The New Spymasters (14 page)

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Martin McGartland was an informer recruited by the RUC Special Branch who became an IRA volunteer. He later recounted the multiple ways his handlers helped him to thwart attacks, including impregnating Semtex bombs with special chemicals to stop them exploding.
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However, he is an agent who has openly stated that he was forced to be complicit in the murder in east Belfast of a British parachute regiment soldier, Private Tony Harrison. It was not always possible to stop the commission of a crime.

I knew then that I was driving to the home of a soldier whom they intended to shoot in cold blood. I wondered what I should do; I wondered if there was anything that I could now do to save the man's life. As we drove along, I prayed that Felix [cover name for his RUC handler] had been able to trace the man and have him moved from the house, but he had told me nothing of the soldier since we had first checked out the area a month before. I debated whether I should try any trick, like stalling the car or crashing it into a vehicle, as if by accident … I wound down the car window so that I would hear if any shots were fired. I prayed that I would hear nothing. I waited what seemed an age, but it was probably less than 60 seconds. Then I heard the shots – one, two, three, four, five – I counted them, and knew in my heart that some poor bastard had been murdered in cold blood.
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McGartland's loyalties were clear. He and the FRU did all they could to thwart the IRA. But elsewhere there was evidence of much greater ambivalence by the security forces when they dealt with Protestant paramilitary groups, those who had declared loyalty to the Crown, even as they were prepared to countenance nakedly sectarian murders of Catholics. As later official inquiries were to uncover, a minority of agent runners in both the RUC and the FRU had colluded in the murder of prominent Republican figures.

The danger with such conclusions – whether true or false – is that they mask the success of other FRU operations and all the lives they protected, both Catholic and Protestant. According to those most closely involved, Steak Knife helped to foil dozens of attacks and arranged the seizure of many weapons, saving dozens of lives.

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For years, Steak Knife was the rock star of Northern Irish spies. And when his existence was finally revealed, his former handlers asked why it had taken so long. After all, his identity had become far too well known in law enforcement circles for his own safety.

In the 1980s, the FRU had a special ‘HQ detachment' at army headquarters in Lisburn. It answered directly to and worked closely with the director of intelligence, the Assistant Secretary Political (ASP), who was normally from MI5. The FRU was based in a Portakabin known as ‘the rat hole' and almost its entire purpose was to handle Steak Knife.

Over time, Steak Knife extended his circle. He befriended most of the IRA's leadership, certainly those in Belfast. They would drive around town chatting, not knowing that behind his car stereo was a sophisticated bugging device, recording every word. Steak Knife's tapes of senior IRA commanders talking in his car would become an essential showpiece of a secret tour of army headquarters that was laid on for a visiting prime minister or for Whitehall officials with the highest of clearances. ‘Steak Knife was recruited for tactical intelligence, but over time his value became strategic,' concluded one insider.

Once, when Steak Knife wanted to buy a new car, technicians from MI5 – known to the FRU for some long-forgotten reason as ‘the wasters' – tried to remove the existing bug. Unfortunately, it fell down inside the chassis. To avoid its discovery, the entire car was blown up at an army range. Steak Knife was driven out to watch and was even allowed to press the detonator.

After a while, it became clear what was happening. Of the key motives for spying, ‘love of the game' had taken over. ‘He loved the buzz and the deceit, the intrigue, the thought of knowing something that no one else knew.'

It was said later that Steak Knife had been motivated by money, but that seems unlikely. He was paid around £300 for a meeting, said one insider. ‘We used to see him about every ten or fifteen days, so maybe he got about £10,000 a year. It was hardly a fortune. He didn't do it for money. He just got to love the thrill of it.'

Contrary to honour and the rules, rival British intelligence agencies often tried to lure Steak Knife away from the FRU by offering him more money. In one case, he recounted, the RUC, who often arrested him, offered him over £250,000. But, like many Republicans, Steak Knife saw the army, as represented by the FRU, as inherently more reliable than the RUC. He said he wouldn't work for the police – or ‘the peelers', as he and other Republicans called them – or even for SIS.

Though he found it thrilling, sometimes the pressure of living on the edge got to Steak Knife. That was why, at one point, the army sent its top general in Northern Ireland, Major-General John Wilsey, for a secret thirty-minute meeting in a car park to thank and reassure him. But living a dangerous lie for years on end was exhausting, so much so that those who knew him would say that when the conflict officially ended Steak Knife was almost a broken man.

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In what was probably the climax of the FRU's operations in the mid-1980s, some of its key players crossed paths.

Steak Knife, as part of his Republican existence, was represented, like many other IRA members, by a feisty Belfast lawyer named Patrick Finucane. While he was on the run, he used to call Finucane regularly, anxiously hoping to hear that the charges against him had been dropped and he could come home. As revealed by British phone taps, Finucane's main concern when talking to Steak Knife, who used to call from phone boxes in the Republic, was how long it would be before Steak Knife could return and fix the tiles in the lawyer's bathroom (as part of his regular job as a builder, he had decorated Finucane's house).

At the time, the FRU was also running another agent, Brian Nelson, who had manoeuvred to become chief of intelligence for the largest Loyalist terror group, the Ulster Defence Association (UDA). In his position, Nelson could save lives, helping the army tip off people – mostly Catholics – whom the UDA planned to assassinate. But it emerged later that Nelson also played a more sinister role, using his contacts with the FRU not only to pass on intelligence but also to gather it for the UDA and its attacks.

In 1989, Finucane, then aged thirty-nine, was murdered at home in front of his wife and three children, who hid under the dinner table. And it was not long before suspicion grew that Nelson had both known about the plan to kill him and helped to advance it. An agent working for the RUC Special Branch had also, it turned out, provided information about the threat to Finucane. This was much worse than McGartland's account, and, by going along with crimes he could not prevent, Nelson was allegedly instigating murder.

From Finucane's death sprang a series of official inquiries, including three by police chief constable Sir John (later Lord) Stevens – latterly commissioner of the Metropolitan Police – which, over the course of more than two decades, gradually uncovered a picture of collaboration between Protestant murder gangs and elements of the British security forces. The inquiries also made public the hitherto secret existence of the FRU.

The Finucane case illustrated the extreme dangers of running agents inside terror gangs. As the third Stevens Inquiry of 2003 concluded, ‘informants and agents were allowed to operate without effective control and to participate in terrorist crimes'.
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A Canadian judge, Peter Cory, who reviewed the Finucane case among others, said it was ‘an indication that both the Security Service [MI5] and RUC SB [Special Branch] saw agent security as taking precedence over the need to warn a targeted individual that his life was at risk'.
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And finally, in 2011, an investigation by a leading British criminal barrister, Sir Desmond de Silva, QC, into the Finucane case blamed ‘agents of the state' but stopped short of accusing the British government of planning Finucane's death. He found ‘there was a wilful and abject failure by successive governments to provide the clear policy and legal framework necessary for agent-handling operations to take place effectively within the law'. The prime minister, David Cameron, recognized the gravity of the case and apologized for ‘the shocking levels of State collusion' that de Silva detailed.
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Another of the FRU's top sources in the 1980s had the code name Melodius. His real name was Frank Hegarty and he lived on the Bogside, the Catholic enclave in Londonderry. Like Steak Knife, he was recruited by the FRU after they learned he was a man slighted. He had been sacked by Martin McGuinness as the local IRA quartermaster – essentially the man who looked after supplies of weapons and bombs. McGuinness, who was highly moralistic about sexual matters, had disapproved when Hegarty left his wife for his mistress.

With coaching from the FRU, Hegarty began to regain the IRA's confidence and, after a while, he resumed his former role. It was from this position that, in January 1986, he alerted the British to a large shipment of arms that had arrived from Colonel Gaddafi's Libya and was stored in three separate hides in the Irish Republic.

The shipment was so large, it was impossible to use the army's usual tactic of tracking the guns through several hands before their seizure. There were too many guns to keep track of and the risk was high that some would be lost. Instead, Hegarty was removed for his safety out of Northern Ireland and resettled in Sittingbourne, Kent. Unfortunately, he left most of his family behind and he could not resist calling them repeatedly.

According to one FRU insider, an MI5 phone tap picked up a record of Martin McGuinness, then a senior IRA commander, urging him to come home. ‘It became a famous tape. “Come back, you will be safe,” he said.' This was echoed by the firebrand Protestant leader the Reverend Ian Paisley, who said that McGuinness had visited Hegarty's mother. ‘He assured the mother, Rose, that if Frank came home, he could sort the matter out and all would be well,' Paisley told the House of Commons. It was ‘a firm assurance for a mother's heart torn about her son. She persuaded her boy to come home. A rendezvous was arranged by Mr. McGuinness.'
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On 25 May, a few days after Hegarty had slipped back into Northern Ireland, his body was found dumped by the roadside. His eyes were taped and he had been shot several times. Two days later the
Irish News
reported, ‘Most people who knew of his disappearance were baffled by his decision to return home to Derry three weeks ago, despite knowing that the IRA suspected that he had been involved in the Sligo and Roscommon arms find.'
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McGuinness has always denied any role in the killing. In fact by then, he has said, he had left the IRA. He once told the
Irish Times
it was incorrect that he had told anyone it was safe for Hegarty to return:

‘That is not true, and the Hegarty family know that. I could articulate … exactly what happened, but if I did that it would be very hurtful and indeed very damaging to the Hegarty family,' he said. He claimed one member of the family knew what had happened, ‘and I am not going to put that person in a predicament'. Speaking generally about his past, Mr McGuinness said people in Northern Ireland were not ‘obsessed by any of this'. He added: ‘The reality is that the past is a very, very dark place for everybody.'
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In 1993, ITV's
Cook Report
investigated the Hegarty murder as part of a wider look at McGuinness's past. After the broadcast they got a phone call from a Freddie Scappaticci, the man later identified as Steak Knife. In a conversation recorded by the journalists, and not published until years later, Scappaticci said that McGuinness had both lured Hegarty home and been ‘the instrument of him being taken away and shot'. He went on, ‘He is ruthless. I can say this unequivocally. He has the final say on an informer, whether that person lives or dies … Hegarty was an affront. He [McGuinness] took it very personally … There is something quite wrong with his head … He would be praying in chapel one minute, go outside and think nothing about ordering a shooting.'

The reporter asked how he knew so much.

‘Well, I was at the heart of things for a long time, right?'

Scappaticci said he had served in the Northern Command, like McGuinness.
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He also said ‘a friend of mine' was supposed to interrogate Hegarty, but McGuinness and two others had interrogated him instead and then McGuinness had ordered him shot dead.

If Scappaticci really was Steak Knife and really was an FRU agent, then the ‘friend' who nearly interrogated Hegarty, his fellow FRU agent, was perhaps Scappaticci himself. It is easy to see why the incident might have affected him so deeply.

After he was named in the press as Steak Knife, Scappaticci was asked about the
Cook Report
tapes. He said he had not realized he was being recorded. ‘In relation to the contents, you have to understand that when I spoke to the journalists, I had been out of the movement for about three years. I felt disillusioned and it's fair to say that I left on bad terms. A lot of what I said was untrue…'
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By the 1990s MI5 had taken over the handling of Steak Knife from the FRU. It was obvious that his handlers had not approved his approach to ITV. At the request of MI5, who told the
Cook Report
that Scappaticci was a valuable informer, the tape was never broadcast and lay buried for ten years, until the Steak Knife story emerged elsewhere.

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While British operations in Northern Ireland may prove the value of human intelligence and provide a model for how spies can be recruited against terrorists, those wishing to apply the lessons elsewhere should realize, first, how spying almost always worked in combination with some form of technical intelligence and, second, how spying was a sword whose blade came to be blunted over time.