Will There Be Another Stakeknife In Northern Ireland?

For a spy, a job requiring furtive anonymity, James Bond always did have an unusual side-line in mass homicide. Apart from The Man with the Golden Gun, where Bond dispatches only the eponymous Scaramanga, his body count almost always hits double figures, peaking with 47 kills in the post-Cold War GoldenEye. Such brutality — and the cinematic thrills it supplies — is enabled by Bond’s “licence to kill”, a ruthless prerogative supposedly invested in him by the security services. Outside of the cinema, this could be regarded as an unrealistic fiction, the British public content that no government of theirs would allow its agents such discretion. Until last Friday that is, when it was revealed that — in the decidedly un-cinematic twilight of Eighties Belfast — a British spy had been operating with almost exactly this authorisation.