Ulster Freedom Fighters

The Ulster Freedom Fighters (UFF) is a Northern Irish Loyalist paramilitary group that has claimed responsibility for dozens of assassinations believed to have been carried out by members of the Ulster Defense Association (UDA).

In Northern Ireland, since the late 1960s, bloody conflict has been regular between the province's Roman Catholics (also called Republicans or Nationalists), who wish Northern Ireland to become a part of [Page 377]the Republic of Ireland, and its Protestants (also called Loyalists or Unionists), who wish it to remain part of Great Britain. Armed paramilitary groups have sprung up in both communities. One such Loyalist group, the Ulster Defense Association, began a campaign of sectarian assassinations in the spring of 1972, killing Catholics at random in reprisal for attacks by the Irish Republican Army (IRA). By the end of the year more than 80 people had been killed.

The Northern Irish police and British government were initially reluctant to acknowledge the murders as politically motivated sectarian attacks. They did not want to give the IRA a propaganda victory and feared provoking a Protestant backlash that could destroy the delicate peace negotiations then under way. For its part, the UDA could not claim responsibility for the attacks without the organization being declared illegal and many of its members arrested.

At a meeting in May 1973, UDA leaders decided that a shadow organization called the Ulster Freedom Fighters would be created within the UDA. The UDA could continue its attacks, but the UFF would claim responsibility. The UFF would also streamline the UDA's terrorist operations. The UDA was structured like the British Army; the UFF, in contrast, would be comprised of small, hard-to-penetrate cells of four or five individuals. The most reliable members of the Belfast death squads that had committed the previous murders were chosen as UFF commanders. On June 26, 1973, a man claiming to be “Captain Black,” of the UFF, called a Belfast newspaper and claimed responsibility for the murder of Catholic politician Paddy Wilson and his companion, the first public use of the UFF name.

The UFF was banned as a terrorist organization in November 1973, while the UDA remained legal (until 1992). Despite the banning, the UFF claimed responsibility for or was implicated in hundreds of deaths over the next 25 years. The UFF has also been involved in the assassinations and attempted assassinations of several prominent Republican activists, including the murder of lawyer Pat Finucane in 1989, and the attempted murders of Bernadette Devlin McAliskey in 1981 and Gerry Adams, leader of Sinn Féin (the IRA's political arm) in 1984. The UFF was also implicated in a 1989 scandal that involved members of Northern Ireland's security forces who had passed on secret police intelligence about Republicans to Loyalist paramilitaries for use in planning assassinations.

In January 1998, the UFF and the UDA declared a cease-fire in compliance with the Good Friday Accords. A series of attacks beginning in 1998 by the groups calling themselves the Red Hand Defenders and Orange Volunteers is believed to have been carried out by former UDA/UFF members. On October 12, 2001, the British government declared that it no longer considered the UDA and the UFF to be honoring the cease-fire, although the group itself has not announced the cease-fire at an end.