Eliza Manningham-Buller
Freddie Scappaticci was the UK’s most lethal mole in the IRA. His codename was Stakeknife. Last March the interim report of Operation Kenova concluded that a string of murders he perpetrated “could and should have been prevented [but] were allowed to take place with the knowledge of the security forces and those responsible for murder were not brought to justice and were instead left free to reoffend again.”
One of Kenova’s challenges was to identify the UK spy agency that ran Scappaticci. Kenova concluded: “MI5 was not responsible for how Stakeknife was targeted or run”.
No less a figure than Baroness Eliza Manningham-Buller purred with delight at this finding. In the early 1990s she ran the MI5 unit responsible for countering the IRA. In 2002 she became the DG of MI5, a post she held for five years. She now runs Chatham House, which supplies RTÉ with guest speakers to educate ignorant Irish peasants about the merits of abandoning neutrality.
After the Kenova report’s publication, the baroness confirmed, on a popular podcast hosted by Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart, that MI5 had not been “aware” of Stakeknife until it was asked to place him in witness protection after his identity had been compromised in the late 1990s. The operation was a “bad” one, not to mention “a disgraceful” one.
“I think, I hope, had it been our operation, we would have aborted it very early on,” she added. “You have to have some moral parameters to intelligence work. If you abandon ethics and say anything goes, you become like the people you are trying to penetrate and you have to maintain that sense of proportion, necessity, the law etc.”
The blame for the atrocious Stakeknife operation lay with the Force Reconnaissance Unit (FRU) of the British army. A “former DG of MI5” told Kenova that “the FRU had an attitude that was ‘gung ho, not well managed, with little meaningful oversight’”.
Alas, the baroness now has a splash of egg on her face. Embarrassing newly discovered MI5 files have emerged (see The Phoenix 23/8/24). According to sources close to Kenova, they show that MI5 was “actively tasking Scappaticci” through the FRU “when he was out and about in Northern Ireland”.
“It is now clear to me”, the baroness has conceded “that MI5 had some limited knowledge [about Freddie Scappaticci], earlier than I had previously understood.”
A key duty of MI5 is to detect hostile Russian and Chinese secret agents operating in the UK. It will fortify the courage of these dastardly fiends to discover that MI5’s former DG – a specialist in anti-IRA operations no less – was not even aware of the identity of the most important anti-IRA secret agent on her books.
