MI5, South Africa and the UDA
01 January 1991
MI5, South Africa and the UDA
artdoc May=1993
Evidence is mounting that British intelligence is implicated in
the major arms shipment from South Africa in 1988 which was split
between three loyalist groups, the UDA, UVF and Ulster
Resistance. The consignment included 200 AK47 rifles, a dozen
rocket launchers, 90 pistols and 500 fragmentation grenades.
Although the RUC seized about a third of the shipment, the
remainder has never come to light, other than from its usage in
subsequent loyalist killings. Some of the weapons were used by
Michael Stone to kill three people attending the funeral of three
IRA members killed by the SAS at Gibraltar. They are thought to
have been used in the two attacks on bookmaker's shops last year
which killed eight people. The UDA intelligence officer Brian
Nelson who worked for military intelligence for ten years was
involved in organising the arms shipment.
Following allegations that British intelligence had full
knowledge of NelsonØs trip to South Africa and, indeed, that
Nelson's visit was cleared by a government Minister as well as
the Ministry of Defence, it is now being suggested that British
intelligence may have had two agents involved in the South
African deal. BBC Northern Ireland's current affairs programme
Spotlight (18.2.93) claimed that Charlie Simpson was the person
Nelson was told to contact in South Africa when setting up the
arms deal. Simpson, the programme says, worked for MI5 on the
Coetzee affair (see Statewatch January/February 1993) but was
originally recruited when living in Northern Ireland during the
1970s, after a possession of weapons charge. Simpson was in the
same Orange Lodge as McGrath (LOL 1303) and was also a member of
TARA, the fundamentalist loyalist group founded by McGrath which
believed that the original Ulster people were one of the lost
tribes of Israel. McGrath was eventually convicted of sexual
offences committed at the Kincora boys home over a prolonged
period. The Spotlight programme repeated the widespread belief
that McGrath was working for, and protected by, MI5 over many
years.
In the late 1970s, Simpson was in the Rhodesian Army and served
alongside a number of people who later joined South African
intelligence. He returned to Northern Ireland where he was
convicted of possessing 49 detonators and a rifle in June 1981,
for which he was fined Ã100 and given a suspended sentence. He
then went to South Africa where he found work as a transport
manager in Durban. In 1984 he apparently returned to Northern
Ireland briefly and told the UDA that there were weapons for sale
in South Africa. UDA leader (until his assassination in December
1987), John McMichael, told Brian Nelson to go to South Africa
and to contact Simpson who took Nelson to a weapons dealer.
During the discussions of the weapons deal, it became clear that
the South Africans were interested in acquiring Short's missile
technology and would supply the weapons cheaply if this could be
delivered. Spotlight argues from this that Simpson was probably
working for both South African and British intelligence.
Certainly, the latter would have known about Simpson because
Nelson says he told his handlers about the South African deal and
Simpson's role in it.
Panorama journalist John Ware has described the South African
weapons' shipment as `one of the least publicised and biggest
intelligence scandals in two decades of Northern Ireland's dirty
war.... You've got a massive weapons shipment going into the
hands of terrorists who are now exceeding the killing rate of the
IRA. For the intelligence services to have failed to prevent that
shipment coming in when they had such an early lead to my mind
demands an answer'.
Statewatch vol 3 no 2 March-April 1993