(Image: Damian Shields)
Our Writer at Large has investigated Ulster's Dirty War for decades. Here, he talks to the veteran BBC reporter, John Ware, about the role of Scottish army officer Gordon Kerr
I want to ask John Ware a question that has been troubling me for years. The question is this: what did fighting the Dirty War in Northern Ireland do to Britain? Did the lengths that the intelligence services went to – the crimes committed by security forces during the Troubles – poison our democracy? In fact, can Britain even call itself democratic given what happened in Northern Ireland?
I began investigating collusion between British security forces and paramilitary gangs as a young reporter in the 1990s. I was inspired by two other older journalists: Martin Dillon, the greatest chronicler of the Troubles, and veteran BBC Panorama reporter John Ware.
Both had delved into the murky, bloody and amoral world of double agents, espionage and collusion. I wanted to follow in their footsteps.
That’s precisely what I did. I eventually unmasked Stakeknife, the highest-placed spy for British military intelligence inside the IRA, as Freddie Scappaticci. I also named the Scottish army officer, Brigadier Gordon Kerr, as the head of the Force Research Unit (FRU), the military intelligence outfit behind much of the Dirty War which ran agents like Stakeknife.
Like Dillon and Ware, I uncovered what had happened, who was responsible, and why they did it. But I never found the answer to the biggest question: what did fighting this Dirty War do to British democracy?
Many innocent civilians were murdered because of the actions of double agents like Scappaticci and his counterpart Brian Nelson, a high-placed spy for the FRU within the loyalist paramilitary organisation the Ulster Defence Association (UDA). Nelson was a former Black Watch soldier.
Ware, now in his late 70s, has just published a book which is the culmination of his work in Northern Ireland. It’s called Neither Confirm Nor Deny. Those are the words you hear when you ask the British government about the use of agents: ‘We neither confirm nor deny…’
The title perfectly encapsulates the secrecy which clouds our ability to assess how British democracy coped with a conflict which tested it to breaking point.
Don’t forget: Northern Ireland, as Margaret Thatcher once said, “is as British as Finchley”.
Yet British intelligence officers and double agents in terrorist organisations were colluding in murder on the streets of Belfast. Imagine how we would view British democracy if such events occurred in London?
Veteran BBC Panorama reporter John Ware (Image: Supplied)
When we meet, Ware is in the garden hideaway that’s his study, surrounded by books, papers and old photographs. He’s in fine fettle: sharp, robust, with a dry sense of humour and brimming with ideas. He wrote the book, he tells me, because he became “obsessed with the covert side of the conflict, the undercover campaign, and where the line should be drawn morally and legally”.
Snap, I say. Whenever Ware spoke to officers from police special branch, MI5 or military intelligence, he realised “the line was fuzzy.” Snap, I say again.
Bombings
HERE'S the central dilemma, as he sees it: “If you want to penetrate terrorist organisations and get reliable, actionable intelligence, you can’t do that without the state agreeing for the agent to sometimes engage in serious criminality.”
As military handlers of double agents have told me repeatedly: if you’re running agents inside terrorist organisations, sometimes they will have to take part in bombings or shootings, otherwise they’ll blow their cover, get killed and the intelligence dries up.
Or, as one source told Ware: “You don’t get intelligence from milkmaids.”
He adds that an agent ordered to take part in “an ambush or bombing can’t say I don’t do that, I’ll make the tea”.
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Not penetrating terror groups leaves the public at risk, so there’s an obligation on the state to act. Yet at what stage, Ware asks, do intelligence officers decide enough is enough, that a line has been crossed, and continuing to use an agent like Stakeknife or Nelson hasn’t just become immoral but illegal – even murderous?
“That dilemma has always puzzled me,” Ware says.
Ware explores that dilemma through the two most notorious double agents to emerge from the Troubles: Nelson and Scappaticci. Ware believes the pair “reflect the modus operandi” of agents and their handlers during the conflict.
We discuss the life and crimes of Nelson first. He ran intelligence for the loyalist terrorist group, the UDA, while working for British intelligence. He was run by the FRU, commanded by Gordon Kerr from Aberdeenshire.
Ware says Nelson’s job for the UDA was “to build an efficient targeting machine” – in other words, to refine its assassination operations.
“The FRU had exactly the same ambitions,” Ware says. He references the Stevens Inquiries – three official investigations by Sir John Stevens, former Met Police commissioner, into allegations of collusion.
“An early Stevens inquiry said the two ambitions aligned.” That meant “the army using agents as proxies to eliminate key IRA players as an alternative to the army just shooting them”.
There’s no doubt, Ware says, that Nelson “engaged in criminality almost every day” while working as an agent. “His handlers knew that,” he adds.
For example, Nelson had a trove of leaked files from “rogue members” – as Ware puts it – of the police and UDR, a British army regiment raised in Northern Ireland to combat the IRA.
These files – some of which were on known IRA members and some on innocent people merely suspected of Republican activity – were used to compile P-Cards, or Personality Cards. P-Cards were used to target assassinations.
How Neil Mackay broke the Stakeknife story (Image: Colin Mearns)
Assassination
WARE says Nelson’s FRU handlers told their agent: “This is a lot for you to go through. We’ll refine it. We’ll go through it and tell you what’s current, what’s out of date, so you can have a more focused approach to your targeting.”
Nelson would then give these P-Cards to “active service units for close-quarter assassinations – basically goons with guns”. As an example, Ware names a specific loyalist killer we both know.
To me, this has long seemed evidence of conspiracy to murder. Indeed, in 2000, I ran an investigation in The Herald headlined “My unit conspired in the murder of civilians”, based on the testimony of an FRU member who said he was aware of at least 14 civilians murdered through collaboration with loyalist terrorists.
Ware has seen notes from interviews with Kerr by members of the Stevens police inquiry teams. He says Kerr doesn’t accept that agents like Nelson were used as proxies.
According to Ware, British intelligence saw Nelson’s double-agent role as “aligned with what the UDA wanted him to do, namely professionalising targeting”. For the FRU, this was a “distraction operation”.
The intention was to “draw the UDA into targeting much more security-aware members of the IRA. That would distract them from whacking some poor soul on the street or some lesser individual like low-ranking Sinn Féin members”.
In reality, Ware adds: “I can’t think of a single senior IRA member that the UDA, through Nelson’s intelligence, managed to kill. They did kill other individuals, some with no involvement with the IRA at all.”
One of the UDA’s victims was Pat Finucane, a Belfast solicitor who had represented IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands.
Ware says the FRU “signed off on Nelson being allowed to distribute his targeting files” to UDA units across Belfast as well as to other loyalist terror groups like the Red Hand Commando and the UVF. The targeting files related to hundreds of people. “A number of them ended up being shot over the years.”
Ware adds: “Nelson’s handlers were okay with him distributing this stuff.” In military terms, though, that meant the FRU operation “went completely out of the control”.
According to Ware, during interviews with the Stevens team, Kerr was asked why he signed off on the operation. Kerr apparently replied with the rather usual response that such a question was “a political allegation”.
Nelson was eventually arrested and pleaded guilty to multiple charges including conspiracy to murder. Kerr gave evidence for Nelson in court. Nelson died following his release while living at a secret location in England.
In prison diaries, Nelson claimed that his handlers “suggested the UDA target an oil refinery in the Irish Republic as part of putting pressure on [the Irish government] to ease up on its extradition rules”.
Arrested civilians are marched towards detention in the Bogside Area of Londonderry by British troops on Bloody Sunday 30th January 1972 (Photo by William L. Rukeyser/Getty Images).
Cold-blooded
NELSON also claimed, Ware added, that “he was given a degree of assistance with the addresses of targets in two or three cases”.
Even if you remove all morality from the Nelson operation, and just consider it on purely military and strategic terms, it’s a total failure.
At most, intelligence from Nelson saved three lives. He was involved, however, in the murder of many more.
A FRU handler once described such intelligence operations to me as a “numbers game”, that it was about how many lives agents saved compared to how many lives it cost running them. By that cold-blooded rationale, the Nelson operation was disastrous. Ware concurs.
Perhaps, Ware suggests, the FRU justified such operations as an attempt to build as full an intelligence picture as possible. “But that brings us back to the question: at what cost? Where do you draw the line? That’s the moral maze I’m wrestling with.”
There was also rivalry between the army and the RUC, Northern Ireland’s police, when it came to intelligence-gathering and agent-handling. The army didn’t have many agents inside loyalist paramilitary groups, so Nelson provided some “kudos”.
Kerr was eventually promoted for his work, and given the prime posting of military attaché to the British embassy in Beijing.
The department of public prosecutions looked at all the material gathered by police inquiries into collusion and, says Ware, “saw fit not to prosecute any member of any agency – either the FRU, Special Branch or MI5. In legal terms, they didn’t see sufficient evidence for a case to answer”.
Operations like running Nelson also destroy any claims by the British state that its primary objective in Northern Ireland was to restore the rule of law.
“For the most part, the overt side of the counter-insurgency was, broadly speaking – with some serious exceptions – an attempt to abide by the rule of law. Not so for the undercover part of the counter-insurgency. That was the great hypocrisy of the ministerial mantra about restoring the rule of law. And ministers knew this.
“They knew agents were being run well outside any legal framework.”
Ware says that Thatcher was informed that intelligence agencies were operating “well outside the law” – a claim I’ve also reported many times.
Ware adds more detail, though, and says that officials in the Northern Ireland Office tried to “square how murder or conspiracy to murder could somehow be legal”. Officials finally came to the conclusion that the best policy for units like the FRU was simply “don’t get caught”.
Ware believes the Stakeknife case, featuring Scappaticci as a double agent inside the IRA, presents an “even more acute moral dilemma. It’s really mucky stuff”.
Freddie Scappaticci, the IRA agent known as Stakeknife (Image: PA)
SCAPPATICCI was at the heart of the IRA’s internal security unit, which Ware describes as “the IRA’s version of MI5”. It was known as the Nutting Squad, for its practice of shooting informers in the head. It hunted spies in republican ranks. The grim irony is astounding.
If you were in the Nutting Squad, your job was to get confessions from suspected informers. Former IRA members have told me that included the use of torture, with methods as barbaric as forcing victims to sit naked on electric cookers.
Once a confession was extracted, victims would be shot, wrapped in plastic and dumped on country roads.
Ware says Scappaticci was “an effective interrogator who excelled at psychological menace”. Following the police inquiry known as Kenova, into the activities of Agent Stakeknife, it emerged that the official body count attributed to Scappaticci ran to 14 murders. Military and IRA sources have told me the real figure is much higher.
The FRU, by running Scappaticci as an agent, “were really playing god,” Ware adds. The FRU had to protect their agent. “Within that framework certain things are inevitable.
“In particular instances, there were poor souls murdered – executed.”
He adds: “When a body turns up, and you know your agent has done the interrogation a few days earlier, then you have been complicit in the murder of that individual, particularly if you’ve chosen not to prevent the murder because it’s more important Stakeknife survives. That happened a number of times and it reaches its most glaring stage in the execution of Joe Fenton.”
Fenton was an estate agent and valuable Special Branch informant. The IRA eventually became convinced he was a spy, and tasked Scappaticci to interrogate him.
Not long before the IRA decided to interrogate Fenton, there had been a “bit of a crisis” for Scappaticci when suspicion fell on him. As he was feeling the heat, Scappaticci “made absolutely clear” to his handlers that Fenton had to die. Scappaticci was determined to prove that he was 100% loyal to the IRA.
Ware says Kerr wrote a letter to Special Branch prior to Fenton’s execution saying effectively that there would be no more intelligence from the FRU’s agent on the issue. In other words, Scappaticci would not be providing any more intelligence on the fate of Fenton via his FRU handlers, in order to protect his cover.
“It’s hard to see it in any other way than they wanted to ensure that the execution went ahead because if Scappaticci had disrupted it then they presumably feared that would revive the questions the IRA had been asking about Scappaticci.”
Ware says this amounted to “Operation Protect Scappaticci”. He adds: “It’s chilling stuff.”
After Fenton confessed, Scappaticci stayed with him until the IRA’s “execution detail” arrived to shoot him. Prior to the execution, the Belfast neighbourhood where Fenton was being held was ruled “out of bounds to security forces” over an alleged bomb threat.
Execution
A POLICE officer, Ware says, actually heard the shot which killed Fenton but, when he notified superiors, he was told the area was a no-go and he couldn’t investigate. Ware says those events look “suspiciously like ensuring the execution went ahead without any complications”.
We’re at the dark heart of the Troubles here. Fenton himself is alleged to have provided information to the IRA about a suspected informer who was waterboarded, shot, packed in plastic, and his body dumped near the border.
There has also been much speculation over the years that an innocent Catholic was offered up as a victim to loyalist death squads in order to distract gunmen from a possible assassination attempt on Scappaticci.
Profound questions about morality and the British state are raised by the Stakeknife case. “It takes us back to the moral maze,” says Ware. “You’d like to think if you or I were running Scappaticci there would come a point where we’d say ‘we can’t continue like this as we’re prioritising the protection of an agent over the lives of others. We’re starting to play god and we need an extremely good reason to keep this individual in place’.”
An agent could be spirited out of Northern Ireland by their handlers. I’ve interviewed those who escaped and were relocated. The same could have been done with Scappaticci.
It’s impossible, says Ware, to draw up an accurate “balance sheet” of lives lost and saved by Scappaticci. However, we know he cost more lives than he saved. In brutal terms, “the broad assessment is that the state didn’t get a good deal from Scappaticci”.
One of the reasons we can’t be certain is that after the Nelson operation, the FRU changed tactics. Officers once kept long, multi-paged documents known as “Contact Forms” detailing discussions between handlers and agents. Contact Forms were summarised down to much shorter documents known as “MISRs” – military intelligence source reports.
“The FRU,” says Ware, “rather wisely – from their perspective – got rid of all contact forms relating to Scappaticci.” When detectives from the Kenova inquiry were investigating they only had “truncated MISRs to rely on”. So history lost swathes of valuable information.
Some handlers became uncomfortable with the activities of Nelson and Scappaticci. Ware refers to an FRU officer, who was one of my sources for naming Scappaticci as Stakeknife, and notes his “misgivings about Nelson”.
Even the former head of MI5, Eliza Manningham-Buller, believed, Ware adds, that Stakeknife was a “bad operation”. That, however, seems to contradict findings by the Kenova team.
When detectives “first got access to Thames House, MI5’s headquarters, the service provided them with their own assessment of Scappaticci’s worth and it was by all accounts glowing”.
Hovering above all this is the figure of Brigadier Gordon Kerr. Born in Aberdeen, he became the star of British military intelligence and head of the FRU. Last year, I tracked him down to his well-appointed French home where he lives in retirement with his wife, and is a pillar of the local community.
Target
THIS week, a French source confirmed Kerr was still in the area. The Herald has chosen not to identify his location as Kerr would still be a target for dissident republicans.
Ware has also tracked Kerr, once doorstepping him in Beijing. Ware was desperate to hear Kerr’s side of the story and didn’t want to frighten him off by sticking BBC cameras in his face. So he asked his bosses if he could simply knock on Kerr’s door and engage in conversation. His request was denied.
Ware believes that if he’d been allowed to run the investigation his way, Kerr may have given him an interview and history would have been done a service.
When he knocked on Kerr’s door, the head of the FRU emerged in his dressing down, smiled, and said “Hello John”. It appears Kerr recognised Ware from Panorama. Kerr’s attitude changed immediately when he saw the BBC cameras.
“You could see his facing going ‘you bastard’,” Ware explains. “I don’t blame him.” Ware remains upset to this day that the instructions he was given by the BBC robbed him of not just a great story but important detail in one of the most disturbing series of events involving British intelligence.
I charted much of Kerr’s early career as a cold warrior in Berlin, where he was seen as a far too gung-ho and aggressive. Ware’s research reveals similar takes on Kerr.
RUC officers, he says, weren’t fond of Kerr. He hadn’t impressed police on earlier tours of duty in Northern Ireland as a young army officer running operations around the Irish border. “They had a whole bunch of trouble with him and didn’t want anything to do with him. He was off their Christmas card list.”
Nevertheless, Ware views Kerr as both astute and brave. During Nelson’s trial, Kerr made, says Ware, a “very eloquent and persuasive case about the limitations of the law when it came to running agents in theatres like Northern Ireland”.
There’s also an arrogance to Kerr. Ware says Kerr became “pissed off” due to the fact that he was questioned not just by each of the three Stevens inquiries, but also by the Cory inquiry into collusion, the De Silva inquiry into the murder of Pat Finucane, and the Kenova inquiry into Stakeknife.
Ware says that Kerr effectively told his questioners: “Why are you talking to me, go and talk to MI5, they were essentially in charge, or at least our product ended up with them, and by the way they did some of the tasking.”
The term “product” means “intelligence”, and “tasking” means “setting priorities”.
Ware adds: “He was effectively saying ‘I’m the monkey, talk to the organ grinder’.”
He believes Kerr had as low an opinion of police as the RUC had of him. “His view was ‘we’re the real deal, you’re just a bunch of coppers and shouldn’t be looking into any of this stuff’.”
BRIAN Nelson, Ware adds, “did a runner on the eve of the fire which burned down the Stevens Inquiry offices”.
The fire has been blamed on British security forces. Military intelligence sources told me some years ago, in claims reported in The Herald, that a “covert methods of entry team” from Ashford in Kent, where the SAS has facilities, was involved.
After his arrest, Nelson began talking to the Stevens Inquiry team. When Kerr was asked “what should we do with him”, Ware says he replied with words to the effect of: “You need to release him because the longer you keep him, the more exposed he is to the risk that the UDA think he’s an agent. So do us a favour, release him and we can carry on business as usual.”
Evidently, Kerr’s wishes were ignored. “That pissed him off hugely. He had very little patience for the police not seeing things his way. There’s a strong streak of self-righteousness in his posture and statements.”
Ware says that Kerr “drove” Nelson’s recruitment, adding: “Did people die as a consequence of Nelson’s recruitment? Yes.” Kerr wasn’t “handling Nelson from day to day, but obviously there’s an element of responsibility there”.
Kerr didn’t recruit Scappaticci but he was in charge of the FRU during Stakeknife’s rein as the most prized double agent for British intelligence. Like Nelson, Scappaticci was known as a “walk-in” – someone who choses to offer their services to an intelligence organisation rather than someone who is turned for money or by blackmail.
Former IRA members, however, have told me they believe Scappaticci was blackmailed, possibly over paedophile material. Before his recent death, Scappaticci was found in possession of extreme pornography including images of bestiality.
In terms of Kerr’s culpability over the crimes of Scappaticci while a double agent, Ware points to the Fenton case and his letter to Special Branch saying “there won’t be anything more from our agent on this matter”. He adds: “And Fenton did die.”
Ware says the reason “neither Kerr nor any handlers were prosecuted”, despite the Stevens Inquiry sending “around one million documents” to the Northern Ireland prosecution service, is that it was decided that FRU officers had “a good defence of abuse of process”. That’s the claim that a defendant wouldn’t get a fair trial.
If that was indeed the case, Ware adds, “then it should have been decided by the courts”. Certainly, he notes, at the time of Nelson’s prosecution in 1992, agencies like the FRU were “terrified. Nelson was going to call his handlers in his defence”. Nelson eventually pleaded guilty in a plea bargain.
The state ensured, Ware says, that in the Nelson case, “only the right questions were asked and no more. There was no washing of dirty laundry. That would have been a very messy business”.
In terms of Scappaticci, Ware says there was a “serious degree of complicity” by the FRU in the case of Fenton alone.
Democracy
WHAT has this done to our democracy though? I grew up in a period when Britain and other Western nations condemned the use of death squads and proxy assassins by security forces in Latin American nations, for instance, as proof that they were not in any way democratic.
In response, Ware says Scappaticci was “employed by the state, and up to his neck in murder. That is the state involved in extrajudicial killing”.
I think I have my answer – for how can any state be called democratic, if its security forces are involved in extrajudicial killings?
Chillingly, it seems that matters may not have changed. Despite what we’ve learned about the Dirty War in Ulster, Ware points to a recent case where MI5 protected an agent who was a neo-Nazi and had attacked his partner with a machete. MI5 lied to three courts while defending the right-wing extremist.
The case has horrible parallels with the Dirty War. “He was a maniac,” says Ware. “Yet MI5 continued to employ him. Is source protection still the priority as it was in Northern Ireland?”