Truth about Stakeknife goes too high to ever be revealed
Posted By: October 29, 2015
Allison Morris. Irish News( Belfast). Thursday, October 29, 2015
The existence of collusion was for many years denied by those who sought to paint conflict here as a squalid little sectarian scrap when in reality differences between the two communities were always exploited by an unseen hand.
The vast scale of the investigation now being called for into murders either committed or ordered by the IRA agent known as Stakeknife has given context to just what lengths the state was willing to go to keep control of organisations it claimed to be fighting against.
While director of the Public Prosecution Service Barra McGrory refused to name the agent Stakeknife, he is said to be 69-year-old Freddie Scappaticci. Originally from the Markets area of Belfast and of Italian descent, the short, plump, middle aged man whose face is now so familiar – and who denies being Stakeknife – is an unlikely serial killer.
But sources put the number of killings allegedly carried out or ordered by Scappaticci at around 40, mainly members of his own community accused by the IRA of being informers.
He was the organisation’s head of internal security, a hunter of ‘touts’[informers], feared as the man who gave either the thumbs up or down, an assassin with the power of life and death in his hands.
A look through the list of 23 initial victims expected to be investigated by police shows a pattern. Stakeknife was killing low level informants, what were known as £10 touts, in order to protect middle level informers while all the time he himself was the highest level agent on the books of British military intelligence. The jewel in the crown, the golden egg.
We know that any investigation into his activities would be a sham were it not to include the handlers and army officers who not only allowed him to kill with impunity but in many cases helped pinpoint targets.
Sacrificial lambs, singled out for murder when the IRA suspected a mole in the ranks. The individuals pinpointed were, it is now suspected, offered up in order to save more valuable assets.
Questions that now need answered centre around if these people’s lives could have been saved by the authorities.
What is the point of running agents if they are taking rather than saving lives? Whose agenda does it serve?
The former police ombudsman Nuala O’Loan exposed a murderous ring of informers at the centre of the Mount Vernon UVF headed up by agent Mark Haddock, currently in jail in England for trying to kill one of his former associates.
But in comparison to Stakeknife Haddock was a minion. His campaign of terror was centred on the sectarian murder of innocent Catholics or killing people who got in the way of his money-making drug empire. He headed up what was in effect an organised criminal gang. He was no threat to national security as such.
The IRA, at a time when they were flooring [destroying]parts of London, were of interest to Downing Street in a way the activities of loyalists would never have been.
The inference being that they not only controlled the activities of Stakeknife regarding internal matters within his own organisation but he also passed on information regarding IRA bomb attacks.
And yet as we know many of the attacks went ahead regardless, people were allowed to die and for what? And by whom?
In 2003 when Scappaticci was first outed as an agent there was a for a time an effort to contain, deny and manage the allegations by republicans and Sinn Féin at a high level.
Not because they believed them to be untrue but because the truth was just too damaging.
After all, collusion was between the British state and loyalist paramilitaries, right?
We now know that nothing could be further from the truth and that the hidden hand was playing both sides of the chess board while people were losing their lives needlessly in what were on occasions preventable incidents.
To what end and on whose orders?
They’re questions that should be answered by any future investigation into IRA collusion with the British state but will they be?
Will they heck, for the truth in the case of Stakeknife goes too high up the chain of power.
