Suffer the innocents?
The Stevens inquiry into Britain’s state assassination policy in Northern Ireland in the 1980s began in September 1989. The police officers who signed up for it didn’t think it would take long to do.
‘We thought it was going to be a fairly routine investigation. We didn’t expect to find that there was much to the allegations of collusion, quite honestly. The claim that officers from the security forces had supplied Loyalist gunmen with the names and addresses of people they thought were terrorists in order to have them murdered seemed too fantastic to have any basis.‘ (Unidentified senior officer quoted in The Sunday Telegraph 30 March 2003)
Should we be reassured that life in the UK is still civilised enough for such innocence to survive in a profession not generally noted for its innocence? Or should we be depressed that senior police personnel could be so far off the pace?
How should we react to the reported recent death of Force Research Unit (FRU) agent Brian Nelson in the midst of the reaction to the publication of the summary of the Stevens Report? (1) Was this tidying-up by a murderous state? Did he die in Canada or the UK? Is he actually dead? Or are we being Alistair Campbelled again?
Then and Now
Before the publication of the Stevens Report summary the line being promoted in reports emanating from media sources close to the state was that tired old standby, ‘rogue elements’, which is dragged into the light when the state needs an explanation for something awkward. In The Daily Telegraph of 3 April, for example, Philip Johnston wrote:
‘A covert Army unit colluded with loyalist paramilitaries to target suspected IRA terrorists for assassination, according to an official police report to be published later this month. The report by Sir John Stevens, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, will say that a shadowy Army outfit called the Force Research Unit (FRU) effectively ran a rogue operation in Northern Ireland in the late 1980s and early 1990s that resulted in a number of murders’ (emphases added).
Presumably briefed by the same sources, this line was also run by John Ware, the journalist who has been given much of this information in the past couple of years. In ‘Exposing the dirty war’ (The Sunday Times Review, 13 April 2003) just before Stevens’ publication, Ware wrote of:
‘…..a group of shadowy intelligence operatives who believed they were accountable to nobody‘ (emphases added).
And in case we hadn’t got the message, Liam Clarke told us in The Sunday Times that the man who had been in charge of the FRU, Brigadier Gordon Kerr,
‘sent agents on rogue spying missions against the Russians after the fall of the Berlin Wall’ (emphasis added). (2)
Damn, these psy-ops people are clever!
In the wake of the publication of the summary of the Stevens Report, Captain Fred Holroyd (Rtd.) had a letter in The Guardian (18 April 2003) pointing out that he’d said pretty much what Stevens had discovered over 30 years ago and had been ignored: the police refused to act on his complaint, saying it was a matter for the Army; and the Army refused saying it was a matter for the police. He wrote:
‘I know, from firsthand experience, that a unit involved in the activities described by Stevens, existed and was known about, and worked with by senior officers and their “special duties” staff and liaison officers. The unit had a parallel command and control system embedded in the normal army command system, compartmentalised from ordinary soldiers and their officers. I have evidence that each brigade in Northern Ireland had a similar unit. I am aware of the names of those military persons involved in, and aware of the unit in my operational area.’
Looking at Roger Faligot’s The Kitson Experiment (London: Zed Books, 1983) recently I noticed this on pp. 38/9:
‘….in February 1981 the Intelligence Officer of the UDA Brigade in Derry turned out to be a Military Intelligence officers, supplying information on local Republicans and feeding a hit-list’. (3)
The politicians may not have been told officially of the assassination policy(4) but this was no ‘rogue element’.
John Ware was probably one of those in Fred Holroyd’s mind when he wrote in his letter of:
‘[a] number of “respectable” journalists [who] consistently “rubbished” Colin Wallace and myself. It is interesting to see their involvement in the release of current stories…….’
With David McKittrick, who is currently writing about Stevens for The Independent, Ware was co-author of one of the biggest state-inspired political assassination jobs of the 1980s, a double-page smear in The Independent in 1987 on Holroyd and Wallace, for which neither paper nor journalists have apologised. But the great thing being a big-time journalist is that you never have to say you’re sorry. You just write a different story when your informants in the state give you new information and the cheques and the plaudits keep rolling in. (5)
Notes
1 The obituary by David McKittrick in The Independent 4 April stated that he died on 11 April 2003, but didn’t tell us where it had occurred.
2 ‘Brigadier “led rogue spying on Russians”‘, The Sunday Times, 27 April 2003.
3 This is sourced to a report in the Irish Times 22 February 1981.
4 See, for example, ‘Former minister was “ignorant of Army collusion”‘, The Independent 19 April 2003. The evidence, such as it is, suggests that not only are the politicians not told, they don’t want to be told.
5 See, for example, David Aaronovitch on Ware as one of democracy’s ‘awkward heroes’ in his column in The Observer 20 April 20, 2003.