Stickknife Scandal: Years of Secret Service Cover-Up.
The final report, known as the Canova Inquiry, which follows a years-long investigation into the activities of a senior British military source within the Provisional Irish Republican Army, paints a shocking picture of the way the country’s intelligence and security services operate, in which the lives of ordinary citizens and even suspected informants were repeatedly sacrificed in the pursuit of a “golden source.”
The independent inquiry, which began in 2016, was tasked with examining the role of a double agent known as “Stickknife” within the IRA’s internal security unit, and how the British military and security services handled his information. The source operated within the same notorious unit that was responsible for identifying, interrogating, torturing, and, in several cases, killing those suspected of providing information to British forces.
The final report stresses that the British security and military services have been aware of the source’s role in kidnapping, torturing, and killing suspected informants for years, but instead of stopping his activities or seriously trying to rescue the victims, in some cases, they have even used special facilities to remove him from the reach of the police and prevent interrogation. In other words, protecting this source has been given practical priority over saving the lives of those described as saveable.
The Canova investigation examined a total of 101 murders and kidnappings linked to the IRA’s internal security unit and concluded that more lives were likely lost in connection with this source than were saved by his information. The report now seriously questions the official narrative in London over the past years about the life-saving role of such sources.
One of the controversial themes of the report is the way in which MI5 and other security agencies cooperated with the Canova investigation team. The officials of the investigation say that after years of cooperation and while it had officially announced that it had handed over all relevant documents, after the publication of the interim report and even after judicial decisions were made on possible prosecution of individuals, the British Home Security Service sent a significant volume of new documents related to the management of this source to Canova at a time when the opportunity for further investigation and investigation had practically been lost.
The head of Canova and also the chief of police of Northern Ireland have described this behavior as “late and damaging” and have warned that such an approach, i.e. keeping documents in the archive and presenting them when the way to the investigation is closed, not only adds to the suffering of the families of the victims, but also exacerbates public distrust in the judicial and security apparatus.
The Canova report also explicitly calls on the British government to deviate from the so-called “neither confirm nor deny” policy regarding the identity of the source in this case. This policy has, for years, prevented the identity of the perpetrators from being confirmed, at least at the official level, although the name of a Belfast man has been mentioned in the British media as the main suspect in this case for many years. The authors of the report believe that this continued official silence has no convincing justification and only leads to a continuation of the wound of distrust among the families of the victims and the society of Northern Ireland.