Stakeknife: The truth comes dropping slow
New files likely to show MI5 knew of controversial army agent from late 1970s
Welcome! I’m Tom Griffin and this is my intelligence history newsletter. Feel free to share this post with the button below.
Incoming Northern Ireland Secretary Hilary Benn will have to deal with the fallout from the latest revelations (Northern Ireland Office).
What did MI5 know? That is the question I asked here in April following publication of a police report on agent ‘Stakeknife’, a key source working for the British Army inside the IRA during the Northern Ireland Troubles.
The interim report of Operation Kenova concluded that the handling of Stakeknife, widely thought to be the late Freddie Scappaticci, probably ‘resulted in more lives being lost than saved.’
In an interview shortly afterwards, former MI5 chief Eliza Manningham-Buller said that ‘we weren't aware of Stakeknife until after we had responsibility, as we did in many other cases, for resettling him as an agent.’ That would likely have been in 2003, when Scappaticci fled Belfast.
At the time I found that difficult to square with our existing knowledge about the relationship between MI5 and the Force Research Unit, the Army element which ran Stakeknife, Most of that evidence comes from the De Silva report into the killing of solicitor Pat Finucane, in which another FRU agent, loyalist Brian Nelson was implicated.
De Silva found that, while there was much friction, the FRU was accountable for its source management to the Director and Co-ordinator of Intelligence at the Northern Ireland Office. The FRU’s source records were actually held by the DCI’s representative at Army HQ Northern Ireland.1 Since both the DCI and his representative were usually MI5 officers it’s hard to see how MI5 would not have known about an agent as significant as Stakeknife.
Now it turns out that they did. Yesterday Operation Kenova revealed that MI5 had disclosed new material in April, weeks after publication of Kenova’s interim report.
From the due diligence carried out, our initial assessment is that the files contain significant new material which appears to point to new investigative leads not previously known. Importantly the material does not indicate further murders of individuals that involved the agent Stakeknife and as such no further deaths would fall into the Operation Kenova Terms of Reference based on the now disclosed material.
According to the BBC’s Peter Taylor ‘The new files are expected to reveal that MI5’s knowledge of Scappattici went back to the late 1970s when he was first recruited by the Army's clandestine Force Reaction Unit (FRU).’
The best that can be said of the resulting picture is that British intelligence in Northern Ireland looks slightly less of a patchwork of rivalries than it did before. The right hand did know what the left was doing, although it remains to be seen how much directing and co-ordinating the DCI was doing in the Stakeknife case.
The new revelations raise profound questions about MI5’s attitude to external scrutiny. The former head of Operation Kenova, and Current Chief Constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland, Jon Boutcher, wrote:
It is unacceptable that MI5 continue to provide material to the Operation Kenova Team so long after they undertook to have given full access to Kenova of all the material they held about the agent Stakeknife. My interim report highlighted a number of issues in obtaining information from MI5 and I reported the similar experiences of Lord Stevens, Judge Cory and others who each called out the unacceptable practices of those not co-operating with and withholding information from legacy investigations.
There are also questions about prosecution decisions made on the basis of the interim report, especially as new prosecutions are precluded by the Legacy Act, the previous Government’s attempt to sweep the Troubles under the carpet.
The new Labour Northern Ireland Secretary, Hilary Benn, is committed to abolishing the Legacy Act and reforming mechanisms for dealing with the past. That task now looks even more complicated.
Sir Desmond de Silva, Pat Finucane Review, Volume 1, p. 12 December 2012, p.75.