But just over a year after the Castlereagh break-in, several newspapers in England and Ireland published a bombshell story. Stakeknife was no figment of anyone’s fevered imagination. He was a real spy, who for decades had been a paid informant of British Army intelligence. His information was so prized that British ministers were regularly briefed on it, and he made the careers of a generation of spymasters. Stakeknife was ‘our most important secret’, in the words of one British Army commander in Northern Ireland. He was ‘a golden egg’. Stakeknife wasn’t Gerry Adams. He was Freddie
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