S9 Ep16: Murder of a British Spy in the IRA with Henry Hemming

[00:00:01] Due to the themes of this podcast, listener discretion is advised.

[00:00:07] Lock your doors, close the blinds, change your passwords. This is Secrets and Spies.

[00:00:27] Secrets and Spies is a podcast that dives into the world of espionage, terrorism, geopolitics and intrigue.

[00:00:34] This podcast is produced and hosted by Chris Carr.

[00:00:37] On today's podcast, I'm joined by author Henry Hemming and we discuss his book Four Shots in the Night,

[00:00:43] which is all about a British agent who penetrated the IRA and was then found murdered in 1986.

[00:00:49] I hope you find this episode interesting. Take care.

[00:00:53] The opinions expressed by guests on Secrets and Spies do not necessarily represent those of the producers and sponsors of this podcast.

[00:01:15] Henry, welcome back to the podcast. How are you?

[00:01:18] I'm doing well. I've got a little bit of a cold, but not too much. Nothing is going to stop me from talking today.

[00:01:27] I hope you've got plenty of water and a bit of honey or something on the side.

[00:01:30] Yeah, I'm on the mend. Definitely.

[00:01:32] That's good. That's good.

[00:01:34] Apparently, singers on the West End use port. They have a shot of port or something before they go on stage.

[00:01:40] And apparently that solves most of the problems.

[00:01:43] I love it. I mean, yeah, we are all out of port in this house.

[00:01:47] Yes.

[00:01:48] If we had someone supply, that would help everything. I've never heard that. I love it.

[00:01:53] Yeah. Yeah. An actor friend I might tell me about a while back is like, oh, okay.

[00:01:57] They skip the cheese because that's bad for your vocals.

[00:01:59] But they just have a nice shot of port. Apparently that sorts a lot of problems out.

[00:02:03] Yeah.

[00:02:04] So there we go.

[00:02:05] So for the benefit of the audience, you may not have heard our previous interview,

[00:02:08] because when we last spoke, it was about your book, Our Man in New York.

[00:02:11] I was wondering if you could just tell us a little bit about yourself.

[00:02:13] Yeah. I've written a number of books about spies, about real spies, about people who've worked for MI5 or MI6,

[00:02:22] and also people who've been investigated by MI5.

[00:02:27] And the last book I wrote, apart from the one we're going to talk about today, was, as you say,

[00:02:32] that was called Our Man in New York.

[00:02:34] And that was about an MI6 spymaster.

[00:02:37] And he was someone who was sent over to New York during the Second World War.

[00:02:41] And the brief he was essentially given was,

[00:02:44] do what you can to try and change American public opinion and try and bring them into the war.

[00:02:50] And that's what he set out to do.

[00:02:52] Yeah. Yeah. It was a very fascinating chat we had.

[00:02:55] So I'll put a link in our show notes if anybody hasn't heard that interview.

[00:02:59] But it's a very interesting book.

[00:03:00] And your new book is equally fascinating.

[00:03:02] So it's called Four Shots in the Night.

[00:03:05] And it's all about a British informant who was in the IRA.

[00:03:08] I was wondering if you could talk to us a bit about what sort of drew you to this story,

[00:03:11] and also how you went about researching it.

[00:03:13] Because quite a lot of our audience are actually academics who are probably researching various papers or books themselves.

[00:03:20] So I think people always appreciate these sort of tips.

[00:03:23] Yeah. No, sure. It's a really good question.

[00:03:25] Well, two questions.

[00:03:26] And in answer to the first one, it began with a conversation I had, I think something like six or seven years ago,

[00:03:33] with someone who said to me, essentially,

[00:03:36] I believe the biggest story in the history of British espionage over the last 60, 70 years is that of spies inside the IRA and the impact they had on the course of the troubles.

[00:03:49] And I hadn't heard that before.

[00:03:51] I was intrigued.

[00:03:52] I was skeptical as well when I first came across that idea.

[00:03:56] So that was the thing that kind of piqued my curiosity.

[00:03:59] And in answer to your second question, what was the research process like?

[00:04:04] Obviously, part of it was text-based.

[00:04:07] I went through as many secondary sources and primary sources as I could find.

[00:04:12] I spent days in the National Archives going through many, many papers in there.

[00:04:17] But I think one of the most interesting resources, if I can refer to it as that, was the set of interviews which I did.

[00:04:26] And that was really interesting and often unpredictable.

[00:04:30] And it involved talking to people who had some kind of knowledge or information to pass on about either the murder at the heart of this book

[00:04:40] or the broader story of British intelligence in Northern Ireland during the troubles.

[00:04:47] And that's something which, I mean, you were talking about kind of tips.

[00:04:51] I guess I did learn a certain amount about approaching someone who may have information that you basically as a writer or an academic or a historian that you want to find out.

[00:05:02] And I think the one thing that became really clear to me is it's incredibly important to set out exactly where you're coming from when you're entering a sensitive subject like this.

[00:05:14] And I still remember early on one of the first conversations I had with someone who'd agreed to speak.

[00:05:20] And they asked right at the start of this conversation, I'm happy to talk.

[00:05:24] However, before we go any further, I want to know what your angle is.

[00:05:29] And I remember being quite thrown by that because I sort of always imagined like, well, I'm just the neutral observer.

[00:05:35] This is not really my story. It's not about me.

[00:05:38] And at the same time, of course, there's really no such thing as a neutral observer.

[00:05:42] We all bring elements of our own cultural baggage to every story and every tale that we try to get down on the page.

[00:05:50] And I think the more I was able to talk about exactly where I was coming from, what my angle was or my lack of angle as I saw it, I think that made the approaches easier.

[00:06:02] That's something I definitely found.

[00:06:05] Yeah. And were most of these interviews in person or were they online or...?

[00:06:10] Yeah, most of them were in person. And they involved lots of travel. Some were in Northern Ireland and some of them were elsewhere in the UK.

[00:06:19] And often one conversation would lead to another.

[00:06:23] So after speaking to one person, they would suggest speaking to someone else they knew.

[00:06:28] Yeah. And did you, did you, because obviously we're talking about a murder, did you experience any either hostility or people not willing to talk who then didn't cooperate or people pushing you down another path or anything like that?

[00:06:42] Yeah. There were certainly people who did not want to speak about this subject.

[00:06:47] And, but at the same time, even in me saying that there's kind of implication, there's some kind of intimidation or me being told, not only do I not want to speak to you, but you should not be writing about this.

[00:06:57] That was not something I heard. And I think it's really interesting. I think the reaction to people like me, i.e. outsiders, beginning to tell stories about the Troubles is very different to what it was 25 years ago or 30 years ago. And, and I think that's, that's significant.

[00:07:14] And I think for a long time, we've got very used to this idea that the Troubles is essentially a subject that is off limits. And there's a degree of exceptionalism in the way we think about the Troubles and Northern Ireland. And yeah, I think that's beginning slowly to change.

[00:07:33] Yeah. Yeah. Well, obviously this is quite a complicated subject to kind of dive into, but I think we'll start around Operation Banner.

[00:07:43] So I was wondering if you could describe the kind of political situation in Northern Ireland that led to Operation Banner, which is the name of the British Army deployment. And obviously then what went on to be known as the Troubles?

[00:07:54] Sure. It began with a civil rights campaign and that involved groups of young people, mostly Catholics and Protestants, carrying out actions, often marches in the streets in Northern Ireland. And they were protesting. They were protesting against one thing that's very specific.

[00:08:10] They were protesting against one thing that's very specific. They were protesting against one thing that was a very specific. They were protesting against one thing that was a very specific.

[00:08:14] They weren't calling for unification of the island, but it was discrimination against Catholics. And in the reaction to these marches and these actions, the reaction from the mostly Protestant police force, you had the beginnings of a more sectarian physical conflict.

[00:08:34] And this escalated during the late 1960s and during the summer of 1969, as people began to be killed in some of the violence.

[00:08:43] And just to give you a sense of the violence, this would include, let's say, a Protestant family living in a mostly Catholic neighbourhood being forced to leave and having their house torched and vice versa.

[00:08:52] So Catholic families in Protestant neighbourhoods being forced to leave and having their homes destroyed.

[00:08:58] And it was at this point in August 1969 that the government in Northern Ireland contacted the government in London and asked for essentially military help.

[00:09:11] And it's important to put this in context.

[00:09:14] So that was the start, the start of Operation Banner.

[00:09:18] And the context is the British Army have almost no experience of policing their own streets.

[00:09:25] I mean, the last time anything like this had happened was back in the 1920s.

[00:09:28] And suddenly the soldiers who were then deployed to Northern Ireland did not have training specific to that region.

[00:09:36] So it was unusual. It was weird.

[00:09:38] A lot of people commanding officers described the sense of making it up as they went along, not really having a long term strategy or some kind of coherent plan.

[00:09:49] And to begin with, it appeared to be working.

[00:09:53] So in the initial few months, the violence subsided.

[00:09:56] There were fewer deaths.

[00:09:57] There were fewer clashes between the police and protesters.

[00:10:00] And by the end of 1969, there were plans to send most of the soldiers onto other deployments.

[00:10:09] But at around about the same time, you have the birth of the provisional IRA.

[00:10:15] And that is where everything begins to change.

[00:10:18] Yeah, yeah.

[00:10:19] Well, I was wondering if you can give us a sort of dummy's guide to the IRA and how it changed during the troubles.

[00:10:24] It's, yeah, I find this story fascinating because so much of the detail is lost.

[00:10:30] Had you been living in Northern Ireland in 1969 at the start of, and someone asked you to describe the IRA,

[00:10:38] they would describe a largely defunct group which was not entirely committed to military action.

[00:10:45] It was a group that was dominated by intellectuals, by Marxists, by people who were talking about the idea of uniting the working class in Northern Ireland,

[00:10:55] Protestant and Catholic.

[00:10:56] And only once that had happened, could you even think about some kind of attempt to unify the island.

[00:11:02] And maybe there would be need for some kind of violent measures along the way.

[00:11:07] So a violent solution to the problem was quite a long way off.

[00:11:12] But also the IRA at that time was seen as not quite a joke, but suddenly not an organisation to be hugely afraid of.

[00:11:22] And far soared a year and the situation has changed.

[00:11:26] So during 1970, the provisional IRA, which broke away from this original group, was completely different in character.

[00:11:34] Was younger, angrier and had an absolute commitment to violence.

[00:11:39] And was already beginning.

[00:11:41] By the end of 1970 had begun its bombing campaign.

[00:11:45] And that became the IRA that most people around the world will have heard of.

[00:11:51] Yeah, yeah, indeed.

[00:11:52] And well, two names that are very familiar are Marcy McGuinness and Gerry Adams.

[00:11:57] I was wondering if you could talk to us a little bit about their roles and their vision for the IRA.

[00:12:01] Yeah, they're both, I find them really interesting characters.

[00:12:06] And they're both different.

[00:12:08] They've both got different stories.

[00:12:10] And I mean, if you're going to like talk about them as a pair, they're both, they're two young guys who were caught up in the troubles right from the start.

[00:12:20] And they have, I mean, similar generationally, they're similar, but they also, they have very different backgrounds.

[00:12:25] So Gerry Adams, he comes from Republican royalty, i.e. his family is deeply embedded in the Republican movement.

[00:12:32] And he has a history of family members being part of the IRA.

[00:12:36] So he's almost expected to join the group.

[00:12:39] And McGuinness is different.

[00:12:41] McGuinness comes from the other side of Northern Ireland.

[00:12:43] His family has no connection to the IRA.

[00:12:46] And when he decides to join his parents, his mum in particular, is shocked.

[00:12:51] And there's a story of her finding the black beret and the gloves in his bedroom and being really worried and just sort of feeling almost let down by what had happened.

[00:13:02] And McGuinness's other problem, not only did he, he didn't come from this background, but the other thing is his eyesight.

[00:13:09] His eyesight was really poor.

[00:13:12] He's described himself, he described himself as being blind as a bat.

[00:13:16] And of course, you can immediately imagine what that means.

[00:13:19] That means that you're part of the IRA, but you can't take part in frontline operations.

[00:13:25] So he's no good in the hijacking.

[00:13:27] He's no good in trying to kill a soldier from distance with a rifle.

[00:13:31] All he can really do is plan operations.

[00:13:36] And in a way, what he begins to hang on to early on in his IRA career is this reputation for being ruthless.

[00:13:44] That's his main, that's his calling card, if you like.

[00:13:48] And so you've got these two people, McGuinness and Adams, and it's only really towards the late 1970s that they form what you could call an alliance.

[00:13:57] I mean, they're already fairly close, but they're seeing each other, someone who shares this underlying vision for how to solve the problem of the troubles.

[00:14:08] And their plan is essentially, well, it's called the long war strategy.

[00:14:13] And this comes about in the late 1970s, and I'm jumping ahead a little bit.

[00:14:17] But this strategy is essentially, I always like to make football analogies.

[00:14:23] But if previously the IRA was going for an unexpected all-out victory against the odds, and every year they'd say,

[00:14:33] this is the year in which we're finally going to kick the Brits out of Northern Ireland.

[00:14:38] McGuinness and Adams in the late 1970s suggest something very different.

[00:14:42] And they say, instead of going for this all-out dramatic, amazing victory, essentially, let's play for a draw.

[00:14:49] Let's set ourselves up in such a way that the IRA cannot be easily defeated, that we can keep going for many, many years to come,

[00:14:57] become this immovable block, because that represents our best chance of getting what we want, which is unification of the island.

[00:15:05] And if not, then political power.

[00:15:08] And this is what begins to happen in the late 1970s.

[00:15:12] The IRA is fundamentally reorganized.

[00:15:16] McGuinness and Adams are two of those who are architects of this revamp.

[00:15:22] And just going back to McGuinness and Adams and who they were, the characters sort of begin to change in the years that follow.

[00:15:29] But I think the one thing that you can say that really unites them is that they have a less devout commitment to violence

[00:15:38] and some of the other factions in the upper echelons of the IRA.

[00:15:42] So yes, they are ruthless.

[00:15:44] Yes, they are responsible for ordering.

[00:15:47] Well, allegedly, in the case of Gerry Adams, as he always likes to point out, for ordering a number of attacks.

[00:15:54] But they didn't have the same perspective as some of the more hardline characters inside the IRA.

[00:16:01] And ultimately, from the early 1980s, it's clear that both begin to see a political solution to the conflict.

[00:16:09] And others in the IRA at that time do not.

[00:16:12] Yeah.

[00:16:13] And I suppose you could argue they've kind of kept a lid on far more attacks and maybe more ruthless attacks as well.

[00:16:20] You could.

[00:16:21] I mean, I'll be completely honest.

[00:16:23] It's sometimes incredibly hard to write about Martin McGuinness.

[00:16:27] He's someone who is capable at some points in his life of unbelievable brutality, savagery, and is responsible for cold-blooded murder.

[00:16:36] And what I mean by that is ordering the deaths of people he knew, people he knew well, people whose families he knew well and you'd think would care for.

[00:16:46] But at different times in his life, he was capable of enormous courage and statesmanship and did a huge amount to secure what was quite a fragile piece in the years after the Good Friday Agreement.

[00:17:01] So he's someone who defies easy description, I think is something I'd say about him.

[00:17:08] Yeah.

[00:17:09] And there's one thing that came out in your book as well about Gerry Adams.

[00:17:12] I think there was, if I recall it correctly, he was quite keen on trying to sort of position this in a kind of almost a sort of far leftist way where trying to make it a worker struggle.

[00:17:24] I noticed that there's a lot of sort of in the UK far left support for the IRA.

[00:17:30] I don't know if you have any sort of thoughts on that.

[00:17:32] I think, I mean, the overriding thought is that, yes, he had that, but a lot of other people in the IRA wanted nothing to do with that.

[00:17:39] A lot of other people in the IRA were far more traditional, were far more religiously and politically conservative, and also far more sectarian.

[00:17:48] Because bound up in that belief that you just have touched upon is a fairly anti-sectarian approach to the situation.

[00:17:56] And, yeah, he certainly, he, for example, invited Jeremy Corbyn and Ken Livingston over to Northern Ireland.

[00:18:05] And, yes, there was a time when he tried to slightly kind of shift the IRA and to move it in a more left-wing direction.

[00:18:15] But ultimately, he didn't have enough support.

[00:18:18] Well, he certainly, he was, yeah, as a member, a very, very senior member of Sinn Féin,

[00:18:22] he was part of the negotiating party that brought about the Good Friday Agreement.

[00:18:27] So, yes, he was, he was a part of that.

[00:18:31] And, but I think if you want to just sort of generalise, he was someone who preferred to be ever so slightly behind the scenes.

[00:18:38] Unlike McGuinness, McGuinness was more willing to put himself on the front line.

[00:18:42] Yeah. So Jeremy's more the politician of it all.

[00:18:45] Yeah.

[00:18:45] Yeah. Although, I mean, ironically, it was McGuinness who, who had a far more successful political career and even stood to be president of the Republic of Ireland in 2011.

[00:18:55] Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Well, thank you very much for that.

[00:18:58] So can you talk to us then about sort of the intelligence mission in Ireland and how that changed after 1978, which seemed to be a kind of key year?

[00:19:06] Yeah, sure. It's, I mean, what's extraordinary is how much it changes. And at the start of the troubles, the British intelligence operation is almost non-existent.

[00:19:18] I mean, MI5 at that time has a Northern Ireland desk, which consists of just two people. That's it.

[00:19:26] And as one of them, Stella Remington later said, she saw the reports coming in from Northern Ireland, but very few of them contained actionable, good intelligence.

[00:19:37] So to begin with, it was pretty limited. And early on, MI5's attitude was this, this is not for us. This is, we'll leave this for the police. We'll leave this for the army.

[00:19:47] Anyway, we've got other things to do, which was for them, chasing Soviet spies around London or going to meetings of trade unions and trying to find out what's going on there.

[00:19:59] And they had a very different approach. However, fast forward 10 years and things have fundamentally changed.

[00:20:09] So by the start of 1980, there's, I won't go into all the details kind of why it comes about. I'll just tell you what has happened.

[00:20:17] There's been a fundamental shift. So MI5 has a different attitude towards intelligence in Northern Ireland and essentially the role it can play.

[00:20:26] They do now believe that it can be useful. It can not only help in a tactical sense.

[00:20:31] So preventing attacks from happening or improving the chances of preventing them, but it can also have a strategic impact.

[00:20:40] So better intelligence on what the likes of Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness are thinking could actually lead the British in a better position when it comes to trying to bring about peace in the region.

[00:20:52] And you've got a similar shift taking place inside the army.

[00:20:57] And the army also, in the early years of the Troubles, had a slightly dismissive attitude towards intelligence.

[00:21:06] When I say the army had this attitude, I mean that a majority of senior army officers felt that way.

[00:21:13] Obviously, there were some who didn't and there were intelligence operations, but it was on nothing like the scale that followed during the 1980s.

[00:21:21] That's when things really begin to change.

[00:21:24] And just from a sort of intelligence historian's point of view, it is almost unbelievable what happens over the next 10 years in terms of the scale of this operation.

[00:21:35] So fast forward again, 10 years to say the early 1990s.

[00:21:39] And you've got an intelligence operation that is larger than anything else the British have tried in terms of just the size of the population they are infiltrating with spies, for want of a better phrase.

[00:21:52] There's this amazing moment when Father Dennis Bradley, who is part of the consultative group on the past, and I think it was about 10 years ago,

[00:22:01] he was asked whether in his role in this group, whether he found out anything about just how many agents were being run in Northern Ireland during the Troubles.

[00:22:11] And he went on the record to say that during the early 1990s, there were more than 800 sources.

[00:22:17] And that's an amazing figure.

[00:22:21] And in the same BBC documentary in which he said this, one former intelligence professional said, actually, that figure is an underestimate.

[00:22:30] So there were more than that.

[00:22:32] I mean, I should add the caveat that we're not talking 800 senior top level IRA officials or anything like that.

[00:22:41] There's a spectrum.

[00:22:42] And so you could have someone right down at one end of the spectrum who is a farmer's wife who lives near the border,

[00:22:50] who might agree to have a cup of tea once a month with a passing army patrol and give some details of some of the things that she has seen.

[00:23:01] And then right over the other end of the spectrum, you have people like Steakknife, who we may come to talk about later,

[00:23:09] someone who was inside the IRA's internal security unit and had access to extremely valuable intelligence.

[00:23:17] In the intelligence picture, there's a few different sort of organizations.

[00:23:21] You've got the Forces Research Unit.

[00:23:23] You've got 14 intelligence companies known as The Debt.

[00:23:26] And then you've got Joint Section, which is sort of MI5 and SIS.

[00:23:30] I don't know if you could just talk to us a little bit about, I suppose, the different sort of aspects of intelligence that they were gathering and how they did or did not cooperate.

[00:23:40] So you've got within the army side of things, you've got the FRU or FRU.

[00:23:44] But you've also got, as you just said, 14 Intel or The Debt.

[00:23:49] And 14 Company or 14 Intel, they were concentrating on reconnaissance.

[00:23:55] And that was their brief.

[00:23:58] They were extremely good at it.

[00:23:59] And they would observe and pass on what they had found.

[00:24:03] Whereas the FRU concentrated on recruiting and running agents.

[00:24:07] That was their brief.

[00:24:09] And meanwhile, you have Joint Section, which began as a, as per the name, a joint endeavor between MI5 and MI6,

[00:24:17] but was then taken over by MI5.

[00:24:20] And they were targeting a slightly different kind of agent to the FRU.

[00:24:26] And most of the time, they were more interested in agents who could supply political information or what was called strategic intelligence.

[00:24:35] And the FRU were often more interested in people who could tell them about where a bomb was going to be planted or where an attack was likely to take place.

[00:24:43] So those are some of the kind of basic distinctions.

[00:24:47] But it's not always in real life as neat as that.

[00:24:50] And you will have an agent who passes on both kinds of intelligence.

[00:24:55] And also an agent who can shift.

[00:24:57] So at one point is providing tactical, but then goes on to provide strategic later on.

[00:25:03] And was there much rivalry between the sort of three key sort of intelligence operations there?

[00:25:10] I mean, absolutely.

[00:25:12] And yeah, I really kind of, I've enjoyed just collecting over the years that I've taken to research this book,

[00:25:19] all the different things that people in the FRU have said about Special Branch and MI5,

[00:25:24] what people in MI5 have said about the FRU and Special Branch and Special Branch and so on.

[00:25:28] And yeah, everyone has, believes that their group were doing the best job.

[00:25:35] And everyone believes that the others weren't doing it quite as well.

[00:25:38] So typically the people in the FRU would tell you that the ones in MI5 were too intellectual,

[00:25:45] were, would overthink things and weren't practical enough, didn't have enough streetwise.

[00:25:50] People in MI5 would often say of the FRU that they were,

[00:25:54] they saw themselves as a, as a law unto themselves.

[00:25:56] They'd gone off the reservation, they were too gung-ho and they took too many risks.

[00:26:01] And, and then the FRU say a similar thing about Special Branch handlers,

[00:26:05] saying they didn't treat their agents with enough respect and they took far too many gambles

[00:26:09] and they, they weren't careful enough when it came to picking up agents and, and returning them.

[00:26:15] So, so yeah, there was intense rivalry, but I mean, at the same time, this is, you know,

[00:26:21] I've talked these last few minutes just about these organizations as if they're just kind of like,

[00:26:26] things or people with single identities and single beliefs.

[00:26:31] The reality, when you begin to dig into this and you begin to meet the personalities involved,

[00:26:37] the reality is that if someone who's working for MI5 gets on with someone who's working for the FRU,

[00:26:44] who's operating in the same part of Northern Ireland at the same time,

[00:26:46] they will cooperate.

[00:26:48] And suddenly you'll have cooperation between the FRU and MI5 because of this personal connection.

[00:26:54] And then someone gets moved on and the replacement is just,

[00:26:58] doesn't get on as well with their counterpart.

[00:27:00] And suddenly the two organizations do not communicate in the same way.

[00:27:04] And I guess one thing I really want to stress is the role played by just human relationships

[00:27:11] and whether people got on, whether they were happy to go for a drink together and,

[00:27:16] and saw eye to eye or if they were, yeah, if they didn't.

[00:27:20] Let's take a break and we'll be right back.

[00:27:39] Well, look, let's move on to how informers are seen in Irish culture,

[00:27:43] because I thought that was a very interesting sort of thing that came up in your book.

[00:27:47] Mm-hmm. It's, um, and there's so much to say about this.

[00:27:51] I mean, in short, the informer in Irish culture is seen as a kind of folk devil.

[00:27:57] And there's definitely a Republican reading of Irish history in which Ireland would have been united

[00:28:05] centuries ago were it not for spies.

[00:28:09] The spies are constantly responsible for undoing the best laid plans.

[00:28:14] And I think just from a historical point of view, it's quite easy to show that that's not true.

[00:28:22] And that often the role of spies is exaggerated.

[00:28:26] The, uh, yeah, and the number of spies can also be exaggerated.

[00:28:30] But in terms of just the reality, the reality during the troubles, what,

[00:28:33] what mattered is that there was a huge stigma attached to the idea of being a spy.

[00:28:39] And so for any one of those 800 people who agreed to work as a spy,

[00:28:44] sometimes they would do so because they'd been blackmailed or compromised

[00:28:47] or effectively coerced into doing this.

[00:28:50] But on other occasions, they would do it because they thought it was the right thing.

[00:28:53] And they wanted to get back at the IRA who had perhaps injured or killed a relative

[00:28:59] or a loved one of theirs.

[00:29:00] Or they believed that the violence needed to end.

[00:29:03] And this is one of the most effective ways of doing it.

[00:29:05] And that was, there was huge jeopardy attached to that decision.

[00:29:11] Huge.

[00:29:12] And I think it's really important to underscore.

[00:29:15] I think the other thing to add, and this is something which, which came up earlier this year

[00:29:19] when the police investigation into state knife, the interim report was released.

[00:29:25] And to me, one of the most powerful and moving parts of that report was the section in which the author,

[00:29:31] John Boucher, described in just in really kind of unrelenting detail,

[00:29:36] just how savage some of the, the experience of having a loved one accused of being a spy and killed,

[00:29:45] how savage the backlash against the family could be.

[00:29:48] And the extent to which that family could be ostracized or could be taunted or terrorized

[00:29:54] by the rest of the community at the behest of the IRA.

[00:29:59] And I think it's, it's a really, it's something which I think in the kind of the history of the

[00:30:03] travels and the way people talk about it, it's almost seen as something that we will just take

[00:30:07] for granted.

[00:30:08] Like, oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:30:08] There's a stigma attached.

[00:30:10] And you know, that's just, if one of your relatives is a spy, then obviously there's going to be

[00:30:14] this horrific reaction against you.

[00:30:16] But we shouldn't take that for granted.

[00:30:19] And that needs to be questioned.

[00:30:20] And it's deeply, deeply unsettling.

[00:30:22] What was the sort of fate of a spy who was caught?

[00:30:25] Because he had the Nutting Squad in the IRA whose job was to kind of find spies and deal with them.

[00:30:32] Yeah, the Nutting Squad.

[00:30:33] Its brief was to, to interrogate people who've been accused of being a spy.

[00:30:37] And a lot of the time they're interrogating people who were not spies.

[00:30:42] Sometimes there was an IRA volunteer who'd just fallen out with someone else inside the IRA.

[00:30:47] And his rival had decided, right, let's bump him off by accusing him of being a spy.

[00:30:52] Sometimes, again, and I'm referring to this police report, sometimes it's because somebody,

[00:30:57] an IRA man was having an affair with another man's wife.

[00:31:00] And we'll then have the man whose wife he was sleeping with accused of being a spy in order to get him out of the way.

[00:31:08] So, yeah, somebody would be accused of being a spy.

[00:31:11] They'd be taken away by the Nutting Squad.

[00:31:13] And they would be questioned.

[00:31:16] And sometimes the questioning would go on for days and days and days.

[00:31:20] All of the reports suggest that this was rarely involving physical violence or physical torture.

[00:31:28] It was more mental.

[00:31:30] And the person would be asked to be deprived of sleep.

[00:31:34] And they'd be asked to repeat their story again and again and again and again and again until some kind of crack appeared or some kind of inconsistency was spotted.

[00:31:43] And then if there was some kind of confession, either genuine or not, it would be passed on to the IRA Army Council.

[00:31:52] And someone there, someone like Martin McGuinness, would make a decision as to what should happen, whether this person should be murdered or whether they should be released.

[00:32:03] And most of the time they were unforgiving.

[00:32:05] Most of the time the order came back for the murder to be carried out.

[00:32:09] So that's roughly what the Nutting Squad did.

[00:32:12] You know, my sort of memories as a kid growing up, not in Ireland, but just as a kid in the 80s and seeing news reports and being around people.

[00:32:22] Like there was talks of people having like their kneecaps taken off and things like that.

[00:32:26] And yeah, all sorts of horrific things would go on.

[00:32:29] Yeah, that was the IRA's civil administration units.

[00:32:35] And they would, in areas where they thought they were in control, they would administer this medieval form of, I don't even want to call it justice.

[00:32:44] It's not, it's just, it's, yeah, abuse.

[00:32:49] And I think it's also deeply misleading when you refer to it as justice, because that implies there's some kind of process or that there's some kind of rectitude and there isn't.

[00:32:57] So yeah, that was certainly a part of the IRA's modus operandi.

[00:33:03] And I mean, I think John Hume is really worth looking up on this subject.

[00:33:09] Every time the IRA murders someone and then accuses this person of being a spy, John Hume would go to the press and say a very, very similar thing.

[00:33:19] Almost every time he'd say the same thing, that these people, the IRA, have given themselves the role of judge, jury and executioner.

[00:33:27] And at one point he said, this is essentially, this is the sign of a fascist.

[00:33:31] This is the, this is not the sign of an enlightened left-wing organization.

[00:33:37] And that they believe that they're the only people who are fully Irish.

[00:33:41] And, and of course, there's a horrible hypocrisy in that.

[00:33:47] And yeah, I think John Hume was, was really interesting on the subject.

[00:33:52] So with all that in mind, obviously there's a lot of risk being an agent deep in the IRA.

[00:33:59] So let's move on to Frank Hegarty.

[00:34:02] Why was he selected as a possible agent and how was he recruited?

[00:34:08] He was, I don't know precisely why he was selected.

[00:34:11] So I'm only surmising what happened.

[00:34:14] And I think part of the reason he was selected was that back in the 1970s,

[00:34:18] he probably passed on some information to the army.

[00:34:23] So he was down in, in, on somebody's file as, um, as a person who had helped in the past.

[00:34:30] But he was, um, he was approached first by MI5 and then he was approached by the Fru.

[00:34:36] And, you know, I think I might even leave for the book,

[00:34:39] the details of exactly how I was recruited.

[00:34:41] It's a good and interesting story.

[00:34:43] And it says a lot about the Fru tradecraft.

[00:34:45] But anyway, a lot of thought went into it and, um, and they managed to recruit Frank Hegarty.

[00:34:53] He agreed to supply information.

[00:34:55] He didn't agree straight away that he took some, some persuading and, um, but eventually he did so.

[00:35:01] And, uh, and he began to work as an agent.

[00:35:04] Yeah.

[00:35:04] Yeah.

[00:35:05] Can you talk just a little bit about sort of what his sort of mission ended up becoming

[00:35:09] and what kind of information he was feeding back to his handlers?

[00:35:12] Yes.

[00:35:12] So he was asked in 1984 to penetrate the IRA and to get close to Martin McGuinness.

[00:35:22] And this is almost certainly because MI5 suddenly didn't have enough information on McGuinness

[00:35:27] and needed more, wanted to know more about what was going on inside the IRA brigade in Derry.

[00:35:35] And Hegarty agreed to do this.

[00:35:38] He, um, he began to, to make his presence known at the local Sinn Féin office and, uh,

[00:35:44] and then began to work alongside the IRA courtmaster.

[00:35:49] The IRA courtmaster within every brigade you'd have one of these.

[00:35:52] And that job was, was essentially to source weapons and ammunition and explosives and supply them to volunteers as and when they needed them.

[00:36:03] So they also needed to, to hide these, these weapons and ammunition and explosives.

[00:36:08] And so Frank became a part of that operation.

[00:36:12] And, um, and then at one point he was, uh, he went across the border into the Republic to visit a series of locations where a huge haul of weapons were about to be deposited.

[00:36:24] And this was part of, um, one of the Libyan weapons shipments.

[00:36:29] So this was when Colonel Gaddafi wanted to, uh, to supply, uh, explosives and weapons to the IRA.

[00:36:37] And, um, and that's what happened.

[00:36:39] And Frank was a part of that, that operation.

[00:36:41] Yeah.

[00:36:41] I heard an anecdote once and it was from when I was chatting with Stephen Gray when he did a book called, uh, The New Spy Masters.

[00:36:48] And apparently an SAS man who was, uh, pretty much long retired was looking at buying a property in Ireland.

[00:36:55] And he and his wife were looking around this farmhouse and suddenly he could smell a very familiar smell.

[00:37:02] And it was a smell of AK-47s and the oil that they use to clean those guns.

[00:37:08] I don't know if you've heard this, you know, about this.

[00:37:11] It's quite an interesting little anecdote that you could literally smell guns.

[00:37:14] And it's true, you can, um, cause my father used to be, um, a competition shooter and he used a particular gun oil called Young's 303.

[00:37:23] And I can smell when somebody has a shotgun in their house, he could just, I know that smell is such an interesting thing.

[00:37:30] So hiding weapons is quite difficult actually.

[00:37:32] Yeah.

[00:37:32] I can imagine.

[00:37:33] It's not something I've tried, but I could, uh, I can very much imagine that.

[00:37:38] That was a funny one, that one.

[00:37:40] Well, um, thank you for that.

[00:37:41] So Frank Hegarty was not the only agent Britain had in the IRA.

[00:37:45] There's this other man, Freddy Scappodici, who recently passed away and his code name was Steakknife.

[00:37:51] Can you talk to us about him, why he became an agent and what kind of information he provided and sort of how he was run?

[00:37:59] So there's quite a lot of questions in that question.

[00:38:00] Yeah.

[00:38:00] No, no, I'm happy to, happy to have a go at all of them.

[00:38:03] Um, Freddy Scappodici was a, um, a Belfast bricklayer and, uh, he's also known as a Belfast 69er in the sense that he was, uh, he was caught up in the troubles right from the start.

[00:38:15] I think for him, probably the moment it began was, um, was one afternoon when he was watching TV with his family in his sitting room in the summer of 1969.

[00:38:25] And, um, and the window suddenly smashed and it was a, um, a firebomb, which had been, sorry, not a firebomb, a Molotov cocktail which had been thrown into the room.

[00:38:34] And, uh, he got his family out, but the house then burned down and, uh, and he moved to a different part of Belfast.

[00:38:42] And that I think is where you can begin to see his radicalization.

[00:38:47] He began to fight with the IRA.

[00:38:48] He joined the IRA.

[00:38:50] He was then interned as a result of his membership of the IRA.

[00:38:53] And, um, and I'll kind of skip a little bit of the story, but he then in the late 1970s, he is recruited by the army, by the British army,

[00:39:04] by, uh, one particular soldier who strikes up a friendship with him.

[00:39:09] And that's something I, it's, it's such a, psychologically, I think it's such an interesting story.

[00:39:15] I don't want to kind of just skim over it, but anyway, it's all, it's all in the book.

[00:39:19] And, uh, but then he, he's encouraged by the army to rejoin the IRA.

[00:39:26] And, um, and I think the most important thing to say about this man, about Freddy Scappaticci, when he's first taken on,

[00:39:32] is that there's one relationship he has, which makes him so much more important to the British than anyone else.

[00:39:39] And it's the relationship he has with Jerry Adams.

[00:39:43] So Scappaticci was interned alongside Jerry Adams.

[00:39:48] He was seen at that time as being one of Jerry Adams's enforcers.

[00:39:52] And, and Scappaticci was a tough guy.

[00:39:55] He was violent.

[00:39:56] He had a short fuse, not somebody he wanted to, to get on the wrong side of.

[00:40:00] And he was very loyal to, to Jerry Adams.

[00:40:03] Jerry Adams trusted him.

[00:40:05] And these two would often drive around Belfast at night and just talk, talk about what was going on and what their, their thoughts on the future were and everything else.

[00:40:15] And quite soon Scappaticci's car was wired for sound.

[00:40:19] And so the British now had this incredible insight into what was going on in the mind of Jerry Adams or a version of it.

[00:40:28] And Scappaticci then rejoined the IRA.

[00:40:31] And he was after that, that he was approached and, uh, and was asked by someone else in the IRA to join the nutting squad.

[00:40:39] So the unit we were talking about five minutes ago.

[00:40:44] And, and what's really interesting is that he immediately went to his handlers and said, what do I do?

[00:40:50] And the handlers came up with some ideas for how to, to mitigate against him being involved in a murder.

[00:40:57] So they thought it was possible for him to join without necessarily taking part in a serious crime such as murder.

[00:41:05] But as we now know, he was involved in a number of murders and the police investigation into him believes he could have been involved in some way in up to 14 different murders during his time inside the IRA.

[00:41:21] So Scappaticci produced extraordinarily good intelligence.

[00:41:26] You asked what kind of intelligence.

[00:41:27] It was not only stuff about what someone like Jerry Adams was thinking, but it's also details of who's inside the IRA, who's being kicked out, who's joining.

[00:41:36] Because the nutting squad would also vet new members of this organization.

[00:41:41] And be aware of who had been accused of a spy, being a spy rather, etc.

[00:41:47] So it was an extraordinarily rich seam of intelligence.

[00:41:51] But I guess there are two things to say.

[00:41:53] First of all, and look, this is familiar from so many stories of espionage.

[00:41:59] The material was so rich and so good that if the British acted on every single thing that was passed on, Scappaticci would not have lasted as an agent.

[00:42:10] And so not all of the information that he passed on was acted upon.

[00:42:16] And the kind of the moral question at the heart of my book of Four Shots in the Night is whether the price that was paid for Scappaticci's intelligence was justified.

[00:42:29] And I think that's a really important question when looking at this story.

[00:42:33] And I don't think there's an easy answer.

[00:42:37] No, no, indeed.

[00:42:39] It's, yeah, it's the sort of murky area of intelligence really is that very moral question.

[00:42:46] And I think that's what I find so sort of fascinating about it.

[00:42:49] It's, yeah, it's a kind of complex thing.

[00:42:52] And there's a lot of lessons to be learned from this.

[00:42:54] Let's talk about Frank Hegarty's murder.

[00:42:57] So can you talk to us sort of about the circumstances that led to his murder and who was allegedly involved in it?

[00:43:05] Yeah, so Frank Hegarty found out that his intelligence had been used to seize a large number of weapons and explosives being held across the border in the Republic.

[00:43:17] So effectively, his cover was blown.

[00:43:19] He needed to get out of Northern Ireland as quickly as possible.

[00:43:23] And he was taken away.

[00:43:26] He was taken to a safe house in Kent.

[00:43:29] And he found it really difficult adjusting to life outside his home in Kent in the safe house.

[00:43:37] And after five months of living there, he left the safe house and made his way back to Northern Ireland.

[00:43:46] And there's, I mean, there's so many different things to say about exactly why he did that, how he did that.

[00:43:52] What is his motivation was and why he believed that this would be a sensible thing to do.

[00:43:58] But I guess the kind of the most important thing to say is that at one point during his time in that safe house, he has a conversation with his mum.

[00:44:06] And while he's on the phone to his mum, Martin McGuinness walks in to his mum's house.

[00:44:12] And during the conversation that follows, Martin McGuinness gets on the phone with Frank Hegarty and he says to him, come home, you'll be safe.

[00:44:24] And Frank's dilemma is whether to take Martin McGuinness at his word.

[00:44:29] And essentially he does.

[00:44:32] He decides to go home.

[00:44:33] He decides to trust Martin McGuinness.

[00:44:37] And Martin McGuinness is then one of the three senior IRA men who interrogates Frank Hegarty and takes the decision to have him killed.

[00:44:47] Yeah, I mean, that's pretty unbelievable, to be honest, isn't it?

[00:44:50] But it sort of reminds me a little bit of some of the kind of KGB tactics where they would say to a suspected spy that, hey, you've got a promotion and you need to come back to Moscow.

[00:45:05] And there's this sort of flight that they would take.

[00:45:08] And on the flight, they would be given the impression that all is fine.

[00:45:13] You know, they'd be treated well, we're given champagne, etc.

[00:45:15] And as soon as the plane had finished refuelling in Ireland, if it's going from America, once it takes off from Ireland, there's no way the person can get off the plane and then things would change.

[00:45:26] So it sounds like Frank had an equivalent experience of that, really.

[00:45:30] It's appalling.

[00:45:31] So can you talk to us about Operation Canova and some of the challenges they faced in investigating Frank's murder?

[00:45:39] Operation Canova is the police investigation into what state knife or Freddy Scappatici did.

[00:45:45] While he was an agent inside the IRA.

[00:45:48] And in total, they looked at 101 murders and abductions, which were believed to have been possibly linked to Scappatici.

[00:45:57] And I said before, they think he was involved in 14 different murders.

[00:46:01] This is what the conclusion they reached after seven years of looking into it.

[00:46:06] But what are some of the obstacles they faced?

[00:46:08] The main obstacle they faced was an evidential one.

[00:46:13] So finding enough evidence to get Freddy Scappatici to be charged and to appear in court and then successfully prosecuted.

[00:46:21] And one of the resources they had was old intelligence reports.

[00:46:25] And it was not always easy for them to get these from the MI5 archive, from the MOD archive or from the police archive.

[00:46:35] And there's a lot that Canova have since said, since the publication of their report, about some of the small administrative difficulties.

[00:46:46] The sense that not every organisation was cooperating with them in full.

[00:46:51] And I think it's worth saying Boucher, in his report, singles out MI5 as being not cooperative at the beginning.

[00:47:00] And he clearly felt that MI5 was trying to delay his investigation.

[00:47:05] And it is interesting that Boucher believes that Scappatici should have been prosecuted back in 2020.

[00:47:15] So quite a long time ago, soon after the case files were sent over to the PPS in Belfast.

[00:47:21] And of course, nothing happened.

[00:47:24] And then Scappatici died in 2023.

[00:47:27] And there was no prosecution, which was enormously frustrating for Boucher.

[00:47:32] And I think, I don't know if frustrating is the right word, but it was hugely disappointing for so many of the families, the families of Scappatici's victims.

[00:47:43] And I suppose kind of the underlying question is, was this a delay that would have happened anyway?

[00:47:50] Or was it a delay that was brought about by some kind of very subtle intervention or interference by either the police, the army, MI5, someone else?

[00:48:02] And having read Boucher's report quite a few times, it's pretty clear that he thinks there was intervention and that this whole process happened slower than it should have done.

[00:48:16] There's one really interesting example he gives.

[00:48:18] So he had all of his kind of like his first big batch of case files setting out why Scappatici should appear in court.

[00:48:26] And this is kind of a big moment for him.

[00:48:28] It was 2019.

[00:48:29] They've been working on this for three years.

[00:48:31] Finally, they've got all this stuff together.

[00:48:32] They've got what Boucher called fantastic, not fantastic, said very strong and compelling evidence.

[00:48:38] You've got forensic information.

[00:48:39] You've got details from intelligence reports.

[00:48:41] You've got physical artifacts, which they've recovered.

[00:48:44] And they've got a number of witness statements.

[00:48:47] So they're just about to send these, courier these over to the PPS in Belfast.

[00:48:52] And on the morning that they're about to do this, they get a message.

[00:48:56] They get a message from MI5.

[00:48:58] And MI5 say, you can't do this.

[00:49:01] And you can't do this because we checked and the PPS in Belfast, their building no longer has the correct security accreditation.

[00:49:09] And also their staff members don't have the necessary training to handle the secret material that you are sending over.

[00:49:17] And it took four months to get the building where the PPS was based to have the necessary security accreditation for the staff members to do the training that MI5 wanted.

[00:49:30] And I'm interested by the kind of emphasis that Boucher placed on that.

[00:49:35] And he says in the report, maybe this was just a cock up.

[00:49:39] But also, maybe it wasn't.

[00:49:41] Well, is there anything else you'd like to add before we wrap up today that's important to you?

[00:49:44] Maybe the one thing to add is that I'm working now on a new updated chapter to add at the end of the book for the paperback, which is coming out in March 2025.

[00:50:00] And I think there's a lot of there's some really interesting details to add.

[00:50:05] Fantastic.

[00:50:05] Well, people should check that out.

[00:50:07] So, Henry, where can people find out more about you, your work and this book?

[00:50:10] They can go to my website or they can buy the book and find out about it that way.

[00:50:18] That's my advice.

[00:50:20] Well, Henry, thank you very much for your time today.

[00:50:22] Pleasure.

[00:50:23] Really, really good to talk.

[00:50:55] Thanks for listening.

[00:50:56] This is Secrets and Spies.