Denis Donaldson's murder could well be the result of unhappiness among IRA members about high-level informers going unpunished, writes Ed Moloney
So, who killed Denis Donaldson and why? As Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern make one more - possibly final - effort to revive the institutions of the Belfast Agreement the answer to those two questions may determine the success of their enterprise and decide whether by December this year the DUP and Sinn Féin will be girding their loins to lead a new power-sharing executive at Stormont.
The questions are important to the future of the peace process not because they impinge directly on the newly relaunched Assembly initiative but for what the answers may tell us about current sentiment towards the Adams-McGuinness strategy and leadership within the ranks of the IRA and Sinn Féin.
To begin with, the notion that those who killed Denis Donaldson did so to cause problems for the Blair-Ahern push is superficially attractive, but does not withstand scrutiny.
To be sure, the killing has cast a shadow over the initiative, but if the aim was to derail it by suggesting the IRA was still active then shouldn't the gunmen have struck nearer to the November deadline for the restoration of devolution, especially if there were signs of a deal emerging by then?
As it is, by the time November comes around in seven months' time, Donaldson's murder is likely to be a distant memory and its impact much less significant.
The search for a motive for Donaldson's killing has to take place elsewhere, and one possible culprit can be excluded straight away. The IRA leadership is probably telling the truth when through its nom de guerre, P O'Neill, it denies involvement, at least any "authorised" involvement. There is one compelling reason to believe them.
All the circumstances of the Denis Donaldson affair suggest that a deal was done between him and the IRA in the wake of his admission that he had been a British spy. In return for leaving him be, Donaldson would come clean about his past and continue to recite the Sinn Féin spin about Stormontgate, which is that there never was an IRA spy ring, only something concocted by British "securocrats" in order to save David Trimble's skin.
The IRA may not have had much choice given its recent pledge to cease all of its activities, but it would not be beyond the IRA, as Donaldson would have known full well, to do him fatal harm in a plausibly deniable way.
Accidents, after all, can be arranged.
If there hadn't been a deal, Donaldson would never have settled in Co Donegal, a county favoured by IRA army council members for holiday homes. And sure enough, when the Sunday World tracked him down to his primitive cottage a few weeks ago, Donaldson was careful to stick faithfully to the spin on Stormontgate.
The IRA has cut many deals in the past with people they would rather have killed, such as supergrasses who retracted their evidence or informers who have taken advantage of amnesties to admit their activities or whose behaviour was too embarrassingly damaging to admit to. By and large the IRA has scrupulously honoured these deals, if only because to do otherwise would mean that no one would ever make a bargain with it again.
At the same time it may have been the IRA's deal with Donaldson - perhaps one deal too far in somebody's eyes - that sealed his fate.
The leniency showed to Donaldson is the third recent example we know of of a high-level, damaging informer being caught by the IRA and then let go. The first took place in the late 1990s, although few if any details were ever made public. The informer was a Sinn Féin councillor in the Republic who also sat on the IRA executive and whose work for the IRA's southern command involved recruiting personnel for the organisation's bombing campaign in England.
He was working for MI5 all along and not only did he give away the IRA's English bombing teams but he is on the list of people suspected of tipping off the British about arms shipments from Libya which culminated in the 1987 betrayal of a gun-running ship, the Eksund. The IRA eventually caught up with him and, although it has in the past killed even the most harmless informers (in one notorious case a young activist who had betrayed an empty arms dump) he was let go on the basis that to do otherwise would be to make an embarrassing admission of high-level British penetration that would enormously discomfit the leadership.
The second example was Freddie Scappaticci, who had worked as a British spy for 20 years inside the IRA's spy-catching team, the security department, and who had risen to command it. Given the security department's almost complete oversight of the IRA, the damage done by "Scap", as he was known in the IRA, is impossible to calculate but it was certainly huge.
"Scap", whose recent relocation to Italy can now be regarded as permanent, was outed by the media in 2003, but some republicans believe he cut his deal with the IRA more than five years earlier.
Then, hard on the heels of Scappaticci, came Denis Donaldson, a member of an elite IRA general headquarters intelligence unit, headed by the same man who masterminded the Northern Bank robbery and the Castlereagh break-in, who was forced to admit that he had worked for British intelligence for two decades, during which time he refashioned the IRA in the US in readiness for the peace process.
A former officer on the Belfast brigade staff, Donaldson was on the outer fringes of the Adams think-tank, which has formulated every IRA and Sinn Féin policy initiative in the last 25 years.
His usefulness to the British therefore had to be considerable, as was the damage attributable to him - yet he too was spared.
The effect of these three incidents was to send a message that horrifies traditional republicans; the message is that the more damage you do as an informer, the more embarrassment you can cause the leadership, then the more likely you are to escape punishment. The deterrent to becoming an informer had been removed.
Leaving aside the possibility that the killer was someone with a grudge against Donaldson, in this context two types of suspect emerge. One is a dissident group, either Continuity or Real IRA, whose motive for killing Donaldson would be to demonstrate their incorruptibility in contrast to the Provisionals' iniquity.
Yet the dissidents would want to claim responsibility, or credit, for killing Donaldson, and they haven't. And the gunman or gunmen used a shotgun to kill him, meaning they wanted to leave no ballistic clues as to their identity or motive.
That points to malcontents within the Provisional IRA as the likeliest culprits, whose reason for killing Donaldson would be to protest the policy of excusing high-level informers and by so doing make a wider point about where the peace process has brought republicans.
Recently the British and Irish authorities began a determined drive against IRA criminality, raiding farms and confiscating millions of euro from leading IRA figures in the south Armagh area. Since this was never supposed to be in the peace process script, the question now is whether the anger of south Armagh republican leaders was given violent and bloody expression in Denis Donaldson's Co Donegal cottage last Tuesday.
If so, then this would be the first outward sign of IRA discontent with the Adams-McGuinness strategy since the Real IRA revolt of 1997.
The dilemma then facing the Sinn Féin leadership would be what to do about it: stay outside a Stormont government in the hope of appeasing the hardliners, or seek refuge from them inside the respectability of a new executive and cut the umbilical cord once and for all.
Ed Moloney is author of A Secret History of the IRA