When I asked if the security services were stalling his progress, Boutcher replied with a firm no comment. “I don’t give two fucks,” elaborated Scappaticci, “because where you’re going you’re not going to able to tell anybody.”. The intelligence the agent was passing about the inner workings of the IRA including its leadership was much more important to the British state than saving lives, the families say. Tous droits réservés. During a previous enquiry led by the then deputy chief constable of Cambridgeshire, John Stevens, a senior army officer denied that they ran any agents in Northern Ireland at all, then a fire torched his offices in a secure police compound near Belfast; in his memoir Stevens presumed the fire was set deliberately by army spooks. Bombs were being intercepted while being transported into the city centre. ‘I Will Either Live Or Die’: Lyra McKee On Investigative Journalism Why Brexit And The Northern Ireland Border Remains Centre Stage The March Of Progress Against Terror In Northern Ireland, Killing For Company: how Brian Masters met serial killer Dennis Nilsen, Andy Coulson: I hope that people will not judge me entirely on my mistakes. And I did not want to be collateral in that scenario.” The British security establishment, he believed, were sending a message. He took up work as a bricklayer. ○ Boggle. Eleven months later, Scappaticci stood up in Westminster Magistrates Court and pled guilty to watching extreme animal pornography, in return for a suspended sentence. Scappaticci is in fragile health. It was also amended to better reflect Jon Boutcher’s remarks to the parliamentary committee about the chances of criminal prosecutions. “I’m not [Edward] Snowden”, he told me. Instead, perhaps inspired by the damp-infested red-brick terraces flanked by outdoor toilets where he spent his childhood, he became a brickie. The Troubles are over. Further files from Operation Kenova are still under consideration relating to a range of potential offences including murder, false imprisonment and assault. The first interview took place on 26 August 1993 at the Culloden Hotel in Cultra, County Down. Later it is claimed he was recruited by an undercover British soldier as an agent. Frank Mulhern's son Joseph Mulhern (23) was shot dead in 1993 after being accused of working as an RUC informer. A prison mugshot taken in 1974 has him staring out the camera with brooding, see-right-through-you eyes – either a wild revolutionary, a demonic priest or a serial killer. [4] The ISU was a unit tasked with counter-intelligence and the investigation of leaks within the IRA along with the exposure of moles/informers (also known as "touts"). By the early 1990s, deduced Bradley, “The IRA in Belfast was a hall of mirrors.”. Recruited in the late 1970s, the spy rose through the IRA’s ranks in Belfast to become head of the paramilitary group’s informer-hunting unit known as “the nutting squad”. The former FRU agent turned whistleblower using the pseudonym "Martin Ingram" has said in his 2004 book Stakeknife that Scappaticci eventually developed into an agent handled by British Army Intelligence via the FRU. © 2020 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. But who was endangering whom? Ask the GP: Could my high blood pressure be caused by isolated systolic hypertension (ISH)? [4] It is unclear whether this audio is a recording made via the Cook Report investigation. A few have written self-aggrandising accounts of their work: Unsung Hero, for example, by the pseudonymous Kevin Fulton and Fifty Dead Men Walking by Martin McGartland. Some insist he was a “walk-in” – that he sauntered into a police station and offered his services – while others say he was snared by detectives at Special Branch. “Stakeknife was involved in many, many murders and it's also alleged he went to meet Margaret Thatcher in Downing Street and she thanked him. It meant those in charge were playing God, deciding who lived and who died. Les jeux de lettre français sont : He was released from detention in 1974 and was by this time a member of the IRA. Freddie Scappaticci. In Jon Boutcher’s sights are not those who worked for the British state, but the senior IRA leaders who might have sanctioned the executions of informers after Scappaticci interrogated them or who worked with him on other IRA business. When he talked about having handled a British spy in Sinn Féin called Willie Carlin, the news made its way swiftly back to Belfast. In April 2004, Stevens signalled that he intended to question Scappaticci as part of the third Stevens inquiry. In his book, Killing Rage, Eamon Collins, an IRA man who’d graduated to working for internal security, recalls Scap and his team discussing an informer who’d been promised an amnesty and led to believe that, blindfolded, he was walking back to his home. In 2003 his son Freddie Scappaticci was alleged to be the British agent known as Stakeknife - a claim he denied. Les cookies nous aident à fournir les services. At one point in his interrogation, according to testimony at the subsequent trial, he was brought a glass of water, but had become so hysterical that he couldn’t bring his muscles to drink. The project that became Stakeknife was so hush-hush that it was kept separate even from the rest of the FRU and staffed by a dedicated group of soldiers on a downstairs floor known to some as “The Rat Hole”. Have all your noisy human rights enquiries if you like, “But wait till you see what we can do.”. So why is each side still intent on taking prisoners?”. If they were looking for something, they found it. Winter concluded our conversation by suggesting that I back up my work. How many more of its citizens, both agents or civilians, did the British government sacrifice to take its intelligence war to the IRA? For years during the worst of The Troubles, Freddie Scappaticci was chief rat and rat catcher-in-chief, at once the most notorious IRA ‘nutter’, tasked with seeking and silencing moles, and himself one of the biggest. The Provisional IRA reportedly assured Scappaticci of their belief in his denials and has issued public statements suggesting that the announcement of the former as a "tout" was a stunt by the British government to undermine Sinn Féin and the Republican movement. Maybe that’s what had happened to Scappaticci years earlier. At least for the time being, it was all they had. Once Scappaticci had been successfully hooked, the relationship between he and Jones flourished like an illicit relationship. When an officer from Kenova phoned MI5’s desk to inform them their man was now under arrest, it came as a surprise to them too. As the British army ‘tout’ code-named ‘Stakeknife’, he belonged to a paranoid shadowland of informers and interrogators, ex-cops and executioners. Freddie Scappaticci: | |Freddie Scappaticci| (born c. 1946)|[1]| is a purported former high-level |double agent|... World Heritage Encyclopedia, the aggregation of the largest online encyclopedias available, and the most definitive collection ever assembled. As street protests for civil rights turned to street violence, he and many others were swept up in it; before long, he was turning his bricks on the helmets, visors and Land Rovers of local policemen and after them the British army.
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