by Liam Clarke, Sunday Times, Feb 11 2001
The Ministry of Defence has banned newspapers from identifying an undercover British soldier who is being investigated for alleged collusion with loyalist paramilitaries in Ulster.
The army has decided to relocate the officer, a female Intelligence Corps captain, after her name appeared on Cryptome, an American-based website.
The MoD has overruled advice given to the press by an official advisory body and threatened the media with injunctions if they publish the information available on Cryptome. Officials say they will have the information removed from the internet.
On Friday night Rear-Admiral Nick Wilkinson, secretary of the defence advisory committee - the D-notice committee - told newspapers that he believed they were free to publish the soldier's name if it was agreed that it was widely available in the public domain.
He told The Sunday Times:
"My advice at the minute is that it seems to be widely in the public domain and therefore can be published."He advised against publishing the soldier's photograph. He added:
"I can give advice based on the defence advisory notices and common sense, but if there is a disagreement it is the court that will decide."
The committee is responsible for advising newspapers on matters of national security and for liaising between the media and security forces. It is a radical change for the MoD to override it in this way.
The soldier, who can only be referred to as Captain M, is a former Force Research Unit (FRU) operative. FRU handled all the army's undercover agents in Northern Ireland in the 1980s and early 1990s.
Before she was commissioned, Captain M was one of the team responsible for Brian Nelson, FRU's most important agent within the Ulster Defence Association. Nelson, the UDA's intelligence officer, was arrested as part of an investigation into collusion between loyalists and the security forces headed by Sir John Stevens, the Metropolitan police commissioner. In 1992 Nelson was jailed for 10 years after pleading guilty to five charges of conspiracy to murder and 14 charges of possessing information useful to terrorists. Stevens recommended that Captain M also be prosecuted, but the director of public prosecutions did not proceed.
The captain is now under investigation by a renewed Stevens inquiry. Police sources say that she, a male handler and Brigadier Gordon Kerr, the former head of FRU who is now the British military attaché in Beijing, will be questioned about their involvement with Nelson.
The MoD made arrangements to move Captain M from the secure Intelligence Corps base where she works and newspapers inquiring about her were threatened with injunctions.
When a former FRU soldier was suspected by the MoD of using the pseudonym Martin Ingram to reveal details of military intelligence dirty tricks to The Sunday Times, he received no such protection after his identity and whereabouts were e-mailed to newspapers.
© Sunday Times, 11/02/2001.