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Britain’s security services allowed a top agent inside the IRA to commit murders and then impeded a police investigation into the affair, according to a damning official report.
MI5 helped the double agent known as Stakeknife to evade justice from a perverse sense of loyalty that outlasted Northern Ireland’s Troubles, the police investigation known as Operation Kenova said on Tuesday.
His handlers twice took him out of Northern Ireland for a “holiday” when they knew police sought to question him on suspicion of murder and false imprisonment, it revealed.
The nine-year investigation painted a highly critical picture of MI5’s handling of Freddie Scappaticci, a mole at the heart of the IRA who is believed to have cost more lives than he saved.
The full report, which cost an estimated £40m, shines a light into one of the murkiest corners of the Troubles but is not expected to deliver justice for victims’ families. Scappaticci died in 2023 at the age of 77 and the investigation has led to no prosecutions. He is not named in the report because of the government policy of not naming informers.
Led by Sir Iain Livingstone, a former chief constable of Police Scotland, the Kenova team accused MI5 of “serious organisational failure” in trying to restrict the investigation and to downplay the agency’s involvement with Stakeknife.
“The revelation of the MI5 material was the culmination of several incidents capable of being negatively construed as attempts by MI5 to restrict the investigation, run down the clock, avoid any prosecutions relating to Stakeknife and conceal the truth,” said the report.
Livingstone and Jon Boutcher, the chief constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland, are to give a joint press conference in Belfast. Lawyers representing victims’ families will give a separate press conference.
Many relatives fear they will never learn the full truth about the relationship between Britain’s intelligence services and an IRA commander who orchestrated numerous murders of fellow republicans from the 1970s to the 1990s.
Scappaticci, the son of Italian immigrants, joined the Provisional IRA in 1969 before turning against his comrades and offering his services to the British in the mid-1970s, launching a double life as a traitor while rising up IRA ranks to head its “nutting squad”, an internal security unit that hunted and killed suspected informants.
To his handlers, Scappaticci was a “golden egg” who produced priceless counter-terrorism intelligence that helped to neuter the IRA and save lives. However, the Kenova team said in an interim report in 2014 that the number of lives saved as a result of intelligence provided by Stakeknife was in the high single figures or low double figures and “nowhere near” the hundreds that security forces had claimed.
It said Stakeknife was implicated in “very serious and wholly unjustifiable criminality, including murder,” and that his involvement with intelligence agencies probably resulted in more lives lost than saved.
After being outed in 2003, Scappaticci fled to England and entered witness protection with lucrative earnings from his services to British intelligence.
In 2016 the PSNI outsourced an investigation to Operation Kenova, a 50-strong team of detectives led by Boutcher, a former Bedfordshire police chief constable. It arrested and questioned former members of the IRA and security forces and obtained access to intelligence files but no prosecutions ensued.
