by Ed Moloney
While the case against John Joe Magee, who is now dead, was never proved, there is less doubt about the other Internal Security Chief named as a spy, Freddie Scappaticci. A member of one of several Belfast-based, Italian-Irish families that have been involved in the Provisional IRA, ‘Scap’ as his IRA colleagues called him, was John Joe Magee’s deputy and succeeded him as head of IRA Security. He joned the IRA in 1970 but was interned a year later. After his release in 1975 he got involved in IRA intelligence work and then moved into the Security Department when it was established. He spent the next fifteen years or so working for it. In 2003 he was outed in the Irish media as the infamous double agent known as ‘Steak knife’, about whose identity there had been feverish media and Republican speculation for some years. ‘Steak knife’ had been named as an agent working for a section of British Military Intelligence known as the Force Research Unit, which ran agents inside the IRA and Loyalist groups in conjunction with MI5 and the RUC Special Branch. ‘Steak knife’ or Scappaticci had been working for the British since the late 1970s and was a ‘walk-in’ agent who volunteered his services allegedly after being given a bad beating by an IRA colleague. Although Freddie Scappaticci denied claims that he was ‘Steak knife’, the assertion that he was had been made by a credible source: a former Force Research Unit NCO who had first revealed ‘Steak knife’s’ existence in 1999. ‘Martin Ingram’, the soldier’s pseudonym, claimed Scappaticci had been allowed by his handlers to get people killed in order to protect his cover. Some estimates put the number of his victims at fifty. Three years after he was exposed, the Belfast High Court heard that Scappaticci had gone into hiding because of a fear he could be killed. The court imposed a media ban on revealing his whereabouts and banned the publication of recent photographs.
By the time Brendan Hughes took over, the Security Department had been well infiltrated by the British and the suspicion that the IRA, especially in Belfast, was being subverted by double agents was widespread elsewhere in the organisation. But the immediate problem facing Hughes was a very different one: to root out torturers in the Security Department, in particular a much feared duo known within the IRA as ‘Burke and Hare’, after the notorious nineteenth-century Scottish bodysnatchers. The pair routinely used violence and sensory deprivation against suspects and employed the IRA equivalent of water-boarding against some. Hughes got them court-martialled and thrown out of the IRA but they were soon allowed back into the Security Department, albeit at a lower level.
… these people tortured guys. There was a friend of mine who owns a bar, Paddy McDaid, an IRA Volunteer who was taken away by these people and tortured. I mean they burned him with cigarettes, they put his head in water, they kept him starved for four or five days in an old … barn somewhere across the border. Paddy McDaid came to me not long after I got out of prison and told me about what happened to him … he was accused of being a tout. Burke and Hare, that was their names, —— and Monaghan … Burke and Hare, the Body Snatchers. But Paddy wasn’t the only one I spoke to. I spoke to other people [who had been tortured]; other people came to me. And this is sacrosanct; I’m not supposed to talk about this, but I will. When a court martial is called you’re sworn to secrecy; you’re not allowed to speak about it, no matter what the decision is. But myself and Billy McKee were on the court martial when this man [told us how he was tortured] and there were lots of others who didn’t survive it; they’re buried down the countryside somewhere by these people, these Internal Security people. I got into major controversy with these people and their court martial was organised. I prosecuted the case. They were both dismissed from the IRA with ignominy. The charges were brutality, cruelty and disobeying Army orders that [said] people are not to be tortured. They were dismissed for that reason. After that I disappeared off the scene to Dublin. Within months the same two people were back [but] they never had the power and the control that they had. It’s hard to believe how people within the IRA were so scared of these people. [But] I went to school with ——; he was a friend all my life [and] I was frightened of him. I went to work in England with him at one time and I was sleeping. When I woke up, he was trying to kill me. He’s into devil worship – Dennis Wheatley, is it? He’s into his books. I woke one night and he’d his hands round my throat trying to kill me, a dangerous, dangerous man. But, I mean, every army attracts psychopaths …
When Brendan Hughes agreed to take on the Security Department brief as well as GHQ Operations, he had unwittingly begun a journey that was to end in disillusionment with the IRA and flight from Belfast. Thanks to an incident so infused with chicanery and double-dealing that it could easily have leapt from the pages of a John Le Carré novel, his conviction grew that the IRA was thoroughly infiltrated by the British. He also suspected that a blind eye was being turned to corruption on the part of well-connected activists and that the leadership, for whatever reason, was not willing to do much about it all.
The figure at the centre of the drama was a gregarious thirty-five-year-old estate agent and wheeler-dealer by the name of Joe Fenton from the Andersonstown area of West Belfast. Although not an IRA member himself, Fenton was a friend to many people who were and had so fully won the IRA’s trust in the city that he had become a facilitator for the Belfast Brigade, providing cheap homes to well-placed figures, safe houses for IRA meetings or lovers’ trysts and empty houses whose floors could be opened to make hiding places for IRA weapons. His connections in the property business meant that for Republicans he was the person to go to if they wanted a mortgage, especially when they were unemployed and not eligible for a home loan. Joe Fenton would happily forge evidence that the applicants held down good, well-paying jobs, even if this made the mortgage-holder guilty of fraud. He also provided the Belfast IRA with vehicles to transport explosives and weapons across the Irish border from mother dumps and fenced stolen goods for those IRA members who engaged in private-enterprise robberies on the side. All in all, Joe Fenton was a great friend and helper to the IRA in Belfast but he was also an agent working for the RUC Special Branch, possibly one of the most valuable ever. The homes and safe houses he provided were bugged; the weapons hidden in empty houses were ‘jarked’ so the security forces could keep track of them, and the vehicles used to ferry weapons put under close surveillance. As for those who had arranged fraudulent mortgages via Fenton, they were perfect candidates for blackmail by the police.
Joe Fenton survived as an informer because he had a powerful protector and sponsor in the IRA. Harry Burns was a scion of one of Belfast’s oldest and most respected Republican families, and he was related by marriage to Gerry Adams. From the St James district of the Falls Road, Burns had been badly disabled when a bomb he was carrying exploded prematurely. Whether it was due to his disability or because he so trusted his friend Joe Fenton, Burns would break IRA rules and get Fenton to drive him to supposedly highly secret IRA meetings. How much information he helped the Special Branch obtain in this and other ways, how many weapons and explosives shipments he helped betray and how many IRA members were blackmailed into becoming informers themselves because of his treachery can only be guessed at. When the Belfast IRA finally moved against Joe Fenton they killed him before he could be thoroughly interrogated and so his hugely valuable secrets went to the grave with him. Joe Fenton was killed before Brendan Hughes could properly question him.
… I got out of prison; I had nowhere to live so a friend of mine called Fra McCullough§§ brought me to an estate agent called Joe Fenton. The two then brought me to a house in Rockville Street. I was immediately suspicious: here’s me just out of prison, brought to a house and told that it was mine, it was my house … I didn’t take it. I instinctively got suspicious. And then I started to look into the background of this man … He was an estate agent, right, so what other people did he get houses for? Then a house was raided by the IRA in that area, in the Rockville Street area, and a bug was found. It was a house that Fenton had handled [and] it was a key house owned by a man called Harry
Burns who is dead now but he was a senior player with the IRA in Belfast. He was O/C of Belfast Brigade and he ran the whole explosives smuggling operation from across the border and loads of people were getting caught. Even when Harry wasn’t running Belfast there was nothing moved in it without his say-so. Because of my job in Internal Security I was looking at the connection and I found the connection between Harry Burns and Fenton. Fenton was supplying the property and sometimes also the cars that were sent across the border to bring stuff in. And I had a major run-in with Harry Burns in his own house. His wife was sitting in the back room and we had a row. Harry was an operator; he lost an arm, lost a leg, I think he lost an eye as well, Cushendall, 1976, when his own bomb exploded in a shop doorway … I argued that there was a security problem with Fenton. Harry swore by Fenton. But then what Harry did was to warn Fenton that I was checking into him. Fenton did a runner; he went to England on the pretext of going to a boxing match and was away for about ten or eleven days. I was running Internal Security on the GHQ staff. Fenton returned. He was told to return by his handlers, that everything was all right; Harry would fix it up. Fenton returned. I was in Dublin, I think, when Fenton returned, and I heard it on the news – Fenton was found dead. Fenton returned to Belfast and was immediately executed by the IRA before I could get to interrogate him. I believe he was executed to protect someone bigger than him. I believe he was executed by the person in the IRA who was handling him. And I believed that the Special Branch threw Fenton to the wolves to protect the major informer. I think Fenton was a runner more than an informer – it was a whole murky business I found myself in. I actually got very frightened that I had discovered something here at a high level. I was getting no help from anybody in Belfast. I mean, people like ——, ——; Fenton got them their houses. And there was half a dozen others. All the houses were bugged. And that was the precondition, they got the houses [but] the Brits went in first and bugged the house. So the whole thing in Belfast was rotten … rotten. And you were taking your life in your hands just by asking questions. I believe that if I had have got my hands on Joe Fenton the first thing I would have done was put him in a car, take him across the border, and hold him for as long as possible. Because there were other people involved, higher-ranking people … As I say, Joe Fenton was only a squirrel,¶¶ right. And somebody had Fenton executed before I could get talking to him. And I have no doubt if I had have got my hands on Fenton I could have unravelled a whole lot of – [but] I might have got myself killed. I was largely based in Dublin by that time and I had a squad of people around me in Dublin and Kerry who I trusted. I didn’t trust Belfast. Belfast was rotten. When I say ‘rotten’, it was fucking riddled with leaks, with informers, and nobody was making an attempt [to clean it up]. You had people like Paddy Monaghan, ——, lifting wee lads off the street and taking them away and torturing them, but not really looking at the overall picture of where the major informers were. People were getting arrested, people were not getting arrested, people who you’d have imagined should have been arrested were not getting arrested. It was only the main players getting arrested and getting taken out, when I say ‘taken out’ and getting shot.
Q. But the Army Council must also have approved Fenton or at least one of them must have approved him getting killed. And I suppose they went on the evidence that was presented to them by the people that wanted him killed?
A. By Belfast Brigade. I mean, there are other people who are still alive who probably know, who definitely do know more about the execution of Fenton than I do. I wasn’t there when he was executed. If I had have been there he wouldn’t have been executed as quick as he was. Somebody had him executed to cover up someone else. I’ve an idea who it was but I don’t know exactly who it was.
Q. Do you want to say? It’s a question I have to ask but you don’t have to …
A. I think —— was involved in the execution of Fenton. —— certainly benefited from Fenton’s involvement in the IRA … It has been said that Fenton’s execution came as a result of people who had massive dealings with him and who needed him out of the way in case he exposed them. I have no doubt that is the truth.
Q. But were —— and Cleaky Clarke|||| not involved in robberies at that time? Was there not something dodgy going on there?
A. There was … and, as I say, I wasn’t there at the time, but there have been accusations that ——, Cleaky and other people were involved in dodgy jobs. Fenton was the key to it: he was the fencer, he was the money launderer, he was the setter-up of the jobs … Fenton could have exposed all this. And I think —— would have been one of the big [names] exposed. But again Fenton was the key, Fenton was taken out. Fenton was a British agent, given a free hand, he took on board other people … I hate to say this [but] —— was one of the people who was involved with Fenton and there are people still there who can answer these questions better than I can because I just touched on it … Fenton was the key to getting into the middle of this. And he was taken out when I was outside Belfast, when I was in Dublin.
The Joe Fenton affair convinced Hughes that he woud be safer in Dublin than Belfast, that if he stayed within the Belfast IRA then his life could be in danger. There was, he believed, no IRA member in the city that he could trust any more, so widespread was corruption within the organisation, not least his old friend Gerry Adams. When he tackled Gerry Adams about it all, Adams told him he was paranoid. After that he left Belfast for Dublin and when eventually he returned to the city of his birth, he had cut all his ties to the Provisional IRA for good.
I just didn’t know who to trust any more. The people I had trusted with my life I couldn’t trust any more. Gerry Adams I couldn’t trust; —— I definitely never trusted, and the other people around me in Belfast I could not trust either. I knew there were robberies taking place; I knew people were getting immunity from arrest; I knew there were touts there; I knew there was corruption there. And that’s what led me to go to Dublin. I was living in Iveagh [mid-Falls Road area] with a girl and I moved to Dublin to get away from all that because I knew my life was in danger, not from Loyalists, not from the British, but from IRA personnel.
Q. It was that bad?
A. It was that bad … Other people certainly didn’t see it, but I had touched … the corruption in my own movement and I knew there were people there who would need to protect their interests. I couldn’t find the main mover … and I knew that I wasn’t getting any support from anyone and I had to get out.
Q. Did you, did you confide these problems in any senior leadership figures?
A. I confided them to Gerry Adams, yes.
Q. What was Gerry’s response?
A. That I was exaggerating, that there might be a wee bit of fiddling going on but there’s not the sort of scale that I was alleging. I confronted —— in Gerry Adams’s house and there was a major blowup, and —— walked out. I sat and talked to Gerry and Gerry says I was getting a wee bit paranoid. So after that I left, I went to Dublin and I lived in Dublin for a while. I didn’t leave the IRA … I moved onto the GHQ staff. I was actually asked by Pat Doherty, who was Chief of Intelligence, to go back to Belfast to try and clean it up and I refused. I said, ‘If I go back in there and start digging up shit, I’ll not last a week.’ He had asked me … because he realised how dirty it was, how corrupt it was. But he wasn’t prepared to go to Belfast and do it himself …
Q. So was that more or less the beginning of the end …?
A. It was for me. Well, when I came back to Belfast I got a job in a bar in Trinity Lodge. And I was approached on at least two occasions by Brian Keenan who asked me to come back into the IRA, that there was a problem within the IRA and there was things that I could help deal with. And I admit I thought about it, I considered it. And then I considered the … person who was asking me, and I refused. I wouldn’t go back in because I wasn’t going to go through all that again. I didn’t trust anybody; I didn’t trust the man who was asking me to come back in. I didn’t trust the people
I was going to be working with.
… last year [2001] I was sitting in a bar and I saw these people eyeing me. Keenan was one, Paddy Adams [Gerry Adams’s brother] was another and a guy from St James’s … Bernard Fox.*** And I walked up to them and I asked them did they have a fucking problem with me and not one of them said a word to me. But the following day Bernard Fox came here where we’re sitting and told me he didn’t have a problem with me. And I says, ‘What about the rest?’ And he says, ‘I can’t speak for the rest.’ … there was total hostility there that night. Actually … a couple of women I was sitting with walked out with me, because they believed I was in danger, as I certainly believed I was in danger … there’s a Republican repression of anyone who dares to object or who dares to question the leadership line … we’ve been told all along that this is not a leadership-led movement, this is a movement led by the rank and file. That’s a load of bollocks. This is a movement led by the nose by a leadership that refuses to let go and anyone who objects to it, anyone who has an alternative, is either ridiculed, degraded, shot or put out of the game altogether.
