The findings of the ‘Operation Kenova’ inquiry, released last week in Belfast, into some of the British state’s covert operations during the ‘Troubles’ in the north of Ireland (approximately from 1969 to 1998) are a devastating indictment of the role played by MI5, British Army, Royal Ulster Constabulary and Special Branch, and their network of informers. The inquiry was set up to investigate the activities of the high-level British agent inside the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA), codenamed ‘Stakeknife’, and widely believed to have been Freddy Scappaticci. It has revealed once again how deeply the British state was embedded in the so-called ‘dirty war’, how far it was prepared to go, and how shamelessly it has protected itself ever since.
The Kenova inquiry’s estimated £40 million cost sparked the usual complaints from right-wing pundits. Yet these same voices remain silent regarding the significantly higher expenditure on state repression in the north over three decades of the conflict.
The inquiry confirmed that Stakeknife (Scappaticci), a long-time British state agent and leading figure in the IRA’s internal security unit, the notorious ‘Nutting Squad’, was allowed to continue operating even as he carried out kidnappings, interrogations, and killings. On at least two occasions, MI5 spirited him out of the North when police attempted to question him for murder and false imprisonment. Scappaticci was protected because he was considered a “golden egg”, a source of intelligence whose value, in the eyes of the British state, outweighed the lives of the people he was allowed to kill.
The British establishment long claimed that Stakeknife had “saved hundreds of lives.” Yet the Kenova inquiry concluded that the number of lives “saved” due to his intelligence was in the high single digits or low double digits, a fraction of the myth spun for decades to justify the state’s dirty war.
Families of those murdered by Scappaticci’s unit are rightly furious that he has never been officially named and that the state continues to hide behind its cynical “neither confirm nor deny” policy. For decades, these families carried the stigma of being labelled traitors within Republican, nationalist and Catholic communities. How many of Scappaticci’s victims were targeted not because they were informers, but because they had begun to suspect Scappaticci or were inconvenient to the interests of British intelligence?
The inquiry also investigated ‘Operation Denton’, which examined the Glenanne Gang, a loyalist paramilitary network responsible for around 120 murders, aided by members of the RUC and Ulster Defence Regiment. The inquiry stated that there was “no evidence” of high-level state involvement in the 1974 Dublin and Monaghan bombings, the worst single day of killing during the conflict. For the families of the 33 dead, these conclusions are an insult. The carefully crafted narrative of “rogue units” and “poor oversight” collapses under the weight of decades of evidence that these operations were not accidents or deviations but that they were core components of British state terror strategy.
The report also fails to investigate the potential involvement of the state in the south, specifically how the Dublin and Monaghan bombings were exploited as a justification for implementing oppressive laws.
Pattern regarding role of British state
There is a clear pattern regarding the role of the British state in the conflict as far as the Establishment is concerned. Inquiries acknowledge fragments of truth and rapp the institutions over the knuckles, while shielding them, as a whole, and highest levels of political leadership, up to British Cabinet level. They point to “systemic failures,” “miscommunication,” or handlers who were supposedly “out of control.” But the British state, far from a neutral actor, consciously pursued a ‘counter-insurgency strategy’ that subordinated human life to the interests of the capitalist state. Before the Troubles, this was a well established British colonial policy in other parts of the world, like Kenya. The British government’s secrecy laws and its refusal to release documents shield the ruling class and the security apparatus from any meaningful scrutiny.
The Kenova inquiry calls for the IRA to apologise to victims of the “Nutting Squad”. When journalists first revealed that Scappaticci was Stakeknife, in May 2003, leading Sinn Fein figures denounced “nameless, faceless securocrats” making baseless allegations against Scappaticci.
While the Provisional IRA’s strategy of armed struggle — ‘individual terrorism’ from a Marxist perspective—undeniably caused many deaths and injuries, and exacerbated sectarian divisions in society, this cannot be allowed to overshadow the actions of the British state. Despite its claims to uphold the rule of law, the state was involved in running agents within republican paramilitary groups who participated in kidnappings and murders, and colluding with loyalist death squads.
In the early 1970s, Militant Irish Monthly (predecessor of Militant Left), predicted the Provisional IRA’s armed campaign to lead inevitably to a dead-end—a futile “duel in the dark” against the powerful British state. This conflict ended not with a victory for either side but in a bloody stalemate, which ultimately paved the way for the peace process and the 1998 Good Friday Agreement.
For all the years of the Kenova inquiry deliberations only a fraction of the British state’s role in infiltrating and manipulating both Republican and loyalist paramilitary organisations has been exposed. Many other incidents have escaped scrutiny. It is probable that the state even sacrificed security force personnel to protect its own operatives.
The capitalist state cannot be trusted to expose its own crimes. Furthermore, as British imperialism pursues future foreign interventions, such as those seen in Afghanistan and Iraq, the British state will seek to employ comparable tactics of state terror and the deployment of agents against other emerging opposition.
The working class in Northern Ireland, Catholic and Protestant, paid the heaviest price for the conflict, with thousands killed or injured and tens of thousands passing through the prison system. Yet it is the working class alone that can deliver a real accounting of the past. Genuine truth and justice demand independent, working-class-led inquiries, free from the restrictions imposed by Westminster, with full disclosure of the activities of the intelligence agencies.
The Kenova inquiry, like all those before it, shows the need for the working class to organise itself not only industrially but politically. Only a strong socialist organisation, rooted in the workplaces and communities across both sides of the divide, with support from trade unionists, can cut across sectarian politicians in Stormont, and the right-wing governments in Westminster. Such a party must be connected to genuine community campaigns, tenants’ movements, and independent working-class organisations. This can mobilise people to fight Northern Ireland’s scandalously low pay, the chronic housing crisis, the education and health crisis, youth unemployment, and the social catastrophe of addiction and suicide that flows directly from decades of conflict and neoliberal neglect and underfunding of social provision.
Building a fighting, working-class socialist alternative is the most effective answer to decades of terror, collusion, and destruction. It offers today’s working-class youth a way forward: not the dead end of sectarian division or the failed strategies of the past, but a united struggle to expose the role of the capitalist state and to fight for a socialist future built by and for the working class.