by Peter Taylor
‘Geoff’ had ingenious ways of confronting a potential source, like on one occasion ‘accidentally’ bumping his car, inevitably forcing the annoyed driver to get out and meet ‘Geoff’ face to face. On one such occasion, ‘Geoff’ told his target he wanted a word with him, took him round to the boot of his car, opened it and showed him a briefcase. He flicked it open and inside was £25,000 in cash. ‘That’s for half an hour of your time,’ he said. ‘What took you so long?’ came the answer. In this particular case, although £50,000 was a good hourly rate, the potential source declined to sign up. ‘Geoff’ was philosophical about it.
He knew his job was dangerous and could never be valued in terms of money but only in the number of lives saved. That was his reward. Like his Special Branch counterparts, he lived with death every day and accepted it as an occupational hazard, but he never expected that as a ‘Fisher of Men’ he would become caught in the net that entangled Brian Nelson. ‘Geoff’ had no idea what lay ahead when he was first introduced to Nelson at the beginning of 1987 as the loyalist paramilitaries of the UFF and UVF intensified their campaign of terror. ‘He seemed quite a nice person. A family man,’ he said. ‘He told me he hated violence and he didn’t agree with the way in which loyalists were carrying out their attacks. He saw himself as the spear-point in the thrust against terrorism.’
Before Nelson became a FRU agent, he had led a chequered life. He was brought up on the loyalist Shankill Road and then, like many of his contemporaries, joined the British army. He enjoyed a less than glorious military career and was discharged. In 1972 he joined the UDA and was subsequently sentenced to seven years for kidnapping. On his release, he returned to the UDA, which by then had spawned the UFF, most of whose targets were innocent Catholics. In 1983, he offered his services to the FRU. He said he was sick of violence and had had enough. With remarkable speed he rose to become the UDA’s Senior Intelligence Officer for West Belfast, feeding vital intelligence to his FRU handlers. After two years, he decided to quit and went to work in Germany, taking his wife and children with him. Whilst he was away making a good living as a roof tiler, loyalist killings dramatically increased from four in 1985 to fifteen in 1986. Again, most of the victims were innocent Catholics. Strategically, the UFF and UVF calculated that if they killed enough Catholics, pressure from the terrorized nationalist community would finally force the IRA to stop.
As the loyalist ‘death squads’ cut their murderous swathe through 1986, a new commander took over the FRU. He became known as Colonel ‘J’ and had been decorated with the Queen’s Gallantry Medal (QGM) for his previous service with the unit between 1979 and 1982. (In 2001, he was believed to be still serving, although in a different capacity.) ‘In January 1987 we were reviewing our current agent coverage and we identified a gap in our coverage of the loyalist paramilitaries,’ he said. ‘We examined the case of Brian Nelson and decided that we should try and re-recruit him.’1 Accordingly, at the beginning of 1987, in the teeth of opposition from MI5 who believed the loyalist paramilitaries were sufficiently covered, the FRU decided to bring Nelson back from Germany and re-infiltrate him inside the UFF. Colonel ‘J’ ordered the move. MI5 felt that Nelson should be left where he was and not brought back to muddy the waters. The FRU got its way. Nelson was persuaded to return to his old haunts on the Shankill Road, given a code number, Agent 6137, and instructed to pick up where he left off.
‘Geoff’ was a fan of Nelson. ‘He was a soldier not a “tout”,’ he said. ‘He saw himself as part of a team.’ Colonel ‘J’ claimed that although Nelson provided the UFF with much of the information its gunmen required, he was not really in a position to know who was going to be involved in the attacks, when they would actually take place or how the planning was done. In some cases, he said, Nelson might find out, in others he would not. Every time a handler met Nelson, invariably around once a week, a record of the encounter would be compiled in what was known as a Military Intelligence Source Report (MISR, pronounced ‘miser’). Overall, Colonel ‘J’ calculated that the FRU produced 730 MISRs on its dealings with Nelson, involving threats to 217 individuals.2 He described such information as of ‘life-saving potential’. Colonel ‘J’ also pointed out that senior Special Branch officers at RUC Headquarters and Regional level as well as senior MI5 officers knew of Nelson and his work for the FRU.
When Nelson was brought back from Germany, ‘Geoff’ became his co-handler and was responsible for his resettlement in Belfast. ‘We brought his family back into this dangerous job, paid the deposit on a house and car and set him up in a taxi firm. Initially we paid him a salary of £200 a week, rising as time went on, to do this job specifically for us. He was also paid generous bonuses on a regular basis. At the time there was a lack of information coming in from the loyalist side and we needed someone to give us that information. They were just killing people and they didn’t care who they were. To me Brian Nelson was a patriot doing an extraordinary job.’ Again, with surprising rapidity, Nelson rose to become the UFF’s Senior Intelligence Officer, this time not just for Belfast but for the whole of the province. His remit from the FRU was to encourage the UFF to redirect its ‘death squads’ from innocent Catholics to suspected republican terrorists. The FRU was pleased with the results, as the MISRs clearly indicate. One dated 3 May 1988 reports, ‘6137 wants the UDA only to attack legitimate targets and not innocent Catholics. Since 6137 took up his position as intelligence officer, the targeting has developed and become more professional.’3 Nelson’s ‘professionalism’ was not always apparent. A week after that MISR was written, he gave a UFF gunman an incorrect address with the result that the ‘wrong’ man, Terence McDaid (29), was shot dead instead of the ‘target’, his brother Declan. Nelson had carried out ‘eyes-on’ surveillance of Declan McDaid but identified the wrong address in the electoral register.
The FRU assisted Nelson to be more ‘professional’ in his targeting by helping him to compile the intelligence to carry out such operations. ‘Geoff’ showed him how to organize the material and make presentations that would impress his paramilitary bosses. ‘We suggested that he collate all the information and we taught him the rudimentary system of compiling “P” [Personality] cards and photographs.’ Nelson used to bring ‘Geoff’ and the other handlers intelligence material that the UFF had gathered from other sources, mainly from the RUC and UDR, usually packed into a large kitbag. The documents would then be copied and returned since Nelson could not afford to attract suspicion by having to explain that some of the material had gone missing. In the end, to facilitate the process and minimize the risk to their agent, the FRU suggested that Nelson put everything on computer. (The UDA, not the FRU, had provided it on the basis that it would streamline the UFF’s operation.) From then on, Nelson could bring his handlers the data on floppy disk without arousing suspicion.
In theory, the FRU’s purpose in encouraging Nelson to focus the UDA’s targeting on IRA suspects was to save lives, not only the lives of innocent Catholics but the lives of republicans too. That was certainly ‘Geoff’s’ understanding, the theory being that once Nelson informed his handlers that an attack was due to take place, the target could be warned or appropriate steps taken by TCG Belfast to prevent it.
This is how the chain was supposed to work. Nelson would warn ‘Geoff’ and then ‘Geoff’ would warn his FRU superiors who would then inform Colonel ‘J’. TCG Belfast would then be brought into the picture and decide what, if any, action to take. On many occasions the system worked as intended, most notably when Nelson told ‘Geoff’ of a planned assassination attempt on Gerry Adams.
Adams had already survived one assassination attempt by the UFF on 14 April 1984 when he was attacked by gunmen as he left Belfast Magistrates Court on the second day of his trial for a minor public order offence.4 The gunmen fired twenty shots and hit Adams with four of them. Adams was rushed to the nearby Royal Victoria Hospital, given emergency surgery and survived. I subsequently interviewed one of his UFF attackers, John Greg
g, in the Maze prison. His only regret, he said, was that he had not succeeded in killing him. Adams is alleged by some to have survived because the bullets had been ‘doctored’ by the ‘Det’, thus negating their lethal impact.
Having failed to kill Adams once, the UFF was determined to try again. In early 1987, Nelson rang ‘Geoff’ and said he needed to see him urgently as the UFF was planning to kill the Sinn Fein President near Corporation Buildings in the centre of Belfast. ‘Geoff’ explained what the plan was and how it would work. ‘The UFF knew that this time he was in an armoured vehicle with two or three minders. The plan was to use a Libyan-type limpet mine with a short fuse and magnet, have a pillion rider clamp it on the roof and accelerate away.’ Adams and his minders would have been burned to a cinder.
‘Geoff’ passed the intelligence upwards and Belfast TCG placed the loyalist who had the mine under surveillance. The location of the limpet mine was identified and the army then conducted a ‘rummage’ search of the general area, looking into dustbins, hedgerows, derelict buildings and everything. ‘And lo and behold,’ said ‘Geoff’, ‘there was a grip with the device in it! The mine was seized, the plan was aborted and Gerry Adams lives.’ Nelson’s involvement was never suspected as he was several removes from the discovery. The fact that Adams is alive today illustrates that the system worked. Many other lives were saved too. But many were not. The theory and practice were fine when used as intended. But that was not always the case. There were times when Nelson did not tell his handlers everything, and even when he did and the information went ‘upstairs’, it was not always acted upon. The brutal UFF killing of one republican, which took place after ‘Geoff’ had ceased to handle Nelson, is a chilling illustration.
Just after 4 a.m. on the morning of 23 September 1988, Teresa Slane and her husband, Gerard, were awakened by sounds outside the bedroom window of their house off Belfast’s Falls Road. Gerard, who’d just bought a new Nissan Sunny, got up to check that joyriders, who were the plague of the area, were not about to make off with it. He returned to bed and told Teresa it was probably only an army patrol checking the registration. A few minutes later, four masked UFF gunmen smashed in the door with a sledgehammer and rushed upstairs to find their target.
The UFF later claimed that Gerard Slane had been involved in the killing of a prominent UDA man, William Quee, a fortnight earlier. Quee was gunned down by the Irish People’s Liberation Army (IPLO), a tiny splinter group that had parted company with the INLA after a feud in 1986. An RUC detective said there was nothing to suggest that Slane had been involved in the killing.
Gerard tried to fight the intruders off on the stairs with a step ladder but was gunned down in the process. He was shot four times in the head. His final words were, ‘Teresa, it’s the “Orangies”!’ When she rushed out onto the landing, she saw her husband lying dead. ‘He was completely covered in blood. I actually saw a pin-hole in the side of his head and blood coming out through his nose and mouth. Blood was all over the wall.’
Nelson had provided the killers with the vital intelligence that had enabled the ‘hit’ to go ahead. He had found Slane’s address, checked it in the electoral register, got hold of a photograph and made out a ‘P’ card on him. ‘Brian Nelson may not have pulled the trigger,’ Teresa told me, ‘but to me he was as guilty of my husband’s murder as the actual murderers themselves.’ But in the case of Gerard Slane, Nelson had done his job. He had warned one of ‘Geoff’s’ successors on two occasions that Slane was being targeted, initially ten days before the attack took place and then the day before the attack itself.
For whatever reason, the intelligence from Nelson was not acted upon. Teresa had no warning visit from the RUC and no attempt was made to thwart the attack. ‘My husband might have been here today were it not for the RUC,’ she says bitterly. But there’s no evidence that the RUC ever knew about it. So what happened to the information? Did it get beyond the FRU? Was it sanitized somewhere up the chain? Did it ever get to the TCG? Was a decision taken to let the killers go ahead? Or was the information simply not precise enough?
Those who came to know Nelson said he had a passionate hatred for the IRA and a ‘psychopathic tendency’. This may have inclined him to act on his own as well as with the encouragement of the FRU. ‘Geoff’ claims Nelson did much of the intelligence work himself and had to do so to maintain his own credibility with the UFF. ‘He constantly asked me for information, to check out a car number plate or an address. As a rule I used to say to him, “It’s better that you collect this information yourself because you have to be seen to be doing this job. You can’t just disappear and come back with it in a day or two.”’ ‘Geoff’ was aware that people would get suspicious and his agent’s life was on the line every day. But did ‘Geoff’ personally ever supply him with information? ‘No, not directly. But if he said, “Is that so-and-so’s registration?” I would say to him, “You don’t have that wrong.”’ If that was the case, I asked, and the car owner was killed, weren’t he and the FRU complicit in murder? ‘Geoff’ was matter-of-fact. ‘Well, it’s a fine line you walk,’ he said. I pointed out that in the end Nelson went to gaol for conspiracies to murder. ‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘at our request.’ Encouraged by him and his colleagues? ‘Yes.’ And by the FRU? ‘Yes.’ And by British intelligence? ‘Yes.’ ‘Geoff’ was astonishingly candid:
I’m ashamed of it. He strayed outside the law at our behest. We instructed him to carry on his job of targeting these people. There were certain risks but it was loosely seen by my hierarchy that if he carried out an action and then reported it, it would negate his guilt. In other words he was doing his job under our direction and once he’d informed us of what he had done, it would not be illegal. Brian believed, not that he was bullet proof, but that he had protection from us and that what he was doing, he was doing at our request and therefore he had immunity. And he didn’t.
Nelson’s role as a FRU agent came to light in the wake of the UFF’s killing of a Catholic from Rathfriland, County Down, called Loughlin Maginn (28) on 25 August 1989. Maginn had never been charged or convicted of any terrorist offence. The UFF insisted he was an IRA intelligence officer, and what is more, said they could prove it. The UDA subsequently produced copies of confidential security force material containing information on suspected terrorists. Details of Maginn were included. The classified details were thought to have come from a UDR base in County Down. To republicans and nationalists it was evidence of what they had always maintained, that the loyalist ‘death squads’ were the puppets of British intelligence.
On 14 September 1989, in response to the huge outcry that followed the killing of Maginn and revelation of the classified intelligence material, Sir John Hermon’s successor as RUC Chief Constable, Sir Hugh Annesley, appointed the Deputy Chief Constable of Cambridgeshire, John Stevens, to investigate the theft and leaking of the security force intelligence documents. Eleven years later, when Mr Stevens became Sir John Stevens, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, the now widened investigation was still going on as Sir John and his team of detectives continued to piece together the elaborate jigsaw of alleged collusion between the FRU and the loyalist paramilitaries.
In his initial inquiry, Stevens made numerous arrests as a result of which members of the old UDA/UFF leadership were gaoled, leaving the way open for Johnny ‘Mad Dog’ Adair and his associates to take over the UFF’s ‘C’ Company on the Shankill Road. Four months into the inquiry, as the trail led the Stevens team ever closer to Nelson, whose fingerprints were on many of the intelligence documents, a mysterious fire broke out on 10 January 1990 at the office of the Northern Ireland Police Authority in Carrickfergus where the team was based. The fire broke out on the very day that Nelson was due to be arrested. That same day he fled to England to escape arrest. The events seemed to be too coincidental to be an accident. When the team discovered the blaze, they found that the fire alarms were not working and the telephone lines were dead.5 The obvious suspicions were arou
sed – that the FRU were involved in the fire. But Nelson’s freedom was short-lived. He was quickly arrested by Stevens’ team. From early on, he had been under strict instructions that were he ever to be arrested, he was to say nothing to the police about his involvement with the FRU. Under the circumstances, he had little choice and gave the team the name of his handler as everything began to come out.
When Nelson was arrested, the intake of breath from FRU’s ‘Office’ at HQNI must almost have been audible. What would happen when he appeared in court? What would his fate be? Would he ‘sing’ and if so to what tune? Nelson appeared in court on 20 January 1992 accused of possessing details on republicans that would be of use to terrorists.6 At first it was thought he was just another UDA/UFF member caught in the net until the sensational news broke that he was not only the UFF’s intelligence chief but a British agent. The only jaws that did not drop were those of republicans who had insisted all along that the ‘Brits’ were hand in glove with the loyalist killers. Colonel ‘J’ gave evidence anonymously, and Nelson pleaded guilty to five charges of conspiracy to murder, thus sparing the army and the FRU the embarrassment of a potentially explosive cross-examination. These charges reflected only a fraction of Nelson’s activities. The army’s records together with Nelson’s own notes are said to indicate that Nelson was involved in at least fifteen murders, fifteen attempted murders and sixty-two conspiracies to murder during the two years when he was handled by the FRU.7 Nelson was sentenced to ten years. He served half of his sentence, was released in 1997 and given a new identity outside Northern Ireland.
‘Geoff’ had always assumed that the ‘Brits’ would look after Nelson and was astonished and dismayed when he went down for simply carrying out his orders from the FRU. At least that’s how ‘Geoff’ saw it.
