NI POLITICS: The people it takes to make a peace process
On 'nutting', 'Stakeknife', and other things just as nice
A deeply unpleasant fellow by the name of Alfredo ‘Freddie’ (or, ‘Scap’) Scappaticci has been revealed to have been a British agent within the Provisional IRA: make no mistake, this is not Sean O’Callaghan we’re talking about here. The facts of his ‘career’ are simple enough: along with fellow sadists like John Joe Magee, and Gerry Adams’s sometime chauffeur, Terence ‘Cleeky’ Clarke, Freddie Scappaticci was a member of the Provo SS, their ‘Internal Security Department’. And for once, a Nazi allusion is not rhetorical bombast. IRA ‘Nutting Squad’ operatives specialised in the murder of their fellow murderers, which entailed the full Third Reich gamut of torture, inhumanity and, evidently, pleasure at the commission of evil. Not white men then. But it would seem that Mr Scappaticci at least has done the state some service. And now this good work has been revealed. Depending on how one sequences these things, this publicity is due to the wickedly foolish Stevens investigation, or perhaps thanks to disgruntled British agents, (the names most often cited are, ‘Kevin Fulton’, Martin Ingram, and ‘Samuel Rosenfeld'), agitating for pensions, who have chosen to reveal ‘Stakeknife’s’ name as part of this campaign. However one accounts for the emergence of Stakeknife’s name in the Dublin Sunday Tribune, the tenor of the coverage is pretty unanimous. As the Tribune doesn’t stretch to a website, the closely related concluding words of the Scottish Sunday Herald will do as an exemplary peroration:
Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, may, privately at least, be heaving a huge sigh of relief that Stakeknife is no more. There has been wild speculation that men like Adams and McGuinness were Stakeknife — today that speculation is over, but now the truth and reconciliation process has to begin.
I would suggest that the two cited gentlemen are not breathing a sigh of relief, but are becoming ever more anxious. Mainland media, I strongly suspect, imagine that the normal laws which govern collective human interaction cease when we contemplate the ‘Republican movement’. Which is to say, they assume that Adams, McGuinness and their less publicity-keen cohort in the Provo/SF high command must, ipso facto, be popular (in that role), as how otherwise would they sustain themselves at the head of a revolutionary, or even merely terrorist enterprise? Of course the truth of the matter is that neither Martin nor Gerry are intrinsically popular with their peers, both being disliked — for different reasons — in large measure by probably a majority of Republicans.
The reasoning then for why I suggest extreme and growing anxiety is liable to be the actual state of affairs for eg Martin McGuinness and Gerry Adams is as follows: the idea — and one has to believe that British black propaganda (aimed, obviously, at sowing dissension within Republican ranks) has had a hand in this rumour building up steam in the way that it has — that the upper echelons of the Provos are riddled with 70s & 80s epoch recruited lags, who are actually working for the Brits too, has caused some fair old degree of internal havoc. It’s virtually impossible to disprove, it’s been sown in very fertile ground (terrorists, like all other criminals, being congenitally suspicious), and most importantly of all, it is, of course, very, very useful factionally.
In other words, if you’re one of those (plentiful) Republicans chafing under the present McGuinness/Adams regime, what more joyous weapon could you have, either because you’re inclined thanks to your ‘tankie’ [sic] beliefs, or far more plausibly, because you see an excellent opportunity to swim to the top of your small pond by disingenuously affecting credibility to the wildest of the ‘MI5’ rumours, than this? That, ‘yes boys, Martin and Gerry are working for them too’. Whether or not internal opponents believe such claims about McGuinness and Adams, still less whether they ‘oppose’ the partitionist strategy firmly in place, this has been simply too good a trick to miss. Be sure about one thing: more stories about Martin and Gerry being ‘Brits’ will have been told, in good faith or otherwise, by their fellow Republicans, than by any other actors in this drama.
More than anything else, this is what I think has led to these ‘revelations’. The whole ‘Gerry and Martin are Brits’ thing was/is getting out of hand within Republicanism (from the point of view of our unimaginative government), and so to protect this useful pair, some considerable sleight of hand was required ie ‘look over here: here’s the fellow! it was him all along, Gerry and Martin had nothing to do with it . . .’ — hence the ‘outing’ of Stakeknife. And no more conspiracy theories for me this year. Mind you, if Government ministers seriously doesn’t realise that they will find, after the departure from the scene of Messrs Adams and McGuinness, any number of willing collaborators to prance about in front of the cameras with them (sorry, 'step forward and assume positions of political responsibility in order to sustain the peace process’), they are collectively off their heads. Just as with that fragile political flower David Trimble qua unionism, it is solely mental inertia that blinds Whitehall to the fact that there are heaps and heaps and heaps of other willing Republicans out there. Picking them too would make as much sense as anything else the state has got up to over the last 30 years.
One more theory
As it's past Lent, I'll indulge myself and draw your attention to just one more paranoid thing: first of all, let’s skip quickly past that pat little narrative about how poor Mr Scappaticci became a Provo nutter after being savaged by another Provo. I mean, that all makes sense, doesn’t it — a fellow terrorist attacks you, so what do you do, what, moreover, are you able to do? why become a Provo responsible for ‘internal security’. And equally, let’s not get too caught up in all those anonymous briefings in the newspapers — from the inevitable ‘security sources’ — which are going to credit little old you with just about every intelligence coup by the security services during the Troubles. After all, you’re bound to have been the principal source of all the hum-int on offer — it’s not as, for instance, the entire Provisional movement is riddled from top to bottom with equally compromised people. Gosh no. What’s we’re going to wonder about is that most mysterious of things, the break-in at Castlereagh that saw policemen politely tied up (and not, say, murdered), files made off with, and general bemusement. What was all that about? I’ll hazard one more guess, and that it’s indeed much as was claimed at the time, an operation by members of the IRA — but not one ordered by the IRA. Rather, this was some of Freddie Scappaticci’s especially compromised Provo peers doing their military (and possibly police) handlers yet another favour. Why? As one last effort, in this sphere at least, to retain the initiative against the police and the army’s greatest foe in Ulster: MI5. It doesn't take a Sunday newspaper to tell one who John Stevens’s greatest ally in all of this has been.
— The Watchwoman
StormontWatch is ERO's occasional, Belfast-based Northern Irish politics column
StormontWatch, May 11, 2003 09:35 AM