[STOPNATO] Ulster & British Military: A Sinister Crime Via NY Transfer News * All the News That Doesn't Fit STOP NATO: NO PASARAN! - HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.HOME-PAGE.ORG http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,212152,00.html A sinister crime John Ware is dismayed as the defence secretary and the country's top policeman seem to be at odds Northern Ireland: special report John Ware Thursday April 20, 2000 The Guardian The most sensitive police inquiry ever undertaken in Northern Ireland was sabotaged by British soldiers themselves who burnt down the inquiry's offices, alleges Martin Ingram, a former army intelligence officer. The policeman in charge of that inquiry was Sir John Stevens, now Metropolitan police commissioner. He has also let it be known privately that he strongly suspects arson, and I can now shed more light on this extraordinary affair. Back in January 1990, Sir John was deputy chief constable of Cambridgeshire. On the night of the fire his officers were preparing to arrest Brian Nelson, a full-time salaried agent in a covert military intelligence group called the Force Research Unit. Nelson had been helping loyalist death squads to assassinate suspected IRA terrorists. Yet how has the present defence secretary responded to Mr Ingram's revelations? Instead of investigating his message, Geoff Hoon seems to want to shoot the messenger by threatening Ingram with official secrets act charges and refusing to lift an injunction stopping him from revealing further details. Apparently Mr Hoon cannot identify any "public interest which demands publication of such material". Admittedly the evidence from Mr Ingram - a pseudonym - is hearsay. He says he saw two members of the army's "covert means of entry" unit in a bar used exclusively by the Intelligence Corps at Thiepval barracks in Northern Ireland. In this intimate atmosphere, there was some slack talk. Ingram and colleagues seated round his table were told the two soldiers had been brought over from the Army's special intelligence wing at Ashford in England to destroy Stevens's offices in the heavily guarded police authority's premises outside Belfast. Sir John and his team have suspected such arson for 10 years. For soldiers trained to break into military installations in the eastern bloc, the Northern Ireland police authority building, housed in a disused tobacco factory and guarded by middle-aged police reservists and civilians, may not have presented the ultimate challenge. According to Ingram, the team had assistance from a "friendly" RUC man. On the night of the fire, four RUC reservists were on duty with three civilians. At 6am the following day, Nelson was to be arrested in "Operation Wheel", so called because he was its hub. Other loyalist paramilitaries were some of its spokes, all feeding bits and pieces of leaked security force information to Nelson who collated it on his home computer into "P" or personality cards on IRA targets. He then passed these to gunmen to help them trace and identify their quarry. One Army file, dated August 4 1988 states: "6137's appointment enables him to make sure that sectarian killings are not carried out but that proper targeting of (P)IRA members takes place prior to any shootings." Another, dated December 30 1988, says: "6137 is in a posi tion to see that correct targeting is carried out and that sectarian murders are avoided." Targeting the enemy for assassination may have had a flawless military logic but it was, of course, a flagrant breach of the criminal law. The files suggest Nelson was involved in many conspiracies to murder, attempted murders and murders, including the deaths of at least two young fathers of six children who were not involved in terrorism. I knew Brian Nelson and met him the day before he was due to be arrested. That very night he fled to England because, we now know, he had been tipped off. Army files show that they had given Nelson regular anti-interrogation briefings in case he was arrested. His handlers thought that burning down Stevens's offices meanwhilewould buy them "a little bit of time to construct an alternative cover story", according to Ingram. That night, Stevens's team worked late. At about 10pm, their office's passive infrared alarms were set and the doors locked by the last group of detectives to leave. At around 11.05pm, four officers returned to file away papers. As they approached the staircase they smelt burning. The seat of the fire was a few inches beyond the partition wall next to a stack of computer paper and a locked filing cabinet containing exhibits and statements. As one of the former senior officers said: "Of all the offices, of all the police stations, the fire starts right next to the heart of our investigation." S arah Bynum, then a detective constable, tried to raise the alarm but to no avail. When she smashed her shoe against a red, wall-mounted alarm, there was silence. She went down one flight of stairs and found a second alarm. Again she smashed it with her shoe. Again, silence. Inside the Stevens offices, computers were melting like Dali paintings; files marked secret, exhibits - everything - was destroyed. Bynum now sprinted down a long corridor to the RUC guardroom where she found RUC reserve constable William Corry. She told him to call the fire brigade but he replied: "The phones are down." Barefoot, Bynum then ran "like hell" back up to the first floor where she found an empty office with a phone and dialled 999. Approximately 17 minutes passed between the time Stevens's officers discovered the fire and the first tenders arriving. At 11.35pm the guardroom telephone that had been dead 25 minutes earlier, came back to life. Bynum noticed that the guardroom clock had stopped at 10.50pm. The phones that didn't work and the fire alarms that didn't ring weren't the only pieces of equipment to malfunction. The infrared alarms installed by the RUC failed to send a signal back to Belfast Regional Control as they were supposed to. In charge of the investigation into the fire was the RUC's detective superinten dent, Alan Simpson, but his report played down arson: "Bluntly put," he wrote, "there is the suggestion of treachery afoot. As the fire occurred within a secure police complex, this view is to the detriment of the reputation of the RUC and is made without regard to the objective evidence." Simpson said that five of the RUC and civilian security officers had all alibied each other. The remaining two, "whose precise whereabouts cannot be confirmed", were patrolling the grounds. However, Simpson's report was regarded by the Stevens team as less than thorough. It made no mention of the failure of the wall-mounted alarms; it suggested the infrared system failed because its beam had been obscured by smoke even though, according to a forensic scientist, the full system wasn't able to be tested since bits of it were "believed to have been discarded" at the crime scene. Simpson also found "nothing sinister" about the guardroom telephone having failed because that "often happens". Although Simpson said he "hesitated" to point an accusing finger, a young female constable who had smoked two or three cigarettes in the office that night was tacitly blamed. She categorically denied she had been careless, pointing out that when she smoked she sat at her desk across from the seat of the fire. Also, both she and the other three officers with whom she left say they neither saw nor smelt any smoke. Nelson was eventually arrested and charged with several counts of conspiracy to murder though none of the classified files, suggesting that the army had recruited him to refine the targeting of Ulster Freedom Fighter death squads - or the true scale of his involvement in assassinations, emerged during the brief hearing. As the peace process falteringly continues, some of the families have been campaigning for a public inquiry into this aspect of Ulster's dirty war. Perhaps the authorities would better serve the public interest by getting to the bottom of this with Mr Ingram on board rather than pursuing him as a common criminal. john.ware @bbc.co.uk. The author is a reporter for BBC Panorama. ================================================================= NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org e-mail: nyt@blythe.org ================================================================= nytire-04.21.00-10:55:07-25862