transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:03] For exclusive interviews, bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, first look at live show tickets, a weekly newsletter and discounted books, join the Declassified Club at therestisclassified.com. How did the British Security Forces recruit agents during the troubles? And how did the IRA try and hunt down those who would become informers? Well, welcome to The Rest Is Classified. I'm David McCloskey.

Speaker 2:
[00:38] And I'm Gordon Corera.

Speaker 1:
[00:40] And last time, we left off with Freddie Scappatici, number two in the IRA's Internal Security Unit, its counterintelligence function. It's the late 1970s. He is in charge of some pretty dirty work interrogating and in some cases executing suspected informants who are working for the British state. But we left off last time with the revelation that Scappatici himself had become an agent for the British state. And that angle to the story is what we'll be looking at in this episode. Now, a bit of context, last time we briefly looked at different parts of the British security establishment who are operating in Northern Ireland. We have the RUC, the Royal Ulster Constabulary or the police, which kind of has primacy in the area. Its special branch is tasked with collecting intelligence. Just to set a bit of the table here for what this conflict felt like, if you were a member of the security forces or the IRA during the late 70s and early 1980s. Interpol data in 1983 showed that Northern Ireland was the most dangerous place in the world to be a police officer. The risk was twice as high as El Salvador, which was the second most dangerous place at the time. So this world that Scampatici is in, these security forces that are attempting to penetrate the IRA, the IRA that is attempting to weed out informants. This is a really high-stakes intelligence game that is being played out on top of a really violent chessboard in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

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Speaker 2:
[03:45] So the RUC, the police force, is a target of the IRA, but it's also trying to recruit agents, but it is seen as close to the Protestant community, which makes it harder to recruit Catholics as agents. So it doesn't really have the resources and the experience to run a large-scale intelligence operation. So other organizations are also going to get involved, particularly the army. Now, it's technically supporting the RUC, but in practice, they're often doing their own thing. They're much bigger, they have more resources. Inevitably, there's quite a bit of tension between them and the RUC. The army see themselves as more professional, perhaps less inclined to use blackmail, able to run agents with a longer shelf life as well. Those are some of the tensions that exist.

Speaker 1:
[04:28] One British security service that we haven't actually, we didn't talk about in the first episode, which maybe listeners will find surprising, is MI5. Yeah. Coming to this story, I would have presumed that a high-level agent who is being run inside the United Kingdom, that this would be an MI5 story.

Speaker 2:
[04:47] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[04:47] But it's not been to this point.

Speaker 2:
[04:49] No. I think it is fascinating when you look at this, because actually MI5, by the time the conflict kicks off in 1969, actually has very little access or agent for source network in Northern Ireland. It's still primarily behind the scenes even at this point. Its role is primarily just supporting the RUC and army in running their agents. There's definitely tension there because you go back to the tensions, the army tend to see MI5 as soft middle class types who come up from London. The only agents that MI5 are supposed to be running and recruiting at this point are ones who can provide strategic intelligence about threats against the mainland, against Britain or British interests overseas. Even when it comes to countering terrorism on the mainland, that's actually the Metropolitan Police Special Branch, which has the primacy there. It's going to be much later that it takes over the leading role, which it now has, in Northern Ireland. At this point, its main job is actually installing and maintaining bugging devices and things like covert cameras for the RUC and to some extent the Army as well. The Army is really the main focus, the military and military intelligence for this story, which I agree, I think for a lot of people might be surprising. But last time we talked a little bit about the Fred Force, which was the early form of group running agents. But once you get to the end of the 70s and the start of the 80s, you get a shift in the way the intelligence game is being run, to try and centralize the process a bit more. Part of that is because 1979 sees a series of major attacks. You get the killing of Lord Mountbatten, a close relative of the Royal Family in August of that year, as well as almost simultaneously an ambush in Northern Ireland that kills 18 soldiers. Earlier that year, you've had an MP, Airy Neve, blown up as he leaves the House of Commons car park. Margaret Thatcher comes into office in 1979. She wants to push the intelligence war harder against the IRA. Interestingly enough, she actually recalls from an academic role, the former head of MI6, Maurice Oldfield, to be the security and intelligence coordinator on Northern Ireland, to beef up that role. He is the person who Alec Guinness models his portrayal of John Le Carre's George Smylian in the TV series, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, which airs on British TV around this time as well. A kind of interesting side note about the MI6 officer coming in. He actually, interestingly enough, Maurice Oldfield doesn't last very long because within a few months of being appointed to this role, the authorities are made aware of homosexual activities, which had obviously in terms of vetting and security clearance, indeed concealed going back a number of years. There have long been rumours that that was revealed as part of a deliberate smear campaign by other parts of the security forces. Now, whether that's true or not, who knows? But it gives you some idea how even within the security world, there were tensions and difficulties. But the one thing you get at the start of the 1980s is the creation of this thing called the Force Research Unit or the FRU, which is the more centralised intelligence gathering section of the army. It's motto, fishers of men and the FRU is operational.

Speaker 1:
[08:11] In the biblical sense, right?

Speaker 2:
[08:12] In the biblical sense, yeah. Not going out fishing with men, but trying to catch them. The FRU is going to be operational until 1995. It's said to have run over 100 agents, and amongst them is Freddie Scappatici.

Speaker 1:
[08:28] We should say the FRU, that is inside the army. That is inside the British army. So Scappatici, do we know when and how he's recruited? I mean, I guess it seems to have been around 1978 or around then, but do we know why they recruit Scapp?

Speaker 2:
[08:47] No one knows for sure. I think that's the first thing to say. There's a lot of different stories about this. I think it's worth picking them apart a little bit. It's pretty clear. I mean, some agents do become agents because they want to save people's lives because they hate the violence. I think we can assume, given what we know about Scappateach and what we talked about him doing, that's not his motivation.

Speaker 1:
[09:13] Not his profile. He seems to actually enjoy the violence to some degree.

Speaker 2:
[09:16] Exactly. There are these different accounts. You get some in Richard O'Rourke's book, Stakeknife, Henry Heming's book, Four Shots in the Night. There's also an excellent BBC podcast series called Stakeknife by Mark Horgan and Kieran Cassidy, which is a great piece of investigation into this. So different accounts in different places with different emphasis on this. One story is that he's beaten up by another IRA member over an affair with that other man's wife, which then prompts Scaparticci to sign up as a walk-in. Now, I don't know what you think, but that's quite a big step to take, and I think the truth is walk-ins were not really always very trusted by the Brits. That account has definitely been disputed as the most likely.

Speaker 1:
[10:05] Has it been disputed simply because of the fact that he was a walk-in? I'm applying the CIA lens to this, but I often think volunteers walk-ins oftentimes end up becoming very valuable assets. But is the dispute around that piece of it, or is it more around the dynamics of his personality? What's the scepticism drawn from?

Speaker 2:
[10:31] Yeah. Even the fight with the other senior IRA member, aspects of that I think have been disputed by the other guy. So I think it's worth bearing in mind, aspects of all of them might be true. Because there's also stories that he fell out with some senior figures in the IRA and had been marginalised. So we talked about a little bit last time that he wasn't quite immediately back on the inside of the IRA when he comes out of his second internment. And he does seem to have resented periods when he's not in the inner circle. Now, another version is that he was blackmailed into becoming an agent, possibly over his interest in hardcore pornography. Now, bizarrely, hardcore pornography is something we're going to come back to at the end of this story because it does play a role in his story and we do know that. And he supposedly had kind of cupboards of these videos. But it strikes me as a bit of a stretch that that would be enough to blackmail you. And turn you into doing what he does. Don't know what you think.

Speaker 1:
[11:29] As we'll see, I think given the duration of his cooperation with The Frew, I suppose some amount of legal leverage could have been part of the initial pitch, the initial recruitment. But I don't see blackmail as a kind of sustainable dynamic in the relationship because it'll last for just so many years, as we'll see.

Speaker 2:
[11:52] Yeah, I think that's right. Because there's another story which is that he's got an interest in young girls. Now, that could be about smearing him, but there is an account by a former colleague in which this former colleague recalled Scappuccino making lewd remarks about young girls and there's an allegation, which again is never confirmed that he was reported for having abused an underage girl. Exact age is a bit unclear around this period of 76 to 78. Of course, if you're prosecuted for that, that could be a disaster and a problem within the IRA, as well as at home. I mean, again, never confirmed. But I agree, blackmail for a long standing relationship. Not sure.

Speaker 1:
[12:32] It couldn't be the only piece. I don't think it could be the only piece. It's potentially a piece of the puzzle, but it's not the whole puzzle.

Speaker 2:
[12:40] Then there's this interesting account from General Sir John Wilsey, who was General Officer Commanding for the British Army in Northern Ireland, who writes a memoir where he doesn't name Scapp, but it does, it certainly, he's talking about him. And he claims one of his skillful and quirky sergeants, who had a bit of a rebellious streak, and frequented pubs and drinking clubs, slowly reeled in Scappaticcia around 1977.

Speaker 1:
[13:06] In his memoir, Wilsey writes of his skillful and quirky sergeant, He bided his time until intuitively he judged the moment right to cast his fly. He then hooked and landed his fish. The fish represented the security force's biggest intelligence breakthrough at the time, and arguably the army's most significant contribution to the whole campaign. Well, that's saying something without kind of saying anything in a way, because it doesn't really explain what handholds this skillful sergeant may have had on Scappaticcia to make the pitch effective.

Speaker 2:
[13:40] Yeah, and even this is seen as being a bit of a dodgy account. I mean, Scappaticcia wasn't much of a drinker. The bar the general mentions wasn't one that Republicans would actually go to, and British soldiers would not recruit Republican bars anyway. I mean, one British soldier, a very kind of unusual character called Robert Narek, does try and go to a bar like that in 1977 to recruit someone. He's almost on a kind of solo venture, it feels like at the time. But he gets found out and his body has never been recovered. I mean, one claim, probably a myth, is that that's because it was fed into a meat mincer. So the idea that this was how it could go down, with soldiers going to Republican bars and just talking to people.

Speaker 1:
[14:22] Chatting somebody up at a bar feels, especially a hardened guy like Scappuccino, that feels a stretch to me.

Speaker 2:
[14:31] Yeah, it does. So then you get to, I think, more interesting theories. One is that he could have been turned after he was arrested for involvement in a building fraud. Now, we mentioned last time how he'd made some money from involvement in a quite complex tax evasion scheme to do with his building work. And other people would be sentenced to years in jail for similar activities. So you could imagine that he gets discovered doing that. He doesn't want to go back to jail. He's already, after all, been interned for years. And, you know, it's not very glamorous either, being, you know, going back to jail for building fraud and that he gets initially reported for this, perhaps to the police and then the army recruit him. Although I think the only bit that's a bit odd about that is it would have been the police who would have investigated or found out about the fraud, but it's the army who recruited the military. So this is possible. I think that's more in the possible category.

Speaker 1:
[15:29] To me, that answer feels kind of right. I mean, it's sort of blackmail light in a way, I guess. It's using the leverage that the state has to make a big problem go away. And the other bit of this that I think maybe adds some color is, I mean, we know, I guess, very few facts. We know some facts authoritatively from Kanova, which is the investigation into Stakeknife, and we'll come back to that later. But it says that the army's cultivation and recruitment of Stakeknife began in the late 1970s, and the motivation for him first wanting to become an agent was linked either to the risk that he was facing in a criminal prosecution or a desire for financial gain. And the risk from prosecution certainly fits with the tax evasion scheme. It fits maybe with the incident with an underage girl, but as we'll see, and this is why I think you could explain the long-term duration of this relationship is, I think it's both making a problem go away and also the promise of financial gain to come. So it's not purely this like jailhouse recruitment where we're using leverage over you. We're also gonna pay you quite well over the years to kind of compel your cooperation with us. Those two things merge together for a guy like Scappatici, I think really works. When we talked earlier about how he likes stuff, he likes vacations. He's got his Manchester City season tickets. He's in many ways very self-interested and self-oriented. I think that pitch plays into those aspects of his personality.

Speaker 2:
[17:06] Yeah, that's right. I think he's reported to have been paid at one point more than 80,000 pounds annually by his handlers, so with lump sums, help to buy property. Money is a factor. Henry Hemming in his book, Four Shots in the Night, says the best guess is that he's first done for tax to be an informer and then reeled in by the army. But also I think the idea that they're exploiting the fact he's annoyed at some other people in the IRA. He wants a bit more power. You know, this offers him a way back to the heart of it. I think that mix, I agree, kind of feels about right. But it does mean that he's going to be recruited by military army intelligence and eventually this thing called the Frew. He's going to get various pseudonyms, including Stakeknife, which we should say is spelt in various different ways. And, you know, in different documents in different times, it ends up being the S-T-A-K-E-K-N-I-F-E or one word, but there's different forms at different types.

Speaker 1:
[18:03] Yeah, we should say, what is a steak? Because when I heard Stakeknife the first time, I thought of a knife used to cut a steak. So S-T-E-A-K, right? Knife. But that's not how it's spelt.

Speaker 2:
[18:15] No. And I think it's, I think just the name has got, got used in different ways and slightly corrupted and ended up as this, as this spelling. But where it comes from originally, we don't quite know because he does get different codenames. He also gets numbers. So at various points, he's Agent 5027 and 6126. The first two numbers normally tell you the location and the latter two are the unique identifier for the Frew. Worth saying that senior officers from RUC Special Branch are aware of his recruitment and identity from the start, and so are MI5. So they are aware of it, but he is fundamentally going to be run by the Army.

Speaker 1:
[18:58] And those Frew handlers, again, Frew, the force research unit inside the Army in Northern Ireland, those Frew handlers are assigned to Stakeknife for anywhere between one to four years. One was assigned for a total of seven years, albeit with a break in there. But he's handled in a kind of somewhat normal way, I guess, where you have case officers that rotate in and out of that relationship. And I guess, here, it's interesting to think about what kind of environment Belfast is in those years for agent handling, because it sounds, from the outside, it feels like a hard place to meet agents. People know each other, run into each other all the time. So how does the Frew actually meet with and handle Stakeknife?

Speaker 2:
[19:46] Yeah, I think that's a really good question, because he's being met by his handlers on average every seven to eight days. So relatively frequently, although not every day, but you're right, it's a kind of small city. The way it's understood is normally he will be out somewhere and then be bundled into, this is typically how they would be, most agents would bundle them into a van or a car on the move at an agreed location and then either talk whilst moving or be taken to some kind of a safe flat for a debrief.

Speaker 1:
[20:18] And you have actually been bundled into an MI5 van, isn't that right Gordon? You were arrested.

Speaker 2:
[20:24] It wasn't when I was arrested. This was, thank you for raising that David. It was actually when I was making a radio documentary for the BBC, I should say. But it was quite an interesting insight into what it's like to be taken to an agent debrief. So I was being taken to meet a real agent who was working undercover in a kind of Islamist setting in London. And I was going to interview him for radio, so kind of anonymously, and had made this arrangement. We'll talk about it in the documentary, where I met in the middle of Waterloo Station. And what I didn't know was there was a surveillance team watching us to make sure no one else was following us or there was nothing else going on. And then I was walked a kind of securitas route around station, taken outside, and there's one of these vans. And this is like an MI5 van. I remember going to the back of the van, and it is a strange experience because it's like blacked out, there's no windows in the back of the van, and then driven around and it was kind of slightly scuzzy van, I'm going to be honest, wasn't particularly glamorous. But that feeling of being in the back of a blacked out van, and we drove around for 10, 15 minutes. And the point is you have no idea where you are, or where you're going, or how far you're going. And we ended up in a lock up, a kind of garage. And for all I know, it could have been around the corner from Waterloo station where we started and we've been driving in circles all that time. And then I got taken into the lock up to kind of meet this agent. But I think that is the closest I've come to being bundled into a security force van and taken to a debrief. What about you?

Speaker 1:
[21:59] I have yet to be bundled up and tossed into a van for a debrief. So I feel a little jealous. I feel a little left out. We should say, it reminds me of the episodes we did on the airline plot, where we went into some depth on breaking and entering operations and surveillance. And it's not glamorous. You know, it's the scuzzy van really fits. And we should say, our producer, Becki, it has noted here that many people think that Stakeknife was supposed to be spelled S-T-E-A-K, sort of suggesting a sharp operative designed to cut the IRA, slicing the organization to pieces. But Stakeknife, which is how it's spelled, S-T-A-K-E, knife, is believed by some to be a clerical error by military handlers, leading to the nickname mistake knife. So there you go.

Speaker 2:
[22:49] Mistake knife.

Speaker 1:
[22:50] So the Scuzzy Vans though, it's not MI5.

Speaker 2:
[22:53] Yeah, not MI5, it's the fruit.

Speaker 1:
[22:55] It's the fruit.

Speaker 2:
[22:56] It's the fruit. And they take him to what are called, they use these things called debrief centers for the fruit, which are basically houses and this, I've seen the pictures of some of them, they use kind of bungalows, quite isolated houses outside of the city, where you can have a proper meeting. And those sessions with the handler are then usually recorded on audio cassette tapes. The handler then goes back to the headquarters, the kind of army barracks in Lisbon, and gives an oral debrief to the commanding officer, the fru, about what had happened. There's also a copy of the transcript, which is placed on the agent's personal file, which also included in that file, the so-called contact forms, which are created for every physical meeting with an agent. Now, it's interesting, but Stakeknife, they immediately realize is really important. Because of the importance of the information he's given, the access he's got to the IRA, they establish a special subunit specifically to deal with his intelligence, which is in a secure part of the barracks, in a group of fenced-off porter cabins, which is known as the Rat Hole, which is again, not the most glamorous name.

Speaker 1:
[24:10] There's a real undercurrent of glamour throughout this entire story, isn't there Gordon?

Speaker 2:
[24:14] You go work in a porter cabin called the Rat Hole.

Speaker 1:
[24:18] This is the grittiest possible intelligence story. The Rat Hole is exclusively for managing Stakeknife's intelligence.

Speaker 2:
[24:26] Yeah, which I think gives you a sense of his importance straight away. And it's partly so they can manage him, his intelligence separately from other agents. So you keep it very compartmented. And that's overseen by the commanding officer of the Frew, plus others who can MI5 and others give admin support. Interesting enough, it's not staff 24-7, but there is a phone line dedicated solely to Stakeknife and which is staffed around the clock within the intelligence section. He's got a phone number he can call anytime to pass intelligence day or night. So he's passing on Intel from phones as well as those meetings, which are on average once every seven to eight days.

Speaker 1:
[25:11] So he's got no spy gear here, right? I mean, he's just going to a phone, calling this number to set up a meeting or to pass intelligence directly over the phone.

Speaker 2:
[25:21] Yeah. And again, with other kind of intelligence stories we've done, that would be surprising, isn't it? Because normally they've got to have covert communications. Again, it goes back to that point that this is the British state running agents on their home turf. So you have control over the environment, including the phone network. So there's no danger of the state or the security forces, being able to get phone records or to tap phones, because you are the state and the security force running the network and running the phone. So in a sense, you have that little bit more control over the things like phones without needing the covert communications, I guess.

Speaker 1:
[25:58] It is remarkable when we have done more modern spy stories of just how much more complex now the tradecraft has become around comms and how much harder it is. Because the way he's being handled in this case, I mean, it feels quaint, it almost feels ancient now. The idea that you can just go to a pay phone or go to... Maybe he's not making these calls. I presume he wouldn't make these calls from his home because I suppose the IRA maybe would have the ability to tap a phone line, but he could go to any number of other phones in the city, be in pattern and make a call. It's not that hard.

Speaker 2:
[26:35] Yeah, he just needs to find a call. Yeah. So then there's a special intelligence database known as Bograt3970.

Speaker 1:
[26:43] That's your Gmail address, right Gordon?

Speaker 2:
[26:45] Bograt3970. You're giving it away, David.

Speaker 1:
[26:49] There you go. Listeners, try that email, see where it goes, right to Gordon Corera.

Speaker 2:
[26:55] Although, interesting enough, there is this intelligence database, all physical trace of which has since disappeared, which is a little bit mysterious. One of the many mysterious disappearances in the Stakeknife story, we should say.

Speaker 1:
[27:08] Do we know what happened?

Speaker 2:
[27:10] Well, it's disappeared. I think we'll come back to that towards the end where there is a tradition of disappearances, even fires at buildings where evidence is being kept, which is just an odd coincidence. So Stakeknife's intelligence is going to get passed to the RUC Special Branch and MI5 on a near daily basis in forms of kind of source reports with his code name on it. Now, some of it is so sensitive, it's written up on a manual typewriter with orders that it's not entered into the main database. And there's just a kind of flood of intelligence. So the operation investigating him, Operation Canova, recovers 377 intelligence reports over an 18 month period at the start of his career. In one 11-day period, it's recorded that he contacted his handlers by phone on two occasions and was met on a further four occasions. So that's six contacts in an 11-day period. So it's a pretty intense relationship. And some of these intelligence, I mean, it sounds like it's pretty mundane. It's like, well, I saw this guy on the street, or I saw these people drinking in this pub, or I heard a little bit of this conversation here. But some of it is really, really, really detailed intelligence reports. But we don't know the exact nature of a lot of it.

Speaker 1:
[28:34] And we also don't really have any insight into his relationships with his handlers.

Speaker 2:
[28:39] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[28:39] We don't even know who handled him inside the fru. Is that right?

Speaker 2:
[28:44] Yeah, it is. It is right. And that might be something we come back to at the end, because there are legal questions around all of this. And I think that issue of how he's handled is interesting. Because again, when there's this Canova report and this investigation into it, there's people from MI5 who said that the fru handlers were seen by MI5 as gung-ho and not well managed with relatively little meaningful oversight. This is part of a battle, if you like, because then the fru are like, no, MI5 knew everything we were doing and MI5 are like, no, no, no, there's a lot of that. You can sense some of the tension. Again, from some of these official reports, early on MI5 says, oh, he's an unreliable mercenary petty criminal. Although well-placed has frequently failed to give advance warnings of pirate activities and a very large proportion of plans on which he reported seem to have come to nothing. But at the same time, we do know that both MI5 and RUC Special Brands try and take him over from the fru. So despite some of those early concerns from MI5, at various points, they basically try and steal him, lure him, pull him over from the fru, because I think that's all a sign really of how valuable he is.

Speaker 1:
[29:59] So maybe there with an understanding of how Scapatigi is handled and how his intelligence is being sifted into the different security forces involved in Northern Ireland. Let's take a break. And when we come back, we will see how you run a high-level important agent who is also involved in a tremendous amount of violence.

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Speaker 1:
[31:27] Well, welcome back. This dilemma Gordon, I think, is gonna characterize or sort of infuse so much of the rest of this series, which is on the one hand, the British state has a golden goose source operating at the highest levels of the IRA. The other hand, he's involved in really nasty, dirty activities, including in some cases, he's directly involved in murder. And I think that kind of dilemma is so central to the complexity around this case, I think let's start with what's he offering? What's he providing? What information is of such value that we could even consider this trade off in the way that SCAP is handled?

Speaker 2:
[32:09] Yeah, so he is number two, as we said, in the internal security unit. But what that offers is first of all, the fact that he's just a senior IRA man. So he knows who's who, who's up, who's down, who's meeting, he's got the gossip. There's talk that he's able to drive round with other senior figures in his car with his car being bugged, you know, is one of the claims, for instance. He's also got a sense of who's joining, who's in. The ISU is actually described as the Clapham Junction of the IRA. Now, David, do you know what that reference means? Maybe not.

Speaker 1:
[32:44] I know that Clapham is a part of London, it is in South London.

Speaker 2:
[32:50] Very good.

Speaker 1:
[32:51] Yes, there is a Clapham Common. What is Clapham Junction?

Speaker 2:
[32:55] Clapham Junction, which is actually really in Battersea rather than in Clapham, long story.

Speaker 1:
[32:59] That's confusing.

Speaker 2:
[33:00] It's very confusing. The reason is that lots of train lines going into London stations go through Clapham Junction. It's actually for a long time is the busiest, I think train station, not just in Britain, but in Europe or something like that, because you've got trains going into Victoria and Waterloo, they all go through Clapham Junction. That's the analogy with the ISU, which is that lots of activity within the IRA went through the ISU. So in that sense, it was in the wiring diagram, it was right at the middle of things, because we talked a bit about how they set up separate cells, but the ISU needs to have a oversight of lots of different things. So for that reason, it's a really valuable place to have an agent. He starts straight away, it seems, helping foil kidnap operations. The IRA is running in Ireland, the Republic of Ireland, against wealthy businessmen, and some of the people get released, and he's able to provide detail on operations. This all goes through his handlers, and it's shared into something called the Tasking and Coordination Group, the TCG, whose job it is to decide the operational response to specific bits of intelligence. It's run by the RUC Special Branch, and they've got a 24-7 capability that if they get a bit of new information from Scapatici about something specific or any agent, they decide what to do about it operationally. But there is a very high level of control over what's done about it in order to protect the source. So, you know, the idea is you can't disseminate where it goes or decide what you do without reference to what the risks are to this vital source.

Speaker 1:
[34:41] I guess you have a fundamental, I guess in some ways operational dilemma, which is if Scap knows about five upcoming operations, attacks, whatever. If you use the information he provides to disrupt all of them, you raise questions about, well, where do those breaches come from? And it could potentially get back to your agent, right? So you have to be thoughtful about how you use his information, what you let go, what you disrupt and how you do it, right?

Speaker 2:
[35:10] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[35:11] So there's an operational dilemma in running this sort of source. There's also a fundamental moral dilemma, which is, this is exactly the kind of agent you want, because if you're the British state, you see yourself as being, we're at war with a terrorist organization. Again, this would be the British state's mentality. We need people inside that organization to provide us information about what's going on. But at the same time, recruiting people inside those organizations means you're going to tend to not recruit angels. You're going to recruit people who, again, from the standpoint of the value of the information they provide, you want people whose hands are dirty because they're the ones who are going to have the information that you actually want from inside that organization, but their hands are dirty, which is a problem.

Speaker 2:
[35:56] Yeah. Almost the dirtier their hands are, the more higher place they'll be and they're more useful they are, and the harder the dilemma gets. It's really interesting because one of the problems that the Frew will have is that there is basically a lack of rules regulation or a framework to deal with this fact. Because officially, those running agents are instructed in their training that agents could not commit crimes. Now, this is a total charade and everyone knows it, because the whole point is you're running an agent within the IRA, which is a prescribed organization, which means membership of it is illegal. Without even committing any acts, your agent is technically breaking the law. So immediately, before you even get to the violence, which we'll come to with Scappatici, you've broken what are technically the rules for running agents. And so the whole business is kind of without rules. And this is gonna be one of the challenges. And the Canova Report says, this fostered a maverick culture for some where agent handling was sometimes seen as a high stakes dark art and was practised off the books. So you immediately get a problem here that the boundaries are not clear about what you allow an agent to do or want them to do or how you run them.

Speaker 1:
[37:16] This will also be a dynamic or sticking point that we'll drill into in our conversation with Patrick Redden Keefe for club members because we'll talk a lot about kind of the nature of how you run informants and sources in this kind of intelligence game. And I guess you could also, going back to Stakeknife a bit, I guess in some cases, you could, and frankly, the agency did this while running assets inside terrorist organizations during, in Iraq or Afghanistan, where you would try to come up with solutions whereby your agent wouldn't directly be involved in violence. You know, so examples of like, you recruit someone who's in al-Qaeda or the Taliban and they're regularly firing rockets at a US, or, you know, mortar fired a US facility in Afghanistan or Iraq. Well, make sure you miss, right? Things like that. I mean, seriously, these are actual cases where, you know, we need the guys who are at these organizations, but we also need to make sure that they're not actually conducting violence against Americans. You try to come up with these kind of artful ways to get around it. But I guess the problem for Scab is that he can't really be in the middle of an operational discussion with somebody or conducting an interrogation and just say, like, I've got to go to the bathroom. I'm going to step out like someone else handled this, right?

Speaker 2:
[38:42] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[38:43] Suspicion would fall on him naturally. And so it's you end up in this situation, which is so complicated, where he's not just breaking the law by being a member of the IRA, but he's directly involved in murder. And this is where the comparison with like the agency in the war on terror totally falls away, is he's committing murder against citizens of the United Kingdom.

Speaker 2:
[39:06] Yeah. That is where this is so complex and dark. I mean, this is when the fact it's in your own country feels different. You know, he is not just breaking the law by being a member of the IRA, but he is directly involved in murder. And we know, tells his handlers that he is directly involved in murder. You know, and that this is recorded by his handlers. You know, this is what makes this such a kind of complex, challenging case. You know, Scappateci knows when someone is brought in by the IRA as a suspected agent, and he tells his handlers, and he tells his handlers, you know, I may be involved in killing this person. This is then reported up to this group, the TCGs, which is the kind of group run by Special Branch, which decides how to act on the intelligence, and whether to intervene based on his intelligence. They effectively are given the decision about whether someone lives or dies. Because to some extent, the Scappateci has got people's lives in his hands because he's interrogating them and potentially executing them. But he is telling his handlers, and that it is up to his handlers to decide, are we going to do something about that or not? Do we want to try and intervene or not? This is, I think, the moral complexity of it. They are, to some extent, complicit or at least knowledgeable. I think that's probably a better way of putting it. But what does that mean morally, ethically, legally in Scappateci's dark deeds? I mean, this is where you, I think, start to understand why it is called a dirty war. Because it is, as you said, also happening within the United Kingdom.

Speaker 1:
[40:53] The other bit of this that I think makes it really, really challenging to discuss and debate the value of an asset like this or how you'd run them is, in some of these cases, Scappateci would have provided the fruit, the British state, with advanced knowledge, with warning that someone was about to be killed too, which is another piece of this. It's not just like looking back because there's a whole separate conversation around these dirty assets or agents where they've been involved in illegal activity in the past and that you're trying to evaluate future cooperation based off of misdeeds from their misspent youth or what have you. But in this case, what makes it so hard is that he is, in some cases, Gappasici, in some cases is saying this person is going to be killed. And conceivably, we could look back on some of these and say, well, the fru could have intervened, the British state could have intervened in theory to prevent these murders from happening and chose not to in order to keep Stakeknife in place.

Speaker 2:
[42:05] Yeah, let's use an example because I think that maybe conveys some of the complexities of it. An early killing that the Nutting Squad does, one of its earliest ones. Michael Kearney is 20 years old. Someone has told the Brits he's delivered bombs to a lockup. He's arrested by the security forces, but then released. Means he comes under suspicion. He's handed over to the ISU on the 27th of June, 1979 and is accused of being an informer. Now, two days later, after he's handed over to the ISU, the first report is received by the British through Stakeknife, so through Scappaticci, warning that Michael Kearney is going to be executed. Now, it is still over the course of the next two weeks. This is interesting, I think, from one of the reports. Two separate agents on three occasions tell British military intelligence and special branch that he was going to be killed. I mean, one of the interesting things about that is it makes clear they've got multiple agents actually reporting on this. It's not even just Stakeknife. They've got multiple agents saying he's going to be killed. And despite those warnings, they don't do anything. And he's found dead on the Fermanagh border on the 11th of July. So two weeks after the first report, and he asked to say a prayer before he was killed. Huge stigma, interesting enough, for his family, for him having been killed for being an informer, people are told not to go to his funeral, for instance. But many years later, after work by his brother, the IRA actually accept that he hadn't passed information, that he hadn't been an informer, and that it shot him in the wrong. I mean, what do we make of that case?

Speaker 1:
[43:50] There's so many layers to this, which is, do you let your agent get involved in murder to protect his position? If you do that, are you murdering people who the IRA suspects are informers but are not? In some cases, I guess you could also run up against a situation where do you let your Golden Goose agent murder other agents or provide you with information that they will be murdered and let it happen? So in some cases, you could have one agent actually killing another. So there's a whole level of operational complexity to this thing and also so much moral complexity because I'd imagine that every fruit case officer who handled Stakeknife would have said, he's providing us with really, really important intelligence that is saving lives, and these lives that are lost are worth it. That's kind of the grim math that I think they're doing, is that what he's providing at the moment are his potential, or Stakeknife's potential future value outweighs the value of those lives. I mean, that is the stark moral calculation that I think that frankly, not just the handlers, the British state is making as they run this guy.

Speaker 2:
[45:15] Yeah. So I think let's leave it there and next time we'll drill down a bit further into some of these cases, the kind of reality and the complexity of how Stakeknife is running and being run as an agent inside the IRA, but also how things get, I'm afraid, even darker and more complex as the killings mount.

Speaker 1:
[45:36] But of course, members to The Declassified Club can listen to this entire series right now, get early access to all of it. You will also get access to our bonus interviews, doing an interview as we mentioned with Patrick Radden-Keefe, the author of Say Nothing, looking at this intelligence conflict inside The Troubles, and you can sign up for all of that at therestisclassified.com.

Speaker 2:
[46:05] You can get tickets for our live show.

Speaker 1:
[46:07] Oh, the live show.

Speaker 2:
[46:08] September the 4th and the 5th when we'll be on stage at the Southbank. So do have a look for tickets for that before they disappear. Our last one in January did sell out. But so sign up for that. Sign up for the newsletter as well, which gives you the latest on what's going on with the podcast. But otherwise, we will see you next time.

Speaker 1:
[46:27] We'll see you next time.

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