-Caveat Lector- http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/Sunday-Times/stinwenws01030.html?999 November 21 1999 BRITAIN Secret army unit burnt police files Liam Clarke A WHISTLEBLOWER from one of the most secret intelligence units in the British army has revealed that it tried to destroy police evidence by burgling and burning the operations centre of a high-powered investigation. A breaking-and-entry team from the army's special intelligence wing based at Ashford, Kent, carried out the raid at the heart of a fortified police station, according to the former undercover soldier. Their target was the offices of John Stevens, the senior police officer who will take over as the Metropolitan police commissioner on January 1. He was investigating links between the police, the security forces and loyalist murders in Northern Ireland. Details of the illegal burgle-and-burn assault by a secret arm of the British state on a figure whose task was to enforce the law have emerged as hopes of peace in Ulster are at their highest for 30 years. The whistleblower, who uses the pseudonym Martin Ingram, was a member of the force research unit (FRU), a clandestine cell within the army Intelligance Corps that handled agents in the Provisional IRA and loyalist paramilitary movements. Ingram, who served in the Intelligence Corps between 1980 and 1991, has asked for his real name to be withheld, but has shown The Sunday Times evidence of his role in the FRU. He says that intelligence officers knew the cause of the late-night "mystery fire" that gutted Stevens's top-floor operations room at Carrickfergus police station on January 10, 1990. A "covert methods of entry" (CME) team had been brought in after Stevens's investigators discovered that Brian Nelson, the head of intelligence in the UDA loyalist organisation, was also acting as a FRU agent. Through him, the FRU had a great deal of control over the UDA's targeting of Catholics and republicans. The attack was to delay the work of the Stevens inquiry, Ingram said. The FRU "wanted a little bit of time to construct an alternative cover story" to explain its relationship with Nelson. In the event, however, Stevens had back-up files. Nelson was later jailed for 10 years, and the FRU was disbanded. Ingram has also revealed another of military intelligence's secrets: that a British soldier was sacrificed so that an IRA informer's identity would be protected. Accusations that the FRU allowed attacks on republican suspects and Catholic civilians to proceed have been made before. Some of these deaths are being investigated again. Ingram brings in significant new information, mainly concerning the death of Neil Clarke, a private in the 2nd Battalion the Queen's Regiment, who was shot dead by a sniper during an attack on an army patrol in Londonderry in 1984. The young soldier was killed with a rifle from an arms dump controlled by Frank Hegarty, a FRU informer within the IRA. According to Ingram, the FRU not only knew about the arms dump but had brought in Intelligence Corps ballistics experts to remove the weapons and test fire them. It had then returned them to the dump.Shortly before Clarke died Hegarty told his handlers that an IRA go-between had asked for rifles from the dump for an operation but no action was taken by the FRU. It would have been possible for the army to have bugged the weapons or rendered them inoperable. But two senior officers decided not to, for fear of compromising Hegarty's cover within the IRA. The strategic decision paid off when Hegarty discovered the location of a massive IRA arms dump in the Irish republic. The weapon that killed Clarke was recovered by police in a haul that included two other rifles. Police sources revealed that the three guns had been used in a dozen attacks, including the murder of Clarke and Private Martin Patten, 18, of the Royal Anglian Regiment. Copyright 1999 Times Newspapers Ltd. This service is provided on Times Newspapers' standard terms and conditions. -- ----------------------- NOTE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material is distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and educational purposes only. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml ----------------------- DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. 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