Police chief considering release of secret MI5 report on Troubles

Northern Ireland’s chief constable Jon Boutcher is reviewing the security classification of an MI5 file from 1973 to see if it can finally be made public.

Jack Morton, a senior MI5 officer, drew up a dossier on how police special branch should respond to the IRA more than half a century ago.

Morton completed his report at the height of the Troubles when the police, army and intelligence agencies were recruiting agents inside the IRA and loyalist paramilitary groups.

Throughout the conflict in Northern Ireland, state agents participated in terrorism including murder and torture.

Boutcher revealed he was reviewing the Morton report’s classification while being questioned by the Northern Ireland Affairs committee in Westminster on Wednesday.

The Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) previously refused to release the Morton report when taken to court by Declassified.

However that decision was made before Boutcher – who is seen by some as a transparency champion – became chief constable.

Claire Hanna MP asked him if releasing the Morton report and other files would “help us to understand better what those in power knew and when about the handling and mishandling of agents?”

Boutcher replied: “I have instigated a piece of work to do a security review of those documents – because this hasn’t happened from a government perspective.

“And my intention is – so this work is underway – is to then go to partners in the security agencies”, the Northern Ireland secretary Hilary Benn and other partners to ask them “how do you feel about that?”

‘Culture of overreach’

Boutcher anticipated that “having done the security check, these documents can now be put in the public domain.”

He had recommended that the classification of Morton’s report and a host of other “legacy” files from the Troubles be reviewed in 2024.

He explained that his colleague, Sir Iain Livingstone, “has been pursuing through the Cabinet Office a mechanism for those recommendations to be delivered upon. And that includes the Morton report. That’s on the list of reports.”

Other documents on the list are thought to include the so-called Stalker and Sampson reports into whether police operated a shoot-to-kill policy during the Troubles.

Daniel Holder, director of Belfast human rights group the Committee on the Administration of Justice, told Declassified: “We welcome the PSNI announcement that they will review the security classification of legacy reports and that that exercise importantly includes the Morton report.

“At the same time it is concerning that the UK government and Cabinet Office have done nothing to take forward the [2024] recommendation to review the security classification of reports in order for them to be made public.

“It remains unclear if it is the general culture of overreach on secrecy that has kept the Morton report under wraps to date or if there are specific issues in this report into RUC Special Branch or that someone is desperate it does not see the light of day.”

Who was Jack Morton?

Morton served as a colonial police chief in India and was director of intelligence in Malaya (now Malaysia) during a communist insurgency against British rule in the 1950s.

He strongly supported the British empire and once described Indians as “a sort of immature, backward and needy people whom it was the natural British function to govern and administer.”

His colonial background gave him extensive experience of undercover operations and armed policing.

He was brought out of retirement in 1973 to review the situation in Northern Ireland.

Victims of the Troubles have expressed concern about what might be contained in his report because, a year after it was compiled, 33 people were killed by Loyalist car bombs in Dublin and Monaghan.

A subsequent inquiry by former Irish Supreme Court judge Henry Barron concluded: “A number of those suspected for the bombings were reliably said to have had relationships with British Intelligence and/or Royal Ulster Constabulary special branch officers.”

Morton advised the Foreign Office and Colonial Office on counter-insurgency strategies across the world.

He urged Sri Lankan security forces to seek training from battle-hardened SAS troops in 1979 when confronted by the Tamil independence movement.

It was at that stage mostly a peaceful struggle but the country soon became engulfed in a full-scale civil war, with Sri Lanka hiring former SAS mercenaries to help suppress Tamils.

Despite the secrecy around Morton’s report on Northern Ireland, other government departments have released even older dossiers he compiled on security situations in different countries.

Those include a strike at an asbestos mine in Swaziland (now Eswatini) in 1963.

Miners, who demanded £1 a day, were interrogated by Special Branch and army intelligence using torture methods known as the five techniques.

Morton died in 1985.