Stalker, Conspiracy?

It is impossible to make an omlette
without breaking eggs. — James Anderton on anti-terrorism

My anger in this case stemmed from the denial
that things had gone wrong, that no eggs were
broken even though the omlette was there to see.
— John Stalker

David Murphy, The Stalker Affair and the Press, Unwin Hyman, 1991
John Stalker, Stalker, Penguin, 1988

Kevin Taylor, The Poisoned Tree, Pan, 1991.
Peter Taylor, Stalker: The Search for The Truth, Faber and Faber, 1987.

I had David Murphy’s book for a number of months before I picked it up to read. When I did I found its coverage of the press campaign on the Stalker affair fascinating. It contained some information that was new to me and so I went back to the other three books to check various episodes. I then got very involved trying to unravel some troubling aspects. For a week or two I went round in circles. I had assumed that a conspiracy had been involved in Stalker’s removal but as I read deeper and cross-checked the stories I began to doubt this explanation. Further on, and deeper still, I returned to the conclusion that there indeed had been a conspiracy. Unfortunately for Murphy, by the time his book appeared the media had moved on from Stalker to other things. However, Peter Taylor revived the affair with a strange defence of the ‘no conspiracy’ line in an edition of BBC2’s Public Eye programme. In some ways this article is a response to that programme.

The killings

On 27 October 1982, three Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) officers were killed by an Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) bomb. It turned out to be a significant incident in a grim year for the security forces. An RUC spokesman said that the bombing ‘raised the temperature’; there were other reports that RUC officers were ‘hyped up’ and ‘very angry’ about the killings. The Independent was later moved to admit that the events which followed ‘looked unpleasantly like revenge’.(1)

On 11 November 1982, three unarmed Provisonal IRA men, Gervais McKerr, Eugene Toman and Sean Burns, were killed at a road block on Tullygally East Road, near Lurgan, by members of the RUC’s elite Headquarters Mobile Support Unit (HQMSU). An RUC spokesman said that the men were shot trying to escape. The police fired 109 bullets into the car. Thirteen days later, another HQMSU unit poured automatic fire into a hay shed. At the subsequent trial RUC spokesmen alleged that seventeen-year-old Michael Tighe and Martin McCauley had pointed rifles at them from inside the building (the rifles later turned out to be useless sixty-year-old weapons). McCauley was wounded while Tighe, who had no paramilitary connections, was killed. On 12 December, two unarmed members of the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) were killed when 19 bullets were fired into their car on the outskirts of Armagh. RUC officers from the HQMSU unit involved lied at the subsequent trials, partly to conceal the fact that members of Special Branch had been involved in an illegal cross-border surveillance operation.

Enter Stalker, ‘high-flyer’

John Stalker, Deputy Chief Constable of the Greater Manchester Police, was asked to investigate the circumstances which surrounded the fabrication of evidence and false statements following the series of killings which were seen by many people as the result of a shoot-to-kill policy. Stalker appeared to have the necessary qualifications and safe hands to undertake the inquiry. By 1983 he was a ‘high-flyer’, attending a year-long course at the Royal College of Defence Studies which dealt, in part, with internal subversion, with Northern Ireland serving as a case study. As Peter Taylor points out in his book on the Stalker affair, it was unlikely that MI5, whose C3 section was responsible for vetting the police, would have allowed him to get this far if there had been a skeleton in his cupboard. (2)

The RUC Chief Constable, Sir John Hermon, was against Stalker’s inquiry from the beginning and ‘privately regarded it as unnecessary’. When the two met for the first time, Hermon warned him about the ‘jungle’ he was about to enter. The Chief Constable had expected the inquiry would be narrowly focused and would merely ‘review’ the in-house CID investigation. However, when it became clear to Stalker’s team that the CID had ‘showed a lamentable standard of professionalism in their enquiries’, Stalker refused to back away from a full investigation of the circumstances surrounding the killings. The RUC Special Branch became obstructive, particularly when the inquiry threatened to intrude into sensitive areas such as the use of informers. Stalker’s team met with hostility from the middle and senior ranks. ‘A few key officers took the decision…… to obstruct the progress of our investigation’. Stalker’s intrusion into their secret world set off all kinds of ‘panic bells’.(3)

Stalker’s team came to believe that a ‘tout’ (informer), known as ‘the mole’, who had provided information which had formed the basis of the HQMSU ambushes, had been involved in serious criminal offences. Stalker began to think that there might be a common thread behind the killings which might lead to similar incidents which had been hidden away. He also suspected that an agent provocateur was at work and that his information may have been bogus.

The Mounsey inquiry

The withdrawal of co-operation by the RUC Special Branch was probably influenced by an earlier 1982 inquiry into leaks of secret information about informers to journalists, instituted by the Chief of the RUC, and conducted by Joe Mounsey, an Assistant Chief Constable from Lancashire. According to a Special Branch officer, it soured relations between the Special Branch and Hermon. Special Branch officers regarded the inquiry as a ‘witch hunt’ and ‘counter-productive’. According to one of the officers, ‘Hermon was paranoid about leaks. [He] had an intense mistrust of the media and was concerned about the management of news-related material… He wanted to be in control of what the public was told.’

It is entirely possible that a conspiracy to remove Stalker evolved as soon as his appointment was announced, that Special Branch officers did not want another Mounsey-style ‘witch- hunt’. Within two months of Stalker’s appointment, a police informer in Manchester, who had helped the RUC with information about the IRA, was making wild allegations about Stalker. Even that stalwart supporter of the Security Service, James Adams, has written that ‘once their actions were discovered….. [Special Branch officers] decided to thwart any outside investigation. The suspicion remains that some members caused the allegations to be made in order to muddy the waters.’ (4)

The information which eventually led to Stalker’s demise was based on allegations made by David Burton (a.k.a. Bertelstein), a professional criminal who, according to the Sampson report, ‘was a regular informant to the police and other bodies’. The latter turned out to include the RUC on cases involving extortion and fraud organised by the IRA. While a few police officers regarded Burton as ‘a high-grade source’, others portrayed him as a known liar, a ‘Walter Mitty’ character, most of whose information proved to be unreliable. That he died in March 1985 has helped fuel the controversy surrounding both the reliability of his information and what precisely he did tell the Manchester police. Similarly, senior policemen have disputed the version of their information which was recorded against Stalker. There is no part of the inquiry into Stalker which is not in dispute. (5)

David Burton seeks a deal

In January 1983, Burton was arrested for cheque fraud in Bolton but was able to obtain bail and avoid custody by claiming he had evidence of police corruption. The named officer was already under internal suspicion and later retired from the police force: he was not charged and was most definitely not Stalker. Superintendent Bernard McGourlay was Burton’s ‘confidant’ at this time and confirms that he never mentioned Stalker, though he did mention another policeman who was too close to the so-called Quality Street Gang. The QSG is allegedly a Manchester-based criminal fraternity. This is also a matter of controversy: is the QSG a serious criminal gang or just a joke? What Burton’s ‘touting’ illustrated was that he was willing to provide information in return for lenient treatment. (6)

In October 1983, Burton was wanted for his part in the ‘Cut Price’ long firm fraud, and to avoid arrest informed the police about a planned IRA attack on the firm’s premises in Northern Ireland. This enabled the RUC to prevent major damage to the warehouse and also to scupper the scheme of his partner, Mark Klapish. According to the Observer, this information ‘appears to have been one of Burton’s few genuine tips’. Accordingly, ‘his stock rose’ and he supplied further information to the RUC and Manchester police, including information about two senior IRA brigade commanders who travelled to Manchester. (7)

On 9 June 1984, Burton’s police confidant, Bernard McGourlay, was on a golf course when he had a conversation with Gerry Wareing, a friend of property developer, land speculator, and chairman of the Manchester Conservative Association, Kevin Taylor. Wareing had recently returned from a holiday in Spain on Taylor’s yacht, Diogenes. According to one account he mentioned the QSG and the fact that Taylor held parties which were attended by John Stalker and other members of the gang. The Sampson report noted that Wareing said of Taylor: ‘You must know him he is pal of Monaghan and Jack Trickett’. (Alleged QSG members — a third member was also mentioned).(8)

Worried about what he had heard, on 11 June 1984 McGourlay went to see Chief Superintendent Peter Topping, who as head of ‘Y’ Department dealt with complaints and discipline. McGourlay has said that he ‘was hoping that somebody would speak to John Stalker and say ‘people are talking about your association with these people’ and advise him to drop them’. This seems reasonable but is not what happened; things went much further. It just so happened that with Topping on this occasion was ‘another detective with previous experience of handling David Burton’. We are then asked to believe that on the same afternoon this detective received a telephone call from Burton in which he made a series of ‘astonishing allegations’. This episode only came to light in a BBC2 Public Eye programme in June 1991 which attempted to rubbish the conspiracy theories surrounding Stalker’s removal. Even the programme’s producer, Peter Taylor, called this a ‘remarkable coincidence’.

We are asked to believe that Burton said that he had been in Bridge Street that same afternoon and had just bumped into a prominent member of the QSG. The account of this conversation as revealed on ‘Public Eye’ goes so:

Burton: Hi ya, long time no see, how ya doing? Hey what’s happening to that little legal problem?
Unnamed man: Oh, it’s a right pain! The case comes up next month.
Burton: What about that copper friend of yours? Can’t he fix it?
Unnamed man: Who do you mean — Stalker?
Burton: Isn’t he a top jolly nowadays?
Unnamed man: Nah, he’s Kevin’s man, he’s not mine.
Burton: Oh, but you’ve got your own man, haven’t yer?
Unnamed man: Him! He’s a jerk. Anyway, I shouldn’t be talking to you. And you want to watch yourself, Burton, and keep away from the pub — you might get clocked by the QS.

As Peter Taylor reported, ‘the encounter seemed too incredible for words’. McGourlay was ‘amazed….. that such a coincidence could happen…. that this conversation was taking place on a busy street in Manchester.’ But Topping supposedly took it seriously and eventually sent on a written report to Greater Manchester Chief Constable James Anderton on 17 July 1984, who authorized further inquiries.

A reasonable person, a sane person, might suggest that this was not a coincidence. Peter Taylor admits that Burton was ‘a compulsive liar’. McGourlay, while acknowledging that he did come up with some useful information, found him ‘a damn nuisance…. I wouldn’t have told Burton I was crossing the road, because he would have told someone else I was committing suicide in front of a taxi….. the problem was that he could not admit to not knowing something about anything, or anything about something.’ Often his information was just too good to be true: ‘He almost sounded as if he was reading from a script.’ (9)

At the time, Burton was on bail for the ‘Cut Price’ fraud and had asked McGourlay for help if he turned ‘supergrass’. Why, therefore, didn’t Burton telephone McGourlay? Was the reality that Topping’s detective (or Topping) telephoned Burton and asked something along the lines of ‘What do you know about Kevin Taylor and John Stalker? Have you heard any whispers about a relationship with the QSG?’ Even if we accept Topping’s version there is every reason to suspect Burton’s testimony precisely because he was trying to trade information for leniency. It is all too pat. Consider the following.

Topping obviously felt Burton was worth talking to and arranged a meeting with him on 22 June 1984, 11 days after the alleged phone call. The allegations were that Kevin Taylor was involved with the QSG, was a financier for drug trafficking, and that there was a corrupt relationship between Stalker, ‘a leading member of the QSG’ and Kevin Taylor.(10)

According to the Sampson report Burton made statements that: ‘Kevin Taylor, Jimmy ‘Swords’ and Joseph Monaghan [brothers] assisted each other financially’ and that ‘James Donnelly [Jimmy the Weed] had said Kevin Taylor and Jimmy Swords [Monaghan] could get things ‘straightened’ through Mr Stalker.’

‘Jimmy the Weed’, James Donnelly, was later to play a role in disseminating Stalker stories to the tabloids which, according to David Murphy, ‘had a smear-like quality’. A Salford ticket agent, ‘the Weed’ was later accused of being the man in a photograph showing Mrs Stalker with a criminal at a party seized from Kevin Taylor’s home. The Sampson report said that it was ‘the Weed’. Donnelly made a statement in which he claimed that he had been invited to the party by Taylor, who had introduced him to Stalker. Acccording to Peter Taylor only one of the three gang members named by McGourlay to Topping attended a party at Taylor’s house and Stalker had no recollection of meeting the man. Taylor later added that in relation to later evidence ‘the most significant was a photograph of the QSG man Burton claimed to have met in Bridge Street, with him was John Stalker’s wife’. Therefore the man Burton claimed to have met was ‘Jimmy the Weed’. (11)

Playing the Burton card

At the subsequent ‘Cut Price’ fraud trial on 4 September 1984, Burton’s co-defendant, Klapish, was sentenced to four years while Burton received two-and-a-half for an identical offence. While the court was cleared, Gourlay told the judge about Burton’s allegations against corrupt policemen. Interestingly, there was a third defendent in the case, ‘Swords’ Monaghan, who, according to Peter Taylor, was ‘a leading member of the QSG’. At a later trial he was acquitted because Burton never testified.(12)

What we have here then, in June 1984, is a known liar, Burton, who was on bail and actively seeking a lenient sentence, reporting what another liar, ‘Jimmy the Weed’, had told him about an alleged relationship between Taylor, Stalker and Monaghan. Monaghan, meanwhile, is charged with fraud in a case in which the informant was also Burton.(13) McGourlay said of Burton that ‘the worst thing you could do was give [him] an idea that you were interested in a particular person because, somehow, he could weave a web of information to include what you wanted to know or what he thought you wanted to know and, consequently, you had to be very, very careful of anything he told you.’

Although there is no direct evidence that the government wanted Stalker removed, the fact that Whitehall disinformers later told Fleet Street contacts that the Deputy Chief Constable ‘had been steeped in naughtiness of the sort which would have turned the average Borgia’s hair white’, suggests that they did. All that was required to set the hare running was a telephone call from Northern Ireland’s RUC Special Branch to, say, Topping’s office.(14)

Stalker the real target

It is my contention that the conspiracy against Stalker started the day he arrived in Northern Ireland to be faced by an RUC Special Branch which had not forgotten the ‘witch-hunt’ of the Mounsey inquiry. I believe that the backstage attempts to derail and finally remove the Manchester policeman went through various stages. Once Topping had his tainted information from Burton, he used it to persuade Anderton to institute an investigation into Taylor and the QSG, though the real target was Stalker. In his account of the Stalker affair in his autobiography, Topping reveals that Manchester police chief, James Anderton, had consulted ‘high-level Home Office officials’ who authorised the inquiry into Stalker.(15)

Meanwhile the Stalker inquiry in Northern Ireland took a new turn when the Manchester policeman and his team discovered that the hay shed, where Tighe had been killed, had been under electronic surveillance. In October 1984 it was originally denied to Stalker that the hay shed had been bugged, but army officers confirmed that a bug had been planted by MI5 and its product recorded by a police and Army technical team. ‘The tape was to become the rope in a bitter tug-of-war between those who believe that methods of intelligence-gathering should be protected at all costs and those who regard the tape as possible evidence of murder committed by police, and therefore belonged in a wider arena.’ (16)

Head of RUC Special Branch, Trevor Forbes, told Stalker, ‘You will never be able to hear it’. Hermon said that he could not further the investigation of the tape without the authority of the Security Service. On 28 January 1985, Stalker travelled to London where he saw Bernard Sheldon, Executive Head of MI5’s Legal Services, who told him that that the Security Service had no objections to him pursuing the matter. Hermon prevaricated over the following months blaming MI5 for the inaction, claiming that they ‘had the most powerful interest in the tape’. On 15 May, Stalker saw another MI5 officer in Belfast, the Director and Co-ordinator of Intelligence (DCI), who, after consultation with Hermon, said that the way was now open to ‘complete consultation’ but subject to ‘unspecified safeguards’. MI5 were to be merely the ‘honest brokers’ assessing the contents of the tape before passing it on. With rising anger, Stalker refused to accept the conditions. He realised that the ‘labyrinthine processes through which [he] had been groping’ had brought him back to the same position he was in five months previously. ‘It was obvious to me that much midnight oil had been burned.'(17)

James Prior by-passed

The following month, Stalker was back in London meeting Sheldon and the DCI. In a classic Whitehall manoeuvre, MI5 appeared to pass the buck on to the RUC. They said that they were prepared to release all the information to him but were ‘very reluctant to discuss the authority for the use and installation of the device’. Stalker was asked to accept that ‘everything was politically and legally in order’. The significance of this request passed Stalker by. According to Stalker’s account, ‘Permission for its installation had been given under the general authority of the previous Northern Ireland Secretary, James Prior.’ However, Peter Taylor says that MI5 by-passed Prior and sought authority from the then Home Secretary, William Whitelaw. Prior was only to learn of the bugging operation when he was informed about it by the DCI when the bugs were in place.

An MI5 technical officer from A Branch inserted two devices in the hay shed at the end of September 1982. Special Branch had been wary of using a bug and thought that human surveillance, though dangerous, would be more reliable. They were proved to be correct. The apparent failure of the bugs led to them not noticing the removal of the explosives hidden in the hay shed. Those explosives were then used in the bomb which killed the three RUC officers on 27 October and which became the springboard for the killings. MI5’s operation had clearly failed and was a great embarrassment for them. Furthermore, the tape’s existence was not revealed to the Attorney-General who undertook the failed prosecution of officers involved in the killing of Tighe in the hay shed.(18)

On his return to Belfast, Stalker was shocked when Hermon told him that while the tape had been destroyed a transcript existed. Stalker believed ‘this revelation came as a surprise even to the senior MI5 officers.’ On this last point, Stalker was to be proved wrong.(19)

The inquiry never did get to hear the crucial tape-recording. It was claimed that the bug was a routine operation and that the tape had been destroyed as per normal policy. There were over forty tapes covering the period of the surveillance operation. The crucial ten minute tape — Tape 42 — which featured the killing shots, was handed by an RUC Special Branch constable who had monitored the shooting, to his senior officer at the Tactical Co-ordinating Group. This, in turn, was sent to Belfast for transcription and was then destroyed. However, a clandestine copy of the missing tape was made by an army officer, who was monitoring the hay shed, as a ‘macabre souvenir’. It was available to at least half a dozen MI5 officers and was eventually locked away in a safe in Belfast. As it held evidence of unlawful killing by the RUC, the tape obviously provided MI5 with valuable bureaucratic ammunition. A senior MI5 training officer doing the rounds of Northern Ireland stations apparently heard the tape and is believed to have been the person who informed the later Sampson inquiry of its existence. Stalker was deliberately misled by MI5 about the tape. As he tried to gain access to the tape, MI5 field officers ordered its destruction. Sampson later recommended the prosecution of a number of MI5 officers for conspiracy to pervert the course of justice for this deliberate destruction.(20)

Stalker was misled by what he called MI5’s ‘essentially neutral stance’. MI5’s reluctance to talk about the authority for the placement of the bug was for fear that Stalker might discover that MI5 had also bugged the car in which McTerr, Toman and Burns were killed. According to BBC reporter Chris Moore, ‘the security forces involved in the covert surveillance operation were able to listen to the conversation going on in the car.’ (21)

An ‘interim’ report was finally delivered to Hermon on 18 September 1985 without the section on the tape. It was already late but Hermon then dragged out the whole process, taking five months to deliver it to the Director of Public Prosecutions in Belfast. On 4 March 1986, the Northern Ireland DPP, Sir Barry Shaw, instructed Hermon to give Stalker greater co-operation on events connected to the hay shed incident. For twelve weeks Hermon studiously avoided meeting Stalker and appeared to pay little heed to Shaw’s instructions. Things were coming to a head. Stalker realised that after eighteen months of trying to obtain the tape he was no nearer. Stalker wrote: ‘Investigations into Kevin Taylor did not truly begin until after I had delivered my report into the RUC to Belfast on 18 September 1985, and enquiries into me did not begin until after I had been given clearance in March 1986 to have access to the tape and to see Sir John Hermon and his deputy.’ (22)

Get Kevin Taylor

The investigation into Kevin Taylor was the means to ensnare Stalker. It was led by a shadowy department of the Greater Manchester Police known as the Drugs Intelligence Unit (DIU) which was both comical in its incompetence and sinister in its uncontrolled ‘cowboy’ operations. The DIU’s ‘Operation Kalooki’ targetted Stalker as ‘FEB’, probably a reference to the month the inquiry began. Officers in the DIU denied being involved in a Stalker inquiry but in court one member, Keith Ware, did admit that the target was the deputy Chief Constable. (23) The DIU was set up on 2 February 1985 and ran until February 1988, spending several million pounds. Controlled by Topping, its official remit was to investigate drug trafficking but this turned out to be a cover for the secret investigation of Stalker. Known as ‘the Butler’ within the force for his obsequiousness, Topping would assert that the fraudster Burton had made allegations that Stalker was ‘bent’. It was members of the DIU who interviewed Burton in prison in February and March 1985. One of those officers was Detective Inspector Ronald Murray, who happened to be the Greater Manchester Police liaison officer with MI5. Topping’s close friend DS John Simon was head of the Fraud Squad and, more importantly, of the Operational Support Group co-ordinating specialist drugs, fraud and serious crimes investigations. He was therefore in the know about the investigation of Taylor. Simon, who ordered the raid on Kevin Taylor’s Bury home, also happened to be Stalker’s number three on the RUC inquiry. One of the officers in charge of the raid was Ronald Murray. (24)

There was ‘paranoid secrecy’ within the Greater Manchester Police about what the DIU was up to, and with good reason. Details revealed at Taylor’s court case painted a picture of a covert force which was out of control and engaging in a campaign of dirty tricks. Taylor alleges, and the evidence he provides supports his view, that the DIU, which contained Special Branch officers, was engaged in illegal surveillance activities, buggings and burglaries. Later, when information about the activities of the unit began to unfold, rather in the manner of Colonel Oliver North, officers began to shred and incinerate documents. (25)

The ‘trawling expedition’ through Kevin Taylor’s house on 9 May 1986, the first visible action against him, resulted in the removal of a number of photographs — some five years old — which showed Taylor and Stalker together at a party. One of the officers involved later admitted in court that he had not been asked to look for drugs, and the prosecution in the case let slip the fact that Taylor ‘was not under suspicion of trafficking in drugs’, though that had been the alleged basis of the inquiry. It was also revealed in court that the Access Orders granted by a judge for the search had been obtained by deceit. On this point the trial of Kevin Taylor collapsed. This was, of course, a prima facia case of a conspiracy. (26)

The case against Stalker moved to a climax in the Spring of 1986. Taylor notes, ‘By the end of March 1986 there were strong suspicions within a very tight circle of officers within GMP that John Stalker’s relationship with Kevin Taylor was suspect.’ Even an apologist for the official version such as Peter Taylor has to admit that ‘there was meticulous planning behind the surgical removal of John Stalker’, though he does not see anything sinister in this. (27)

At some point in the middle of May, Anderton contacted Sir Philip Myers, HM Inspector of Constabulary for the North, which included Northern Ireland, and the man responsible for appointing Stalker, and told him about the allegations against Stalker. Peter Taylor suggests May 16, though the fact that Stalker was told on May 14 by Myers to cancel a planned trip to Belfast with no explanation given suggests that it was before that date. Myers told Stalker to re-arrange a meeting with Ulster Police chief Sir John Hermon for 26 May. Myers then referred the matter to Sir Philip’s superior, Sir Lawrence Byford, HM Inspector of Constabulary at the Home Office. Byford had apparently seen a dossier with allegations about Stalker on Saturday 17 May. Although it was not formally his decision to take, Byford had decided on the Sunday that Colin Sampson, Chief Constable of West Yorkshire, an officer he knew and respected, should lead the inquiry into the allegations against Stalker. Byford then arranged for a meeting to take place at a Police Federation conference at Scarborough the following day with Myers, Anderton and Sampson in attendance. (28)

The Scarborough meeting

According to a diary entry made by Sir John Hermon on Sunday, 18 May 1986, Myers rang the RUC Chief Constable and mentioned ‘a C.C. seeing [‘has seen’ in Stalker’s version] B. S., R. A. and T. K. and that D. H. was au fait with developments’. Much controversy surrounds this entry and the Home Office tried to talk down its significance. A ‘former senior Northern Ireland official’ claimed that the meeting referred to an event after Stalker had been removed from the inquiry; and the press generally lost interest when it was revealed that Stalker’s identification of the names was mistaken. The initials actually referred to Barry Shaw (Director of Public Prosecutions in Northern Ireland), Robert Andrew (Permanent Secretary at the Northern Ireland Office), Tom King (Northern Ireland Secretary) and Douglas Hurd (Home Secretary). ‘C.C.’ was generally accepted to be (Chief Constable) Colin Sampson. Hermon was later to claim that this was the first time that he had heard of ‘a Stalker problem’. The various accounts imply that Hermon was not told that Sampson would also take on the (Stalker) RUC inquiry. (29)

At the Scarborough meeting, according to Peter Taylor’s account, Sampson ‘was taken completely by surprise’ by Byford’s request for him to undertake the Stalker investigation. The decision to combine the two inquiries — Stalker and the RUC — ‘was not made on the spot. It was only reached shortly afterwards, following long and agonizing discussions.’ (30)

In my view the two accounts of what happened over that long weekend are irreconcilable. Byford claims that he is ‘absolutely positive’ that Douglas Hurd only knew about the allegations against Stalker and ‘the developments that had taken place’ at Scarborough. How can this possibly square with Hermon’s diary note that on the day prior to Scarborough, Hurd ‘was au fait with developments’? (31) According to the official account of the affair as outlined in Peter Taylor’s book Stalker and a later Public Eye television programme, Sampson knew nothing about Stalker’s troubles until he was approached at Scarborough. It is difficult to reconcile these two accounts. How was it possible for Hermon to know that Sampson was going to attend a meeting at least ten days in the future when Sampson had not even been approached to take over the inquiry?

We do know that Sampson went to Northern Ireland but it was before Stalker was removed. The Belfast Telegraph revealed that between the 19 and 26 May 1986 Sampson had travelled to Belfast where he had consultations with Hermon and Myers about the allegations against Stalker. According to the official account, around the 23 May Myers had gone to Belfast and consulted with Sir Barry Shaw, the Northern Ireland DPP and Hermon about taking Stalker off the inquiry. However, Sampson had already been given the inquiry and this could only be done when Sir John Hermon ‘agree[d] to [Stalker’s] removal’. (32)

It is possible that on the Sunday Myers was informing Hermon on the basis that he expected Sampson to accept Byford’s request, but this difficult concept is undermined by a second point about this diary entry which has been missed. Again according to Peter Taylor, while Sampson was approached at Scarborough about taking on the inquiry into Stalker, it was only after ‘much discussion’ that it was agreed that he should undertake the RUC inquiry as well. If this is true, then it has to be asked why Myers should mention to Hermon a meeting with Northern Ireland officials who would have had no official interest in an internal police inquiry in Manchester? The only reason for Sampson to meet these officials was if he was going to be involved in the RUC inquiry. It can only lead to the conclusion that Byford, Myers and Hermon had already agreed to that.

On 28 May 1986, Stalker was busy in his garden when an official from the Greater Manchester Police Authority telephoned to inform him that he was under investigation by a team led by the West Yorkshire Chief Constable, Colin Sampson. The various insubstantial allegations centred around his relationship with Kevin Taylor, and were largely based on the uncorroborated testimony of a known criminal and liar, David Bertlestein (Burton), who had died in prison in March 1985.

In one of the strangest turn-arounds by any investigative journalist, BBC reporter Peter Taylor reversed the conclusion of his award-winning Panorama programme on the Stalker affair and decided that there had been no conspiracy involved in the Deputy Chief Constable’s removal from Northern Ireland. Taylor believes that the events in Northern Ireland and Manchester were completely coincidental. In removing Stalker and replacing him with Colin Sampson, Chief Constable of Yorkshire, the aim had been ‘to protect the integrity of the inquiry’ and ensure that it was not derailed by the accusations against Stalker. The proof of this assertion, which was clearly what senior civil servants wished to propagate, lay in the outcome of the RUC inquiry which Colin Sampson took over from Stalker. On 23 March 1987, the final section of Sampson’s report was delivered to Sir John Hermon and Sir Barry Shaw. Taylor appears to have had more than an inkling of what was going to happen in that he warned the reader of his book that because ‘ ‘national assets’ and covert operations run by MI5 and other intelligence agencies’ with ‘particular reference to Northern Ireland’ were involved, the Attorney-General might decide that further prosecutions ‘would not be in the public interest’. Taylor thought the DPP would be faced with ‘a finely balanced judgement’. (33)

Enter ‘national security’

In January 1988, Attorney-General Sir Patrick Mayhew told the Commons that because of ‘considerations of national security’ no charges would be brought against any of the eight named RUC officers in the Sampson report, including offences for conspiracy to murder, nor against the MI5 officers involved in conspiracy charges. Revealing his ‘deep anxiety’, Mayhew added, ‘I have had to balance one harm to national security against another.’

The government had been clearly uncomfortable when Stalker had initially proposed charging seven officers with conspiracy offences, something which would have led ‘to the top of the force, and beyond, by exposing the philosophy, strategy, and tactics behind covert security operations in Northern Ireland’. I believe that there was indeed a conspiracy to remove Stalker from the inquiry which had strayed into too many sensitive areas of the secret state. However, the purpose of the conspiracy was not to sabotage the whole inquiry but to blunt its edge. Whitehall had wanted the inquiry to succeed, if only as a public relations exercise, but by dragging it out as long as possible its impact would be considerably lessened. To this extent their delaying tactics were successful. The true nature of the conspiracy is partially revealed in Stalker’s own book. ‘It seemed that for well over two years, in Northern Ireland, in MI5, and now in my own police force and the Home Office, decisions have been constantly delayed, discussed behind closed doors, altered, amended, shaped and then passed to someone else to endorse them. In the meantime the clock had ticked away.’ This theme is repeated. ‘Time had been bought….. five years after the events themselves the reasons for bringing charges had become obscured… So far as I am concerned, the time for prosecutions was in late 1985, when the evidence was fresh and strong — not in 1988.’ (34)

No conspiracy?

While much effort has gone into claiming that Stalker’s removal did not involve a conspiracy, criticism of the ‘conspiracy theorists’ has been often misplaced and rather banal. Defenders of the official account portray a conspiracy as a massive enterprise which is straightforward in operation. The reality is that most conspiracies are small scale — ‘office politics’ — and complex, as is bound to be the case when several people are involved. Critics also tend to ignore the fact that all that is needed to legally define an event as a conspiracy is evidence of ‘the agreement of two or more persons to effect any unlawful purpose’. The term might also be used to include the deliberate evasion of set rules such as those used by the police which, though not law, do warrant disciplinary charges if broken. It should also be noted that under the law those involved in a conspiracy need only have knowledge of the purpose and are not required to have acted on it. It appears obvious to me that there were a number of conspiracies involved in both the smearing of Stalker and his final removal.

Notes

1. Independent 20 January ’90; P. Taylor pp. 32/3.
2. P. Taylor p. 12.
3. Stalker pp. 27 and 3; P. Taylor pp. 62/3 and 101.
4. Martin Dillon, The Dirty War, Hutchinson, London 1988, p. 393; James Adams (and Robin Morgan and Anthony Bambridge), Ambush: The War Between the SAS and the IRA, Pan, London 1988, p. 93.
5. See the Observer 28 September ’86 for details of Burton’s links to the RUC.
6. The Observer 28 September ’91.
7. Ibid
8. Murphy p. 73.
9. P. Taylor pp. 129/30.
10. P. Taylor pp. 127 and 135.
11. Murphy, p. 61; Peter Taylor p. 134; Public Eye, BBC2, 14 June ’91.
12. P. Taylor p. 131.
13. BBC2 Public Eye.
14. Murphy p. 146.
15. K. Taylor p. 165. Since we know that Sir Lawrence Byford, HM Inspector of Police at the Home Office, had known about the Stalker allegations at least a year before Stalker’s dismissal in May 1986, it may be Byford to whom Topping is referring.
16. Stalker p. 66.
17. Stalker pp. 82-83.
18. Stalker p. 85; P. Taylor pp. 107 and 109.
19. Stalker p. 86.
20. P. Taylor p. 196; Stalker p. 68; Guardian 14 June ’91; Public Eye, BBC2. op cit.
21. Stalker p. 89; Dillon op cit pp. 400/1.
22. Stalker pp. 188/9.
23. K. Taylor pp. 186 and 189. Later the unit liaised with the Sampson inquiry. The very close relationship between the Manchester and West Yorkshire forces probably precluded any claim that the Sampson inquiry could be independent.
24. Murphy p. 160.
25. K. Taylor pp. 158/9 and 199. According to Taylor, Stalker told him that the Greater Manchester Police were using over 10,000 telephone taps a year — an astonishing figure if true. See K. Taylor p. 94.
26. Additionally, Topping had been at the hearing before the Recorder of Manchester and he had told the judge that the application involved a matter of ‘national interest’. He told the judge not to take notes and asked for the documents supporting the application to be sealed.Stalker p. 267; K. Taylor pp. 125, 190 and 209. On 26 March 1986, an RUC policeman ‘above the rank of chief superintendent’ made a secret vist to Manchester. Whether this was a coincidence or not I do not know, though, unusually, it was the DIU which provided transport to and from the airport. K. Taylor p. 189; P. Taylor p. 154.
27. P. Taylor p. 162.
28. P. Taylor pp. 159 and 161.
29. Murphy pp. 249/50, quoting the Observer 21 January ’90.
30. P. Taylor p. 159.
31. BBC2, Public Eye, op cit.
32. Belfast Telegraph, 9 June ’86, quoted in Murphy p. 151; P. Taylor p. 163.
33. P. Taylor pp. 197-9.
34. Stalker, pp. 221/2 and 272; the Guardian 16 June ’86.