Tomás Ó Flatharta

Ed Moloney is the first journalist who publicly unmasked Freddie Scappaticci. A strange coalition issued denials : Scappaticci himself, the British Government, and Sinn Féin. Shortly afterwards extraordinary proof emerged, which proved beyond any shadow of doubt that Scappaticci was a British informer.

Questions remain – above all whether the state organisations and the then IRA leadership – responsible for many Scappaticci murders – can be made accountable for their actions. The British state is determined to prevent this happening.

On March 8 2024 a cover-up Kenova Report does not name Scappaticci. In the same week we learned that an innocent civilian called Seán Brown, an active GAA member, was killed in 1997 by loyalists, with help from 25 members of the British state security forces. An inquest into the assassination of Seán Brown was stopped because the British State, covering up its dirty work, issued Public Interest Immunity Certificates.

presiding coroner Mr Justice Kinney abandoned the long-running inquest in Belfast and confirmed he would write to Secretary of State Chris Heaton-Harris to ask for a public inquiry.

He said Mr Brown’s inquest could not continue due to material being withheld by state agencies on the grounds of national security.

The PSNI and MI5 have made applications for multiple redactions to sensitive documents connected to the murder under Public Interest Immunity (PII).

https://tomasoflatharta.com/2024/03/05/surveillance-operation-on-lvf-suspect-mark-swinger-fulton-lifted-the-day-before-sean-brown-murder-irish-news-report-lifts-lid-on-a-1997-sectarian-murder-facilitated-by-the-bri/

The stories below are recommended.

---

Stakeknife ‘told TV crew that McGuinness ordered killings’

Army mole in IRA allegedly told reporters they had not revealed enough about Sinn Fein leader

Rosie Cowan, Ireland correspondent
Monday July 14, 2003

Guardian

The Army/IRA double agent Freddie “Stakeknife” Scappaticci told television documentary makers Sinn Fein’s Martin McGuinness was a ruthless terrorist leader who sanctioned murder, secret tapes have allegedly revealed.

Mr Scappaticci was exposed two months ago as military intelligence’s top spy within the Provisionals, for whom he was deputy head of the notorious internal security unit, the Nutting Squad, responsible for torturing and killing suspected informers.

So far, Mr Scappaticci, whom the government paid more than £80,000 a year and whom sources have linked to more than 40 murders, has brazened it out, denying everything and returning to his west Belfast home after his security force handlers failed to persuade him to flee the country for his own safety.

Although many IRA members believe he is Stakeknife, the republican leadership has stuck by him, albeit at a distance, perhaps reckoning that the secret services would capitalise further on any IRA attempt to harm or exile him.

But these revelations, disclosed last night on the BBC’s Panorama programme, could tip the balance. Security sources claimed he was on holiday in Italy and had been warned not to come back to Northern Ireland.

The Panorama team was given tapes covertly recorded 10 years ago for the investigative journalist Roger Cook in which Mr Scappaticci calls Mr McGuinness, the Mid-Ulster MP and senior Sinn Fein negotiator, an “evil man” who “one minute would be in church and the next would say, ‘Stiff [kill] him’.”

Mr Scappaticci phoned the now defunct ITV programme, The Cook Report, after it broadcast a documentary on Mr McGuinness. Researchers met him twice in August 1993.

He told them they had not gone far enough and that while Mr McGuinness would not “dirty his hands” by physically participating in the murder of Frank Hegarty in May 1986, he was responsible for luring the Derry informer back home to his death.

Mr Hegarty, who, like Mr Scappaticci, worked for the army’s shadowy Force Research Unit, fled to England after exposing an IRA weapons haul from Libya.

Mr McGuinness denied any involvement in the Hegarty case, dismissing similar claims by the dead man’s mother, Rose, as the ramblings of a “confused old woman”.

Mr Scappaticci also named Mr McGuinness as the man in charge of the IRA and Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams as a key member of the republican paramilitary group’s seven-strong army council. Mr Adams has always denied ever being an IRA member.

At the time, the Cook Report researchers had no idea of the identity of the man who introduced himself as Jack, but a later check on his car number plate confirmed it was Mr Scappaticci. But at the behest of the security forces, their programme did not include any clues that might betray him.

Last month, Mr Scappaticci won the right to a judicial review to try to force the Northern Ireland security minister Jane Kennedy to deny he is Stakeknife. Ms Kennedy said the government never commented on confidential intelligence matters.

Mr Scappaticci’s lawyer, Michael Flanigan, said: “My client denies implicating either himself or Martin McGuinness in any way in the case of Frank Hegarty and he further questions the authenticity of the tape recording and/or its transcript.”

But according to the tapes, Mr Scappaticci claimed nothing happened without Mr McGuinness’s approval and also insisted he cleared a series of city centre bombings.

He said Mr McGuinness gave Rose Hegarty his word of honour her son would be safe if he returned to Derry but he was shot and dumped by the roadside “like a dog”.

“If you meet him [McGuinness] in his role in Sinn Fein, he’s a nice, plausible person,” Mr Scappaticci allegedly told the television researchers. “But in his role in the IRA, he is a cold, ruthless person. You don’t get much chitchat from him. He sends a shiver down your back.”

Sources say remarkably similar things about Mr Scappaticci, alleged to have tortured and executed suspected IRA moles. The former FRU agent known as Kevin Fulton has told police that Mr Scappaticci threatened to kill him in 1994.

Sir John Stevens, the Metropolitan police commissioner investigating security force collusion with terrorists, intends to question Stakeknife but has not set a date for this.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,,4711611-103690,00.html

=================================================

Scappaticci told me IRA secrets before cop told me he was an agent called Stakeknife

(Sylvia Jones, The People)

Last week The People revealed that Stakeknife Freddie Scappaticci was a source for a damning 1993 TV documentary about Sinn Féin’s Martin McGuinness.

Mr McGuinness strenuously denied allegations made in The Cook Report programme at the time – and he repeated those denials this week. Amazingly Freddie Scappaticci has also denied being a source for the programme.

But today in The People for the first time, a journalist who met Scappaticci ten years ago when making the programme gives her full account of what happened based on tapes of her interview. Sylvia Jones is a former crime correspondent of The Daily Mirror. This is her story.

Light was fading on the warm, wet August evening when the security services’ most important IRA agent pulled into the hotel car park for a secret meeting.

Freddie Scappaticci – alias Stakeknife – was used to the danger – he thrived on it. But this time things were different. He wasn’t going to meet his Army handlers, he was there to meet journalists from a high profile television programme. And he wanted to dish the dirt on the most feared man inside the IRA – Martin McGuinness, the man the programmed dubbed a terrorist godfather.

That meeting took place on Thursday, August 26, 1993, and for the last ten years those journalists – myself, TV director and producer Clive Entwistle and award-winning ex-Daily Mirror reporter Frank Thorne – kept a promise to police not to reveal his true identity. Top brass in Army intelligence and Special Branch were furious that Stakeknife had compromised his position in what they considered a foolish way.

A senior officer in the then RUC warned us in the strongest terms that everything possible should be done to protect Scappaticci because even the slightest slip could put his life in danger and threaten their most important source of intelligence. But now that his cover has been blown, we are free for the first time to tell the full truth about the extraordinary meetings we had with Stakeknife and the lengths we went to in order to conceal his identity and protect the job he did for British intelligence.

Two nights before our first meeting, the popular investigative ITV programme The Cook Report, had broadcast a hard hitting expose on McGuinness – who would later become Northern Ireland’s Education Minister – in which he was accused of being one of the most senior leaders of Provisional IRA and involved in ordering executions. But Stakeknife thought the programme did not go far enough and was prepared to put his life on the line to give us more detailed information about McGuinness and other top terrorists.

In an amazing breach of security, Scappaticci rang The Cook Report main office at Central Television in Birmingham calling himself ‘Jack’ and claiming he was an IRA insider.

There had been many calls in the wake of the shockwave caused by the McGuinness programme, but there was something about Scappaticci’s voice that made production manager Pat Harris take careful note. She rang us at the Culloden Hotel just outside Belfast and Frank took down a contact telephone number and rang it. Scappaticci answered and made arrangements for a meeting in the hotel carpark.

We had no idea then who Jack was and made plans for Clive to be on hand as a security measure. For all we knew ‘Jack’ could have turned out to be a McGuinness supporter wanting revenge.

Clive and Frank were in place early, sitting in separate cars parked facing each other, noting the registration number of each vehicle that arrived. I was in the hotel having a meeting with a senior officer passing on information for the police investigation launched into the serious allegations made in The Cook Report.

I was waiting for details of the meeting to check out the potential new informant. The policeman wanted to know whether the mystery man would end up being a crucial witness for his inquiry.

‘Jack’ arrived on time, driving his own car. He parked and got out to join Frank.

Before he got into front the passenger seat, Frank and Clive both noted that he had a stocky build, about 5ft 9ins tall, with shortish black straight hair that was receding, and was aged mid to late forties with swarthy skin and hairy arms.

As he got in, there was a discussion about Clive sitting in a nearby car. ‘Jack’ accepted this security precaution and agreed for Clive to join them after being reassured that no photos were being taken.

“Basically, I felt, see, the programme itself, it didn’t go deeply enough,” he told us in his strong Belfast accent. “If you want to take in Martin McGuinness, you have to take in a couple of other people.”

For the next 50 minutes, Stakeknife launched into an astonishing who-did-what expose of the workings inside the IRA. He named names, telling us about the Army Council, how the IRA was organised and those responsible for operations, including atrocities in England.

Scappaticci admitted he had served on the IRA Northern Command alongside McGuinness and had known him for 20 years. He also claimed that McGuinness had lured Frank Hegarty, a man the IRA suspected of being an Army informant back to Derry from a safe house in England. Hegarty had betrayed the locations of secret Libyan arms.

McGuinness, determined to get Hegarty back, had befriended Hegarty’s family. and promised his mother that her son would be safe with him if he returned.

Hegarty did return and eventually agreed to meet IRA leaders in Donegal to ‘clear things up’. He was driven to the meeting by his sisters. They never saw him alive again.

According to Scappaticci, Hegarty was interrogated by McGuinness and others and then shot in the back of the head. No-one has ever been convicted of his murder.

Our first meeting with Scappaticci ended at 7.50 pm and a second meeting was arranged for the next day, in Belfast city centre. By this time, I and the senior RUC officer had checked the registration of his car. When the number was fed into the police computer, alarm bells rang in every security intelligence office in Northern Ireland.

When the officer was called back with the information, his normally ruddy complexion faded with disbelief as he realised just who we were meeting in the carpark. There was a stunned silence as he worked out what to tell us – and more importantly how much to tell us. But when he knew the kind of details Stakeknife had divulged, he then told us his name was Freddie Scappaticci and that he was indeed the IRA man he claimed to be and was in a position to know a lot of information about McGuinness.

In an extraordinary co-incidence, the hotel carpark was at the time of meeting being scanned by security police in preparation for a dinner appointment at the hotel that night for the then chief constable Hugh Annesley. Whether they spotted the senior IRA man having a covert meeting is not recorded.

The officer asked for a further meeting after we had transcribed the tape and shorthand notes and urged us not to discuss this with anyone until we had talked again. By the next day, the officer had taken advice and told us that Scappaticci was a ‘very, very important’ informant and that it was vital for his safety and the continuation of his work as a top agent that we protect his identity at all costs.

The security services knew they could not stop us using the material, so they took a calculated gamble to trust us. But they warned: “One slip could cost him his life.”

We were urged not only to use an actor to speak his words, but that it was even necessary to change Stakeknife’s distinctive phraseology to prevent him being identified by the fellow IRA comrades he was betraying. We gave our word.

By this time, we were due to have our second meeting with Scappaticci, but he was not answering his phone to fix the final details. Unbeknown to us at that time, Stakeknife’s handlers were giving him a ferocious rollicking for his freelance activity at the Culloden Hotel. They wanted him to stop all contact with us. But Scappaticci seemed to be a man who liked to live on the edge, and he eventually arranged to see us again.

We met at 10 am the following day, Saturday August 28 at a carpark, this time on the rural outskirts of east Belfast.

Scappaticci was there when we arrived, me driving, Clive beside me and Frank in the back wearing his tape recorder in the right hand pocket of his shirt, covered by his jacket. Scappaticci was distinctly nervous as we drove off.

We didn’t blame him. Now we knew who he was and what he did, we were anxious, too. We were in a strong, Protestant area and here we were with a top IRA terrorist in our car.

His conversation this time was more difficult and he gave us little new information. But we went over all his earlier details. But his handlers had done their job and he wasn’t going to open up. By this time, the car was heading towards Newtownards, another Protestant stronghold, but we were all concentrating on Scappaticci’s words instead of taking much notice of where we were going and what was ahead.

It was Scappaticci himself who saw it first and shouted “Christ, turn left. Quick, quick.” It was the marching season in Northern Ireland, and we were heading straight into an Orange March, complete with banners, pipes and drums. I turned left and sped away with the noise of the march ringing in our ears.

The realisation of what might have happened if we had been caught with Scappaticci in the back made us all panic – but Stakeknife most of all. The sweat poured off him as he slumped back in the seat.

July 20, 2003
________________

This article appeared first in The People on July 20, 2003.

====================================================================

====================================================================

Stakeknife flies home

(Greg Harkin, The People)

Stakeknife Freddie Scappaticci was staying at his favourite Italian hotel yesterday after fleeing west Belfast amid threats from former IRA comrades. The final straw for the agent who bumped off IRA members while earning up to £80,000-a-year as a tout for the British Army came in a series of articles in The People and the publication of a book about his secret double life.

A senior security source revealed yesterday: “Mr Scappaticci was warned ten days ago that his life was in imminent danger from republicans.

“He was told to take precautions and advised that he should move from his home in west Belfast.

“He has now done that.”

Last month The People revealed the Italian bolthole where Stakeknife planned to retire with the fortune he earned as a tout.

Incredibly, on Friday night, Freddie Scappaticci was back in the hotel he fled to when he was first exposed as an agent for the Force Research Unit in this paper last May. A receptionist at Hotel La Pace – talking to an Italian-speaking People reporter – confirmed: “Si, Freddie Scappaticci e qui. (Yes, Mr Freddie Scappaticci is here).” She then put us through to his room, but there was no answer. The receptionist added: “Sei un amico? Si ti chiama pui tarde poi parlare adesso ma deve chiamare un altro linea. (Are you a friend? If you call back later on a different number, you can talk to him then.)” There was no answer from room 653 last night. A new receptionist insisted Scap had checked out early yesterday.

Scappaticci, number two in the IRA’s internal security unit for 20 years, could be heard on an internet tape recording two weeks ago naming alleged senior members of the IRA to journalists from the Cook Report in August 1993.

More damning claims from the man involved in the culling of up to 35 IRA members – some informers and some not – were the final straw for republicans.

On one the tapes – first revealed in The People last July – Scap could also be heard describing IRA interrogation methods. He says: “See, when they have anyone the standard procedure is to strip them and de-bug them, right? Just to see if they are wired up or whatever.

“Then they usually put a boiler suit on them. They put them in chair facing the wall, right, and go from there.

“See, when people say now they [the IRA] use a lot of violence, they don’t really. Physical violence they don’t use now. They use mental violence obviously, you know.

“It’s a psychological thing. They get you into a room. They blindfold you, strip you. They have you sitting there, right.

“Maybe the room’s cold. They make you all sorts of promises, and everybody being what they are has a breaking point you know. And they think there are going to go home…but they don’t!”

There is growing concern within the IRA at Scappaticci’s role as an informer, particularly in how he helped the FRU and Special Branch set up the arrest in 1990 of Sinn Féin publicity director Danny Morrison. The IRA later helped to provide an alibi for Scap. That move is now being investigated.

Ironically on the same 1993 tapes, Scappaticci slags off Morrison, calling him a ‘pen pusher’.

“He was Director of Publicity. But he was also on the IRA Army Council, but he had no balls and that’s basically it. He was a pen pusher, if you want to put it that way,” Scappaticci can he heard saying on the tape.

A voice analysis between his exclusive interview for BBC Newsline last May and the recordings made in the car park of the Culloden Hotel in 1993 show beyond all doubt that the recordings are authentic.

Last night a senior republican source in west Belfast confirmed the IRA was now preparing to go public on Scappaticci.

“Firstly there are the very serious allegations made about Scap in Stakeknife: Britain’s Secret Agents in Ireland.

“The transcripts of the Cook Report tapes make for devastating reading in the book and their subsequent release on an internet website has confirmed, at the very least, that Scap had a big mouth and was prepared to shaft people who saw him as a comrade.

“He would be a very foolish man to return to Belfast from Italy now,” said the source. There has been speculation in some republican circles that IRA members have openly boasted that they will defy the Provo ceasefire to attack Scappaticci, though the PIRA leadership has refused to sanction any attack.

The flight of Stakeknife comes just 12 days after a High Court action by him was adjourned in unusual circumstances.

Scap was due to appeal against the dismissal of his judicial review last August when he lost a bid to force Security Minister Jane Kennedy to confirm he was not the agent alleged to have supplied the Army with high grade intelligence. Mr Scappaticci’s lawyer, Michael Lavery QC, told Lord Chief Justice Sir Brian Kerr that he was applying for an adjournment and the judge indicated that the court had received a letter giving the reason for the application. Declan Morgan QC, for the Minister, said he, too, had seen the letter and was not objecting to the case being adjourned.

The reason for the adjournment was not revealed and, when Mr Scappaticci’s lawyer was asked about it outside the court, he declined to comment. The Lord Chief Justice said it would be put in for mention again on April 23.

March 14, 2004
________________

This article appeared first in The People on March 14, 2004.

http://www.nuzhound.com/articles/Sunday_People/arts2004/mar14_stakeknife_flies_home.php