Neither Confirm Nor Deny: British Intelligence, Lawless Agent Running and the Suppression of Truth

‘ The State is assassinating people.’

These were the chilling words said to have been sent to Tony Blair in 1999 in a damning note bluntly summarising one of the consequences of Britain’ s decades-long intelligence war in Northern Ireland. State forces had crossed a line, guided by a secret review from 1980 that quietly rewired Britain’ s war, placing intelligence gathering above the law.

What followed was the creation of a vast, covert agent-running machine that penetrated loyalist and repu...