Interesting that the Stakeknife story is suddenly dead as a dodo. When Freddie Scappaticci talked to this paper in Belfast on Sunday and was pictured outside our offices, that sound you heard in the background was a collective groan from journalists who were looking forward to another week of no work but plenty of words.
The Andersonstown News scoop was the first authoritative piece of journalism to have appeared in print since the Stakeknife madness first erupted. And because of that simple, inescapable fact, even the most cynical journalist has been effectively barred from churning out baseless nonsense because now, finally, one of the protagonists has put his cards on the table.
The Freddie Scappaticci interview ran for 2,500 words and the hard questions were put. He said:
- He never worked for British intelligence
- He never got a penny from British intelligence
- He never left the country with British intelligence
- He’ll meet the families of the people the media said he killed and tell them he didn’t do it
- He left the republican movement in 1990
You don’t have to accept or reject the veracity of any of the above, all you have to do is to acknowledge that the man came out and said them. Freddie Scappaticci’s source is Freddie Scappaticci – that is the only source in all of this that we have seen or heard. It is now, quite simply, the job of those people who continue to claim that he is Stakeknife to put up or shut up – their credibility rests on their being able to present us with irrefutable evidence, something that they have signally failed to do. They continue to quote unnamed sources not knowing or, more likely, not caring, that every time they do so they’re making a photocopy of a photocopy and the picture they’re presenting to their readers is gradually fading away to nothing. The truth of the matter is that they didn’t want Scappaticci to talk, they wanted him to keep quiet – their ideal scenario, the one that would have given them journalistic carte blanche, involved him keeping quiet – and running away.
Vincent Brown in the Irish Times perceptively remarked that there was only one verifiable piece of information in the original Stakeknife story: that Freddie Scappaticci was in the tender care of British intelligence. It wasn’t verified. In fact, it was complete rubbish. Take it from there.
If we were to pick a journalist at random from any other country in the world – the United States, let’s say, or France – and put a representative selection of what has been written about Stakeknife over the past ten days or so in front of them, they’d fall off their swivel-chairs.
It is to be hoped that when this affair is over that a reckoning of sorts will take place among newspaper readers, because there will be none among newspaper writers. Wouldn’t it be nice if readers, when they came to the dread words ‘security sources’ or ‘republican sources’, instead of blithely reading on, stopped for a moment and thought a bit. Thought about how certain journalists and their ‘sources’ have performed in this particular matter and whether anything we hear from them from here on in is worthy of any other than the deepest scepticism.
Want to hear something really depressing? Some of the ‘sources’ for the Stakeknife stories don’t mind their names being used at all – quite enjoy seeing their names in print, actually. But because they’re so utterly and terminally discredited, journalists won’t use them because even the word ‘sources’ sounds more believable. Your head starting to hurt yet? Good, now you know what it’s like in this job day in and day out.
It wouldn’t be all bad news for journalists if their sources were laughed out of existence. There’s plenty to write about for heaven’s sake: postponed elections, Michael Stone’s police pals, the spooks in the Saville Inquiry, Special Branch, the Stevens report, destroyed SAS interview notes. Now we sit back and wait. And wait.
