For those that do, even then the spot is rarely targeted with such pinpoint accuracy and potency to assign a destiny to the work that would allow it to remain in the literary stratosphere long after others have reached their sell-by date, their star long faded. Stratospheric greats in the literary skies that leap to mind include Ed Moloney's A Secret History of the The IRA, Patrick Radden Keefe's Say Nothing and Dean Godson's Himself Alone. Time is the sole measure of a book's stamina, but the newly published Neither Confirm Nor Deny by John Ware is a hot contender to make that star bound odyssey.
While the North's armed groups were awash with agents, Brian Nelson and Freddie Scappaticci - both run by the British Army's Force Research Unit - are the two that weave their malign aura throughout this compelling read. They are the characters through which the author narrates a harrowing tale of lost lives that could have been saved, of decision making in state institutions that ensured people died when they could have lived. It is a tale of torturous logic pursued by the British state right up to the present day where the policy of neither confirming nor denying the status of an agent, even after they are dead, has drawn down skip loads of ridicule on the heads of state and security officials who continue to behave remarkably like the Soviet officials they often caricatured during the Cold War era.
Evil is a word which, like sin, drips too much with religiosity. In a secular world it has the sound of fish and cheese. But if for secular reasons evil is not applied to RUC Special Branch and the Bill Mooney run CID, baleful works just as well. Michael Kearney's life was decided by a vote amongst cops to either release him to Milltown cemetery or charge him with explosives possession and place him in Crumlin Road. Callous indifference won out and Michael Kearney died on a dark border road at the hands of those who included some guilty of what they falsely accused him of.
When Paddy Murray meets with his Special Branch handlers to inform them that the IRA's Internal Security Unit has summoned him to a meeting in West Belfast, they tell him not to worry as they will be monitoring the house. They did but drove off after two hours with Murray still inside the execution chamber, from where he was taken out, hands tied, eyes taped and shot dead. IRA personnel undoubtedly pulled the trigger that sent Murray into nothingness but they alone were not culpable for his death. And it is difficult to suppress an image of the Branch driving away from the scene chuckling to themselves 'sucker' in the full knowledge of the fate that awaited their man. In the hierarchy of agents, protecting Scappaticci was prioritised over saving Murray.
While the author does not state it outright it is easy to infer from the pages that agent handling was primarily designed to defeat the IRA rather than the loyalists. The British were not about eradicating terrorism as they called it, but using the terrorism of the UDA as a foil against that of the IRA. Nelson was not dissuaded by his FRU handlers from killing but to narrow the killing zone so that only IRA personnel, not innocent civilians, stepped inside.
Prior to finding a way to frustrate the IRA campaign, ensuring it ended in failure, the British state found itself up against a formidable and ruthless opponent. It might even have felt trapped on the horns of the wartime dilemma so astutely identified by Albert Camus: many actions are as unavoidable as they are unjustifiable. But this does not constitute the grounds for a pardon application by the British state. To this day it has yet to admit that its dirty war in Ireland was just that, or to acknowledge that if unavoidable, it was certainly not justifiable. This refusal is the engine driving much nationalist disquiet and feeds the thirst for books like Neither Confirm Nor Deny.
There is also a peculiar irony at play. Ware has been criticised by a mullah-like triumvirate at the top of Sinn Fein's smear squad responsible for the issuing of hatewas against those the party disapproves of. Yet the three to differing degrees were involved in either covering up for Freddie Scappaticci and his crimes or minimising his role. By extension, they were also covering up or downplaying the British state's dirty war in Ireland and the war crimes which that form of unclean endeavour inevitably gives rise to. Perhaps two of them fell for the guff and signed up to silliness, but Danny Morrison believed Scap was a tout and nevertheless chose to launch a weapon of mass deception into the public square.
By contrast, Ware who has been to the fore of many exposés throughout his five decades plus career in journalism, in Neither Confirm Nor Deny not only nails Scappaticci in his role as the agent Stakeknife but hammers even longer nails into the British state security agencies who were responsible for the Stakeknife operation. Neither Confirm Nor Deny is nothing short of a searing indictment of the British security establishment.
Not that Ware is implacably hostile to the British state. He is no clench-fist, beret-attired revolutionary at the head of a guerrilla phalanx urging it to storm the doors of Thames House. This is not agenda driven journalism where the objective is to erode the institutions of the British state. Ware wants the state to perform better, not euthanise itself. The wrong he identifies, he points out rather than pontificates about.
But, thanks to people like John Ware, and no thanks to those ostensible republicans who have sought to smear him, much more is now known about the role of the British security establishment. Theirs was not the rule of law but the rule of law enforcement.
An example of Ware's probing comes with his illumination of the murky depths within the British state that the policy of neither confirm nor deny both reached and corrupted. The much vaunted separation of powers was demonstrated as transactional when Lord Chief Justice Carswell allowed himself to be persuaded out of court to behave improperly inside it, all for the purpose of satisfying MI5's need to protect the policy of neither confirm nor deny. Carswell listened to evidence from Scappaticci he knew to be perjured yet ruled in accordance with raison d'etat rather than justice.
The reader will come away from this book realising that leading lights of the republican world and their counterparts in the British judicial world, both referred to - one accurately the other mockingly - as Lord Chief Justices, engaged in collusive activity for the sole purpose of concealing from the public the role of Scappaticci. Danny Morrison and Justice Carswell - that's a thought that might keep the reader awake at night for longer than they are comfortable with. There is some consolation to be drawn from that: the delaying of the nightmares that the revelations in this book might spur.
A book sans padding or lacunae, it never lets up. Not a sentence wasted on frivolity, it is placed on the shelf once the last page of a page turner is turned, the density of its gravitas weighing heavily on the mind.
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