-Caveat Lector-
>From http://www.observer.co.uk/focus/story/0,6903,742342,00.html
}}}>Begin
Focus
Scandal of the secret killers
Henry McDonald reveals a new thread in the web of collusion between British
intelligence and loyalist terrorists
Henry McDonald
Sunday June 23, 2002
The Observer
Their murder campaign took them from the scenic shores of Lough Foyle in Co
Donegal on the western seaboard of the Irish Republic and back across the border
to their base in one of the most prosperous, staunchly loyalist towns in Northern
Ireland.
Their targets included Sinn Fein councillors and suspected republican sympathisers,
but in the main their victims were innocent Catholics in and around the Greater
Lisburn area, a predominantly Protestant market town south of Belfast.
And all the time, from the late 1980s to the mid-1990s, one of the men sending out
dedicated loyalist gunmen to hunt down and murder for the terrorist Ulster Defence
Association was himself an intelligence agent for the British Army.
It has now emerged that another agent was working for Army intelligence at a high
level inside the UDA at the same time as Brian Nelson - the spy who helped set up
the murder of lawyer Pat Finucane.
The revelation that another agent operated for the Army's highly secretive Force
Research Unit - a shadowy group of intelligence agents - inside the UDA while the
terror group carried out sectarian murders will put further pressure on the
Government to hold a public inquiry into the murky world of the security services'
relationship with loyalist terrorism.
Finucane, a Belfast solicitor, was shot dead in front of his family in 1989 after
Nelson, a former British soldier and FRU informer, passed on his personal details to
the UDA. The FRU and elements of the now defunct Royal Ulster Constabulary
stand accused of aiding loyalists in setting up republican and Catholic targets in
Northern Ireland.
Specifically in the Finucane murder, former UDA terrorists have claimed that rogue
police officers wanted the lawyer killed and did nothing to stop the assassination
team carrying out the murder. So intense has the controversy been surrounding the
FRU's activities in Greater Belfast during the early 1990s that the Army has tried to
erase bad memories by giving it a bland new name: the Joint Services Group.
But a name change, as was the case with Windscale turning into Sellafield, or Long
Kesh becoming the Maze prison, cannot wipe away the scandal that has stained the
reputation of the Army and other branches of the security services in Ulster.
And now The Observer can reveal that the UDA's second-in-command in Lisburn
was also an agent for the FRU in the early 1990s. This man has since fled Northern
Ireland with the aid of the security forces who spirited him and his immediate family
out of the Co Antrim town to a secret location in England in the mid-1990s.
He was a member of one of the UDA's most ruthless assassination squads, which
between 1989 and 1993 murdered six Catholics in the Lisburn area. Such was the
reputation of the UDA's Lisburn unit that some of its members were recruited to
carry out a high-profile murder across the border in the Irish Republic. UDA killers
from Lisburn were sent to kill Sinn Fein councillor Eddie Fullerton at his Donegal
home on 25 May 1991.
This latest revelation is another indication of just how deeply penetrated the UDA
was with both Army and police agents during the upsurge in loyalist violence of the
early 1990s. Although The Observer has established the FRU agent's identity, he
cannot be named for legal reasons.
The agent had been recruited into the UDA's assassination team in Lisburn by the
late John McMichael, the organisation's 'Brigadier General' whom the IRA murdered
in 1987. The UDA eventually unmasked the FRU's informant after he was spotted
being escorted into Thiepval barracks at the edge of Lisburn. Thiepval is the British
Army's headquarters in Northern Ireland and the nerve centre of the military's
counterterrorist intelligence operations.
As second in command of the Lisburn UDA, the agent would have had access to
information on planned killings and other terrorist activity in the town and beyond.
Loyalist sources admit that the informant managed to thwart several attacks in the
Greater Lisburn area by his contacts with FRU.
Their admission certainly bolsters claims by Army intelligence officers, including
Nelson's former boss in the FRU, Brigadier Gordon Kerr, now Britain's defence
attaché in China, that their agents actually prevented scores of loyalist murder bids.
Kerr has always contended that Nelson actually saved the life of Sinn Fein
President Gerry Adams by thwarting a limpet-mine attack on his car.
Meanwhile, Sir John Stevens, the senior police officer whose report into the
collusion allegations is set to be published within the next few weeks, has refused to
elaborate on why he changed his mind over the causes of a controversial fire at his
former headquarters in Northern Ireland.
In January 1990, an office the current Metropolitan Commissioner was using as part
of his investigation into allegations of collusion between the security forces and
loyalist terrorists, was set on fire. A month later, Stevens released a statement
firmly rejecting conspiracy theories relating to the blaze at Seapark, a Royal Ulster
Constabulary base on the northern outskirts of Belfast.
Stevens said in February 1990: 'I am happy to state categorically that I am satisfied
with the RUC investigation into the fire at the Seapark Office.
'Despite the most thorough tests, there is simply no evidence to suggest that the
cause of the blaze was anything other than accidental.'
However, on the first half of a two-part Panorama investigation into collusion in
Northern Ireland screened last Wednesday, Stevens was asked what caused the fire
at Seapark. 'I strongly believe that it was deliberately set; it was not caused by a
discarded cigarette,' he told the programme.
Asked why the Commissioner has now changed his mind about the origins of the
fire - which at the time many in Northern Ireland believed was deliberately started to
frustrate his inquiry - a spokesman for Stevens said: 'The Commissioner's
comments regarding the fire were made at the time of the incident; however, further
information has come to light and in view of this the Commissioner has made
further comments.'
The Observer has also established that Panorama's chief source on the first
programme, the self-confessed UDA terrorist Ken Barrett, was not the assassin who
killed Finucane. According to senior loyalists, Barrett drove the car over to the
lawyer's home off the Antrim Road in Belfast.
Barrett did burst into the Finucane home on 12 February 1989 but did not fire the
fatal 14 shots that killed the solicitor in front of his wife and children. Barrett was
filmed in secret by the Panorama team and claimed on camera that elements in the
police wanted Finucane dead. He went on to claim that the security forces not only
could have prevented the murder but also cleared a route for the killers on the night
of the killing.
Whatever the substance to the allegations of highly placed informants directing
UDA terrorism and members of the security forces aiding and abetting loyalist
groups, there is one clear upshot from these controversies: Special Branch in
Northern Ireland is to lose its primary role in controlling counter-terrorist
intelligence.
Special Branch is to be merged with the CID in a new anti-crime unit within the
Police Service of Northern Ireland. Overall control of intelligence material will in
all
likelihood be passed to MI5, with only a slimmed-down anti-terrorist unit operating
inside the PSNI. No such reforms, however, are planned for the other agency
alleged to have dabbled with loyalist terrorists in the early 1990s, the Army's highly
secretive FRU.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2002
End<{{{
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