Republican News · Thursday 24 April 2003

Stevens - The cover-up continues

BY FERN LANE

Less than a page and a half for each year of investigation is what the publicly available part of John Stevensí report amounts to. It isn't much, but his tersely worded conclusion, after 14 years, that there was indeed collusion between the RUC, British Army intelligence and loyalist paramilitaries has genuinely shocked much of the British public who have, by and large, remained ignorant of what successive British governments have been up to in the Six Counties in pursuit of their dirty war - or who accepted it when they were told, by government, the RUC and unionism, that the allegations of collusion, including those in respect of the murder of Pat Finucane, were nothing more than republican propaganda.

For nationalists and republicans, however, the 20-page summary report merely provides confirmation of what they have known since the mid-1980s; that the British state, in the form of British Army Intelligence and the RUC Special Branch, was conspiring with loyalism to murder Catholics in the north of Ireland. According to Stevens, this "unlawful involvement of agents in murder implies that the security forces sanction killings".

In the report, Stevens says that his enquiries "highlighted collusion, the wilful failure to keep records, the absence of accountability, the withholding of intelligence and evidence, and the extreme of agents being involved in murder". British agents, he says, "were allowed to operate without effective control and to participate in terrorist crimes". These acts "have meant that people have been killed or seriously injured". The report also concludes that "nationalists were known to be targeted but were not properly warned or protected".

Throughout this latest enquiry, which began in April 1999 and was restricted to the murders of Pat Finucane and Brian Adam Lambert, Stevens says that, in common with his two previous investigations into collusion, he recognised that he was "being obstructed". This obstruction, he adds, "was cultural in its nature and widespread". He also notes "with considerable disquiet" the late disclosure of relevant documents by the MoD during the course of all his investigations. For example, the team investigating the activities of the British agent Brian Nelson asked to examine particular documents "but received written statements that they did not exist". These documents were eventually recovered and, according to the report, the dates on them show that they did exist when they were requested.

Stevens says that he is currently investigating "whether the concealment of documents and information was sanctioned and, if so, at what levels of the organisations holding them". It has been necessary, he adds, "to interview the same witnesses a number of times because of the failure to provide complete information at the first time of asking".

The report also mentions what it refers to as "an allegation" that senior RUC officers (one of whom, according to some reports, was Ronnie Flanagan in his previous incarnation as head of Special Branch) briefed the then Home Office minister, Douglas Hogg, that "some solicitors were unduly sympathetic to the cause of the IRA". On 17 January 1989, Hogg chose to repeat these sentiments in the British House of Commons and, despite the intervention of other Members who begged him to retract the comments because they placed lives in danger, refused to withdraw them. Weeks later, Pat Finucane was shot dead by the UDA.

Of Hogg's decision to make his comments in the way that he did, Stevens says that "to the extent that they were based on information passed by the RUC, they were not justifiable, and the enquiry concludes that the minister was compromised".

The report goes on to say that during the enquiry into Brian Nelson, whose function as agent 6137 was to guide loyalist murder gangs towards the "right" targets, including Pat Finucane, his so-called "intelligence dump" was seized by his FRU handlers before the Stevens team were to arrest him and Nelson himself was warned by his handlers to leave home the night before the planned arrest operation. "Information was leaked to loyalist paramilitaries and the press," says the report, and the operation was aborted. Shortly afterwards, a fire destroyed the Stevens' team incident room. The fire, says Stevens, "has never been adequately investigated". He believes it was "a deliberate act of arson".

In his conclusion, Stevens says that during the course of this third investigation, his team made 144 arrests, of which 94 have led to convictions. To date, 57 separate reports have been submitted to the Director of Public Prosecutions and are under consideration. It is in these files that the full details of all three investigations are contained, running to some 3,000 pages.

Stevens also concludes that he has uncovered enough evidence "to lead me to believe that the murders of Patrick Finucane and Brian Adam Lambert could have been prevented. I also believe that the RUC investigation of Patrick Finucane's murder should have resulted in the early arrest and detention of his killers. I conclude there was collusion in both murders and the circumstances surrounding them."

Inadequate response

Although the Stevens summary report vindicates what nationalists and republicans have consistently said for at least 15 years, it remains an inadequate response to the issue of collusion. The terms of reference and the restrictions imposed on the investigating team means that some of the most important questions were not even addressed, much less answered.

For example, the report does not mention the head of the FRU, Brigadier Gordon Kerr, who was interviewed under caution by the Stevens team. Kerr is now the British military attache in Bejing and in recent days the MoD have denied that he has been suspended from duty following the publication of Stevens' report. Although it is believed that Kerr is included in the 57 files that have been sent to the DPP, there is no suggestion of it in the report. At the trial of Brian Nelson, Kerr gave evidence on his behalf from behind a screen and was identified only as 'Colonel J'. He praised Nelson and claimed that he had helped to save the lives of 200 people. The Stevens' enquiry team has effectively discredited his claims, saying they found evidence in only two cases where there was any suggestion at all that Nelson's information had prevented a killing.

There is no indication as to who any of the files submitted to the DPP refer to or indeed whether any of the individuals concerned are still employed by the RUC, the British Army or intelligence agencies. Despite Hugh Orde's recent claim that most Special Branch officers involved have now retired, there are suspicions that a significant number of them still retain senior positions. The report also neglects to address directly the role of Ronnie Flanagan as head of Special Branch during the height of the department's collusion with loyalists.

The report does not talk about how much members of the British government, including Douglas Hogg, knew about the FRU and Special Branch or how much of their activities were the result of political decision making at the highest level. Crucually, although Stevens notes the implication that "the security forces sanction killings", he stops short of addressing himself to the issue of whether this sanction actually originated from outside the crown forces and from within the British government - as many in the nationalist community, including the Finucane family, suspect it did.

Further, the report fails to make any mention whatsoever of other known victims of collusion, including uninvolved Catholics who were murdered as a direct result of information Nelson and others received from British intelligence and then passed on to loyalist murder gangs. These victims included Francisco Notarantonio, a 66-year old father of 11. The FRU, in a deliberate lie, told the UDA that he was the head of the IRA in Ballymurphy. In May 1988, Terry McDaid was killed, apparently in mistake for his brother Declan. Two members of the British Army were subsequently convicted of passing documents to the UDA, but received only short, suspended sentences.

A few months later, Gerard Slane was murdered at his home by UDA on the false pretext that the 27-year-old father of three had been involved in the killing of one of its members a fortnight earlier. In June 1989, some three months after the murder of Pat Finucane, the UDA murdered Liam McKee. McKee's details were in Brian Nelson's 'intelligence' files and in 1992 a UDR soldier was convicted, with a life sentence, for passing McKee's details to the UDA.

Since the publication of the summary report, the family of Pat Finucane have reiterated their demand for an independent public inquiry into collusion and all the killings that resulted from it. The family has refused to cooperate with any of the Stevens' enquiries, saying that the only way to get to the truth of the collusion question is for a full and public examination of all the evidence.

Of the current Stevens report, Pat Finucane's son Michael, also a solicitor, said: "The latest Stevens report is an embodiment of broken promises and dishonoured commitments. It carries the hallmark of all of Stevens' work in Northern Ireland: secrecy and repression. This hallmark has, for over 15 years, been synonymous with Stevens' work. The latest report has taken four years to deliver and cost the public £4 million. The Stevens' team claim to have interviewed 15,000 people, catalogued 4,000 exhibits, taken 5,640 statements and seized 6,000 documents. None of this is available for public scrutiny.

"This report is widely believed to be some sort of 'systems analysis'; an examination of what went wrong in Northern Ireland and how that can be prevented in the future. On this level also, Stevens' work is flawed. Nothing went wrong. The 'system' worked exactly as intended and, in the British government's eyes, it worked perfectly. The policy in Northern Ireland was - and may yet be - to harness the killing potential of loyalist paramilitaries, to increase that potential through additional resources in the shape of weapons and information and to direct those resources against selected targets so that the government could be rid of its enemies. Simple policy. Simple operation. Simply chilling.

"We are convinced beyond any doubt that Britain's policy included amongst its victims one lawyer the rule of law could not stop. I refer, of course, to my late father, Patrick Finucane. His murder is just one example of what the British government was prepared to do in order to further its own ends, but he is not the only casualty. My family and I call upon the British government once again to establish a full independent judicial public inquiry into the murder of Patrick Finucane and the policy of collusion with loyalist paramilitaries. The findings of the international judge, Peter Cory, should also be made public at this time.

"Many people were murdered by these agents of the British state and this is the real price of Sir John Stevens' report. It has been paid for not just with public money but with the lives of many people and it is for them and their families that the truth must be known."