‘We want to target Finucane again,’ Nelson said. ‘You asked me to tell you and I’m telling you.’
‘What’s the plan,’ he was asked.
‘I don’t know,’ Nelson replied, ‘but I’m just letting you know he is a target. Last time you lot stopped us getting him but you won’t this time. We know that he is one of them, working with the IRA. We’re certain of it.’
‘How can you be so certain?’
‘Because we’ve been watching him. Our intelligence tells us that he is making the system look foolish, using every legal loophole to get off these bastards that target innocent Protestants. We’re not having it any more.
‘Get it?’
‘We understand,’ he was told, ‘but we know you always do the recces for your mob so you had better tell us what the plans are, Brian. We have to know. This is a two-way relationship between you and us. You have to trust us to take the right decisions. That’s not your job. You’re the intelligence officer keeping us informed of what’s happening on the streets; it’s not your job to tell us what we should or should not do. Do you understand?’
‘I understand that,’ Nelson replied, ‘but if I keep you informed on this one, will you promise me that you won’t try and stop us?’
‘That’s not up to us,’ replied one of his handlers, ‘we don’t make the decisions; that’s up to senior officers way above our level.’
‘All right, then,’ Nelson replied, ‘but don’t let me down, for fuck’s sake. I got into enough shit last time you fouled up our attempt to get him. My lot will get pretty sick if you stop us again.’
Nelson confessed that the UDA had planned another ambush, similar to the last one, but that this time Finucane would be attacked shortly after he had left his Belfast office at the end of a day’s work. Using a gunman riding pillion on the back of a motorbike, they planned to hit the lawyer between the time he left his office and began the drive home.
‘There’s only one point,’ said Nelson. ‘We’re not sure which way he will go when he leaves his office. We need his home address. We think he must live in north Belfast but we’re not sure.’
‘We’ll let you know,’ replied a handler.
Three days later, after the request for Finucane’s home address had been passed to senior FRU officers, Nelson arrived for a scheduled meeting at the prearranged pick-up point. After chatting over a cup of tea he asked: ‘Have you got Finucane’s address for me?’
‘Aye,’ came the handler’s reply, ‘he lives in a detached house in Fortwilliam Drive, off the Antrim Road in north Belfast. You could have got it yourself, you know.’
‘How’s that?’ he asked.
‘Because Finucane’s home address is in the phonebook,’ he was told, ‘you only had to look it up.’
‘Fuck me,’ said Nelson. ‘For fuck’s sake, keep that to yourselves, otherwise I’ll look a right idiot.’
Nothing further was said about Finucane during that meeting, but Nelson now had the vital piece of information which would seal the lawyer’s fate. And, phonebook or not, it had been supplied by British Military Intelligence.
Once again the TCG were informed of the UDA’s plot to kill Finucane and once again the gunmen’s plan was thwarted when the area around his Belfast office was covered each day with RUC officers and army patrols, making any attempt to get close to the Belfast solicitor an impossibility.
And once again Brian Nelson was an angry man when he confronted his handlers. ‘I see you bastards managed to stop us again,’ he said sarcastically. ‘You’re not involved with this one. We want to target him and that should be the end of the matter. Now, for fuck’s sake, leave him to us. You all know that he’s one of them, a fucking Provo, and we have an arrangement. You provide the information and we carry out the killings. Just leave us alone and let us get on with the job.’
‘You know that we have to obey orders,’ his handlers told him. ‘We receive information and pass it on for decisions to be taken. If the officers above decreed an area should be swamped, for whatever reason, it’s got nothing to do with us. They give the orders, we carry them out. You’ve been in the army, Brian, you must understand how it works. Now get off our backs.’
It was at that meeting that Nelson was informed that Patrick Finucane had been persuaded that the time had come for him to have protection. There were fears in the community that he had become so high-profile, defending Provos and Republicans charged with various serious offences, that he should take precautions to ensure his own safety. Although it was the duty of the RUC to defend those believed to be targeted by either the Provos or the Loyalist paramilitaries, some Sinn Fein activists worried that the RUC might turn a blind eye if they heard an attack was planned on someone such as the Republicans’ lawyer. As a result, Patrick Finucane finally agreed, after much persuasion, that he should accept a guard, and two Republican hard men were called in to protect him. From that moment on, whenever Finucane left his office, attended court or travelled anywhere by car, he was under constant guard. His two escorts even began accompanying him to and from his home in north Belfast though they did not stand guard outside his home. After dropping him off each evening and ensuring he was safely in the house, they would return the following day to accompany him to his office. But even that strategy would not prove sufficient.
‘Shit,’ Nelson said on hearing the news, ‘we thought he was always on his own.’
‘He was,’ one handler told him, ‘but not any more. Now he’s protected whenever he’s out of his home. Perhaps he’s been tipped off that your lot are after him.’
Nelson immediately rounded on his handlers. ‘Have you fuckers told him that he’s been targeted? Have you shits gone behind our backs and told him we’re after him?’
Nelson would have gone on ranting but the senior officer raised his hand, indicating the agent should calm down and keep quiet. ‘No, we haven’t done anything of the sort and nor do we think anyone else has warned him. It’s not our policy to do that. If we think someone’s been targeted then we make sure they are protected and those intending to carry out the attack are stopped in one way or another.’
But Nelson was not happy and when he left the meeting that day the FRU were worried that he now believed Finucane had been tipped off by one of the intelligence agencies. They wondered what course of action he would take.
Incredibly, while the UDA were working out just how to murder Patrick Finucane, and while MI5, the TCG and Military Intelligence knew such an attack was frequently being planned and thwarted by the security forces, an extraordinary speech, provoking a political outcry, was made by a junior Home Office minister, Douglas Hogg. In his speech in January 1989 Hogg suggested that certain Northern Irish solicitors were ‘unduly sympathetic’ to terrorists. Despite the storm that remark caused in the Province’s legal circles, Home Office spokesmen made it clear that Douglas Hogg stood by his controversial statement, despite accusations that his words would put the lives of some lawyers at risk.
There has never been the slightest suggestion that Douglas Hogg’s remarks were intended to give the green light to the UDA to proceed with their plan to take out Patrick Finucane, but it is known that plans to target the Belfast solicitor had been forwarded by MI5 in Northern Ireland not only to the Home Office, their political masters in government, but also, of course, to the Joint Intelligence Committee in London. That committee, which met frequently at 10 Downing Street, would, almost certainly, have known of plans to murder Finucane when the issue first came to prominence some eighteen months before Hogg’s infamous speech.
On the evening of Sunday, 12 February 1989, Patrick Finucane, his wife Geraldine and their three children had just sat down in the kitchen for their evening meal when there was a knock at the front door. As Patrick Finucane went to see who was there, three masked gunmen simply turned the handle and walked in. Unbelievably, the front door had not been locked; the house was wide open. Before Finucane had even left the kitchen a masked man pointing a ha
ndgun appeared and fired twice, hitting Finucane who fell to the floor. Then another masked man came to the kitchen door armed with a sub-machine-gun and riddled the lawyer’s body with bullets as Geraldine Finucane and the three children screamed at the men and the horror of what was happening in front of their eyes. One bullet hit Mrs Finucane in the leg; none of the three children was injured in the attack.
The men then turned and ran out of the house to a waiting taxi. The taxi, which had been hijacked earlier that evening, was later found abandoned at the junction of the Loyalist Forthriver and Ballygomartin roads. Within hours of the RUC beginning their investigation, detectives said that the killing bore all the hallmarks of a Loyalist paramilitary group.
Tom King, the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, immediately expressed his horror at the killing: ‘No civilised society can tolerate murder from whichever vicious extreme it comes. The deaths of every one of the seven people murdered so far this year – some by the IRA, some by Loyalist extremists – show the total futility and awfulness of killing. The police and security services will do all they can to bring the perpetrators to justice. Everyone in Northern Ireland must help in ending this awful cycle of violence.’
The day following Patrick Finucane’s assassination, the president of the Law Society of Northern Ireland, Colin Haddick, accused Douglas Hogg of having created ‘an excuse’ for terrorists to carry out murder: ‘We are on record at the time Mr Hogg made the statement as having expressed our disbelief at what he said. If Mr Hogg had specific cause for concern about solicitors generally or as individuals, there are well-known channels through which he could have had such matters investigated. Let me add that the Law Society has never once been asked to investigate the conduct of any solicitor. What Mr Hogg has done is to create an excuse for terrorist organisations to carry out murders – something which was not available to them before.’
Anger at Patrick Finucane’s killing was shared by many of Northern Ireland’s political leaders. Dr Brian Feeney, the SDLP Councillor for north Belfast, who was one of the first to arrive at the murder scene, said, ‘This cowardly act was a direct result of Home Office minister Douglas Hogg’s remarks some weeks ago. He said then that some Northern Ireland solicitors had links with terrorist organisations. At the time, the Northern Ireland Law Society reacted angrily to the allegation and Mr Hogg’s stupid remarks have been used by those who carried out this attack to legitimise murder.’
SDLP chairman Alban McGuinness also condemned the killing and called for Hogg’s resignation. At the same time, he appealed to the government to provide protection for solicitors handling terrorist-type cases. Kevin McNamara, the Opposition’s chief spokesman, commented, ‘I think Mr Hogg should be examining his conscience very carefully.’
And north Belfast solicitor Paschal O’Hare, who had known Patrick Finucane for twelve years, said that the dead man had never expressed any concern for his own safety. But he added, ‘Highly irresponsible remarks about the legal profession were made in the House of Commons in recent weeks. I condemn without reservation the recent remarks of British politicians and those of Mr Douglas Hogg. They were highly irresponsible and have led directly to this horrible and brutal murder.’
Alan Dukes, who was then the leader of the Fine Gael Party in the Republic of Ireland, denounced the killing as ‘a savage attempt to discourage people from exercising their legal right to defend themselves in court, which is a fundamental right in any democracy’.
And Belfast’s Lord Mayor, Nigel Dodds, condemned the killing of Finucane saying, ‘All such murders only serve to heighten tension and fear throughout the community.’ Without realising it, Dodds had described perfectly the precise motives behind the aggressive policy of the Force Research Unit’s secret operations.
There were demands for Douglas Hogg to resign, but these were firmly rejected by the Home Office. Hogg issued a statement saying, ‘This is clearly, like so many others, a tragic and wicked killing. As to its cause, that must be a matter for the RUC. I very much hope those people responsible will be arrested, tried and sentenced to extremely long terms of imprisonment.’
In spite of such statements, there is evidence that certain members of the British government knew exactly what was going on at that time in Northern Ireland because of the constant stream of totally reliable information forwarded to both the Joint Intelligence Committee and the Home Office by their officers working and serving in the intelligence agencies in Northern Ireland. Though the British Army’s Force Research Unit may have been more actively involved in directing and aiding Loyalist paramilitary gunmen than any other security force during those three years, an MI5 officer sat in the same office as the FRU’s second-in-command, who was known as the Operations Officer, and was privy to everything that was going on. On every single occasion when any one of the FRU’s forty handlers had any dealings with Brian Nelson, or any other informant for that matter, the handlers would fill in a Military Intelligence Source Report (MISR). This report, usually between two and five hundred words long, would automatically be passed to the Operations Officer. He would take the decision whether to send it to the FRU’s Commanding Officer or even to the TCG. Every report would also be read by the duty MI5 officer who sat in the same room as the Ops Officer. Matters which FRU handlers believed were very important or highly sensitive intelligence material, as was often the case when dealing with Brian Nelson, were written up as MISR Supplements, which could be up to a thousand words long. These would usually be circulated not only to the FRU Ops Officer but also the TCG and the Joint Irish Section.
Handlers were also responsible for passing to the back-room staff the all-important Contact Reports, when details from touts would include sightings of Provo and Loyalist gunmen, their movements, meetings with their friends and acquaintances. These Contact Reports also included as much detail as possible about the sex lives of these Provo and Loyalist activists, containing information of the names and addresses of their lovers. The FRU knew from their touts that many women whose husbands were serving long prison sentences found comfort in taking these dangerous men as their lovers. They also knew that some of the gunmen deliberately boasted about the killings they had been involved in as a way of attracting women who liked such macho behaviour.
All these sightings and contacts would be filed away by the FRU backroom staff of nearly a hundred men and women who would cross-reference the comings and goings of the gunmen on their computer databases. It was by such detailed filing that the FRU were able to keep track of many of the Provo and Loyalist hard men and thus, on occasions, spring traps, make arrests or prevent attacks taking place in both Northern Ireland and the British mainland.
There were, of course, other shootings by UDA gunmen during those years, many ending in the deaths of Provo and Republican diehards, but many others also ending in the murders of totally innocent Catholics. And, of course, the IRA did not just sit around idly waiting for yet another of their men to be targeted and killed. In the early 1980s a British Army analysis of the structure and strength of the Provisional IRA concluded that the Provos had about five hundred full-time activists, including gunmen, bombers, intelligence staff, operatives and back-up staff, with thousands of passive supporters willing to store weapons or hide an activist who might be wanted by the authorities. It was no wonder, therefore, that throughout the three years that Brian Nelson worked with British Military Intelligence, the Provos would hit back whenever one of their men was taken out. And there were times when the Provos would be more ruthless, resorting to the bomb, and seemingly not caring who, or how many, might be killed or wounded in such operations. It was in November 1987 that the IRA killed eleven innocent people and injured scores more in an appalling bombing at the Remembrance Day ceremony at Enniskillen, Co. Fermanagh. A remote-controlled bomb was detonated at 11 a.m., the precise moment the Provos knew the people of Enniskillen would be gathered around the town’s cenotaph to show their respect to those local people who gave their lives in the
two World Wars. And in August 1988, an IRA landmine killed eight British soldiers near Omagh.
Such callous killings by the IRA had the effect of spurring on the hard men of the Ulster Defence Association, who had no qualms about targeting Provo activists and supporters. Some UDA gunmen saw such IRA atrocities as encouragement to target innocent Catholic civilians themselves. Most of the UDA’s attacks were carried out in the name of the Ulster Freedom Fighters (UFF). Others were carried out by the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), the other main Loyalist paramilitary organisation. For many years during the 1980s the UDA claimed that they had nothing whatsoever to do with the UFF, but that was untrue, and was the reason why in 1992 the British government finally outlawed the organisation. Although the UFF and the UVF sometimes resorted to internecine violence, there were occasions when the two worked together, exchanging intelligence and even weapons.
Chapter Eleven
Saving Gerry Adams
Perhaps the most senior political figure targeted by the UDA during the years when Brian Nelson was the linchpin of this extraordinary episode was Gerry Adams, the president of Sinn Fein.
Before becoming more politically involved with Sinn Fein, Adams is believed to have been a valued and highly placed commander with the Provisional IRA. Brought up in the tightly packed streets of west Belfast, he claimed that as a teenager he had become actively engaged in direct action on the issues of housing, unemployment and civil rights. Yet in the latest volume of his autobiography, Before the Dawn, Gerry Adams writes nothing whatsoever of his time as an active Provo leader, Adjutant of the Provisional IRA’s Northern Command, or of his years as head of the Provos Belfast Brigade during the early 1980s. And, despite his background as the head of an active service unit which was responsible for a number of killings and bombings during the late 1970s and early 1980s, Adams became one of the most important politicians in Northern Ireland, hauling Sinn Fein/IRA away from purely military activities and persuading the hard men of the Provisionals and the seven-man IRA Army Council to look instead at pushing for a political solution which, he maintained, had a greater chance of success. Despite being a member of the Army Council since the late 1980s, Adams earned considerable respectability by shaking the hand of President Bill Clinton in 1996.
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