It wasn't just the Special Branch and FRU. In 1975 Sergeant Clive Wright of the British army was prosecuted for attempted murder. In June 1972 he had fired from an unmarked car, seriously wounding four men standing at the Glen Road bus terminus in west Belfast. His defence was that he was carrying out an operation as a member of a unit called the Mobile Reconnaissance Force (MRF). He was acquitted.
The MRF had been set up by Brigadier Frank Kitson who commanded 39 Brigade covering the greater Belfast area. One of the unit's activities was to drive around informers from Catholic districts so that they could point out IRA men to the MRF. On a number of occasions in 1972 and 1973 the MRF shot at such men in 'drive-by' shootings but innocent Catholics were killed or injured. We know this because embarrassing details of the MRF's operations emerged during Sergeant Wright's trial.
The MRF's activities led people in nationalist districts to be extremely wary of cars prowling around at night. The IRA in Belfast was much exercised by the existence of the MRF. They set men at locations where suspected MRF vehicles had been seen. This may have led to the killing of Jean Smith a fortnight before the shooting with which Wright was charged. It was probably a jittery IRA man who fired into Mrs Smith's car near the same spot on the Glen Road. In October 1972 the IRA attacked a number of the MRF's undercover operations, including the Four Square laundry, which consisted of a van with a hide constructed to conceal a soldier.
The MRF never recovered. By 1973 it was gone, replaced by what in the 1980s came to be called the 14th Intelligence Company. As part of his reorganisation of military intelligence in 1980, Major-General Glover, commander of land forces here, established the Field Research Unit (FRU) based at British army HQ in Lisburn. It later became the infamous Force Research Unit. Alongside 14th Int and the SAS it formed a tripod on which covert military activity was based during that decade. It would take too long to detail the disastrous consequences of unleashing these undercover military units on the north's population.
What we do know is that they murdered with impunity. They were spirited away from the scene of their killings often before police arrived. No attempt was made to preserve evidence. What would have been the point? None of them was ever prosecuted. They didn't even have to turn up at inquests. They made copious mistakes. As Sir John Stevens has concluded about the Special Branch, even in their own terms they killed the 'wrong' people, they did not shorten theTroubles by one second, but on the contrary, prolonged them. What was the ratio of innocents to IRA killed and injured? How many innocents equals one IRA man? Their actions were a complete failure in conception and execution.
We also know the British army's undercover activities were monitored by the Joint Intelligence Committee, part of the Cabinet Office, and that therefore politicians were well aware of what was going on and sanctioned it. It is also the case that the Security Service Act 1989 made the director and coordinator of intelligence at Stormont, who sat on MI5's board, responsible to the secretary of state here. Yet northern secretaries have always evaded any scrutiny about their knowledge or direction of undercover military actions here despite having at their disposal more spooks and licensed killers than any other member of the British cabinet.
It's clear from the fraction of one per cent of the Stevens report made public that by the end of the eighties some loyalist murder gangs were made up almost completely of paid agents of either military intelligence or the Special Branch. The state had hundreds of agents in the IRA too. Agents on both sides were involved in murder. 'Gang on gang', Kitson called it.
Amazingly there are still hundreds of paid agents out there yet Stevens recommends, "guidelines on the use of covert human intelligence sources (agents)... should be completed as a matter of urgency". In other words, incredibly, there are no guidelines even yet. Some of his other recommendations show agents can still do as they like. Conclusions? The secret war British politicians ran here directed all their security agencies almost exclusively against republicans. If innocent Catholics had to die, hard luck, they're only Catholics. It was rotten, unethical and immoral from day one. It brought the law into disrepute, it corrupted the legal system. It used the RUC as dupes. Who cares, it's only Ireland. Our current milk and water proconsul says Stevens raises 'very disturbing issues': not disturbing enough for him to do anything about them, even though he is responsible for security here.
