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The Perfect Form of Collusion
Michael Finucane, whose father, Pat, was assassinated by agents of the British government, last week joined with his sister Katherine and brother John, in calling for a public inquiry into their father’s killing, following the recent Panorama expose, ‘A Licence to Murder’.
However, a public inquiry is the last thing the British government wants, and John Stevens, currently putting the final touches to his report into official collusion between state forces and loyalist paramilitaries, knows it also. The strategy, it would appear, from comments made by Stevens on the BBC programme (he is careful not to suggest that the British government, the police or army officially sanctioned these killings), and echoed by the programme maker John Ware, is to emphasise that collusion was down to some ‘rogue elements’ and that Brian Nelson was ‘out of control’. We even had First Minister David Trimble attempt to set the parameters when he said: “One thing there was not was collusion by the RUC organisation with the paramilitaries. There may be individuals who have behaved badly but it was not structural or systemic.”
This, of course, is a red herring. No one is claiming that the entire hierarchies of the RUC or British army were engaged in systematic collusion. In fact, had every loyalist murder gang been receiving instructions or help on a widespread basis then it would have been simple for investigative journalists to have found evidence of collective collusion, given how leaky loyalist paramilitaries tend to be.
What the British army and the Special Branch had in their arrangement with Brian Nelson was the perfect form of official collusion. Nelson was the UDA’s top intelligence officer and they controlled him and streamlined his target files, which he then went on to distribute to almost any murder gang that asked. If they wanted someone killed they just had to suggest the name or a different target if they wanted someone preserved. Either way the forces of law and order were murdering citizens through the use of proxies.
An example, of what can go wrong, when state forces engage in too generalised a form of collusion, and involve too many people, can be seen from the ‘GAL scandal’ in Spain which led to the fall of Felipe Gonzalez’s socialist government in 1996. When Gonzalez came to power in 1982 he sanctioned the creation of special units called the Grupos Antiterroristas de Liberación (GAL), which essentially were paramilitary death squads made up of hired assassins and members of the security forces which hunted down Basque ETA members, mostly on French territory. They killed at least 28 ETA members, but also shot several civilians who had no political connections.
When allegations of state involvement in the death squads appeared in newspapers relatives of the victims began a campaign for a judicial inquiry into GAL. The paper ‘El Pais’ referred to kidnappings, the use of drug world figures as mercenaries and the purchase of guns in South Africa - all of which uncannily echo aspects of the terror scenario between the UFF, British Intelligence and the Special Branch. The first inquiry in 1988 under Judge Baltasar Garzon was blocked by a higher court.
Then Garzon - not unlike Stevens - took the case again in 1994 after two former chiefs of the Basque Civil Guard (paramilitary police) blew the whistle. In 1991 the two had been sentenced to 108 years in prison after confessing to acting alone in a series of attacks against Basque separatists. It transpired later that the State Security Department had paid the two defendants more than $1.5 million to keep quiet, and also provided monthly payments to their wives. When the money dried up the two decided to name names and tell their story to the newspapers.
The Supreme Court convicted two senior government ministers for ordering and financing the kidnapping of an alleged ETA activist (they had kidnapped the wrong man). A former interior minister and his security chief were jailed for ten years. GAL was established and organised by government officials (both from the central and regional governments), Secret Service officials and high-ranking police and military officers. It was masterminded by the Defence Intelligence High Command. In other words, the operation involved too many and was too loose.
Nevertheless, the trail got lost before it led to the cabinet room. Gonzalez and his colleagues, who denied all knowledge of Spain’s dirty war against Basque separatists, were never prosecuted.
Michael Finucane is correct when he says that the truth about his father’s murder would rock the foundations of the British state. We know that in 1989 the then RUC Chief Constable Sir Jack Hermon and two other senior officers gave a private briefing to the Home Office Minister Douglas Hogg in Belfast. Hermon had claimed that some solicitors were sympathetic to, and were helping, the IRA.
A few weeks later Hogg repeated the remarks in the House of Commons. According to Greg Harkin in last week’s ‘Sunday People’, “Within hours UDA's west Belfast commander Tommy 'Tucker' Lyttle was meeting with his Special Branch handler… Lyttle would later claim that his handler had discussed Hogg's comments and said to him: ‘Why don't you whack Finucane?’
“The UDA's intelligence officer Brian Nelson, an agent of the army undercover unit, the Force Research Unit, was summoned to Lyttle's home in Sydney Street West and told to prepare a file on the lawyer. When Nelson reported back to his handlers, rather than discourage him from taking on the operation FRU members actively encouraged him to go ahead and gave him every possible assistance.”
In places like Central and South America, when there have been allegations of collusion between official government forces and right-wing death squads, European social democracies have been, rightly, outraged, and the attitude has been to treat such countries as pariah states. The BBC, though it made the Panorama programme, never broadcast any trailers, nor were there follow-ups on the 10 pm news, Newsnight or News 24 (which is broadcast internationally), which seems extraordinary. It certainly smacks of a certain ambivalence, indicating an attempt to cosset the British public from the truth about the blood on the hands of those it elected to govern.
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© 2007 Irish Author and Journalist - Danny Morrison