17.10.04

The Observer

MP: 'I was not in covert army squad'
Tory says loyalist connection claim is 'total nonsense'


Henry McDonald
Sunday October 17, 2004
The Observer

A Tory MP last night firmly denied he was ever a member of the British army's highly controversial Force Research Unit.

Patrick Mercer, a former army officer, admitted he had co-operated with the FRU during several tours of duty in Northern Ireland. However, the MP for Newark described the allegations published on a website that monitors the activities of the intelligence services as 'total nonsense'.

The Cryptome website was the first public forum to name the British agent 'Steak Knife' inside the IRA as Freddie Scappaticci.

It now claims that Mercer was in the FRU while serving in the Province. The site even pointed to a group photograph of FRU soldiers that included Brigadier Gordon Kerr, the officer questioned by the Stevens Inquiry into collusion with loyalists. Cryptome alleged Mercer was one of those in the photograph.

The FRU is an army undercover unit attached to the Intelligence Corps which mounted covert operations against the IRA and loyalist terrorists.

It also ran high-ranking informers working within all the major paramilitary groups in the Province.

Mercer said Cryptome's allegations did not stand up to scrutiny. He said that, at all times, he served in Northern Ireland only with his own regiment, the Sherwood Foresters.

'I was never a member of the FRU. I have had plenty to do with them in the past, as with all the intelligence agencies in Northern Ireland, but I never served in the unit.'

Of the group photograph, Mercer said: 'I don't believe I've ever met Gordon Kerr, although I did speak to him on the phone once. The person in the photograph is not me as I was never in the Intelligence Corps, nor would I have wanted to be.'

Mercer said he had dealings with the FRU while serving as a staff officer at Thiepval Barracks, the army's headquarters in Northern Ireland between 1990 and 1991.

'Where the confusion arises is that Cryptome knows that I was in the Province and they have obviously put two and two together and made five,' he said.

The FRU is at the centre of the ongoing controversy over links between army officers and loyalist terrorists. Kerr has been questioned by Sir John Stevens's team about the use of Brian Nelson, a former soldier who the FRU ran as an agent inside the loyalist Ulster Defence Association. Nelson knew about the plot to murder the Belfast solicitor Pat Finucane in 1989 and, it is alleged, so did his army handlers.

Former FRU sergeant Martin Ingrams has alleged that Nelson's handlers did nothing to halt the Finucane assassination even though they could have prevented it.

The forthcoming public inquiry into the Finucane murder will shine further light on the murky world of intelligence agencies, including the FRU, which have operated in Northern Ireland.

Mercer's military career brought many commendations for bravery, as well as awards, including the MBE and OBE. He served in frontline units in South Armagh as well as Bosnia during the Balkan civil wars.

He left the army in 1999 and became a defence correspondent for the BBC. He was elected to the House of Commons in 2001.

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