Official title: Agent-handling
In brief
- Agents were run without an adequate legal framework or clear limits on their involvement in crime.
- De Silva places responsibility for that gap on government as well as the agencies.
What this chapter covers
Chapter 4 examines how the state ran agents (informants) inside paramilitary groups in the 1980s: recruitment, tasking, payment, record-keeping and, above all, the rules on what agents could and could not do.
The central finding
De Silva's core point is that agent-handling took place without an adequate legal or policy framework. Handlers had no clear guidance on how far an agent could take part in a paramilitary group's crimes in order to keep his cover and keep supplying information. The chapter argues that this left individual handlers and agents to make life-and-death judgments with little oversight.
The report places responsibility for that gap on government as well as the agencies. It notes that the problem had been recognised internally before 1989 without being resolved.
Why it matters
This chapter is the foundation for the report's judgments on Brian Nelson in chapters 6 to 8 and William Stobie in chapter 10. It is also where the report connects most directly to later reforms. When the Prime Minister responded on 12 December 2012 he pointed to the statutory framework for informants introduced by the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 as one of the changes made since 1989.