Contents:
1. Scappaticci, a sexually deviant, sadistic torturer and mass murderer.
Operation Kenova Inquiry took seven years to complete its indisputably botched and misleading interim report. The document appeared in March of 2024.
It looked at a string of crimes committed by Alfredo ‘Freddie’ Scappaticci, yet was unable to state that Scappaticci was Agent Stakeknife.
Scappaticci was a cold blooded killer without a single redeeming feature. He was an ideal asset for an organisation such as MI5. He lusted after children and spent hours masturbating in front of pictures of extreme pornography, some of which involved animals.
Richard O’Rawe, a former IRA hunger striker turned author, published, Scappaticci’s Dirty War, in 2023. One IRA man interviewed by O’Rawe told him:
‘I think Scap was turned because of a lust for young children … he was reported to the RUC for having abused a child in west Belfast, but they never acted upon it.’
Scappaticci was convicted at Westminster Magistrates Court in 2018 after he admitted two counts of possessing extreme pornography.
The Kenova report states that:
‘As part of the Kenova investigations, Freddie Scappaticci was first arrested on 30th January 2018 in relation to offences connected with the Kenova [terms of reference]. A search warrant was executed at his home address following his arrest. Searching his property, we recovered numerous exhibits including electronic devices.
‘A laptop recovered from the sitting room at his address contained 329 images of an extreme pornographic nature. Kenova officers and Hi-Tec crime forensic experts were able to prove that Mr Scappaticci was responsible for accessing and downloading these images.
‘On 1st February 2018, while in police custody, we further arrested Freddie Scappaticci for being in possession of extreme pornographic material contrary to section 63 of the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008. Mr Scappaticci admitted viewing the material but not storing the images, he accepted that he was the sole user of the laptop. He was charged with two specimen counts of possession of extreme pornographic images contrary to section 63, covering a period from October 2015 to January 2018.
‘On 4th December 2018, at Westminster Magistrates’ Court in London, Mr Scappaticci pleaded guilty to possessing extreme pornographic material. The Chief Magistrate sentenced him to three months in custody suspended for 12 months. In sentencing, the Magistrate said, “You have not been before the court for fifty years and that’s good character in my book”. These remarks frustrated many victims and families who have engaged with Operation Kenova and I can understand why.‘
2. MI5 controlled Scappaticci. Kenova has ignored his real – and barbaric – value to MI5.
The interim Operation Kenova report was published in March 2024 on the basis all relevant MI5 files had been delivered to it.
One of the challenges faced by Operation Kenova is to identify the UK spy agency which ran Agent Stakeknife. The flawed interim report concluded that: ‘MI5 was not responsible for how Stakeknife was targeted or run.’
Kenova decided that Stakeknife was handled by the Force Reconnaissance Unit (FRU) of the British army. This limited section of its findings was correct but what role did MI5 play in the process?
The FRU worked closely with MI5. The interim Kenova Report disclosed that:
‘A former Commanding Officer in the FRU has stated that everything it did was done with MI5’s knowledge and consent.‘ [67.2]
MI5, a notoriously deceitful and dishonest organisation, tried to distance itself from Stakeknife by responding to what the FRU officer revealed thus:
‘Senior MI5 officers and the various [directors-general of MI5] interviewed [by Operation Kenova] deny this categorically.‘ [Paragraph 67.2 interim report]
Who was telling the truth?
Operation Kenova decided the FRU was lying. Yet, it offered no explanation for this perceived lie.
Kenova proceeded to conclude that all the blame for the Stakeknife operation lay at the feet of the FRU.
The report added that a ‘former D-G of MI5’ told Kenova that ‘the FRU had an attitude that was “gung ho, not well managed, with little meaningful oversight”.’
3. The Baroness from MI5 purrs with delight. The operation was a ‘bad’ one, not to mention, ‘a disgraceful’ one.
Baroness Eliza Manningham-Buller purred with delight at the interim finding. In the early 1990s, she ran the MI5 unit responsible for countering the IRA. In 2002 she became the D-G of MI5, a post she held for five years. She ran Chatham House until September 2025. (It supplies RTE with guest speakers to promote the notion of abandoning neutrality.)
After the publication of the interim Kenova report, the Baroness appeared on the popular podcast hosted by Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart (ex-MI6). She stated that MI5 had not been ‘aware’ of Stakeknife until it had been asked to place him in witness protection after his identity had been compromised in the late 1990s.
The operation, she opined, had been a ‘bad’ one, not to mention, ‘a disgraceful’ one.
‘And 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.’
4. Missing MI5 files turn up.
Embarrassing a tranche of undisclosed MI5 files emerged. They made a nonsense of Kenova’s interim conclusions about MI5.
According to sources close to Kenova, they established 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 had to concede ‘that MI5 had some limited knowledge [about Scappaticci], earlier than I had previously understood’.
5. A specialist in anti-IRA operations?
The Baroness was a specialist in anti-IRA operations.
She rose to the top of MI5.
Yet, she was not aware of the identity of the most important anti-IRA secret agent on her books?
6. The truth about Scappaticci.
In reality, the service Scappaticci performed for MI5 was to destabilise the IRA by spreading rumours about the infiltration of the organisation by British agents or ‘moles’. This was followed by the framing, torture and murder of loyal members of the IRA, a strategy that probably paved the way for the promotion of actual FRU-MI5 moles. The Kenova Report ignores this aspect of Scapatticci’s function as a British agent. The first person to make this accusation was Ian Hurst of the FRU.
It is also a view held by senior Gardai.
Operation Kenova was led by Jon Boutcher who is now Chief Constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI).
Boutcher did at least recognise that:
an environment [was allowed] to evolve in which people were tortured or killed without efforts being made to protect them or to bring agents responsible for serious crimes to justice.
7. Operation Kenova is lost in a sea of lies, deflection, bias and incomptence.
Jon Boutcher failed to appreciate the deeply criminal nature of MI5, the FRU and RUC special branch.
The claim published in the interim Kenova report by the unnamed former D-G of MI5 that the FRU had an attitude that was ‘gung ho, not well managed, with little meaningful oversight’ is deflection.
Scappaticci was very well managed.
He survived as an agent for decades and died of natural causes.
He managed to eliminate targets on behalf of Whitehall, the Northern Ireland Office (NIO), Ministry of Defence, MI5 and the FRU.
8. Boutcher gave MI5 every bounce of the ball.
Boutcher was faced with the clear and obvious fact that the UK State’s security forces repeatedly withheld – and did not action – information about threats to life, abductions, and murders of IRA members. Looking at MI5, FRU and RUC in a benign and favourable light, Boutcher concluded that this was done in order to protect secret agents such as Scappaticci from compromise. He concluded that:
‘As a result, murders that could and should have been prevented 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.’
Boutcher could not fail to notice that more lives were lost than saved by Scappaticci, and has acknowledged this much as fact. Yet, he did not deduce from this that Scappaticci was tasked with the elimination of IRA members, not the saving of lives.
9. Licence to kill other British agents.
Circumstances also arose where Scappaticci was permitted to murder British moles in the IRA to preserve his cover.
MI5 undoubtedly calculated that this was a price worth paying.
The torture and execution of moles also served to enhance Scappaticci’s reputation as a trustworthy member of the IRA.
10. The MI5-RUC-FRU murder machine.
There is an overarching naiveté to the interim Kenova report.
Boutcher was critical of how Stakeknife was run without any regard to the European Convention on Human Rights or the rule of law.
Has he no knowledge of the Troubles?
The NIO and MI5 engaged in widespread criminality during the Troubles. Criminal organisations do not believe in human rights.
Whitehall, the Ministry of Defence and the NIO, lied for decades about what happened on Bloody Sunday and during the Ballymurphy massacre.
The murder of Patrick Finucane by agents of MI5 and the RUC is further testament to this.
What about the hooded men? Hooded men.
The victims of the Miami Showband massacre were given over £1,000,000 in compensation by the NI State because it knew British operatives organised that atrocity and was afraid to let the scandal go to trial.
What about Kincora? Kincora’s darkest secret.
11. A two sided coin.
Operation Kenova has not – and will not – conclude that the operation involving Scappaticci was the mirror reflection of a parallel murder campaign run with Loyalist paramilitary agents.
Brian Nelson was the Director of UDA Intelligence. Nelson’s function was to line up IRA members for assassination. He did so with the assistance of his FRU-MI5-RUC puppet masters.
John Stevens led a number of inquiries into the FRU and UK State-Loyalist collusion. His team discovered that 203 Loyalist paramilitaries were on Britain’s pay roll. See the short clip below:
It is not logical to contend that the ruthless British officials controlling the UDA’s assassination programme – via Brian Nelson – failed to deploy Scappaticci for the same purpose?
Scappaticci was the intelligence dirty trick equivalent to a poison which they injected into the body of the IRA.
The interim Kenova report makes excuses for choices and actions (and inactions) of Scappaticci’s handlers. None of them are going to be prosecuted despite the long list of those Scappaticci killed.
12. ‘The sickening crimes committed by the ISU of the IRA.
The Kenova report is also highly critical of the IRA’s utterly repugnant Internal Security Unit (ISU):
The sickening crimes committed by the ISU against those accused or suspected of being agents represented the worst of what one human being will do to another.
David Burke is the author of ‘Deception & Lies, the Hidden History of the Arms Crisis 1970’ and ‘Kitson’s Irish War, Mastermind of the Dirty War in Ireland’ which examines the role of counter-insurgency dirty tricks in Northern Ireland in the early 1970s.
His third book, ‘An Enemy of the Crown, the British Secret Service Campaign against Charles Haughey’, was published on 30 September 2022.
These books can be purchased here:
https://www.mercierpress.ie/irish-books/kitson-s-irish-war
https://www.mercierpress.ie/irish-books/an-enemy-of-the-crown
https://www.mercierpress.ie/irish-books/deception-and-lies
He is also the author of The Puppet Masters: https://www.mercierpress.ie/books/the-puppet-masters/
