Word: castlereagh
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...seems too farfetched even for an airport novel. Three men breeze into a heavily fortified police station, stroll straight to the office that contains its most sensitive information, and walk out again with highly classified documents. But that's just what happened last week at Castlereagh Police Station in Belfast. The perpetrators of this audacious crime did more than just provide the authors of cheap fiction with a new plot twist - they managed to spook the real-life spooks...
...Castlereagh was supposed to be secure. The small complex of squat brick buildings in east Belfast houses the divisional headquarters of the Police Service of Northern Ireland, the armed service that operates across the province. Castlereagh is also a nest of spies, a base from which the secret wing of the police, Special Branch, trades information with British military intelligence and MI5, Britain's internal security service, about loyalist and republican terrorists. Room 220 is where informers working inside paramilitary groups arrange meetings with police. And it was here that the burglars struck...
...burglars appear to have been intelligence insiders rather than terrorist raiders. Not only was their knowledge of Castlereagh intimate, it was also bang up to date - Room 220 had been moved to its present location just a week before. "These people weren't walking about aimlessly looking for an office," says one police source. "This was very slick and very professional...
...murky events at Castlereagh are feeding the conspiracy theories. Reid has placed a trusted mandarin in charge of reviewing the breach - which will run in parallel with a criminal investigation - but his report is "unlikely" to be made public. By invoking national security, Reid also has the power to freeze out any political scrutiny. Denis Bradley, vice-chairman of the new board set up to oversee policing, fumed: "I have yet to meet anyone in Northern Ireland who believes this is anything other than the government looking after its own needs." These are delicate days for policing in Northern Ireland...
...discussing the century of relative stability after the Congress of Vienna in 1814, Kissinger draws on his published doctoral dissertation on Metternich and Castlereagh (A World Restored, 1957) and an academic paper he wrote on Bismarck. (Like a good professor, he footnotes himself.) One difference between the earlier works and Diplomacy is that Kissinger now puts slightly greater emphasis on the role of justice and values. "The Continental countries were knit together by a sense of shared values," he writes. "Power and justice were in substantial harmony...