MI5 subjected to increased scrutiny amid growing distrust

A major investigation into the state agent in the IRA known as Staeknife has revealed that MI5 played a greater role in his handling than previously claimed.

The final report of Operation Kenova also said MI5’s late discovery and disclosure of documents as part of the investigation last year was a “serious organizational failure”.

Stakeknife was Freddie Scappaticci, who died in 2023, but Kenova continues to be muzzled due to the government officially naming him.

He worked as a British agent from the late 1970s to the 1990s and was linked to 14 murders and 15 kidnappings. MI5 and the Army knew of his role in the IRA’s feared internal security unit and his role in torturing and killing people accused of being informants.

Operation Kenova’s definitive conclusion about MI5’s candor is the latest serious criticism of the security service by the courts and official investigations in the last two years.

The public inquiry into the 2023 Manchester Arena bombing, which killed 22 people, has found that MI5’s senior corporate witness gave false evidence about key intelligence he held about the bomber before the attack.

Earlier this year MI5 was forced to apologize. BBC proves three tribunals gave false evidence In a case involving the neo-Nazi government informant known as Agent X.

MI5 later attempted to withhold further damning material from the High Court, and its third-in-command gave an inaccurate account of what had happened to senior judges. It led the Prime Minister to order a new investigation.

Jon Boutcher, chief constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland, says there is a problem with MI5’s approach to cold cases in Northern Ireland and he thinks things need to change.

But there is also a wider question about whether MI5 can be trusted to provide accurate and complete evidence to courts and investigations.

This poses a profound challenge for the government, which acts on behalf of MI5 in the courts and relies on intelligence assessments to make major decisions.

MI5’s evidence is really important. As with Operation Kenova, this evidence often relates to matters of life and death, but also to cases involving people who have been stripped of their British citizenship or deprived of their freedom.

There are calls for MI5 to be subjected to greater scrutiny and held more accountable to the law.

Campaigners behind the upcoming Hillsborough Bill demand MI5, MI6 and GCHQ be subject to the same law duty of honesty, like other public institutions and government agencies.

The law will impose a new legal duty on public institutions and officials to act honestly and fully support government investigations and ensure that wrongdoings are not concealed.

However, as things stand, this duty will not apply equally to MI5 and the intelligence agencies; Individual MI5 officers will not be subject to duty, unlike people working for organizations such as the police.

Another big problem for the government and MI5 is that, despite repeated requests, Kenova was not allowed to name agent Stakeknife, and much of what was revealed as a result could not be made public if the agent was identified.

Stakeknife, as everyone knows, was Freddie Scappaticci, and on Tuesday Jon Boutcher said the ban on identifying Stakeknife was a “pantomime”.

MI5 justifies the ban by citing its core ‘neither confirm nor deny’ (NCND) privacy policy, which has long been presented to the public as a monolithic principle that is impossible to deviate from.

But in the neo-Nazi Agent X case, MI5 was forced to abandon the NCND and confirm that the man at the center of the case was a government informant; After the BBC proved that the man told me he was a spy when he was trying to impersonate him.

MI5 was also forced to admit that it had misled the court by not disclosing the existence of policies for leaving the NCND (policies it had kept secret).

Last year Kenova recommended that the government should review, adjust and define the appropriate boundaries of NCND policy in relation to the identification of agents and its application in the context of cold cases in Northern Ireland.

On Tuesday, Kenova said there had been no concrete progress on the recommendation yet and it was unclear if or when it might change.

But Stataknife’s “pantomime” and MI5’s outspokenness in other important cases are now putting pressure on the government to take action.

If you have information to share with the BBC News Investigations team about this or a similar story, please get in touch. If you would like to speak to a BBC journalist please include a contact number. You can contact us in the following ways:

Email: Security.investigations@bbc.co.uk

Signal: @danields39.63

click Here To learn how to use SecureDrop, an anonymous reporting tool that only works in the Tor browser, and follow the advice to stay safe.