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Showing posts with label Kevin Fulton. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Kevin Fulton. Show all posts
The much vaunted Operation Kenova has seen the air let out of expectations over the Stakenife investigation. Are  all  inquiries into events in the North's violent conflict destined to get lost in the fog of British  'National Security'? 

Deirdre Younge in a 2016 Village piece provides crucial insight which resonates today in the context of the ongoing dirty cover up of the North's Dirty War. 

The investigation into the deaths of the most senior RUC officers shot dead during the North's violent conflict saw Drew Harris, former ACC PSNI in charge of legacy investigations and representative of M15, throw a log across the runaway train that was the Smithwick Tribunal. 

 This raises misgivings that the current much publicised historical investigation, Operation Kenova, has a sort of 'here we go again' inevitability ingrained into its function and ultimate purpose. The Jon Boutcher led inquiry has found no evidence to support Fulton's statements implicating Scappaticci in the Tom Oliver murder or in Fulton's own interrogation, which was another of Fulton's assertions at Smithwick.

 Deirdre Younge shows that the investigation into Breen and Buchanan came to a dead end. Is it realistic to expect a different outcome to flow from Kenova? Like Smithwick, like the PONI investigation into the Loughinisland murders, Kenova, already on the same track, seems to be heading for another case of collusion but no colluder.

A new source tells Village that Smithwick Tribunal unduly relied on double agent Fulton’s evidence that Corrigan was the colluder. Confusingly, the PSNI named someone else as the colluder.

Concentrate Now: Smithwick Tribunal ended up with strange finding of ‘collusion’ but no name for the ‘colluder’ in murders of RUC men – apparently because Smithwick was swayed by the successor to the RUC (PSNI) giving untestable very late evidence privately naming someone more plausible than Owen Corrigan as the colluder. Smithwick always focused on Corrigan because the Cory Inquiry, which prompted the Smithwick Tribunal, unduly relied on 2003 evidence of dissembling double agent ‘Fulton’, now challenged by a Village source, that Corrigan gave relevant information to the IRA about the RUC men, though Fulton seems to have later changed his story (when giving evidence to Smithwick in 2011) to say that Corrigan gave information to the IRA only about informant Tom Oliver, and even the changed story was expressly and ignominiously disavowed by Smithwick in a recent High Court judgment to the extent it implied that Corrigan’s information led to Oliver’s death.

The Smithwick Tribunal was set up in 2005 and sat in public from 2011 until 2013, to examine the possibility of collusion in the deaths of Chief Superintendent Harry Breen and Superintendent Bob Buchanan, of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) who were murdered North of the Border in March 1989, after a brief meeting in Dundalk Garda Station. The purpose of their visit was to discuss a move against the IRA’s Tom ‘Slab’ Murphy, which had been ordered by then Northern Ireland Secretary of State, Tom King.
Breen and Buchanan shot on the Edenappa Road
about 500 yards from the border crossing
In 1999 John Weir, a former RUC Sergeant who had been convicted of murder as part of a loyalist gang, drew up an affidavit for a defamation case which was published by the Barron Inquiry investigating the Dublin and Monaghan bombings, which asserted he personally knew that senior RUC Officers had colluded with the UVF. He alleged that Harry Breen supplied arms to the UVF in Portadown.

Smithwick implicitly accepted only that Breen was targeted by the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) because he was photographed in 1987 with weapons taken from Loughgall where eight IRA men were killed after British secret services got advanced warning of an ambush there.

The Tribunal spent years investigating alleged collusion of a different kind, between very different agents: by three gardaí in Dundalk Garda Station with the IRA. Confusingly, the PSNI arrived at the eleventh hour, with news of a ‘Fourth Man’, so defusing the allegations against the first three.

Though it found “no smoking gun” in Dundalk, the Tribunal weakly decided there was indeed less specific evidence of “collusion by gardaí” in the murders. Dutifully, Enda Kenny described these findings as “shocking”.

Key figures in the Smithwick Tribunal
The central figure in the Tribunal was retired Garda Detective Sergeant Owen Corrigan, who had served along the Border for his entire career. Corrigan was a pivotal figure in Special Branch in Dundalk until 1985.

Corrigan became the target of allegations ten years after the murders of Breen and Buchanan, in Bandit Country, a vivid account of the IRA in South Armagh, written by top British journalist Toby Harnden in 1999.

Corrigan was identified as ‘Garda X’ who was alleged to have furnished information to the IRA about Breen and Buchanan. Harnden was later to say that he had received information from an unidentified source in the RUC Special Branch claiming this. Kevin Myers, in the Irish Times, repeated these allegations unadulterated. Corrigan denies any wrongdoing and no finding of collusion with the IRA in relation to Breen and Buchanan was made against him despite the most thorough scrutiny by the Smithwick Tribunal.
Toby Harnden: top journalist
In 2003 a Canadian Supreme Court judge, Peter Cory, was asked by the British and Irish governments, jointly, to look into whether there should be independent public inquiries into a number of Northern murders, including those of Pat Finucane and Breen and Buchanan.

In its report on the Breen and Buchanan case in 2003, the Cory Collusion Inquiry details verbatim an interview with Harnden conducted in 2000. Cory damningly commented that:

The interviews revealed how little these gentlemen relied upon fact and how much they relied on suspicion and hypothesis. 

Cory quotes Harnden as conceding:

A lot of what was told to him was circumstantial and that he did not believe he was in possession of evidence that could result in any charges. 

Not surprisingly, Harnden did not give evidence to Smithwick.

Alan Mains, who had been Chief Superintendent Breen’s Sergeant in Armagh for three months before Breen’s death, had been assigned to help Harnden when he was writing his book. He changed his statement more than ten years after the murder to say Breen was fearful of going to Dundalk because he suspected Corrigan’s links to the IRA, though in fact it is clear that Breen was justifiably fearful on a number of grounds. Corrigan plausibly and consistently denies such links.

On recent visits north of the border, reliable loyalist and Unionist sources revealed to Village some details of Breen’s state of mind. They claim that, the night before he died, Breen met a close friend and revealed his fear of travelling to the border. He knew that an IRA action of some kind was being planned and, as a high-profile target, he feared for his life. The order to go to Dundalk, however, had come from the Chief Constable, Jack Hermon, based on the determination of then-Northern Secretary of State, Tom King, to tackle ‘Slab’ Murphy’s smuggling empire.

Owen Corrigan
Apart altogether from the Breen and Buchanan murders, the Smithwick Tribunal heard an allegation made about the murder of a small farmer, Tom Oliver in July 1991. He was abducted from his home in Riverstown on the Cooley Peninsula by a group including double agent ‘Kevin Fulton’ aka Peter Keeley, a Newry man recruited from the British Army in 1979 to infiltrate the South Down IRA.

Kevin Fulton gave evidence over three days in December 2012 to the Smithwick Tribunal. In the course of his evidence Fulton said he was being paid a living allowance and accommodation by MI5 as part of its duty of care to him. He denied being involved in the kidnapping that led to Oliver’s death, and Smithwick accepted that.

Oliver was interrogated and murdered in Belleek in County Armagh. The allegation of murder was regarded as particularly important by Smithwick, being the one piece of direct evidence of collusion against a member of Dundalk station.

The problem is that under proper scrutiny allegations of collusion here – as absolutely elsewhere else – are contested and, in the end, unproven.

Fulton’s specific and momentous allegation was that in 1991 Corrigan met Patrick ‘Mooch’ Blair, a senior IRA member, in the car-park of Fintan’s Céilí House near Dundalk, and told Blair that Oliver was passing information about the IRA to the Garda Síochána. Blair is then alleged to have threatened to murder Tom Oliver, who was indeed killed soon afterwards. Fulton had become Blair’s driver. Fulton was a professionally trained dissembler and kept his handlers in MI5 and Army intelligence supplied with information for well over a decade.

Kevin Fulton / Peter Keeley
Surprisingly, Smithwick was to say of Fulton: 

He sat only metres from me and I observed him throughout. He was a very impressive and credible witness and I have formed the view that his evidence was truthful.

Fulton now distances himself from Unsung Hero, a graphic book about his life. Nevertheless it is notable that at no stage in the book does Fulton mention a garda in Dundalk station passing information to the IRA. Nor is there any evidence that he passed information about Corrigan or other Dundalk gardaí, to his handlers.

Just weeks before his final report Cory came to Dundalk and met campaigners who were looking for an inquiry into the murders of Breen and Buchanan. When they asked if he was going to call for an inquiry he said: “I know something happened here but I have no evidence to call for an inquiry”. When asked “What do you need?” (He obviously needed direct evidence of collusion), normally reliable sources told Village: “They [the campaigners] wrote up a statement and gave it to Fulton to sign”. The statement said Owen Corrigan had passed information to Patrick ‘Mooch’ Blair in a car with Fulton.

Ultimately, for whatever reason, Cory was convinced after meeting Fulton and, according to sources, receiving a statement from Fulton. He cited Fulton’s evidence as a major reason for calling for a public inquiry into the Breen and Buchanan murders, focusing on Dundalk Garda station. That inquiry became the Smithwick Tribunal.

However, clearly there is a shadow over the statement which inspired Cory’s call for what became the Smithwick Tribunal. If this is so it rewrites the history of both inquiries.

Soon after that, Fulton went to Cory and read the statement. Village‘s sources, however, are adamant that the initial statement as given to Cory concerned Corrigan giving information to IRA member Patrick ‘Mooch’ Blair about the arrival of Breen and Buchanan at Dundalk Garda station. Village‘s sources insists that the statement described how Detective Sergeant Corrigan came out of Dundalk Station and said to ‘Mooch’ Blair – who was supposedly sitting in a car with Fulton – “they’re here”, after Breen and Buchanan had entered Dundalk.

Crucially, by the time Fulton reached Smithwick the alleged collusion had morphed into allegations about Corrigan’s passing ‘Mooch’ Blair information about Tom Oliver. Not having access to the original Cory documents it has not been possible to verify – and Patrick Blair and Corrigan utterly deny – the allegations. A description of this scandalous contradiction appeared in a 2007 story by Suzanne Breen in the Sunday Tribune.

Suzanne Breen did not name Fulton but reported: 

An IRA informer also alleged Garda collusion in the Breen and Buchanan murders. A source told the Sunday Tribune that this informer claimed that he and ‘M’, a senior IRA figure, travelled to Dundalk on 20th March 1989. While Breen and Buchanan were inside the Garda station, a garda left the building and told the two IRA men that the two men would be leaving shortly.

Among the pieces of evidence accepted by Smithwick in a chapter devoted to Fulton’s evidence was firstly that Corrigan had been known as “our friend” to the IRA, someone who gave information to the South Armagh brigade. Fulton initially said he knew Corrigan was “our friend” but under cross-examination admitted he just “believed” he was. He alleged that on the day of the Breen and Buchanan murders a member of the local IRA unit told ‘Mooch’ Blair and Fulton that “our friend” gave information about Breen and Buchanan.

Patrick ‘Mooch’ Blair
He gave a second piece of hearsay evidence: that Corrigan managed to destroy evidence of bomb-making in a house in Omeath in 1989. In fact Corrigan had been on sick leave from Dundalk and played no part in the investigation into the Omeath incident. The third and most serious allegation made by Fulton concerned the alleged meeting, described above and first mentioned in Cory, between Corrigan and ‘Mooch’ Blair outside Fintan’s Céilí House in which Corrigan is alleged to have passed information about how Tom Oliver informed to the Garda about IRA weapons found on his land.

The first two pieces of Fulton’s evidence were hearsay, but the Oliver allegation was Smithwick’s only piece of direct evidence of collusion of any sort, by anybody, with the IRA after years of public and private hearings. It is this evidence, vehemently denied by Corrigan, which was the subject of the statement by the Tribunal that brought the Judicial Review to a halt and removes the taint of involvement from Corrigan.

But Smithwicks’ initial acceptance of Fulton’s evidence, about Corrigan and Oliver, ran directly contrary to evidence delivered to Smithwick from the PSNI and the UK Security Services, in May and October 2012. Smithwick stated, with apparent satisfaction, that the Tribunal was in a unique position as it was receiving evidence and co-operation from the Northern and UK authorities. However, he ignored or downplayed this evidence in his report. Anyone reading the report must work hard to find the details of this.

Everyone, including probably you dear reader, thinks the Smithwick Tribunal was about collusion, which everybody thinks it found, but ultimately not one allegation of collusion remained solid and firm at the conclusion of proceedings.

In a dramatic last-minute intervention, on 2 May 2012 PSNI Chief Inspector Roy McComb attested the following to the Tribunal:

The IRA had received information regarding Breen and Buchanan from a detective Garda officer who had not been publicly identified to the Smithwick Tribunal and that this individual had been paid a considerable amount of money for this information.

Intelligence indicated that this officer also provided information about Tom Oliver and continued to provide information to the IRA for a number of years.

This extraordinary information was underpinned by the then Assistant Chief Constable, now Deputy Head of the PSNI, Drew Harris, an officer significantly senior to McComb, who gave further evidence to the Tribunal, in October 2012. Harris stated:

I would make the point that the inquiry was provided with all the information which related to the murders of Breen and Buchanan. What has happened now is that more information has become available to the Police Service and, as I have said, that is live information and of the moment. The initial provision of information was both by ourselves and the Security Services, and… was a full disclosure of the information that we felt able to give. 

Smithwick was being assailed by last-minute, game-changing new evidence.

Harris was cross-examined by Owen Corrigan’s Senior Council, Jim O’Callaghan SC:

Q “Were you aware, Mr Harris, when you read these five pieces of intelligence…that they were beneficial to my client, Mr Corrigan, who has been the focus of this Tribunal inquiry for a number of years”.
A “Yes”.
Q “Did you see any unfairness in the fact that the PSNI hadn’t released this information earlier?”.
A “This material, no, because this material was released as quickly as we could manage to release, given our other responsibilities”.

But who is the Fourth Man about whom the two pieces of intelligence relate who was just revealed in 2012?”.

Counsel for the Tribunal Mary Laverty SC and Drew Harris had the following exchange (led by Laverty):

Q. “Do you believe Mr Harris that there is any information that you could obtain for the Tribunal in the near future” ?
A. “Well contact with an individual, and hopefully other individuals is ongoing and hopefully within a few days to a week I will know whether I have further information which will be of assistance”.

The cross-examination of Corrigan was overshadowed by the new information. When Roy McComb arrived with new intelligence, Owen Corrigan had been in the witness box for just one day; the cross- examination by the Tribunal hadn’t begun.

But while McComb and later Harris provided succour to the three gardaí who had been the relentless focus of the Tribunal, Senior Garda and their lawyers went on the offensive against the quality of this new intelligence. Diarmaid McGuinness SC fumed that he regarded the information as “nonsense on stilts”.

As it was impossible to “get behind” the intelligence, it was impossible to assess it. The concentration on methodology therefore distracted from the extraordinary content and the possibility it posed of identifying the ‘Fourth Man’.

In February 2013, counsel for the Tribunal Mary Laverty SC announced that the Tribunal had gone on to check out the new information with some PSNI and Garda Síochána members, but the inquiries had run into the ground.

The Tribunal unsurprisingly declared that the murder of Tom Oliver was not part of its remit, but then accepted evidence that Corrigan had given information that set him up for murder. This was an unusual approach and of course Corrigan took legal action by way of Judicial Review. Following discussions between the parties, on 25 May 2016, the Tribunal confirmed, in a statement read to the High Court, that, whatever evidence it had heard, its final report had made no finding that the killing of Oliver was as a result of information the ex-garda provided to the Provisional IRA.

The action was then struck out by the High Court on the following terms:

While the Tribunal accepted the evidence of Kevin Fulton there was no finding in the Tribunal’s report that the killing of Mr Oliver was as a result of the information provided by Mr Corrigan to the IRA.

The Smithwick Inquiry ended with an enigmatic conclusion: a collusion – which this article has shown was not satisfactorily proven, with no named colluder.

⏩ Deirdre Younge is a writer/producer/director.

How Smithwick Got Diverted

Kevin Fulton aka Peter Keeley was the Central witness at the Smithwick Tribunal. 'Killusion' written in 2016 Village by Deirdre Younge explains his role. It provides useful background to a lengthy article by her which featured in TPQ earlier this month.

Full-time for ‘Fulton’ whose changing and inaccurate evidence sparked the Smithwick Tribunal and whose wide-ranging role is beginning to emerge in other Tribunals. 

The Smithwick Tribunal was set up in 2005, by the Irish Government on the advice of Michael McDowell, then Minister for Justice, and sat in public in Blackhall Place from 2011 until 2013, examining the possibility of Garda collusion in the deaths of Chief Superintendent Harry Breen and Superintendent Bob Buchanan, of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) who were murdered North of the Border in March 1989, after a brief meeting in Dundalk Garda Station. The purpose of the RUC officers’ visit was to discuss a move against the IRA’s Tom ‘Slab’ Murphy, which had been ordered by then Northern Ireland Secretary of State, Tom King.

The Smithwick Tribunal ended up in 2011 with a strange, abstract, finding of ‘collusion’ in the murders of the two RUC men. Though it found “no smoking gun” in Dundalk, the Tribunal weakly decided there was indeed less specific evidence of “collusion by gardaí” in the murders. Dutifully, Enda Kenny described these findings as “shocking” and a public and media jaded in affairs Northern determined rather vaguely to remember that Smithwick was about a search for evidence of collusion which it had somehow found.

What is extraordinary is that Smithwick provided no name for the ‘colluder’, though it clearly for a long time thought it was Owen Corrigan – even though it wasn’t. One of the reasons for this is that there may in fact have been no Garda colluder, a big embarrassment for those who felt a tribunal needed to be instigated and, worse, for those who conducted the inquiry without ever drawing attention to the inaccuracy of the premise that led to it but who saved face by continuingly, through the eight years of its existence, pretending there was one, albeit with less and less specificity.

Smithwick was swayed into its collusion abstraction by the PSNI (which succeeded the RUC) giving untestable, very-late evidence to the Tribunal privately naming a fourth garda who was more plausible than Owen Corrigan as the colluder.



Fulton: the man whose evidence led to a falsely perceived need for the Tribunal

Smithwick always focused on Corrigan as the colluder because the Cory Inquiry, which prompted the Smithwick Tribunal, unduly relied on the 2003 evidence of a dissembling double agent known as ‘Kevin Fulton’ – now challenged by a source who spoke to Village – that Corrigan gave deadly information to the IRA about the RUC men. In its report the Smithwick Tribunal stated [at 15.1.2]:

This statement was a key factor in Judge Cory’s decision to recommend the establishment of this Tribunal, and Kevin Fulton was therefore an important witness before this Tribunal.

In any event Fulton actually seems to have later changed his story (when giving evidence to Smithwick in 2011) to say that Corrigan gave information to the IRA only about a 37-year-old Cooley farmer, informant Tom Oliver, who An Phoblacht then accused of passing on information to Garda Special Branch. Oliver was kidnapped, allegedly interrogated by Scappaticci and subsequently murdered. The changed story was that Corrigan gave information about Oliver, not about the doomed RUC men; but even the changed story was expressly and ignominiously disavowed by Smithwick, under pressure in a recent High Court case, to the extent it implied that Corrigan’s information led to Oliver’s death. In other words everything related to Fulton collapsed, despite Smithwick’s paean to him.

Kevin Fulton/Peter Keeley

Kevin Fulton had begun to engage with the Smithwick Tribunal in 2006. In its opening statement in 2011, the Tribunal made it clear that “Mr Fulton has elaborated on and expanded the statement he provided to Judge Cory”.

The expanded statement was given to Corrigan’s lawyers in November 2011. For the first time they saw the central allegation made by Fulton which sensationally implicated Freddie Scappaticci, ‘Stakeknife’. It did not concern the murders of the two RUC Officers but instead implicated Sergeant Owen Corrigan in giving information which would lead to the death of an alleged IRA informer, Tom Oliver. The first reason not to believe Fulton is that a book about him makes no mention of any of this. Admittedly Fulton now distances himself from the graphic book called Unsung Hero about his life but this is chiefly understandable as an expedient in the face of the, at least nine, PSNI Investigations arising from it, and the many civil actions in the pipeline. He has already had to pay compensation to the family of Eoin Morley, a Newry man shot dead in 1990, after failing even to enter an appearance in the Belfast High Court to proceedings by his mother.

Nevertheless it is undeniably notable that at no stage in the book does Fulton mention a garda in Dundalk station passing information to the IRA, though it was scarcely something he’d be expected to omit. Nor is there any other evidence – of any sort – that he passed information about Corrigan or other Dundalk gardaí, to his handlers.

Bizarrely Smithwick warmly endorsed Fulton, a man who had made a lifetime “career” of deception, as a highly credible witness, in his final report, even in effect if he completely and absolutely disavowed him in the subsequent legal action. Surprisingly, Smithwick was to say of Fulton:

He sat only metres from me and I observed him throughout. He was a very impressive and credible witness and I have formed the view that his evidence was truthful.

However, clearly there is a shadow over the statement from Fulton which inspired Cory’s call for what became the Smithwick Tribunal. If this is so it rewrites the history of both inquiries.

Fulton’s’ similar role in other high-profile investigations will emerge in the coming months.
But what exactly was the core allegations that convinced Cory and then hung Smithwick out to dry?

This is the Fulton Statement as published originally in the Cory Report in 2003:

In 1979 I enlisted in the British Army. Within months of my posting, I was recruited by a British Intelligence Agency to act as an agent. In this capacity, I became a member of the Provisional IRA. On one occasion in the late 1980s, I was with my senior IRA Commander, Joseph Patrick Blair and another individual in my car. I knew the other individual to be [Owen] Corrigan, a member of Special Branch of the Gardai. I was introduced by Blair to Corrigan. I knew that Corrigan, who was stationed in Dundalk, was passing information to the Provisional IRA. I was in Dundalk on the day of the ambush of Superintendent Buchanan and Chief Superintendent Breen. I am aware that, after the ambush took place, Joseph Patrick Blair was told by a member of PIRA that Sergeant Corrigan had telephoned the Provisional IRA to tell them that officers Breen and Buchanan were at Dundalk Station.. I should add that I know nothing about the murder of Lord Justice and Lady Gibson. I have read this statement and its contents are true and accurate. – Kevin Fulton

Judge Cory redacted parts of his report so – extraordinarily – it’s not possible to know whether any parts of this particular statement were withheld. Corrigan’s legal team was only given access to the unredacted report on 17 May 2011 according to an affidavit drawn up by the Tribunal solicitor in 2014. This gave notice to Corrigan’s legal team that Fulton’s statement would be an issue, as it turns out a crucial and determining issue, for the Tribunal. However, the core allegation of collusion i.e. precisely what exact information passed from Corrigan to a PIRA member was not in the Cory statement. Nor was the Smithwick version of the statement released until November 2011.

The statement as published, in what the Tribunal says is the unredacted version of Cory, contains one description of an event – an alleged meeting in a car between a Special Branch man and a member of PIRA. However, Corrigan emphatically denies this ever happened – as did Patrick Blair, the PIRA man who he allegedly met. As this is the kind of meeting policemen have regularly organised for information gathering purposes the paragraph itself is meaningless without knowing the content of the conversation. The rest of the statement is a hearsay allegation, that Owen Corrigan was a man known as “our friend” who passed information to PIRA. Fulton on cross-examination substantially resiled from even this and actually changed his evidence under cross-examination.

However Fulton’s one piece of direct evidence, which he accepted was at the core of his allegations of collusion was an alleged meeting between PIRA South Down ASU Commander Patrick ‘Mooch’ Blair and former Special Branch Sergeant Owen Corrigan outside Fintan Callan’s Céili House – a busy roadhouse on the main road, open to public view. Mooch Blair couldn’t drive at this point which is why Fulton, as his driver, says he was in the car. But for the first time (insofar as can be ascertained) in March 2011, after interacting with campaigners, politicians and security forces about his knowledge of PIRA since 1999, Fulton “revealed” the contents of the conversation between Blair and Corrigan. He alleged that Corrigan told Blair that a Cooley Farmer, Tom Oliver, was giving information to the Garda about PIRA weapons and their movements.

After the meeting with Corrigan, Blair was then alleged to have threatened to murder Oliver. Fulton then alleged that soon after the meeting Tom Oliver was picked up at his home by a PIRA team, and handed over to Freddie Scappaticci for interrogation. Oliver was subsequently murdered, it is believed, in the Cooley Mountains. Fulton said the date of the alleged meeting between Blair and Corrigan was sometime in early 1991 though he couldn’t be pinned down to a precise day. He was certain however that weeks after the date of this alleged meeting in July 1991 Tom Oliver was interrogated and shot dead.

His body was found with a number of bullets in the back of the head in Belleeks, Co Armagh. But the date of the alleged meeting outside the Céili House, in the crucial Fulton statement, changed from late 1989 in Cory to 1991 in Smithwick. This is a curious jump considering a senior Judge like Peter Cory would have been punctilious about the accuracy of his reporting of statements. Fulton’s statement changed between Cory and Smithwick. Though Fulton had been interacting with the Tribunal since 2006, Judge Smithwick in December 2011 gave personal assurances to Corrigan’s legal representatives that the Fulton statement hadn’t changed beyond minor corrections.

While cross-examining a witness in 2011 Fulton’s lawyer revealed that Fulton would say that he was at a meeting in Blair’s house on the 20th March when he and Blair were told by a PIRA member who came into the house after the shootings that the Garda had given info about Breen and Buchanan. Senior counsel for Owen Corrigan, Jim O’Callaghan, then says that this is a change of evidence and the first he has heard of this meeting, occasioning the following exchange:

O’Callaghan: Why did you mislead Judge Cory?
Fulton: I would not have purposely misled Judge Cory.

Even a benign interpretation suggests Fulton misled Cory.

Fulton talks to campaigners in 1999 
Under-researched pieces by Myers and Harndon caused havoc in the RUC

In late 1999 Fulton began interacting with campaigners along the border after being introduced, he said, by the Northern Editor of a British newspaper who he described as a Registered Special Branch informant. He gave information to them about his first activities in Newry and Dundalk.

Cory in Dundalk

Reliable sources describe what happened. At a meeting in Dundalk in 2003 Cory is said to have remarked to campaigners looking for an investigation into the Breen and Buchanan murders, that while he believed there were questions to answer he had no direct evidence to argue for a Tribunal of Inquiry. According to sources the “Fulton statement” was written up for Fulton including a direct allegation against Corrigan, he signed it and subsequently appeared before Cory just weeks before Cory’s final report. This normally reliable source is adamant that what became seen as Fulton’s central allegation — the passing of information from Corrigan to Mooch Blair about Oliver, was not made and that, in fact, the allegation was rather that Corrigan had tipped off Blair about Breen and Buchanan’s arrival at Dundalk station.

Village‘s sources, however, are adamant that the initial statement as given to Cory concerned Corrigan giving information to IRA member Patrick ‘Mooch’ Blair about the arrival of Breen and Buchanan at Dundalk Garda station. Village‘s sources insists that the statement described how Detective Sergeant Corrigan came out of Dundalk Station and said to ‘Mooch’ Blair – who was supposedly sitting in a car with Fulton – “they’re here”, after Breen and Buchanan had entered Dundalk.

Crucially, by the time Fulton reached Smithwick the alleged collusion had morphed into allegations about Corrigan’s passing ‘Mooch’ Blair information about Tom Oliver. Not having access to the original Cory documents it has not been possible to verify — and Patrick Blair and Corrigan utterly deny — the allegations. The Tribunal unsurprisingly declared that the murder of Tom Oliver was not part of its remit, but then accepted evidence that Corrigan had given information that set him up for murder.

This was an unusual approach and of course Corrigan took legal action by way of Judicial Review. Following discussions between the parties, on 25 May 2016, the Tribunal confirmed, in a statement read to the High Court, that, whatever evidence it had heard, its final report had made no finding that the killing of Oliver was as a result of information the ex-garda provided to the Provisional IRA. The action was then struck out by the High Court on the following terms:

While the Tribunal accepted the evidence of Kevin Fulton there was no finding in the Tribunal’s report that the killing of Mr Oliver was as a result of the information provided by Mr Corrigan to the IRA.

The Smithwick Inquiry ended with an enigmatic conclusion: a collusion — which this article has shown was not satisfactorily proven, with no named colluder. It is important that it is registered by anyone concerned with the truth that Smithwick had to close down the judicial review — it risked exposing the mess, the confusion and the contradictions that lie at the heart of its final report.

The problem with Smithwick is that it was bedevilled by its dependence on the UK ‘Security Services’ which determined how little intelligence the Tribunal Team would receive, and it was badly chaired. The Tribunal was instigated largely as a sop to Unionists to maximise pressure on the British Government to carry out inquiries into the likes of Pat Finucane’s murder and Bloody Sunday. The exercise was tainted in its conception and in its application.

Smithwick Tribunal: Enter Freddie Scappaticci

In 2006 Smithwick received an application from Freddie Scappaticci for legal representation though this was turned down. By May 2011, however, the Tribunal informed Scappaticci’s solicitor that as he now “appeared to be a person whose reputation was at risk, i.e. a person against whom allegations may be made”, he would be allowed limited representation and information.

In a decision made on 6th June 2011 Smithwick allowed his lawyers limited access to Tribunal statements as they applied to him. After a further application heard in July 2011, that legal right was extended to limited legal representation at the Tribunal on specified occasions on matters that concerned him. Scappaticci’s lawyers were alerted to at least some of the contents of Fulton’s statement before it was distributed to other parties: Corrigan’s lawyers did not receive the final Fulton statement with its extraordinary allegations involving Tom Oliver, until November 2011 five months after it was received and just two weeks before the evidence of former PIRA man, Mooch Patrick Blair, a crucial witness.

Operation Kenova is an investigation into the executions of suspected informants by the Army agent Stakeknife. It notes that “many are concerned at the involvement of this alleged State agent in kidnap, torture and murder by the Provisional IRA during ‘the troubles’ and believe they were preventable”. It will also “look at whether there is evidence of criminal offences having been committed by members of the British Army, the Security Services or other government personnel”. The overriding priority of the investigation is to discover the circumstances of how and why people died, to establish the truth regarding those offences covered within the Terms of Reference.

According to Eamon Mallie:


A question screaming out for an answer is how the Army and MI5 explain and justify the alleged role of Stakeknife – an agent in that part of the IRA that interrogated and tortured other suspected agents, steps often leading to execution. Under what rules of intelligence gathering or agent handling was that possible? Were other agents sacrificed in those places where Stakeknife was at play?.


From an Italian immigrant family and originally from the Markets area of Belfast builder Freddie Scappaticci was fined for riotous assembly in 1970 after being caught up in “the Troubles” and, one year later, was interned without trial with, among others, Gerry Adams. He became deputy head of the IRA’s internal security, its so-called nutting squad. In 1978 he was apparently beaten by a fellow high-ranking member of the Provisional IRA, prompting him to offer his services to the British security services; he eventually came under the control of the British army’s shadowy FRU “force research unit”. Sir John Wilsey, at one time the most senior army officer in Northern Ireland, was secretly recorded in 2012 by a military intelligence whistleblower claiming to be a television news researcher.

Wilsey described Stakeknife as “our most important secret”, “a golden egg”…“We were terribly cagey about Fred”. Scappaticci was named in the press as Stakeknife – Britain’s top agent inside the IRA in 2003 and soon resurfaced at a press conference in Belfast, denying that he had ever worked for Army intelligence or been involved in terrorism. However, shortly afterwards he fled Belfast.

In his book Killing Rage former IRA man Eamon Collins, himself killed by the IRA, characterised Scappaticci as “small and barrel-chested with classic Mediterranean looks – olive-skinned with tight black curly hair”. He described him as a cold-hearted killer and conveyed graphic details of his viciousness. Scap is now in his late 60s and living in hiding under security-service protection. The media is not allowed to report anything that could suggest where he is living or to show images of what he now looks like.

His activities as agent ‘Stakenife’ are now the subject of a major investigation in Northern Ireland involving over 50 officers, Operation Kenova.

The Northern Ireland Director of Public Prosecutions, Barra McGrory, announced in 2015 that he had asked the chief constable of the PSNI, George Hamilton, to investigate allegations that Scappaticci was involved in at least 24 murders. It is speculated that he could be responsible for up to 40, some of his victims allegedly sacrificed to protect his identity. McGrory also asked Hamilton to investigate the British security-service controllers who handled him. Operation Kenova is headed by Chief Constable Jon Boutcher of Bedfordshire Constabulary has already begun to talk to victims’ families. It is not yet clear if the investigation will extend to the murder of Tom Oliver, and examine the allegations of Fulton made to the Smithwick Tribunal in Dublin that Scappaticci was involved in the kidnap and interrogation of Oliver who was subsequently murdered in Louth before his body was dumped in South Armagh in July1991. Scappaticci was an important, though unseen presence, at the Tribunal – his interests represented by his lawyers, paid by the Irish taxpayer.

Scappaticci sought legal representation to counter claims by Fulton that he was involved in the Tom Oliver abduction and murder.

At one stage Scappaticci’s senior counsel put it to Fulton:

You see, what I am suggesting to you Mr Fulton is that you are desperate for attention…and naming Mr Scappaticci is an attempt to get the Spotlight back on you? …… And I suggest [to] you that you evidence that he was involved in any matter concerning you or Tom Oliver, or indeed in 1994, is a fabrication for that reason.

Scappaticci enjoyed increasing levels of representation at the Tribunal and unsuccessfully pursued a Judicial Review of Smithwick’s decision to allow Fulton to give evidence behind a screen. His barrister described him as an attention-seeker who lied about Scappaticci. Fulton, of course, denied this. Credible sources maintain that he spoke to Tribunal personnel privately for three days in Dublin and some sources say he denied having anything to do with the Tom Oliver murder. but the Tribunal has denied that Scappaticci engaged with them.

If he did give evidence the legal teams were not informed. The Tribunal was so confused that such anomalies were the least of its problems.

Scappaticci’s final handler, an Army Intelligence Major and one of the most important Army Intelligence Officers based in Northern Ireland, gave evidence to the Tribunal in April 2012 that, contrary to Fulton’s’ claims, Scappaticci had never given any information about Owen Corrigan colluding with PIRA nor was there any evidence, whatever, to that effect.

Fulton’s specific and momentous allegation was that in 1991 Corrigan met Patrick ‘Mooch’ Blair, a senior IRA member, in the car-park of Fintan’s Céilí House near Dundalk, and told Blair that Oliver was passing information about the IRA to the Garda Síochána. Blair is then alleged to have threatened to murder Tom Oliver, who was indeed killed soon afterwards. Fulton had become Blair’s driver.

Fulton was a professionally trained dissembler and kept his handlers in MI5 and Army intelligence supplied with information for well over a decade.

The arrival in 2012 of the (now) Deputy Head of the PSNI Drew Harris with his evidence not only served to exonerate Corrigan but also to overshadow Fulton’s allegations against Scappaticci.

Certainly the Smithwick Tribunal made no useful findings but almost certainly there was no reason for the Smithwick Tribunal in the first place.

Justice and Truth demand that the truth of why Tom Oliver was killed, and the role of one of the most brutal double agents, Stakeknife in it, are ascertained.

Postscript: Since the above article was written Kenova has found no evidence to support Keeley/Fulton's allegations that Scappaticci was involved in the Tom Oliver murder (still unsolved) or his interrogation.

⏩Deirdre Younge is a writer/producer/director.

Killusion

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