NI: MI5, South Africa and the UDA
01 March 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 Nelson's 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 100 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".