Kenneth Lennon was on the run when he wandered into Ronnie Scott's jazz club in London's Soho district one night earlier this month. He also was drunk. George Melly, a blues singer and former film critic for the Sunday Observer, had never seen him before, but Lennon insisted on buying Melly a brandy. "He seemed pretty frightened," Melly recalls, "but the fear was covered with drink, and drink had given him a certain courage."
Lennon told Melly that he had been an informer for Scotland Yard's Special Branch and had been responsible for sending to prison some friends who were sympathizers of the Irish Republican Army. "I am not getting protection," he muttered. "There are two lots after me, both lots." Melly suggested he tell his story to the National Council for Civil Liberties (N.C.C.L.), and Lennon left with what seemed at the time to be characteristic barroom bravado. Says Melly: "He told me that if I read in the papers that he had been found face down in a puddle, or maybe it was a ditch, I would know he was speaking the truth."
Four days later, Lennon's body was found in a Surrey ditch; he had been shot twice in the back of the head. Police said it looked like an I.R.A. execution. Before he died, Lennon had taken Melly's advice and gone to the N.C.C.L. For six hours the disheveled, unshaven Ulsterman spilled out an incredible story of how he had been blackmailed into becoming an informer on the I.R.A. for British intelligence. He was clearly afraid for his life, recalled Larry Grant, the council's senior legal officer, and feared not only that the vengeful I.R.A. would hunt him down but that "the Special Branch might try to kill him and make it look as though it were an Irish job."
The council's release of Lennon's 17-page statement last week touched off new demands for a full parliamentary inquiry into British counterterrorist methods. A month ago, Kenneth Littlejohn, 32, a convicted bank robber, escaped from Dublin's Mountjoy prison. He set off a public clamor by claiming in a series of interviews that he had been hired by British intelligence to infiltrate the I.R.A. and stir up trouble in the Irish Republic, thereby forcing Dublin to crack down on terrorist sanctuaries. Littlejohn, who is still at large, said that he had been ordered by the British to commit the bank robbery. He added that he had worked with an assassination squad in an unsuccessful attempt to murder Sean MacStiofain, chief of the extremist and sometimes murderous Provisional I.R.A.
Egg Them On. A native of Newry in County Down, Lennon, 30, told the N.C.C.L. that he had been approached by two Scotland Yard detectives one day last April when he was leaving a London hospital where his wife was being treated for a brain tumor. The detectives knew about his wife's illness ("All the boys at the Yard are sympathetic," said one). They also knew that his sister Bernadette was active in politics in Newry, and showed him photos of a 1969 civil rights demonstration in Ulster during which Lennon had helped to throw metal crowd-control barricades into a canal.