Interesting in the light of the fact that so many of Keir Starmer s Labour party officials and MPs have links to the IRA....
From The Telegraph
It turns out agents in terror groups ran riot in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, building bombs, procuring guns, plotting murders and even shooting people. All the while, they were on the British state’s payroll, feeding everything back to their handlers in the Army and police.
The FRU and Special Branch had agents on both sides: in the IRA as it waged a violent campaign to unite Ireland, as well as among mostly Protestant loyalist paramilitaries, which wanted to keep Northern Ireland part of the United Kingdom.
Former FRU soldiers tell me they worked in a “moral quagmire”. Ultimately, they say, their intelligence curtailed the IRA. But families bereaved by spies are still trying to find out why that intelligence wasn’t used to save their loved ones.
The FRU was a covert unit of the British Army that operated in secret. Formed in 1979 by former head of MI6 Maurice Oldfield, its goal was to turn paramilitary fighters into spies.
In 1987, Brigadier Gordon Kerr took over the FRU, after a stint working in intelligence on the frontlines of the Cold War in Germany, and ushered in a new era.
“The unwritten guidance given by Kerr is that the gloves are off,” says former FRU soldier Ian Hurst, who leaked the identity of the agent Stakeknife to the press. “He was a good boss but I think he had a blind side.”
Another former FRU soldier, who uses the pseudonym Rob Lewis, says the unit was maverick. “If you could save somebody’s life and if you could defeat a terrorist act, then they were quite happy for you to do anything you wanted,” he says. “Gordon Kerr was a bit controversial, but he was a brilliant guy and I would still back him even now.”
The most prolific known FRU agent wasn’t in fact Stakeknife, but the UDA’s head of intelligence Brian Nelson, known as Agent 6137. A military veteran from Belfast who spied on the upper echelons of the UDA, Nelson is alleged to have been involved in 29 murders.
“It really is in the public interest for people to understand that this wasn’t just the IRA Nutting Squad,” says Lord Stevens. “I’m absolutely amazed that there’s been no kind of connection between Stakeknife, the FRU and Nelson.”
Lord Stevens unravelled the FRU’s connection to scores of murders in the longest criminal investigation in UK history, the Stevens Inquiry, which began in 1989 and resulted in more than 100 convictions, including Nelson’s (he was jailed for 10 years on five counts of conspiracy to murder).
“He was a drunkard and he was a psychopath,” says Lord Stevens. “And he wasn’t to be trusted.”
Official accounts say the FRU recruited Nelson in 1984, a decade after he had tortured and nearly killed Gerald Higgins, a partially-sighted amateur singer and father of five. After being recruited, Nelson briefly left the UDA and moved to Germany. “MI5 didn’t want Nelson back in Northern Ireland,” says Lord Stevens. But the FRU travelled to Germany to pull their prize asset back into action.
Together, Nelson and the FRU wanted to make the UDA “more professional” by directing their gunmen towards IRA members, rather than Catholic civilians. From leaks in the police and Army, Nelson got hold of intelligence about suspected IRA members, including names, addresses and cars that they drove. He passed these details to UDA gunmen, who led the subsequent assassinations. Nelson’s handlers knew all about this targeting – and they even helped him by telling him what information was accurate.
“The Army was helping these intelligence packets to be handed to the psychopaths and the murderers, who then went out on the basis that they were killing the right people,” says Lord Stevens. “Of course, we know they didn’t kill the ‘right’ people. There are a number of people who are totally innocent. I don’t believe any of them deserved to die.”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/02/02/british-army-unit-dirty-war-ira
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