And here's a case which the powers that be want to try and cause to disappear from history:
guardian.co.uk
British army spy at heart of IRA death squad unmasked
· Agent known as Stakeknife in hiding
· Provos shocked as 25-year role revealed
· Dozens may have died to protect cover
Rosie Cowan and Nick Hopkins
Monday May 12, 2003
The Guardian
The IRA was reeling in shock and panic last night after one of its top members was unmasked as the infamous army spy known as Stakeknife.
Alfredo Scappaticci, deputy head of the Provisionals' internal security unit, the notorious Nutting Squad, is alleged to have supplied crucial information to the shadowy military intelligence wing, the Force Research Unit, for the past 25 years.
He was secretly paid £80,000 a year for his role.
Scappaticci, who was outed on several websites and in a number of Irish Sunday newspapers, is also suspected of involvement in more than 40 murders. Dozens of people may have been allowed to die in order to protect his cover.
Scappaticci, who has homes in Dublin and west Belfast, was spirited away to a safe house in England by undercover agents yesterday morning. Republican sources insisted he was prepared to tough it out in his west Belfast house, but security forces eventually persuaded him to leave.
However, Sir John Stevens, the Metropolitan police chief who is investigating security force cooperation with terrorists, said: "We will be questioning Stakeknife soon. We fear other informants have been sacrificed to save him and we will be asking him about that."
The agent is said to have been responsible for the death of many republicans he judged guilty of being informers, including the horrific triple murder of fellow FRU agents Aidan Starrs, Gregory Burns and John Dignam in south Armagh in 1992.
Sir John, who has already reached devastating conclusions on the level of collusion involving loyalist paramilitaries, will also want to interview Stakeknife's army handlers about claims that innocent Catholics died to safeguard the informer's identity.
Among these was said to be 66-year-old Francisco Notarantonio, shot in his bed in west Belfast in 1987 by loyalist paramilitaries after being suggested as an alternative to their original target, Scappaticci.
Three prime ministers, Margaret Thatcher, John Major and Tony Blair, would have read intelligence provided by Stakeknife, although there is no indication that they knew exact details of his activities.
But Sir John could question former ministers, and will also want to talk to special branch officers, who twice tried to lure Stakeknife to work for them, and senior MI5 officers who would also have known about his role.
Scappaticci, a close friend of Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams since they were interned together in 1971, joined the IRA in the 1970s but became an informer after a brutal beating from a fellow Provo in 1978.
He rose to a senior role in the Nutting Squad in the 1980s and has been at the heart of the paramilitary organisation and army intelligence ever since.
The weekend disclosures have sent panic through the IRA.
One former Provo, Anthony McIntyre, also from west Belfast, claimed the republican leadership could be shaken to the core.
"If this is true, then it's a major coup for the British. It would mean they have been steering republican strategy for years," he said.
But it could also prove devastating for the British establishment.
It raises serious questions about the extent to which some people were prepared to go to protect a suspected serial killer, whom the government was paying £80,000 a year into a secret bank account in Gibraltar, where, coincidentally, the SAS killed three IRA members, Mairead Farrell, Sean Savage and Danny McCann, in 1988, supposedly on information provided by Scappaticci.
The Northern Ireland Office, the army and Sinn Fein all refused to comment last night, while the republican party's former publicity director, Danny Morrison, whose arrest Scappaticci is reputed to have organised, said he was sceptical of any allegations which came from British intelligence.
Nevertheless, the case is sure to fuel calls for a wide-reaching public inquiry, and perhaps some sort of truth commission into all the goings-on in the security forces' so-called "dirty war" against terrorists.
Ministry of Defence nervousness that Stakeknife was about to be exposed has been growing for months.
Although Scotland Yard refused to comment on the weekend disclosures, a source close to the Stevens investigation said Sir John had been examining the extent of Stakeknife's activity since he discovered hundreds of army documents, including notes from the spy's handlers, a few months ago.
He will be irritated that his careful approach has been pre-empted by publicity.
The SAS was deeply involved in the British conflict in Northern Ireland since its start in 1969. At the beginning they operated openly in their own uniform, and later on they planted moles in the IRA, who were involved in terror bombing. The well known August 15th, 1998 Omagh bombing attack, which killed 29 civilians was done by an SAS double agent as reported by Sunday Herald (http://www.sundayherald.com/17827). The Paper also reported the confession of another SAS member, who operated as an IRA mole from 1981 to 1994 while on full British army pay. He helped to develop a new type of bomb activated by photographic flashes to overcome the problem of IRA remote-control devices being signal jammed by army radio units. (http://www.sundayherald.com/print25646). Another mole, known by his codename "Stakeknife", was still active in December of 2002 as one of Belfast’s leading provisionals. His military commander "allowed him to carry out large numbers of terrorist murders in order to protect his cover within the IRA". (http://www.sundayherald.com/29997). In late 2002 the paper reported reliable evidence that the British army had used its moles in terrorist organizations to "carry out proxy assassinations", such as the case of the human rights activist Pat Finucane, who was murdered in 1989 by the Protestant Ulster Defense Association (UDA). The mole supplied the UDA with necessary information to assassinate Finucane. (http://sundayherald.com/29997). |
