by Thomas Leahy
Academics, journalists and former Troubles participants have all presented examples of what they believe represents ‘senior’ infiltration within the Belfast IRA. Their primary example is Stakeknife. Various republicans, a former British intelligence officer and journalists all claim that the agent Stakeknife was originally an IRA volunteer from the Markets area in Belfast. The security forces interned this individual in the early 1970s. Once released, he was involved in IRA intelligence work in Belfast. By the early 1980s, the IRA had created an internal security department. Moloney suggests: ‘[t]he department was tasked with vetting recruits and investigating IRA operations that had gone wrong’. Moloney adds that the internal security department’s remit eventually grew from Belfast to cover the entire organisation.41 Various republicans and other sources dispute the remit of this unit, although evidence does suggest that it had access to Belfast and Newry units at the very least.
Various republican sources confirm the description of the internal security department provided in various academic and journalistic accounts. More importantly, they agree that Stakeknife was a leading figure within that department. Eamon Collins, killed by republican dissidents in 1999, wrote in 1997 that he once worked for the internal security department in Newry alongside the man accused of being Stakeknife.42 Collins’s account is particularly intriguing because he died before the revelations surrounding Stakeknife emerged. Elsewhere, McKearney writes that it is ‘now widely accepted’ that ‘Freddie Scappaticci, head of IRA internal security, was a British agent and had had access to the organization’s secrets and layout.’43 Anthony McIntyre, a former Belfast Provisional and prisoner, agrees that Stakeknife was in the internal security department, vetted volunteers and hunted informers.44 Gerry Bradley from Belfast says that Stakeknife ‘ran the IRA’s fearsome Internal Security, in Belfast’ and alleges that ‘all operations in Belfast had first to be cleared by Internal Security’ by the late 1980s.45 A number of republicans interviewed did not object to the Stakeknife rumours, demonstrating that it is not just republican dissenters who accept the allegations surrounding Stakeknife’s identity. Scappaticci denies all allegations that he was Stakeknife.46
There is evidence to suggest that Stakeknife had a significant impact on the IRA in Belfast. Bradley suspects that Stakeknife helped prevent nine out of every ten IRA operations there by the early 1990s, although Bradley does not explain exactly how he would know such details.47 Nevertheless, his figures correspond with those provided by former RUC Superintendent Ian Phoenix.48 As Appendix A.1 demonstrates, there was a noticeable decline in ‘intended target’ killings by the Belfast Brigade after the late 1970s, the period when Stakeknife was operating within the internal security unit. McKearney agrees that Stakeknife’s ‘access to the organization’s secrets … inflicted considerable damage on the IRA’.49 McIntyre goes further, saying:
The organization’s weaknesses and strengths, the unquestioning or critical approaches to leadership … would all have been known to Stakeknife … Stakeknife damaged the IRA irreparably and helped pave the way for its defeat … a seriously compromised IRA campaign would reinforce a peace lobby within republicanism. Arguably, this is where the role of Stakeknife became crucial.50
We need to treat such allegations with caution as they are presented by republican dissenters. These claims may be influenced by criticism of Sinn Féin’s strategy since 1998.
Having said that, evidence is certainly growing to suggest that Stakeknife had a direct impact on the Belfast IRA in the 1980s and parts of the 1990s. Human intelligence sources such as Stakeknife facilitated the use of technology and eavesdropping devices by suggesting who and where to bug.51 Stephen Grey suggests that Stakeknife ‘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.’ Grey suggests that Stakeknife’s information was sometimes passed to British prime ministers.52 Following continuing revelations and investigations into Stakeknife’s activities in 2017, a British Army source credited Stakeknife with saving an estimated 180 lives based on intelligence that led to the seizure of weapons, disruption of attacks and arrests. These figures need to be considered alongside a recent Northern Ireland Police Ombudsman assessment that Stakeknife killed at least fifteen other suspected agents and informers.53
Stakeknife was not the only senior informer alleged to have existed within the Belfast IRA. The IRA shot Joseph Fenton and accused him of being a RUC Special Branch agent in February 1989. Various accounts claim that Fenton became an estate agent with the help of his handlers in the early 1980s. The intelligence services wanted to discover and thwart IRA plans discussed in the houses that Fenton lent the IRA. According to Martin Ingram and Brendan Hughes, Fenton tried to entrap senior IRA volunteers. Hughes alleges that after he was released from prison in the mid-1980s, Fenton offered him a house. Hughes refused as he was very suspicious as to why Fenton – whom he did not know – was being so friendly. According to senior Belfast republicans, Fenton represented major ‘penetration’ and led to various arrests and the seizure of many weapons, including the discovery of a mortar-bomb factory at a house he owned in west Belfast in 1988. Hughes claims that eventually the IRA’s internal security department asked him to help locate and remove agents and informers in the late 1980s. Hughes is convinced that Fenton was promptly killed by Stakeknife and others in 1989, before Hughes could interrogate him properly, in order to protect another agent. This account cannot be verified currently. According to Hughes, Belfast was ‘rotten’ with agents and informers by the 1990s.54
There were various cases of suspected low-level infiltration between 1980 and 1994. According to author and journalist Brian Feeney, Peter Valente ‘had a major impact on the whole republican movement in Belfast’. Feeney’s judgement is partly based on interview material with Bradley, an IRA volunteer from the Unity Flats who knew Valente from the local area. On 14 November 1980, Valente’s body was found in the Highfield estate, a loyalist area of Belfast. Initially, the IRA claimed that loyalists had killed Valente. It transpired, however, that the IRA killed him as an alleged informer. The IRA explained in An Phoblacht in January 1982: ‘for the sake of his staunchly republican-minded family … his execution was not claimed at the time’. The article claimed: ‘Valente gave information on IRA operations … named Volunteers and detailed movements and locations of weapons.’ Bradley says that Valente was exposed because a republican was visiting a country hotel in 1980, and spotted Valente chatting to a police officer. Bradley passed on this information to senior personnel and ‘[t]he next thing I heard, Valente was … whacked. He told his interrogators … [he was] a British agent.’55
Feeney describes how ‘the shooting of Valente sent ripples through the IRA in Belfast … the IRA shot at least three others on foot of information extracted from Valente’. On 20 January 1981, the IRA killed Maurice Gilvarry from north Belfast. The IRA placed his body on a border road in south Armagh. The IRA alleged Gilvarry ‘turned’ under interrogation at Castlereagh in 1977, ‘and … gave information regarding a planned operation that [later] led directly to the deaths of several IRA Volunteers’. The IRA were referring to the SAS ambush of an IRA unit attacking a postal depot in June 1978, in which the SAS killed three IRA volunteers. Gilvarry’s family deny the claims. Next, the IRA killed Patrick Gerard Trainor from Divis Flats. An Phoblacht recorded how: ‘in February 1981 Trainor supplied names of Volunteers … and gave locations of weapons dumps’. His family and the RUC deny IRA allegations. The IRA then shot dead Vincent Robinson, a twenty-nine-year-old from west Belfast, who was active in the hunger-strike campaigns. The IRA believed that Robinson ‘supplied information which led to the discovery of … explosives … close to his home’. Both his family and the RUC deny these allegations.56 Dillon also suggests that Anthony Braniff’s killing in September 1981 was connected to Valente’s alleged informing. The IRA initially accused Braniff of
revealing locations of arms dumps. In September 2003, the IRA admitted that Braniff had broken under British interrogation, but had immediately gone to the IRA once released. Ingram believes that Stakeknife suggested that Braniff was an informer in order to remove him.57
The IRA killed other alleged agents and informers before the 1994 ceasefire. There is not the space available to detail all cases, but a few examples demonstrate that the IRA feared it had been infiltrated.58 In September 1985, the IRA killed Catherine and Gerard Mahon, husband and wife, in west Belfast. The IRA claim that the intelligence services had forced the Mahons to inform following unpaid fines in the early 1980s. Various accounts say that the intelligence services bugged their premises before they lent them to IRA volunteers. Ingram claims that the Mahons were discovered because Joseph Fenton accused them of informing to deflect attention away from himself after raids on his safe houses.59 John Joseph Mulhern was found dead on a country road in County Tyrone in June 1993. The IRA claimed that he was an associate who had been informing since 1990, leading to the capture of volunteers and the discovery of weapons. These accusations cannot be confirmed.60 Mulhern’s and a few other cases are currently being reinvestigated by the Police Ombudsman in Northern Ireland as part of Operation Kenova, the independent investigation into the alleged activities of Stakeknife. The families of those killed say that Stakeknife was involved.61 McIntyre argues that the republican leadership should pardon those killed as informers by Stakeknife, because the latter’s judgement cannot be trusted.62
Other low-level informers infiltrated the Belfast IRA but survived. Martin McGartland from west Belfast initially operated as a taxi driver for the Belfast IRA, whilst infiltrating the organisation as a RUC Special Branch agent between 1987 and 1991. The advantage of McGartland’s position was that he initially avoided the restrictions of a cell, travelling with various Belfast units. This position made him less suspect when operations failed.63 It is possible to verify some of his claims. Phoenix recorded in his diaries that McGartland (known as ‘Agent Carol’) provided intelligence to prevent the IRA killing an off-duty policeman in east Belfast in April 1991.64
Various features of urban areas made infiltration possible. A former British soldier feels that the compact nature of republican estates in the cities allowed ‘nosey neighbours’ greater opportunities to spy on the IRA than existed in the vast rural areas.65 Féilim Ó hAdhmaill, a former republican prisoner and Belfast resident, supports this point: ‘in Belfast … somebody could have picked-up the phone and mentioned spotting a republican’, since republican streets were small.66 Various low-level agents and informers gathered basic information by observing what was happening in the bars, pubs or the streets in the compact working-class areas of cities such as Belfast. Jack Holland interviewed IRA personnel from Belfast in January 1977, reporting how: ‘drinking clubs … became an important source … of information for the police’. This factor is not necessarily a problem unique to the urban IRA. Rural units, however, could sometimes evade capture after loose talk by crossing the border.
The IRA’s need for operational expertise meant that former internees and prisoners were still recruited to cells after 1976, causing two potential problems. First, unknown cell members could be exposed by associating with former prisoners. Second, mixing volunteers from various parts of Belfast and from different age groups potentially removed inhibitions that prevented some people from informing. They sometimes had no personal ties to those they operated alongside. True, close ties between volunteers did not stop a few volunteers before 1975 informing on people from their own area in the old battalion structure. But mixing personnel with no close association beforehand posed the risk that certain people might feel less reluctance to inform.
McKearney believes that the only way to increase security was ‘ensuring that the guerrilla soldier [was] kept out of the enemy’s hands’. McKearney concludes: ‘[t]he decision by the IRA to encourage … members to remain in their own homes … granted their opponents an enormous advantage in terms of access to active volunteers’.67 For McKearney, British intelligence and its informers simply had to watch a person’s house and movements to gather information, particularly in Belfast where there was no border to escape across. A further problem that McKearney saw for the IRA after 1975 is that the cells interacted with each other: ‘[i]f a cell hasn’t enough manpower … it needs … help from its neighbouring cell. Equipment was constantly moved from one IRA unit to another. So people become more aware’.68 This contact presented agents and informers with opportunities to infiltrate various units. For instance, McGartland and other taxi drivers were potentially deadly to the IRA. They assisted units in the cities as other volunteers did not use their own vehicles, fearing they were already on the computer systems of the intelligence services. If there was a crossover between cells, infiltration was possible. The mass arrests inflicted by Christopher Black during the supergrass trials in the early 1980s demonstrates this point. His information was not restricted to one cell. Bradley recalls that Black’s evidence ‘wiped out Ardoyne and the Bone’ for a time.69
The other structural weakness for the Belfast IRA was its centralisation. Bradley reports that the Belfast Brigade staff, and later the internal security unit, had to ‘okay’ every operation for his cells. A primary reason for this vetting, according to Bradley, was to ensure that IRA operations in the city were not contradicting the political objectives of Sinn Féin.70 McKearney made a similar point during an interview: ‘the political imperative … meant it wasn’t feasible … to allow cells to act totally independently’.71 McKearney explains the problems that centralisation caused the IRA:
The greatest threat to a cell system … is when someone from Headquarters (particularly if they have responsibility for coordinating or scrutinising activities) is working for the opposition, and it is now recognised that … Freddie Scappaticci … [was] carrying out this role for British intelligence.72
By allowing the internal security department significant access to IRA volunteers and plans in Belfast, British intelligence could discover the identities of the personnel of various cells. Whilst I suggest below that Stakeknife’s access to cells in Belfast was not as extensive as some authors claim, there is no doubt that he had some access and that he restricted operations in specific periods. Nevertheless, any suggestion that the new cell structure and centralisation of the movement made damaging infiltration more likely is debatable. The IRA had experienced numerous arrests in Belfast before the cells came into existence.73
Surveillance measures also affected the Belfast IRA. After Operation Motorman, British troops and RUC officers poured into republican areas, and imposed restrictions on movement via helicopters, CCTV and patrols. Laurence McKeown recalls how ‘there was more surveillance in the cities … People in urban areas were easier to spot. With choppers [helicopters] in the sky and mobile posts on many streets, you were tied down to certain streets.’ 74 Bradley concurs:
If the chopper was up, you weren’t allowed to move out of a house: army orders … Ops [operations] were cancelled regularly because of it … If the chopper spots one major player in the wrong place, that’s it, an op is ruined.
Bradley also believes towers in security bases equipped with listening and monitoring devices ruined IRA operations. ‘Between the chopper and the towers’, Bradley argues, ‘maybe 80 percent of ops had to be called off’.75 A former British soldier agrees that: ‘[t]he change in technology in the 1980s was enormous … One of the big pluses of technical source information is that it is very difficult to work out on the PIRA side where did that come from’.76
Ian Phoenix led an E4A unit in Belfast between the late 1970s and early 1980s.77 Phoenix agrees that ‘informers remain the most powerful tool that the police have against illegal organisations, allowing them to anticipate crimes’. But he emphasises how ‘technical surveillance would grow in importance as it grew in sophistication’. Phoenix remembers that by the mid-1980s, a variety of surveillance ope
rations and bugging devices were being utilised with the assistance of MI5 to disrupt the Belfast IRA. In December 1983, following the killing of Edgar Graham, an Ulster Unionist Party member and Queen’s University Belfast lecturer, E4A began to carry out surveillance to track down the IRA personnel involved. One IRA volunteer monitored was the intelligence officer for the university and south Belfast area, who had been identified beforehand, perhaps via an informer. Following observation of this known IRA member’s property, the E4A came across an unknown individual. Confirmation of the previously unknown person’s involvement in the IRA emerged when E4A saw him meet ‘Number 9’ of the Belfast Brigade staff, whom E4A had been observing for some time. An undercover surveillance team watched the previously unknown person’s movements and property. The intelligence services even rented a flat next door to the property so that they could use cameras and other surveillance techniques to watch it. After three men left the property one night after carrying out various ‘recces’ of another building, Phoenix and his team believed an attack was imminent. The security services arrested the three people.78
Bugging devices were sometimes used to complement human intelligence. McGartland recalls his vehicle being bugged to help RUC Special Branch in Belfast track his movements and those of IRA personnel that he was driving around the area.79 Elsewhere, Ingram claims that bugging devices in Fenton’s properties helped the intelligence services discover and prevent various IRA operations in Belfast during the 1980s.80 Members of GCHQ and RUC Special Branch were also listening to recordings of conversations between suspected republicans within Northern Ireland and calls made from Northern Ireland to the Republic or UK. This was a security risk for IRA volunteers in Belfast and elsewhere.81
