Male model, Mensa member and British spy – the many lives of Det Gda Patrick Crinnion

New book claims the officer was spy who exposed what was later known as the Arms Crisis

Patrick Crinnion was not the stereotypical guard of the 1960s and 1970s. A gifted intellect saw him pass the tests for Mensa and he was also a part-time model. On top of that, he was a senior special branch detective with direct access to the most sensitive security material, especially relating to republican subversives amid the Troubles.

There are strong indicators that he delivered to Fine Gael opposition leader, Liam Cosgrave, details of the Irish government’s efforts to import arms, to help defend beleaguered nationalists in the North.

These arms conspiracy revelations forced the abrupt exit of three senior Fianna Fáil ministers from Jack Lynch’s government in May 1970. This also led to a series of extraordinary trials in which two Irish government ministers, Charlie Haughey and Neil Blaney, were acquitted on arms importation charges.

Any of these facts would have made Patrick Crinnion a remarkable and atypical member of An Garda Síochána.

But all that is topped by the revelation in a new book by David Burke, The Puppet Masters, that Crinnion was a British spy who was ultimately unmasked, charged in court and jailed in 1973, before disappearing without apparent trace for the ensuing half-century.

Patrick Crinnion’s parents worked for viscounts of Powerscourt, Mervyn and Sybil Wingfield, in Co Wicklow. The Wingfields were conscientious employers and the Crinnions lived in an estate cottage on Boghall Road in Bray.

Crinnion was a bright student and qualified to join the intellectual movement Mensa through rigorous tests in which he scored over 98pc. In 1955, 20-year-old Patrick Crinnion began his career as a garda.

While stationed in Donnybrook, he was assigned to protect the home of then taoiseach John A Costello, whom he befriended.

It was while on duty in this job that he met his future wife, Nancy Lattimore, who lived close to Costello’s home.

On the beat one night, Crinnion found a large sum of money that he handed in at the garda station. When he later tried to collect this money, which he deemed his as it remained unclaimed after a year and a day, he was refused.

He legally challenged his superiors’ decision that a garda on duty could not avail of the unclaimed rule. In this case, he was helped by Costello, who was also a renowned barrister. In a later letter to Costello’s son Declan, Crinnion said that he lost that case on a legal technicality.

Crinnion was a non-smoker and teetotaller and his potential was recognised by his bosses, who assigned him to the special detective unit (SDU) in the late 1950s during the IRA’s 1956-1962 border campaign.

Careful with money, he took all the overtime he could get and was able to buy a house in Stillorgan in autumn 1959, around the same time he married Lattimore.

His career was boosted by the attention of Patrick Carroll, the head of C3 unit, the core of garda intelligence operations based in the Phoenix Park.

Crinnion’s start with C3 put him into “a world of deception and lies”. But it was here that he served the rest of his garda career from late 1960 until 1972.

C3 collected and analysed reams of intelligence from SDU officers across the country. Crinnion was very vain about his abilities and in a later letter described his own work at C3 as “not just first class but exceptional”.

He was soon a central person in coordinating and summarising masses of intelligence. He came under the tutelage of senior intelligence officer, Thomas Mullen, who inducted him into the dark art of supplying this information to British intelligence.

Mullen deemed this British spy activity as vital to the battle against subversives. Crinnion’s upbringing, in a world of deference to English-rooted aristocracy, and his work in an intensely anti-IRA organisation dovetailed with this world view and the extra income from London was a boon.

Crinnion made the acquaintance of his long-time handler, the notorious British spy and dirty-tricks organiser, John Wyman, in the early 1960s. Fatefully, he was arrested at Wyman’s Dublin hotel in 1972 when things came apart.

His promotion to writing intelligence synopses for government, socalled Monthly Confidential Reports (MCRs), further enhanced his ability to spy for the British – but would also play a part in his downfall.

The book’s author devotes an entire chapter to outlining his case that Patrick Crinnion was the man referred to as the “Midnight Postman” who dropped a note into the home of Fine Gael leader, Liam Cosgrave, in early May, 1970.

Government and senior gardaí were by then in a state of ferment about police investigations into ministers’ efforts to import arms for Northern nationalists under threat of vicious sectarian attacks.

Burke cites a meeting between then taoiseach Jack Lynch and head of the Justice Department Peter Berry on April 30, 1970.

Berry noted Lynch saying he had spoken with ministers Blaney and Haughey, and they had undertaken to definitively stop involvement in arms importation – meaning this issue was now closed. The Midnight Postman’s note put paid to that concealment effort as Cosgrave unveiled things in the Dáil.

Crinnion’s own unmasking was a dramatic high point in events. In December 1972, the British embassy in Dublin gave Lynch the notorious “Border dossier”, packed in the most explicit detail with names, dates and places of IRA activity in the Republic and especially on the Border.

Lynch was now a man under intense pressure from every side.

This dossier bore an uncanny resemblance to Crinnion’s security report summaries to government.

Lynch phoned the head of special branch with a terse message: “We have a spy in the camp – find him.”

Patrick Crinnion and his handler, John Wyman, were soon in Mountjoy Prison awaiting a trial that excited much public and media interest. Crinnion spent his time writing to public figures, who studiously ignored his exculpation claims, and he also wrote a memoir that has since disappeared.

The trials, held partly in camera, came to a climax amid the February 1973 general election campaign, ultimately won by Cosgrave. Defence lawyers’ challenges to the State to produce security documents to prove its case soon put paid to the more serious charges.

The less serious charges stuck – but the defendants were sentenced to “time served”, which amounted to almost three months.

There followed a chaotic exit from prison and dramatic dashes through Dublin Airport to meet an MI6 jet to spirit both men to Britain. From then, Crinnion mysteriously faded from view, reputedly paying the bills via a job selling aircraft components.

But The Puppet Masters further reveals that he slipped back into Ireland in 2001 and lived quietly in the south of country in a place the author keeps secret, to protect his innocent wife Nancy.

Patrick Crinnion died in 2021, aged 86.

‘The dossier was uncannily similar to Crinnion’s reports. Lynch phoned the special branch to say: “We have a spy in the camp. Find him”’