Freddie Scappaticci and the illusion of intelligence dominance
How a misreading of the Northern Ireland Troubles shaped counterinsurgency in Iraq.
Freddie Scappaticci, the man thought to be the British army's top mole in the IRA, agent Stakeknife, died last week.
Ironically, the news came only a few days after an update from the investigation into Stakeknife's activities, alleged to include some 18 murders. Operation Kenova is nearing the end of the process of taking representations from those criticised in its report, a process that will presumably be simplified after Scappaticci's death.
There has always been scepticism about whether Scappaticci would be prosecuted. It is now certain that he will never be tried. Operation Kenova officers have nevertheless expressed the hope his death would encourage new witnesses, insisting that prosecutors are still considering files from their investigation.
The allegations against Stakeknife include some of the darkest episodes of the Dirty War in Northern Ireland. Some allegations against him relate to the murder of informants in the IRA like himself, sacrificed to protect his cover.
It is sometimes suggested that such actions were necessary to bring about the peace process. David Trimble believed that Stakeknife's actions forced Sinn Fein to the negotiating table.
The most authoritative examination of this thesis, Thomas Leahy's 2020 book The Intelligence War Against the IRA, argues that Stakeknife had 'a significant impact on the IRA in Belfast' but nevertheless finds that 'the current literature overplays infiltration as a main reason for a decline in killings by the Belfast IRA between 1976 and 1994.' Other explanations include shifting tactics and the electoral rise of Sinn Féin. The IRA in rural areas and in Britain was less affected by agent penetration, enabling high-profile 'spectaculars' like the 1991 mortar attack on Downing Street.
Ultimately, Leahy concludes that 'the complexity of the IRA prevented the intelligence war from containing the entire organisation and forcing republicans into peace. The Provisional IRA still could not win, however, because they lacked substantial support from the Irish people.'
The peace process reflected the primacy of politics, rather than triumph in an intelligence war which brought its problems for the British as well as republicans.
Indeed, it has been suggested that Scappaticci's exposure was intended to divert attention from some of the other activities of his handlers in the Force Research Unit, such as the involvement of agent Brian Nelson in the murder of solicitor Pat Finucane.
In his 2004 book The Trigger Men, veteran Troubles journalist Martin Dillon wrote:
It could be argued that the 'Stakeknife' story was created to minimise the damaging effects of the Stevens investigations on the whole intelligence community. It shifted the media focus to the IRA - a partner in the peace process, with an equally violent role in the dirty war. One could reasonably assume 'Stakeknife' was intended to weaken the IRA at a time when it was refusing to decomission its arsenal. The unsubstantiated 'Stakeknife' revelations created deep suspicion in IRA ranks. some of its leading operatives considered breaking with the organisation and transferring their loyalties to an IRA offshoot.
Stakeknife's exposure came at a crucial moment in the peace process, with the Northern Ireland Assembly suspended and elections postponed following a police raid on Sinn Féin offices on Stormont. The allegations of IRA spying which prompted that raid would eventually lead to the exposure of another agent in the republican movement, Denis Donaldson.
As Dillon notes, the-then emergent narrative, that the intelligence war had manipulated the IRA into peace, risked fuelling dissident republican attempts to return to conflict.
It also had potentially far wider ramifications. At the same time when the British Army was spiriting Scappaticci out of Belfast in May 2003, other British soldiers were in Iraq, helping to establish the Coalition Provisional Authority following the formal end of the invasion at the beginning of the month.
A few years earlier, Northern Ireland was seen as an example of the triumph of politics over military stalemate. Now it became a model for intelligence warfare. In 2001, the RUC was abolished, to be replaced by the more human rights-focused Police Service of Northern Ireland. Only a few years later, veteran RUC Special Branch officers were advising on one of the largest counter-insurgency campaigns since the Vietnam War.
As Iraq dissolved into sectarian conflict in 2006, the neoconservative Weekly Standard called for a new approach it labelled 'Intelligence Dominance.'
Some democracies--notably the United Kingdom and Israel--have mastered this approach through bloody trial and error, in the course of meeting the challenges posed by armed groups. Though each country tailored its techniques to the specifics of its geopolitical situation, the techniques they came up with are similar from country to country.
The lessons they drew from Northern Ireland make instructive reading when compared with Thomas Leahy's analysis. One Northern Ireland operative told the Weekly Standard:
'We had to know what the IRA boys were doing, keep them on the defensive, always causing them to worry about our next move. You must collect comprehensive intelligence--complete block by block coverage--of each location out of which the terrorists operate.'
This is exactly the kind of surveillance which Leahy found was relatively effective in Belfast, but difficult to replicate in rural areas.
The Weekly Standard goes onto describe how an IRA bombing campaign was foiled in Belfast in the mid-1980s, because the householder of the gang's safehouse was spotted buying an unusual amount of groceries. Leahy's account agrees that this type of operation was regularly foiled in Belfast, but also shows that the IRA retained the capability to carry out large-scale commercial bombings in the city, right up until the 1994 ceasefire.
If their account of RUC methods was probably accurate, the Weekly Standard writers over-stated the degree of dominance that had been achieved. Inflated claims about the intelligence war against the IRA, rooted in the political stand-off of the early 2000s peace process, contributed to the hubris of the War on Terror.