150. Britain’s Man Inside the IRA: How to Run a Killer (Ep 2)

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0:25How did the British security forces recruit agents during the Troubles? And how did the IRA try and hunt down those who had become informers? Well, welcome to The Rest is Classified. I'm David McCloskey.

0:38David:And I'm Gordon Carrera. And last time, we left off with Freddy Scappaticci, 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 Scappaticci himself had become an agent for the British state. And that angle to this 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.

1:31We 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 Scappaticci 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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3:35The rest of Classified listeners also benefit from 10 % off HP business technology with code T-R-I-C-10. I sold my car in Carvana last night. Well, that's cool. No, you don't understand. It went perfectly. Real offer, down to the penny. They're picking it up tomorrow. Nothing went wrong.

3:53David:So, what's the problem? That is the problem. Nothing in my life goes to smoothie. I'm waiting for the catch. Maybe there's no catch. That's exactly what a catch would want me to think. Wow, you need to relax. I need to knock on wood. Do we have wood? Is this table wood? I think it's laminate. Okay, yeah, that's good. That's close enough. Car selling without a catch. Sell your car today on Carvana. Pick up fees may apply. 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.

4:27David:And 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. And 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. One British security service that we didn't talk about in the first episode, which maybe listeners will find surprising, is MI5.

5:07Yeah. 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, but it's not been to this point.

5:19David:No. And 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 or source network in Northern Ireland. And it's still primarily behind the scenes, even at this point. So its role is primarily just supporting the RUC and army and running their agents. And there's definitely tension there because, going back to the tensions, the army tend to see MI5 as kind of 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.

6:05David:And 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 that it now has in Northern Ireland. But 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. So 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.

6:44David: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 knee blown up as he leaves the house of commons car park you know margaret thatcher comes into office 79. She wants to push the intelligence war harder against the IRA.

7:24David:Interestingly enough, she actually recalls from an academic role, the former head of MI6, Sir 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 Carré's George Smiley on in the TV series, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, which airs on British TV around this time as well. So a kind of interesting side note about the MI6 officer coming in. 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 he'd concealed going back a number of years.

8:10David:And there were 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 are 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. Its motto, fishers of men and the FRU is operational - In the biblical sense, right? In the biblical sense, yeah. Yeah. Not going out fishing with men, but trying to catch them.

8:49David:And the Fru is going to be operational until 1995. It's said to have run over 100 agents, and amongst them is Freddy Scappaticci. We should say the Fru, that is inside the army. That is inside the British army. So Scappaticci, 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 Scab? No one knows for sure. I think that's the first thing to say. There's a lot of different stories about this, and 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.

9:36David:I think we can assume, given what we know about Scappettich and what we talked about him doing, that's not his motivation. Yeah, not his profile. He seems to actually enjoy the violence to some degree. Exactly. Yeah. So there are these different accounts. You get some in Richard O 'Rourke's book, Steak Knife, Henry Hemming's book, Four Shots in the Night. There's also an excellent BBC podcast series called Steak Knife by Mark Horgan and Kieran Cassidy, which is a great piece of investigation into this. And so different accounts in different places with different emphasis on this you know one story is that he's beaten up by another ira member over an affair with that other man's wife which then prompts scappatici to sign up as a walk-in now i i don't know what you think but that's quite a big step uh to take and i think the truth is walk-ins were not really always very trusted by the brits so that account has definitely been disputed as the most likely.

10:35Has it been disputed simply because of the fact that he was a walk-in? I mean, I'm applying the sort of 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? It doesn't fit. What's the skepticism drawn from?

11:01David:Yeah, even the fight with the other senior RA 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 RA and had been marginalized. So we talked about a little bit last time that he wasn't quite immediately back on the inside of the RA 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.

11:41David: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. As we'll see, I think given the duration of his cooperation with the Fru, 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.

12:22David: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 Scappaticci 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. And of course, if you're prosecuted for that, that could be a disaster, you know, and a problem, you know, within the IRA as well as at home.

12:54David:I mean, again, never confirmed. But I agree, you know, blackmail for a longstanding relationship. Not sure. It couldn't be the only piece. I don't think it could be the only piece. It's like a, it's potentially a piece of the puzzle, but it's not the whole puzzle. And 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 Scat, but it does. It's 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 Scappaticci around 1977.

13:35In his memoir, Willsey 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 Scappaticci to make the pitch effective.

14:10David:Yeah. And even this is seed as being a bit of a dodgy account. I mean, Scappaticci 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 Nairak, does try and go to a bar like that in 1977 to recruit someone. He's almost 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.

14:45David:So, you know, the idea that this was how it could go down, you know, with kind of soldiers going to Republican bars and just talking to people. chatting somebody up at a bar feels especially a like hardened guy like scappatici it feels that feels a stretch to me 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 and that 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.

15:55David:So there's possible, I think that's more in the possible category. 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 Canova, which is the investigation into Steakknife, and we'll come back to that later. But it says that the Army's cultivation and recruitment of Steakknife 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 criminal prosecution or a desire for financial gain.

16:38And 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 jailhouse recruitment where we're using leverage over you. We're also going to pay you quite well over the years to compel your cooperation with us. Those two things merge together for a guy like Scapatichi, I think really works. We talked earlier about how he likes stuff.

17:22He likes vacations. He's got his Manchester City season tickets. He's in many ways very self-interested and self-oriented. And I think this, you know, that pitch plays into those aspects of his personality.

17:36David:Yeah, that's right. And I mean, I think he's reported to have been paid at one point more than£80 ,000 annually by his handlers. So, you know, with lump sums, you know, help to buy property. So money's a factor. I mean, you know, 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. This offers him a way back to the heart of it. I think that mix, I agree, kind of feels about right.

18:10David:But it does mean that he's going to be recruited by military army intelligence and eventually this thing called the Fru. He's going to get various pseudonyms, including steak knife, which we should say is spelt in various different ways. and in different documents in different times, it ends up being the S-T-A-K-E-K-N-I-F-E, all one word, but there's different forms at different times. Yeah, we should say, what is a steak? Because when I heard steak knife 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 spelled. No, and I think just the name has got used in different ways and slightly corrupted and ended up as this spelling.

18:54David:But where it comes from originally, we don't quite know because he does get different code names. 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 Fru. 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. And those Fru handlers, again, Fru, the force research unit inside the army in Northern Ireland, those Fru handlers are assigned to Stakeknife for anywhere between one to four years.

19:41One 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 through actually meet with and handle steak knife?

20:17David: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. And you have actually been bundled into an MI5 van, isn't that right, Gordon, when you were arrested?

20:54David:It wasn't when I was arrested. 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 made this arrangement. We 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.

21:36David:and then I was walked a kind of circuitous 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 I don't know 10 15 minutes and the point is you have no idea where you are you know where you're going or how far you're going and we ended up at a lockup 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 in circles all that time and then you get i got taken into the lockup to kind of meet this agent but i think that is the closest i've come to being bundled into a um security force van and uh taken to a debrief What about you?

22:29I 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, Becky, has noted here that many people think that steak Knife 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 Steak Knife, 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.

23:18So there you go. Mistake Knife. So the SCSI Vans, though, it's not MI5. Yeah, not MI5.

23:24David:it's a fruit it's the fruit 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 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 in Lisbon and gives an oral debrief to the commanding officer of 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 all the so-called contact forms, which are created for every physical meeting with an agent.

24:09David:Now, it's interesting, but steak knife, they immediately realise is really important. Because of the importance of the information he's given, the access he's got to the ra they establish a special subunit specifically to deal with his intelligence which is in a secure part of the of the barracks in a kind of group of fenced off porter cabins which is known as the the rat hole which is again not the most glamorous name there's a real undercurrent of glamour throughout this entire story isn't there gordon i mean you Go work in a porter cabin called the rat hole. This is the grittiest possible intelligence story.

24:50The rat hole is exclusively for managing steak knives intelligence.