Peter Taylor has made more TV programmes about Northern Ireland since 1969 than other any British journalist. His most recent was the documentary, Loyalists, earlier this year, a series of interviews with Loyalist paramilitaries and politicians. This was followed by a book, Loyalists (Bloomsbury, 1999), which contained some of the interviews in that programme. Like the TV programme, this is fascinating stuff for anyone interested in events in Northern Ireland. But the book and TV programme are not identical. The most striking section of the TV programme was an interview with a UDA? UFF? member (I didn’t tape it and can’t remember the details) who described the torrent of official information they were receiving from their British military and intelligence connections in the late 1980s – more material than he knew what to do with, he said. This section is missing from the book. It’s not that Taylor actually tries to avoid this area: it just doesn’t get its due. The biggest story, the most important development, in our knowledge of the Loyalist paramilitaries in the past ten – maybe twenty – years gets three and a bit pages from Taylor.
After recounting how in 1989 the UDA/UFF were getting official, classified, intelligence material from the security forces, he writes:
‘To republicans and nationalists it was clear evidence of collusion between members of the security forces and the loyalist paramilitaries’ (emphasis added).
Not so: it was clear evidence to anyone.
Taylor describes how, using state intelligence, the UDA’s ‘targeting’ of the Nationalist community improved: fewer Catholics were murdered at random, more IRA members. Another way of describing these events would be this: the British Army was running the UDA’s assassins against the IRA – and successfully, too. In effect, in the late 1980s the British state decided that while they could not kill the IRA openly (the late Alan Clark MP’s solution: let the SAS loose), they could get the Prods to do it for them. A case can be made that part of the reason we have an IRA cease-fire at present is the inroads made into the IRA’s ranks by this joint Army-UDA assassination programme.
Nairac
These revelations have shifted the British state’s line. Military and intelligence collaboration with the Loyalist paramilitaries used to be flatly denied. That was the line which would not be officially conceded. Now the line appears to be yes, it happened in the late 1980s but not before. In a book which consists in large part of interviews with Loyalist ‘terrorists’, there is no reference by Taylor to Fred Holroyd, not only the sole British military intelligence officer from that war who has talked a length, but one who was working, liaising with the RUC, in the Portadown area, one of the hot spots.
Taylor discusses the murder of the IRA man John Francis Green by Protestant paramilitaries. Fred Holroyd was told by Captain Robert Nairac that he, Nairac, had been involved in the shooting. Nairac gave him a Polaroid photograph taken of the dead Green. This is awkward for the British state – and Taylor. Acknowledging this would be to give too much propaganda advantage to the IRA. So this is Taylor on Nairac:
‘There were rumours and allegations that Captain Robert Nairac, a legendary army intelligence and liaison officer who was later kidnapped and killed by the IRA, was involved in Green’s death, but the allegations were never confirmed. It was, as with the Dublin and Monaghan bombings, a conspiracy theory that was never proved’ (emphasis added).
Fred Holroyd is those ‘rumours and allegations’.(1)
Precisely what Nairac was doing we still don’t know. It is clear from his book that Holroyd suspected that Nairac was working with or running a group of Loyalist killers; and that this was probably the role of the group of soldiers variously described as a Field Survey Troop, 14th Intelligence Company, or ‘the det’ (detachment), which Holroyd kept bumping into around his patch. Reviewing the recent book about Nairac (Death of a Hero, John Parker, Metro, London, 1999), Colin Wallace ruminates on what Nairac was doing and for whom; and wonders if Nairac even knew.
‘One very experienced SAS NCO – not quoted in the book – who knew Robert well said this about his activities: “Had he been a SAS member, he would not have allowed to operate in the way he did. Before his death we had been very concerned at the lack of checks on his activities. No one seemed to know who his boss was ….” (Wallace’s italics).(2)
Reviewing the same book, a former army officer who served in Northern Ireland, Alexander van Straubenzee,(3) describes Nairac as having been ‘a member of the Army Surveillance Unit which became 14th Intelligence and Security Company (14th Int)’ – a new name to me for the unit discussed above.(4)
A woman called Oonagh Flynn, claiming to have been Nairac’s girlfriend, was the subject of 4 pages in the Sunday Mirror on May 16. Flynn – not her real name, according to a June 18 report in The Phoenix (Dublin) – claimed that Nairac told her, inter alia, that he had killed John Francis Green and had organised the bombing of the Miami Showband. She claims he told her that ‘security forces allowed weapons shipments to reach the paramilitaries, and terrorist training staff from Libya to pass unhindered.’ (Libyans in Northern Ireland?) She claims that towards the end of his life Nairac was afraid of being murdered by his own side and expresses doubts about the official story that he was killed by the IRA. (A second part to the story was advertised but never appeared.) The status of her allegations is unclear to me.
Finally on Nairac there is the affidavit of former RUC officer John Weir, several thousand words of it, written in February 1999. On Nairac, Weir writes:
‘….[Nairac] had infiltrated both sides, Loyalist and Republican, in an attempt to intensify the conflict so that each side would wipe the other out…..a Republican informant, the late Packy Reel, from Dorsey, South Armagh, told me that he had been aware the role Nairac played in infiltrating both Republican and Loyalist terrorist groups, the IRA and the UVF…..he told me Nairac had supplied explosives to the IRA and I knew from my Loyalist contacts in Portadown that Nairac was involved with [Loyalist killer] Robin Jackson…. Reel explained that the IRA had, for a time, believed Nairac to be sympathetic to their cause, which was the reason he had been allowed to participate in IRA meetings…’
Ken Livingstone’s memory
Ken Livingstone MP revisited this area in his column in The Independent on 21 May. Titled ‘The secret conspiracy to destroy peace in Ireland’, this was Ken revisiting the days in 1987 when he made his maiden speech in the Commons based on the allegations of Colin Wallace and Fred Holroyd about dirty tricks in Northern Ireland and the mainland UK. Unfortunately Ken’s memory of the period is a little hazy.
The outrage on the Tory benches at Livingstone’s maiden speech was focused on his references to the role of the late Airey Neave in the so-called Wilson plots of mid-1970s, as told to Ken by Colin Wallace. Wallace had been contacted by Neave in 1976 after Wallace had been bounced out of Northern Ireland and his job as the British Army’s psy-war specialist in the Army’s Information Policy unit. In his column Livingstone tells us that after his maiden speech:
‘Rumours began to circulate that Kinnock had been warned by MI5 that if he did pursue these claims, then damaging stories about Labour MPs’ sexual and financial peccadilloes would be leaked to journalists. MI5 wasn’t joking. Pictures of a married former Labour cabinet minister in the company of two extremely attractive Yugoslav women popped up in the gossip columns.’
The article did not appear in ‘a gossip column’. It was a front page lead in the Sunday Express on 14 February 1988, seven months after Livingstone’s Commons speech. According to the Express article, the picture, of the former Labour MP and later SDP member of the House of Lords, John Diamond, was taken in 1964. The picture was extremely fuzzy – presumably taken with a long lens – and it is impossible to tell whether the two women are 20 or 50, never mind whether they were attractive or not.
Livingstone states in his column:
‘The spy master Peter Wright, of Spycatcher fame, makes no mention in his book of the extensive work he undertook in Ireland, yet he was the central figure among the group of MI5 officers trying to bring down the Labour government.’
In Spycatcher, Wright refers to his time in Northern Ireland on pp. 358 and 59. If there is other information on Wright’s ‘extensive work’ in Northern Ireland, it is not in the public domain. As for Wright being ‘the central figure among the group of MI5 officers’, this is unclear. Wright offered at least four versions of his role in the so-called ‘Wilson plots’.
Livingstone states that:
‘[Airey] Neave himself privately employed Colin Wallace to spread disinformation and black propaganda.’
Colin Wallace did no work for Airey Neave. However, he did send him an article he had written, ‘Ulster, a state of subversion’, which Neave acknowledged receiving in a letter to Wallace on 31 August 1976. Neave used some of this in a speech reported in the Daily Telegraph.
Livingstone states that
‘the most likely scenario is that [Peter] Wright and others directed the murder of [IRA man John Francis] Green and the Miami Showband killings into order to deny the minority Labour government the popularity that would have followed from its concluding a peace deal with the IRA.’
This is a very seductive bit of dot-joining but alas there is not a shred of evidence connecting Wright to the murders of Green, carried out by Captain Robert Nairac and others; or to the Miami Showband killings. Nor is there any evidence that Wright was in Northern Ireland in 1975 when the deaths occurred; or that he ever met Nairac; and there is no evidence that the Labour government was close to concluding a peace deal with the IRA in 1975.
Livingstone concluded that
‘A full investigation could reveal that Airey Neave, the man who organised Thatcher’s seizure of the Tory Party in 1975, was also guilty of treason and an accessory to murder.‘
Well, anything is possible: a full investigation could reveal that Airey Neave was really a woman. But on the basis of what we now know all that could be proved is that Airey Neave received some pretty unexceptional thoughts on the war in Northern Ireland from Colin Wallace. Given the political climate in 1976, the rumours of coups and the campaign against Wilson and other members of the Labour government in the preceding two years; given Wallace’s former role as a psy-war officer; and given Neave’s role as Thatcher’s confidant at the time, this in itself is interesting. But no more than that.
The irony of the episode is that unknown to Livingstone, at the time of his maiden speech the late Humphrey Berkeley was (he said) close to persuading a group of the ‘great and good’ of British politics, including Edward Heath and Merlyn Rees, to publicly call for an investigation into the ‘Wilson plots’. As soon as Ken made his speech the ‘great and good’ stopped returning Berkeley’s calls. The ‘Wilson plots’ may have been important but were not important enough to be seen agreeing with Ken Livingstone!
The Committee
The affidavit of John Weir, referred to above, was on the Web at http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Senate/1922/ Or some of it was, when I looked. (I have since been sent a complete hard copy.) Weir’s statement is full of details of the collaboration between the Crown forces in the province and the Loyalist paramilitaries. At one point he states:
‘I think it is important to make it clear that this collusion between Loyalist paramilitaries such as Robin Jackson and my RUC colleagues and me was taking place with the full knowledge of my superiors.’
On page 12 he describes a meeting in 1998 with a solicitor called Richard Monteith, at which they discussed the book The Committee (reviewed in Lobster 36). (Monteith is allegedly a member of the Committee.)
‘Richard Monteith told me that the book was basically accurate but he thought there were a number of small mistakes, such as in the case of the Prentice brothers [the car dealers who are suing Committee author Sean McPhilemy in the United States].’
Weir’s affidavit ends with him stating that he is willing to testify in the libel cases against McPhilemy.
The chief informant in The Committee was a man called Jim Sands. The Observer (12 September) ran a long piece about Sands who now claims he made the whole thing up – it was a hoax. If anything the hoax being perpetrated by Sands is on The Observer. Did Henry McDonald, the author of the piece, look at The Committee before writing it? If he did, he failed to notice that included within it are long extracts from Sands’ interviews with RUC officers about the book and his allegations. Despite being in protective custody at the time, in none of those does Sands claim he made it all up – which would have ended all his difficulties. Whatever the truth of the allegations in The Committee, this latest claim by Sands won’t make it all go away. That The Observer actually ran this story is a sad testimony to its decline.
Notes
- On Green and Nairac see Fred Holroyd, War Without Honour, Medium Publishing, Hull, 1989, pp. 76-79.
- Colin Wallace, ‘The man who knew too much’, The Oldie, May 1999.
- A relation of former Heath era Northern Ireland Minister, William van Straubenzee, who died in November?
- ‘Behind the lines’, the Spectator, 13 March 1999.