David Rupert documentary highlights MI5 focus on infiltration over prosecution
BBC Northern Ireland's Spotlight strand featured an intriguing documentary last night on David Rupert, the agent who infiltrated the Real IRA for the FBI and MI5 from the late 1990s onwards.
The program (still available on iPlayer) highlighted significant cultural differences between the agencies responsible for domestic security intelligence in the UK and US:
Rupert's spy masters seemingly had different priorities.
The FBI is primarily an evidence-gathering organisation, versus MI5 whose focus is on intelligence gathering.
"MI5 wanted to keep it going forever," said Rupert.
"The FBI won. I mean they won the argument. It was more important to MI5 to have a thumb on the pulse than it is to go arrest a couple of people and prosecute them."
In early 2001, in a top-secret meeting in Dublin, Rupert made a detailed statement to Irish police who were building a case to prosecute McKevitt, who lived in the Irish Republic (BBC News).
The FBI is a police agency originating in the federal Department of Justice. MI5 emerged out of the Secret Service Bureau formed with a focus on counter-espionage before the First World War.
The summit of its success in that role came with the Double-Cross system during the Second World War, when MI5 focused on turning agents in preference to prosecuting them, and effectively controlled German intelligence in Britain as a result.
Although MI5's role in the early years of the Irish Troubles is greater than sometimes claimed, it's culture was slow to change in response. In the 1970s, its focus shifted not to counter-terrorism but to counter-subversion and the rise of the New Left, and the situation in Northern Ireland was initially interpreted in those terms.
Not until the early 1990s would Stella Rimington win responsibility for counter-terrorism in Britain from the Metropolitan Police Special Branch, a remit which would be extended to Northern Ireland with the demise of the RUC.
Rimington herself claimed that MI5 could have taken over earlier, but older officers preferred to leave fast-moving counter-terrorist investigations to the police. The early revelations of David Shayler partly reflected the frustrations of the younger generation of MI5 counter-terrorist officers with the service's existing culture.
The shift towards counter-terrorism has been much more profound in the 21st century, the era of the 9/11 and 7/7 attacks. Nevertheless, MI5's organisational USP is still very much a long-term infiltration approach rooted in its earlier history.
MI5's resistance to prosecuting Michael McKevitt is consistent with that approach, and highlights the risks when it is applied to counter-terrorism rather than counter-espionage.
The forthcoming Omagh inquiry will have to consider whether MI5 should have passed the police more of Rupert's intelligence about Real IRA targeting of the town.
The recent report on the 2017 Manchester Arena bombing highlighted several failures of communication between MI5 and counter-terrorist police, despite an apparently much improved relationship. It is worth considering whether this was still a reflection of a culture focused on the security of long-term intelligence operations rather than criminal investigation.