By David McCullagh and Fiachra Ó Cionnaith
The top British soldier in Northern Ireland was so enraged by the establishment of a new inquiry into Bloody Sunday that he launched an extraordinary attack on his own government, accusing it of a "cynical political move".
The incendiary remarks by General Rupert Smith were made at a dinner with Irish officials based in Belfast, according to newly released State Papers.
Derry's Bloody Sunday in January 1972 saw British paratroopers shoot 26 unarmed civilians during a civil rights march.
Thirteen of them died on the day, while another died some months later.
A judicial tribunal shortly after the shootings under the English Lord Chief Justice, Lord Widgery, blamed the organisers of the march for the trouble, largely clearing the soldiers of wrongdoing.
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Relatives of the victims campaigned for a new inquiry for over a quarter of a century, and in January 1998, then British prime minister Tony Blair announced a new tribunal to be chaired by Lord Saville.
His decision did not go down well with the British military and particularly not with the commander of British troops in Northern Ireland, General Rupert Smith.
Smith was himself a former officer in the Parachute Regiment who had served in the North, though he wasn't in Derry on Bloody Sunday.
He had also suffered 28% burns to his body after being caught in an explosion in the North in 1978.
Irish officials in the Anglo-Irish Secretariat in Belfast invited him to dinner in June 1998, near the end of his time in Northern Ireland.
They regarded him as more cerebral than the average British soldier and fond of provocative theoretical debate, though this was not "accompanied by sensitivity to nationalist concerns or any real understanding of how the Army is perceived on the ground in Northern Ireland".
At the mention of the new Saville Tribunal, Smith expressed his "trenchant opposition" to what he called a "cynical political move" designed to scapegoat soldiers "yet again".
He insisted "with some passion" that the Widgery report had "got it about right".
It was, he claimed, "immature" to try to assign absolute guilt in such complex situations.
Once he calmed down, Smith accepted that Bloody Sunday was "a uniquely appalling event" and that a new enquiry was part of the price to be paid for a comprehensive settlement.
However, his "vehement" opinions clearly reflected a belief that politicians were responsible and were trying to shift the blame onto the military.
It was quite extraordinary for such a senior figure to express such views to representatives of another State.
A year later, the Secretariat hosted Smith's replacement, General Hew Pike.
He was "a quieter and more unassuming type than his predecessor...and is also of a less cerebral disposition. He confessed himself 'baffled' by NI politics since he arrived here and said that he is on a very steep learning curve".
But again, the Saville Inquiry was a bone of contention, Pike insisted that the British Army would resist Saville's efforts to lift the anonymity of the soldiers involved.
Ian Hamill, a Ministry of Defence official attached to the army's headquarters in Northern Ireland, was reported to have described Saville as "an expert on Scottish commercial law [who] knows very little about Ireland".
Clearly the establishment of the inquiry had raised the hackles of the military - but not nearly as much as Saville's findings, when he finally reported in 2010.
The tribunal found that the soldiers had "lost control" on the day, that none of the victims had posed a threat, and that the troops had lied to cover up their actions.
[Based on documents in 2024/28/11, 2024/28/12 and 2024/28/43]
