But just over a year after the Castlereagh break-in, several newspapers in England and Ireland published a bombshell story. Stakeknife was no figment of anyone’s fevered imagination. He was a real spy, who for decades had been a paid informant of British Army intelligence. His information was so prized that British ministers were regularly briefed on it, and he made the careers of a generation of spymasters. Stakeknife was ‘our most important secret’, in the words of one British Army commander in Northern Ireland. He was ‘a golden egg’. Stakeknife wasn’t Gerry Adams. He was Freddie Scappaticci.
‘I am not guilty of these allegations,’ Scappaticci said. After being exposed in the press, he appeared at the Belfast office of his solicitor. Short, jowly, and puffy around the eyes, he seemed remarkably composed for a man who would now have a hefty price on his head. But then, Scappaticci knew a thing or two about how to comport yourself when someone is accusing you of being a spy. Never confess, Trevor Campbell used to tell his informants. Confess and you’re dead. Before anyone managed to nut Scappaticci, he vanished from Belfast and went into hiding, with the assistance, presumably, of his handlers. He had been a double agent for a quarter of a century, since initially offering his services to the authorities in 1978. In fact, Scappaticci was reportedly a walk-in. It has been suggested that he was motivated, in the moment, by revenge, having recently received a beating at the hands of other members of the IRA. But it may never be known what precisely impelled him to become the most important double agent of the Troubles.
For the IRA, this was a devastating paradox: the man the organisation had entrusted to root out moles was a mole himself. For the British, having an informant at the heart of the IRA’s own internal security unit had been a singular coup. In order to thwart penetration by spies, the Provos had reorganised, in the late 1970s, into a cellular configuration, in which each operational node would have limited insight into the activities (or even the existence) of the others. But as an army-wide internal affairs unit with a mandate that always seemed urgent, the Nutting Squad had access to everything: personnel, weapons supplies, attack plans. As one former Provo put it, the security unit was like a junction box for the whole organisation, and for most of the Troubles, the British had a man placed right inside it. If the IRA burgled Castlereagh in the hopes of uncovering Stakeknife’s identity, they failed; Scappaticci’s name was presumably so sensitive that it was not kept in the files there. In fact, when Scappaticci was outed by the press, the shock in republican circles was so intense that a number of Sinn Féin leaders cast doubt on the idea that Scap really was Stakeknife at all, cautioning people to be sceptical of the ‘unsubstantiated allegations’ against him.
‘I still can’t believe it,’ the Sinn Féin official Dennis Donaldson, who was one of Gerry Adams’s most trusted apparatchiks, told a visiting American journalist after Scap was exposed. ‘My God,’ he said, shaking his head.
But then, Donaldson was a spy himself. In December 2005, at a hastily assembled press conference, Adams announced that Donaldson had confessed to being a paid informer for British intelligence over the previous twenty years. Nearly eight years after the Good Friday Agreement, Adams said, some segments of the military and intelligence establishment refused to accept that ‘the British war in Ireland is over’. As if in warning to others who might consider betraying the movement in the future, Adams noted that those who become British agents are ‘blackmailed, bullied, coerced, bought, broken, used, abused, and then thrown to one side’.
Donaldson went into hiding, in an isolated Donegal cottage that pre-dated the nineteenth-century famine. Like a portal into Ireland’s miserable agrarian past, the place had no running water or electricity. But a lucky horseshoe hung above the door. Donaldson grew a penitential beard and chopped wood in order to heat the place. Then, one day, someone arrived at the cottage and killed him. (It has never been ascertained who precisely shot Donaldson, or who ordered the shooting. But both Gerry Adams and the Provisional IRA have strenuously denied that they played any role. After the BBC reported that it was Gerry Adams who ordered the killing, Adams initiated a legal action against the network, contesting the claim.)
How could such informants, at such high levels, remain hidden for so long? Nobody in the IRA was under any illusions about the willingness of the state to embrace unsavoury tactics in this dirty, undeclared war.
But if an agent is a murderer, and his handlers know that he is murdering people, does that not make the handlers – and, as such, the state itself – complicit? British Army sources would subsequently claim that the efforts of double agents saved many lives. But they allowed that such numbers could only be ‘guesstimates’, and this sort of thinking can degenerate pretty quickly into a conjectural mathematics of means and ends. If a spy takes fifty lives but saves some larger number, can that countenance his actions? This kind of logic is seductive, but perilous. You start out running numbers in your head, and pretty soon you are sanctioning mass murder.
For years, when the Provos made claims about collusion between the RUC or the army and loyalist paramilitaries, it was dismissed as propaganda. After all, the image that the British state had scrupulously cultivated for decades was that of the reluctant, impartial referee, stepping into the fray when nobody else would, to sort out two warring tribes. But the truth was that, from the beginning, the authorities perceived the Provos as the main enemy, where their energies should be focused, and regarded loyalist terror gangs as a sideshow – if not an unofficial state auxiliary.
As early as 1975, an army officer in Belfast wrote a letter to his boss warning about connections between loyalist paramilitaries and members of British intelligence and Special Branch, who appeared to have formed ‘some sort of pseudo gangs in an attempt to fight a war of attrition by getting paramilitaries on both sides to kill each other’. In another letter, the following month, the officer expressed the view that the exploding violence of the Troubles could be attributed largely to British intelligence agents’ ‘deliberately stirring up conflict’.
Loyalist gangs, often operating with the tacit approval or outright logistical assistance of the British state, killed hundreds of civilians in an endless string of terror attacks. These victims were British subjects. Yet they had been dehumanised by the conflict to the point that organs of the British state often ended up complicit in such murders, without any sort of public inquiry or internal revolt in the security services. All those bright lines that bureaucrats and legal scholars draw to delimit the government’s monopoly on the legitimate use of force, those boundaries that are meant to separate order from barbarism, had been transgressed. ‘We were not there to act like an army unit,’ one former British officer who served in the MRF later acknowledged. ‘We were there to act like a terror group.’
One day in the late 1980s, Raymond White, a senior Special Branch officer who oversaw the handling of informants, met Margaret Thatcher and explicitly raised the danger of paramilitary collusion. ‘I’m sitting here, with the agents and handlers out there, and I feel somewhat uncomfortable,’ White told the prime minister. ‘Because I’m asking them to do things that technically could be construed as criminal acts.’ White’s remit was to recruit sources inside the paramilitaries. But paramilitaries steal vehicles. They build bombs. They kill people. ‘To be a paramilitary is itself a criminal act,’ White said. He wanted a set of clear legal guidelines, he told Thatcher, that would spell out just what the state could authorise its informants to do – and what it couldn’t. To continue functioning in a grey area could be dangerous, he felt. Thatcher considered the request. But in the end, she would offer him no such boundaries. To White, the message was clear: ‘Carry on doing what you’re doing. But don’t tell us the details.’
Stakeknife was hardly the only paid double agent who has been alleged to have been a murderer. One of the top British informants on the loyalist side was Brian Nelson, a former army officer who became a paramilitary with the Ulster Defence Association. After a stint in prison
during the 1970s for kidnapping a disabled Catholic civilian and torturing him with a cattle prod, Nelson became an informant for the Force Research Unit (FRU), a shadowy army intelligence outfit that was a successor to the MRF. (It was the FRU that employed Scappaticci.)
In his day job as a loyalist paramilitary, Nelson’s responsibility was to gather intelligence, and, particularly, to assemble dossiers on republicans who might make worthy targets for assassination. He would end up linked to some fifty murder plots. When Gerry Adams was wounded in the shooting by loyalist paramilitaries in 1984, he had suggested that the authorities must have known about the attack in advance. At the time, this charge may have seemed ludicrous – if the government had known beforehand of a plot to assassinate a Member of Parliament in a drive-by shooting during the lunch hour in busy central Belfast, surely it would have prevented the attack – but in fact the government did know about the plot, because Nelson had tipped off his handlers. The government allowed it to proceed.
One night in February 1989, a thirty-nine-year-old solicitor, Pat Finucane, was at home eating Sunday dinner with his wife, Geraldine and their three children in a prosperous neighbourhood in North Belfast when gunmen crashed through the front door with a sledgehammer and murdered Finucane, shooting him a dozen times. His wife was hit by a ricocheting bullet. His young children witnessed the whole thing. As a lawyer, Finucane had advised many republicans. But he was not a member of the IRA himself. Nevertheless, the authorities felt that he had become too close to the organisation. Members of the RUC had complained about lawyers who were ‘effectively in the pockets of terrorists’. It was Nelson who gathered information about Finucane in advance of the shooting and supplied it to the execution team. The weapons used in the attack were supplied by a different man, who had also been a police informant. A subsequent inquiry stopped short of concluding that there had been ‘an over-arching State conspiracy to murder Patrick Finucane’, but it did say that he would not have been murdered without ‘involvement by elements of the state’. (Finucane’s family, convinced that there had indeed been an overarching conspiracy, rejected the findings of the inquiry as a cover-up and a ‘sham’.)
On one occasion in 1987, Brian Nelson saved Freddie Scappaticci’s life. A loyalist boss had given Nelson a list of Provisional IRA members who were being targeted for possible assassination. Nelson dutifully passed the list along to his handlers in the FRU. One of the names on the list was Freddie Scappaticci. At that point, Stakeknife had already been a valuable informant for a decade, and he stood poised to deliver an untold bounty of intelligence in the future. As an investment, he was still maturing nicely, so the presence of his name on a loyalist kill list prompted panic among his British handlers. Nelson himself did not know that Scappaticci was also an informant. Any given mole rarely knew about the others. So the FRU devised a scheme to try to divert the murderous intentions of Nelson’s loyalist associates. In the words of one member of the unit at the time, ‘The aim was to switch attention to another individual.’
The British Army handlers fed Brian Nelson the name of a different potential target: Francisco Notarantonio. A Belfast Italian, like Scappaticci, Notarantonio was a former taxi driver. At sixty-six, he was a pensioner, a father of eleven, and a grandfather. What he wasn’t was a member of the IRA. But Nelson’s handlers made him out to be a major figure, a Provo godfather, someone easily on a par with Scappaticci. One morning, Notarantonio was at home in his bedroom with his wife of thirty-nine years when gunmen climbed the stairs and shot him dead in his bed. When he was buried, a few days later, hordes of mourners came out to the funeral procession. One of them was Freddie Scappaticci, who had no inkling that the innocent man in the coffin had just been sacrificed so that he might live.
‘In almost thirty years as a policeman I had never found myself caught up in such an entanglement of lies and treachery,’ said Lord John Stevens, a top English police official. Stevens had been selected to conduct an investigation into the FRU and collusion between loyalist paramilitaries and the state, but his efforts were obstructed along the way. In 1990, a fire broke out in the office where Stevens and his team had been working. A subsequent police investigation concluded that the fire was an accident. But Stevens remained convinced that it was sabotage – an act of deliberate arson designed to destroy evidence of state collusion.
In 2012, the British prime minister, David Cameron, acknowledged the existence of ‘frankly shocking levels of state collusion’. The Good Friday Agreement had contained a few specific clauses on criminal justice. There was a provision to free paramilitary prisoners who were being held at the time of the agreement, and under this framework, any sentence delivered in the future for Troubles-related crimes would be capped at two years. Beyond that, however, there were no suggestions in the peace agreement for how to address the crimes of the past. There was no mechanism through which amnesty might be granted in exchange for testimony. Nor would the kinds of murders that the Nutting Squad and Nelson engaged in – and the state facilitated and condoned – be prosecuted as war crimes, because, whatever the reality on the ground might have been, the Troubles were never declared a war. What this meant was that the many unsolved murders of the Troubles would remain open criminal cases, in which ex-paramilitaries and ex-soldiers might yet be prosecuted. There was one notable exception: under the 1999 legislation designed to help recover the bodies of the disappeared, a limited amnesty would be provided if people with knowledge of the particulars of these cases came forward to share it voluntarily with the authorities.
One late-summer evening in 2003, eighteen months after the Castlereagh heist, a man named John Garland was walking along Shelling Hill Beach, near Carlingford, in the Republic. Garland had just taken his son and daughter for a visit to his mother’s grave in a nearby cemetery, and now they were strolling back along the beach. The tide was going out, and the children wanted to catch crabs. As they capered on the damp shore, Garland’s eye fell on something, a scrap of fabric sticking out of the sand. Approaching it, he picked up a piece of driftwood and used it to try to drag the material out. But it wouldn’t budge. Curious, Garland pulled harder. Then he stopped, suddenly, as the material came loose and he caught sight of human bones.
‘These were the disarticulated remains of an adult,’ a subsequent pathologist’s report concluded. ‘There were no soft tissues adherent to the bones and the bones were crumbling. There was some evidence of plant growth on the bones.’ It was the skeleton of a woman. After counting the ribs and enumerating the other intact bones, the report noted, ‘There was a single gunshot wound to the back of the head which would have been sufficient to cause her death.’ A flattened lead bullet was recovered not far from the skull.
Four years after their long vigil in the summer of 1999, the McConville children reassembled on this stretch of beach, several hundred yards from the area that had been so comprehensively excavated in the earlier search. A series of recent storms had caused heavy erosion in the area, so, after remaining hidden for decades, the grave had gradually been uncovered by the elements. The skeleton’s left femur was sent away for genetic profiling, along with DNA samples from Archie and Agnes McConville. But in the meantime, there was that fabric, a few tangled garments that had swaddled the bones over the decades in their unmarked grave. At a nearby morgue, the children of Jean McConville were ushered into a room, one by one, so that they could examine the clothing, which was laid out on a table. Tights, underwear, the remains of a skirt, a pink woollen top, the sole of a single shoe. Archie went in first, but he couldn’t bring himself to look.
Instead he asked a question: ‘Is there a nappy pin?’
The coffin of Jean McConville passes Divis Tower (PA Images/Alamy)
A police officer surveyed the garments and said no, there wasn’t. Then he folded over a corner of fabric, and there it was. Thirty-one years after Jean McConville vanished, her body had been found. ‘My mother was a very good mother to all of us,’ Archie declared at a subsequent
inquest. ‘All of our lives has been hell without her.’
Jean was reburied that November. The coffin was decorated with a spray of flowers, and the children accompanied it through the streets of West Belfast, pausing for a moment of silence when they passed Divis Tower, where Brendan Hughes still lived. Father Alec Reid, who had been so instrumental in the peace process, attended the funeral. But some others who accompanied the coffin felt that West Belfast was oddly quiet, as if the locals had been told to stay away, as if they were shunning the McConville family once again.
When the remains of other individuals who had been disappeared were discovered, the chief focus was on recovering the bodies and burying them in consecrated ground. But the coroner in the McConville case ruled that Jean’s body did not fall under the limited amnesty agreement governing the disappeared, because she was found not through the assistance of the IRA but by a random member of the public who happened to walk on the beach. This had one very serious implication, the coroner declared: ‘The criminal case remains open.’
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