Ben Lowry: The police chiefs who oversaw the Kenova investigation should not be pushing their views on the highly contentious and political matter of how Northern Ireland should handle legacy
This week I was at the launch of the final report of the vast Operation Kenova investigation into Stakeknife.
The 160-page report, which cost almost £50 million, found that MI5 was closely involved in handling Stakeknife, who was Freddie Scappaticci, who ran the IRA’s brutal ‘internal security unit’.
It found evidence of Stakeknife's involvement in “kidnap, interrogation and murder". And it found that protecting Scappaticci was "apparently more important than protecting” alleged IRA informers who “could have been saved".
The report reaches a conclusion that I consider to be both improbable and inappropriate – that he took more lives than he saved. Aside from the impossibility of knowing that, it undermines the value of the man who was (as far as we know) the most important IRA agent of all to a UK state that was trying to (and did) prevent civil war. It is widely accepted the intelligence penetration of the Provisionals – the organisation that killed by far the most people in the Troubles – was central to them giving up violence in the 1990s.
Everyone now knows that Scappaticci was the informer but the report has not been able to name him as such, because of the Neither Confirm Nor Deny (NCND) approach that the UK takes to informers. This means that their identity cannot be revealed even decades after they died (Scappaticci only died in 2023). The reasons for this are obvious – that people might not only want their identity to be shielded when they are alive, but also after their death, for reasons such as the welfare of their families. If they know this might be divulged, they might never inform.
The PSNI chief constable, who launched Tuesday’s findings at the Stormont Hotel, has become an outspoken critic of NCND. While it was reasonable of him, and his replacement as head of Kenova Sir Iain Livingstone, to make clear their view in their findings that NCND hampered their attempt to bring final transparency to Stakeknife, I think it is inappropriate for them to campaign on such a political matter. On Tuesday I asked both men about their tendency to make clear their views on political matters such as the sort of legacy structures that are best for dealing with the Troubles. The video accompanying this article shows their reply (I don’t think they answered my point).
I felt a déjà vu from having been a a previous press conference at the same east Belfast hotel venue 20 months ago for the publication of the interim Kenova report. Then, as now, almost all media questions were based on the implicitly anti-state premise that the security forces were to blame for the Stakeknife murders of alleged IRA informers. For example, a reporter for a national media outlet asked why Mr Boutcher had not been more emphatic in calling for the UK to apologise over Stakeknife.
The opposite view is barely considered – that this whole process, which has taken the better part of a decade, is the latest almost surreal inversion of the truth of the Troubles, which is of a remarkably restrained UK response to carefully pre-meditated IRA terror, in they tried different ruthless tactics as the violent years churned on. Instead of celebrating the penetration of the IRA to a very high level and all the missions thwarted and lives saved, while learning lessons from failed aspects of that penetration, the intelligence agencies have essentially been put in the dock over their handling of informers (almost literally so, had there been prosecutions of intelligence officers). This has reinforced the overall nationalist narrative of the Troubles, of a rogue and murderous British state.
It is notable that the Kenova investigation has also found that there is no evidence that UK security forces co-operated with the UVF to carry out the 1974 Dublin and Monaghan bombings, and that there was no overall systemic collusion with the so-called Glennane gang (which was not a gang as such, but a series of killings), albeit individual instances of RUC and UDR collusion.
Last year I asked Mr Boutcher if it was his conclusion that the security forces and IRA were equally culpable for the Stakeknife deaths they examined – he did not answer directly (Click here to read ‘We got things wrong, says Jon Boutcher when asked about the culpability of state forces on Kenova,’ March 9 2024, and to read Ben Lowry’s column on Kenova last year click here: ‘We heard little yesterday in the reaction to Kenova about how hard it is to run an agent in a brutal terror group like the IRA’, Mar 9 2024). This year I asked him and Sir Iain about why they felt they could express their views on the sorts of legacy structures NI needs when this is highly contentious, amidst growing fears in London that legacy has been handled in a way that is disproportionately focused on claims against the state while soft on terrorists.
Both emphasised their view that most security force members behaved with integrity, but that was not what I was asking.
• Ben Lowry (@BenLowry2) is News Letter editor