Shadowy figures linked to intelligence, politics and royalty identified in intense interview
By Mark Watts | 18 July 2015
Former Kincora boy Richard Kerr has finally identified several establishment figures as people who helped to cover up a paedophile network of VIPs.
He picked out from photographs a series of men connected with intelligence, military, and politics – and even the royal family. Some he identified as paedophiles themselves.
Exaro has been able to test the plausibility of Kerr’s explosive claims with a credible former intelligence officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity, and other sources.
Among those who were part of the cover-up of a paedophile network linked to Kincora boys’ home in Belfast, Northern Ireland, according to Kerr, were:
- Lord Mountbatten, a cousin of the Queen, great-uncle to Prince Charles, chief of the defence staff from 1959 to 1965, murdered by the IRA in 1979;
- Sir Maurice Oldfield, director of the Secret Intelligence Service, better known as MI6;
- Sir Anthony Blunt, master of the Queen’s pictures, former officer in the Security Service, or MI5, who became a Russian spy;
- Sir Knox Cunningham, Unionist/Ulster Unionist MP, parliamentary private secretary to Harold Macmillan as prime minister, and member of the Conservative party’s national executive committee 1959-66.
Kerr, who has been speaking to Exaro since August 2013, said previously that he was too scared to name names. Asked for his reaction to people who disbelieve his claims, Kerr said: “I am not here to try to prove it to them. I am here to tell what happened to me, and I know what happened to me, and I know what happened to those other boys.”
Kerr has given a revealing interview to a current-affairs programme in Australia, 60 Minutes. Exaro helped 60 Minutes to make the half-hour film on the ‘Westminster paedophile network’.
The programme is expected to show on Sunday night (local time) some of the dramatic sequences where Kerr identifies powerful men as part of the Kincora cover-up.
During the interview with the programme’s Ross Coulthart, Kerr also picks out other powerful people as members of the paedophile network who sexually abused him while he was a Kincora boy:
- Sir Peter Hayman, deputy director of MI6, previously the UK’s high commissioner to Canada;
- Sir Nicholas Fairbairn, Conservative MP, solicitor general in Scotland;
- Sir Cyril Smith, Liberal MP, who, says Kerr, assaulted him in Manchester.
All the men named are dead, but Kerr remained fearful about identifying them. He agreed to identify them on camera, but was unwilling to say more about some of them.
Kerr told Exaro that Joseph Mains, the warden at Kincora, talked to him about Mountbatten. “When Joe was drinking, he would let down his guard,” said Kerr.
An intelligence source told Exaro that Mountbatten mixed with paedophiles who went to parties in the Republic of Ireland.
Mountbatten is also understood to have visited Kincora, although why remains unclear.
Kerr tells 60 Minutes that he walked in on a meeting at Kincora between Oldfield and Mains. He says that Mains immediately and forcefully ordered him out of the room.
Mains was subsequently, in 1981, jailed for six years for sexual offences against boys.
Kerr did not know at the time who Oldfield was, he says, and does not suggest that he abused Kincora boys.
Kerr says that he recognised Blunt from his time at Kincora as one of a group of three men. The other two men sexually abused him as a boy, he says, although Blunt did not.
The intelligence source told Exaro that Blunt frequented Northern Ireland’s gay scene, while enjoying immunity from prosecution for spying for Russia.
In 2012, Exaro named Blunt as having gone to Elm Guest House, the notorious paedophile brothel in south-west London.
Kerr identified Cunningham from the pictures, but says that his lawyer had advised him not to speak about certain people.
According to the intelligence source, Cunningham helped to fund Tara, a paramilitary-style group of Protestants.
Its leader, William McGrath, a house master at Kincora and allegedly an MI5 agent, was jailed for four years for sexually assaulting boys at the children’s home.
Related Stories: Child sex abuse, ‘Fernbridge’ and ‘Fairbank’: Exaro story thread
