MI5 under increased scrutiny after multiple criticisms

The major investigation into the IRA state agent known as Stakeknife has revealed that MI5 had a larger role in his handling than previously claimed.

The final report on Operation Kenova also said MI5’s late discovery and release of documents to the inquiry last year was “a serious organizational failure”.

Stakeknife was Freddie Scappaticci, who died in 2023, but the government continues to prevent Kenova from officially naming him.

He worked as a British agent from the late 1970s to the 1990s, and has been linked to 14 murders and 15 kidnappings. MI5 and the army were aware of his role in the IRA’s feared internal security unit and his involvement in the torture and murder of people accused of being informants.

Operation Kenova’s harsh findings about MI5’s candor are just the latest severe criticism of the security service by courts and official investigations over the past two years.

In 2023, the public inquiry into the Manchester Arena bombing, which killed 22 people, found that MI5’s main corporate witness had given inaccurate evidence about key information he had about the bomber before the attack.

Earlier this year, MI5 was forced to apologize after the BBC showed it had presented false evidence to three courts in a case involving a neo-Nazi state informant known as Agent X.

MI5 then attempted to withhold more damning material from the High Court, and its third-in-command gave an inaccurate account of what had happened to senior judges, prompting the Prime Minister to order a new inquiry.

Jon Boutcher, chief constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland, says he believes MI5 has a problem with its approach to legacy cases in Northern Ireland and that things need to change.

But there are also wider doubts about whether MI5 can be trusted to provide truthful 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 its intelligence assessments to make big decisions.

MI5 evidence really matters. As with Operation Kenova, that evidence often relates to matters of life and death, but also to cases involving people who have been stripped of British citizenship or people who have had their freedoms taken away.

There are calls for MI5 to come under greater scrutiny and be made more accountable to the law.

Campaigners behind the impending Hillsborough Bill are demanding that MI5, MI6 and GCHQ be subject to the same duty of candor as other public bodies and government agencies.

The law will create a new legal duty for public bodies and servants to act sincerely and fully support investigations into the state, ensuring that irregularities are not hidden.

However, as things stand, the duty will not apply in the same way to MI5 and intelligence agencies, and individual MI5 officers will not be subject to the duty, unlike people who work for organizations such as the police.

Given Kenova’s findings, how will ministers and lawmakers now react?

Another major problem for the government and MI5 is the refusal to allow Kenova to name the agent Stakeknife, despite repeated requests for him to do so, with the consequence that much of what has been discovered cannot be described publicly should he identify the agent.

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

MI5 justifies the ban with reference to its core “neither confirm nor deny” (NCND) secrecy policy, which has long been publicly presented as a monolithic principle from which it cannot deviate.

But in the case of neo-Nazi Agent

MI5 was also forced to accept that it had misled a court by failing to disclose the existence of policies relating to NCND deviations, policies which it had kept secret.

Last year, Kenova recommended that the government should review, codify and define the appropriate boundaries of the NCND policy as it relates to agent identification and its application in the context of Northern Ireland legacy cases.

On Tuesday, Kenova said no substantial progress has yet been made on the recommendation and it is unclear if and when this could change.

But the Stakeknife “pantomime”, and MI5’s lack of candor in other major cases, is now putting pressure on the government to act.

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