Few, then, could have imagined that, three decades later, he would assume national prominence for having become embroiled in one of the major controversies to emerge from the British State’s dirty war in Ireland.

The republican writer Danny Morrison urged caution yesterday, drawing attention to similar reports that have proved groundless. Mr Morrison, however, does admit that the IRA has on occasion been penetrated by the British.

While in the H-Blocks of Long Kesh in 1986, I expressed the view to Brendan Hughes, the senior Belfast IRA commander, that it would make sense for the British to place an agent in the upper echelons of the IRA’s Internal Security Department: they would secure a long-term agent who, unlike those in the operational IRA who habitually risk imprisonment, would serve them as a permanent listening device.

There is no route more direct through the fog of IRA mystique and secrecy than that of seniority within the Internal Security Department. Those who manage it know most of what is worth knowing. Stakeknife, if one of its senior operatives, may not have been aware in advance of IRA operations but would certainly have known the identity of all key operators.

His continuing debriefing of volunteers after arrest, or as part of the incessant inquiries that characterise the IRA, was made workable only by an extensive knowledge of the background. The organisation’s weaknesses and strengths, the unquestioning or critical approaches to leadership of its volunteers, the fighters and the shirkers would all have been known to him. More importantly, British-placed informers within the IRA could have been protected by Stakeknife, while more committed volunteers may have been set up for arrest or assassination.

Given that his information did not remain the prize of his military handlers but was passed to the desks of Prime Ministers, the British Government was optimally positioned to encourage the peace lobby within the republican camp, to punish the enemies of that lobby and to reward its friends. It knew the military strength or weakness behind every republican position and could readjust accordingly.

The ultimate aim was to secure republican acceptance of the British state’s alternative to republicanism, ultimately made manifest in the internal solution known as the Good Friday Agreement.

Stakeknife damaged the IRA irreparably and helped to pave the way for its defeat. The suggestion that Sinn Fein leaders were conscious British agents remains unfounded but there is little room for doubt that the hand of the British state was on the tiller of the peace process that the Sinn Fein leadership came to embrace. And its grip was made all the firmer by Stakeknife.

Anthony McIntyre is a former IRA prisoner.

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