The report details the activity of the British army’s Force Research Unit (FRU), which ran spies in loyalist organizations. “Loyalist” is the term applied to organizations that defend British rule in Northern Ireland. The report described how an FRU agent, Brian Nelson, supplied the UDA—a loyalist paramilitary organization—with information that led to the murders of several Republicans and nationalists, including Finucane. The investigation found that the FRU and officers within the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) Special Branch knew about the murder plot but did nothing to stop it from taking place.

In the report Stevens mentions an “allegation” that Douglas Hogg, the Home Office minister of the British government at the time, was given information by senior RUC officers that some solicitors were “unduly sympathetic to the IRA.” Hogg repeated this publicly in the House of Commons, just three weeks before the murder of the Belfast solicitor.

Responding to the report’s publication, Michael Finucane, the dead solicitor’s son, said, “This report is widely believed to be…an examination of what went wrong in Northern Ireland and how that can be prevented in the future…. Nothing went wrong. The ‘system’ worked exactly as intended and, in the British government’s eyes, it worked perfectly. The policy in Northern Ireland was—and may yet be—to harness the killing potential of loyalist paramilitaries, to increase that potential through additional resources in the shape of weapons and information, and to direct those resources against selected targets so that the government could be rid of its enemies.”

Alex Maskey, Belfast’s first lord mayor elected from the Sinn Fein party, said, “This is not about rogue elements within the British system. It is about a state policy sanctioned at the highest level.” Sinn Fein is the party leading the fight for Irish unity and for the withdrawal of the British armed forces from the north.

Stevens also recounted how in 1987 the FRU employed Nelson to steer a UDA hit squad away from killing a British agent operative inside the IRA code-named “Stakeknife.” The British spy unit directed the squad toward an alternative target, pensioner Victor Notarantonio, fingering him falsely as the head of the IRA in Ballymurphy. Notarantonio, a 66-year-old father of 11, was gunned down by the hit squad in front of his wife as he lay in bed. Top UDA leaders told the Observer that if any of their men face charges for these crimes they would name the British agent in public.

In the weeks that followed the publication of the Stevens report, anonymous “security sources” named Belfast resident Freddie Scappaticci as “Stakeknife.” The alleged agent was supposed to have penetrated the IRA at the “highest rank,” according to a BBC item, which also reported that Scappaticci had fled to a safe house in Britain after the allegations were printed. In the days that followed, a flurry of speculation appeared in the British press, including suggestions that in order to protect his cover Scappaticci had executed other British agents working in the Republican organization.  
 
Media justifies use of informers
The right-wing Daily Telegraph editorialized, “informers have always been an essential part of the state’s armoury against terrorism…and their activity must necessarily be shady.” It went on to condemn the British government for encouraging speculation about the functioning of its spies by opening “breast-beating inquiries into British conduct over the past three decades…as part of a process to appease the IRA…. It is impossible to see how anybody except the terrorists can benefit from opening them to the light.”

The press was caught off guard when Scappaticci appeared at a press conference at his west Belfast home to deny the allegations. “Nobody has had the decency to ask me if any of these allegations were true and why the police had not come to question me about these allegations,” he said.

Following Scappaticci’s denial, Sinn Fein representative Gerry Kelly described the charges as “unsubstantiated,” although they had been “accepted and repeated as fact by a large section of the media without question…. These allegations are made by the same people who killed Pat Finucane; ran Brian Nelson and used him and other agents to control and direct loyalist death squads; continue to control and direct unionist paramilitaries; [and] continue to target and gather intelligence.” Kelly demanded that the files of Britain’s security agencies be opened up.

So far only a fraction of Stevens’s report has been made publicly available. The material released makes no mention of the many other instances of collusion between British state forces and loyalists. An editorial in the Republican newspaper An Phlobacht called for the report to be published in full.

In the days following the publication of the excerpts, the British government announced that it would postpone the May elections for the Northern Ireland Assembly, which had been established by the 1998 agreement among the British and Irish governments and political parties in Northern Ireland.

The justification for the move was the alleged “lack of clarity” over the IRA’s willingness to disarm. Before the 1998 deal and many times since then London has used the IRA’s refusal to surrender weapons as both a pretext to obstruct agreed-on steps and an attempt to force the capitulation of those fighting British rule. Last fall, the government closed down the assembly for the fourth time in its short existence, using the pretext of supposed IRA spying.

Sinn Fein condemned the postponement. “Hold the elections now and let the electorate have their say,” said Mitchell McLaughlin, the party’s chairperson. “The British government is ducking the central issue,” he said. “They will put questions, they will be answered, and then they will hit you with another round of questions.”

Reminding people that for decades London had denied Catholics the same voting rights as Protestants, McLaughlin said, “We are back to a 1969 scenario of demanding the right to vote.”

Meanwhile, loyalist paramilitaries continued their activity, with reports in April that UDA soldiers were forcing Catholic families in south Belfast to leave their homes.  
 
 
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