Fans of spycraft and espionage who have read John LeCarre’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (spoilers ahead) will know that the most damaging agent one can recruit is a senior figure in the other lot’s own intelligence services. In LeCarre’s book, Bill Haydon, the very senior MI6 officer, turns out to have been a mole for the Russians for years, and to have compromised an unknown number of British agents. Such figures can also be used to feed false and misleading intelligence to the enemy.
In recent years, there has been much outrage about the British Government’s recruitment and support of their agent Stakeknife, finally named in the Dáil by the Taoiseach yesterday as Freddie Scapaticci. Yet the scale of the damage that Scapaticci must have done to the IRA over the years can barely be comprehended: This was the IRA’s own head of internal security. And for an unknown number of years, but at least two decades, he was working for the IRA’s sworn enemy.
In some ways then, it is hardly surprising that there has been so much hue and cry from Republican circles about the supposed underhandedness of all of this, and the undoubtedly immoral things that British security services did to keep “their man” undetected. Because ultimately, Scapaticci’s existence is a complete humiliation for the IRA, whose own internal security measures were essentially being directed by MI5 for most of the “troubles”.
One of the things Scapaticci was responsible for, by all accounts, was the vetting of new IRA recruits. Consider that: In essence, this means that the British – if they wanted it – had access to the IRA’s own list of members, and the IRA’s internal security files on them all. This is as close to complete organisational penetration as it is possible to get.
But it does raise serious questions for the British: The Kenova report, for example, states that on balance Stakeknife probably cost more lives than he saved. Why? Because the British prioritised protecting their source above using his information to save lives. Some IRA operations were allowed to proceed rather than risk Scapaticci being exposed as a mole. Some IRA members, it seems, were allowed to be murdered by Scapaticci’s internal security unit on suspicion of spying or touting, even when they were innocent. Most unforgivably, it seems some were allowed to be murdered who were guilty of spying for the British, which suggests that London threw some of its own agents under the bus to protect a more senior one.
But add those up and you get the same picture: The British are guilty not of using their agent too aggressively, but of not using him aggressively enough. Prioritising future intelligence (of unknown value) against the loss of life in the present. I am no professional ethicist, but allowing innocent people to die in the present so you might theoretically prevent the loss of more innocent lives in the future is, at very best, ethically dubious. At worst, it is a complete inversion of what the security services exist to do. A shameful betrayal of their foremost duty.
But at the same time, we should not forget that Scapaticci was not executing IRA members without the say-so of the IRA’s high command. If the power to prevent deaths rested with the British in this mess, then it is also true that the power not to order deaths rested, and always rested, with the IRA. Who ordered those deaths anyway. In a war – and the IRA still insists it was fighting a war – one combatant does not necessarily have a moral or legal obligation to prevent the other combatant from mistakenly executing its own soldiers.
What it does have an obligation to do, however, is to protect the lives of its own civilians – and this is where British intelligence must stand accused. The whole point of MI5, the very reason it exists, is to protect the lives and security of British people. The Kenova report tells us that on multiple occasions, the British authorities had intelligence that could have saved the lives of civilians, and chose not to act on it.
On this, by the way, something is worth noting: Republicans living in Northern Ireland, whether they enjoy this fact or not, are British subjects by law. The British security services therefore have the exact same duty to protect their lives as they have to protect the lives of somebody living in Milton Keynes with a St. George’s flag hanging in their window. Reading the Kenova report, one thing that comes through it very strongly is that MI5 did not feel that way about their own job, and saw some of their citizens almost as enemy civilians.
In truth, nobody comes out of this mess well. The British had a prize agent, and they seem to have prioritised having a prized agent over actually using him to save lives. The IRA, aside from the incompetence of being so completely penetrated, cannot resile from responsibility from all the brutal killings they ordered. And critically, must never be permitted to do so. MI5 did not pull the trigger in any of the cases of the disappeared. The IRA did.
There’s a final point here: The Republican movement in Ireland has not gone away. Many senior figures from that era remain prominent in the political wing of what was once a paramilitary organisation. These are people who were so incompetent then that they could not detect a spy in one of their own most important intelligence positions. We are to trust, it seems, that they are more competent today.
I’ve seen nothing in the public record that gives me any confidence that this is true.