28 March 2012
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Northern
Ireland
What did 'Bob' do with FRU?
Following the appointment of Jonathan
"Bob" Evans as Director-General of MI5, there is growing
interest in his role as an MI5 operative in Northern Ireland.
According to The
Observer (11 March 2007, link) Evans's role in Northern
Ireland was to work with the British Army's Force Research Unit
(FRU) about which little is known, notwithstanding the steady
stream of revelations in recent years about collusion between
state security forces and paramilitary organisations. Evans apparently
treated agents much better than his predecessors, insisting that
they call him "Bob" and flying them to good hotels
in France and Scotland for briefing sessions.
Below, Statewatch publishes an article about FRU written in 2003. This was prepared before the publication of the Cory Reports, the Barron Inquiry Report (to be followed by the McEntee Report) and the Police Ombudsman's reports dealing with collusion (such as the report on the death of Raymond McCord - Operation Belfast).
Britain's Force Research Unit
In April 2003, Sir John Stevens, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Service, gave the first official description of the British Army's Force Research Unit (FRU). In his brief 24-page report of 17th April, the FRU was described simply as "the Army's agent handling unit in Northern Ireland". This came as part of the only public report on Stevens' fourteen years of investigation into collusion between the official security forces and unofficial loyalist armed groups.
The significance of the Stevens Report and its public acknowledgement of FRU should not be underestimated. FRU was at the heart of a counter-terrorist strategy in which intelligence, police and military operatives actively supported loyalist paramilitary groups and dramatically increased their killing capacity. That support included the sourcing of weapons, the provision of surveillance, the identification of targets and the facilitation of murder operations.
Over many years, and especially since the murder of lawyer Pat Finucane in February 1989, a range of evidence has come to light which makes it impossible to continue to deny the reality of systematic collusion. Stevens was obliged to reveal that his inquiries:
"have 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. These serious acts and omissions have meant that people have been killed or seriously injured."
It is no surprise that it took Stevens fourteen years to reach this conclusion and to air it publicly. Stevens writes:
"throughout my three Enquiries I recognised that I was being obstructed. This obstruction was cultural in its nature and widespread within parts of the Army and the RUC."
FRU was central in obstructing Stevens, once it was clear that Stevens wanted to arrest Army agent Brian Nelson who was acting as head of intelligence for the largest loyalist group, the Ulster Defence Association, at the time of Finucane's murder. FRU took Nelson's intelligence records (which FRU itself had been instrumental in creating and organising) into "safekeeping" in an effort to prevent Stevens finding out the significance of Nelson's role. FRU also tipped Nelson off that Stevens was about to arrest him:
'There was a clear breach of security before the planned arrest of Nelson and other senior loyalists. Information was leaked to the loyalist paramilitaries and the press. This resulted in the operation being aborted. Nelson was advised by his FRU handlers to leave home the night before.' (Stevens Report, p13)
A fresh date was set for Nelson's arrest but the night before, there was a fire in Stevens' incident room which was 'never properly investigated' and which Stevens regards as 'a deliberate act of arson'.I would attribute this It's also Stevens probably same page as above.
At the time of Stevens first investigation he sought to examine certain documents (most likely the contact records of agent handlers) but was told in writing that these did not exist. This was a lie and some of the records were eventually handed over to Stevens as recently as November 2002.
Alongside this obstruction, the Ministry of Defence and successive governments have worked hard to prevent any information about FRU from reaching the public domain. As recently as 16th May 2003, the Secretary of State for Defence refused to answer a parliamentary question which merely asked when FRU was established, when it was disbanded and what its mission was. No answers were given and all that exists as a 'mission statement' is the FRU's motto - "Fishers of Men". FRU has now been renamed as the Joint Support Group. Most of the recent revelations about FRU have come in the context of Finucane's murder.
The only point of substance to have emerged from parliament
was that Stevens had by May 2000 interviewed 15 former members
of FRU. In December 2000, the Defence Secretary was asked about
the number and costs of legal proceedings against newspapers
designed to prevent information about FRU being published - at
the time five court hearings had been held preventing the Mirror
Group Newspapers and specifically the Sunday People and the Sunday
Times from printing stories about FRU.
Former foreign editor of Mirror Group Newspapers, Nicholas Davies,
succeeded in publishing 'Ten Thirty-Three, the inside story of
Britain's secret killing machine in Northern Ireland in 1999
(Mainstream Publishing), but only after a delay of two years
and the deletion of material from several chapters at the insistence
of the MoD. The book claims that its title Ten Thirty-Three refers
to Nelson's secret code number but this is not the case. Part
of the game of obfuscation is to set up false leads of names
- Stakeknife or Steaknife; Force Reaction Unit, Force Reconnaissance
Unit, Field Research Unit; Joint Services Group or Joint Support
Group are all examples.
Davies claims that FRU was set up in the early 1980s. One of
its forerunners was the Mobile Reaction Force, a unit that was
quickly disbanded 'before questions could be asked as to why
the squad appeared to have a licence to kill'. MRF's functions
were taken over by 14th Intelligence Company, a unit under the
control of, and largely staffed by, the SAS. FRU was established
as an elite military intelligence unit and operatives were trained
by 14th Intelligence and the SAS. FRU had up to 80 officers and
about 100 support staff. It became the most important source
of high grade human intelligence and the products of its work
were passed upwards to the Joint Irish Section and on to the
Joint Intelligence Committee in London. FRU, the SAS and 14th
Intelligence were operationally coordinated by the Tasking and
Coordinating Group, in theory linking MI5 with Army intelligence
and RUC Special Branch information. In practice, FRU often acted
independently. It often put out 'restriction orders', cleared
by the TCG, which meant that all police and military personnel
had to leave the designated area.Loyalist gunmen were thereby
free to move into republican districts, carry out shootings and
escape.
It is tempting to regard the whole FRU scandal as belonging to the 'dirty war' in the decades prior to the mid-1990s but special intelligence-led operations continue to dominate policing. As one member of the Stevens' investigation team commented to the Guardian in June (14th ) 2002, the agencies are so obsessed with gathering intelligence that:
"there's no attempt to keep law and order. That is the story of what is going on in Northern Ireland at the moment, not what happened more than ten years ago."
The present government seems determined to delay for as long
as possible the holding of a public inquiry in to the role of
FRU or any aspect of its involvement in a substantial number
of killings in Northern Ireland. It is incomprehensible why,
for example in the Finucane and Lambert cases, the government
delays holding a judicial public inquiry, given Stevens' conclusion
that 'there was collusion in both murders and the circumstances
surrounding them'.
For the past eighteen months, Canadian Judge, Peter Cory, has
been looking through documents relating to six controversial
killings in which collusion has been alleged. This exercise,
carried out at the behest of the British and Irish governments,
is widely seen as a further delaying tactic. On 7th October (2003),
Cory presented his findings but even his recommendations will
remain secret for several months until the British and Irish
government decide on the information that can be published. It
may be that Cory recommends the holding of a 'truth commission'
as a way of making the acknowledgement of state killings reliant
on voluntary testimony. Alternatively, an inquiry held along
the lines of the Bloody Sunday inquiry would provide immunity
from prosecution for the key operatives involved and give the
MoD similar scope for defending them.
There is a long way to go before the governments and ministers who presided over FRU's activities are brought to account for the murders it colluded in. The fact that the FRU scandal has not shaken the British political establishment suggests the long hard fight to expose the true nature of secret counter terrorist intelligence units is far from over.
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