Source: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-676552,00.html
The Sunday Times
May 11, 2003
Liam Clarke
BRITAIN’s most important agent inside the IRA was pulled out of Ireland by the security services yesterday hours before he was named in a Dublin newspaper.
The agent — codenamed Stakeknife — is understood to have been taken to a safe house. The dramatic move brings to an end a 30-year career during which he penetrated the highest ranks of the IRA. He was moved because his exposure would have led to near-certain kidnap, interrogation and murder by the terrorist organisation.
Defence sources confirmed last night that Stakeknife was being taken to a safe location. The military acted after receiving intelligence that the agent’s name was about to be published in Irish and Scottish newspapers.
Stakeknife’s card has been marked since Sir John Stevens, the commissioner of the Metropolitan police, revealed last month that he intended to question him as part of a long-running inquiry into alleged collusion by the security forces in paramilitary killings.
“We will be questioning Stakeknife soon. We fear other informants have been sacrificed to save him and we will be asking him about that,” Stevens said.
Stakeknife, whose existence was revealed by The Sunday Times four years ago, was regarded by the British military as “the jewel in the crown” of its network of agents in Ireland.
He first volunteered to work for the army in the 1970s and was steered to an influential position in the IRA.
He was run by members of the army’s Force Research Unit (FRU), the same intelligence organisation which is at the centre of Stevens’s inquiry. Stakeknife was paid about £60,000 a year for his services and his intelligence was read at cabinet level.
Now in his sixties, Stakeknife is originally from Belfast but was living in Dublin until yesterday’s security alert. He spoke to The Sunday Times more than a year ago, saying he had had to cut down his involvement in the IRA for health reasons and that he might tell his story when he had recovered.
The Sunday Tribune in Ireland and Sunday Herald in Scotland both name Stakeknife today and outline his role within the IRA. If he decided to talk now that his identity has been revealed his story would be political dynamite. Stevens — who has forwarded files on FRU soldiers to Northern Ireland’s director of public prosecutions — suspects Stakeknife and his handlers are linked to up to 40 preventable murders.
Stakeknife was recently advised by the army to move to the republic so he would be outside Stevens’s jurisdiction.
The army is furious with Stevens. Stakeknife’s handlers claim that he was responsible for saving far more lives than he ever cost. They point out that Britain was effectively at war with the IRA and in such circumstances their tactics were necessary.
Stakeknife’s handling was one of the army’s most sensitive secrets. An FRU unit, with its own fleet of vehicles, was maintained at the army’s Northern Ireland headquarters in Lisburn to handle him.
The plot to name Stakeknife is being linked to a man known by the pseudonym Kevin Fulton.
He is a former British soldier from the IRA country of south Armagh who infiltrated the republican terror group for the intelligence agencies. These included the army, the Royal Ulster Constabulary, Special Branch and customs.
He is best known for claiming that he warned the RUC anti-racketeering squad, for whom he was working at the time, about the Omagh bombing in 1998.
For the past two years he has been agitating for an army pension and resettlement package. Earlier this month he accused the Ministry of Defence of reneging on undertakings to help him and threatened, in an interview with a tabloid newspaper, to reveal the identity of Stakeknife if the ministry did not pay up.
He maintains that he has named Stakeknife only in sealed affidavits. These would be revealed by a lawyer in the event of Fulton dying or being injured.
However, senior security sources believe that he has now made good his threat to name Stakeknife.
One murder that Stevens is thought to want Stakeknife’s help in solving is that of Joseph Fenton, a Belfast estate agent and police informer who was murdered by the IRA’s internal security section. Fenton was supplying the IRA with safe houses for meetings but also informed the police, who subsequently bugged them.
He was found in February 1989 with three bullets in the head and one in the body.
Fenton had been warned to leave Northern Ireland after police told him that he was under suspicion. But he decided to return.
The Stevens team believes that despite this he could have been saved had Stakeknife and his handlers passed on all they knew about the IRA’s plotting to the police.
Another murder being investigated is that of Francisco Notarantonio, a Belfast pensioner and IRA veteran who was killed by the UDA in 1987. Here the suspicion is that Notarantonio’s name was given to the UDA by an army informant and his FRU handlers as a substitute for Stakeknife.
Stevens’s team of detectives has taken possession of all Stakeknife’s “contact forms”, records of how he met his FRU handlers and what was said at each meeting.
It is not known where Stakeknife is now being hidden and it is possible that he will eventually be set up with a new identity abroad.
Stevens would be concerned if any such move resulted in Stakeknife being put beyond the reach of his inquiry.