The publication of an interim report by the Kenova Inquiry into the activities of the IRA informer known as Stakeknife” on March 8th, has told us little new. The Inquiry has now lasted seven years, cost £40 million but has struggled to uncover basic facts. Even the most uncontroversial information about what happened has been withheld from families.
We do know that Stakeknife, real name Freddy Scapattici, was a state agent within the IRA for decades. In this role he was head of the IRA Internal Security Unit, also known as the “nutting squad”, which sought out and executed alleged informers. He was involved in the murder of 20 or more individuals who were accused of betraying IRA secrets. Some of his victims may well have been working for the British state, but some were certainly innocent. There is ample evidence that his British Army handlers allowed some to go to their deaths to protect his identity.
The report is clear on one point: on Stakeknife, it says, “The number of lives he saved is between high single figures and low double figures and nowhere near hundreds”. The state’s justification for the use of informers was that it was and is necessary to save lives, but in fact, he cost more lives than he ever saved.
Stakeknife was only one of hundreds of state agents in all the paramilitary groups in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. There were low-level informers at rank-and-file level, but also “agents of influence” at the top of the groups. Thus, the state gained intelligence on day-to-day attacks, but also had the means to manipulate the armed groups.
Frank Kitson and Counterinsurgency
The use of informers is but one strand of the web of repression employed in the North. A few weeks before the publication of the Kenova Report, General Sir Frank Kitson died at the age of 97. When the British army came onto the streets in 1969, Kitson was its established “expert” on counterinsurgency. He had seen action in Kenya, Malaysia, and Aden where the British Army believed it had conducted successful campaigns against Communist insurgents. Kitson wrote a book explaining his methods and was highly influential in the early 1970s. His ideas were adopted by the British Army and by the militarised Royal Ulster Constabulary over the following decades.
Kitson was behind the undercover Military Reaction Force (MRF) which put 40 plainclothes British soldiers onto the streets in unmarked cars. They drove around working-class areas, gathering intelligence but also shooting and killing or injuring vigilantes standing at barricades in 1972, when the Troubles were escalating rapidly. Most of those who fell victim to the MRF did not belong to any paramilitary group. Some belonged to the Catholic Ex-servicemen’s Association, which took defensive action only. It was clear that the actions of the MRF were designed to cause fear and confusion, destabilising the local support base of the IRA.
Kitson was in command of the Paratrooper Regiment which shot unarmed civilians in high profile massacres on Bloody Sunday (which left 14 dead in Derry in 1972) and in the Ballymurphy massacre (11 dead in Belfast in 1971).
He was rewarded for his service with the top position in the British Army and an appointment to Queen Elizabeth the Second. His record of murder and oppression is one that will never be forgotten in the Catholic working-class communities of Northern Ireland, where his name is loathed.
An International Inquiry
The Kenova Report highlights the continuing failure of British governments, political parties, and the armed groups to acknowledge the hurt inflicted on the families of those who were murdered, or to provide them with a meaningful examination of the circumstances of their deaths. It states that Stakeknife should have been prosecuted (he died in 2023) and called upon the Government and the IRA to apologise to all the families who those who died.
For socialist the conclusions are clear: the state in the last analysis can be reduced to armed bodies of men acting in defence of the interests of the ruling class. The worker’s movement is the only force in society that can offer a way forward and its role cannot be supplanted by armed groups adopting the method of individual terrorism.
Apologies, if they ever come about, will change nothing. For socialists what matters most is that the state is held to account. There can be no doubt that key decisions, including not just those already described but the deliberating killing of suspected members of paramilitary groups in the “shoot to kill” ambushes were taken at the highest level.
An international inquiry involving representatives of the workers movement, human rights activists, and survivors and victims’ themselves would assist in shedding light on the past. We should demand such an inquiry, but without illusions. To be successful, of course, it would require a degree of transparency from the state that is unlikely to be forthcoming. The full history of the Troubles will only be written after a successful socialist revolution.