From the archives: Secrecy and Northern Ireland’s Dirty War - the murder of Pat Finucane
On the evening of Monday 8 January 1990, a group of British detectives decided that they had done enough for one day. It was getting late now, and some of the officers had been working for thirteen hours on a complex and politically fraught investigation that was being conducted against a backdrop of escalating violence.
First they smelt the smoke. Then they saw the flames. The entire incident room was ablaze and they rushed to raise the alarm. Sarah Bynum, one of the detective constables, later recalled: ‘There were a number of fire alarm points in the building and I went to one and I smashed it with the heel of my shoe and nothing happened. I ran down to another one and smashed that and again nothing happened.’
This remains their belief a quarter of a century later. While an RUC investigation concluded that the fire had been started by accident, John Stevens, now Lord Stevens, is of a different view: ‘This incident, in my opinion, has never been adequately investigated and I believe it was a deliberate act of arson.
In linking Nelson to the Finucane murder, Stevens’ detectives were not merely solving a single crime - they were, in Stevens’ words, about to uncover ‘something extremely dangerous and difficult’ - namely, the evidence that the British state had been operating a death squad in Northern Ireland. It wasn’t pulling the triggers of that squad’s guns, perhaps, but, through Nelson - and others - it was pulling the strings of those who did.
There is a suspicion among some in Northern Ireland that the British state is unable to contend with the past because it cannot disclose the full truth, in all its intricacies. During the first week in his new job, Hermon asked the Irish Joint Section, the combined MI5 and MI6 organisation then operating in Belfast, to look into the issue and produce a report. The work was carried out by Patrick Walker, soon to become the most senior MI5 officer in the province and, by the end of the decade, Director General of the agency.
The RUC’s Chief Constable had decided, with the en-couragement of MI5, that the gathering of intelligence would take priority over the apprehension and prosecution of people responsible for killings, kidnappings and bombings. And, on occasion, the people who were responsible for these acts would remain at liberty, if they were also working as informants for the police or the Army, and their usefulness to the state was assessed to outweigh the danger that they posed to the public.
The problem, as the RUC pointed out at this meeting, was that the only guidelines to police work of this nature had been written in 1969, before the conflict began, and ‘were totally unrealistic/unworkable for dealing with terrorism’.
The RUC’s Special Branch was not the only force operating in a legal grey area. The Army’s undercover Force Research Unit handled agents in an almost identical fashion. There were frequent tensions between the two organisations, and some misunderstandings. Special Branch regarded the Army’s sources as being ‘rubbish and of a poor standard’.
A thin, nervous-looking man, a drinker and a chain smoker, Nelson was the most unlikely-looking terrorist and intelligence agent: ‘not an inspiring specimen’, according to Stevens. Born in 1947 in the loyalist Shankill district of west Belfast, he joined the Black Watch regiment of the British Army as a teenager, serving in Cyprus and Germany. But his disciplinary record was poor, marked by repeated periods when he was absent without leave, and in 1969 he was discharged.
In Durban, Nelson examined a number of weapons, and was particularly taken with an automatic shotgun called the Striker which ‘could be used to devastating effect . . . in close-quarter combat’. Armscor made it clear that it would accept a cash sale, but also wanted to know whether the UDA could provide it with one of the latest generation of ground-to-air missiles that were under development at Shorts, an aircraft and armaments factory in east Belfast.
The loyalists and arms dealers involved in this operation are convinced that Nelson knew about both arms-smuggling operations, and assume that he must have informed the FRU. Noel Little, one of the loyalists detained in Paris, says: ‘Brian Nelson was inserted into the UDA as an agent, he wasn’t a recruited member. How could he know about it and not tell his handler?’
By the end of 1985, a few months after his return from South Africa, Nelson had had enough. He resolved to break his links with both the UDA and the British Army’s FRU,60 and took his wife and three children to what was then West Germany. He found work in a small town north of Munich, fitting floors in new buildings.
As well as the information supplied by the FRU, Nelson and other members of the UDA were receiving material from other soldiers and police officers. In the mid-1980s, MI5 estimated that eighty-five per cent of the organisation’s intelligence was the result of security force leaks. The largest single source was the Ulster Defence Regiment.
McDaid, twenty-nine, was shot seven times, and died within minutes. The intended target had been his older brother Declan, who lived two streets away. The FRU had been aware of the plot to murder Declan McDaid for seven months by the time Terry was shot dead. Nelson would later tell his solicitor, the police and a journalist that the FRU had provided the incorrect address, but later withdrew this claim.
Pat Finucane was thirty-nine. He was from a republican family: three brothers had been members of the IRA. As a solicitor, he had advised many members of the organisation, including the hunger striker Bobby Sands, and Gerry Adams. He also represented Protestants accused of terrorist offences. When the shooting stopped, Geraldine opened her eyes and saw her husband lying on his back beside her. His dining fork was still in his left hand. He had been shot six times in the head, three times in the neck and three times in the torso. One of the first detectives at the scene would later recall: ‘I had attended the scenes of some two hundred murders, suicides and sudden deaths, but what lay before me was a picture of ferocity the likes of which I had encountered few times before.
De Silva pointed out that during the period at which Nelson was being tasked with the targeting of members of the IRA, he was an employee of the Ministry of Defence. ‘The very nature of Nelson’s re-recruitment from Germany and his subsequent handling leads me to the conclusion that by 1989 Nelson was, to all intents and purposes, a direct State employee,’ he said.
Shortly after his arrival, senior military officers told Stevens that the Army never ran agents of any kind in Northern Ireland. But it wasn’t long before Stevens’ team identified Nelson as one of the Army’s key assets. It was the beginning of the end for the FRU’s operations. It is far from evident that government ministers had been in control of the events that had led to the death of Pat Finucane and the many others who were targeted by Nelson. It is possible that the FRU and Special Branch were permitted to operate under a system of political oversight that was so loose that the control that the state was exerting over loyalist paramilitaries could always be disavowed.
In Belfast, meanwhile, the Director of Public Prosecutions of the province was coming to the conclusion that it was in the public interest to bring charges. Along with the UK Attorney General, Patrick Mayhew, he withstood significant political pressure to drop the case against Nelson. Eventually, the DPP decided that there was sufficient evidence to charge Nelson with two counts of murder, four of conspiracy to murder, one of attempted murder, and a number of lesser charges.
Nelson served a little more than four years before being released. The Army was as good as its word - he had maintained his silence, after all - and he was given a new identity and a new life. His by-now-estranged wife and their children were provided with a new home in the north of England. Police officers had been urging loyalists to kill Finucane, while holding them for questioning about other offences. The man who supplied the weapons used to kill Finucane had been a Special Branch informant for the previous eighteen months. He had warned his handlers that an attack was about to take place, but they took no action.
Nevertheless, Cameron’s government reneged on a supposedly binding international agreement to hold a public inquiry. Meeting Geraldine Finucane at Downing Street to explain his decision, Cameron raised one finger in the air, according to a number of those present, drew a circle, and said that there were ‘people in buildings all around here who won’t let it happen’.
As of 2014, inquests had yet to be concluded into seventy-four killings during the conflict in Northern Ireland. Around half were inquests that the Attorney General had ordered to be reopened after finding that the original hearings were flawed; half were cases that had been adjourned shortly after the death, and never completed.
At the time of writing, the Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland was attempting to investigate around 300 allegations of serious wrongdoing by officers during the Troubles, including collusion in murder. These included the Glenanne gang killings, and the question of whether police failed to prevent Stakeknife’s killings. As a consequence of budget cuts, the Ombudsman has warned that some investigations will take twelve years to complete.
The destruction operation was made public only after the family of a young Catholic man shot dead by loyalists in 1991 discovered that none of the police records relating to his un-solved murder any longer existed. The reason given for their destruction was identical to that given by the Ministry of Defence for the non-disclosure of some of its most sensitive papers - they had been stored in an area where asbestos had been found.
By the time Stevens’ three inquiries in Northern Ireland came to a conclusion in 2003, the documents that his team had amassed were estimated to weigh around 100 tonnes. Following the fire at his incident room, he had been taking very good care of them: before he left Belfast they were loaded into Ford Transit vans and driven to an airport where a Hercules transport aircraft was waiting.
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