WikiLeaks cables: MI5 offered files on Finucane killing to inquiry

[Magda Hassan]

WikiLeaks cables: MI5 offered files on Finucane killing to inquiry

Leaked dispatches strengthen Finucane family's demands for inquiry into collusion between UFF gunmen and security forces

• Nicholas Watt and Owen Bowcott
  
• The Guardian, Monday 13 December 2010 WikiLeaks cables reveal US diplomats feared that 'elements of the security-legal establishments' in Britain beyond MI5 were resisting an inquiry into the murder of Patrick Finucane. Photograph: Reuters MI5 has said that it is prepared to hand over sensitive files on one of the most high-profile murders during the Northern Ireland Troubles carried out by loyalist gunmen working with members of the British security forces.
  The offer in the case of the Pat Finucane, the well-known civil rights and defence lawyer murdered in front of his wife and three young children in 1989, is contained in confidential US embassy cables passed to WikiLeaks.
  Supporters of Finucane welcomed the revelation of the offer last night as "highly significant" and believe it could pave the way for a fresh inquiry into the killing that would be acceptable to the family.
  Owen Paterson, the Northern Ireland secretary, has told Finucane's widow that he will decide early next year whether to hold a hearing that could shine a new light on collusion between gunmen from the Ulster Freedom Fighters and members of the security forces. A refusal to hold such a hearing, which Paterson has questioned in the past, would prevent an examination of the MI5 files.
  Finucane's supporters spoke out last night after leaked US embassy cables, published by WikiLeaks, showed that: • Bertie Ahern, the Irish prime minister between 1997 and 2008, told US diplomats that "everyone knows the UK was involved" in the murder.
  • US diplomats feared that "elements of the security-legal establishments" in Britain beyond MI5 were fighting hard to resist an inquiry.
  • Brian Cowen, the current Irish prime minister, warned that a failure to hold an inquiry could be a "deal breaker".
  Finucane's family said MI5's offer was a highly significant development in their 20-year battle to uncover the circumstances surrounding the murder.
  The Security Service's offer is revealed in a cable from June 2005, written by the US ambassador to Dublin, James C Kenny, which reported on a meeting between the head of MI5 and Mitchell Reiss, the US special envoy to Northern Ireland. In an account of the meeting between Reiss and Ahern, the ambassador wrote: "Reiss briefed him on his talks in London, including with the head of MI5 [Eliza Manningham-Buller], who committed to turning over all evidence her agency has to the inquiry, but she was adamant that the inquiry will proceed using the new legislation."
  Peter Madden, Finucane's partner in the Belfast solicitors' firm Madden and Finucane, said: "This might significantly change things. This is something new and unexpected. It will have to be considered by the Finucane family." Madden said the family would proceed with care because MI5 said any inquiry would be carried out under new legislation, which allows for material to be withheld from the final report. The family have demanded the same terms as the Bloody Sunday inquiry, but the legislation for that dated back to the 1920s and was repealed in 2005.
  Madden said the family may change its mind in light of the MI5 offer. "Our stance has been that we want the inquiry but it's the way the inquiry is proposed that is difficult to be part of, if it's held under the 2005 Inquiries Act. We need to look very carefully at the cables. I think [it is] highly significant for the family and it might well change things."
  Ahern told the US he was adamant that members of the British security forces were involved in Finucane's murder. The cable said: "The taoiseach said that the GOI wants the UK to provide evidence acknowledging its involvement in Finucane's murder and it wants to know how high in the UK government collusion went. He said if the UK were to provide the information, it would only grab the headlines for a few hours because 'everyone knows the UK was involved'."
  A year earlier, US diplomats raised fears that some forces in British were determined to block an inquiry. A cable by the same ambassador on 26 July 2004 quoted Ahern as saying: "Tony [Blair] knows what he has to do." An explanatory comment inserted by the US ambassador noted: "Presumably, that the PM will have to overrule elements of the security-legal establishments to see that some form of public inquiry is held." The elements resisting an inquiry could be the old Royal Ulster Constabulary Special Branch and British military intelligence.
  Lord Stevens of Kirkwhelpington, a former commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, concluded in a report in 2003 that members of the security forces had colluded in the murder of Finucane.
  Several members of the UFF involved in the murder turned out to have been either agents or informers for the security services.
  Meanwhile, Paterson told Geraldine Finucane that he has an "open mind" on whether to hold a public inquiry.
  David Cameron told MPs in June – on the day he published findings of the £200m inquiry into the 1972 Bloody Sunday shootings – that there would be "no more open-ended and costly inquiries into the past", though he added that each case would be considered on its merits.
  In his letter to Finucane's widow, Paterson said that the factors influencing his decision would include: "the commitment made to parliament by the previous government in 2004", "the experience of the other inquiries established after the Weston Park commitments", "political developments", "the potential length of any inquiry" and "the potential cost of an inquiry and the current pressures on the UK government's finances".
  "It is my intention to consider the public interest carefully and in detail at the end of the two month period for representations," he informed Geraldine Finucane, "and then take a decision after such consideration as to whether or not to hold a public inquiry into the death of your husband."
  Officials in the UK believe a public inquiry would raise difficult questions for the military but not for MI5. To win MI5's support, Blair made two key changes to the legislation governing public inquiries to prevent investigation beyond the official files it has been granted.
  Alex Attwood, an SDLP minister in the Northern Ireland executive, said last night he regarded the decision of Mitchell Reiss to highlight the MI5 offer as potentially significant.
  "Mitchell Reiss very much understood and had the measure of London," Attwood said. "He was not going to buy a pig in a poke."
  
  

[Albert Doyle]

Huge news.


The British Government has issued a formal high apology to the family of Patrick Finucane admitting members of its Intelligence Services were highly involved in his murder.


This event is close to me since a relative visited Mr Finucane and his wife and kids in the same kitchen a few weeks before he was brutally murdered.


This should automatically vindicate Julian Assange.

[Danny Jarman]

State sponsored terrorism.

I wonder if Cameron & co will bring those involved to justice?

I won't hold my breathe...

[Jan Klimkowski]

Anatomy of a limited hangout.

This is state-sponsored assassination, covered up for decades.

The evidence is taken in secret by a judge and he finds there was no high level political knowledge.

What a shambolic joke.

This is legal endorsement of (im)plausible deniability as legitimate governmental strategy.

Read it here: "There was a wilful and abject failure by successive governments to provide the clear policy and legal framework necessary for agent-handling operations to take place effectively within the law," (judge DeSilva) said.

"The system appears to have facilitated political deniability in relation to such operations, rather than creating mechanisms for an appropriate level of political oversight."

Those who directed and took part in the murder of Finucane were mainly agents and informers working for the army's Force Research Unit (FRU).

I'm going to shout:

THIS IS LEGAL ENDORSEMENT OF (IM)PLAUSIBLE DENIABILITY AS LEGITIMATE GOVERNMENTAL STRATEGY.

Pat Finucane report: David Cameron apologises over killing

PM says report highlights 'shocking levels of collusion' with terrorists in Northern Ireland, but widow labels report a sham

Henry McDonald, Ireland correspondent, and Owen Bowcott
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 12 December 2012 14.30 GMT
Jump to comments (309)

The prime minister, David Cameron, makes a statement in the House of Commons on collusion between British security forces and loyalist terrorists Link to this video

David Cameron has apologised to the family of the murdered Belfast lawyer Pat Finucane and agreed that there was state collusion between police officers and soldiers and his loyalist killers.

Launching the De Silva report into one of the most divisive murders of the Northern Ireland Troubles, the prime minister said there were "shocking levels of collusion" in the killing. Cameron told the House of Commons that the depth of the co-operation between the security forces and Finucane's loyalist killers was "unacceptable".

Addressing parliament, Cameron said that "on the balance of probability", an officer or officers from the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) did propose Finucane as a target to loyalist terrorists.

He did, however, deny there was any overarching conspiracy to use loyalists to target members of the nationalist community or active republicans.

However, Finucane's widow, Geraldine, was scathing about the report, describing it as a "sham … a whitewash … a confidence trick. Most insulting of all, this report is not the truth."

"Yet another British government has engineered the suppression of the truth about the murder of my husband, Pat Finucane," she told a press conference.

The prime minister admitted that the report made for "extremely difficult reading" in regard to Sir Desmond de Silva's findings, such as the revelation that 80% of the Ulster Defence Association's intelligence information came from official state sources.

The UDA was responsible for shooting Finucane dead in front of his family at their north Belfast home in February 1989. His family and human rights campaigners have insisted over the past 23 years that there was collaboration between the UDA in west and north Belfast and members of the security forces.

The De Silva report concluded that British army agent handlers "deliberately" helped loyalist gunmen select their targets in Northern Ireland in the 1980s.

But ministers may have been unaware that Finucane was being lined up for assassination, De Silva said.

The legal supervision of agents in paramilitary gangs was nonetheless woefully inadequate and the high-level ignorance was possibly intentional, his report said.

"There was a wilful and abject failure by successive governments to provide the clear policy and legal framework necessary for agent-handling operations to take place effectively within the law," he said.

"The system appears to have facilitated political deniability in relation to such operations, rather than creating mechanisms for an appropriate level of political oversight."

Those who directed and took part in the murder of Finucane were mainly agents and informers working for the army's Force Research Unit (FRU).

De Silva's report shows the RUC was aware of two previous plans to kill Finucane earlier in the 1980s but did not notify him of the threat.

"Notwithstanding the apparent seriousness of the threat to Finucane's life," the report says, "the decision was taken by RUC special branch, supported by the Irish Joint Section (of MI5 and MI6), to take no action to warn or otherwise protect him because to do so could compromise an agent from whom the intelligence derived."

It adds, in reference to another solicitor suspected of having links to paramilitaries: "Steps were often not taken to secure the protection of those who were considered to be a thorn in the side of the security forces during this period of the Troubles."

Addressing the Finucane family, who were in London for the report's launch, the prime minister said he was "deeply sorry" in relation to the scandal. However, he tried to exonerate the former Tory cabinet minister Douglas Hogg over comments he made prior to the Finucane murder in which Hogg said some solicitors in Northern Ireland were unduly sympathetic to the IRA.

The prime minister insisted that Hogg made his remark because of briefings he had received back then. The comments Hogg made were not intended to encourage people to attack Finucane, according to De Silva, Cameron added.

Amnesty International, however, said the De Silva review had failed the Finucane family and had not delivered them justice.

Patrick Corrigan, Amnesty's director in Northern Ireland, said: "The Finucanes, and indeed the public, have been fobbed off with a 'review of the paperwork' which reneges on repeated commitments by the British government and falls short of the UK's obligations under international law.

"It is unacceptable and Amnesty, his family and the public should not settle for anything other than the full and independent investigation that this case, and Patrick Finucane's memory, warrants. The state has accepted that there was collusion in Patrick Finucane's killing. Those responsible must be held accountable."

The prime minister said he "respectfully disagreed" with the Finucane family over their demand for a full, independent public inquiry and cited the cost of the Bloody Sunday tribunal as one reason for opposing it.

He also accepted that RUC special branch was "responsible for seriously obstructing the investigation".

One of the security force whistleblowers in the Finucane case, the ex-military intelligence officer Ian Hurst, who belonged to a secretive army unit running agents inside the UDA, said there was little chance of either police or military handlers or their loyalist informers facing the courts. He has faced charges of breaching the Official Secrets Act for leaking information about the role of army intelligence in running agents within the UDA who committed crimes including the targeting of Finucane.

"There is as much chance of that happening as there is of Sir Jimmy Savile returning as a saint and making love to the Queen," Hurst told the Guardian.

He said he backed "100%" the Finucanes' demand for a full, independent inquiry.

"They should be entitled to the whole truth, not a version of it," the ex-intelligence officer added.

In his speech to the Commons, the prime minister said that both RUC special branch and the army group Hurst once belonged to, the FRU, had advance notice of assassinations the UDA was planning but took no action.

One of the agents who was centrally involved in the Finucane murder plot was Brian Nelson, the UDA's so-called intelligence officer at the time. FRU officers provided Nelson with intelligence files on IRA and republican suspects, which the former soldier then passed on to his UDA colleagues.

On the army's role, Cameron told MPs that the military and Ministry of Defence officials provided ministers with "misleading and in parts factually inaccurate advice about the Force Research Unit's handling of Nelson".

Nelson was certainly not alone in terms of informants working inside the UDA. At least 29 members of the UDA in north and west Belfast were informers for at least one or more security force agencies at the time Finucane was shot dead.

Intriguingly, the prime minister during his speech admitted that the attorney general in John Major's government was under "considerable political pressure to ensure Nelson was not prosecuted". Cameron said Sir Patrick Mayhew deserved credit for resisting these demands to protect the agent inside the UDA.

Opposition politicians also expressed their dismay over the Finucane scandal and De Silva's findings. Sir Menzies Campbell, the former Liberal Democrat leader, said he had never heard a statement in the Commons that filled him with more "revulsion" than the prime minister's address.

[Jan Klimkowski]

The Finucane family's words need no contextualisation:

Pat Finucane's family denounce report as a 'sham'

Widow who campaigned for public inquiry into murder of Pat Finucane describes De Silva report as 'hurtful and insulting'

Owen Bowcott, legal affairs correspondent
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 12 December 2012 15.49 GMT

Geraldine Finucane and family arrive at a press conference in Westminster after hearing the report into the murder of her husband. Link to this video

The Finucane family, who have campaigned for a public inquiry into the murder of Pat Finucane, have described the report as a "sham" and a "whitewash".

Geraldine Finucane, the widow of the murdered lawyer, watched the debate on Sir Desmond de Silva's report (video) in the House of Commons before addressing a press conference in Westminster.
David Cameron makes a statement in the House of Commons on collusion between British security forces and loyalist terrorists Link to this video

"What's most hurtful and insulting," she said, "is that this report is not the truth.

"It's a report into which we have had no input. The British government has engineered a suppression of the truth behind the murder of my husband."

Dead witnesses and now-defunct military organisations had been given the main share of the blame, she said.

Asked about the chances of a public inquiry being held, she said: "I'm not pessimistic. When others who support us [see this] they will realise that we are doing the right thing."

Michael Finucane, one of Finucane's sons, said: "This is another piece of the jigsaw. The report needs to be read and the documents studied.

"They are bare and cold, containing more shocking facts. That can be used to further our case for a public inquiry."

[Jan Klimkowski]

See also the following DPF threads on The Dirty War:

The Committee - Northern Ireland Death Squads

The Mystery of the 1994 Mull of Kintyre Chinook Crash

Catholic priest's involvement in bombing covered up by British deep state

The assassination of Loyalism's King Rat

Then there's the Dirtiest Secret known as Stakeknife, see posts #197ff here.

Why were Murdoch's creatures hacking a British intelligence whistleblower?

A front page scoop? No - Stakeknife doesn't sell papers.

What was I saying earlier?

Oh yeah.

CUT OUTS.

PLAUSIBLE DENIABILITY.

ALL SIGNED, SEALED AND DELIVERED WITH IMPUNITY.

[Jan Klimkowski]

My emphasis in bold.

I wish I could highlight the passage in whitewash instead.

Pat Finucane report: army handlers 'helped loyalist gunmen select targets'

David Cameron says Finucane's murder was 'an appalling crime' and tells Commons the degree of collusion was unacceptable

Owen Bowcott
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 12 December 2012 13.34 GMT
Jump to comments (76)

The prime minister, David Cameron, makes a statement in the House of Commons on collusion between British security forces and loyalist terrorists Link to this video

British army agent handlers "deliberately" helped loyalist gunmen select their targets in Northern Ireland in the 1980s, a damning official report has revealed.

But ministers may have been unaware that the lawyer Patrick Finucane was being lined up for assassination, the inquiry by Sir Desmond de Silva QC found.

The legal supervision of agents in paramilitary gangs was nonetheless woefully inadequate and the high level ignorance was possibly intentional, his report says.

The prime minister, David Cameron, told the House of Commons that the murder was "an appalling crime" and said the degree of collusion exposed was unacceptable.

And he said, in a message to the family: "I am deeply sorry."

Cameron said the Finucane family had suffered "the most grievous wrongs" and he respected their view that the De Silva review was not the right response. But he said he disagreed with them, and said a public inquiry might not have uncovered as much information about the killing.

In his report, De Silva says: "There was a wilful and abject failure by successive governments to provide the clear policy and legal framework necessary for agent-handling operations to take place effectively within the law.

"The system appears to have facilitated political deniability in relation to such operations, rather than creating mechanisms for an appropriate level of political oversight."

The murder of Finucane in front of his family at his home in west Belfast on a Sunday evening in February 1989 has proved to be one of the most divisive killings of the province's 30-year-long Troubles.

Those who directed and took part in the attack were mainly agents and informers working for the army's Force Research Unit (FRU).

De Silva's report shows that the Royal Ulster Constabulary was aware of two previous plans to kill Finucane earlier in the 1980s but did not notify him of the threat.

"Notwithstanding the apparent seriousness of the threat to Finucane's life," the report says, "the decision was taken by RUC Special Branch, supported by the Irish Joint Section (of MI5 and MI6), to take no action to warn or otherwise protect him because to do so could compromise an agent from whom the intelligence derived."

It adds, in reference to another solicitor suspected of having links to paramilitaries: "Steps were often not taken to secure the protection of those who were considered to be a thorn in the side of the security forces during this period of the Troubles."

De Silva's report covers ground that has been repeatedly trawled over by previous police investigations and inquiries. The British government has admitted there was collusion between elements of the security forces and loyalist paramilitaries.

His conclusions about the Finucane murder are broadly in line with previous reviews but are expressed in even more forceful tones.

"I was particularly concerned," De Silva says, "by the fact that, on occasions, FRU handlers [of the loyalist agent Brian Nelson] provided him with information that was subsequently used for targeting purposes. These actions are, in my view, indicative of handlers in some instances deliberately facilitating Nelson's targeting of Provisional IRA members."

But he exonerates ministers from participation in the Finucane killing. "I have found no evidence whatsoever to suggest that any government minister had foreknowledge of Patrick Finucane's murder nor that they were subsequently informed of any intelligence that any agency of the state had received about the threats to his life."


The annex to De Silva's report also breaks new ground in publishing internal MI5 documents on the Finucane case.