by Ken Wharton
* Mad Dog, David Lister & Hugh Jordan (Mainstream Publishing, 2004) p.101.
* Neither of whom are included on the ROH.
** Dum-dum bullets are normal rounds, irrespective of calibre, with the point filed down or split. When the round enters the body, it disintegrates, sending massive amounts of shrapnel into vital organs, veins, etc., causing almost irrevocable internal damage.
* The Miami Showband Massacre: A Survivor’s Search for the Truth, Stephen Travers & Neil Fetherstonhaugh (Hodder Headline Ireland, 2007), p.86.
** McFarlane is now a member of Coiste na n-larchimí. He is a voluntary worker for Sinn Féin looking after the welfare of former prisoners.
* Noel Cardwell was murdered by Adair personally at Boundary Street in the Shankill on 13 December 1993.
** ‘Billy’ is referring to the unsubstantiated accusations that Nairac might have been involved with the Miami Showband massacre as well as the killing of PIRA man John Francis Green inside the Republic in January 1975.
CHAPTER 9
‘THE NUTTING SQUAD’ AND INFORMERS
Throughout its long and arguably inglorious history, the IRA, more recently the Provisional IRA, has long been riddled by informers, agents, or in the contemporary parlance, touts. The Republicans have long been paranoid about these people in their midst and have taken some extraordinary measures to nullify the sometimes catastrophic harm that some of these touts have caused. Some of the agents or informers were motivated by a sense of justice, others were motivated by a feeling of revenge, and others by the lure of money and possessions. Whatever their raison d’etre, the damage to PIRA operations, personnel and even their local armouries was the same.
In the late 1970s, they had cause to suspect a South Armagh member following the loss of some of their arms caches and the unfathomable ‘ability’ of the local SF to prevent assassinations and bomb attacks. As one RUC officer said, ‘Certainly as the years went on, what amazed me was the sheer number of people in both the Loyalist and IRA organisations who at one time or another worked for us. Some people worked for us for twenty or thirty years. They were career informants rather than terrorists.’* Indeed, one totally unsubstantiated rumour that has prevailed for many years – and one to which this author gives no credence – was that the late Martin McGuinness, the famed ‘butcher of the Creggan’ and once the Head of PIRA’s Northern Command, was an informant, working for either for the RUC or the Army. It is not this author’s intention to spread hearsay, but merely to report on the rumours that have circulated for several decades about this senior Sinn Féin/PIRA member. It is widely thought that Freddie Scappaticci – of whom we will read more in this chapter – was for years an agent acting on behalf of RUC Special Branch (SB). Born in 1948, the man known as both ‘Stakeknife’ and ‘Scap’ is said to have been recruited as early as 1978, having offered his services to SB following an alleged assault by a fellow PIRA member.
The author Martin Ingram claims that Stakeknife provided high-quality intelligence for many years, including identifying the kidnappers of millionaire businessman Ben Dunne in 1981, and helping to prevent the planned kidnapping of Canadian tycoon Galen Weston in 1983. Later that same year, his information is alleged to have led to the rescue of Don Tidey, the CEO of Quinnsworth and Crazy Prices retail chain. Sadly, in the gun battle that raged between members of An Gardaí Siochana together with their comrades of the Irish Army and Mr Tidey’s PIRA kidnappers, Gardaí Gary Sheehan (22) and Irish soldier Patrick Kelly (36) were killed. Scap was known as the ‘Crown Jewels’ by his handlers in SB and Force Research Unit (FRU, an undercover British Army Intelligence unit) as his information prevented many deaths.
The Provisionals were not known to use kid gloves, acting swiftly and ruthlessly against informers. For example, the South Armagh unit had long suspected that one of their members was a tout owing to the numbers of abortive missions of which he had been privy. To smoke him out, a fake VCP, using stolen British uniforms, was set up close to Crossmaglen. When his car was stopped at the fake VCP, he* was told that the ‘soldiers’ were SAS and were going to kill him. In a panic, he identified himself as an informer for the RUC; that sealed his death warrant. He was taken away by the Internal Security Unit (‘nutting squad’) and during torture was likely to have been asked, ‘... which road do you want to close?’ This was a sickening reference to the fact that the SF would close a road off after the discovery of a body for fear it may be booby-trapped. The unfortunate man was later hooded before being shot twice in the back of the head, while a ‘tame’ Catholic priest added ‘dignity’ to the murder by reading him the last rites.
This sickening act of making ‘respectable’ the sordid and brutal interrogation, torture and finally death of a tout (or even suspected tout) by inviting or intimidating a Catholic priest into giving the condemned man the action of contrition or final rites was a favourite of the Provisionals. Often after the nutting squad had carried out most of the above, a priest was summoned to hear the beaten suspect make his final confession. In his excellent God and the Gun, Martin Dillon perfectly illustrates one such event where the squad had all but finished their dirty business and the bleeding and bruised man wished to make his peace. Dillon interviewed a priest known only as ‘Father Pat’ who had been summoned to a PIRA safe house and led upstairs to the bathroom, which had clearly been employed as a torture chamber:
I froze when the bathroom door closed. I was suddenly dealing with evil and not just talking about it. The man in the chair was one of my parishioners. I remember looking at the bath filled with water wondering what they had done with him. He was stripped to a pair of wet underpants. His hair and body were wet so they’d obviously been holding him under the water ... He was badly bruised, and his eyes were so swollen he could hardly see me ...The victim was incapable of walking. I put my arm around him ... it seemed the only loving thing I could do. His lips were swollen, and I heard him murmur: ‘Please help me, Father.’ I felt so helpless. Leaving that room was a nightmare I have to live with.**
John Nichol, in his excellent book on Second World War evasion lines, described a Gestapo torture chamber as ‘... a place only Dante could imagine ...’*** It can have been no less in these rooms, barns, disused buildings and the like that the Provisional IRA and their imitators used to extract information in a manner that would have done England’s seventeenth-century torturers proud. It is this very private side of Irish Republicanism that is rarely exposed in public, for obvious reasons.
There was one other well-publicised incident in which a Catholic priest added ‘respectability’ to a PIRA execution. Eamon Molloy – the first of the ‘disappeared’ – was abducted from near his North Belfast home in May 1975, suspected of being an informer. His brother, Martin, was contacted in 1999 by Father Eugene McCoy, who told him that he had been summoned by a late knock at his door and taken to a caravan in Co. Louth. He was shown into a bedroom where a man, bleeding and badly beaten, was trussed hand and foot, lying on a bed. The priest was instructed to hear his final confession but refused unless the man was untied. He told Mr Molloy that three men remained inside the caravan but that at least ten others kicked a ball about outside. He explained that the man was very distressed and could barely say his own name. The man told the priest that he wasn’t an informer and begged him to take a message to his wife and family. A short time later, Eamon was taken outside and murdered. His body was placed in a coffin, with instructions from the IRA that it was to be hidden in a churchyard at Faughart near Dundalk. The IRA commanders insisted that the coffin had to remain above ground; it was finally discovered twenty-four years after the murder. Martin Molloy told Ulster TV: ‘I did feel Eamon’s pain, being there alone, being on his own and obviously knowing he was going to be killed ... I did feel consoled ... that he had the priest with him at the end, before he died, that he could make his peace with God.’*
These torture chambers, according to the priests who Martin Dillon interviewed, along with accounts from
some of the informers and agents and other contemporary accounts, were places of almost medieval barbarity. Some of the methods employed by the nutting squad might well have been taken from the handbook of the Middle Ages’ torturer or from the despicable Spanish Inquisition. Witnesses speak of stained and soiled clothes where the tortured suspect had lost control of their bodily functions; vomit-covered floors; bloodstained clothes and bedding; pools of blood; scattered broken teeth; and blood-covered saws, chisels and screwdrivers. This was hardly the image with which to impress their Irish American backers, and those ‘romantic’ priests in the Catholic faith who saw them as freedom fighters.
There are numerous well-documented incidents concerning ‘suspected’ Volunteers being called in to see their local commanders, suddenly finding themselves isolated in a darkened room. Others were simply bundled into the backseats of cars, held down in the footwell, hidden from prying eyes under heavy blankets or sacking, being transported in this state for an hour or more. Some were taken across the border, or into safe houses on the Republican stronghold estates, where there would be no respite and certainly no escape from their tormentors.
The first informer thought to have been killed in the Troubles was John Joseph Kavanagh (28), father of two young children, executed by the Provisionals on 27 January 1971. He was a roof tiler by trade, living in Kashmir Road, a street of blackened stone terraced houses that connected the Springfield Road – by now, all Catholic – with Cupar Street. He had been walking along Lady Street when armed men bundled him into a car. He was taken to a nearby house where he was interrogated; after questioning, he was forced to kneel on waste ground before being shot in the head. There was no evidence to suggest that he was an informer and it may well have been a matter of score-settling by a sociopath with a gun who decided that Mr Kavanagh should die. He wasn’t the first innocent man to die at the hands of the IRA, and nor would he be the last.
There is also the celebrated case involving the ‘Four Square Laundry’, which is covered in more detail in Chapter 6. During the Army’s undercover laundry’s lifetime, two IRA members had been ‘turned’ by INT and were privy to the operation. However, later, having been put under pressure by the nutting squad they confessed their guilt, informing them of this bogus laundry service. The two men** were Seamus Wright and Kevin McKee, known in Army-speak as ‘Freds’. Under interrogation from an IRA torture team, they confessed everything, which led to the Provisionals killing one soldier as they closed not one, but two undercover operations. Incidentally, these Freds would be selected from PIRA men arrested in Army swoops and isolated at places such as Palace Barracks in Belfast, where they were plied with both offers of money and women or simply cajoled and threatened into becoming informers, paid or otherwise.
There is no doubt that the period known almost euphemistically as the Troubles witnessed a brutal and dirty war, but it didn’t come any dirtier or brutal than the sordid, murky world of the agents and informers who penetrated the Provisionals. This was the world of danger, excitement and a sense of achievement, especially when such men and women saved lives through their brave diligence, but it was also the world of sudden discovery followed inevitably by their own violent, often prolonged death. It was a ‘dog eat dog’ existence, with operatives knowing of the identity of fellow agents within their own cell being forced to sacrifice their colleagues to keep themselves alive. It wasn’t unknown for the Army or RUC Special Branch handlers to betray a less regarded agent to take the heat off their own favourite agent, if they wished to give their own man or woman some breathing space.
A classic example of this was the case of freelance estate agent Joseph Fenton, who had a series of empty houses – funded by his Special Branch handlers – that he allowed local Provo leadership to use for intelligence and operational meetings. He was being paid by RUC Special Branch to allow the planting of listening devices so that every word could be monitored by them. In August 1985, Fenton was advised that the nutting squad was closing in on him; to save his life and maintain his usefulness, fellow agents Gerard and Catherine Mahon were betrayed. They were tortured and executed, thus giving Fenton a little breathing space and an extension of intelligence. That ‘extension’ of intelligence lasted only until his own execution in February 1989.
In the excellent Killing Rage (Granta Books, 1997), former PIRA Volunteer Eamon Collins writes of the subterfuge and physiological cruelty employed by the men of Freddie Scappaticci’s unit. Collins tells of suspected informers who would receive an innocent-sounding message, often delivered by a local child, or just a knock at the door, asking him to report to the local area commander for a quick chat. Any apprehension felt was quickly dissipated by a warm smile and friendly reassurance that it was ‘... nothing to worry about ’. The victim would turn up at a pre-arranged destination to find himself seized, arms pinioned at his sides, led to a darkened room and made to sit on a solitary chair, facing the wall, with an instruction not to turn around. Soon, several silent men would file into the room to begin the process of psychological torture. After some moments of silence, they would speak. At first, the questioning would be routine, gentle even, but if the terrified man began to betray himself, the next stop would be the bathroom with a ready prepared bath of freezing cold water; at that stage, the torture would commence immediately. There may also be an assortment of makeshift weapons – sharpened screwdrivers, heavy metal hammers, Stanley knives and the like – all designed to inflict terrible torture on the victim with one objective only: to make him confess, even if there was nothing to confess.
On the other hand, if there was a confession forthcoming immediately, the informer might be assured that he would be taken home, while a sentence was being considered and that they would meet again ‘later in the week’. However, once in the car, the man would be blindfolded for ‘security purposes’; at the same time he would be reassured that they would see him safely home. The man’s rapidly thumping heart might then begin to slow to normal, with the feeling that he was going to be allright, unaware that he was being cruelly played with by psychopathic minds. Instead of the man’s home, the car would be driven somewhere remote before stopping. The PIRA team would assist the still blindfolded man out of the car, with a friendly ‘There’s your house, walk straight ahead’. With that, a gunman would fire two shots at very close range into the back of the man’s head – another execution by the ever-righteous men of the Provisional IRA’s nutting squad.
There were numerous executions – some Troubles historians state fifty-plus – carried out by the respective internal security units of the main Republican paramilitary organisations; some of these victims were undoubtedly innocent men. In the fraught, nervous atmosphere of the terror groups, paranoia reigned supreme, with every man suspecting every other man. It is somewhat axiomatic that this atmosphere encouraged score-settling for slights, real and imaginary. A typical example might well have been one man coveting another’s wife; given the power that was automatically bestowed to leading members, a whispered word in the right ear containing enough doubt about a rival might well see the end of that person’s life.
While many of the killings were shrouded in mystery and secrecy, the controversial nature of these internal killings clearly cost the IRA much-needed support around the world. In this instance, we turn to early 1986; Frank ‘Franco’ Hegarty was a former Volunteer in the Londonderry Brigade who at some stage was ‘turned’ by RUC Special Branch. He agreed to become a ‘supergrass’ and give evidence against a score or more Provisionals. However, PIRA leadership was determined to bring him back to Northern Ireland from the English safe house to where his handlers had whisked him. First, they kidnapped Hegarty’s father, threatening to execute him if his son refused to return to the Republican fold. When this failed to persuade the informer to come back, the top man in the Northern Brigade, Martin McGuinness, the ‘butcher of the Creggan’ by now a respectable Sinn Féin, later MLA and Deputy Leader of Northern Ireland’s elected Assembly, was brought
into the fray. He wormed his way into the affection of Mrs Hegarty, making frequent visits to her Londonderry home, begging her to persuade her son to return. The Hegarty family say that he made repeated promises, guaranteeing Frank’s safe passage as well as understanding and compassionate treatment if he helped with damage limitation. They have stated that the late McGuinness turned up at the house on most occasions armed with a packet of Marietta Biscuits – so often that they named him ‘Marietta McGuinness’, or the ‘Marietta Kid’. Eventually, Hegarty returned home assured by the safe conduct guaranteed by the ‘statesman’.*
Shortly after his return, he was ‘collected’ by members of the nutting squad on or around 1 May 1986, before being taken across the border into the Irish Republic. After interrogation, he was taken to a deserted rural spot, where he was forced to his knees, hands pinioned behind his back, and several feet of white masking tape** were wrapped tightly around his head. Two shots into the back of his head ended the informer’s life – another victim of Republican lies. All through the interrogation, torture and even after execution, ‘Marietta McGuinness’ assured the man’s mother that her son was in safe hands and enjoying the debrief, and he even claimed that while the pair chatted her son was ‘finishing off a Chinese takeaway’. Duplicity seemed to come so very easily to this man and other members of his organisation.
Martin ‘Marty’ McGartland, possibly the most famous and arguably one of the most effective of all the agents who penetrated the Provisional IRA, wrote in his informative Fifty Dead Men Walking (John Blake Books, 2009) of the night that he was lifted by the nutting squad in West Belfast. As the title of his book suggests, he was responsible for foiling many PIRA operations, but eventually his luck ran out and he was summoned for a meeting with Pödraig Wilson at Sinn Féin headquarters at Connolly House on Andersonstown Road. Wilson was the Head of Discipline throughout Belfast and, as such, liaised with Scappaticci. When McGartland arrived, he was informed that the meeting had been switched to another location owing to security worries. He was taken to a car by James McCarthy and Paul ‘Chico’ Hamilton, known Provisionals, and the three of them drove off together in the direction of the Nationalist Twinbrook estate, where they parked up outside a block of flats in Broom Park. He was taken inside, where he met a third man; he was immediately restrained by Hamilton and McCarthy who barked out: ‘Listen; Provisional IRA: you’re under arrest,’ and, with that, a pistol was shoved roughly against his head.
