The Secret Army review: Extraordinary story of lost IRA documentary told in gripping style

Darragh MacIntyre is the sort of investigative journalist television producers adore. He isn’t opposed to inserting himself into the action, and there will always be a scene or three in one of his reports in which he huffs about, chasing a lead like Hercule Poirot hunting down a murderer.

All of his detective skills are required in The Secret Army (BBC One, Wednesday), a fascinating factual whodunnit featuring a lost IRA “documentary”, a potential CIA operative, and a cameraman who may or may not have worked for Mossad. It’s The Troubles meets a Tom Clancy novel – brimming with twists relayed with maximum dramatic impact by the reliably melodramatic MacIntyre.

Even without his bombastic style, the story is extraordinary. In 1972, during the darkest days of the conflict in the North, John Bowyer Bell, an American academic sympathetic to the Provos, persuaded the Provisional leadership to allow him film their bloody campaign from the inside, for a project he titled The Secret Army.

The footage, discovered by a BBC researcher six years ago, is chilling (some of it has featured in a previous film by MacIntyre, 2019′s Spotlight On The Troubles: A Secret History). In one sequence, Bowyer Bell and Jacob Stern, a composer he hired for the project, accompany Provisionals as they plant explosives in central Derry – part of a bombing blitz that would claim eight lives. “We were very worried if people were going to be injured,” recalled Stern. “It was a hell of an explosion.”

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Why would the IRA allow themselves to be shadowed by a camera crew as they unleashed carnage across the North? Perhaps they sensed a propaganda coup. “You wouldn’t know what Bowyer Bell told them,” says historian Tim Pat Coogan, who published a book on the Provisionals around the same time as the elusive American. “Did they think there was going to be a Hollywood bonanza from this film that money would flow into the coffers?”

The Secret Army is two documentaries in one. MacIntyre interviews several former senior Provisionals who appear in the film and are, in the main, unapologetic about the IRA’s activities.

“I wasn’t in any doubt that he was a CIA agent. Straightforwardly duplicity. He was fooling the IRA. Acting as a spy”

—   Tim Pat Coogan

“I’m still under constant surveillance. My phone is tapped,” says Des Long, who was on the Provisional IRA executive council for 17 years and is shown providing firearms training in footage recorded by Bowyer Bell. “You find Special Branch passing your house. I can’t go to England, I know I will be stopped and questioned. I’m banned out of America. I consider that a badge of honour.”

The second, more outlandish component concerns Bowyer Bell and his director on The Secret Army, a former Nazi hunter named Zwy Aldouby; in Harvard, MacIntyre tracks down the now deceased Bowyer Bell’s resumé, which reveals a close relationship with the CIA. Was he spying on the IRA?

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“At all times, I had some suspicions of Bowyer Bell. I wasn’t in any doubt that he was a CIA agent,” says Coogan. “Straightforwardly duplicity. He was fooling the IRA. Acting as a spy.”

The probability that Aldouby was a mole, potentially working for the Israeli secret service, is also taken seriously.

“There would be a strong possibility,” says his son, who says Mossad would have noted the support Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi was providing to the IRA while simultaneously campaigning for the destruction of Israel. “There is a connection between the IRA and Israel. Gaddafi – he was giving arms to the IRA, Israel was in a very precarious state.”

Bowyer Bell brought his film back to the United States where it was snapped up by distributor Viacom (excerpts were also broadcast on CBS Evening News). But then it mysteriously passed out of history. Those involved in making and distributing The Secret Army were in little doubt about what happened: Britain leant on the US government to suppress it lest it serve as a rallying tool.

“I showed it to Viacom; they loved it. They offered me a contract for worldwide rights,” says Leon Gildin, the documentary’s co-producer. “What happened after that? Viacom took the worldwide rights and never sold a copy.”

More than 25 years after the Belfast Agreement, it would be easy to conclude that the conflict in the North has been scrutinised from every angle. Are there any Troubles stories left to tell? MacIntyre has discovered a new one – and it makes for a gripping, ripping yarn.