Summary: two books plumbing the depths of the intelligence war during the Troubles

The morally vile, but tactically brilliant, American Confederate general, Nathan Bedford Forrest had a philosophy when giving battle: Get there first with the most.

This philosophy seems to have been taken up with some degree of alacrity by a raft of English politicians and writers who want to capture the history books to rewrite the Irish peace process as a benevolent English achievement. 

Central amongst these has been Peter Taylor whose focus for some years has been on the role of British intelligence in the peace process, particularly the “Back Channel” between MI6 and the IRA. This, as far as he seems to be concerned, was the only strand of the peace process that mattered. Forget the Hume-Adams talks; forget Irish diplomacy and the Downing Street Declaration; forget George Mitchell; forget the European Union; forget Mo Mowlem. Instead, the peace process was something gifted to the quarrelsome Irish by perspicacious spooks, selflessly concerned with Paddy well-being. 

Hemmings’ book gives a nod to diplomacy with mention of the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985 – also portrayed as a British initiative. But, like Taylor he is also principally interested in intelligence operations, albeit with a broader perspective. At its core his book explores three parallel but occasionally overlapping British intelligence operations: In addition to MI6 and the Back Channel, Hemmings describes MI5’s efforts to boost Sinn Fein’s electoral fortunes with a view to weaning them away from violence, and the army’s efforts to disrupt the IRA’s military operations through the activities of, in particular, Freddie Scappaticci – Stakeknife. 

Scappaticci was the army’s most important agent in the IRA. A senior figure he was the head of the IRA’s internal security – the Nutting Squad. He was personally involved in the interrogation, torture and murder of dozens of suspected IRA informers. Many of these were, of course, also British agents, like Scappaticci himself. 

The term “British agent” can be a misleading one. It can lead one to think of James Bond, who was an intelligence officer NOT an agent. The agents are the vulnerable people who through blackmail and bribery are recruited by officers to turn traitor on former friends and neighbours. 

The pathetic plight of these desperate people is a central concern of Richard O’Rawe.  O’Rawe, a former IRA man himself, knew Scappaticci. But given the sociopathology that he documents, he records that he is thankful that he did not know him well. 

Scappaticci was an army intelligence operation. But O’Rawe shows, there was an essential unity between the IRA’s Nutting Squad and the “Tasking and Co-ordinating Group”, the senior officials from all British intelligence agencies who oversaw their diverse operations. So much so that it was they, ultimately, who decided who would live and who would die, and gave orders accordingly for favoured British agents like Scappaticci to kill other less valued ones. 

O’Rawe’s past IRA involvement gives him access to other IRA volunteers and his interviews with them provides a broader perspective on the Troubles to Hemmings whose book is more dominated by British sources. O’Rawe also has an altogether more morally clear-sighted view of that squalid war than Hemmings. He is not afraid to use the term “war crime” in his assessment of the savagery of both IRA and British actions. 

Aside from the desperately sad human stories that these books recount, and the important ethical questions relating to the conduct of insurgency and counter-insurgency that they raise, these books also offer valuable insights into some broader historical questions. 

First, the whispered accusation that Martin McGuinness was a tout is effectively discounted. Given the efforts that MI5 was putting in over decades to coaxing the republican movement onto a more constitutional path, compromising McGuinness like that would have risked wholly undermining their efforts. But while he may never have been a tout, the callousness which McGuinness showed towards human life, particularly in diverse killings of suspected informers, means that while he may be an important figure in Ireland’s history, he should never be thought of as a hero. 

Second, the idea that the IRA was beaten is disabused. Even though British intelligence had compromised major parts of the IRA, its rural organization in South Armagh, Tyrone and Fermanagh were still capable of sustaining the killing, even if there was never any hope of military victory. 

This leads us to the third point, that of the importance of the political processes that were running parallel to these intelligence ones. Without those, offering a constitutional framework that, if not giving the IRA all that they wanted, at least gave them some, there would have been nowhere for the Back Channel to go. The British might like to now remember the peace process as a British led affair, one of the great achievements of New Labour as that morally bankrupt party likes to chauvinistically put it. However, without the thread of Irish leadership showing the way, they would still be entangled in the labyrinth of killing typified by their Stakeknife operation.

Both O’Rawe and Hemmings describe with some admiration the efforts of Jon Boutcher’s Kenova enquiry to get to the bottom of the moral morass of the Troubles intelligence operations. Boutcher, who was involved in the police killing of Jean Charles de Menezes may have been expected to do the decent thing by the British Establishment and cover up embarrassing information. Instead, he recommended prosecutions in 28 cases involving both former IRA and senior British personnel. 

The Public Prosecution Service declined to undertake these prosecutions, which seems a travesty. But in that it is hardly surprising. The Stakeknife operation is but one among many war crimes that the British state was involved in: Aside from Ballymurphy and Bloody Sunday there was also extensive collusion with Loyalist death squads across the North. So, this makes it more understandable why past British governments have scrambled to introduce blanket amnesties for all Troubles era killings. It also gives insight into why the current British government of “human rights lawyer” Keir Starmer still strives to prevent a public inquiry into the killing of Sean Brown. 

Both Hemmings’ and O’Rawe’s books may require some revision – in the details but most probably not in the substance – in the light of Boutcher’s final Kenova report. But they are still fine work, grappling with difficult subjects. O’Rawe’s in particular, while more narrowly focussed than Hemmings, is an elegantly written work, marked by a burning sense of indignation at the scale of the depravity that he describes