Occasional Slugger guest writer Gary Kent speculates that quite a few senior members of the NI press corps may have been sucker punched into believing the Stakeknife story in all its gory detail.
A golden rule in life is that if something’s too good to be true, then it probably isn’t.
Opponents of the IRA must have been chuckling at recent allegations that the top British Army Agent in the IRA was the deputy head of its internal security operation. The Agent’s codename was Stakeknife. It now increasingly seems that there is something fishy about the whole story.
It also seems as if there are two men of the same name. Initially, however, the revelations were seen as a devastating blow to the guerrilla organisation. The man, named by many newspapers as Freddie Scappaticci, was said to have volunteered his services in 1978.
He may not have been involved in external operations but had an internal vantage point over all the volunteers of the organisation. He was also allegedly involved in dozens of murders.
Former IRA volunteers said that his allegedly secret role would be of great concern to the IRA and its political wing Sinn Fein. But the lurid story of Scappaticco’s allegedly bloody record and services to the British state is fast unravelling.
Commentators should have seen this one coming.
It was said that he was to be exposed by a disenchanted British agent in the pro-British loyalist paramilitary forces. But just how would such an agent have known about someone who was often said to be the crown in the jewels of the British intelligence operation against the IRA?
Stakeknife would have been a closely guarded secret and yet the newspapers have been chock-a-block full of details of his life. Any self-respecting member of the intelligence services would have cringed if such information about a genuine agent was released into the public domain.
Who, after all, would ever put their lives at risk to work for the British secret services if a low-level informer could one day blow their cover? There is also confusion about the whereabouts of Mr Scappaticci. Some reports located him in his house in hard-line West Belfast while others say that he was whisked away to a safe house in an Army base in England.
Mr Scappaticci has now released a statement through his lawyer, Michael Flanigan in Belfast.
A number of most serious allegations have been made about my client in the press since Sunday. My client denies each and every one of these allegations. He is not “Stakeknife”. He has never been an informer, has never contacted the intelligence services, has never been taken into protective custody and has never received any money from the security services.
My client is the victim of misinformation, apparently emanating from the security forces and disseminated by the press. Mr Scappaticci is an ordinary working man living in west Belfast and as such has no means at his disposal to combat this onslaught of false allegations.
Clearly, his life has been placed in danger as a result and he is now in hiding. He has not been arrested and no attempt has been made by the police to speak to him about any of the matters referred to by the media. He has not been contacted by the Stevens investigation team.
The plot has thickened. It’s now possible to construct all sorts of conspiracy theories to explain what has happened. The Home Affairs Editor of the Daily Telegraph, Philip Johnston posits a few in a paper that’s normally reliable on security issues:
Around the dangerous and murky world of counter-terrorism nothing is ever quite as it appears. In order to protect agents and informers, false stories abound, fake identities are created and black propaganda is disseminated.
One school of thought has it that Stakeknife does not exist but is a deliberate construction to discomfit the IRA.
Stakeknife does exist but is not the man identified. There is a mole at the very top of the IRA but in order to protect him, the Belfast man named at the weekend has been thrown to the wolves.
Stakeknife does not exist. There is no senior agent at the top of the IRA but since the terrorists think there is, what better than to sow total confusion by pointing the finger at a nasty piece of work who has been involved in scores of killings without being brought to justice.<br
The story is not true but is being used by the IRA to embarrass the Government. It is possible IRA leaders know the Stakeknife story to be a fabrication but are using it to discredit the Government.
It’s impossible to know what is true and what is hype and which way it will bounce in the coming days and weeks.
Once again, events in Ulster have disproved the cynical adage in Britain and elsewhere that “Northern” and “Ireland” are the two most boring words in the English language. It will be fascinating to see who benefits from this extraordinary series of charges and counter-charges.
Mick is founding editor of Slugger. He has written papers on the impacts of the Internet on politics and the wider media and is a regular guest and speaking events across Ireland, the UK and Europe. Twitter: @MickFealty
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