In a first television interview, a member of the gang linked to the Dublin Monaghan bombs and many other atrocities reveals that their intent was to foment a civil war - and in that event, they were confident they could "crush the other side".
Taoisigh Jack Lynch and Liam Cosgrave were met with flat denials when they raised collusion with their British counterparts. The film will reveal that the British were well aware of it.
Supported by archive evidence and interviews with senior Irish and British officials of the period, the film reveals that the British Army decided early on it could not fight a war on two fronts and concentrated its efforts on "destroying" the Provisional IRA, while at the same time saying publicly it was dealing with the conflict in an even handed way.
Such was the extent of collusion in the eighties, the film will also reveal that an RUC Special Branch officer tipped off a UDA brigadier about an informer. It could easily have led to the man's murder. Northern Ireland's Police chief George Hamilton confirms a police officer could face serious charges.
In the programme, a former UDA brigadier also names senior loyalist paramilitaries he believes were working as agents for the security forces.
A former head of RUC Special Branch also reveals that he personally asked the then British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher for a legal framework for the handling of agents within paramilitary groups. This didn't happen because, in effect, HMG was saying "carry on - just don't get caught".
Even as late as 2003, six years after the Good Friday Agreement , when a former Police Ombudsman began to investigate new murders involving collusion she reveals for the first time that senior British Government officials tried to put pressure on her not to probe. She eventually uncovered truly shocking levels of collusion between police officers and what she described as serial killers.
A former Chief Constable of the Northern Ireland police service also states that justice would have been better served if a British Army brigadier, in charge of a secret unit that ran an agent convicted of multiple murder conspiracies, had faced a public trial.
The film will also reveal that a new collusion investigation has been launched into 19 other linked killings and a former British security minister admits that the scale of collusion was much greater than he imagined.
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