Nelson simply shrugged, unable to offer any explanation.
The killing of Captain Armstrong worried the FRU officers for it showed either that Nelson’s advice was not being followed by the UDA leadership or that his authority within that organisation was negligible. And yet, on other occasions, it was obvious that the UDA leadership were taking note of Nelson’s information. On this tragic occasion, however, it appeared that a Loyalist hit-squad had simply decided to go out to kill someone that Saturday afternoon and had mistakenly killed one of their own.
One of the killings that alerted the RUC Special Branch to Brian Nelson’s possible involvement in the spate of UDA shootings was the murder of Phelim McNally in November 1988. The gunmen had not in fact been interested in Phelim McNally, but were after his brother, Francis, a well-known Sinn Fein member of Cookstown Council in Co, Tyrone. Some weeks before Phelim’s murder, Agent Ten-Thirty-Three had informed his handlers that the UDA wanted to check out and perhaps target Francis McNally.
‘We understand McNally is as thick as thieves with the Provos,’ Nelson told his handlers during one of his biweekly chats with them.
‘What makes you think that?’
‘Our contacts in Cookstown have been keeping an eye on him and they have seen him hanging around with known Provo activists in the area.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Well, the people who gave me the information are reliable,’ Nelson replied, ‘what more do you want?’
‘And they’re sure the man seen talking to Provos is the Cookstown Councillor Francis McNally?’
‘Aye, we’re certain, positive,’ Nelson replied. ‘He’s been identified.’
‘What do you plan to do?’
‘My men are checking out his place now. We have his name and address but no one has yet visited the area to see if it would be possible for one of our teams to get in and out without too much trouble.’
‘We haven’t been told that this man is in fact working with the Provos,’ his handler commented. ‘How can you be so sure?’
‘You know we have men in Cookstown,’ Nelson said, ‘and they told me that this fella is one of them. Definite. No doubt.’
Nelson was told to return with any plans that he and his team might draw up before going ahead with any action against McNally. His FRU handlers told him that they would check out the councillor to see if the information Nelson’s men had provided could be backed up by any other source.
Nelson didn’t like that idea. ‘Don’t go fucking up my contacts,’ he said, raising his voice as if he was in charge of the meeting. ‘I know what you fuckers can play at. This one’s mine and if we want to get him, we fucking will, okay?’
‘Well, we must check first,’ he was told as the handler tried to diffuse the situation. He didn’t want Nelson raging around, throwing his weight about and setting up operations himself without recourse to advice from his handlers. They knew from experience that such behaviour by a tout – believing in their own arrogant opinions, their own triumphs and their invincibility – was certain to end in disaster.
After that meeting the FRU officers did check out Councillor McNally and discovered that while he was an ardent, enthusiastic Sinn Fein member, there was no hard evidence that he was involved with the IRA. The fact that he was a Sinn Fein councillor simply showed that he was a Republican and possibly a Provo supporter but did not imply he was a Provo activist or a member of the IRA.
This evidence was put before Nelson at their next meeting a few days later.
‘I will inform my military wing,’ Ten-Thirty-Three told his handlers. ‘It will be up to them to make a decision. I’ve given them my evidence, the word of my contacts on the ground, and they are convinced that Councillor McNally is a Provo.’
‘But you have no proof,’ one handler protested.
‘We have all the fucking proof we need,’ replied Nelson. ‘He drinks with Provos, he talks to Provos and, for all I know, he probably attends Provo meetings. He’s certainly Sinn Fein and that’s good enough for us.’
‘But you told us that from now on you would only be targeting known Provo activists.’
‘I know I did,’ Nelson replied, ‘but that was then; this is now. In any case, what the fuck’s it got to do with you lot? You just keep supplying the information and we’ll carry out the jobs. That’s the deal we’ve had from the beginning and there is no reason why it shouldn’t continue. You know that we’ve got loads of info coming in from all over the place, making it easier to target known Provos and their mates. Well, this is just another one, okay?’
It was obvious that Nelson had no intention of backing down. In an effort to ensure that the UDA were not targeting innocent people, the FRU handlers asked Nelson to check Councillor McNally’s background once more.
‘If it’ll make you happy, we’ll run another check,’ said Nelson, sounding miserable once again, ‘but we know we’ve got the right guy.’
‘Have it your way,’ he was told, ‘but check first, okay?’
‘Okay,’ he replied and was gone.
The MISR sent forward to senior officers giving details of that meeting with Ten-Thirty-Three included the warning that Francis McNally was, in all probability, to be targeted in the very near future. No instruction came back from senior officers to say that anything should be done by the FRU to stop the attack.
Some weeks later Phelim McNally, aged twenty-eight, was at Francis’s home in Derrycrin Road, Coagh, Co. Tyrone, sitting in the kitchen and playing the accordion late into the night. A talented musician and keen traditional music enthusiast, Phelim was a married man with five children. On that night, Thursday, 24 November 1988, his wife was in hospital about to give birth to their sixth child.
At 10 p.m. three masked gunmen stopped a car in Mossbank Road, Coagh, and ordered the driver out of the vehicle. They told him that on pain of death he was to say nothing to anyone about what had happened. The men then drove off in the hijacked vehicle.
Twenty-five minutes later the sound of breaking glass was heard at McNally’s home by neighbours, followed seconds later by the sharp crack of five shots. The UDA gunmen had walked to the back of the house where, through the kitchen window, they could see the figure of a man playing the accordion. Apparently, there was no conversation between the man and his killers; no identification was checked. As Phelim heard the breaking glass he instinctively looked up and, as he did so, five shots rang out. He died instantly. RUC detectives investigating the murder were convinced that the killing of Phelim McNally was a case of mistaken identity.
When Ten-Thirty-Three was confronted by his handlers later that day he simply shrugged his shoulders as though the matter was of little concern to him. But they pushed him, determined to make him confront the fact that his intelligence work had played an integral part in the murder of a totally innocent man, the father of a young family.
Nelson seemed unrepentant. ‘Nothing to do with me,’ he protested, almost in a whisper, giving strong hints that he had no wish to continue the conversation.
Pressed further, he went on, ‘You know all I do is give the name and the address and, of course, a photograph of the target. All that was done. We had no idea that his fucking brother would be in his house that night sitting in the kitchen playing the fucking accordion. It was just bad luck.’
‘Is that what you call it, “bad luck”?’ he was asked.
‘What would you call it then?’ Nelson retorted. ‘What do you want me to say? That I’m sorry? That I’ll send flowers to his fucking funeral? Well, the answer is no. This is war we’re involved in and we are simply defending the Loyalist cause. Get it?’
No more was said on the subject because the handlers realised that their tout was in no mood to give ground or even admit that a terrible, tragic case of mistaken identity had robbed a family of their father. Such cases caused concern and apprehension within the FRU, and not only because members of the Unit prided themselves on being a dedicated, efficient and professi
onal outfit which did not make such basic mistakes.
But the catalogue of mistakes did not end there. Another extraordinary ‘error’ was the murder of a Protestant man by two UDA gunmen who believed their target was a Catholic. Agent Ten-Thirty-Three had been informed by one of his streetwise touts that a man believed to be a Catholic had just been hired to work on a construction site in Lisburn. Most of the other men employed by the building firm were understood to be Protestants.
In the early-morning darkness of Wednesday, 25 January 1989, twenty-six-year-old David Dornan kissed his wife and their nine-month-old baby daughter goodbye, left his home in Carlisle Park, Ballynahinch, and set off for work at a building site on Knockmore Road, not far from the Protestant Rathvarna housing estate in Lisburn. He had been working on the site for just a week, and was glad of the chance to earn some money.
The Force Research Unit had no idea that an attack was planned on David Dornan or anyone working on that building site. This was a Loyalist attack which was planned and executed without any reference whatsoever to Military Intelligence. Ten-Thirty-Three had never raised the matter in any of his discussions with his handlers. Not surprisingly, as the FRU knew nothing about it, no arrangements had been made to keep the police and the security forces out of the area surrounding Knockmore Road, and the RUC had arrived on the scene within minutes. As a result, the murder of David Dornan caused a massive and immediate police response and a number of people were arrested and taken in for questioning over the killing.
Dornan had begun work at eight o’clock that morning and was busy driving a mechanical digger, a photograph of his beloved baby daughter pinned inside the cab. He was thrilled to be a father and frequently told his workmates all about the baby and her progress.
Two young men in their late twenties or early thirties casually walked onto the building site and went up to Dornan’s vehicle, flagging him down, asking him to stop because they wanted to question him. Not for a moment expecting to be attacked, Dornan stopped the vehicle. As he bent down so that he could hear what the two men wanted, they opened fire, one with a handgun, the other with a sawn-off shotgun. David Dornan slumped forward over the steering wheel, fatally injured. His workmates rushed over when they saw what had happened and gave him emergency first-aid but doctors pronounced him dead shortly after he arrived at hospital.
The two killers were seen running from the scene towards the Loyalist Rathvarna estate. Police and soldiers were drafted in and two army helicopters took to the air in a bid to spot the men. Within thirty minutes of the shooting the housing estate had been sealed off and four men had been arrested and taken to police headquarters for questioning. Other RUC and army personnel conducted house-to-house searches along Ballymacash Road and Knockmore Road, off the main Lisburn-to-Glenavy road.
The local community was shocked and angry at the killing, unable to understand why David Dornan, a family man with no paramilitary connections, had been targeted and killed. Detectives discovered later that Dornan was not in trouble with any terrorist organisation nor was he in debt, and they could not find any motive for the cold-blooded murder. There was in fact no reason. It had simply been a stupid mistake on behalf of the UDA’s intelligence section who had misinformed their bosses that the man hired to drive the digger on that building site was a Catholic, and that as such he would be an easy target for Loyalist gunmen.
Sinn Fein Councillor Pat Rice knew what had happened. He said at the time: ‘The shooting of David Dornan was purely sectarian. His attackers obviously thought he was a Catholic so they killed him.’
The Workers’ Party spokesman, John Lowry, appealed to the public representatives in Lisburn to call for a united stand by all political parties in the area against paramilitary gangs of any sectarian persuasion in an effort to stop the mindless, callous killings and bring peace to the town. But his appeal fell on deaf ears.
Against this, of course, were the IRA bombers who, it was claimed, only targeted Loyalists, RUC members and soldiers but who in reality were happy to risk the lives of women, children and old people in the process. Time and again – like the horrific explosion at the Remembrance Day parade in Enniskillen in November 1987, the Droppin Well Bar, in Co. Derry in December 1982, the bombing of Christmas shoppers at Harrods in 1983, Warrington in March 1993 or Omagh in 1998 – the Provos’ bombs killed totally innocent people who had no part in the troubles of Northern Ireland.
But during the late 1980s in particular, the UDA were so eager to destabilise Sinn Fein and the IRA that they seemed prepared to risk killing innocent people who just happened to drink in the wrong pubs or who were simply unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
One such was Seamus Murray who lived on the Suffolk estate in the Twinbrook area of west Belfast. He was a hard-working Catholic, married with a family, who had never been in trouble with the RUC or involved in petty crime. He had never been interviewed in connection with any criminal offence and had never been arrested. Indeed, at no time had there ever been any suggestion that he was involved with the Provisional IRA, Sinn Fein politics or even the Republican cause. But, unluckily for him, he happened to work on a Housing Executive building site in the protestant Legoniel area of north Belfast. The site was supposedly ‘protected’ by the Provisional IRA.
In January 1988, UDA men, always on the look out for potential targets, noticed that Murray regularly visited both a known Republican club and a pub frequented by Provo activists. They had no idea if he drank with these activists or with another, non-political, group of men. The UDA traced him to the building site and assumed that Seamus Murray was an IRA activist or, at the very least, a sympathiser and supporter.
For three months one of Brian Nelson’s intelligence units stalked Murray, checking his movements and noting where he drank, the friends he met and, of course, finding out his home address. Then, one evening in the early summer of 1988, they struck, smashing their way into his kitchen where he and his wife were eating. His wife screamed at her husband to try and escape and, to her great credit, tackled the armed gunmen, trying in desperation to stop them shooting Seamus. But she was no obstacle to the burly UDA hitmen who pushed her violently out of their way before opening fire on the defenceless Murray.
That unprovoked killing of an innocent man was one of the worst examples of Brian Nelson’s reign of power as the UDA’s intelligence officer. On that occasion he had not sought information from the FRU, though he had notified his handlers that the UDA were targeting a man named Murray who appeared to have links with the Provos. Worried that another innocent person might be about to die, Military Intelligence checked their files but could find no one of that name who had any link with the IRA or the Republican cause. Nelson was informed of this and advised to leave the man alone. By the summer of 1988, however, Brian Nelson had become almost a law unto himself, taking little notice of what his handlers told him, only using them to obtain intelligence, photographs and information about possible IRA targets.
The following day, the FRU called him to a meeting and demanded to know why Seamus Murray had been murdered when Nelson had been advised there was no evidence to link him with the Provisional IRA.
‘I had no idea the killing was to take place,’ he told them. ‘My job is simply to target people; I had nothing whatsoever to do with the murder.’
‘But why didn’t you ask us for further information on the man? If you had done so we would have told you that to the best of our knowledge Murray was an innocent man.’
‘But we had other intelligence,’ Nelson argued, ‘which suggested that he was not innocent.’
‘What evidence?’ he was asked.
‘Our own evidence,’ was Nelson’s weak reply.
‘Well, remember this occasion,’ one of the handlers told him, ‘and next time ask us? Do you understand?’
‘Okay,’ he replied but with no great enthusiasm.
At meetings over the next few weeks Nelson’s handlers urged him to keep them informe
d of exactly who was being targeted. They could not afford to let any more innocent people die. Nelson replied that he was now keeping them ‘fully informed’ of everything, claiming that he religiously passed to Military Intelligence every UDA decision he knew about. His handlers believed he was lying. They were sure that he knew far more than ever he declared, but they had no way of checking. In notes to senior officers, they communicated their fears of the consequences of their agent’s reckless behaviour, and the matter was discussed at meetings of the Joint Irish Section. But at no time were they told to stop Nelson’s undisciplined operations or told to curb his apparent desire to have random killings carried out, even if that meant innocent people died.
But the handlers had no intention of permitting Nelson to dictate to them. They decided the time had come to take firm action if they were to rein in Nelson’s headlong dash to open sectarian warfare on the streets of Belfast. That day they warned him to slow down and not to jump to conclusions just because some of his touts on the streets had reached hasty decisions that were probably based on hearsay with little concrete evidence to support them. Nelson was warned that if he persisted in targeting innocent people his arrangement with the FRU, including his three hundred pounds a week, and the information and advice he was given, would end forthwith.
The senior handler advised him, ‘If you carry on like this we won’t be able to protect you. If UDA gunmen are caught and your name comes up, it will be impossible to save you. In those circumstances you could be done for conspiracy to murder and that would mean twenty years behind bars. So, take note. Do you get the message?’
For a moment Nelson appeared to have accepted what was being said. But a couple of minutes later he had regained his customary bumptious attitude. In fact, he appeared even more cocksure. ‘That don’t worry me,’ he said, ‘because I’m doing nothing except passing on information that you lot have given me for months now. I’ve got all the proof I need in my database. If I’m caught and questioned I’ll simply have to tell the truth. Then we’ll all be in the shit, won’t we? Two can play that fuckin’ game.’
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