Two days before this date Nelson was asked to attend a safe-house meeting with his FRU handlers and was told that it might be better for him if he was to leave Northern Ireland for a while and spend a period on the mainland.
‘Why the fuck should I do that?’ he enquired, somewhat puzzled by the turn of events.
‘To protect you,’ a FRU handler told him.
‘Protect me from what?’
‘From questions, from the inquiry.’
‘But I don’t need any protection,’ argued Nelson, ‘I’ve got you people to defend me.’
‘It’s not that simple. It might be better for you to go to England; lie low for a while, just until this blows over.’ He was not told during that interview that the Stevens Inquiry had asked the RUC to arrest him at dawn in two days’ time.
‘What shall I do for money?’ asked Nelson. ‘Where shall I go?’
He was handed three hundred pounds in cash and a return ferry ticket to the mainland and advised where to go and stay. Later that day an FRU handler visited Nelson’s Belfast home and gave his wife a hundred pounds to cover any expenses she might incur while her husband was away. Nelson left home with an overnight bag that evening and, accompanied by a handler, was taken in an FRU car to Larne where he caught the ferry to England.
Hours before Nelson was due to be arrested, four officers from the Stevens Inquiry returned to their Belfast offices in an RUC headquarters complex that was under twenty-four-hour armed guard. As they walked along the passage to their suite of offices they noticed the smell of burning and then saw smoke seeping out from under the door to their offices. When they unlocked the door they discovered a fire raging beneath a table on which many of their files and witness statements were stacked.
One of the officers smashed a nearby fire alarm with the heel of her shoe and pressed the alarm button. Nothing happened. She sprinted up the stairs to the second-floor landing and tried to activate that alarm. Again nothing happened. She ran to a telephone to call 999 but there was no dialling tone. She did manage to get through to the RUC headquarters operator only to be told, inexplicably, that the phone lines were down.
In the meantime, the other three members of the inquiry team tried to tackle the blaze but their efforts were useless against the flames. By the time the fire brigade did arrive, the hoses connected and the blaze put out, most of the witness statements and files had been totally destroyed.
Stevens and his team were convinced that the fire had been started deliberately even though their offices were in an armed RUC complex that was under constant guard. The RUC’s own internal investigation concluded that the fire was undoubtedly an inside job. They later briefed journalists that the fire appeared to have been started by someone carelessly discarding a lighted cigarette.
Stevens and his team were beside themselves with rage that the RUC – at some level – had obviously been privy to a conspiracy to set fire to the documents; they were also angered by the RUC’s internal investigation, which they described as ‘a travesty and a disgrace’. The RUC’s report into the blaze neglected to mention that two alarms had failed to work that night, though the report did state that there was ‘nothing sinister’ about the failure of the telephones because, they claimed, ‘it often happened’.
An attempt had been made in the RUC report to explain why the intruder alarms in the inquiry team’s offices had failed to go off. The system was connected to the RUC’s Belfast Regional Control. It had been switched on at 10 p.m. when the team had left the office to take a much-needed break. When forensic scientists tested the alarm thirteen days after the fire, they found that what was left of it was in good working order.
One senior officer on Stevens’ team commented at the time: ‘Of all the offices, of all the police stations, of all the nights, the fire starts right next to the fruits of out investigation . . . and it’s an accident?’
Nothing was said at the time to Stevens or his team but there were those in the RUC and the Special Branch who recalled that something very similar had occurred in an RUC station during the Stalker investigation. On that occasion a locked safe in the offices used by the Stalker team had been opened, the contents taken out and set alight. Valuable documents, files and statements had been destroyed. And, once again, no one was ever found to have been responsible for these actions.
One week after the fire Brian Nelson returned to Belfast and was duly arrested by the RUC and handed over to the Stevens Inquiry team for questioning. Those at FRU headquarters held their breath, wondering if their agent would keep his part of the bargain and say nothing. Within hours they heard from the RUC that Nelson was ‘singing like the proverbial canary’.
Brian Nelson informed the Stevens team that he had been recruited by the Force Research Unit and employed by them, receiving detailed information from them on the names and addresses of Republicans whom the UDA should target and take out. He gave exact details, precise information and names and addresses of IRA terrorists whom the FRU had suggested his UDA colleagues should kill. And he named his FRU handlers.
After debriefing Nelson for weeks, the inquiry’s next step was to interview the Force Research Unit handlers whom Nelson had named as his co-conspirators in the many plots to murder Republican activists. It appeared there was little they could do to defend their actions during the previous two years. Fortunately for the FRU, however, there was a way out.
It had been decided at the very outset of Nelson’s notorious career that each time he was interviewed, briefed or debriefed at any of the safe-houses, a record should be kept on tape of everything that was said, both by the handlers and by Nelson. Nothing would be destroyed, so, after every interview, the tapes were methodically locked away in a safe for some future occasion when they might be needed as evidence. These tapes were immediately handed over to the investigators. The Stevens team, who spent hour upon hour listening to every recording, taking notes and discussing the questions and answers, were puzzled by what they heard. On a number of the tapes it appeared that Nelson was providing the FRU with intelligence material, not the other way round as Nelson had claimed. And if that was the case, both the FRU and the Stevens team knew full well, there would be no case to answer. It seemed from many of Nelson’s conversations that the FRU were trying to obtain information – in other words, simply carrying out a difficult job to the best of their ability.
All was not quite as it seemed. The tapes that the Stevens team had been handed were indeed a complete set of recordings of Nelson’s interviews with his handlers, but many of the more delicate matters involving the targeting and killing of Republican activists had been conducted either before the tapes were switched on or after they had been turned off. This was why Nelson’s conversations with FRU officers were stilted, affected and sometimes disingenuous. As a result, the team never did discover the precise details of those vital, all-important conversations. It was extremely fortunate for the FRU, as well as MI5 officers serving in Northern Ireland at that time, that the full transcripts of those conversations were never revealed because the Stevens Inquiry might well have tried to force the issue and bring a number of those responsible to court on the most serious of charges.
Some members of the team did smell a rat and decided to push the FRU as hard as possible to hand over all the files relating to Ten-Thirty-Three – including the all-important Contact Reports, laboriously and meticulously written out by the handlers and sent forward to their officers and MI5. Indeed, some of these Contact Reports were even forwarded, usually on request, to the Prime Minister’s Joint Intelligence Committee. To all intents and purposes, they contained all the relevant details of the conversations in the safe-house meetings, and they were most detailed.
The Force Research Unit, backed by Military Intelligence, were determined not to hand over these reports – they knew they could be used against them if the authorities considered the Unit had a case to answer. It was recognised throughout Military Intelligence that some of those Contact Re
ports were extremely damaging. Detective Chief Superintendent Vincent McFadden, Stevens’s deputy, knew all about the intelligence service’s famous Contact Reports, and appreciated how valuable such material could be in this particular case. He asked the FRU to hand them over.
This request put senior Military Intelligence officers in an appalling position: if they refused the request it was obvious they wanted to hide the evidence from the inquiry team; if they readily gave up the reports, they would be handing over crucial evidence to the investigators. They decided to play for time. Senior officers and the handlers who had been closely involved with Ten-Thirty-Three knew that the evidence contained in those Contact Reports would be all but conclusive proof of collusion between Nelson and the security services. The fear among Army Intelligence chiefs was that some of the evidence included in those written documents could form the basis of charges of conspiracy to murder against their FRU officers and handlers.
A long and bitter dispute followed with McFadden demanding the documents and Military Intelligence withholding them. That dispute, which went on for weeks, was resolved only when McFadden threatened to arrest senior army officers on a charge of obstruction of justice. Sir John Walters, General Officer Commanding forces in Northern Ireland, was, at one point, summoned back from leave and, as a result, the relevant files were eventually handed over.
After weeks of closely examining the Contact Reports and debating the evidence they revealed, Stevens’s team summoned officers and handlers of the Force Research Unit one by one to be interviewed. The Ministry of Defence employs their own band of first-class army officers who are also lawyers and they were immediately drafted in to represent anyone called to give evidence before the inquiry. Every officer and handler who gave evidence was represented by a Legal Officer who sat with them throughout, advising when and when not to answer the questions thrown at them. The interviews would go on for hours at a time, with the Stevens lawyers delving ever deeper and the army officers resisting their attempts to implicate the FRU in any law-breaking.
In May 1990 John Stevens published a preliminary report revealing nothing about the army’s Force Research Unit or its dealings with Brian Nelson. At that stage of the inquiry, Stevens’s conclusion was that any collusion between the security forces and the Protestant paramilitaries had been ‘neither widespread nor institutionalised’, involving no more than the leaking to the paramilitaries of standard security-force documents on Republicans suspected of terrorism. These were available to almost every police officer and soldier in the Province.
But Stevens had every intention of pursuing the matter with ever more vigour. He believed that Military Intelligence had been guilty of collusion at the very least and was determined to find out as much as he could.
It appeared to Military Intelligence that John Stevens had turned his investigation into a personal crusade, determined to persuade those in power that the FRU officers and handlers should be charged with certain offences pertaining to Nelson and the paramilitaries and be brought to court.
At this stage of his investigation Stevens was not sure how serious those charges were but he was adamant that those responsible should be charged and made to face the consequences in a court of law.
But John Stevens was never aware that the Force Research Unit was originally set up to undertake aggressive intelligence, carrying the battle on the streets to the Provos, harassing them and disrupting their campaign of terror in Northern Ireland and the mainland. Nor did he have any idea that not only did MI5 know precisely what was going on inside the unit on a day-to-day basis, but that they were also responsible for sending weekly reports on its activities to the Home Office as well as to the Joint Intelligence Committee which usually met weekly at 10 Downing Street. Indeed, in an effort to conceal their involvement in the Nelson affair, MI5 officers gave evidence to the Stevens Inquiry that they had no knowledge of the agent’s assassination conspiracies.
Unhappy with that point-blank denial, John Stevens took the matter further, asking to interview MI5’s Director and Co-ordinator of Intelligence, who claimed that it had never been MI5’s policy to collude with the UDA in killing Provisional IRA activists. Stevens was convinced that MI5 officers and their director were being economical with the truth.
After months of further investigation throughout 1990, John Stevens wrote his second report. It painted a totally different picture from that which appeared in the preliminary document of May 1990. This report pulled no punches. It set out the evidence that the Force Research Unit had colluded with the UDA in targeting members of the Provisional IRA, relying for much of its substance on the inquiry team’s long debriefing of Brian Nelson. The file was passed to the Director of Public Prosecutions, Northern Ireland, but, after close consultation with Sir Patrick Mayhew, then the Attorney-General, the decision was taken not to prosecute any officer or handler of the Force Research Unit. Only Nelson would be charged.
John Stevens pushed hard to persuade the government to publish his report. He believed it would create such a furore in the media that the government would be forced to prosecute members of the Force Research Unit. But such a decision could have backfired on the government; they did not know whether the officers charged would have been prepared to carry the can or whether they would have told the court of others who had been aware of exactly what was going during Brian Nelson’s three years as an agent. And, of course, the government were obliged to protect their Intelligence operations at all costs, especially as the Provisionals still seemed intent on bombing and shooting their way to power in the Province, regardless of the loss of life that policy entailed. Mrs Thatcher, too, may not have wished to hand Sinn Fein and the IRA such a worldwide propaganda coup where British Military Intelligence officers had to face charges of conspiracy to murder in open court.
During the following year scores of meetings were held involving Military Intelligence, the Director of Public Prosecutions, Chief Constable John Stevens and a host of lawyers, including the all-important army lawyers, in a battle over the charges Nelson would face. Throughout those discussions Nelson pleaded innocent to all the charges. He believed he had done nothing wrong in defending Northern Ireland from the Provo gunmen and bombers. He could not accept that he was to be taken to court on charges which could result in twenty years in jail, when Military Intelligence personnel were being let off the hook, despite advising, encouraging and providing vast amounts of information which permitted the UDA to carry out their attacks.
Finally, after months of legal wrangling, a deal was struck which Nelson reluctantly agreed to. It was agreed that he would not face any murder charges but that he would plead guilty to five charges of conspiracy to murder, fourteen charges of collecting information likely to assist acts of terrorism and one charge of possessing a sub-machine-gun. As a result Nelson would be jailed for a total of ten years but, with remission, and the time he had spent on remand, he would be out in 1994. Military Intelligence persuaded Nelson that after he had completed his prison sentence he would accept a complete change of identity, relocation to anywhere in the world that would take him, a three-bedroomed house worth around £100,000 and a lump sum in excess of £75,000. In return, Nelson agreed never to relate his experiences and never to write a book about his relationship with the UDA and British Military Intelligence.
Despite these arrangements and the assurances that he would only serve a couple of years or so in prison, it was a reluctant Brian Nelson who finally stepped up to the dock at Belfast Crown Court on Wednesday, 22 January 1992. He pleaded guilty to all the charges as arranged and heard the prosecution say that a decision had been taken not to go ahead with fifteen other charges, including two of murder, after a Crown lawyer told the court: ‘This decision has been taken after a scrupulous assessment of the possible evidential difficulties and a rigorous examination of the interests of justice.’
For the prosecution, Mr Brian Kerr QC told the court that on Nelson’s appointment as senior intelligence officer
with the UDA he gained a considerable volume of UDA information which was built upon and supplemented by his own activities. It consisted of information on possible victims for assassination whom they regarded as legitimate targets. Kerr argued that it was the Crown’s case that in the collection of information about those individuals – often carried out with great assiduousness and ingenuity – Nelson had played a pivotal role.
Later, Kerr would contend that it was evident that although Nelson was in contact with his army handlers, he did not relay important information promptly, and on some occasions not at all. He added that during the period of the offences, Nelson was in regular contact with his handlers and in some cases gave quite extensive information about his activities, but there was ample evidence that there were occasions when the information passed on was neither as detailed nor as comprehensive as it could and should have been.
A week later the court case against Nelson was resumed and an unnamed colonel in Military Intelligence spoke of the alleged reasons why Nelson had agreed to join the service. ‘Nelson,’ the colonel said, ‘was motivated by team spirit and loyalty to the army. I have no doubt it was not out of loyalty to the UDA. I have no doubt it was to make up for past misdemeanours, to save lives and eventually to bring down the terrorist organisation.’
And then the officer claimed in graphic detail what happened to Nelson when he was suspected of being an informer. ‘He was taken to a house on the outskirts of Lisburn. Three times an electrified cattle-prod was applied to the back of his neck, throwing him in convulsions on to the floor. He was assaulted and brutalised but was eventually released.’ The night Nelson claimed he was assaulted and tortured he was in fact injured during a drunken brawl over a young woman.
But accurate statements of his vital work on behalf of Military Intelligence were also discussed in court. Nelson’s defence counsel, Desmond Boal QC, explained in some detail: ‘Nelson’s identity was known to a very small number of people within the security services, such as senior Special Branch officers within the RUC and senior members of the security services. He wasn’t, however, an RUC agent . . . In other words, Nelson’s information was passed around throughout the intelligence community and at a high level. Because of that he has to be considered a very important agent of some standing.’
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