Marginal Footnotes

As some of you may know, I live in Belfast.  So, this morning while I'm making a cup of coffee, I notice that the Irish News has run a front page story on allegations from a former British intelligence officer that Martin McGuinness, chief negotiator for Sinn Fein and former IRA second-in-command during the 1972 Bloody Sunday event in Derry, is in fact a British spy.  McGuinness has variously called the charge 'nonsense' and 'rubbish'.   Few on either side of the sectarian divide seem to believe the allegations. 

In any event, it's an interesting piece of what has become a much wider story in Northern Ireland.  Just some of the basics:

–Back in 2003 there were reports that a man named Freddie Scappaticci, an official in the Provisional IRA, was in fact a British agent.  A former British intelligence official and agent handler named Martin Ingram exposed Scappaticci, and later wrote a book about 'Stakeknife', his codename.  Scappaticci is now in hiding.  Incidentally, he happened to be the man in the IRA who went after suspected informants. According to a massive article in The Atlantic Monthly (subs. required), Scappaticci worked for a British intelligence group called the ‘Force Research Unit. Through the FRU, Scappaticci served a host of agencies, among them MI5, a paramilitary police unit called Special Branch, and army intelligence. Eventually he became one of the most important spies in Britain's history, working his way toward the IRA's heart’.     

–Following the 1998 Belfast Agreement which set up a devolved consociational government in the North, the Stormont assembly variously functioned and ceased to function until it was finally closed for the last time in the midst of a spy scandal allegedly involving the IRA.  This particular intrigue, which came to be known as 'Stormontgate', was said to have involved an IRA spy-ring based in the Northern Ireland Parliament.  Investigations led to Sinn Fein Chief of Staff Denis Donaldson, his son and another man, all of whom were arrested.  Donaldson allegedly ran the intelligence operations of the IRA.  

–This December I was getting my hair cut and read an article that all charges against these men had been dropped.  The British government explained that it was 'no longer in the public interest to pursue' the case.

–About a week after the charges were dropped, the front page of pretty much every newspaper on the rack carried a story that Donaldson was in fact a British double-agent, and had been so for some twenty years.

–Subsequent to this, in April 2006, Donaldson was shot to death at a cottage in Donegal.  It seems he was tortured before he was killed. Obits here and here.  

–Now Martin Ingram, the spy handler who exposed Stakeknife, is alleging the McGuinness is a British spy. 

Who knows where this will go.  At the moment there's wholesale skepticism from pretty much everyone–McGuinness' republican credentials are impeccable.  But, so were Donaldson's.  

–mpd 

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