her and she does not appear in the 1911 census. Clearly she passed away sometimes in the next decade. From what I will never know, but my father never spoke of her.

Suddenly realizing I had an Aunt Maggie who did not live fills me full of curiosity about her. What happened, why was it never spoken about?

It was certainly not unusual for people to pass away back then in the age before antibiotics but it is a sad moment to realize I lost a relative so young.

John Dowd, the oldest son in my father’s family is there. He is called Jack and will later leave for America. He will settle in Detroit and work for the Ford motor Company his whole life.

He will have triplets, so rare an event that they are featured in several national magazines and I will get to know them
In 1981 I will visit him in Detroit, in the little suburban bungalow he has made his home in. He will press $20 into my hand in an envelope, as all emigrants did for new arrivals back then.

He will ask me what fields are they planting back home but I am no longer from Kerry and am unable to answer. He is the spitting image of my father.

John’s older sister, Mary, also made her way to America and Detroit but I never had the opportunity to meet her. She would die in a traffic accident.

The census has once again re-wakened all these echoes and made me aware once again of how lucky my generation was with our access to education and life choices, these relatives would only have dreamt of.

And then there’s my dead little aunt Maggie who I will never know. She is a poignant postscript to reading about my father’s family in the 1901 census.

May she rest in peace.

John Brennan, son of Irish immigrants, now Obama's top gun

John Brennan, son of Irish parents, has become the most valued foreign policy aide to President Barack Obama says the Washington Post.

The Post reports that Brennan shares a small west wing office with Denis McDonough, another key Irish aide to Obama and that both men have major access to the president.

Brennan was the man the president turned to after the near explosion on board a flight on Christmas day.

"Within two weeks, Brennan had produced a sharply written report that caught other intelligence heads by surprise -- and caused an uproar in some quarters for its harsh assessment of intelligence agencies' performance." the paper reports.

"Brennan has grown only more powerful within the White House, according to numerous officials. His allies -- and there are many -- say he is abundantly competent with a reassuring style." the Post reports.

The paper says that Brennan has built a "high-voltage security hub in the White House, one that far outmuscles that of his predecessors. From a windowless, lower-level West Wing suite that he shares with Denis R. McDonough, the chief of staff to the National Security Council, Brennan has frequent access to the president."

He is Obama's 'Invaluable go-to person'

Brennan, 55, was in the CIA most of his working life.

He speaks fluent Arabic and was once CIA station chief in Saudi Arabia.

He was born in Northern New Jersey to Irish parents from Roscommon.

Now he is at the right hand of Obama for every major foreign policy crisis.It is a major achievement for the son of immigrants from the old sod.

Hillary Clinton would have made a better president than Obama

The senior politician could not have been more direct with me.

"President Obama never thinks of addressing the ordinary guy, the intellectual exercise is what it is about, not what is in people's hearts."

"What he needs is some Lyndon Johnson about him, some down and dirty horsetrading to get the work done."

18 months into his term , President Obama seems becalmed, unsure of what to do next. The fact that he had such a rapid rise to the pinnacle is coming back to haunt him.

In the end of the day he does not have the necessary experience it seems to be a great president.

There's a lot of on the job training going on. The great orator has become a muted voice, the daredevil candidate who capsized the stars has become an introspective halting leader.

He seeks bipartisan support where none exists and seemingly is unable to maneuver and bring it about.

Where has the great orator who inspired a generation gone now that he has the bully pulpit?

Which makes me think again about Hillary Clinton.

She is showing the muscle and guts in State that Obama seems to have lost in the White House.

She also had good long-term relationships with many Republicans from her time in the senate. She also understood how the game was played, how the horse trading got done.

She also has a clear voice with no muddled message.

Take the issue of the killings by Israeli commandos in Gaza of the Free Gaza flotilla members.

It was State that came out quickly and forced Israel to back away from their initial belligerent statements.

It seems Clinton is not afraid to confront a great ally and tell them when they were wrong.

She is not afraid to confront period.

That comes from a lifetime of seasoning in different political jobs and positions and a sense that when compromise is impossible confrontation is not to be shied away from.

It seems increasingly apparent to me, watching Obama founder, that the wrong Democrat was elected president.