Those
sentenced to death in Japan never know the moment
of their execution. They may languish in jails,
with only the basic necessities to ease their predicament.
Suddenly, maybe decades after the passing of sentence,
the cell door opens and the condemned is rushed
to the gallows. On occasion misfortunates have fainted
from shock before they made the drop. Perusing some
journalistic reports would lend to a belief that
the late Denis Donaldson lived such an existence,
every noise sending the heart thumping to the thought
of 'they have come.' Kevin Toolis, author of Rebel
Hearts: Journeys Within The IRA's Soul, suggested:
Donaldson
was a dead man walking. His end in a squalid remote
cottage in Co Donegal was a death foretold. Indeed
Donaldson must have wondered why his one-time comrades
had waited so long since December to kill him.
This
is unlikely. Donaldson most likely believed he was
safe. He could have got out if he felt otherwise.
His handlers, even if they now despised him, were
in no position to abandon him to his fate had he
requested a move. His was too high profile a case
to do otherwise.
Toolis
would find reinforcement for his thesis in the attempts
by Sinn Fein leaders, and those writers they have
managed to turn into Orwell's 'minor officials',
to convey an image of Donaldson as disdainful and
defiant, to whom the IRA could be forgiven for feeling
no sense of reciprocal obligation. Gerry Adams writing
in the Village stated:
Denis
Donaldson was very unforthcoming about his activities.
The party broke off all contact with him shortly
after all this. He was told that if he wanted
to make a full disclosure he should get in touch
with us. He never did.
This is an allegation that had been doing the rounds
in Belfast for at least a month prior to the Donegal
killing. It may have increased the level of resentment
already existing toward the former agent of the
peace process. Those angry that he was a spy, may
now have felt that he was rubbing their noses in
it by disdainfully declining to divulge the extent
of that spying. Having your beach towel stolen is
bad enough; having sand kicked in your face by the
thief for good measure may make the difference between
resentment and revenge.
Nevertheless,
it is hard to buy into the notion that Donaldson
was not the recipient of a safe passage ticket from
the Provisional leadership. What else explains his
decision to snub his handlers and push the Sinn
Fein line that the only espionage venture at Stormont
was a British one? Knowing that he could easily
have been bumped off in a variety of ways by any
number of people, an obvious calculation for him
to make was that he would need to placate the one
force with the ability to centralise and control
the bulk of his potential killers - the Provisional
leadership. Would he have ventured, an Eliza Manningham-Buller
signed cheque in his wallet, into the wilds of Donegal
having thumbed his nose at it?
From
this perspective, Donaldson told his Provisional
interrogators as much as he felt he needed to in
order to stay alive. According to Gerry Moriarty,
the Sinn Fein leaning Daily Ireland, shortly
after his exposure, made that much clear. It indicated
that:
self-confessed
British agent Mr Donaldson was co-operating with
Sinn Féin at a de-briefing session somewhere
in Ireland. It said that Mr Donaldson reportedly
had been "candid" in his accounts of his
role as an informer over two decades but was "downplaying
the effect his spying activities had on his former
colleagues''.
And
the tactical options adumbrated by Daily Ireland
for the consideration of Donaldson's former colleagues:
A
bullet will have to be bitten between now and the
February Sinn Fein Ard-Fheis: do republicans spell
out the full extent of Donaldson's breathtaking
double-dealing over 20 years and risk further reverberations
or do they keep mum and join Peter Hain and Hugh
Orde in drawing a veil of silence over what has
taken place?
Most
likely, the leadership pretended that Donaldson
withheld all details about his involvement with
the British to spare it the task of having to detail
the extent of his nefarious activity to the Provisional
grassroots. This may have been done to cut off at
the pass demands for his immediate execution. Alternatively,
the leadership may have wanted to minimise its own
culpability in failing to detect him for so long.
Whatever
Denis Donaldson told those who debriefed him will
now remain a secret. The full extent of what the
leadership learned from him about his spy role will
never be known unless some leader or interlocutor
is of a mind to share it. Given that the same leadership
did everything possible to allow Freddie Scappaticci's
role to go unexplored, the chances of transparency
in the case of Denis Donaldson must be slim.
In
this sense, while the leadership is likely to be
remain absolved of complicity in his fate, his killing
dovetails nicely with its need to ensure that no
more informers come forward to embarrass it. If
Denis Donaldson was, as British intelligence sources
told Thomas Harding of the Daily Telegraph,
not the star mole but in the top 20, a possible
further 19 holds out the promise of many blushes
to come.
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