IRISH FREEDOM COMMITTEE® NEWSLIST
www.irishfreedomcommittee.net
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Subject: Liam Clarke: Scapaticci’s Past
Date: 05 18 03
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http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2091-683795,00.html
May 18, 2003
The Sunday Times - Ireland
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
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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.
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