John Ware has form as a leading investigator into the Troubles for BBC Panorama, including the Stakeknife record and responsibility for the Omagh bomb. His relentless account in the Irish News of the lengths to which the British state was prepared to go to deny the identity of Freddie Scapatticci as Stakeknife has an added significance beyond filling in the details. The fact that his well placed legal sources were prepared to talk in a generally conservative environment speaks volumes. Ware’s account depicts MI5 becoming increasingly isolated among establishment players as holding the veto on a blanket Neither Confirm Nor Deny (NCND) policy on the role of Scapatticci as Stakeknife. This was despite it being common knowledge to those acute observers “the dogs in the street”.
Ware’s account of Scapatticci defying both the state and the IRA to out him as Stakeknife is as bizarre and gripping as anything produced about spying and betrayal during the Cold War. It has the added dimension of how he gave the state including the judiciary the run around in order to stay living in Belfast for years inviolate, unlike other eminents such as Denis Donaldson in 2006.
Scap got the timing right .For the IRA to execute him when ” Stakeknife” broke in 2003 would have harmed their transition in the peace process. And for the state to have challenged his denial as Stakeknife in court would have confirmed their belief in his true identity. Did he I wonder think it all up.on his own or did he have advisers?
Scapatticci’s death in 2023 removed one plank of the government’s denial.
But Scap has an afterlife in the form of Operation Kenova instigated by the present Chief Constable Jon Boucher. Boucher is openly scathing about Stakeknife’s value as an agent saving” “hundreds of lives ” But Kenova has so far been prevented by MI5 from sharing with families the details of evidence of his guilt as an IRA executioner and the repeated unsuccessful.attempts to prosecute him which Ware describes as ” an elaborate legal charade” . MI5’s veto seems have been endorsed by the Public Prosecution Service against the recommendations of the PSNI.
While the PPS knew Scapatticci was committing perjury by swearing he was not Stakeknife, they accepted he did so in order to stay alive in Belfast.
Ware also questions PPS decisions not to prosecute Scapatticci for 15 murders identified by the Stevens inquiries and a further 32 cases in 50,000 pages of evidence submitted by Kenova. Perhaps it revived the old dilemma; prosecuting him would acknowledge he was in fact Stakeknife.
State ranks have been broken by Chief Constable Boucher. While he and his.successor as head of Kenova “militantly favour” NCND they insist it is too widely drawn.
How does the state overcome MI5’s alleged claim that abandonment of NCND over collusion/ handling informers would create a precedent for today?
The Troubles were an internal not an international conflict that is mainly over. Even seasoned operatives, lawyers and police officers familiar with inside stories now favour disclosure where human life is no longer at risk. We should know what there is to know not only about those who pulled the trigger but others higher up who pulled the strings. Perhaps there is even less to know than the sternest critics of collusion believe and a gaping vacuum awaits discovery, perhaps carefully engineered for deniability. By contrast revived tensions with Russia and China are in many ways a resumption of the Cold War where familiar rules apply. Yet even here MI5 and MI6 have been happy to disclose new Cold War stories about how close we came to nuclear confrontation. Ware presents a formidable list of Cold War revelations. Surely it’s worth taking far lesser risks over the Troubles.
Where a legal position becomes out of line with acknowledged facts, it becomes untenable. The new or amended Legacy Act will be a failure unless it contains appropriate new protocols for what constitutes “national security” in the Northern Ireland of today.
Former BBC journalist and manager in Belfast, Manchester and London, Editor Spolight; Political Editor BBC NI; Current Affairs Commissioning editor BBC Radio 4; Editor Political and Parliamentary Programmes, BBC Westminster; former London Editor Belfast Telegraph. Hon Senior Research Fellow, The Constitution Unit, Univ Coll. London
Discover more from Slugger O'Toole
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
