Stakeknife: Britain’s Secret Agents in Ireland
Martin Ingram and Greg Harkin
Dublin: The O’Brien Press: 2004, £8.99, p/back
Mad Dog: The rise and fall of Johnny Adair and ‘C Company’
David Lister and Hugh Jordan
Edinburgh: Mainstream, 2003, £15.99, h/back
Stakeknife is a former member’s account of some of the operations of the British Army’s Force Research Unit (FRU) – and the attempts by the British state to keep this version of the story from appearing. Ingram’s account is reminiscent of the first of these memoirs of counter-terror activities in Northern Ireland, Fred Holroyd’s War Without Honour, 20 years before: decent bloke, who believes in the cause, discovers the real world is more corrupt than he can handle and, eventually, becomes a reluctant whistle-blower. The bit neither of them could swallow is also essentially the same: state counter-terror outfit becomes part of the terror. Ingram tell us:
‘Although politicians claimed that the FRU was directed at loyalist and republican para-militaries, this is simply untrue ….the FRU was prevented by RUC Special Branch from infiltrating loyalist murder gangs.’ (p. 32) (1)
The exception to this was ex-Army Brian Nelson, the ‘intelligence officer’ of the UDA, who directed the UDA’s killing of republicans for the FRU. Ingram suspects that Nelson never left the British Army (as does Paul Larkin: see below). As well as directing the loyalist killer gangs, the FRU also provided some of their arms, apparently believing that this was the only way to redress the balance of forces after the IRA received arms from Libya. (p. 191)
The behaviour of Johnny ‘Mad Dog’ Adair and his gang goes some of the way to illustrate the claims of those who defend the FRU running Nelson; namely, that in so doing they were saving lives (and, some of the time, killing the ‘right’ people) by having their man Nelson direct the UDA killings, rather than leaving the business to enthusiastic freelancers like Johnny Adair for whom the distinction between Catholic and republican was fuzzy.
Adair’s story is an account of the ‘squalid, sectarian thuggery’, to use Roger Cottrell’s phrase above, into which sections of the loyalist community descended. But for all the striking and entertaining details of who-shot-and-fucked-and-sold-which-drugs-to-whom there is a much more important issue here to which the authors devote less than a page. Adair’s gang of psycho-killers turned drug-dealers was being allowed to operate up to 1993 because it was killing republicans. The authors quote an RUC detective who wanted to move against Adair’s gang as saying:
‘Some of my [Special Branch] colleagues were quite content to do nothing,’ he said. ‘They would say, “But he’s got the Sinners [Sinn Fein] on the run.”‘ (p. 141)
This all changed with the Hume-Adams agreement in 1993 and the subsequent IRA ceasefire. Suddenly getting Adair (and people like him) became top priority lest they upset the ‘peace process’ apple cart.
As well as a fascinating account of a section of the loyalist tribe, this is also an illustration of how a paramilitary structure formed to do one thing fight a sectarian war – can be adapted to do another. In the post-WW2 period, particularly since the CIA’s creation of the army of anti-Castro Cubans in Florida, this has almost always meant supplying the drug trade. Which is what Johnny Adair and his little band of Catholic-killers turned to.
The FRU was able to do the things it did things because it was ‘a self-regulating body. The commanding officer of the FRU had the power to authorise any operation as he, or she, saw fit.’ (Stakeknife p. 211) This is the central point, surely: the core activities of the British state – police, military, intelligence – are still not accountable in any real way to the politicians; and, for reasons still unclear to me, this is a situation with which most of our politicians are content.
Notes
1 For a secret operation, a huge amount about the FRU has been leaked and published in the last few years, despite the best efforts of HMG to keep it quiet. A Google search for FRU + Northern Ireland produces over 3000 hits.