Close as we’ll ever get to the truth

62 February/March 2024 February/March 2024 PB

y any yardstick Richard O’Rawe, a

former H-Block prisoner, has

produced a truly astonishing account

of the IRA’s most spectacular double

agent - Freddie Scappaticci who was

given the codename “ Stakeknife” by his British

intelligence handlers.

Scappaticci sat at the very centre of the IRA

campaign against the British, holding privileged

roles ﬁ rst as OC Belfast Brigade and then crucially

Head of the notorious Internal Security Unit also

variously described by the media as the “Nutting

Squad”.

According to O’Rawe, Scappaticci was

responsible for at least 16 of the total 37

executions by the IRA Internal Security Unit. For

ﬁ fteen years Scappaticci tortured and killed IRA

volunteers deemed to have become British

informers.

The GOC of the British Army in the North, Sir

John Wisley, described him as “the military’s

most valuable asset”. Scappaticci was well able

to take care of himself. “He had balls to burn”,

according to a colleague.

Within the next few months, a £37m inquiry will

issue its report into the handling of Scappaticci

by his British army intelligence handlers. At issue

is whether in fact these intelligence handlers

allowed Scappaticci to execute both innocent IRA

volunteers and their own lower-level agents to

protect their prize agent. O’Rawe believes the

Operation Kenova investigation represents an

“expensive whitewash”.

The identiﬁ cation of Stakeknife came about in

May of 2003 in a book published by Martin

Ingram. a member of the Force Research Unit, a

top secret British army unit that inﬁ ltrated, and

gathered sensitive information on, the IRA.

Freddie Scappaticci’s reaction to his outing was

to tell journalists it must have been someone else

of the same or similar name.

The implications were so enormous for the IRA

and Sinn Féin that they immediately went into

media overdrive bolstering Scappaticci’s denial,

fearful no doubt that relatives of Scappaticci’s

dead victims would engulf them with vengeful

questions about how and in what circumstances

their loved ones had died.

Stakeknife led his double life with a certain

degree of calm but was a ﬁ gure of great fear

within the IRA. He did make a chilling admission

for a TV interview: “everybody being what they

are, everybody has a breaking point, y’know and

they think they’re going home but they don’t”.

The technique was to torture informants to

exhaustion and then lure them into the lie that if

they confessed all would be ok.

Why Stakeknife chose to work for the British is

still something of a mystery — perhaps fear of

returning to jail due to a construction tax scam he

ran or a predilection for child pornography which

would have left him subject to blackmail by the

British operatives he worked with. It appears that

members of the IRA’s Internal Security Unit were

not themselves subject to security vetting.

Doubts surfaced by South Armagh IRA about

Scappaticci in 1984 were waved aside by the

leadership. A British intelligence operative called

Pete, who handled another IRA agent, asks

“who’d ever suspect that someone executing

informers is an agent?”.

Richard O’Rawe suggests that “Adams and

McGuinness had it in their minds that the military

campaign had to be curtailed and, in this context

, the East Tyrone and South Armagh units were

seen as a liability”. Ironically these were the IRA’s

most e ective operations. Stakeknife gave the

British all the information the British needed to

stymie and stop large-scale IRA attacks from

these units.

Many of those quoted in the book, including

IRA personnel and intelligence operative Martin

Ingram, say Martin McGuinness worked for MI6.

Ingram even quotes the intelligence service code

number (J118) allocated to McGuinness.

However, Richard O’Rawe remains

professionally sceptical: “I don’t want to be

saying that he was an agent. You need

incontrovertible evidence. I’m not sure it is there.

He behaved in a very bizarre way”. There is little

doubt that both Adams and McGuinness were

shielded by the security services from

prosecution as the peace process got underway.

In my own memory of it this in itself would have

spawned suspicion within the ranks.

McGuinness and Scappaticci worked closely

together, with McGuinness dining frequently in

Stakeknife’s home. However, there appears to

have been a falling out. Scappaticci made a

deliberate e ort to damage McGuinness when he

did a covert interview for the Cook Report TV

programme. This seemed to have been a double-

blu or warning to both his British intelligence

handlers and the IRA ahead of his unmasking as

an agent.

A recent update from Operation Kenova

ominously stated that the Tasking and

Co-ordination Group (TCG) which lay at the heart

of British operations against the IRA took its

decisions in a fast-moving and complex way with

“no contemporaneous records of the TCG

decision making retained by the RUC”.

The shredders in the TCG were obviously

working well before the Inquiry actually began. It

is frankly incredible that the TCG neither made nor

kept any records.

How heavily inﬁ ltrated, the IRA was when it

sued for peace we may never actually know.

Freddie Scappaticci died in 2023 having been

safely re-located elsewhere by the British

authorities. Richard O’Rawe’s book may be as

close as we’ll ever get to the truth.

Conor Lenihan is a former government Minister

and author of a biography of Albert Reynolds

entitled ‘ Risktaker for Peace’ He acted as an

intermediary in the peace process.

Close as we’ll ever

get to the truth

Conor Lenihan reviews Richard O’Rawe’s

astonishing ‘Stakeknife’s Dirty War: The

Inside Story of Scappaticci, the IRA’s

Nutting Squad and the British Spooks

who Ran the War’

CULTURE & BOOKS