by Peter Taylor
He saved, in my estimation, dozens of lives. He was essential to the war effort and gave us an insight into the loyalist organizations we never had in the past. He was the jewel in the crown. I’m ashamed at the way he’s been treated by the Establishment who used him and guided him and put him in that position. He was hung out to dry. I was disgusted. I promised Brian that the Establishment would look after him and it didn’t. It let him down and I’m ashamed of that.
Towards the end of his time as handler, ‘Geoff’ did become concerned at the way Nelson was behaving. Not surprisingly, given his perilous position, he was under intense psychological pressure. The pressure was physical too. In August 1988, Nelson was taken to a house on the outskirts of Lisburn and subjected to a violent interrogation by the UFF in which he was ‘assaulted, brutalized’, and thrown into ‘physical convulsions on the floor’ when he was stabbed on the back of the neck with an electric cattle-prod.8 Remarkably the interrogation was not because the UFF suspected that Nelson was working for the ‘Brits’ but because they suspected he was leaking information to the IRA. In ‘Geoff’s’ view, Nelson was also getting reckless. ‘He would take unnecessary chances. For example, he would sit on the Falls Road licking an ice-cream, targeting what he believed to be top Provisional IRA members, with no back-up whatsoever. He was becoming careless and I could see that he was getting into this targeting very deeply.’ ‘Geoff’ put his concerns in writing and sent a report to his superiors, recommending that Nelson should be stood down for a while. His report was ignored. ‘I was told that he was too important and that he had to stay in place because the information coming in was so important,’ he said. Nelson stayed put and became involved in even more controversial killings, which, many years later, were to have sensational repercussions. By the year 2000, with the Inquiry now more than a decade old, Sir John Stevens had entrusted day-to-day operational command of the investigation to one of his Deputy Assistant Commissioners, Hugh Orde, with orders to leave no stone unturned. Mr Orde and the Stevens team carried out the Metropolitan Police Commissioner’s instruction, finally getting access to the FRU’s top secret records (including the book that recorded all intelligence passed on to Special Branch) and getting ever closer to the truth of what happened. The MOD’s nerves were jangling at the prospect of what might be revealed, so much so that injunctions were issued against the Sunday Times and the Sunday People newspapers who sought to tell their readers what the FRU was alleged to have done in their name. The most potentially explosive allegation of all was that the FRU had guided Brian Nelson to direct the UFF to kill a 66-year-old veteran Ballymurphy republican, Francisco Notarantonio, who was shot dead as he lay in his bed on 9 October 1987. Notarantonio had been involved in the IRA in the 1940s and interned in the 1970s but he had long ceased to be active. It was alleged that the unwitting UFF had been inadvertently directed to do so in order to divert their attention from the person believed to have been the FRU’s top agent within the IRA, code-named ‘Steak Knife’, whom they planned to kill. ‘Steak Knife’ was a priceless asset for the ‘Brits’ and is alleged to have worked for British intelligence for many years at a rate of £75,000 per annum, reportedly paid through a secret bank account in Gibraltar.9 Astonishingly, it alleged that when the FRU found out from Nelson that the UFF were planning to shoot ‘Steak Knife’ (without either Nelson or the UFF having any idea that he was working for British intelligence), the FRU gave Nelson the name of Notarantonio as a substitute target to protect their top agent. The scenario seems more suited to a Tom Clancy thriller but in Northern Ireland fiction and fact sometimes mingle – hence, no doubt, the injunctions against newspapers. If the remarkable allegation proves to be fact not fantasy, Hugh Orde and the Stevens team were on the brink of breaking one of the most explosive stories of the Troubles.
Almost equally sensitive was the killing of the solicitor Pat Finucane, who represented Bobby Sands during his hunger strike and acted for many republicans over the years. Two of his brothers, Dermot and Seamus, were senior members of the IRA. A third brother, John, died in a car crash whilst on IRA ‘active service’ in 1972.10 Pat was gunned down by masked UFF gunmen whilst he was having supper with his family on 12 February 1989. A week before, a MISR indicated ‘6137 initiates most of the targeting. Of late, 6137 has been more organized and he is currently running an operation against selected republican targets.’11 The loyalists smashed in the door with a sledgehammer and shot Pat Finucane fourteen times in front of his wife, Geraldine, and their three children. They left him bleeding to death on the kitchen floor.12 Nelson had helped provide the intelligence that led to the attack by supplying the killers with a photograph of Pat Finucane leaving Crumlin Road Courthouse with one of his republican clients. He handed it over three days before Finucane was shot. Nelson maintained that he assumed the client was the target not his solicitor.13
The killing of Pat Finucane and Francisco Notarantonio and the allegations of collusion that swirl round them remain the most sensitive of all the matters still under investigation by the Stevens Inquiry more than a decade after its inception. Sir John and his team remained determined to get to the bottom of what happened, not just in these two cases but in the others in which Brian Nelson was involved. John Stalker plunged into the murky world of covert operations in Northern Ireland and lived to rue the day. The Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police had no intention of letting the same thing happen to him. The can of worms labelled ‘Brian Nelson’ that he opened all those years ago still has to be closed. At the time of writing, the dénouement has yet to come.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Turning the Screw
June 1988–February 1992
Although the IRA’s four shipments from Libya contained a few spectacular additions to its armoury like SAM 7 surface-to-air missiles,1 the most lethal donation from Colonel Gaddafi was a large quantity of Semtex high explosive. This could be used on its own to devastating effect or as a booster for the IRA’s huge fertilizer-based bombs. Nineteen eighty-eight was the year of Semtex and there was little the ‘Brits’ could do to counter it beyond warning the security forces to be vigilant and look under their cars before they got in. Twelve people died that year when Semtex booby-trap bombs exploded under their vehicles.2 Although the SAS operations at Loughgall and Gibraltar were severe setbacks for the IRA, as was the Remembrance Day bomb at Enniskillen, none of them blunted its offensive. Largely due to Semtex, thirty-four soldiers died in 1988, more than in any other year since 1982.3 Fourteen of the victims died in two bombings. In the first, on 15 June, six were killed as they returned to their barracks in an unmarked van after taking part in a charity ‘fun run’ in Lisburn to raise funds for the YMCA. The IRA had placed 7.5 lbs of Semtex under their vehicle which exploded when the van stopped at traffic lights. It was thought that the IRA had planted the bomb whilst the soldiers were running.4
The second incident, two months later, was even more traumatic. Soldiers from The Light Infantry Regiment, with only six months of their two-year tour of duty to go, were returning from leave and on their way back to their base at Omagh, having been collected by coach from Aldergrove airport. For whatever reason, the driver chose to take a particular stretch of the A5 trunk road, known locally as ‘bomb alley’, that the army had been told to avoid as there was intelligence of ‘a threat’ along it. As the coach bypassed the village of Ballygawley, the IRA detonated a 25-to 30-lb Semtex bomb by command wire. The coach was hurled into the air and crashed on its side. The result was devastating. Eight young soldiers, all between eighteen and twenty-one years old, were killed, most of them instantaneously. Twenty-seven were injured.
One of the IRA suspects was Gerard Harte (29), who was believed to be the commander of the IRA in mid-Tyrone. Ten days later, he was dead, along with his brother, Martin (22), and another IRA man, Brian Mullin (25). All were killed in an SAS ambush not far from the spot where the eight young soldiers had died. The operation against this particular ASU had been planned for som
e time and was not put in place as a direct result of the Ballygawley bomb. The three had been under ‘Det’ surveillance and an MI5 ‘bug’ had been planted in one of their houses.5 TCG South had established that the unit planned to kill a UDR man who drove an easily recognized lorry around the area, calling at coal depots and visiting the joint RUC/army barracks in Carrickmore and the UDR barracks in Omagh.6 A carefully planned ambush was set up. An SAS soldier, bearing some resemblance to the driver, took over the wheel of the lorry as a decoy and for a couple of days followed the UDR man’s usual route to lure the IRA into a trap. On 30 August, the SAS decoy stopped the vehicle at a prearranged spot on a country lane near Drumnakilly, knowing that the IRA was unlikely to ignore such an obvious opportunity for a ‘kill’. He acted as if his vehicle had broken down and pretended to be attending to a wheel. The Harte brothers and Mullin drove by in a white Sierra, planning to kill the driver of the truck whom they believed to be the off-duty UDR soldier. They were wearing blue overalls and black masks and armed with two AK 47s and a Webley .38 revolver.
Around a dozen SAS soldiers were lying in wait, some of them manning a heavy machine gun as they had done at Loughgall the previous year. The army said the IRA opened fire first and the SAS returned it as the ‘decoy’ dived for cover over a wall. A local farmer working in a field a few hundred yards away told a different story. He did not see the shooting but heard the first burst of firing, describing it as loud and rapid, which would suggest the SAS machine gun. But whoever fired first, the ASU was never going to leave the scene alive. The IRA fired sixteen shots. The SAS fired 236. The IRA never stood a chance. The subsequent inquest did not reach any conclusion about who fired first. There is no doubt that the SAS soldier changing the wheel was an agent provocateur, and a very brave one at that. Two days later, Mrs Thatcher made her position clear. ‘When you are faced with terrorism, you obviously do not let the terrorists know precisely what steps you are taking to counter their terrorism. Nor shall we. But my message to them is this: Do not doubt our resolve to defeat terrorism.’7
In the face of increasing demands for tougher action after the Ballygawley bomb, the Government acted on another front too. On 19 October 1988, six weeks after the Drumnakilly ambush, the Home Secretary, Douglas Hurd, announced restrictions to prevent broadcasters from transmitting the voices of members of organizations involved in ‘terrorism’ or organizations that were deemed to support it, except when discussing constituency matters or at election time. Although the restrictions were primarily aimed at the IRA and Sinn Fein, they affected other republican organizations and loyalist groups too. Those covered by the restrictions, which became known as ‘the broadcasting ban’, could be seen but not heard. The ‘ban’ was introduced on the grounds that the British public found it offensive to hear the words of those who espoused violence. If that was the case, clearly the sight of them on television would be even more offensive but the Government was not going to fall into the trap of actually banning them from the screen as this would have been a propaganda ‘own goal’, skilfully exploited by Sinn Fein.
Broadcasters were not prepared to take this restriction to their freedom lying down, and used sub-titles and actors’ voices to repeat the words of the ‘banned’ individuals. Some got it down to a fine art, lip-syncing an actor’s voice to the real person’s lips. One actor, who imitated Gerry Adams to perfection, is said to have made a small fortune. Despite the ridicule the restrictions increasingly attracted, not least from the broadcasters themselves, they did have some effect. In the four months before the ‘ban’, Sinn Fein had 471 enquiries for interviews. In the four months after, the party had enquiries for only 110.8
The ‘ban’ presented us with almost insuperable difficulties when we made the BBC television documentary ‘Enemies Within’ in the summer of 1990, when, with the NIO’s permission, I interviewed a host of IRA and loyalist paramilitary prisoners inside the Maze. In principle we faced the prospect of wall-to-wall sub-titles or actors’ voices; in practice we found what we believed to be a legitimate way round it. After long discussions, we decided that as long as the interviewees were deemed to be speaking in their personal capacity and not as spokespersons for their particular ‘banned’ organizations, we could transmit the sound of their own voices. This we did with one or two exceptions, the most notable being the IRA’s ‘food spokesman’ who, in discussion with the prison’s cooks, was complaining about the size of the sausage rolls. We subtitled his words, ‘the thing about the sausage rolls, they’re getting smaller’ as he was speaking in an official capacity on behalf of the IRA. I understand that following the programme, his reign as IRA ‘food spokesman’ came to an abrupt end.
The restrictions were finally removed, after nearly six years, on 16 September 1994, just over a fortnight after the IRA announced its historic cease-fire. Lord Mayhew, who as Sir Patrick Mayhew was both Attorney-General (1987–92) and Northern Ireland Secretary (1992–7) whilst the ‘ban’ was in operation, was not convinced, with hindsight, that it had been effective. ‘It came after a series of hideous outrages by the IRA and there was a very great need to be seen to be doing something about it,’ he told me. ‘I don’t think it actually served very much purpose but I wholly understood why it was introduced.’ It was Sir Patrick who finally put an end to it.
As they continued to pile on the pressure, Special Branch and the ‘Group’ were far more effective than any broadcasting restrictions in countering the IRA. The ‘ban’ was cosmetic whereas the impact of the intelligence services was real and increasingly worrying to the IRA, given the growing sophistication of the technical and electronic surveillance aids now at the disposal of the ‘Brits’. By the end of the 1980s, Mrs Thatcher had quietly authorized a huge sum of money (I heard the figure £20 million) to be spent on acquiring and developing the latest technology. The ring of giant watch-towers the military constructed along the border, in particular in South Armagh, was a visible sign that the army could keep an eye on its enemy in both North and South. On top of the towers were cameras with enormous lenses giving the army the ability to monitor ‘targets’ without the ‘targets’ necessarily knowing that they were being watched. The watchtowers advertised the fact that the IRA was under surveillance. The ‘Det’ covert cameras did not. ‘Ken’ was trained to be one of 14 Intelligence Company’s technical surveillance experts, using video cameras that could transmit live, ‘real time’ television pictures, in colour, of whatever premises or person they were focused on. These live pictures could then be transmitted by microwave link to intelligence monitoring stations up to fifty miles and more away. ‘We could watch the daily routine of particular suspects and the buildup of operations,’ he told me. ‘You could work out what was going to happen or the intelligence services could figure out the type of operation from the type of characters who turned up.’
The ‘Det’ covert cameras were particularly useful for cross-border surveillance, enabling the ‘Brits’ to watch what was going on without running the political risk ofbeing physically caught on the wrong side of the line. ‘Ken’ said in one operation they had been watching ‘one of South Armagh’s main players’ living just across the border in the South for two years.
With a long lens, we could see into his house, watch him having his breakfast, see what was on the table and who was with him. We knew when he left his house and when he came back. We knew what he was doing in the house and around it. Blokes sat watching him for weeks. And these are live, television pictures, transmitted back to TCG South so they could be watched and acted upon with decisions being made at the highest level very quickly. We could watch him at night too in black and white with infra-red.
Concealing a camera with a giant lens was not easy. It was usually dug into the ground and camouflaged ‘using all the skills of nature’ to hide it in places so remote that only the ‘Det’ could get to them. Operators could either stay with the camera or operate it from a distance by remote control which meant that if the camera was compromised, t
he operator was not. Such close-up surveillance operations on the ‘bad guys’ were conducted province-wide and against loyalists as well as republicans. ‘Ken’ worked everywhere from South Armagh to Bangor and Derry. ‘I know who they are, who they meet, where they go, when they leave, when they come back, both day and night depending on the type of camera you’re watching.’ Microphones attached to some cameras could pick up conversations taking place a considerable distance away.
Where appropriate for intimate surveillance close up to the ‘target’, the ‘Det’ used tiny cameras with even tinier lenses. But however small, these still had to be camouflaged to blend in with their surroundings. And it was not just the camera itself that had to be concealed. The battery that powered it and the cable to the transmitter all had to be disguised and hidden, using whatever natural material was available. Sometimes the camera would be concealed inside a rock that was an exact replica of a real rock at a particular spot close to the ‘target’. The rock would be covertly photographed at night with an infra-red camera and an identical replica made, usually by the operator himself, back at base. It was then replaced at night on the exact spot it had come from but now with a tiny camera inside. ‘Ken’, like most of the ‘Det’ operators, loved his work and knew how important it was. ‘To think that these operations may well have saved one or two lives is a great achievement,’ he said.
It would be naïve to think that the IRA did not know what was going on. They did, and made every effort to counter the increasingly effective surveillance of the ‘Brits’ by ‘executing’ informers, electronically ‘sweeping’ premises and individuals, and uncovering hidden cameras and listening devices in rooms, cars and the countryside. When Brendan Hughes was finally released from the Maze in 1986, he found the ‘Brits’ were far ahead in their surveillance and intelligence-gathering techniques compared with when he was arrested in 1974 at Myrtlefield Park. The days of the ‘Four Square laundry’ were long gone. ‘British Intelligence learned an awful lot by their war here,’ he said.
