Official title: Intelligence structures
What this chapter covers
Chapter 3 describes the three intelligence organisations whose conduct runs through the report:
- RUC Special Branch, the police intelligence arm, which had primacy for intelligence in Northern Ireland and ran its own agents;
- the Force Research Unit (FRU), an Army unit that recruited and handled agents; the chapter describes how it was formed;
- the Security Service (MI5), which advised on intelligence and ran its own operations.
Key points
The chapter explains how intelligence was passed between these bodies and who was supposed to act on it. In the late 1980s Special Branch could decide whether intelligence was passed to the police criminal investigation department (CID), which in practice gave it great influence over arrests and investigations. Several later findings, including the failure to act on threats to Pat Finucane and the withholding of William Stobie's information, turn on that arrangement.
Critical readings
Some reviewers of the report, including a 2013 Statewatch analysis, argued that it should have said more about the policy decisions that put informants at the centre of policing in Northern Ireland. De Silva's approach in this chapter is descriptive; his judgments on how the system worked come in later chapters.