Neither McKittrick nor the soldiers who speak in Nairac’s defence can prove that the Captain was definitely not involved in illegal killings. On the other hand, the government inquiry in 1990 which found that Wallace had been unjustly dismissed, and confirming that Wallace had indeed been involved in disinformation, do not invalidate the main point of McKittrick’s article – the questioning of allegations by Holroyd and Wallace that the intelligence services colluded with loyalist hit squads. And such allegations have not been confirmed by the government or substantiated by other journalists.
Much of what the two men have said is undoubtedly true: there was a deep rivalry between SIS and MI5 of a kind described by Holroyd in his book and articles, and politicians were smeared, as Wallace claims. The fact that many of their allegations are rooted in fact has given them a wider credibility. There is a community of journalists and people active in politics which believes all of their allegations are true. Another group believes the two men have failed to prove their most disturbing suggestions: that the security forces colluded with loyalist death squads to dispose of dozens of republicans and (in Holroyd’s case) that serving British soldiers were directly involved in a number of killings.
The schism between the believers and those who are sceptical has become acrimonious – journalists have labelled one another as gullible or as instruments of state disinformation. My own research has not produced any evidence to support the claim that the security forces colluded with loyalist death squads in any planned or deliberate way. Soldiers who served with Captain Nairac have, on the contrary, denied Holroyd’s allegations. In the absence of conclusive evidence one can say only that the most serious charges levelled by Wallace and Holroyd remain unproven.
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Republican activists and some journalists also allege a link between the intelligence services and the killing of several people connected with the Irish Republican Socialist Party and its military wing the INLA. In June 1980 Miriam Daly, a senior IRSP figure, was shot dead in her home in Belfast. The killing was reported as the action of an unspecified loyalist group. In October another senior IRSP figure, Noel Lyttle, and an important INLA commander, Ronnie Bunting, were also killed. They too, it was assumed, had been killed by an unspecified loyalist group. Robert McConnel, a UDA man later convicted for his part in the killing of a moderate nationalist politician soon after the murder of Daly, alleged later that he had been in contact with Army intelligence, who had asked him for information on leading IRSP figures.
Some people have connected the killings to the death of Airey Neave, arguing that the intelligence services killed them in revenge. On 30 March 1979 Airey Neave, the senior Conservative who had orchestrated Mrs Thatcher’s campaign for the Party leadership, was killed by a car bomb outside the Houses of Parliament, and the INLA had claimed responsibility for the blast. Neave had enjoyed close contacts with the intelligence establishment and had called for a stepping-up of SAS operations in Northern Ireland.
The writer Martin Dillon has also investigated the INLA killings. He says claims that they were carried out by the SAS are ‘nonsense’ and, through his own paramilitary contacts, concludes that they were the work of a UDA hit team. However, he suggests that the actions of the killers, deep in republican territory, may indicate that local UDR members had colluded in the murders.
Like many other rumours surrounding the intelligence services in Ulster the ‘Neave revenge’ thesis cannot be comprehensively disproved, but it must be said that the evidence to support it is feeble and circumstantial. Loyalists had also killed an INLA man in Armagh in 1978, before Neave’s assassination; that they did so afterwards as well proves nothing.
Any operation which appears to be the work of loyalists, but which shows a level of sophistication higher than simply shooting the nearest available Catholic, tends to attract the suspicion of republicans. The killing of John Francis Green in 1975 was an example. The more interesting, and perhaps more plausible, charge against the intelligence specialists is not that they have run loyalist groups but that in cases where they have learned of an imminent loyalist attack against a republican target, they have made only half-hearted attempts to stop it. Allegations of this kind have been made to me about the attempt in 1984 on the life of Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams. He was seriously injured as he was being driven away from a court house. Republicans said the loyalists had been put up to the attack; Army and police officers retorted that Adams would have found it rather hard to thank the soldiers who intercepted the attackers for saving his life. The assassination attempt will be examined more closely in chapter eighteen. Despite the Adams incident, it must be noted that if ever anybody in the intelligence world did commission loyalist terrorists to kill senior IRA figures, they failed to do so during the late 1970s and early 1980s.
During 1989 many official documents identifying republican suspects came to light. These were said to have been used to target people for assassination and were later leaked to journalists by loyalist paramilitary groups. The loyalists did prove more effective in targeting leading republicans during the late 1980s, although many put this down to them learning the IRA’s lesson and putting more preparation into their attacks. Once again, however, there is a great difference between obtaining
