Campaigners in Belfast have criticised police for not releasing a file from the Troubles after similar documents were discovered in Foreign Office archives.
Police in Northern Ireland continue to withhold a Troubles-era report by an MI5 veteran despite his dispatches from other countries being made public.
Counter-insurgency expert Jack Morton authored a landmark review of the Royal Ulster Constabulary’s Special Branch in 1973.
It is thought to contain recommendations on handling informants – one of the most contentious legacy issues – and is potentially relevant to ongoing inquests.
The Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) rejected a freedom of information request for Morton’s report in 2017.
Police cited a national security exemption that allows them to withhold files relating to, or supplied by, the Security Service MI5.
They successfully defended this censorship at an information tribunal in 2021 when challenged by Declassified UK and later by Margaret Campbell, whose husband was murdered in the Troubles.
However, it has now emerged that in the middle of this transparency dispute, the Foreign Office released a series of similar reports written by Morton.
Asbestos miners’ strike
The dossiers, which survey Special Branch units in three southern African colonies, contain papers from MI5, including some marked “top secret”.
Morton wrote the reports while on secondment from MI5 to the Colonial Office as its security and intelligence adviser.
They reveal Morton advised Special Branch officers in Swaziland (now Eswatini) during a strike at an asbestos mine in 1963.
Miners, who demanded £1 a day, were interrogated by Special Branch and army intelligence using torture methods known as the five techniques, according to a book by journalist Ian Cobain.
Suspects were hooded and forced to stand in stress positions amid the sound of constant white noise while they were deprived of food and sleep – techniques the European Court of Human Rights found to be “inhumane” when later used in Northern Ireland.
Although Morton did not directly discuss such methods in files on Swaziland seen by Declassified, he appears to allude to them with references to “expert techniques”.
At the height of the asbestos strike, Swaziland’s resident commissioner asked the Colonial Office for “very urgent reorganisation and training of Swaziland’s Special Branch”.
Morton replied the next day, advising that a Special Branch captain in Swaziland, who had recently completed “an additional course with the Kenya Special Branch…is available to assist…in the application of expert techniques”.
The reference to Kenya is concerning as torture by British forces in the east African colony had been routine during the preceding decade.
Morton was no stranger to Swaziland, having visited the land-locked territory a year before and after the 1963 strike.
On a third visit there in 1966 he described its Special Branch as a “well-balanced, professional organisation”. He praised their “procedures for the recruitment and control of agents and informers”, commenting that “value is being obtained for money”.
Among other files found by Declassified are instructions Morton gave to police in Basutoland (now Lesotho) for undercover operations in 1966.
He said: “An ‘infiltration’ register should be maintained by the head of Special Branch to show the nature of coverage by all sources in respect of particular targets.
“Quarterly reports should be obtained from…agent handlers on the performance of individual agents.”
Morton returned to MI5 after his stint at the Colonial Office and rose to be director of the Security Service’s counter-subversion branch. He died in 1985.
Inconsistent
His reports from southern Africa, many of which were released in 2019 but only now discovered at the UK National Archives, are the latest example of censorship being applied inconsistently.
Under the Freedom of Information Act, authorities can withhold files that relate to security bodies such as MI5 and the SAS.
Yet the Morton telegrams released by the Foreign Office contain repeated references to the Security Service and suggestions that colonial Special Branch officers attend MI5 courses in London.
A serving MI5 officer accompanied him on several of his trips and correspondence with MI5 headquarters in London are among the papers that have been released.
The Ministry of Defence also released papers in 2007 that detailed advice Morton gave to authorities in Sri Lanka during the late 1970s.
He suggested their security forces receive SAS training to crack down on an uprising among the island’s Tamil minority.
‘Unnecessary secrecy’
More recently, the PSNI released another review of Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) Special Branch, compiled by a serving MI5 officer Sir Patrick Walker in 1980.
Walker recommended that arrests of terror suspects “must be cleared with Special Branch” in advance, to ensure they were not state agents.
Detectives “should not proceed immediately to a charge whenever an admission has been obtained” from suspects, in case they could be recruited as agents.
A couple of points in the Walker report remain redacted, which appear from the context to refer to Morton’s earlier report.
Daniel Holder from the Committee for the Administration of Justice, a human rights group in Belfast which first obtained the Walker report, commented: “The Morton report into RUC Special Branch is over fifty years old.
“Thanks to Declassified UK it is now clear that similar reports by the same author are now in the public domain, as is the Walker report which superseded Morton.
“It is difficult to think of any other explanation other than that there is either something profoundly shocking in the 1973 Morton report about RUC Special Branch that there is an ongoing attempt to conceal, or it has fallen to the over-zealous desire for unnecessary secrecy on legacy issues which has been typical of past approaches.”
Holder added: “Before the Boris Johnson government’s 2023 Legacy Act shut down all of the independent investigations being conducted into Northern Ireland conflict related cases, we had a number of important reports investigating human rights violations relating to covert policing and military intelligence.
“This included the ‘Operation Kenova’ interim report of March 2024 which recommended that the security classifications of previous Northern Ireland legacy reports be reviewed so that they are declassified and made public.
“In light of all of this we will be making a fresh request for the PSNI to now release the Morton report.”
The PSNI did not respond to a request for comment.