It is both darkly telling and extraordinarily dispiriting that even now, after a £40m investigation, Chief Constable Jon Boutcher cannot formally say in his interim report that Stakeknife, the British spy at the heart of the IRA, was Freddie Scappaticci, despite the fact that he died last year in England, aged 77.
“The security forces and the government have steadfastly refused to confirm or deny the allegations that Mr Scappaticci was an agent or that he was Stakeknife,” the police officer writes of the man, who operated inside the IRA’s so-called Nutting Squad, which sought to root out and kill alleged informers.
The identity is not seriously doubted, but the refusal to confirm it reflects the British state’s enduring addiction to secrecy, even when serious allegations of misconduct are at stake. It is an addiction that, as Boutcher makes clear, has hampered murder investigations, had lasting consequences for victims’s families, and eroded respect for authority in a period when trust was supposed to be rebuilt.
“It is unacceptable that 25 years since the Good Friday agreement, many families of those who were killed during the Troubles are still seeking information from the United Kingdom and Irish governments,” he writes, arguing that a properly funded process to investigate legacy deaths is achievable and necessary, even if the UK government does not seem to agree.
An obsessive Conservative concern with preventing the prosecution of a handful of British army veterans for serious offences has already led to the passing of the Northern Ireland legacy act in September. That halted fresh investigations into Troubles-related murders, whether allegedly by paramilitaries, soldiers or police, leaving the families of victims such as Tony Harrison, a British army paratrooper shot dead by the IRA in 1991, isolated and frustrated.
Yet it is just the latest effort to sweep concerns about wrongdoing under the carpet.
Previous inquiries into RUC “shoot to kill” policies by John Stalker or alleged state collusion with loyalist paramilitaries by Sir John Stevens remain substantively unpublished – classified as secret or top secret. They were, Boutcher said, “overclassified, meaning that the lessons they were intended to draw cannot be learned or subjected to public scrutiny”.
Even during his inquiry, Boutcher, a former chief constable at Bedfordshire police, and now the chief constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland, was placed under suspicion. At one point the senior investigator was accused of having “passed the names of state agents” to third parties in breach of the Official Secrets Act and the intelligence passed to MI5. He denied it, and no prosecution followed.
As Boutcher makes clear, an almost obsessive focus amongpolice and the intelligence agencies is to “neither confirm nor deny” the identity of any informants or agents, Stakeknife included. Terrorism in Northern Ireland was undoubtedly a threat to public safety – over 70% of Troubles killings were conducted by paramilitaries – and protecting informants necessary, both at the time and for life.
But the senior policeman makes clear that NCND policy, as it is known inside the British state, has become overused, assuming “a totemic status” in parts of government and the security forces, “an implacable dogma or mantra with the qualities of a stone wall”, which assumes that in every single case the state has no questions to answer, even when serious wrongdoing by an informer is alleged.
Earlier this week, a coroner in Belfast abandoned an inquest into the killing of Sean Brown by loyalists in 1997. The court had heard that more than 25 people, including state agents, had been linked by intelligence material to his murder, but the coroner said his inquiry could not continue because so much material was being withheld on the grounds of national security, nearly a generation after Brown’s death.
Police and intelligence agencies say their practice has been tightened since Northern Ireland’s darkest days, and that recently passed laws allowed informants to break laws only where “necessary and proportionate”. But the heavy-handed application of secrecy, even when state wrongdoing is alleged, invites public suspicion and evokes a darker, violent past.
