Times

May 12, 2003



How Stakeknife paved way to defeat for IRA

By Anthony McIntyre







FOR young people in the Markets and adjacent Lower Ormeau area of Belfast in the early 1970s, Freddie Scappaticci was a household name. A well-known and respected local republican, he twice found himself interned without trial.

Few, then, could have imagined that, three decades later, he would assume national prominence for having become embroiled in one of the major controversies to emerge from the British State’s dirty war in Ireland.



The republican writer Danny Morrison urged caution yesterday, drawing attention to similar reports that have proved groundless. Mr Morrison, however, does admit that the IRA has on occasion been penetrated by the British.



While in the H-Blocks of Long Kesh in 1986, I expressed the view to Brendan Hughes, the senior Belfast IRA commander, that it would make sense for the British to place an agent in the upper echelons of the IRA’s Internal Security Department: they would secure a long-term agent who, unlike those in the operational IRA who habitually risk imprisonment, would serve them as a permanent listening device.



There is no route more direct through the fog of IRA mystique and secrecy than that of seniority within the Internal Security Department. Those who manage it know most of what is worth knowing. Stakeknife, if one of its senior operatives, may not have been aware in advance of IRA operations but would certainly have known the identity of all key operators.



His continuing debriefing of volunteers after arrest, or as part of the incessant inquiries that characterise the IRA, was made workable only by an extensive knowledge of the background. The organisation’s weaknesses and strengths, the unquestioning or critical approaches to leadership of its volunteers, the fighters and the shirkers would all have been known to him. More importantly, British-placed informers within the IRA could have been protected by Stakeknife, while more committed volunteers may have been set up for arrest or assassination.



Given that his information did not remain the prize of his military handlers but was passed to the desks of Prime Ministers, the British Government was optimally positioned to encourage the peace lobby within the republican camp, to punish the enemies of that lobby and to reward its friends. It knew the military strength or weakness behind every republican position and could readjust accordingly.



The ultimate aim was to secure republican acceptance of the British state’s alternative to republicanism, ultimately made manifest in the internal solution known as the Good Friday Agreement.



Stakeknife damaged the IRA irreparably and helped to pave the way for its defeat. The suggestion that Sinn Fein leaders were conscious British agents remains unfounded but there is little room for doubt that the hand of the British state was on the tiller of the peace process that the Sinn Fein leadership came to embrace. And its grip was made all the firmer by Stakeknife.



Anthony McIntyre is a former IRA prisoner.

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Replying to:

The Sunday Times - Ireland

May 18, 2003



Focus: Scappaticci's past is secret no more

Liam Clarke reveals how he discovered the identity of the British

Army's prize 'mole' but could not reveal it throughout four

dangerous

years



He didn't look like a monster or a superspy, just a frightened,

thickset, middle-aged brickie with an unseasonable sun tan. Was this

Britain's top secret mole in the IRA, who had haunted me for two

decades?



When Freddie Scappaticci, a stocky, second-generation Belfast

Italian, surfaced in his solicitor's office last week, he had the

cuddly paunch and grizzled curls of a Mediterranean grandpa, but his

puffy eyes were those of a man on the edge of a breakdown.



As well they might: he had been outed in the press as Stakeknife,

the

jewel in the crown of British military intelligence in Northern

Ireland, an allegation he denies but which I pursued from the early

1980s until finally learning his name four years ago.



The evidence against him is sufficient for Sir John Stevens, the

London police commissioner, who heads the long-running official

investigation into collusion between the security forces and

loyalist

paramilitaries in Northern Ireland, to want to interview him.



The unmasking of Stakeknife marks a seismic moment in the Northern

Ireland process: the beginning of the end for both the IRA and the

Force Research Unit (FRU), the controversial British Army undercover

unit that handled him.



The IRA leadership is thoroughly discredited for trusting him for so

long; all their talk of secrecy and security is exposed as a sham.

And on the army's part, all the FRU's embarrassing secrets are

likely

to come tumbling out under the spotlight of the media and the

Stevens

inquiry.



His unmasking is also the trigger for some disturbing questions.

Within the IRA, Stakeknife had the task of rooting out informers in

the ranks. The IRA must ask itself if any of its volunteers were

wrongly killed with the connivance of the British, and the army

itself must ask if others could have been saved.



But who is Scappaticci? Are his denials to be believed? I have had

nearly 20 years to mull over this extraordinary enigma.



I FIRST heard the codename Stakeknife in the early 1980s, when an

informant told me that he was the army's top agent within the IRA.

He

was not part of the political leadership, my source said, but was a

hard-line military figure whose identity "you would never guess at".

And he had such a stunning overview of the organisation that a whole

British intelligence unit was devoted to handling him.



His output was so prolific that two handlers and four collators

worked full-time on his leads. His source reports were read by

ministers. Army careers were built on his information.



I wrote about Stakeknife, or "Steak Knife" as I assumed it was

spelt,

in the Northern Ireland newspaper I worked for at the time, and

occasionally I dropped the codename into conversations at military

and police gatherings to test the reaction.



Generally I got funny looks and raised eyebrows, but occasionally

there were nuggets of information. A handler was mentioned, and I

learnt that Stakeknife was from Belfast and had been recruited in

the

1970s.



But who was he? Time gradually narrowed the field: by the late

1990s,

death, retirement and imprisonment had taken its toll on the 1970s

IRA leadership. Fewer and fewer people fitted the Stakeknife profile

I had built up.



Still, I kept guessing wrongly until more details came my way in a

series of interviews with Martin Ingram, the pseudonym of a retired

member of the FRU who had recruited and run agents in the IRA.



Although Ingram knew Stakeknife's identity, he would not reveal it.

He did tell me, however, the story of how Stakeknife used his

FRU "get out of jail free card" after being arrested by the RUC.



Ingram said he was on night shift at the British military

intelligence headquarters in Northern Ireland when one of the phones

rang. It was the hotline, a number known only to, and reserved for,

Stakeknife.



The RUC sergeant at the other end of the line blurted out. "We have

arrested a Mr Padraic Pearse (not his real name) and he gave us this

number to contact. He says he works for a man called Paddy", giving

the cover name of a military intelligence handler. Stakeknife was

released a few hours later.



When The Sunday Times published that story in August 1999, adding

further details, including the revelation that the army had paid

Stakeknife up to £60,000 a year, a man suspected of being Ingram was

arrested and I was questioned for a suspected breach of the Official

Secrets Act.



Gradually further pieces fell into place, however. Unexpected

sources

came forward and within weeks I believed I had the name: Freddie

Scappaticci, a former internee who was described as the deputy head

of the "nutting squad", the IRA's feared internal security division,

responsible for interrogating suspected informers. Once I had

indicated who I thought Stakeknife was, and suggested a name to my

sources, a select few all but confirmed it, if only to warn me how

dangerous this information was. "If the Provos think you know who

top

agents are they will grip you, and it won't be too nice talking to

them," a senior source warned me as he gripped me by the arm to

underline his point.



Scappaticci had all the right credentials. He had been interned

without trial in the 1970s, sharing a cage in 1975 with such

legendary IRA figures as Owen "Jug Ears" Coogan, who had led the

anti-

British bombing campaign for years, and Con "Bald Eagle" McHugh.



Michael Donnelly, a veteran republican from Derry, was also a fellow

internee. He recalls "Freddie Scap" as "short-tempered and quick to

throw a punch . . . If he had been a foot taller he would have been

a

dangerous bully, but as it was he usually had one or two with him

when he did throw his weight about and he didn't do much damage."



Donnelly said Scappaticci "hung around with the Ballymurphy team who

were led by Gerry Adams". He was particularly touchy about his name,

which many of his fellow inmates mispronounced. "He would stamp his

feet and shout, "It's scap-a-tichi, scap-a-f******-tichi!"" Donnelly

recalls.



In the years after his release he had become a feared figure,

regarded as a man whose accusations could lead to IRA members being

demoted, ostracised or, some believed, shot. One republican told

me: "Having someone like that near you was like Germans having a

Brown Shirt or a Stasi officer at the end of the street. You were

nice to him, you tried to keep on the right side, but it was through

fear, you couldn't relax or get close."



Despite the image, some former republicans, among them Eamon

Collins,

a sometime IRA intelligence officer from Newry, told me of moments

of

kindness from 'Scap'. He had a stern exterior, they said, but was

often willing to cover for the mistakes of others.



It also emerged that there was intense rivalry for Stakeknife's

services between FRU and the RUC Special Branch, which had tried to

recruit him on several occasions. One source claimed that the RUC

threatened him with exposure unless he worked for them.



I told senior figures in The Sunday Times about Scappaticci, and for

obvious legal and security reasons we decided to wait and watch. If

he died or was exposed, we would tell the story.



Around last October, Scappaticci's name started circulating among

journalists. At the same time, more seriously, Stevens's inquiry

seized the records of his meetings with his army handlers.



Kevin Fulton, a former army agent within the IRA, appears to have

learnt Stakeknife's identity and lodged it in sealed affidavits in

court as part of a campaign to persuade the army to give him a

pension.



OCCASIONALLY, I rang Scappaticci, and he didn't seem to fit the

stereotype of an IRA hardman. He arranged to meet me once but pulled

out citing ill health. I learnt he was being treated for depression

and was thinking of moving to southern Italy where his family

originated.



It was only when he was outed last weekend and appeared on

television

that I could fully humanise him. True to his IRA training, he

admitted his name but nothing else. "I am telling you I am not

guilty

of these allegations," he intoned solemnly as his solicitor stood

beside him threatening to sue. The uncomfortable truth is that both

sides have to ask themselves where his true loyalties lie.



Anthony McIntyre, a former IRA commander turned academic, has

published an article about Stakeknife on the internet which raises

the possibility that "the IRA already knew his identity, debriefed

him some time ago and have remained silent since, a bit like the

British did in the case of Anthony Blunt".



On the British side, there were suspicions about him since shortly

after Stakeknife walked into an army base and offered his services

in

the late 1970s. A senior intelligence officer warned both Special

Branch and the head of military intelligence that he believed the

informer was using his relationship with the army for the benefit of

the IRA, that he was in effect a double agent.



The officer said: "He was able to tell us where bodies were to be

found but not to tell us how to prevent the murders. On a couple of

occasions, he told us of planned IRA bank robberies but when we

deployed undercover surveillance units no robberies took place.

Instead, the IRA recceed the banks and observed how we deployed.

Nobody acted on it: he was too good, nobody wanted to see the

flaws."



Yet there was serious damage to the IRA. Much of it sprang from the

roles that Scappaticci and his boss John Joe Magee had in carrying

out postmortems on failed IRA operations, after bombs failed to

detonate or arrests were made, for instance.



They had a right to walk into any IRA unit, find out who the bomb

makers were, who planted the devices, where the explosives were

hidden and to suggest changes. Knowledge in the IRA is normally

strictly compartmentalised on a need-to-know basis, but Scappaticci

and Magee could ignore that rule, getting a complete overview of an

operation, which could be passed on to the British army.



Scappaticci was routinely shown British Army surveillance devices

that IRA units had discovered, information that could be reported

back to the army so that the devices could be made more secure.

Specialist army units could go to weapons dumps pointed out by their

agent and bug or disable the weapons. They could also target

vulnerable individuals for recruitment as agents and dangerous ones

for surveillance and harassment.



One such target was Dan McCann, a Falls Road IRA man who took part

in

a hard-line 'heave' against the leadership in the mid-1980s and was

for a time suspended from membership. McCann later made his peace

with the leadership but, for a time, the suspicion of disloyalty

hung

over him. He was vetted by Scappaticci and Magee and cleared for

terrorist 'active service' overseas, but put under surveillance by

the army.



The surveillance later resulted in the deaths of McCann and two

other

IRA members, Sean Savage and Mairead Farrell, in Gibraltar on March

14, 1988, when they were gunned down by the SAS as they attempted to

bomb a changing of the guard ceremony. Farrell had also been vetted

by the IRA's internal security unit and found to be reliable in IRA

terms and a dangerous militant in British Army terms. The families

of

those killed by the IRA as informers, often mistakenly, have many

questions to ask. Mary Finnis, whose son Rory was murdered by the

IRA

as an alleged informer on June 6 1991, suspects that he was a fall

guy executed to save a higher level informant. Similar suspicions

swirl around the case of Paddy Flood, at one time the IRA's main

bomb

maker in Londonderry, who was abducted and tortured before being

murdered in July 1990.



Authoritative security sources say that neither Finnis nor Flood

ever

supplied information to the police, although Flood had confessed to

doing so after nearly seven weeks in IRA custody. His abductors

threatened to kidnap his wife if he didn't talk.



Senior detectives defend Stakeknife's role in retrospect. One

said: "It was probably not on every occasion that he could say I

don't want to be involved in an interrogation.



"I am sure that on many, many occasions when he was involved he

alerted people at a very early stage that X, Y or Z was under

suspicion. He was in the business of saving lives."



One such tip-off ended nonetheless in murder. It involved Joseph

Fenton, a West Belfast estate agent who began acting as a Special

Branch informant in 1982. Fenton supplied the IRA with vacant

properties on his books, where they held meetings and stored

weapons.

The police bugged the gatherings and disabled the weapons or placed

tracking devices in them. Fenton gained considerable satisfaction

from undermining the IRA and profited financially but, by 1989, the

organisation had worked out what was happening.



Scappaticci seems to have been given timely warning and Fenton's RUC

handlers told him to leave Belfast as he was about to be abducted

and

killed. They offered him a new life in England; but once there he

contacted a Northern Ireland MP and complained that his handlers

were

too cautious. He convinced himself that he would be able to talk his

way out of any suspicion and asked the MP to speak to the police on

his behalf.



The MP told me some months later: "Special Branch told me that if he

came home he would be killed very quickly. They warned me he was a

marked man and that it was dangerous to be associated with him and I

passed this on to him, but he still went back."



Fenton was abducted, held in a house in Carrigart Avenue, West

Belfast, questioned until he had confessed, and murdered.

Scappaticci

had been under suspicion over Fenton's escape to England, but with

the estate agent's death his cover was protected.



A YEAR later a second informer, Sandy Lynch, was brought to the same

house and questioned. Police swooped on the premises, arresting an

entire IRA unit and capturing Danny Morrison, the Sinn Fein director

of publicity, who said he had come to issue a press release but who

the security forces believe was there to pass a death sentence on

Lynch.



Lynch told the police he had been questioned by Scappaticci. But

according to superintendent Tim McGregor, who headed the subsequent

RUC investigation: "Lynch's evidence on this point was totally

flawed. He was talking about a big man with balding, white hair,

which is what John Joe Magee had. We arrested Scappaticci and he had

jet black hair."



Swapping names like this was one of the security procedures adopted

by Scappaticci and Magee and it helped both of them to escape

criminal charges on that occasion.



Morrison and others were jailed, however, and a massive internal

inquiry was launched within the IRA. It was at this point, security

sources say, that Scappaticci started to get frozen out of the IRA's

inner circle, though suspicion also focused on Magee. (Magee died in

1998 of a heart attack.)



Scappaticci said in his brief statement last week that he had

dropped

out of republican activity around this time, but sources suggest

that

he continued for some years, albeit in a less trusted role.



What is known is that, when The Sunday Times published the Ingram

interviews mentioning Stakeknife four years ago, MI5 felt he was

sufficiently under suspicion to offer him a new life under a fresh

identity abroad. He turned this down saying, like Fenton before him,

that he could look after himself.



What now? Although Scappaticci denies that he has been contacted by

the Stevens inquiry, there is no doubt that it wants to interview

him. A spokesman for it said last week: "We are not talking about

this, apart from saying that we intend to interview him. That is

still our intention and we will do that in due course. As for the

timing of that we are not going to discuss that."



For its part, the republican movement is in a quandary, unable to

accept publicly that it could have suffered such a security lapse.

Sinn Fein is struggling hard to portray the whole thing as British

black propaganda. An affiliated website argued last week: "There is

growing suspicion that the story was planted to distract from the

British government's cancellation of elections in the North of

Ireland."



Scappaticci is known to be a compulsive gambler. As the Stevens team

closes in and prepares to arrest him, he continues to stake his life

on his ability to tough it out. Perhaps he has built up favours with

the IRA that we can only guess at.