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From Pat Finucane Centre

We received the following article from the US regarding the Force Research Unit, the death of Pat Finucane and others. The article, which purports to name Brian Nelson's handler, has apparently attracted much attention from the British security services. We have decided not to forward the name contained in the article. As a human rights group it would be unacceptable for us to dissiminate the name of an individual allegedly involved in a murder campaign with no corroborarting evidence other than a newspaper article.

This is not to cast doubt on the allegations contained in the article. The named individual may have been a FRU operative...or may not. Pat Finucane's death, in part, was the result of unsubstantiated allegations made by members of the RUC and Junior Minister Douglas Hogg MP in the House of Commons. We have forwarded the article, including names, to the Finucane family.

This is the article off the US based cryptome website which names Brian Nelson's controller in the FRU. According to a note on the website Brit spooks have been hacking it and putting pressure on the ISP. Injunctions are threatened on any media printing the information it contains.

In fact most of it is well known, but worth circulating anyway.

ENQUIRY: THE KILLING YEARS IN IRELAND

7 February 2001. Thanks to Anon. http://cryptome.org/fru-walshaw.htm

By ANON = MAHARAJAH 3 February 2001

British journalists, police officers and Army undercover intelligence agents are increasingly in battle with each other as an intelligence scandal threatens to expose a series of state-sponsored killing of the kind more commonly associated with former South American dictatorships than with a modern western European nation.

For the last two years, British security authorities have resorted to legal duress and intimidation tactics to conceal the identity and activities of Army intelligence operators who played a key role in a secret unit that set up innocent civilians to be murdered, actively collaborated with and fed intelligence to death squads, and then set fire to police offices to destroy their files and prevent an investigation uncovering their activities.

The secret unit, called the Force Research Unit (FRU) was a high level intelligence unit tasked with handling undercover agents in Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic. It was set up in the early 1980s to take over previously unco-ordinated agent running activities, placing them all under a single professional command structure.

The lawless misconduct of FRU has come to light over the last two years as a result of an extended police enquiry into controversial assassinations by the Protestant terrorist organisation, including the Ulster Defence Association (UDA). The enquiries originally focussed on the slaying of prominent republican lawyer Pat Finucane in February 1989.

It has since emerged that Finucane's killing was planned by the UDA's intelligence officer, Brian Nelson. But, unknown to his terrorist colleagues, Nelson was a British intelligence agent. He was being run by the FRU, to whom he reported routinely, exchanging information on republicans whom the UDA sought to kill. The UDA's quartermaster, William Stobie, who provided the murder weapons and hid them afterwards, was also a British agent. He worked for the Special Branch of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, the police force of Northern Ireland.

Former members of the FRU have told journalists that up to 13 Irish Catholics were killed in this way. One case which came to light last year was the 1987 murder of a Catholic pensioner living in West Belfast, Francisco Notorantonio. Notorantonio, aged 66 when he died, had not been involved in politics for 30 years. He was set up to be killed by the FRU, as a sacrificial victim to protect a top British agent.

Shortly before the murder, FRU had been informed of a plan to kill a leading member of the IRA, who was secretly a British intelligence agent. Codenamed STAKEKNIFE, the agent was and still is British intelligence's longest term and most successful informant inside the Irish terrorist group. When they learned of the plot, the FRU panicked. To head the killers away from STAKEKNIFE, they prepared and handed over a false dossier, suggesting that the innocent and harmless Notorantonio would be a better target for their bullets.

The existence and importance of Agent STAKEKNIFE has recently been publicly confirmed by the police investigation which is determined to undercover the truth of the FRU affair. The investigation is headed by Sir John Stevens, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan (London) Police. He is Britain's most senior police officer. Ten years earlier, when he was in a less senior position, Stevens was first asked to investigate the killings in Northern Ireland. As he and his team started to uncover the nature of Army collusion with protestant terrorists, he faced an arson attack. The teams' offices, which were located in a highly secure police headquarters building with multiple alarm systems, went on fire, destroying the files. The attack effectively brought Stevens' first enquiry to a fruitless end.

The mystery of how sophisticated alarms had been disabled to get in and burn the files was solved when a former member of the FRU came forward and revealed that they had been responsible for the crime. The breaking, entering and fireraising had been carried out by a team from Army intelligence's CME (Covert Methods of Entry) unit. Called in by the FRU commander to destroy the incriminating evidence accumulating in police hands, the CME team flew in from England and carried out the arson attack on the police. They crudely attempted to disguise the fire as having been started by a cigarette left in a waste bin.

Three years ago, Sir John Stevens, now promoted to be the commissioner of the Metropolitan police, was asked to conduct another enquiry into collusion in Northern Ireland, focusing on the murder of Patrick Finucane. Since then, he and his operational assistant, Deputy Assistant Commissioner Hugh Orde, have made it clear that they are not going to be deflected by Army dirty tricks and disinformation.

The former soldier who came forward used the pseudonym "Martin Ingram". The Ministry of Defence responded ferociously. One soldier whom they believed to be Ingram was charged under the Official Secrets Act. Journalists to whom he spoke were threatened with prosecution. The charges meant that while one police enquiry was relying on him as a key witness, another police enquiry was trying to silence him.

But, with increasing controversy surrounding British secrecy laws, the charges against "Ingram" had to be dropped. Harassment then started from a new quarter. A group calling itself "friends of FRU" started circulating personal information about him. One former FRU colleague e-mailed dozens of newspapers giving details of "Ingram's" identity, address and activities. He was being set up.

The former FRU soldier behind the e-mail campaign was arrested for harassment. But then the charges were dropped. Fearing that the police could not protect him safely, "Ingram" withdrew his evidence from the Stevens enquiry.

Two weeks ago on Ulster Television, another member of FRU came forward to talk about what the unit had done. Agreeing that there had been a policy of "shoot to kill by proxy", the former the FRU member said that his unit had acted as "judge, jury and executioner ... [it was] immoral and probably unlawful".

FRU is still operating, running agents in Ireland. Since it became controversial, it has adopted a new cover name. This is JCU(NI). It stands for the Joint Collection Unit (Northern Ireland). It works directly with the British Security Service (MI5), which also has offices and technical teams on the ground in Northern Ireland.

To confuse the many British journalists who are now investigating the activities of FRU, another intelligence unit was renamed FIU. This is the Force Intelligence Unit. It has nothing to do with FRU, but runs more orthodox intelligence activities, such as the computer called CAISTER which holds "fine grain" intelligence files on most of the Northern Ireland population. It was formerly called 12 Intelligence Company.

A third group in the undercover world of Northern Ireland is the Joint Support Group (JSG). Formerly known by a variety of names such as "14 Intelligence Company" or "The Dets", it provides undercover surveillance teams for long-term surveillance activities. Its teams work closely with the SAS detachment based in Northern Ireland.

Until now, mystery has surrounded the identity of the agent handler who was Brian Nelson's link to the Army and who passed on the critical instructions and government intelligence to enable the protestants to murder the Army's selected targets. But the name leaked out late last year.

Early in December, the government threatened legal action to gag the Sunday Herald, a Scottish newspaper, after former colleagues of Nelson's handler revealed her identity to their journalists. The paper was compelled under threat of legal order to undertake that it would not reveal her name, location or identify her by printing a photograph.

Then the case for conspiracy to murder against her and the officers who gave her orders grew stronger, after police Commissioner Orde revealed that he had recovered boxes of army intelligence documents called "contact forms" and MISRs (Military Intelligence Source Reports). The contact forms give details of every meeting between agents and their handlers. The MISR reported detailed and assessed the intelligence provided by the agents. The police found that some of the reports were "incriminating".

The officer who commanded the Force Research Unit during the killing years was Lt Colonel Gordon Kerr. He has since been promoted to Brigadier. As the British police homed on his importance, he was sent to the other side of the world, to serve as the British military attaché in Beijing.

The intelligence operator who handled Brian Nelson - whose name is banned in Britain - is Captain .................. Although any British newspaper editor who published her name is threatened with imprisonment, she is openly listed in the current official British government publication, the "Army List". At the time she ran agent Brian Nelson and supervised his murderous activities, she was a non commissioned officer (sergeant) in Britain's Intelligence Corps.

On 1st April 1998, Sergeant ............ was promoted from the ranks to become an officer. She has also been awarded the "British Empire Medal" for her achievements.

See: http://cryptome.org/fru-walshaw.htm

MoD FARCE AS SUNDAY HERALD GAGGED

SUNDAY HERALD News
Sunday, 11 February 2001
http://www.sundayherald.com/news/newsi.hts?section=News&story_id=14272
By Neil Mackay, Home Affairs Editor

BRITAIN'S intelligence chiefs face a hugely embarrassing fiasco this weekend over the exposure on the internet of one of the military's most prized secret agents.

With the kind of Orwellian double-think only Britain's spymasters can muster, one arm of the Ministry of Defence spent yesterday trying to gag the Sunday Herald and stop us revealing the identity of the female army undercover agent - despite the fact she is named on the internet. Meanwhile, the formal press liaison this paper has with the intelligence services at the MoD supported our right to name her.

Until now she has only been identified as Captain M - a member of the covert Force Research Unit that served under the command of Brigadier Gordon Kerr, the Aberdonian former Gordon Highlander who is now British military attache to Beijing.

M, or Mags as she has also been called, is accused by former members of the FRU of colluding with loyalist terror gangs in the murder of prominent Catholics and nationalists in the late 1980s. She is still an army officer with the Intelligence Corps and is the subject of a long-running police investigation headed by Sir John Stevens, the Scotland Yard commissioner.

In a series of investigations over the last two months, the Sunday Herald has revealed both the activities of the FRU in Northern Ireland and the operations M masterminded. These include passing information to the outlawed Ulster Defence Association which was used to murder the Catholic solicitor Pat Finucane.

In December, the Sunday Herald was again threatened with an interdict by the MoD after officials learned that this newspaper knew the identity and location of M and had a photograph of her. At the time the Sunday Herald decided not to reveal her identity as this could have seriously prejudiced her safety.

However, the Sunday Herald, Sunday Times and Sunday People were tipped off early last week that M's identity had been revealed on a US website dedicated to releasing intelligence information. The Sunday Herald notified Rear Admiral Nick Wilkinson, the secretary of the MoD's D-Notice Committee, the body that decides whether or not to gag the press on the grounds of national security. Wilkinson checked the site and said that as M's identity was now in the public domain, newspapers were free to publish her identity.

Within hours, the MoD was back in touch with the Sunday Herald via Treasury Solicitor Roland Phillips. He made it clear that, unless we issued him with an undertaking that we would not publish her name, he was instructed to seek an immediate interdict to prevent us naming her.

He said the MoD did not consider M's identity to be in the public domain since only 230 people had read the internet document. However, John Young, who runs the intelligence website based in New York, said that at least 3000 people had visited the FRU page by Friday afternoon. He accused British intelligence of illegally hacking into his site to find out who was accessing the material.

Young says he will not remove her name until a US judge compels him. It is unlikely an American court would do so due to the First Amendment, guaranteeing the right to freedom of the press.

Claims that the information on the internet would not harm M as long as it was not repeated in the press were proved ridiculous when a senior member of the republican movement contacted the Sunday Herald to say they had seen her name online.

Both Phillips and Wilkinson admitted the situation was farcical. The Sunday Herald's solicitor, Peter Watson, said the threat of gagging made a "mockery of the Labour government's pledge of open government". Watson also said that the absurd position of the MoD in both attacking and supporting the same newspaper showed how the "old and new guard inside the military establishment were riven over secrecy". He added that it was "apparent that the MoD was incapable of making one clear policy".

Both the Sunday People and Sunday Times were also forced to back down from publishing M's identity.

The MoD's claim that it wishes to protect the identities of agents in order to prevent assassination attempts is highly questionable. Last year the chief whistleblower to the Stevens inquiry, a former FRU officer who goes by the cover name Martin Ingram, had his real identity leaked to the press by former FRU colleagues.

The MoD took no action to protect his identity and a police inquiry into the leak was later dropped. The MoD also took no action against the Sunday Herald when it revealed the identity of Gordon Kerr last year .

As one disaffected FRU source said: "It is a matter of who should be protected. The protection is not equal. Ingram is a whistleblower so they don't care about him. Kerr is out of the country so he is safe. But Mags is important. If anyone is jailed for collusion with loyalists it will be her, and the powers that be don't want that. So she is untouchable -- for the moment."