This appalling sectarian killing infuriated the FRU and led to one of the most ferocious rows between Brian Nelson and his handlers. They called him to an urgent meeting that very day.
‘What have you got to say about what happened on the Tonagh Estate in Lisburn early today?’ he was asked as soon as he arrived at the safe-house.
‘Don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about,’ said Nelson.
‘You know right enough,’ an FRU handler told him.
‘I’ve just told you; I don’t know what the fuck you’re on about,’ he repeated.
‘So you’ve never heard of Liam McKee then?’
‘No, never,’ he replied.
‘Have you not listened to the news today?’
‘Oh yeah,’ he agreed, you mean the lad killed in Lisburn last night. I didn’t know his name.’
‘Yes, you did,’ said one handler, ‘because some time ago you asked us if we had anything on him.’
‘Did I?’ said Nelson. ‘Well, I must have forgotten.’
‘You know bloody well,’ the man continued. ‘You asked us for information and we told you that we had nothing on him, that he was clean.’
‘So,’ said Nelson, shrugging his shoulders as if wanting to end the conversation.
‘You’re the UDA’s intelligence officer and your gunmen killed this poor bastard,’ said the other man, raising his voice. ‘And you, Brian, probably set up the whole attack.’
Before Nelson could again deny his involvement, another handler told him, ‘Just listen a moment. If you don’t tell us the truth and own up to this one then we are all in a lot of trouble. And in your capacity as chief intelligence officer it is quite likely that the RUC will be paying you a call. Do you understand?’
Ten-Thirty-Three knew only too well that with the evidence that the FRU had concerning a range of killings, he would be in trouble. But he was still playing the tough image. ‘Don’t give me that bollocks,’ he said. ‘You wouldn’t fucking dare. If you dropped me in it then I would just spill the beans and every one of your lot would be in the shit. Now stop trying to give me a hard time; it won’t work.’
Nelson was asked what he thought of the killing of Liam McKee.
‘Not much,’ he replied. ‘I just look on it as a bit of ethnic cleansing if you want to know.’
‘But a man was shot dead,’ a FRU handler told him, exasperated at Nelson’s couldn’t-care-less attitude.
‘Tough,’ he replied.
It seemed obvious that Nelson was not about to admit to anything and so one of the chief handlers decided to read him the riot act. ‘You carry out another killing like that and you’re on your own. We will disown you and, believe me, we have so much on you that we could send you down for twenty years. Now play the game as we want you to or pay the consequences. You do not target innocent Catholics just because you want some “ethnic cleansing” in a Protestant area. We either work together or not at all. Have it your way but remember that of one thing you can be certain: if you don’t go along with our plans, you’re finished, washed up and totally in the shit. Get it?’
Before Nelson could reply, the man began again: ‘Say nothing now. Go away and think. Then let us know. But remember my words of warning. Now fuck off.’
There was disagreement within the Force Research Unit about what should be done about Agent Ten-Thirty-Three’s taking the law into his own hands and killing an innocent man. Some handlers believed they should cut their losses and get rid of Nelson, even though they knew that by doing so they would be getting rid of their prime source of information. They also feared that if they gave Nelson his marching orders he would probably take with him the forty or so touts that happily worked for the UDA’s intelligence-gathering organisation and obviously provided valuable street-level material. Other handlers saw Nelson was a hero, doing valuable work in an impossible situation, keeping his FRU contacts happy as well as having to provide regular and vital intelligence material to his UDA bosses. Some FRU officers were also convinced that Nelson was working as a double-agent, telling the UDA hierarchy that he had somehow managed to infiltrate British Military Intelligence and that was how he was able to provide hot, up-to-the-minute information on anyone the terrorists wanted to target.
After much discussion it was decided to keep running with Ten-Thirty-Three but somehow try to contain his ambitions, to get him back on side obeying instructions rather than acting as a loose cannon doing whatever he wanted, when he wanted, as though it was he who was controlling the Force Research Unit.
In the summer of 1989 the UDA decided to step up their campaign of murdering Catholics because they weren’t having much success in killing their preferred targets – known IRA activists and their supporters or even Sinn Fein members. The UDA were afraid that their killing rate couldn’t match that of the Provos, which was far higher at that time. The IRA had killed not only British Army personnel and members of the RUC, but also prison officers and Protestant taxi-drivers, so the Loyalists decided to increase the stakes.
Ten-Thirty-Three took up the matter with his FRU handlers to see if they would approve. At a meeting during that summer Nelson casually asked if there would be any objection to UDA members on active service using motorbikes as these seemed to have the edge on cars or vans.
‘We’ve discussed it,’ he told them, ‘and we believe it would be better to switch to motorbikes when targeting a man on his own because it is far easier to make a good escape; far better than a car. It worked well on Fusco.’
‘True,’ replied a handler, ‘motorbikes are always far better in traffic and escape is easier.’
‘Is there anything against motorbikes?’ Nelson enquired.
‘Well, protection is almost non-existent,’ he was told. ‘If someone returns fire there’s a good chance the motorcyclist or his pillion passenger will be hit. You’ve no protection whatsoever. In a surprise attack, there’s far less chance of being hit if two of you are in a car. There is another drawback, too: only one person can fire, unlike in a car where there can be three armed passengers as well as a driver. It is true, you know, that there is safety in numbers.’
‘But it’s much more manoeuvrable,’ Nelson suggested.
‘Yes, and brilliant to make a getaway in traffic,’ replied the handler. ‘There is also another point. No one can walk around wearing a balaclava or a mask because it’s so fucking obvious you’re up to no good. But no one takes any notice of someone wearing a helmet and no on can recognise you.’
Some days later Ten-Thirty-Three returned for a further chat and he told his handlers that the UDA had decided to go ahead and use a motorbike on a couple of hit-and-runs in Belfast city centre.
‘But you don’t know who you’ll be hitting if you just drive around the centre of Belfast,’ they replied.
‘We know where the Micks go, don’t you worry about that,’ said Nelson, ‘we won’t make fucking mistakes. In any case, my fellas can smell a Mick a mile away.’ And he laughed at his joke.
An MISR was immediately sent to the FRU’s operations officer and commander giving details of the UDA’s latest plan. The MISR was passed to the Joint Irish Section but no guidance was received from above. No instruction came back as to whether the UDA should be permitted to target people using motorbikes or not. As a result, the FRU decided to follow the UDA bikers with two motorcycles of their own and a back-up car, all of which were in constant radio contact.
For three days the UDA motorcyclist and his armed pillion passenger rode around Belfast, mainly in the city centre, looking for likely targets. They knew that they were being followed, that their every move was being watched and, during that time, no offensive action was taken by the UDA bikers.
On the fourth day it was decided to relieve the follow-up team of FRU bikers and personnel and hand over the watch to 14th Int, the famous ‘Det’, to see if things might hot up somewhat if the UDA bikers thought no one was following them and keeping an eye on their antics. The Det motorcyclists a
nd a back-up car, a blue Vauxhall Astra with two armed men inside, continued riding and driving around the city centre. Then the UDA bikers broke away from their usual tour and headed off away from the city centre and along the Crumlin Road. They believed they had shaken off the bikers who had been tailing them and did not realise they were still being surveyed by the Det motorbike and back-up car.
Shortly after ten o’clock on Saturday morning, 2 September 1989, the UDA bike suddenly stopped outside the shops on the Ardoyne Road. The pillion passenger pulled a revolver out of his shoulder holster and fired four shots at the stranger standing on the kerb. Patrick McKenna, a single, unemployed man in his thirties from nearby Farringdon Court, slumped to the ground. He was dead. He had had no idea that he was being targeted that day and had just walked to the shops from his home. He was given no chance of escape and was shot in the back for no apparent reason.
The soldiers on the pursuing motorbike – officers carrying out a two-year stint with the Det – saw exactly what had happened and immediately swung into action. They had no intention of letting two thugs who had just gunned down a pedestrian get away with murder.
The UDA bike accelerated away down the Crumlin Road but had not travelled more than a couple of hundred yards before the officers struck, shooting the pillion passenger in the back. Two shots from the soldier’s Heckler & Koch machine pistol and the man fell to the ground. Brian Robinson, a member of the UVF, was dead, killed on active service.
The other man decided to make a dash for it but as he tried to accelerate away, the Det back-up car followed, hitting the motorbike broadside, a lesson learned in training. The motorcyclist was catapulted from his bike. Before he had time to pick himself up or use his handgun, the officers had raced to the spot, one soldier throwing himself on the man, pinning him to the ground to prevent him getting his gun.
‘Don’t move!’ another yelled, his gun only a couple of feet from the UDA man’s head. ‘Don’t dare move an inch or I’ll blow your head off! Keep still!’ he yelled again while his mate took off the man’s crash helmet and searched him, taking away his gun and checking if he had any other weapons on him.
The Loyalist rider was injured though not seriously hurt and none of the Det soldiers had sustained any injuries. The shootings had been witnessed by many people, most of whom had been going about their Saturday-morning shopping, some of them accompanied by their children. Within minutes the RUC and ambulances were at the scene. After handing over the UDA man to the RUC and exchanging a few words with the senior RUC officer, the Det team disappeared.
McKenna’s killers had known neither his identity nor his religion. Shocked members of his family said they were ‘dumbfounded’ by the news of his murder. McKenna was quiet and gentle, a man well known and well liked in the area because of his interest in football and his voluntary work for the John Paul Youth Club. Sinn Fein Councillor Gerard McGuigan said that Patrick McKenna had no political connections of any kind. ‘It is obvious that he was simply a random victim of what was clearly a sectarian attack by Loyalists.’
Brian Nelson was angry, frustrated and bitter when he next met his handlers. ‘Fuck you, fuck you all!’ were his opening words. ‘You were tailing our men and when they kill some Provo bastard as arranged you fucking shoot our men! What the fuck are you playing at? What’s your fucking game?’
‘Listen,’ one handler said in an effort to calm him down.
But he hadn’t finished his tirade. ‘I thought we had a deal. You provide the information and we carry out the dirty work. I thought we were in this together. So tell me, why the fuck did you kill our man? I am in deep shit over this and my bosses are fucking fuming. They know he was taken out by your blokes and they want an explanation, otherwise the deal is off. We’ll simply piss off and let you bastards stew in your own juice!’
‘It wasn’t like that,’ said one handler. ‘If you’ll give us a minute, we’ll tell you what happened.’
‘So it was a cock-up?’ asked Nelson.
‘In a way, yes.’
‘Okay, tell me then,’ he said, ‘but it had better be no fucking cock-and-bull story ’cos I won’t buy it.’
The officer explained exactly what had happened. He said that FRU personnel had been following as arranged and then it had been decided to let the Det team take over the operation so that it didn’t look as though the UVF riders were being tracked by the same bikers for long periods of time. The Det team did not, unfortunately, realise that a joint exercise between FRU and the UDA bikers was in progress. When they saw the gunman take a shot at someone walking along the road, they decided to act.
‘So you’re saying it was just bad luck?’ asked Nelson.
‘Sort of,’ he was told.
‘What am I going to tell my bosses?’ Nelson pleaded, looking desperate. ‘They think its my fault.’
‘Tell them the truth. Tell them exactly what happened,’ he was told. ‘Explain that accidents happen. They’ll understand that.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Nelson, looking moody and downcast. ‘I could be for the fucking high jump on this one.’
‘Don’t talk bollocks,’ he was told, ‘just tell them what happened; they’ll understand.’
There would be more conspiracies involving the Force Research Unit and the Ulster Defence Association and most involved Ten-Thirty-Three, the link man who boasted both to his handlers at the FRU and to his UDA bosses that he was the most important person in the campaign to disrupt, wreck and confuse the Provo leadership. But mistakes occurred and innocent men were murdered.
Chapter Thirteen
Out of Control
It seemed extraordinary that, despite constant assistance from Military Intelligence, using detailed and accurate information from the most sophisticated computer databases operated by a conscientious and hardworking team of back-room specialists, so many innocent people should have been targeted and killed by Loyalist gunmen during the years when Agent Ten-Thirty-Three was operating. Some might argue that, in the chaotic, crazed cauldron of Northern Ireland, ‘accidental losses’ would have to be accepted, and that the Loyalists wouldn’t have killed anyone had the IRA not tried to bomb and blast their way to power. Most Loyalists would point the finger at the hardline Provos who took over the leadership of the Republican movement in the early 1970s and started their campaign to terrorise the Protestant population in the hope that eventually they would come to accept the principle of a united Ireland.
On a number of occasions during those thirty years Northern Ireland was a hair’s-breadth away from all-out civil war and it took the intervention of the British Army, and the heroic discipline of the RUC, to avert open warfare. In the last three years of the 1980s, however, it was the conspiracy between Military Intelligence and the Ulster Defence Association which carried the battle on the streets to the very heart of the Republican movement. And the campaign of intimidation and killing of Sinn Fein/IRA politicians, gunmen, bombers, supporters and sympathisers by the UDA, aided and abetted by British Military Intelligence, was known about by MI5, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and a few senior government ministers and civil servants.
For all the intelligence material and expert free advice that was available to Brian Nelson, it seems extraordinary that the Loyalist gunmen would make such errors as, for example, killing the wrong person and, sometimes, even shooting members of their own side, Protestants that they mistook for Catholics. Whenever such dreadful mistakes occurred, the Force Research Unit officers were at their wits’ end to know how they could control Ten-Thirty-Three and his gunmen when the the UDA were allegedly only interested in taking out Provos, hardline Republicans and Sinn Fein activists.
One such killing occurred on a cold, bright January afternoon in 1988, when a young man and his girlfriend were walking along Park Road, near the junction with the Ormeau Road in Belfast. Timothy David Armstrong, aged twenty-nine, was a captain in the Ulster Defence Regiment, a dedicated, keen member of 8 UDR who had served with the reg
iment since 1978 and was based at Dungannon.
His girlfriend, who was not injured in the shooting, told RUC detectives that no warning whatsoever was given to Armstrong and that neither of the two masked gunmen had bothered to ask his name or what he did for a living. She believed he had been murdered by the Provisional IRA simply because he was a full-time member of the UDR, and that somehow they had tailed him and decided to shoot him at that time on that day, Saturday, 16 January 1988. She had always known that he could be murdered in cold blood by the Provos. She was taken to hospital suffering from shock. When she later discovered that the killers were in fact Protestant UDA gunmen, she was devastated, unable to believe that the organisation would so callously kill someone without having any idea of their identity.
Once again, it seemed, the UDA had stupidly selected the wrong target, revealing how amateurish their set-up had become despite the advice and assistance they received almost on a weekly basis from British Military Intelligence. The dead man was a well-known, well-liked officer. Ulster Unionist MP Ken Maginnis commented at the time: ‘Captain Armstrong served in my constituency and I knew him as someone who was considerate to his men and courteous to the public.’
At Nelson’s next meeting with his handlers, he was asked to explain the murder of Armstrong. With a shrug of the soldiers he replied, ‘It was a fuck-up, a mistake; there’s nothing more I can say. They shot the wrong man.’
‘But didn’t anyone check first?’ he was asked.
‘I dunno,’ Nelson replied, ‘I wasn’t there.’
‘Why didn’t you ask us for advice?’ one handler asked him. ‘Why didn’t you check out the man’s name with us? You’ve asked us about other people before, so why didn’t you on this occasion?’
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