Frank Steele
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[Secret Intelligence Service|MI6] officer who opened contacts with the IRA in the early 1970s.
- When Stormont collapsed [in 1972] a diverse collection of home civil servants, diplomats and spooks was sent out to try and make sense of the place. One of these was a remarkable Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) officer, Frank Steele, a former colonial officer and travelling companion to the explorer Wilfred Thesiger.
Steele made it his job to get out into Catholic ghettos like the Falls Road in Belfast and the Bogside in Derry and to make contacts at all levels. Eventually he was able to get in touch with Provisional IRA leaders and suggest they come to London to see Willie Whitelaw [the first Northern Ireland secretary] in 1972. Steele was the first British official to meet the IRA.[1]
