Conspiracy theorists who advance the proposition that there was high-level collusion between loyalist paramilitaries and the security forces have one important consideration working against them: according to statistics, of all categories of victim in the Northern conflict, those least likely to die at the hands of the UVF or UDA were active members of the IRA, INLA and IPLO. Of the approximately 948 people loyalists murdered between 1969 and 1994, around 30 were active members of the IRA, INLA and IPLO, of whom 18 died in circumstances which might suggest that their killers were acting on accurate information.
However, this has not stopped Nicholas Davies in Ten-Thirty-Three from claiming that thanks to Brian Nelson, working as an agent for the British army's Force Research Unit, the UDA was able to "target the IRA, keeping them on their toes, worrying and unnerving them to such a degree that they were unable to concentrate much of their energies on venomous attacks against British forces, RUC personnel or Loyalists", nor from asserting: "Never before had the [IRA] lost so many activists; never before had the UDA gunmen proved to be so successful at tracking down and targeting their activists and bombers".
Yet of all the murders that the UDA carried out from about 1987 until Nelson's arrest some three years later, only one was of a republican paramilitary; and he was killed during the course of a wild attack on a republican funeral. In 1987 and 1988, two IRA men, Larry Marley and Brendan Davison, died at the hands of loyalists in Belfast - but it was the UVF, not the UDA, that was responsible. In his confused description of the murder of Davison, the author gets around this fact by stating that it was the UDA who shot him.
The most prominent UDA victim of the period was the solicitor, Patrick Finucane, but Ten-Thirty-Three adds nothing new to the controversy surrounding that murder.
Confusion and error mar the entire book. Davies's claims that several of Nelson's victims were IRA members is contradicted not only by the IRA but by the police who testified at their inquests that they were uninvolved Catholics. In fact, the most significant paramilitary figure murdered during those years was John McMichael, the UDA leader, whom the IRA assassinated in December, 1987. Far from being unnerved by loyalist attacks, the IRA enjoyed a resurgence in the late 1980s.
Unhelpfully, the author makes no effort to source his information, other than to say at the beginning of the book that it was written with the assistance of "three former members of the British security and intelligence services". This is especially a problem when Davies serves up page after page of conversation supposedly between Nelson and his FRU handlers - which, to be authentic, would had to have come from tape recordings or detailed notes. But the reader is left in the dark as to its origins. The lack of an index is an added nuisance.
Confidence in his account is further undermined by the naivete that these supposedly hardened FRU men display about the UDA. In one instance, the author describes how "alarmed" they were that the UDA "would ever contemplate attacking a republican club in such a manner, spraying scores of rounds of automatic fire, not caring how many innocent people were killed . . . " Clearly, they hadn't done their homework on the nature of loyalist violence. Nor, it would seem, has the author.
Jack Holland is a novelist and journalist who has written extensively on Northern Ireland. His most recent book is Hope Against History: The Ulster Conflict.