The final report into the activities of Stakeknife, the British army’s top IRA agent during the Troubles, will be released in Belfast later on Tuesday.
It is understood it will not name Stakeknife – widely accepted to be west Belfast man Freddie Scappaticci, the former head of the IRA’s notorious internal security unit (ISU), the “Nutting Squad”, who died in 2023 – due to the UK government policy of “neither confirm nor deny” (NCND) relating to sensitive intelligence issues.
It is expected, however, the report of the £40 million Operation Kenova investigation will provide more details on his recruitment as a double agent and his involvement in serious criminality, including murder and abduction.
Its publication will also include short summaries of the high level findings of the other investigations and reviews carried out by the Kenova team.
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These are Operation Mizzenmast, which examined the shooting dead of Jean Smyth-Campbell in west Belfast in 1972, Operation Turma, into the murders of three RUC officers at Kinnego Embankment in Co Armagh in 1982, and Operation Denton, which examined allegations of collusion between the British state and loyalist paramilitaries in the so-called Glenanne Series of killings.
The summary of the Denton review – which covers approximately 120 killings in more than 90 incidents in the early to mid-1970s on both sides of the Border, including the murders of 34 people in bombings in Dublin and Monaghan in May 1974 – was the subject of a last-minute legal challenge on Monday which failed to prevent its publication.
The full report had been due to be published by the end of 2025.
Alan Brecknell, whose father Trevor’s murder was one of those attributed to the so-called Glenanne Gang, said it was “disappointing” bereaved relatives “had been promised a report, that as far as we’ve been led to believe, was somewhere in the region of 450 to 500 pages”.
“The headlines will be, here’s the important points out of Operation Denton, will people ever sit down and read the 400-odd pages if and when the final report is published?
“Families would have expected the opportunity to have read the report, or at least have seen the whole report, before having to comment on what the headlines are, as opposed to what the substance of the report is,” he said.
In a statement, a spokesman for the Kenova investigation said the publication of the full Denton report was “still subject to consideration of representations in line with our protocols for the release of all our reports”.
“We have already provided personal briefings to many impacted families to provide answers they have been denied for too long,” he said.
“We remain fully committed to publishing the full report to provide as much information as possible to the families and others affected by the awful incidents reviewed as part of Operation Denton.”
Mr Brecknell, who represents other families bereaved during the Troubles through his work at the Pat Finucane Centre, said the reality of the report was that “some families may find out not a lot more … whereas others will probably be disappointed because there was a lack of information in the first place.
“But the big point for me personally is that this is an official state organisation looking at this and coming up with their findings, and if in the report there is acknowledgement that there was collusion in a number of the killings, that’s important.”
He said that for some of the families, “how they have been approached by the people who have worked within Operation Denton has been a sea change from how they’ve been treated in the past” and it was important there was “a learning from this process” for current attempts to address the legacy of the Troubles.
“What I witnessed was a degree of empathy that in the past hasn’t always been there, and this process, as well as any legacy process, is possibly the last chance to learn for a lot of people, and we need to get this right now,” he said.
The interim Kenova report, released last year, concluded more lives were lost than were saved as a consequence of the activities of Stakeknife.
It outlined the activities of a specialist British army unit and RUC special branch in “withholding information from and about their agents” with the result that “very serious criminal offences, including murder, were not prevented or investigated when they could and should have been”.
