State Violence

by Raymond Murray

RUC forensic teams have been reluctant to disclose the ballistic history of weapons used by loyalists. In the mid-Ulster and north Armagh areas demands for this information by nationalist politicians and others have been ignored. When information has been released, it has tended to be general rather than specific. For example, following the murder of four men in Cappagh, County Tyrone, on 3 March 1991, the RUC confirmed that the weapons had been used before in seven killings in two years in the Lurgan, Stewartstown and Cookstown areas, but they did not specify which killings. ‘It is not our policy to give the history of firearms for evidential reasons’ was how an RUC spokesman responded to a demand for information on the weapons used to kill Tommy Casey in October 1990 near Cookstown. This attitude contrasts with the release of the ballistic history of weapons used by republican groups. The most recent example followed the shooting of Jimmy Brown in Belfast by the IPLO in August 1992. Within hours of his death the media had a full record of the weapon used to kill Brown and previous victims.

  Catholic complaints about the British army and the RUC in regard to their attitude to loyalist violence may be summarised as follows:

  1. Failure to respond to nationalist demands for protection.

  2. How do RUC and British army bases fail to detect or deter loyalist murder gangs when they enter Catholic areas since they are equipped with sophisticated surveillance apparatus?

  3. The response of the RUC after loyalist attacks is slow and complacent.

  4. Injury is added to injury when the RUC and British army oppress Catholic areas following loyalist attacks. They do not direct their attention to the areas into which the loyalists have escaped.

  5. There have been incidents when there have been no follow-up operation of the RUC.

  6. British army and RUC have sometimes insulted and abused the families of the victims and have beaten and insulted mourners at funerals of their murdered relatives even when the funerals have had no paramilitary trappings.

  7. RUC forensic teams have been wilfully negligent or incompetent in gathering evidence at the scene of murders carried out by loyalists paramilitaries.

  8. The RUC is selective in releasing ballistic information in regard to killings. Prior to court cases it releases the history of weapons used by republican paramilitaries but withholds such information in regard to loyalist paramilitaries and of course state forces.

  Collusion Unveiled

  On 20 March 1998 investigative journalists John Ware and Geoff Seed, with Alasdair Palmer, published an article in The Sunday Telegraph unveiling documntary evidence that the British army colluded in murder with Brian Nelson. They called it assassination by proxy. A combination of Nelson’s diaries and the British army’s records show in their estimation that Nelson was involved in 15 murders, 15 attempted murders and 62 conspiracies to murder. Secret files provide evidence that the British army’s Force Research Unit (FRU), a branch of Military Intelligence responsible for running agents in Northern Ireland, was associated with murders carried out by the UDA between 1987 and 1990. The documents are secret records of meetings between FRU and Nelson, commonly known as ‘contact records’. The theme of the article is that British army handlers planted Nelson in the UDA, provided him with detailed profiles of republicans, and directed him to refine the UDA’s wide target of ‘any Catholic will do’ to ‘taking out’ republicans. This was a return to the tactics of the 1970s when army intelligence under the name of the Military Reaction Force had recruited ‘pseudo gangs’ to assasinate ‘republicans’. The return to such a risky course of action followed the thwarting of the ‘Shoot-to-Kill’ policy by the Stalker report. The journalists claim that Nelson was paid £28,000 a year by the British army. In the article they highlighted the attempted murder of Alex Maskey, Sinn Féin councillor, and the murders of Gerard Slane at 4.15am on 23 September 1988 and of Terence McDaid on 10 May 1998. Nelson organised and planned Slane’s murder, providing the assassins with his address, picture and logistics of surveillance. Slane was suspected by the UDA of having links with a republican paramilitary group. The evidence was flimsy. Nelson checked out Slane’s photograph with people who witnessed the murder of a UDA associate, William Quee. Two of these said he might have been the gunman but they were not sure. This was one of the killings which prompted Nelson’s British army handler to write, ‘his targeting information is already of a high quality and recent attacks have proved this accurate’.

  Nelson also suggested Declan McDaid as a target to a UDA assassin called ‘Winkie’ Dodds. He believed he had a republican link. He provided Dodds with a photograph but mistakenly gave the address of McDaid’s brother Terence. The UDA murdered Terence McDaid who had absolutely no association with the IRA. The army handler placated Nelson when he discovered his mistake by telling him that Terence McDaid had been ‘traced as Provisional IRA.’

  The journalists expand on Nelson’s background. he was born in 1947 and grew up on the Shankill Road, Belfast. He joined the Black Watch regiment when he was seventeen. Within five years he was discharged, officially on medical grounds but, as they say, ‘he had been absent without leave and was known to be wild and reckless’. He joined the UDA in the early 1970s. He was sentenced to seven years imprisonment in 1974 after his conviction of kidnapping and torturing a partially-sighted Catholic. After his imprisonment he rejoined the UDA but at the same time offered to work for British army Intelligence. He went to work in Germany in 1985 after being involved in shootings. In 1987 Colonel J of the Force Research Unit asked him to return. he was then planted in the UDA once more to target IRA activists. Naturally he became their chief intelligence officer since he had access to security files. The journalists speculate that there had been a ‘battle between the army and M15 as to who was to secure his services’. Of course M15 was fully aware of Nelson’s trip to South Africa to ship arms to the loyalists in January 1988.

  In 1992 the BBC Panorama team in a programme drew on a 90,000 word account which Nelson wrote on his work for the military Force Research Unit.

  It was the UDA themselves who laid Nelson open to discovery when they could not resist boasting of the excellence of their intelligence following the murder of Loughlin Maginn at his home in Rathfriland, County Down, on 25 August 1989. They published a confidential security force file on Maginn. Public opinion forced the RUC to hold an inquiry. It was led by the Deputy Chief Constable in Cambridgeshire, John Stevens. The army warned Nelson not to reveal to the inquiry that he worked for them. They called in Nelson’s entire collection of intelligence ‘P cards’ which they had helped to compile lest he should hand them over to the inquiry. Stevens first report concluded that the leakage of intelligence was occasional material available to every policeman and soldier. Then Nelson’s fingerprints, traceable from his criminal records, were found on confiscated leaked documents. The inquiry team planned to arrest him on 11 January 1990. Nelson, obviously tipped off, fled to England the evening before. That same night, by an extraordinary coincidence, many of the inquiry team’s statements and documents were destroyed by fire in their office within a secure area of Carrickfergus RUC complex. On his return to Belfast, Nelson was arrested. he revealed that he was an army agent. It was only when Stevens’s deputy, Detective Chief Superintendent Vincent McFadden, threatened to arrest senior army officers on a charge of obstruction of justice that the ‘Contact Forms’ written by Nelson’s handlers were handed over. Colonel J, head of FRU, told the inquiry that the policy was to use Nelson to persuade the UDA to target republicans rather than just Catholics. He indicated that the protracted time it would take the UDA to gain intelligence could give the army enough time to warn the RUC Special Branch who was at risk and thus save lives. 730 intelligence reports, he said, which identified threats to 217 individuals, had been passed to the RUC. The RUC denied the value of this information. One Special Branch superintendent testified that, ‘I have been asked if I can name an individual whose life was saved as a result of Nelson’s information and I cannot’. Special Branch officers tes
tified that only two cases received from FRU were specific enough to anticipate an attack and put preventive measures into action. One of these intended victims was Gerry Adams. Notes of Nelson’s army handlers show that in at least 92 cases FRU knew who the UDA was going to murder.

  The Stevens team compiled a second report. It was never published. John Ware and his associates wrote, ‘In that report, it set out the evidence that the army’s Force Research Unit had colluded with the UDA in targeting members of the Provisional IRa. The file was passed to the DPP, Northern Ireland. In consultation with Sir Patrick Mayhew, then the attorney general, it was decided not to prosecute Colonel J or any of Nelson’s army handlers: only Brian Nelson was to be charged. In the event, there was no trial. Nelson was persuaded to plead guilty to five charges of conspiracy to muder. In a hearing in 1992 before a judge on the length of his sentence, Colonel J once again stressed that he believed that Nelson’s intelligence had enabled his unit to pass on to Special Branch reports that identified 217 individuals. The judge at the hearing accepted this. In sentencing Nelson he said that he gave special weight to the fact that he passed on what was possibly life-saving information in respect of 217 individuals.

  Nelson was sentenced to ten years imprisonment. He was released in 1997. The article continues, ‘(He) is now believed to be living with financial assistance from the army. But his legacy continues. Nelson distributed his “P” cards to several other Protestant paramilitary groups, which may have used them in the planning of assassinations. Colonel J was awarded the OBE. Some of Nelson’s handlers have been promoted and given medals. One went on to give lectures on “agent handling” to Military Intelligence.’

  The Sunday Telegraph says that the Force Research Unit, set up for the sole purpose of running agents in Northern Ireland, had no authority to mount such an operation. It consisted of around 50 officers and soldiers and ran more than 100 agents. It was disbanded in 1990 after Stevens’ second report. It suggests that it was reconstituted under another name.

  The editorial in the paper on 29 March 1998 was critical of the British army ‘No less than the police or the judiciary in Northern Ireland, the army has always been expected to observe the due process of law: soldiers face trial for murder if they fail to follow the procedures laid down for the lawful use of lethal force. Indeed, it is this belief in legality which has helped draw a completely unambiguous distinction between the necessary use of force by soldiers and the murderous violence of the terrorist gangs. It is this basic distinction which army intelligence jeopardised by colluding with loyalist paramilitaries and taking sides in the conflict. Those officers involved demeaned the moral authority of the crown. Their defence was little more than a moral fig-leaf: that, since the UDA was going to kill people anyway, it should kill identifiable republican terrorists, rather than randomly selected Catholics. But even judged by their own supposedly military criteria, Nelson’s handlers failed abysmally.’

  The Death Toll caused by South African Weaponry, 1988–94

  The consignment of illegal weapons that British agents and UDA Intelligence Officer, Brian Nelson, had been instrumental in acquiring from South Africa arrived in the north of Ireland in January 1988. It consisted of 200 AK47 automatic rifles, 90 Browning 9mm pistols, c.500 fragmentation grenades, 30,000 rounds of ammunition, a dozen ROG7 rocket launchers and an unknown number of warheads. Because of Nelson’s position within the UDA, he also knew the storage locations of the weapons. On 8 January 1988, 60 AK 47 automatic rifles, 31 pistols, 150 grenades and 11,000 rounds of ammunition were recovered near Tandragee from the UDA. On 5 February 1988, 38 automatic rifles, 15 pistols, 100 grenades, one RPG7 rocket launcher, 26 warheads and 40,000 rounds of ammunition were recovered on the northern outskirts of Belfast from the UVF.

  Since 1988, over 30 AK47 rifles, 3 RPG7 rocket launchers and a number of grenades have been recovered in other finds, including some from the Ulster Resistance Movement. Some of these weapons had already been used by loyalists to kill nationalists. Loyalist paramilitaries, therefore, still possess a significant amount of the initial consignment. BBC’s Insight Ulster programme on 28 January 1993, dealing with the South African weapon consignment, reported that British Intelligence services attributed the fact that loyalist paramilitaries had received the weapons to a breakdown of their own intelligence and surveillance services. The weapons shipment, the report continued, had been monitored by British Intelligence from South Africa to the north of Ireland, but a breakdown occurred when it arrived in the north. They lost trace of it.

  Speakers from South Africa made a deep impression on the delegates at a conference held in Belfast, 6–8 June 1995, entitled Reconciliation and Community: The Future of Peace in Northern Ireland. Members of Relatives for Justice held discussions with Mr Dullah Omar, the South African Justice Minister during his visit. Mr Peter Madden, legal representative of Relatives for Justice, travelled to South Africa in June 1995 to present a submission on their behalf to the Cameron Commission on arms trade. I went to South Africa in November 1995 and met with Dr Alex Boraine, Justice in Transition Minister, to seek details of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa and explore the possibility of the murders from South African weaponry in Northern Ireland being included also under that commission. Mr Martin Finucane followed up the South African contacts with a visit to South Africa in March 1998.

  The Relatives for Justice submission was made at the same time as a Sinn Féin submission presented by Brian Currin (Lawyers for Human Rights) and Gregg Nott (Bell Dewyer and Hall, Johannesburg). The submissions were made in week two of the hearings which related specifically to ‘procedures’ which were under consideration for application to any future domestic arms trade policy which might be introduced by the government. The submissions were well received. Both were the only submissions from outside the country made orally.

  The use of South African arms by loyalists in Northern Ireland to murder Catholics between 1988 and 1994 was sanctioned by the British government.

  The pamphlet Collusion 1990–1994: Loyalist Paramilitary Murders in the North of Ireland contained a list of killings that can be attributed to imported weaponry from South Africa. I am indebted to Arthur Fegan for his research.

  Submission of Relatives for Justice to the Cameron Commission

  Submission to Cameron Enquiry into Alleged Arms Transactions between Armscor and one Eli Wazan and other related matters appointed by President Mandela on 14 October 1994.

  The submission is made by a number of families of those persons who were murdered by weapons allegedly shipped from South Africa to Northern Ireland by loyalists in 1988.

  We are concerned that the 1988 shipment may have been only the first of a number of shipments made and that further shipments may have been made between 1988 and 1994 (See our pamphlet Collusion 1990–1994 enclosed herewith). Details of arms shipments from South Africa to Northern Ireland were disclosed by several investigative journalists. Shortly after the weapons arrived in Northern Ireland in 1988 there was a clear upsurge in the use of weapons allegedly supplied from South Africa.

  According to the investigative journalist Ed Moloney of the Dublin-based newspaper The Sunday Tribune, Brian Nelson, a British soldier working undercover in Northern Ireland, established links in 1985 with South Africa to set up an arms deal involving the purchase and shipment of a large supply of arms and ammunition for use in the murders of Catholics in Northern Ireland.

  At the time Nelson was both a member of the British army under direct command of an officer of colonel rank and a senior intelligence officer in the UDA (Ulster Defence Association, the main loyalist group) [see The Sunday Tribune 26 January 1992].

  A plan to forge links with loyalists and the South African government was established in order to transport weaponry originating from Armscor to loyalists in exchange for missile technology from the north of Ireland. The plan was that the South African government would obtain the technology for use in its wars with neighbouring
African states and the loyalists would receive an arms arsenal of modern weaponry for its war against the IRA (Irish Republican Army) and the republican movement and for its ongoing terrorist campaign against the general Catholic population in Northern Ireland. It is suspected that, since the British government could not be seen to supply the loyalist groups directly, they used the South African arms industry and its international arms dealing policy to sanction the supplies of weapons to loyalist groups in Northern Ireland.

  In April 1989 three loyalists and a South African government official were arrested in Paris along with an international arms dealer. It was alleged in the press that they were all involved in a conspiracy to exchange missile technology being developed in Belfast for arms shipments from South Africa. As a result of this, it is our concern that arms shipments were made subsequent to 1988.

  In September 1989, as a result of a public outcry about collusion between British security forces and the loyalists, the British government set up an enquiry into collusion headed by John Stevens who was then deputy chief constable of the Cambridge constabulary. Stevens submitted a report of which only a part was made public.

  Nelson was arrested in Belfast in January 1990 by police officers working for Stevens and was charged with the murder of Catholics and plotting to murder political opponents of the British government.

  Two investigative journalists, John Ware and Geoffrey Seed, revealed that Nelson had spoken to them before and after his arrest. Both journalists obtained a ‘jail diary’ from Nelson and spoke to him at length about his role as a member of the British army and as a member of the UDA group responsible for hundreds of murders in the north of Ireland. Ware and Seed produced the BBC Panorama programme on collusion which was broadcast in February 1990, after Nelson’s arrest but researched in 1989.