One former senior officer says that the security forces did sometimes have foreknowledge of attacks by one IRA faction on another, during the feuds in the organization in the early 1970s, which they made no attempt to stop. Another indicates that the intelligence agencies deliberately stirred up the rivalry between the Officials and Provisionals by planting stories in the press. Although admitting these activities against the IRA, the senior officer adds, ‘Never, ever, was there any suggestion of us playing the loyalists off against the Provisional IRA. If you light that fire, it’s like putting a match to petrol.’
I have interviewed two people who worked with Robert Nairac. Both deny Fred Holroyd’s claims of involvement in assassinations. One, a member of 14 Intelligence Company, says that he remembers the killing of John Francis Green and that both Captain Ball and Lieutenant Nairac were involved in a surveillance operation in a different part of Ulster at the time. He denies that the unit kept non-standard weapons and says, ‘There’s no way we’d go out and murder people. You have to fight wars within the law.’ The idea that the surveillance operators carried non-standard weapons is further undermined by the evidence of the McNutt and Heaney shootings and that of Corporal Harman in 1977 and 1978: in all cases the undercover men were carrying standard issue 9mm pistols.
Those who believe the Holroyd allegations may argue that it is hardly surprising that those who worked with Captain Nairac deny them. Holroyd’s most serious allegations involved people who are dead. Cynics in the Army say that, of all the people whom Holroyd could have chosen to link to such crimes, he has courted controversy by choosing an officer regarded by many as a hero, and who is hardly in a position to sue him.
Martin Dillon, a Belfast-born writer, used contacts in loyalist terrorist groups to investigate the Holroyd claims in his book The Dirty War. He says he has interviewed people close to the groups which carried out the Green and Miami Showband killings and that there is no substance to the claim that Nairac was involved in either. Both acts were carried out by loyalist gangs, without state support, he contends. Dillon finds Holroyd an unreliable witness and believes ‘he was obliged to construct a conspiracy’ to rationalize his own removal from SMIU and referral to a psychiatric hospital at the time of his marriage break-up in 1975.
In September 1987 the Independent published a lengthy article critical of the more sensational Holroyd and Wallace allegations by its Belfast-based correspondent David McKittrick. Colin Wallace subsequently appealed to the Press Council that the articles had contained inaccuracies about him, a complaint which was upheld. Among many liberal-minded commentators there was both surprise that the newspaper should have devoted so much space to a ‘knocking’ story, and a feeling that McKittrick may have been fed disinformation by the RUC. Many felt that the subsequent government inquiry into the dismissal of Wallace, which judged that he had been unfairly dismissed and recommended the payment of compensation, vindicated his allegations. But matters were hardly this straightforward.
McKittrick reproducd a page from what was said to be Holroyd’s scrapbook. It showed a photograph of Green taken many hours after his death by Irish police photographers, according to the Independent, and was accompanied by notes saying that Green was killed by loyalist paramilitaries. Holroyd maintains that the picture shown was not the one given him by Nairac which he says was taken some hours before the Gardai photographers got there.
Albert Baker, the prisoner who claimed the security forces had used him to kill republicans, has not been backed in his allegations by others among the 200 or more loyalist terrorists serving life sentences for murder. None of the ninety or so convicted of murders in early 1975 have endorsed Wallace’s claim that the security services put them up to it. It may be argued that they would not do so out of fear of reprisal, either against themselves in jail or against their families. However, it may equally be said that a man facing a minimum thirty-five-year stretch in jail, as the killers of the Miami Showband were, might say anything if he thought such allegations would lessen his sentence. The willingness of loyalist paramilitary groups to embarrass the government has been apparent on other occasions; for example, in 1989 there was a wave of leaks of security forces documents on republican terrorist suspects, prompting an inquiry into possible links between loyalist terrorists and the security forces.
McKittrick did not contest in his article Wallace’s own claims that he had been involved in disinformation in his role as Army intelligence officer, smearing politicians in Ulster. But some other journalists believed there was more to it than just that: investigations by the This Week television programme and by Barrie Penrose of the Sunday Times provided a measure of confirmation for some of Wallace’s other claims. Penrose tape-recorded a telephone conversation with Peter Leng, Commander Land Forces in the mid 1970s, which indicated that, as Wallace had claimed and contrary to the position of the government in various inquiries on
