The Spy Who Jailed the Omagh Bomb Plotter | Inside Britain's Vast Espionage Network | 4

0:01From Audible Originals, I'm James Bond novelist Charlie Higson, and this is The Spy Who. Thank you for joining us for our final episode of The Spy Who Jailed the Omar Bomb Plotter. David Rupert is a spy who stood at the crossroads in Irish and British political history. With the Good Friday Agreement signed, various hardline Republicans vowed to keep fighting for a united Ireland. Nicknamed the Big Yank for his towering six foot seven frame, David certainly did not blend in. And yet he was able to infiltrate one of the world's most violent terrorist organisations, eventually helping to bring Michael McKevitt, one of the Omar bomb plotters, to justice.

0:49But David Rupert was actually only one of many spies to infiltrate the IRA. In this episode, we're going to focus on a recent report which asks troubling questions about one of the most famous spies from that period, Steakknife. I'm talking with author and journalist Cara McGugan. She uncovers and investigates British scandals. And her latest project is the podcast Bed of Lies. Season 3 finds her investigating the use of MI5 agents during the so-called Troubles, including Steakknife. Steakknife was a high-ranking IRA member who secretly worked as a British intelligence agent while allegedly being involved in interrogating and killing suspected loyalist informants.

1:39As we'll discuss, it's a strange paradox that, through agents like Steakknife, more lives were lost than saved. And he wasn't the only one executing at will. The report, known as the Kennevar Report, was released in late 2025 and covers how MI5 knew what their agents were up to, raising urgent questions about how far British intelligence was willing to go to influence and meddle in the political landscape of Northern Ireland. With JBL Live headphones, you'll lose yourself in your favorite music. In fact, you can get so immersed, we had to add a few disclaimers. While listening with JBL Live headphones, do not start twerking in your office break room.

2:28Do not begin line dancing at the DMV. And do not practice your moonwalk while crossing a busy intersection. Or, if that sounds like a good time, then go ahead. Just don't say we didn't warn you. JBL, made to be heard. Find your pair at jbl.com. This is Audible. Welcome, Cara. Thank you so much for joining me on The Spy Who. Hello, thank you for having me on. This must be a busy time for you as someone who's been covering spies during the Troubles. Yeah, we've just had the final report from the Canova Inquiry, which has been looking into steak knife, one of the most notorious agents of the troubles.

3:08And that's given us a sort of full rundown of this eight year police investigation that cost nearly 50 million pounds, which has been looking into murders he was involved in, tortures he was involved in, what his handlers knew and ultimately asking the question, you know, should we have been using him as a spy? So that's been, it's been very busy with that report coming out and the kind of digging into it, looking at what it said and what it's finally concluded. So can you tell us about Operation Canova? What were the findings? So this spy steak knife, widely believed to be Freddy Scappaticci, which we'll come on to why I'm phrasing it like that in a second.

3:47He was found to have been involved in 14 murders and 15 abductions. He was in the Nutting Squad, which was the IRA's internal security unit. They rooted out spies in the IRA and then killed them. But all the while, he himself was a spy. MI5 was aware of what Steakknife was doing, and this was viewed as acceptable. He was paid tens of thousands of pounds for his work, including at certain points being helped to buy a car and a house. He was taken on a few holidays by his handlers at times when things were a bit too stressful. He needed a break. He needed a bit of wooing. Flown out in military aircraft for a break.

4:27What is the hoped for outcome of this? I mean, other than just saying this happened, is it looking at laying blame at people? At the heart of it is a quest by families whose loved ones were tortured and killed by a steak knife, who want to know what actually happened and who was involved, how high up the chain of command it went, what did the army know, what did the police know, could their loved ones have been saved. But this is happening decades after the fact. And at this point, you might think a police investigation would strive towards convictions is not going to happen. The PPS said they're not going to bring any charges off the back of this report.

5:04How did the report come about? So after Freddy Scappaticci was exposed in the press as the agent's steak knife, it kick-started a big police investigation. The longest running police inquiry in the UK's history, the Stevens inquiry, and it had many chapters starting with looking at a loyalist agent, Brian Nelson, moving on to kind of more forms of collusion and then they opened Stevens 4 which was looking into the work of Freddy Scappaticci but the sort of money dwindled over the years the interest and also the kind of Stevens inquiry were finding it very hard to really get anywhere and so their work was sort of packed into 32 boxes which gathered dust for the best part of a decade and in 2012 the steak knife files were reopened families of some of Freddy Scappaticci's victims had urged the police ombudsman to review the evidence that was in these boxes and they found new leads.

6:00So in 2016, a second criminal investigation into Steakknife began and that was Operation Canova. Now, the one thing that you've hinted at is this complicated business that the UK still refuses to officially name Steakknife, Freddy Scappaticci. What would they lose or what would they give away by saying, yes, they are the same person. The report hasn't been able to kind of write down in paper that Freddy Scappaticci was the agent's steak knife, which I know that the lead of the Canova report, John Boucher, has been very angry about. The establishment would say that if they break the policy in this one instance, policy of neither confirm nor deny, then that opens them up to having to break it in other instances and that that could put the lives of agents and former agents and handlers at risk.

6:55There have been occasions when they have broken that policy. So I think maybe they've just gone so far down the line with Freddy Scappaticci that at this point they might as well dig their heels in until the very end. So the whole of this report has been done where they're only talking about this character, Steakknife. No, so the report is quite funny because it has sections on Steakknife and it has detailed sections on Freddy Scappaticci. So Freddy Scappaticci is a named character and all of his work is in there as well as Steakknife. But they just can't write that final line that says Steakknife is Freddy Scappaticci.

7:34There's this idea that he has basically been involved in killing more people than his intelligence saved. But is he driving that or is he just doing what he's told? Yeah, that's a very good question and one that we can't necessarily know. What we do know is that there are times when Steakknife has told his handlers that a certain person is going to be interrogated and the location of that interrogation. And his handlers have been well aware of that, but they haven't intervened to stop the killing from happening. So the question is, I guess he wasn't necessarily passing that intelligence in order to save the life of the person, because if the military swooped, that would blow his cover.

8:15So there were lives that were allowed to be lost in order to protect his cover. As one person said to me, you know, you don't get intelligence from the IRA by making the tea. So what is the useful stuff that he's passing on that he's acted on? Well, that's a good question. And one that I think, you know, there's been lots of debate about. It's helpful for the security services to know when their agents are being suspected by the IRA so that they can get them to safety. I mean, operationally, he's not in the position of kind of planning bombing attacks. So this isn't an agent who is kind of feeding back, there will be a bomb at this place at this time that can then be intercepted.

8:59but he was high up in the IRA so he would have had access to some information from the agents he's interrogating and from the people he's associating with of where there might be kind of big weapons stashes things like that so it is a debate about kind of was he this like prize asset because he's not militarily planning attacks for the IRA I know this series is about David Rupert and he's got a high profile for different reasons he was operating a bit later but helped bring the Omer bomber to justice. I think either spies' intelligence should be used to stop attacks or in the aftermath of attacks to bring the attackers to justice.

9:40The bad agents, as it were, their intelligence was neither used to stop attacks or bring people to justice from what I've found. So when MI5 found out about the killings and what he was up to, what happened? So this wasn't being conducted in secret in terms of what the intelligence services knew. The army were working alongside MI5. There aren't lines saying what an agent can and can't do. You know, really, they're allowed to do whatever's needed in order to protect their cover. And how did they originally turn him, as it were? So this is a question that lots of people have kind of speculated on over the years.

10:20There's been stories of him being involved in some sort of tax fraud or sexual crime. and the police kind of offering him this kind of get out of jail card in order to become a spy. But there's also a story of a former army handler who said that he kind of met Steakknife in the pub and he became friendly with him. And it was actually that his relationship with Scappaticci that brought him onto the military side. The report had a couple of lines about how he became an agent. It didn't give us a huge amount more, but it did say that Freddy Scappettici had wanted for quite some time to become an agent.

10:56So he'd become disillusioned in some way and he wanted to kind of bring forward information to the military about the IRA. But he of all people knew what the consequences were if he was found out by the IRA. Do we know anything about how he dealt with all that? I don't know how he felt about that. He spoke very little himself of kind of his time as a spy. There's very little known about him. Yeah, when you think about the stuff he was involved in, you know, like the shootings where people were so unrecognisable that they had to be identified by their jewellery, it's not screaming someone that's kind of ruminating on their actions, is it?

11:36And do we know whether the IRA did try and get to him afterwards? So there was quite a strange pact made that after he was outed, The IRA sort of stood by him. So he's exposed in the press and he then does a press conference with the IRA and comes out and says, I'm not a spy. And the IRA sort of stand by him. He actually then brazens it out and returns to Belfast. So he really is kind of quite brashly trying to front this out. In the long run, that's not possible. And he does end up kind of being taken to the south of England and being given a new identity. But I think he hated that. He liked being this kind of like man about Belfast, having the power.

12:18And people I spoke to did say that in those years after he was exposed, he had what's called a narcissistic collapse. And so he started kind of behaving quite erratically, made things quite hard for his handlers and the people trying to protect him. But ultimately, he was forced into this kind of quiet suburban life in Surrey.

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14:27So this is one individual case. I mean, can you give us an idea as the extent of British espionage during the Troubles. I mean, are there many more of these types of cases do you think that are going to come out? So Steakknife is seen as this kind of most notorious agent, but he is really just the tip of the iceberg, to use a cliche. I spoke to one former chief constable of Northern Ireland and he was actually in charge after the Troubles, but he said that he came into power and looked at the agents they were running and they had so many agents that they were effectively running the loyalists.

15:02and he stood them down. So, you know, we're talking hundreds if not thousands of agents throughout the Troubles on both sides, in the IRA and in the loyalist paramilitaries. And there's probably many that we don't know about. There could be someone much worse than him, but they haven't been exposed. So that's definitely a thing that kind of people suspect is that there might be others. So what kind of information were the British harvesting through using these methods? so spies were involved in getting sort of live information from inside paramilitaries on operations that were being planned you know be it people that were going to be targeted for killings bombing attacks that might happen but also to gather information on the people involved like who was in a certain ira unit who was in a loyalist unit who was involved in plotting and carrying out said attacks.

15:54So in an ideal world, that information would be used to kind of catch the perpetrators, prevent the attacks. But what we found across the board is that that wasn't really happening because you do that and it compromises your spy and they're found out. So the intelligence officers had to play a kind of calculated game of which intelligence they acted upon and which they didn't. So that I know that there was kind of rules in place that you had to have got a piece of intelligence from multiple sources so that, you know, the blame could be, was disparate. So it wouldn't point fingers in one direction at your spy.

16:32Why was it so hard for the British to infiltrate the IRA? Well, I think there's certainly a point in the Troubles when, you know, the Brits weren't winning and it was very hard to kind of access this closed society. And the community in Northern Ireland is very small. Lots of people all went to school together. They grew up around the corner. they know each other and so it was very hard to infiltrate the IRA as an outsider which is why they might try and find someone from the local area the IRA were very clever they kind of split into kind of small units to make sure that you know information sharing was kind of kept contained it was after a few big incidents like the Brighton bomb that targeted Thatcher and the killing of Mountbatten when there was a kind of big push to like beef up the intelligence war and recruit spies and you know get a handle on it which came all the way from Thatcher.

17:27We're talking here about police special branch, the army's force research unit, MI5 and MI6. So that in a sense shows you a sense of scale. Can you just clarify what is FIU or the FRU, the force research unit? So the Force Research Unit was a specialist unit of the army in Northern Ireland, which was dedicated to running spies. It was found that within the Force Research Unit of the army, there was a special division put together just to run steak knife called the Rathole. Right, so it's basically British military intelligence. Yes. And was that something that only existed in Northern Ireland?

18:07Yeah, that was set up in Northern Ireland after those big attacks I mentioned with Mountbatten and in order to gain intelligence from inside the paramilitaries. Now, just to backtrack a bit, and you did touch on this before, about how the British attempted to recruit people from the community. I mean, what were the sort of things they were trying to pick up on and thinking, all right, this might be someone who we could turn? There were times when people were kind of maybe picked up by the police for something and then given the opportunity to inform. So one good example of this was Joe Fenton, who was later killed by Scappaticci.

18:44He was an estate agent in the West Belfast area. He wasn't part of the IRA, but he was accepting of the IRA's kind of actions and he would help like move weapons around or let the IRA store weapons in his empty houses and helped IRA members leaving prison, find somewhere to live, that sort of thing. he was once caught with explosives that he was helping transport for the ira and the police said to him well why don't you help us and so he actually didn't feel like he had a choice he didn't want to be an informer he tried to get out of it but he wasn't able to and so he started working for special branch and what that meant was when he had these empty houses that he was allowing the ira to have meetings in special branch were bugging those houses beforehand so they could listen in on top IRA meetings.

19:35So he was what's known as an eyes and ears spy. So very useful, but not part of the action himself. But there was one too many operations that were foiled. And then an IRA member found a gun in one of Joe Fenton's houses, which had clearly been tampered with by the Brits. And so he was called in for questioning by Freddy Scappaticci and the Nutting Squad. So that's a sort of example of like, someone being turned because they had they'd been involved in some sort of petty criminality i know that there's also kind of intelligence people did a lot of work on profiling potential spies and then finding moments to approach them so they're frank hegarty and derry so he was actually an ira member the legend goes that he was kind of walking his dog when a member of the army approached him kind of in a quiet area and sort of started talking to him about greyhounds, which he loved, and then sort of ultimately fostered that relationship and encouraged him to start feeding them information.

20:38So there's huge resources being pumped in from the British side. To what extent were the British controlling the war? One person has described this to me. It was as though there was a game of chess being played with the IRA on one side. and the loyalists on the other and the British turned the lights off, moved the pieces into position and then turned them back on. So that idea that they had enough pieces across the board who they were in touch with that they could sort of direct what was happening. Now, I'm not sure we'll ever know the truth of that. There are agents who were kind of involved in the political machinations, you know, helping to steer the IRA towards politics away from violence.

21:21And so I'm sure also that we've got those who were involved in helping prevent attacks. There were agents so high up in the paramilitaries that they did hold positions of power that in that regard, you could say that the Brits were involved in kind of directing what was happening. Depending on who you speak to in Northern Ireland, you'll get very different answers on this one. So it's hard to definitively say. I mean, and is there a case that these IRA members and also loyalist paramilitaries were being manipulated by British intelligence? Were they being goaded or pushed further than they might have done had the British not intervened?

22:05There were certainly agents who would have never been involved if it wasn't for the British. There's one agent I looked at who was a soldier, Peter Keeley, known by the pseudonym Kevin Fulton. He was from Northern Ireland. And he was then approached by military intelligence and said, well, rather than being a soldier, would you actually leave the army, like leave in air quotes, and go and join the IRA? and he ended up climbing through the ranks as a bomb maker and he was involved in making bombs and conducting operations that ended up killing a police officer and one of his former fellow soldiers.

22:41And we know about this because he wrote a book about his time in the IRA called Unsung Hero, so very much self-aggrandizing. And I spoke to a family who they discovered that he was one of the gunmen who had stormed into their house in the middle of the night, balaclavaed, and shot their dad. And they found out years later when this book came out that this agent had been involved in breaking into their house because they read the book. So Cara, with your podcast Bed of Lies, you explore state-sponsored cover-ups and the crossing of moral and legal lines by those states. How were you able to get at the truth of what happened?

23:21Because I imagine the truth would have been incredibly hard to get. Yes, well in this case it's hard to know if we'll ever fully know the truth. But I came at this story from having spoken to families who have been seeking justice and answers for decades, whose loved ones were killed by paramilitaries, but including people they suspected of being agents, and therefore have questions such as, what did the police or army know? Could they have intervened to save my loved one's life? And so they have kind of fought these campaigns, bringing civil lawsuits, freedom of information requests, that sort of thing, to try and get answers about what happened.

23:58And it's a very, very difficult thing, especially in Northern Ireland. I mean, there are so many aspects of this story that are pretty shocking. Was there anything in particular that really shocked you? For me, I think certainly the sense of scale. And going into this, my dad's, he grew up in Scotland, he's Scottish, but his family, parts of them originally hailed from Northern Ireland. And so that interest was there. But, you know, I remember being at school at A-level history. And my history teacher said, don't answer the question on Northern Ireland. It's too complicated. And I think we have this total ignorance.

24:37Speaking to people there who are like, thank you for telling this story. People in Westminster and London just don't care. And, you know, this is part of our country. We do treat it as a kind of over there issue. But this was like, this happened in our lifetimes. in our country and we've just sort of left northern ireland to pick up the pieces on its own and then on top of that i think the idea of how many families are still fighting for justice the trauma runs very deep i spoke to one family uh two children were injured one of them her eyes was scored like a football pitch from after glass shattered over her when gunman shot through the car window and killed her dad so she's got physical scars and her father was killed and to this day she's still not got answers about what exactly happened and she's still bringing a legal case.

25:27And that's time and time again for every agent with kind of multiple victims. And then those victims' families, they want to know, was the British state involved in killing their loved one? And the steak knife report has only recently come to its conclusion. Do you know how the families have reacted to it? I think there's a feeling that now this is out, they can speak for the first time. There's a deep shame in Northern Ireland of relatives of people that were suspected of being or were informers. Like, I spoke to one person who said that in Northern Ireland, a tout, an informer, is worse than a paedophile.

26:09so these families they've kind of got this intense stigma from their community of their loved one having been rooted out to be a spy but also they've got this anger at the state because the state has badly let down their their relative who was working for the good who was passing over information to the brits and who was then allowed to be killed by another agent so it's this very difficult thing I think where they have felt silenced but now the report has come out I think people are feeling more confident I think they're feeling a bit heard they're still waiting on an apology from the IRA for killing their loved ones we're also still waiting on an apology from the state so there's lots that still needs to happen but I think for them it's like a good step forward I mean does it open things up though for family members to take private prosecutions yeah for a Longtime families in Northern Ireland have used the civil courts as their only means of redress.

27:06And so this report will now form a foundation by which more civil cases can be brought, more specific ones. And so I know that lawyers and families are looking at that right now and kind of hoping that they can get, you know, some sort of compensation, further answers through the courts.

27:43We've talked about State Knife. Can you tell us about some of the other agents who were working for the British? So I've mentioned his name, Brian Nelson. He was Freddy Scappatici's essential mirror in the loyalists. He was exposed shortly before Freddy Scappatici had to go on the run. and he was head of intelligence for the UDA, the Ulster Defence Association, which was the biggest loyalist paramilitary. So Brian Nelson himself had been a soldier. He'd been in the Black Watch Regiment and then he'd left and joined the UDA before then becoming an agent. So I think, and what that meant was he was involved in selecting targets for the UDA to go out and shoot and kill.