Infiltrating agents is the business of intelligence organisations, but there is a line that must not be crossed, writes Brian Feeney
Fifty-five years ago the man who ran the Soviet counter-intelligence desk in Britain's MI6 was a colonel in the NKVD, Kim Philby. As MI6 parachuted agents into eastern Europe and the Ukraine in the early years of the Cold War, Philby informed his Russian controller. The agents were never heard of again. Whatever you may think of Philby, it was an entirely proper course of action for Soviet intelligence to follow.
To place an agent at the head of the most sensitive department in your enemy's organisation is surely the goal of any espionage agency. It appears that British intelligence in the North achieved this goal. Whatever you may think of Freddy Scappaticci, "Stakeknife", his placement was an entirely proper course of action for British intelligence to follow. Scappaticci allegedly served his apprenticeship as an agent in the 1980s in the IRA's Security Department, essentially counter-intelligence, under John Joe Magee, a fearsome former member of the British Special Boat Squadron: on Magee's demise he took over.
There is no surprise that the British should seek to place their agent in such a vital position. What is astonishing is that no-one in the IRA GHQ staff seemed to imagine that their security department would be a key target for British intelligence or thought to question some of the strange results of the security department's work, the simplest one being that Freddy Scappaticci was a complete failure except, if the allegations prove correct, when it came to killing people at close quarters.
If there are serious questions for the men in charge of the IRA during the last decade or so of their campaign, the alleged activities of Stakeknife and other well-placed British agents raise fundamental issues for the British government and security forces who were supposed to be acting on behalf of the public.
By coincidence, on April 17th, Sir John Stevens, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, presented the latest fragment of his report into collusion which the public is permitted to see. He addressed some of those issues and his conclusions, according to the Northern Secretary, Paul Murphy, raise some "very disturbing issues".
They are all relevant to the alleged role of Stakeknife. The most fundamental issue is how the state can justify permitting its agents to commit murder, not just once but repeatedly. The answer is it cannot. The dividing line is quite simple. It is when agents cease to be channels for information and become agents provocateurs. What was worse in the North was that, as Stevens concluded "even in their own terms" the intelligence services had the "wrong" people killed. Sometimes they allowed these murders to protect their agents, but sometimes it was simple callousness.
The second fundamental issue is that the British forces in the North were consistently partial in their pursuit of terrorism. Virtually the whole of their apparatus was directed against republicans. They also used the UVF and UDA as proxies to kill IRA men and women. If they murdered ordinary Catholics by mistake, too bad. Stevens asked whether the security services made the same efforts to warn Catholics who were in danger as they did with Protestants. His blunt conclusion: "No they did not."
During the 1980s British intelligence allowed loyalist terrorists to import weapons from South Africa; assault rifles, automatic pistols and hand grenades, surplus from the Frelimo guerrillas of Mozambique, where the conflict had ended. Loyalists used these weapons to kill dozens of Catholics in what they euphemistically called "spray jobs" on pubs, clubs and bookies' shops. Many of the loyalists engaged in these attacks were paid agents of British intelligence and RUC Special Branch, occasionally of both.
Military intelligence, Special Branch, 14th Intelligence Company, MI5 and the infamous Force Research Unit all competed for agents and with each other. Vast quantities of treasure were disbursed: £25,000 a year to an individual was not unusual. Who was in charge? Who knew? We do know matters improved slightly after the Security Services Act 1989, which gave the Director and Co-ordinator of Intelligence (DCI) at Stormont a seat on the MI5's board and made him responsible to the Northern Secretary.
We also know that intelligence from top agents like "Stakeknife" was read by Cabinet members of the Joint Intelligence Committee who include the British prime minister. Are we seriously expected to believe that these politicians did not know of their agents' unsavoury misdemeanours? Does anyone believe senior intelligence officers did not ask for such behaviour to be sanctioned at Cabinet level? If Northern Secretaries did not know what FRU or MI5 was up to, or ask the DCI for reports, why not? There was enough public disquiet to warrant searching questions.
One of Stevens's recommendations is startling in this context. "Guidelines on the use of Covert Human Intelligence Sources should be completed as a matter of urgency." In other words, after all the controversies of the last 15 years, including the murder of solicitor Pat Finucane which Stevens is still probing, as of last month, there are still no guidelines for running agents. And we know from Stevens that there are hundreds of them.
The latest allegations about "Stakeknife" confirm what many nationalists have always believed, namely that crushing the IRA campaign was the sole priority of the British security forces, at whatever cost, and that included not just alienating the nationalist community from the institutions of the state, but allowing innocents to be murdered in the process, often by loyalists. What was the ratio of innocents to IRA members? How many innocents equals one IRA member?
In the end, what was the result? Sir John Stevens concludes that the intelligence services, far from advancing the cause of peace, actually prolonged the troubles. No wonder that when British politicians would castigate the IRA as a "small group of evil men" their remarks produced a hollow laugh from people in republican districts who had suffered at the hands of state-sponsored murder gangs. No wonder the British government waited until the day Parliament rose for the Easter recess to release the Stevens's report.
Brian Feeney is an author and commentator. His latest book is Sinn Féin: A Hundred Turbulent Years.