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21 June 2001 Edition

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MI5 guidelines point finger at British government

BY LAURA FRIEL

If RUC Special Branch controlled the RUC and MI5 controlled the RUC Special Branch, then just how much did British government officials and ministers know about crown forces collusion with loyalist death squads?

That's the question raised by the leaking of a top secret document written by a senior MI5 officer, Patrick Walker, who operated in the Six Counties and was later to head the military intelligence agency.

The existence of the Walker Report was first revealed by UTV's Insight programme in which senior RUC officers alleged that Special Branch had curtailed investigations, hindered operations and suppressed crucial information which might have led to arrests.

The report, which became operational practice in March 1981, shows how MI5 dictated counter insurgency policy in the north of Ireland in the 1980s and 1990s, giving primacy to the Special Branch within the RUC. In addition, MI5 ran covert British Army units like the FRU, the unit at the centre of the collusion controversy.

The report gives RUC Special Branch responsibility for handling informers and agents and primacy over detectives responsible for investigating crime. ``All proposals to effect planned arrests must be cleared with Regional Special Branch to ensure that no agents of either the RUC or (British) army are involved,'' says the report.

This not only reveals the power of the Special Branch within the RUC; it also indicates an inside knowledge of the British Army's handling of agents and informers by units like the FRU.

If RUC Special Branch at a regional level have the power to sanction an arrest without exposing British Army agents as well as those working for the RUC, then it suggests a closer working arrangement between the two groups than has often been supposed. The report suggests a sophisticated degree of integration and cooperation rather than rivalry and mistrust as characterising the two agencies.

This is particularly significant in the case of Pat Finucane, the Belfast defence lawyer killed in 1989 and the circumstances of whose death have fuelled the collusion controversy for over a decade.

It has been established that the FRU, a covert British Army unit run by MI5, through their agent Brian Nelson knew Finucane was being targeted. Many people now believe they deliberately encouraged the UDA to target Finucane and made it easier for the killing to proceed.

It has also been established that an RUC Special Branch informer, William Stobie, supplied the weaponry used by the loyalist gang who carried out the killing. Stobie informed his Special Branch handlers of a pending killing but they claim no intervention was possible because they didn't know the gang's intended target.

It was always a lame excuse. A simple roadblock could have intercepted the gang. But now it increasingly looks like a deliberate lie. If the Special Branch knew when the killing was taking place and by whom and the FRU knew who was the target and where, then someone somewhere must have been aware of the entire plot.

Indeed, many people suspect that the FRU and RUC Special Branch were merely the conduits through which collusion with loyalist death squads in the assassination of republicans and nationalists was realised by the British state. Far from a regrettable renegade reaction, collusion is increasingly being exposed as a proactive strategy option, one which had been endorsed politically as well as militarily.

Earlier this month, former British government minister Douglas Hogg was questioned by the Stevens team investigating the assassination of Pat Finucane. Three weeks before the killing, Hogg had told the British House of Commons there were a number of lawyers in the north who were ``unduly sympathetic'' to the IRA.

At the tim,e Hogg's statement had caused uproar, with Seamus Mallon saying ``it would be on the minister's head if an assassin's bullet did what his words had done''. As a junior defence minister, Hogg would have been privy to briefings from the RUC and MI5.

During the interview with the Stevens' team, it is understood that Hogg denied knowing anything about the plot to shoot Pat Finucane, although he admitted that he had been briefed by RUC Special Branch about Belfast solicitors shortly before his Commons statement.

Hogg also denied any knowledge of the FRU. Hogg was not arrested nor was he interviewed under caution. In a statement, the former British minister maintained that the timing of his comments had been unfortunate rather than sinister. The statement will probably be included in the report due to be presented by John Stevens to the RUC Chief Constable Ronnie Flanagan later this year.

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