Scappaticci Scandal Will Force A Rethink Of Adams’ Military Leadership

It is early days, relatively speaking, in what we can now justifiably call the Stakenife or Scappaticci Scandal, but already one consequence is becoming clear: any hope that MI5 might have had that the affair would die with the agent is rapidly fading. The anticipation of this twist in the story may itself help to explain why MI5 took ownership of the scandal, which they did weeks before his death, when an ailing Freddie Scappaticci was housed in an MI5 hospital, all the easier to control and keep outofreach.

So a harsh light is likely to be shone on MI5’s role in this affair and that’s simply because when you run an agent inside a group like the IRA it is in the knowledge that to succeed you must sanction murder. Scappaticci killed people – the estimates ruin as high as 30 or 40 – because the British intelligence establishment allowed him to, and for all we know encouraged him as well. No other reason.

That is one early observation from a scandal that has terrible possibilities for British spy chiefs.

The other casualty is the carefully cultivated reputation of Gerry Adams as the architect of the IRA rescue and revival of the late 1970’s. There is little doubt that when Adams, along with Ivor Bell and Martin McGuinness, took over the IRA in the late 1970’s, they rescued it from defeat. The major change was the abandonment of the companies/battalions structure and their replacement by small active service units (ASU’s), the idea being to make British penetration more difficult.

Adams and his colleagues were acutely aware that they were in a lengthy intelligence war with the British and so they created a spycatcher’s cell, called the Internal Security Unit (ISU), whose job was to hunt for British moles. The ISU was given the authority to go anywhere in the IRA and interrogate anyone. Their principal modus operandi was to interrogate IRA members whose operation(s) had somehow gone wrong, which given the propensity to commit ‘fuck-up’s’, as they were termed, would in all probability mean that at one time or another the ISU would know the IRA’s entire battle order.

As if that was not enough access, the ISU was given authority to vet new members, meaning that the secret army was now, in reality, an open book, at least for MI5, the Force Research Unit and the RUC Special Branch – although Scappaticci appears to have drawn the line at contact with the police it is likely MI5 shared at least some of their intel with the RUC. (The current Garda Commisssioner would know a thing or two about that story). Hunting down informers was the raison d’etre for all this, the supreme irony of the Troubles, to say the least.

So, the salient feature of the Adams’ IRA re-organisation plan was to create the machine for its own destruction. The fact that Scappaticci and his boss were kept on and not replaced at regular intervals, as happens routinely in most state-controlled intelligence agencies, compounds the blunder. Only when the ISU over-reached, asking for an inquiry into the Army Council, did the IRA leadership move against Scap and his colleagues and by that stage it was too late, the damage had been done.

Any assessment of the Adams’ leadership of the Provisional IRA from the late 1970’s onwards will have to factor in the game-changing triumph by British intelligence represented by Freddie Scappaticci and the colossal blunder made by the IRA leadership.