Collusion strategy published after 38 years

Posted by Jim on June 26, 2018

 

A secret MI5 report that resulted in the RUC (now PSNI) police

protecting its agents and informers regardless of their role in the
conflict has been made public after 38 years.

The author of the report, Patrick Walker, was a former colonial
administrator in Uganda. He went on to become head of
‘counter-terrorism’ at MI5 and served as the head of MI5 between 1987
and 1992. He was knighted in 1992.

The Committee for the Administration of Justice (CAJ), a Belfast-based
human rights organisation, is understood to have obtained a copy under
the Freedom of Information Act after going before an information
tribunal.

Daniel Holder, the deputy director of CAJ, told the Guardian newspaper:
“In our view the Walker report was the blueprint for making RUC special
branch a ‘force within a force’. It radically altered the structures of
the RUC, centralising enormous power within special branch which
controlled everything from forensics to who was arrested and charged.”

Walker’s report in 1980 resulted in Crown force police being ordered
never to arrest a loyalist or republican without consulting Special
Branch (police intelligence). Detectives were told that anyone who was
arrested could be recruited as a British agent.

As a consequence, a number of loyalists were given free reign to kill
Catholics to terrorise the nationalist population into submission, while
IRA informers such as ‘Stake Knife’ were allowed to kill genuine
republicans.

The Walker report, named after the senior MI5 officer who drafted it,
was commissioned in January 1980 at the height of the conflict, shortly
after the IRA killed 18 British soldiers in a single attack. British
Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was said to fear the IRA was gaining
the upper hand. Walker’s strategy brought scores of killers into the pay
and protection of Special Branch.

“All proposals to effect arrests, other than those arising directly out
of an incident, must be cleared with SB [Special Branch] to ensure that
no agents, either RUC or army, are involved,” he wrote.

“If an individual has made an admission and the CID [Criminal
Investigation Department] officer considers he may have intelligence of
value to give, SB should be allowed to question the individual on more
general matters. It is important that CID should not proceed immediately
to a charge whenever an admission has been obtained.

“If a CID officer decides that an individual being interviewed is not
going to make an admission but may have intelligence of value, he should
arrange for the interview to be taken over by SB.”

After the implementation of the Walker report, a number of loyalists and
republicans became widely known as “protected species”.

One such man was Gary Haggarty, who was jailed for six-and-a-half years
last January after admitting to over 500 crimes including five murders,
five conspiracies to murder and others. Haggarty had been a Special
Branch double agent with the loyalist Ulster Volunteer Force.

A controversial cover-up is continuing in the case of Freddie
Scappaticci, who has been accused of being ‘StakeKnife’, an agent for
the British Army within the IRA’s internal security unit, who executed a
number of genuine republicans as informers.

Official inquiries into the murder of the Belfast defence lawyer Pat
Finucane in 1989 have found that Brian Nelson, the man who targeted
Finucane and handed information about him to his loyalist killers, was
also an agent in the pay of the British Army, as were others in the
murder gang. The inquiries found that Walker did not wish to see Nelson
prosecuted, telling the attorney general that he was concerned that it
would damage the morale of agents.

The 1982 report of John Stalker, who investigated ‘shoot-to-kill’
(political executions) found crime detectives were told the cases were
“out of bounds” to CID. Stalker was not told about the Walker report,
but he guessed at “high-level endorsement” of killer agents.

The CAJ’s Daniel Holder said today: “Our concern has long been that the
approach to informant-handling in the past was outside of the law and
violated human rights. The system established by the Walker report not
only fuelled and prolonged the conflict, but left a poisonous legacy
that makes dealing with the past more difficult in the face of
relentless attempts to conceal the impact of such practices ever since.”

News of the release of the report today is extraordinary — it came as
it was announced by the Fine Gael government in Dublin that it is
appointing PSNI Assistant Chief Constable Drew Harris, a former head of
Special Branch, as Commissioner of the 26 County police.