Toomebridge was an unsatisfactory episode for the Army. Neither Walls nor McLarnon was subsequently convicted of any offence for their part in the evening’s drama. A man had died who was, if not entirely innocent of connections with terrorists, at least not a member of the IRA. The possibility that the soldiers had been compromised in their position for days without knowing it must also have been a worrying one. The only comfort that could be taken was in the recovery of the firearms.
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For the security forces, possession of informer intelligence posed real dilemmas. While most attention centres on operations to counter actions by republican groups it is apparent that penetration of loyalist terrorist organizations must also sometimes offer the chance to pre-empt their actions. Yet, in the many years of special forces operations only one loyalist has ever been shot dead by Army special forces, following the killing of a Catholic late in 1989.
From 1987 members of the Field Research Unit, the Army’s élite agent running team, had an agent high in the Ulster Defence Association. Brian Nelson, a former member of the Black Watch regiment, returned to Ulster at the behest of the FRU after working in Germany. Nelson had been both a loyalist terrorist and an Army agent before, but on his return became the UDA’s senior intelligence officer, with a key role in targeting Catholics. Nelson’s work put him in an ideal position to give the security forces the chance to pre-empt such killings. In January 1990 detectives of the Stevens inquiry, investigating how loyalists had obtained security forces intelligence documents, arrested Nelson. At his trial in January 1992, Nelson pleaded guilty to five charges of conspiracy to murder and fifteen other offences. Crown lawyers dropped two murder counts at the last minute, leading to claims of a deal whereby Nelson pleaded guilty to lesser charges to prevent details of his secret work becoming public.
It emerged that Nelson had told his handlers in advance of UDA plans to kill two loyalists believed to be republican terrorists. Gerald Slane and Terence McDaid were gunned down in 1988 despite these warnings. An unnamed colonel, in fact a former Commanding Officer of the FRU, appeared in court to plead mitigation for Nelson, saying the agent had warned of 217 individuals targeted by the UDA. Nelson’s information was said to have saved Gerry Adams from a UDA bomb in 1987.
Despite evidence of Nelson’s success as an agent, the case raised uncomfortable questions about the difference between the security forces’ response to foreknowledge of republican and loyalist attacks. Clearly Nelson’s intelligence and that of other loyalist informers has been used to thwart attacks, in the same way as information from republican groups. But it is clear that attempts to exploit this intelligence to ambush loyalists have rarely if ever been made.
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During the 1980s the TCGs and Int and Sy Group had exploited informer intelligence to intercept republican terrorists on a number of occasions. As their practice in such techniques improved, their ability to tell good information – ‘hard int’ – from vague informer hearsay allowed them to place surveillance teams and SAS men in the right place at the right time more often. However, a by-product of this process was that regular infantry battalions in Ulster on four-month and two-year tours very rarely had the chance to take any kind of initiative against the IRA or INLA. Uniformed Army or police patrols remained the target for terrorist attack but were rarely used when the security forces had the intelligence to pre-empt it.
The character of Northern Ireland tours had changed considerably since the early 1970s, when battalions fired hundreds of rounds in running street-battles during their four-month tours. During the period from December 1983 to February 1985 when the Group had been involved in the deaths of nine IRA men, the other 10,000 members of the Army in Ulster had not been involved in a single killing of an IRA member. When such incidents did happen, for example in the case of Tony Gough, a Derry Brigade member killed in February 1986, they resulted largely from chance encounters between uniformed patrols and IRA members who were preparing or had just carried out an attack on them.
For the vast majority of soldiers Northern Ireland tours mean an often frustrating combination of avoiding IRA ambushes and trying to keep your temper in the face of insults and provocation from an alienated nationalist population. Squaddies often invoke the imagery of the rifle range. ‘We’re just Figure 11s out on the streets’, a young commando says – the ‘Figure 11’ is the graphic representation of a charging enemy soldier which the Army uses for target practice. Better trained battalions are normally able to contain these frustrations, but where discipline is not so good they sometimes result in assaults on local people, death threats to terrorist suspects and vandalism during house searches.
Officers tend to be philosophical about the position in which the centralization of intelligence and covert operations places normal units. ‘Attrition,’ the
