Stakeknife

Alfredo Scappaticci (12 January 1946 – April 2023) was an Irish IRA member named in the Kenova report as a British Intelligence mole with the codename Stakeknife.

Scappaticci was a member of the IRA’s Internal Security Unit. In 2003, it was reported that Scappaticci had been working for British intelligence, their highest-ranking agent in the IRA, and was known by the codename "Stakeknife". Both the IRA and Scappaticci himself publicly denied involvement with British intelligence.

Early life

Scappaticci was born on 12 January 1946 to Mary Murray and Danny Scappaticci and grew up in the Markets area of Belfast. His father had been an Italian immigrant to the city in the 1920s. The '' Irish Times'' reported that his birth name was Frederico, but he has said that "Freddie" was the name on his birth certificate. He took up work as a bricklayer.

Scappaticci was fined for riotous assembly in 1970 after being caught up in the Troubles and, a year later, was interned without trial in Long Kesh at the age of 25 as part of Operation Demetrius. Among those interned with him were figures later to become prominent in the republican movement, such as Ivor Bell, Gerry Adams, and Alex Maskey. He was a low-level member of the Provisional IRA in the 1970s. On his release, he found work on a building site, where he was later questioned by the police over a tax scam he was accused of participating in.

Scappaticci married Sheila Cunningham, and they had six children.

IRA career

By 1980, Scappaticci was a lead member in the Internal Security Unit (ISU) for the IRA Northern Command. The ISU was a unit tasked with counter-intelligence and the investigation of leaks within the IRA and the exposure of moles or informers, known as "touts". Via the ISU, Scappaticci played a key role in investigating suspected informers, conducting inquiries into operations suspected of being compromised, debriefing IRA volunteers released from Royal Ulster Constabulary and British Army questioning, and vetting potential IRA recruits.

The ISU has also been referred to as the "Nutting Squad", in reference to the fact that many of the informers uncovered were shot in the back of the head (the "nut"). 18 killings as a result of ISU activities have been directly attributed to Scappaticci, including the murders of two senior policemen and a suspected informer named Joe Fenton.

After the original allegations broke in 2003, Scappaticci, by now living in the Riverdale area of West Belfast, claimed that his involvement with the IRA had ended in 1990 due to his wife's illness. He denied that he had ever been linked to any facet of the British intelligence services, including the Force Research Unit. He then left Northern Ireland and began living under witness protection. He is known to have lived in Cheshire and Manchester, where his brother had settled, and later moved to a gated community in London, where he appeared before and was discharged by Westminster Court for alleged sex offences. He briefly returned to Belfast in 2017 to attend his 99-year-old father's funeral. His wife had remained in Belfast, and he lived apart from her from 2004 onwards, though they occasionally holidayed together and were said to have kept in contact until her death in 2019. Around this time, he was said to be living in a detached house in Guildford and driving a Mercedes.

Involvement with British intelligence

Scappaticci's first involvement with British intelligence is alleged to have been in 1978, two years before the Force Research Unit (FRU) was formed in 1980. The role of the unit was to centralise Army Intelligence under the Intelligence Corps. He was said to have worked as an agent for the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) Special Branch; he had previously been interviewed by the RUC’s fraud squad in connection with a construction industry tax scam. Fearful of returning to prison, he offered to become a low-level informer.

The former FRU agent turned whistleblower using the pseudonym " Martin Ingram" said in his 2004 book ''Stakeknife'' that Scappaticci eventually developed into valuable ''Agent 6126'', handled by British Army Intelligence via the FRU. Ingram says that Scappaticci's activities as a high-grade intelligence source came to his attention in 1982, after Scappaticci was detained for a drunk driving offence. Ingram paints Scappaticci at this time as "the crown jewels", the best agent handled by the FRU, and the asset was said to have been paid £80,000 a year. He cites a number of allegations against Scappaticci. His accusations centre on various individuals who died as a result of the activities of the ISU between 1980 and 1990. Ingram also alleges that Scappaticci disclosed information to British intelligence on IRA operations during the time period, involving:

*IRA members involved in the kidnapping of wealthy Irish supermarket magnate Ben Dunne in 1981. Ingram alleges that Scappaticci was influential in identifying his kidnappers to the authorities.Ireland's richest businessmen victims of 1980s kidnap epidemic
, Paul T. Colgan, The Sunday Business Post, 22 September 2002, Retrieved 3 March 2009
*the attempted kidnapping of Galen Weston, a Canadian born business tycoon in 1983. Weston kept a manor outside Dublin where the kidnapping was to take place.
*the kidnapping of supermarket boss Don Tidey from his home in Rathfarnham in Dublin. Ingram alleges that Scappaticci tipped off the FRU on the details of the kidnapping, which eventually resulted in the killings of a trainee Garda Síochána (Gary Sheehan) and an Irish Army soldier (Private Patrick Kelly).

Aside from providing intelligence to the FRU, Scappaticci is alleged to have worked closely with his FRU handlers throughout the 1980s and 1990s to protect and promote his position within the IRA. The controversy that has arisen centres on Ingram's allegation that the FRU killed individuals who might have exposed Scappaticci as an informer.

Stakeknife

"Stakeknife" was the code name of a high-level spy, now widely identified as Scappaticci, who successfully infiltrated the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) while working for the Force Research Unit (FRU), a British military intelligence unit. Stakeknife allegedly worked as an FRU informant for 25 years.

Stakeknife has been accused of being a double agent who was involved in the IRA's torture and murder of suspected informers while in the employ of the FRU. The British government launched Operation Kenova to investigate claims that the Royal Ulster Constabulary had failed to investigate up to 18 murders, to protect Stakeknife's identity from exposure.

In January 2018, Scappaticci was arrested amid accusations that he was Stakeknife, a claim widely acknowledged to be accurate. Scappaticci always publicly denied he was Stakeknife.

"Stakeknife" had his own dedicated handlers and agents, and it was suggested that he was important enough that MI5 set up an office dedicated solely to him. Rumours suggested that he was being paid at least £80,000 a year and had a bank account in Gibraltar. It has been alleged that Stakeknife's intelligence handlers allowed up to 40 people to be killed by the IRA's Internal Security Unit to protect his cover.

Stakeknife revealed

In 1987, Sam McCrory, an Ulster Defence Association/"Ulster Freedom Fighters" member, killed 66-year-old Francisco Notarantonio at his home in Ballymurphy in West Belfast. The UDA/UFF had decided to murder the republican sympathiser who unknowingly had been targeted by the Force Research Unit (FRU) to divert attention away from Scappaticci. It has been alleged that it was FRU agent Brian Nelson who gave Notarantonio's name to the UDA/UFF to protect the identity of Stakeknife.

On 11 May 2003, Scappaticci was named as Stakeknife, the British spy who had operated at the very highest levels of the IRA for more than 20 years in Northern Ireland, by the Glasgow-based ''Sunday Herald'', the Irish edition of the ''People'', and by the Irish newspapers ''Sunday Tribune'', and ''Sunday World''.

Scappaticci, born in Belfast to Italian parents, denied the claims, and launched an unsuccessful legal action to force the British government, to publicly state that he was not their agent. A report in a February 2007 edition of the '' Belfast News Letter'' reported that a cassette recording, allegedly of Scappaticci talking about the number of murders he was involved in via the "Nutting Squad", as well as his work as an Army agent, had been lodged with the PSNI in 2004 and subsequently passed to the Stevens Inquiry in 2005.

A former British Intelligence agent who worked in the FRU, known as " Martin Ingram", has written a book titled ''Stakeknife'' since the original allegations came to light, stating that Scappaticci was the agent in question.

Involvement with The Cook Report

In 1993 Scappaticci approached the ITV programme ''The Cook Report'' and agreed to an interview on his activities in the IRA and the alleged role of Martin McGuinness in the organization. The first interview took place on 26 August 1993 in the car park of the Culloden Hotel in Cultra, County Down. This interview was, unknown to Scappaticci, recorded and eventually found its way into an edition of the programme. The interview was posted online as the 2003 allegations against Scappaticci surfaced.

Scappaticci appeared to give intimate details of the modus operandi of the IRA's Northern Command, indicated some of his previous involvement in the organisation and alleged, among other things, that Martin McGuinness was involved in the death of Frank Hegarty – an IRA volunteer who had been killed as an informer by the IRA in 1986. It has since been alleged that Scappaticci knew the intimate details of Hegarty's killing because, as part of his duties in the ISU, he had reportedly been involved in the interrogation and execution of Hegarty regarding a large Libyan arms cache, which the Gardaí found. Martin Ingram stated that Hegarty was an FRU agent whom other FRU members had encouraged to rise through the organisation and gain the confidence of key IRA members.

Involvement with the Stevens Report

Things deteriorated for Scappaticci when Sir John Stevens, the Metropolitan police commissioner, who was investigating collusion between British security forces and loyalist paramilitaries in the killing of Protestant student Brian Adam Lambert in 1987 and the killing of solicitor Pat Finucane in 1989, revealed that he knew of his existence. In April 2004, Stevens signaled that he intended to question Scappaticci as part of the third Stevens inquiry.

Investigations

A report in a February 2007 edition of the '' Belfast News Letter'' reported that a cassette recording allegedly of Scappaticci talking about the number of murders he was involved in via the "Nutting Squad", as well as his work as an Army agent, had been lodged with the PSNI in 2004 and subsequently passed to the Stevens Inquiry in 2005. It is unclear whether this audio is a recording made via the ''Cook Report'' investigation. There were several inconsistencies with the various media reports alleging that Scappaticci was Stakeknife. 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 republican movement in Northern Ireland.

In October 2015, it was announced that Scappaticci was to be investigated by the Police Service of Northern Ireland over at least 24 murders. In June 2016, it was announced that this investigation would be carried out by Bedfordshire Police and would examine the alleged activities of Stakeknife and possible crimes by IRA members and members of the British security services. Scappaticci was arrested in connection with Operation Kenova in January 2018.

In January 2018, Scappaticci was arrested by police regarding offences including murder and abduction, but was released on bail. On 5 December 2018, the Westminster Magistrates' Court sentenced Scappaticci to three months' imprisonment, suspended for one year, after he pleaded guilty to possessing "extreme pornographic images", including those which featured animals. The pornographic materials were uncovered during an investigation into serious crimes committed during the Troubles.

On 29 October 2020, the Public Prosecution Service for Northern Ireland decided that there was insufficient evidence to put him on trial on charges of perjury. Stephen Herron, the PPS director in the area, also ruled out prosecutions of former members of the security services who are understood to have been his handlers as well as a former member of the PPS. This meant that there was little chance of him appearing in a criminal trial during the final years of his life, despite a multimillion pound investigation into his role as a state agent inside the IRA.

Scappaticci died in April 2023 without being charged. The general officer, Sir John Wilsey who commanded the British army in Northern Ireland between 1983-1990, described agent Stakeknife as “the golden egg” of military intelligence’s agents during the Troubles. General Wilsey's opinion is that Stakeknife saved “hundreds and hundreds of lives”. He was also suspected of tipping off British security chiefs about the IRA operation in Gibraltar in 1988, in which three IRA members were killed.

On 5 March 2024, journalist Peter Taylor was permitted to publish a video of Scappaticci wearing a dressing gown outside his former home, in 2004. "In addition to spying for the British army, he was also the ISU's RA's, Internal Security Unitchief interrogator, in which role he is believed to have been involved in 17 murders." BBC documentary, ''Our Dirty War: The British State and the IRA;'' had been prevented from publishing the video footage of the British agent, for 20 years, until now, Scappaticci is seen threatening and saying "I'll do you," if the photographer continues to film. In March 2024, the interim Kenova report, said more lives were lost than saved through agent Stakeknife's activities.

"To be clear, this hundreds of lives claim emanated from the FRU itself. A similar claim was made about the loyalist agent, Brian Nelson. Both were false and wildly exaggerated. A major police investigation would later conclude that the probability was that more lives were lost than saved as a result of the agent's Stakeknife.”

Death

On 11 April 2023, it was announced that Scappaticci had died the previous week at age 77. ''The Guardian'' reported that his health had deteriorated due to a series of strokes. Because he was still living under witness protection, little information about his death was publicly revealed, and it was only announced after his burial had taken place.

Undisclosed files

See also

* Murder of Thomas Oliver

References

Further reading

* Matthew Teague, (April 2006)
Double Blind: The untold story of how British intelligence infiltrated and undermined the IRA
" ''The Atlantic''
* Greg Harkin and Martin Ingram (2004), ''Stakeknife: Britain's secret agents in Ireland'', O'Brien Press

British Irish Rights Watch Report

stakeknife.eu

External links

''The Cook Report''], cryptome.quintessenz.at/mirror/scappaticci.htm; accessed 5 June 2014.

Transcript of Scappaticci speaking to the Cook Report
cryptome.org; accessed 5 June 2014.


, newspapersoc.org.uk; 19 May 2003

Scappaticci profile
''Sunday Business Post'', 31 August 2003.


cryptome.quintessenz.at/mirror/scap-clive.htm; accessed 5 June 2014.
Operation KenovaBBC Podcast “Cover”
accessed 27 December 2024.

{{DEFAULTSORT:Scappaticci, Freddie
1940s births
2023 deaths
Paramilitaries from Belfast
Provisional Irish Republican Army members
Republicans imprisoned during the Northern Ireland conflict
People from Northern Ireland of Italian descent
Date of birth missing
Bricklayers
Police informants
Double agents
Place of death missing