Stakeknife: What did MI5 know?
Britain’s The Rest is Politics podcast hosted two former intelligence chiefs recently, Baroness Eliza Manningham-Buller of MI5 and Sir John Sawers of MI6.
The episode was of interest partly because of the identity of its hosts. As Tony Blair’s director of communications, Alistair Campbell was heavily involved in the British Government’s controversial use of intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq War. Campbell’s co-presenter Rory Stewart, the former MP and son of deputy MI6 chief Brian Stewart, served as a coalition governor in Iraq after the invasion.
Manningham-Buller and Sawers make some pointed and compelling criticisms of the US-UK use of intelligence around that time, and the whole podcast is definitely worth a listen.
However, I was most struck by Manningham-Buller’s discussion of the recent Operation Kenova report into agent Stakeknife, a British Army mole in the IRA who was found to have cost more lives than he saved.
…’we weren't aware of Stakeknife until after we had responsibility, as we did in many other cases, for resettling him as an agent. It's a disgraceful case. To some degree I have sympathy with the NCOs who were running those sort of cases. They were not properly trained. They didn't have rules and discipline.
I heard your comments on this operation on an earlier podcast, and I dissent from a couple of things you said, where you said the police had systems and requirements from the '60s. They didn't. You know. The RUC was had up for sleep deprivation. Lots of mistakes were made. My organisation had very strict rules on this from the early '80s onwards, late '70s onwards.
As a former head of MI5’s Northern Ireland counter-terrorism branch in the mid-1990s, Manningham-Buller is well-placed to comment on this issue.1 While it is plausible that MI5 didn’t have direct responsibility for Stakeknife until his resettlement (presumably in 2003), it’s harder to believe the service had no inkling of him before that.
Stakeknife was run by the Army’s Force Research Unit (FRU). The fullest account of the FRU’s relationship with MI5 is in the De Silva report into the murder of solicitor Pat Finucane, a case in which FRU agent Brian Nelson featured heavily.
De Silva extensively documents the lack of intelligence guidelines which Manningham-Buller describes.2 He also records significant rivalries between intelligence agencies, particularly the army and the police, represented by RUC Special Branch.3 MI5’s T Branch agent-runners seem to have prioritised their relationship with the RUC at the expense of the FRU.4
MI5 were nevertheless aware of Nelson’s recruitment from an early stage, and even asked their liaison officer at Army HQ Northern Ireland, the Assistant Secretary (Political), to sound out the FRU about taking him over.5 This led to a falling out between the FRU and MI5’s Patrick Walker.6
Despite this conflict, the preponderance of evidence is that MI5 exercised a degree of oversight over FRU. The army unit’s 1986 directive stated:
The overall direction for source coverage within the Province is the responsibility of the Director and Coordinator of Intelligence (DCI), who exercises this responsibility through the various Intelligence Committees. Within HQNI the Assistant Secretary Political (ASP), who is DCI’s representative, is to be kept informed of the status of current sources on a regular basis. In addition, he is the Security Service’s representative, responsible for the maintenance and safekeeping of all FRU source files.7
The DCI and the ASP were both MI5 officers, although not within the same chain of command as T Branch. The head of the FRU claimed that MI5 provided ‘close monitoring and support of our work.’8
The ASP or DASP always accompanied me when I went once a month to Stormont to brief the Intelligence Co-ordinator on FRU casework. I also recall that the ASP sat in on my regular briefings to CLF. Sadly both the ASP and the Intelligence Co-ordinator are now dead but I must stress that they knew about Nelson’s activities, including the intelligence records [the ‘intelligence dump’] because I personally briefed them. They also knew of my approach to the application of the Directive and Instructions and they never suggested it was wrong.9
The DCI in place in 1990, probably the late John Deverell, commented on this:
There is an element of truth in this [A/05’s claim] but it is not really an accurate representation of the realities. It would be wrong to say that we had carefully monitored the case; [A/05] was not a man who sought our advice (or that of anyone else). It is however true that ASP and DASP could always see the files if they wanted them and [A/05] did brief me roughly once a month, although 6137 [Nelson] would be only one of about 15 cases – and by no means the most important or significant.10
Stakeknife must surely have been one of these 15 cases, perhaps even the most significant. Operation Kenova’s interim report confirms MI5’s oversight role.
During the Troubles, MI5 advised and assisted the FRU generally, was copied into its intelligence and even conducted a supportive review of its handling of Stakeknife in particular.
However, MI5 was not responsible for how Stakeknife was targeted or run and could not sensibly be criticised for the conduct or operation of the FRU or any of its agents. Indeed, MI5 came onto Kenova’s radar in a largely tangential way because it retained a vast amount of FRU and RUC Special Branch intelligence product when others did not.11
Despite Operation Kenova’s own fractious relationship with MI5, it seems to have reached a more sympathetic interpretation of the service’s relationship with FRU than De Silva, who concluded that ‘the Service failed to carry out their advisory and co-ordinating duties adequately in relation to Nelson and the FRU.’12
Kenova’s final report will presumably provide more detailed evidence comparable to De Silva’s. As things stand there must be a suspicion that just as the politicians declined to provide legal guidelines, those charged with the overall direction of source coverage were happy to leave the untrained NCOs to carry the can.
Christopher Andrew, Defence of the Realm, The Authorized History of MI5, Allen Lane, 2009, p.786/
Sir Desmond de Silva, Pat Finucane Review, Volume 1, p. 12 December 2012, p.75.
De Silva, p.67.
De Silva, p.66.
De Silva, p.109.
De Silva, p.112.
De Silva p.221.
De Silva p.222.
De Silva p.222. The CLF was the Commander Land Forces Northern Ireland.
De Silva p.224.
OPERATION KENOVA NORTHERN IRELAND ‘STAKEKNIFE’ LEGACY INVESTIGATION, Interim Report of Jon Boutcher QPM, 2024, pp.118-119.
De Silva, p.9.