Final Stakeknife report lays bare the scale of intelligence handed over by IRA informer - with over 3,500 reports found to contain his information
The final report of Operation Kenova has laid bare the sheer “vast" scale of intelligence handed over by the agent known as Stakeknife.
The report – published on Tuesday – was the final one from Operation Kenova, the police investigation into the activities of the army agent widely believed to have been Freddie Scappaticci (who died in 2023).
The authorities have long come under fire over their handling of Stakeknife, with doubt cast over whether letting the killer operate as a mole inside the IRA was worth it in terms of the intelligence he produced.
The report reveals that during the decade or so when Stakeknife was most active, on average he was being met by his army handlers every seven to eight days.
This dropped off in the 1990s, and his intelligence became more “political or strategic than operational or tactical”, including giving opinions on “developments within the Sinn Fein and [the] PIRA leadership relevant to the peace process”.
The report states: “From the outset of his deployment, the amount of intelligence attributed to Stakeknife was vast.
"Operation Kenova recovered 377 intelligence reports attributed to him over an 18-month period at the start of his career as an agent.
"In one 11-day period, it is recorded that he contacted his handlers by phone on two occasions and was met on a further four occasions.
"In total, 3,517 separate reports containing intelligence attributed to Stakeknife were recovered.
"Some of these contained only a single line of intelligence or very mundane information, eg, sightings of individuals in the street, individuals seen talking in various drinking establishments or snatches of overheard conversations.
"However, much of it was valuable and many reports contained multiple strands of intelligence over many pages.”
Even this, the authors added, was only a partial account, saying: “It must be acknowledged that the complete reporting picture was not recovered, eg, intelligence passed orally over the phone may not have been recorded and would now be impossible to recover.”
The final Kenova report was critical of the intelligence services’ handling of him whilst he was running the IRA’s so-called Nutting Squad, which existed to abduct and kill IRA members suspected of being informers.
An earlier interim report by the same investigators stated that it is “probable that this resulted in more lives being lost than saved”.
Tuesday’s final report stated that he was linked to 14 murders and that “time and again, it would appear that protecting the agent outweighed protecting the life of a victim”.
Tuesday’s report also said that “it is in the public interest that Stakeknife is named” officially by the government, but the government has declined to do so – with PSNI Chief Constable Jon Boutcher saying that this is "bordering on farce".
Meanwhile the Kenova report castigated MI5 for disclosing files which it held about Stakeknife late to its investigators, calling this a "significant failure".
Among the report’s recommendations are that “the republican leadership should issue a full apology for PIRA’s abduction, torture and murder of those it accused or suspected of being agents during the Troubles and acknowledge the loss and unacceptable intimidation bereaved families and surviving victims have suffered”.
In addition, “the UK government should acknowledge and apologise to bereaved families and surviving victims affected by cases where an individual was harmed or murdered because they were accused or suspected of being an agent and where this was preventable or where the perpetrators could and should have been subjected to criminal justice and were not”.