BRENDAN BEHAN was either “a little mad, or drunk”, an MI5 officer decided after he listened to a bugged telephone call between Behan and a Communist sympathiser in London in 1957.
In the August 1957 call to Barbara Niven, the middle-class, Cambridge-educated graduate who ran the Communist Party's paper, the Daily Worker, during the 1940 and 1950s, Behan appears self-pitying and incoherent.
From the MI5 records released today by the UK National Archives, it is not clear who was being bugged, and Niven is just as likely to have been under surveillance, if not more so. The MI5 officer consistently misspells Behan’s Christian name as Brandon.
“He said he had his mother with him. Did Barbara understand him? Barbara said she did not understand him. Brandon said he was going to give a subscription to the Daily (Worker) for a year.
“Barbara said that was wonderful. Brandon said he understood that canvassing was very bad. Brandon said could he call around to see her. Barbara said she was very busy as she was writing something which had to be finished by that evening.
“Brandon said he wanted to give the money to her himself and he wanted to see her because he was a first-class man and no one would call for him. Not even his own class would talk to him, he said,” the officer wrote.
Faced with such entreaties, Ms Niven conceded and told him to come over in an hour, though Behan went on, according to the account: “He said he had got the embassy working for him. He hoped that they would get him a plane.
"He wanted to go home to Ireland where he lived. His brother Brian had dragged his name in the mud by his interview in the Daily Express," the officer wrote, adding, "I assumed Brandon was either a little mad, or drunk."
In his retelling of his arrest in Newhaven, Sussex, in October 1952, Behan said he was pressed by MI5 agents to become an informer on the IRA after he was detained while travelling on false papers.
However, the MI5 files make no mention of the attempt to recruit him, saying only that Behan when arrested said, “I will explain everything, but not now as I am suffering from a hangover.”