Operation Chiffon : The Secret Story of MI5 and MI6 and the Road to Peace in Ireland

Operation Chiffon centres on an intelligence officer known only as Robert, who served in both MI6 and MI5 and ran a secret channel between British intelligence and the republican leadership in the early 1990s. The book carries his first account on the record. Alongside him stand Brendan Duddy, the Derry businessman who acted as intermediary and hosted meetings at his home, and Michael Oatley, the MI6 officer who set up an earlier channel and reopened contact with Martin McGuinness.

At the centre of the book is a meeting in March 1993, when Robert met Martin McGuinness and Gerry Kelly. It took place after the British government had called off talks following IRA bombs in England that killed two young boys. According to BBC reporting summarised by the intelligence history writer Tom Griffin, Robert's words there were not authorised by the government, and he went ahead despite being told not to by the head of MI5 in Northern Ireland. The book accompanied a BBC Two documentary broadcast on 25 March 2023, marking 25 years since the Good Friday Agreement.

Peter Taylor is a BBC journalist who has reported on the Northern Ireland conflict and political violence for around 50 years, having earlier worked on ITV's This Week and BBC Panorama. His earlier books Provos, Loyalists and Brits each examine the conflict from one of its main parties, and this one was presented as completing a quartet.

Writing on Substack, Griffin credited Taylor with a scoop in Robert's testimony, though he noted that much of the ground had been covered before and that Taylor plays down the rivalry between MI5 and MI6. Dr Robert Lyman MBE called it "an excellent book" in The War Room, while arguing that it is too lenient on republican paramilitaries. This Bloomsbury paperback of Operation Chiffon was published in March 2024 and runs to 400 pages.

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