‘They knew’ – Victims of IRA executioner condemn British collusion

“My brother endured 11 days of unspeakable horror before he was killed. My father walked the streets of Dublin for days hoping to bump into him. And all the time, the [British] authorities knew he wasn’t coming back. He was gone.”

Moira Todd was speaking after the publication on Tuesday of a police report about Operation Kenova, which took seven years to complete, cost £40 million and involved over 60 detectives.

Yet it was banned from officially naming ‘Stakeknife’, the state agent held directly responsible for 14 murders and 15 abductions, including that of Moira’s brother, Eugene Simons.

Stakeknife is widely known to have been Freddie Scappaticci, a Belfast man of Italian extraction and member of a ruthless IRA unit called the “nutting squad”. For decades he functioned as a double-agent, reporting to British military intelligence and MI5.

Surrey safe house

Simons, a 26-year-old plumber and father of three from County Down, disappeared in January 1981. Three years later, his body was discovered south of the border in a shallow grave.

“We signed up for the whole truth, not what they are prepared to give us,” his sister said at the Kenova press conference. “It’s the information we want, not an apology.”

Scappaticci died in March 2023 after admitting, in December 2018, not to any of the murders, torture or abductions, but possessing extreme pornography, some involving animals, on a computer at his taxpayer funded safe house in Guildford, Surrey.

The secrecy surrounding his identity is still so sacrosanct that, even after he and his wife have died, not even the probate details of his sealed will can be published to preserve his anonymity under London’s “Neither Confirm Nor Deny” (NCND) policy.

Scappaticci was once described by General Sir John Wilsey, a former army commander in Northern Ireland, as the “goose that laid the golden eggs”.

Kenova concluded however, that the number of people whose lives were saved due to his information was “between high single figures and low double figures and nowhere near hundreds sometimes claimed”.

In fact, Kenova found the entire operation probably cost more lives than it saved.

MI5 had much more involvement with Scappaticci than previously thought. They even knew that Stakeknife’s military handlers twice took him on holiday using military aircraft and military ID when he was wanted for questioning by the police for murder.

Forgotten victims

The families of Scappaticci’s victims have largely remained out of the public eye, stigmatised by claims that their loved ones were “touts” (Irish parlance for informers).

Now, however, they are emerging from the shadows to demand answers on why and how their relatives were killed.

Paul Wilson, whose father Thomas, was killed by the IRA in 1987, said naming Scappaticci as Stakeknife was “a basic, basic thing”.

Kenova, he said, had been “excellent for our family” but “it never feels like they are in control – it goes so far and then they are told ‘Stop, go no further’.”

Kevin Winters, a solicitor representing over 20 of the families bereaved by Scappaticci and his British state handlers, also accused the Public Prosecution Service (PPS) in Northern Ireland of being unduly influenced by MI5.

“Families,” he said, “may be forgiven for having a perception that the PPS are the Praetorian Guard of MI5 state intelligence. It’s a view that’s hard to resist when you stand back and look at the systemic pattern of prosecutorial shut down on every … strand of the Stakeknife saga”.

MI5 personnel knew (and had used) the numbers for a combination lock on a secure locker used by Kenova to store classified material. The numbers had to be changed.

Yesterday’s final report into the Scappaticci saga, said Winters, was far from the end of the story as at least three more legal challenges are before the courts with more likely in the years ahead.

Kenova, he said, had opened up “a Pandora’s Box on MI5” and their “control over life and death”. Suggestions of MI5 being an “honest broker” were “well and truly consigned to history – we now see the ugly reality for what it was”, he said.

‘Untenable’

Jon Boutcher, the former head of Operation Kenova who is now Chief Constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), was equally – if not more – critical of MI5, calling the NCND policy “untenable” and “unjustifiable”.

If Stakenife had been a police agent, Boutcher said he would have had no compunction in naming him as he did not think it would compromise national security or the use of agents in the future.

In an interim report, published by Boutcher in 2024, he had recommended that all public authorities be subject “to an unqualified and enforceable legal obligation to co-operate with and disclose information and records to those charged with conducting Northern Ireland legacy investigations.”

He had also recommended that the “top secret” security classification of previous Northern Ireland reports be reviewed “in order that their contents and (at the very least) their principal conclusions and recommendations can be declassified and made public”.

This would include the Stalker/Sampson reports into a series of “shoot-to-kill” incidents in the mid-1980s as well as the Stevens Report into the murder of solicitor Pat Finucane. It could also mean publishing the 1973 Morton Report into the tactics of RUC Special Branch.

Loyalist collusion

Yesterday’s final report into the actions of the state in its dealings with Scappaticci also included an interim report on Operation Denton.

This is reviewing the murders of 127 people during the mid-1970s by loyalists in Mid-Ulster, many allegedly in collusion with police officers and British soldiers.

While it reported that, “In a number of individual cases, clear evidence of the active involvement of members of the security forces with loyalist paramilitary groups” involving “extremely vicious and serious criminal activity, including bombing attacks and murder”, it did not find evidence of systemic or corporate collusion.

The interim report, however, also concluded “that if it were the case, it is unlikely there would be records either made or retained which would reflect this” – absence of evidence not necessarily meaning evidence of absence.

At yesterday’s press conference in a Belfast hotel, it was notable that the bereaved families sat at the back of the room when Boutcher spoke, alongside the man who took over from him, the former Chief Constable of Police Scotland, Iain Livingstone.

The organisers of the event had failed to set up a public address system, meaning the families had to struggle to hear what was being said – while a phalanx of cameras and journalists in front of them meant they could not see either Boutcher or Livingstone.