Sealing Stakeknife's will weakens faith in security services

Times

3 days ago

In a remarkable judgment last week, details of the will of a Belfast builder were sealed for 70 years — a provision previously made only for members of the royal family. The step was taken to keep secret the estate of Freddie Scappaticci who was the agent Stakeknife, British intelligence's top spy inside the IRA during the Troubles.
While spying on republican leaders, Scappaticci was also chief interrogator, torturer and executioner for the IRA's internal security unit, which hunted and killed suspected informants. He was exposed in 2003 and was spirited away by MI5 to live under false names at comfortable addresses in Surrey until his death in hospital in March 2023.
When he died Scappaticci was the chief suspect in a police investigation, Operation Kenova, which linked him to at least 14 murders. Detectives concluded that many of those killings could have been prevented by his handlers.
• Secret court seals will of IRA spy Stakeknife until 2095
Just why is this killer entitled to state protection after his death? Why has a senior judge afforded him the same post-mortem secrecy given to Prince Philip and the Queen Mother? After a closed-door hearing, Sir Julian Flaux found there could be a threat to the safety of his beneficiaries. Those are most likely to be his six children; yet no evidence has been cited of any threat to them since their father disappeared from Belfast.
The judge also insisted that there was nothing remotely interesting to the press or the public in Scappaticci's will. How he knows that without asking to hear submissions from interested parties is a mystery.
Did the judge think to ask for the views of the survivors of IRA interrogations or the families of those killed by Scappaticci who have lodged 30 civil claims against him? The contents of his estate (which presumably include the proceeds of a £443,000 house sale in 2019) are a matter of legitimate interest in those cases.
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I fear the courts have once again been hoodwinked by the application of the security services' doctrine of NCND (neither confirm nor deny). Created by the CIA in the 1970s, NCND is enthusiastically applied by Whitehall to cloak its more embarrassing secrets. NCND is a necessary tool to protect sensitive operations and information.
But in the Stakeknife case it is used to bury uncomfortable truths and thwart justice. A report into the scandal last year was prevented under NCND from formally identifying Scappaticci as Stakeknife.
The continued adherence to NCND in the Stakeknife scandal is ridiculous. It undermines public trust in the security services. To restore even a semblance of faith, NCND and its limits must be properly codified, not continually stretched.