Brian Nelson

Army double agent

Brian Nelson was a deep-cover military intelligence agent. He was once officially hailed as a courageous operative who saved many lives; an alternative view is that he was part of a sinister military strategy to assassinate enemies of the state.

Nelson's name is expected to figure prominently in the report on intelligence collusion with violent loyalist paramilitants to be published on Thursday by the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir John Stevens. Stevens believes many of those involved in running Nelson as an agent inside the Ulster Defence Association should be charged with offences such as conspiracy to murder. The most prominent case under review is that of the Belfast solicitor Pat Finucane, who was shot dead by the UDA in 1989.

Brian Nelson was a Belfast Shankill Road Protestant who once served in the Army with the Black Watch. In the mid-1970s he joined the UDA and was imprisoned for a sectarian offence, at a time when he appears to have been a low-level army informant. Later he took his family off to Germany, where he worked in a construction job. But in 1985 he was approached by Military Intelligence, who asked him to go back to Belfast to infiltrate the UDA. Within the UDA he quickly rose to the post of senior intelligence officer. In one extraordinary act he took a suitcase of the organisation's ill-organised documents to his military handlers, who tidied it up, streamlined it and returned it to him.

This incident raised suspicions among many that the Army's intention was not so much to gain information as actually to point the UDA in the direction of certain targets.

When Stevens was asked to investigate alleged collusion in the early 1990s, he uncovered Nelson's activities and had him charged. Nelson subsequently pleaded guilty to 20 charges, including five of conspiracy to murder. At his trial in 1992 a senior military intelligence officer testified on his behalf, saying that, while Nelson had made mistakes, he had always been loyal to the Army and had never given allegiance to the UDA. He said a number of people owed their lives to him, including the Sinn Fein President, Gerry Adams, and that Nelson had given the Army early warning of possible UDA targeting of more than 200 people, only three of whom had subsequently been killed by loyalists.

Sentencing Nelson to 10 years in prison, the judge said he had acted "with good motivation, not for gain, and with the greatest courage", but that on five occasions he had disobeyed Military Intelligence and crossed the line from lawful intelligence gathering into criminal participation. A number of charges against Nelson were quietly dropped, including two counts of murder. Many other features of his career remain unexplained, including his part in a South African arms deal which increased the loyalist paramilitary armament.

Nelson was released after serving his sentence, and little has been heard of him since. But the collusion issue has remained very much to the forefront in Northern Ireland. Among those who have been under investigation is the senior officer who gave evidence on Nelson's behalf.

David McKittrick

Brian Nelson, soldier and military intelligence agent: born 1948; married (three children); died 11 April 2003.