by Peter Taylor
In 1999, in the wake of rising demands for a public inquiry into the killing of Pat Finucane, Sir Ronnie Flanagan asked the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir John Stevens, to investigate the killing and the allegation of collusion, as Stevens had initially investigated the broader allegations of collusion between the security forces and the loyalist paramilitaries in 1989 (see here). It was Sir John who brought Stobie’s involvement to light with the result that he was charged with involvement in Finucane’s murder and the killing of the young Protestant student, Adam Lambert. The case came to trial in November 2001. The key witness was a former journalist, Neil Mulholland, to whom Stobie had spoken, presumably as a means of self-protection. Stobie had also conducted an off-the-record interview in 1990 with the respected Belfast journalist, Ed Maloney. Maloney, however, obeyed the cardinal journalistic principle and refused to give the new Stevens inquiry his confidential notes that were taken at the time. Mulholland, however, did cooperate with the Stevens team and was due to become the chief prosecution witness in the trial at considerable risk to himself. But the case against Stobie collapsed when Mulholland indicated that he did not wish to testify as to do so might severely damage his health. To say he felt under pressure was probably a massive understatement. As a result, on 26 November 2001, the case collapsed and Stobie walked free from Belfast Crown Court. As he did so, Sinn Fein’s Assembly Member for West Belfast, Alex Maskey, who himself had escaped a UFF murder bid in 1994, launched into the ‘Brits’. ‘The role of the RUC Special Branch and British military intelligence in collusion and running agents within the loyalist death squads has not been explained. Cover up is still the order of the day,’ he said. ‘Are Stobie’s handlers now members of the new policing arrangements? The reality is that Special Branch still exists and exists as a secret police force. Nationalists and republicans will not support policing arrangements with an unaccountable wing, a Special Branch, governed by a culture of silence and operating with no controls, accountability or scrutinity.’18
Surprisingly, Stobie did not flee the country as might have seemed sensible given his exposure as a Special Branch agent but returned to the loyalist Forthriver area, having allegedly received assurances from his former UFF comrades that his life was not in danger. Stobie was either naïve or foolhardy or both. On 2 December 2001 the RUC warned him about his personal security. Ten days later he was shot dead, taking his secrets to the grave and fuelling even more vociferous demands for a public inquiry into the killing of Finucane and related loyalist shootings. Ironically Stobie himself had called for a public inquiry, describing himself and Mulholland as ‘pawns in a bigger game, caught up in a tangled web spun by very powerful people’.19
The day Stobie was gunned down, the second shock hit Special Branch, the Chief Constable, and the new Police Service of Northern Ireland. The implications were potentially even more damaging as the shock involved intelligence provided to Special Branch in advance of the ‘Real’ IRA’s Omagh bombing on 15 August 1998 in which 29 people died in the worst atrocity of the conflict (see here). The dramatic allegation, mirroring that in the Stobie/Finucane case, was that Special Branch had been provided with information by its agents but it had not been acted upon. Ironically, the shock was delivered in-house by the Police Service of Northern Ireland’s new Ombudsman, Nuala O’Loan who investigated the Omagh allegation and published her draft report on 12 December 2001. Mrs O’Loan is a former solicitor, law lecturer and member of the now defunct Police Authority, her remit as Ombudsman under the Police (Northern Ireland) Act of 1998 is to provide ‘an independent impartial police complaints service in which the public and the police have confidence’. Her office, with a hundred staff and a Chief Investigator on secondment from the Metropolitan Police, opened in November 2000. The Act and the establishment of the Ombudsman’s office were vital parts of the post Good Friday Agreement institutions designed to restore public confidence in the police, in particular on the nationalist side.
Mrs O’Loan began her investigation on 17 August 2001 following allegations made by an RUC agent and former British soldier codenamed ‘Kevin Fulton’ that two or three days before the Omagh bombing he had warned the police that he had heard from a senior member of the ‘Real’ IRA that there was ‘something big on’.20 He said he suspected the man was making a bomb and passed on the person’s name and car registration number. ‘Fulton’ did not mention Omagh or the precise location and time of the attack. It is said that the officer then logged the warning. It appears that there was an even earlier warning on 4 August 1998, eleven days before the attack, in which Special Branch was told of weapons being brought across the border and into Omagh for an attack on the police on 15 August.21 The key question that Mrs O’Loan and her team had to investigate was what happened to the intelligence Special Branch received. Was it passed on and could the slaughter of 29 people have been avoided? When Mrs O’Loan published her draft report it made devastating reading:
The police had received two warnings on 4 and 12 August 1998. The Chief Constable’s judgement and leadership were ‘seriously flawed’. The result was that the chances of detaining and convicting the Omagh bombers were ‘significantly reduced’.
Special Branch officers failed to pass on the warnings.
Besides also being highly critical of the way the RUC had conducted its investigation after Omagh – and the RUC’s own internal report into the original investigation had been critical – the Ombudsman’s draft report did claim that it was unclear that had action been taken on the warnings, the bombing would have been prevented. It then recommended that a new team of police officers from an outside force should investigate the bombing and the role and fuction of Special Branch should be reviewed.22 Reaction to Mrs O’Loan’s report was predictably split along nationalist and Unionist lines. The Chief Constable, Sir Ronnie Flanagan, was incandescent and hit back saying that the report was ‘wildly inaccurate’ and even remarking, uncharacteristically, that he would ‘commit suicide in public’ if it could be proved he was wrong.23 He attacked its ‘basic unfairness’ and its ‘wild and sweeping allegations’. He said ‘Fulton’ was unreliable. ‘I do not think these people have ever investigated a terrorist incident in their lives,’ he said. ‘I have to say that I am astounded by the ignorance that they have displayed in terms of how terrorist organisations operate.’24 He also pointed out that Mrs O’Loan had not conducted a proper, formal interview with him and therefore the report was the case for the prosecution without hearing the defence. Mrs O’Loan said she was ‘enormously saddened’25 by the Chief Constable’s response. Tony Blair gave his full support to the Chief Constable who had steered the RUC through its difficult transition to the Police Service of Northern Ireland. Yet, the repercussions of the O’Loan report and the killing of William Stobie were destined to rumble on, and perhaps lift the carpet on still more embarrassing corners of the so-called ‘dirty war’.
In Ireland the ghosts of the past seldom rest but return to haunt the future epitomised most painfully by the ongoing Saville inquiry into the events of ‘Bloody Sunday’. Despite all the remarkable progress that has been made since the Good Friday Agreement, culminating in the establishment of new political institutions, a new police service and the first verifiable act of IRA decommissioning, the road ahead will still fall under the long shadows cast by the conflict. These shadows will be thrown not only by the raw sectarian hatreds generated once again at Holy Cross but from the murky world of intelligence gathering and the recruitment of informers and agents. The danger is that these shadows may still have the power to destabilise the future. The ‘Brits’ may have contained the IRA and encouraged it down the political road, even to the extent of giving its four Members of Parliament offices at Westminster, but now they have to consolidate the peace. Changing political institutions is difficult enough but changing hearts and minds is a challenge of a different dimension that will take years and generations to complete. As Tony Blair warned in his words after the IRA’s historic ge
sture on decommissioning, ‘We are a long way from finishing our journey but a very significant milestone has been passed’.26 There are still many more milestones to go before the IRA’s last bunker is sealed and a line is finally drawn under the ‘Brits’ 30 year ‘war’ against the IRA, thus sealing too the final peace in the centuries-old conflict between England and Ireland. Only then will it truly represent a ‘farewell to arms’.
Pictures
British troops deployed in Londonderry, 1969.
‘Bloody Sunday’, 1972. Father Edward Daly, with bloodstained handkerchief, escorts the dying Jack Duddy, shot by British paratroopers.
Peter. Former military intelligence officer, 1972.
Lt-Gen. Sir Anthony Farrar-Hockley. Commander Land Forces, Northern Ireland (1970-1).
Donegall Street, Belfast, minutes after the IRA bomb exploded in 1972, killing seven people and injuring 150.
William ‘Willie’ Whitelaw, the first Northern Ireland Secretary (1972–4).
Roy Mason, Northern Ireland Secretary (1976–9), with British troops.
Lt-Col. Brian of the Gloucestershire Regiment.
George of the Gloucestershire Regiment.
Michael Oatley, former MI6 officer.
IRA leader Francis Hughes. He was the ‘Most Wanted Man’ at the time of his arrest in 1978. He died on hunger strike in 1981.
John Boyle. He was shot dead by the SAS during a stake-out in Dunloy graveyard, 1978.
‘Jim’ as a member of 14 Intelligence Company, late 1970s.
The wreckage of the IRA’s attack on the Parachute Regiment convoy at Warrenpoint, 1979. Eighteen soldiers died, the army’s heaviest loss in a single day in the current conflict.
Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher visiting British soldiers in Northern Ireland.
Stuart of the Parachute Regiment, a survivor of Warrenpoint, in army quarters in Northern Ireland.
The old German rifles, without ammunition, found in the hayshed where Michael Tighe was killed by an RUC anti-terrorist unit, 1982.
John Stalker, Deputy Chief Constable of Greater Manchester police, removed from his RUC inquiry, 1986.
Sir Colin Sampson, Chief Constable of West Yorkshire police who took over John Stalker’s RUC inquiry, 1986.
Wreckage of the police patrol car blown up by an IRA bomb on the Kinnego embankment, 1982. Three RUC officers died. The explosives had been stored in the hayshed and removed without the knowledge of the intelligence services.
The Grand Hotel, Brighton, bombed by the IRA during the Conservative Party conference, 1984. Four members of the Conservative Party were killed. Mrs Thatcher narrowly escaped death.
The British and Irish Prime Ministers, Margaret Thatcher and Dr Garret FitzGerald, sign the Anglo-Irish Agreement at Hillsborough Castle in 1985.
Member of the IRA East Tyrone Brigade active service unit shot dead by the SAS at Loughgall, 1987.
‘Frank’ of the ‘Det’, early 1980s.
The cake baked for the SAS and the ‘Det’ after the SAS shot dead IRA man, William Price, at Ardboe, 1984.
Solicitor Pat Finucane, who was gunned down by loyalists of the UFF at his home, 1989.
Brian Nelson. British army agent of the Force Research Unit (FRU).
RUC Chief Constable, Sir Hugh Annesley (right) and John Stevens, Deputy Chief Constable of Cambridgeshire police, with the first Stevens Report, commissioned (1989) following allegations of collusion between loyalist paramilitaries and the security forces.
Aftermath of the IRA mortar attack on Downing Street, 1991. The mortars were fired from a van in Whitehall, which can be seen in flames in the photograph.
Peter Brooke, Northern Ireland Secretary (1989–92).
Prime Minister John Major (right) and Sir Patrick Mayhew, Northern Ireland Secretary (1993-7) at Hillsborough Castle.
Sir Kenneth Stowe, Permanent Under-Secretary of State Northern Ireland Office (1979–81).
Sir Robert Andrew, Permanent Under-Secretary of State Northern Ireland Office (1984–8).
Ian Burns, Deputy Under-Secretary of State Northern Ireland Office (1987–90)
Commander John Grieve, head of Scotland Yard’s anti-terrorist squad at the scene of the Docklands bomb, February 1996.
An artist’s impression of the lorry and trailer carrying the Docklands bomb.
James McArdle, the ‘triple thumbprint man’, who drove the Docklands bomb to Barking on the outskirts of London.
The waste ground in Barking, where the lorry carrying the bomb was parked before the explosion, and where a copy of Truck and Driver magazine that provided the vital thumbprint clue was found.
David Trimble and Gerry Adams during the Good Friday Agreement negotiations, 1998.
British and Irish Prime Ministers, Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern, 1998.
Mo Mowlam, Northern Ireland Secretary (1997–9).
Senator George Mitchell.
The Northern Ireland Executive: (clockwise from right) David Trimble MP (UUP), First Minister; Seamus Mallon MP (SDLP), Deputy First Minister; Brid Rodgers (SDLP), Minister of Agriculture; Mark Durkan (SDLP), Minister of Finance; Dr Sean Farren (SDLP), Minister of Higher and Further Education; Sam Foster (UUP), Minister of the Environment; Sir Reg Empey (UUP), Minister of Enterprise, Trade and Investment; Michael McGimpsey (UUP), Minister of Culture; Bairbre de Brún (Sinn Fein), Minister of Health; Martin McGuinness MP (Sinn Fein), Minister of Education; John Semple, Head of Northern Ireland Civil Service.
Peter Mandelson, Northern Ireland Secretary (1999-2001).
Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness on their historic first visit to No. 10 Downing Street, 1997.
Gunner Robert Curtis. The first British soldier to be killed by the IRA (1972) in the current conflict.
Lance-Bombardier Stephen Restorick. To date (January 2001) the last British soldier to be killed by the IRA (1997) in the current conflict.
Acknowledgements
I find acknowledgements almost the most difficult part of writing a book, not least because of the fear of forgetting to mention someone whose contribution or assistance was so vital. If I do, I hope they will forgive me and still accept my gratitude. These words are usually written when the long labour of writing is done – a task which, though lonely, is in reality the fruit of the labours and assistance of many. Provos, Loyalists and now Brits, which together make up the contemporary historical trilogy of the current Irish conflict, could not have been written without the enthusiasm and dedication of the team that I worked with in making the BBC television series on which the books are based. Sam Collyns was the best series producer I could have wished for, was great to work with and always believed there was light at the end of the tunnel if we just persevered; assistant producer Julia Hannis displayed her customary tireless energy in tracking down unfindable people as well as generously checking facts for the book; film archivist Stuart Robertson found revelatory footage to illustrate our theme, and executive producer Peter Horrocks kept the lightest touch on the tiller and always moved it in exactly the right direction. I’m also grateful to all my BBC colleagues for their support with the series and the book. At one stage I was minded not to write it but was told by friends, colleagues and others that I must, on the grounds that Provos and Loyalists were only two-thirds of the story. I hope they are not disappointed.
Thanks, too, to all those without whose remarkable interviews neither book nor series would exist. Many took great risks in co-operating with Brits both on and off the record and many of their names I cannot mention. They know who they are and I am deeply indebted to them. Many are featured in the book under pseudonyms marked by inverted commas. I’m also grateful to Brigadier Sebastian Roberts of the MOD who supported the project from the start and did all he could to assist despite the fact he was not able to help with Special Forces; and to RUC Chief Constable Sir Ronnie Flanagan and his colleagues who went out of their way to provide access to individuals who enabled us reflect such a vital part of the story.
At Bloomsbury, Bil
l Swainson was a cool and incisive commissioning editor who, when it became clear the book was going to overrun, encouraged me to get the story down first and worry about length later. Brits is much longer than originally envisaged and would have been even longer without the cuts overseen by Bill and Pascal Cariss, who brilliantly edited and improved the text. The book is infinitely the better for it and I am indebted to them both as well as to Edward Faulkner, who so meticulously put the jigsaw of text, changes and rewrites together and to Douglas Matthews for his excellent index. I’m grateful to my agent John Willcocks who sorted out the contractual side, leaving me free to get on with the writing, and also to David Hooper for his valued legal advice.