By any standards, what the Stevens Report is threatening to say about the role of the intelligence agencies and the security services in the North beggars belief. To find that part of the recognised forces of law and order in the North have been involved in the murder of citizens with `near impunity' over many years is astonishing. These allegations have been around for years, but were frequently discounted as `Provo-propaganda' and, especially by unionists, as a concerted campaign to denigrate what was seen as the `war against terrorism'. Now to discover Stevens is suggesting that people at the heart of the British security services were involved in organised mass murder over a long period of years is without precedent in British legal history in the modern era. In the 1920s, the behaviour of the Auxiliary and Black and Tan forces in Ireland raised international concerns. In the early 1950s, there were allegations of widespread torture in Korea. British post-colonial operations in Kenya and Malaya in the 1950s also brought up allegations of such abuses. But what the Stevens Report will reportedly point up is something quite different. It all took place under British control in recent years. In the context of membership of the European Union, it makes the seriousness of the scenario all the greater. Already the Guardian's leak of the Stevens Report is suggesting that, while a state bordering on `institutional collusion' existed, there is no evidence of a conspiracy stretching throughout the wider reaches of the British establishment. It adds that there is no evidence that British ministers sanctioned such killings. There are two ways to read this. One is that the inner reaches of British intelligence and security continue to operate beyond democratic political control, as has often been alleged. The other is that the report is already preparing to sacrifice some of the braves to save the chiefs. Not for the first time will the Byzantine British security apparatus be brought in to camouflage ultimate responsibility. Now that the report is about to be published, it is important to recall the modus operandi many have long suspected as being behind the campaign of murdering civilian Catholics. Setting aside for the moment the warfare between the paramilitaries, thousands of innocent Catholic civilians were deliberately killed. It was a deadly pogrom with a specific purpose. From the Shankill Butchers era in the early 1970s through the Murder Triangle killings and the years of the LVF, Catholics of all ages and sexes were murdered without mercy. In the Lurgan/Portadown area over the past 30 years nearly 300 Catholic civilians were murdered; their deaths remain unexplained. They were housewives, farmers, taxi drivers, milkmen or just young Catholics shot dead in random slayings. The crime of each one was simply being the unlucky Catholic in the wrong place at the wrong time. The rationale for these actions was that terrorising the Catholic population, particularly in areas where the IRA was strong, would weaken the IRA's campaign. Many murders were simple revenge murders in particular for the killing of part-time Protestant security force members. Yet in the long years of the propaganda war, the ruthless and random nature of this campaign against innocent civilians was never exposed. The official liars within the British security services became expert at compromising the innocence of these victims, the long years of Section 31 censorship buried them in the shadows of innuendo. And there were always enough hacks about to swallow and regurgitate the disinformation they were fed daily. This campaign was never made up of spontaneous reaction by loyalist paramilitaries to IRA murders. It always smacked of careful organisation and planning. There was considerable evidence that the entire loyalist paramilitary structure existed at the behest and service of hidden hands and that parts of these organisations weren't aware of what other parts were doing. Over the years, more and more evidence of direct security force involvement in loyalist paramilitarism emerged. As security services minders and contacts lurked in the background, the straw that finally broke the camel's back may have been the Pat Finucane and Rosemary Nelson murders. Both victims were high profile, and well-served by determined and knowledgeable campaigners. Their killings did not simply disappear. Finucane and Nelson's murders were the equivalent of Veronica Guerin's murder in the Republic. Some years ago in conversation with a former security operative, who had fallen foul of his superiors, he explained something to me that I have never been able to forget. It was so compellingly pragmatic that it underwrites the collusion scenario. In a situation such as that encountered by the secret services in the Six Counties, he said, it would be militarily impossible to win the war if both paramilitary sides were allowed to operate beyond their control. The rationale was that since they could only fight one side in the war and sooner or later the IRA campaign would provoke a similar loyalist reaction -- from the outset they had to become involved in that loyalist response. Since it was all inevitable anyway, the security services should control and contain it and where possible use it for their own purposes in the war against the IRA. Of course, it would require an extensive campaign of law breaking and collusion up to and including murder, but there was no other way to contain the situation. "How could you allow the loyalist heavies a free rein?" he said. "They could eventually end up bombing London for their own purposes. The men in Whitehall were determined that what happened to the French in North Africa would never happen to them." In war, all sides treat civilians as pawns to all sides, but if the Stevens Report is as anticipated it will open up a vista so appalling that the post war liberal and democratic British state should be shaken to its core.