by Stephen Grey
Spying was dangerous and the recruiter was potentially leading his new friend to his death. ‘You are fucking with people’s lives. You have a moral responsibility to these people. Then, at some point, you would have to hand them off, to a new case officer. I worried constantly about recruiting someone and turning that agent over to someone else. It’s like giving a kid away,’ said Frank. But he did it anyway. That was the job. And he had made sure his agents knew what they were getting into.
* * *
Steak Knife’s handlers agreed that recruitment was friendship with that twist. ‘They are or become your friends, but it is also something a bit one-sided. You are never going to invite them to Special Forces dinners or tell them about your girlfriend or your real life.’ A handler could establish a very personal relationship with his agent, but there was an element of acting. The handler needed to preserve some separation.
The skilful bit of counterterrorist spycraft in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s was not just signing up recruits but also steering their terrorist careers towards a useful position within an organization. In the case of Steak Knife, he was helped and persuaded to regain his confidence and ascend the IRA’s ranks again. He ended up as second-in-command of the IRA’s counterintelligence wing, charged with hunting the very sort of ‘touts’ (traitors) that he himself had become. Also known as the ‘nutting squad’, the unit was notorious for the kneecappings and other punishments handed out to traitors.
It was a promising place to be. Close to the IRA’s leadership, he could be a sounding board for their fears and doubts, and – even if he was involved in the brutal treatment of traitors – he would not be directly involved in any terrorist attack. His role was also self-protective: he would be among the first to hear about fears of a mole in their ranks.
According to someone involved, one such occasion came in 1984. Michael Bettany, an MI5 officer, had been caught trying to sell secrets to the Soviet Embassy in London. Sentenced to jail for breaching the Official Secrets Act, he was carelessly held on remand in Wandsworth Prison alongside an IRA prisoner, Pat Magee, who was accused of planting the Brighton Bomb. Bettany had served extensively in Northern Ireland and, although he regretted it later and told MI5 what he had done, he approached Magee in the prison chapel and could not resist passing on details of the British agents he knew in the IRA. Magee in turn passed those details on to a prison visitor.
Among the leaks were details about Steak Knife himself. Luckily for him, it was Steak Knife who was handed this information and he was able to suppress it. But other sources were blown by Bettany’s betrayal. Among them was Willie Carlin, agent for both MI5 and later the FRU. He was a former British Army non-commissioned officer from Londonderry. When he retired from the army, he volunteered for an intelligence mission and was sent back to get close to Martin McGuinness, then the IRA leader in the city and a member of the four-man leadership of the Northern Command. Carlin’s penetration – under the code name 3007 and then Fox – was so successful that he went on to be selected as a candidate for Sinn Féin in council elections. He told the FRU he had become so involved he even helped Sinn Féin organize the rigging of elections. But, after Bettany’s betrayal, Carlin had to be resettled.7
Steak Knife’s role was a deep secret but, under the rules of police primacy, the FRU had to inform the RUC about him, and even let senior RUC officers know his identity. ‘The secret was supposed to stay only with the head of the RUC’s Special Branch, but of course it percolated down,’ said one FRU handler. And however secret Steak Knife was supposed to be, his status did not give him a ‘get out of jail’ card.
At one point Steak Knife and his ‘security squad’ detained a suspected traitor. They blindfolded him, but the prisoner recognized Steak Knife’s voice. Able to escape and jump out of a window, the man ran to a police station and accused Steak Knife of the abduction. Now a wanted man, Steak Knife fled across the border into the Republic.
During his time on the run – or ‘OTR’ as it was called – Steak Knife could not understand why the FRU were unable to get the RUC to drop its charges. ‘He thought we were gods, untouchables,’ said one insider. The truth was, even if they could have intervened, they did not want to. A spell of OTR did wonders for Steak Knife’s credibility within the IRA and he also picked up wonderful intelligence from the South. (For the FRU, it meant hair-raising meetings with their agent in ‘bandit country’ near the border, as FRU officers were not authorized to operate in the Republic.)
The charges against Steak Knife, which were eventually dropped, illustrated the hardest part of running an agent like him: namely, how to prevent him being complicit in crime.
When Steak Knife’s alleged identity as Scappaticci was first revealed, two sources went public with details of his spying. One was Peter Keeley, a retired soldier and former FRU agent who used the name ‘Kevin Fulton’. The other was a disaffected former FRU member, Ian Hurst, who used the name ‘Martin Ingram’. Neither had been a case officer or been even remotely involved with Steak Knife, but, from their work with the FRU, both had picked up some details of the case. Both alleged that Steak Knife had been allowed to participate in serious crimes.
In his account of the case, Hurst wrote:
It is a fact of life that no informant inside any paramilitary organization could possibly get to the heart of that organization without committing criminal offences, and this is where the agencies who employ such informants walk a fine line. They have to ask themselves how far they can allow such agents to go, and when does the cost become too much.8
According to Keeley, a Catholic from Newry, the British had to allow Steak Knife to take part in not only the kneecapping and torture of alleged IRA traitors, but also the murder of several of them. Keeley said Steak Knife also had advance knowledge of, and did nothing to forestall, a plot to ambush and kill two senior RUC officers on the border.
Once a soldier with the Royal Irish Rangers, Keeley had returned to civilian life and infiltrated the IRA himself, working over the years for the FRU, the RUC, British customs and MI5. He alleged the British issued instructions for their agents to take part in attacks to maintain cover: ‘My handlers told me to do anything to win their confidence. That’s what I did. My brief was that if I got into a situation where I couldn’t get to my handlers but if I had to break the law, I was to try not to take a life.’9
The intelligence services had a strategy to mitigate the dangers, but Fulton said it did not always work:
I was to shoot high or blow up a bomb prematurely. But that isn’t always possible. If I f***ed up all the time, then the IRA would shoot me. Don’t forget I also ran the risk of getting shot by the army and the police. I mixed explosives and I helped develop new types of bombs. I moved weapons. If you ask me, ‘Did I kill anyone?’ then I will say ‘no’. But if you ask me if the materials I handled killed anyone, then I will have to say that some of the things I helped develop did kill. I reiterate, my handlers knew everything I did. I was never told not to do something that was discussed. How can you pretend to be a terrorist and not act like one? You can’t. You’ve got to do what they do. The people I was with were hard-hitters. They did a lot of murders. If I couldn’t be any good to them, then I was no use to the army either. I had to do what the man standing next to me did.10
Keeley had his grudges and some unanswered questions remain about parts of his account. In 2013, an Irish judge, Peter Smithwick, who led an inquiry into the murder of two RUC officers and collusion allegations surrounding it, found him to be a ‘very impressive and credible witness’ whose ‘evidence was truthful’.11 However, others have concluded that Keeley changed his stories too frequently.
From what I learned from several interviews with people involved in espionage in Northern Ireland, the idea that the security services deliberately allowed the IRA to murder someone to protect a source in place was inconceivable. Did they allow agents to commit other crimes short of murder? Certainly. The police and intelligence operatives in U
lster even had a term for crimes they permitted: ‘freebies’. And might things have gone tragically wrong sometimes? It was possible, even probable.
* * *
The issues involved were legal, practical and moral. In the 1970s and 1980s, UK law had no provision to allow an agent to commit any crime. They might turn a blind eye, but they could not sanction it. In practical terms, it was also dangerous. If an agent became involved in plotting a murder, he might himself get killed or arrested, rendering him useless. And then there were the ethics, probably the most powerful factor. No one in the British Army or RUC had any wish to be involved in anything that could lead to the murder of a fellow soldier or policeman, and even less in the killing of an innocent bystander. This was a war fought on home turf and it would have seemed unconscionable to have been involved in the killing of a comrade or neighbour. ‘That would be the most horrendous thing. You cannot imagine how abhorrent that would have seemed,’ said someone closely involved.
To avoid such killings, the UK put in place a sophisticated strategy, one that has often been significantly underplayed due to the sensitivity at the time of the tactics and technology involved. It involved tracking and disarming illicit bombs and firearms, as well as covert communications with agents to deal with emergencies.
The standard first tactic was to make a bomb non-functional and harmless. Special teams of covert bomb disposal technicians, controlled by MI5, would break into a home or weapons cache and tamper with the devices. If a bomb later failed to detonate it would raise little suspicion – after all, most of the IRA’s devices were home-made and errors were expected.
For the sake of security, sometimes even the agents themselves had no knowledge of what had been done. They might have thought the British callous, because they did not know the secret actions being taken to mitigate the danger. ‘There were agents who thought we were allowing them to plant a bomb, not knowing that we had secretly made it ineffective,’ said a former bomb technician who was attached to MI5.
Although he was no longer a member of an ASU and therefore not required by the IRA to handle guns or bombs, Steak Knife often reported on the location of weapons caches or plans to mount an attack. Following such reports, guns were often secretly removed and fired at an army range so as to collect the weapon’s ballistic signature. (This would be used later to work out if they were involved in any attack.)
Some rifles were also fitted with tracking devices, in a process known to insiders as ‘jarking’. This was an effective and, in its time, highly advanced way of protecting Steak Knife and other agents. If the British came and seized the guns, they risked exposing the informer. But if the guns were tracked onwards through several hands, then they could be seized to prevent their use but no one would be sure who had tipped off the army.
For use in an emergency, if he was ever called to commit a murder or serious crime, Steak Knife was also issued with another clever little spy gadget. This was what they called a ‘sick pill’. It looked like an ordinary aspirin and could be easily concealed. If swallowed, it would send you retching uncontrollably into the toilet. No sane terrorist would want you joining them on a mission in that state.
As a final resort, Steak Knife also had a panic button: a secret switch inside an ordinary-looking household radio in his family kitchen that would summon assistance from the army.
Despite all those measures, did the FRU avoid involvement in murder in the Steak Knife case and others? The full truth will probably never be known. While the army did what it could to save lives, agents also put their own lives on the line. For the sake of survival, as they juggled the different rules of the two worlds they lived in, there were probably plenty of crimes that agents never told their handlers about. As one former RUC officer said, ‘Do you think an agent is not smart enough to realize there are things he should not share with his handler? There were times when it was in both their interests to keep quiet.’
* * *
Martin McGartland was an informer recruited by the RUC Special Branch who became an IRA volunteer. He later recounted the multiple ways his handlers helped him to thwart attacks, including impregnating Semtex bombs with special chemicals to stop them exploding.12 However, he is an agent who has openly stated that he was forced to be complicit in the murder in east Belfast of a British parachute regiment soldier, Private Tony Harrison. It was not always possible to stop the commission of a crime.
I knew then that I was driving to the home of a soldier whom they intended to shoot in cold blood. I wondered what I should do; I wondered if there was anything that I could now do to save the man’s life. As we drove along, I prayed that Felix [cover name for his RUC handler] had been able to trace the man and have him moved from the house, but he had told me nothing of the soldier since we had first checked out the area a month before. I debated whether I should try any trick, like stalling the car or crashing it into a vehicle, as if by accident … I wound down the car window so that I would hear if any shots were fired. I prayed that I would hear nothing. I waited what seemed an age, but it was probably less than 60 seconds. Then I heard the shots – one, two, three, four, five – I counted them, and knew in my heart that some poor bastard had been murdered in cold blood.13
McGartland’s loyalties were clear. He and the FRU did all they could to thwart the IRA. But elsewhere there was evidence of much greater ambivalence by the security forces when they dealt with Protestant paramilitary groups, those who had declared loyalty to the Crown, even as they were prepared to countenance nakedly sectarian murders of Catholics. As later official inquiries were to uncover, a minority of agent runners in both the RUC and the FRU had colluded in the murder of prominent Republican figures.
The danger with such conclusions – whether true or false – is that they mask the success of other FRU operations and all the lives they protected, both Catholic and Protestant. According to those most closely involved, Steak Knife helped to foil dozens of attacks and arranged the seizure of many weapons, saving dozens of lives.
* * *
For years, Steak Knife was the rock star of Northern Irish spies. And when his existence was finally revealed, his former handlers asked why it had taken so long. After all, his identity had become far too well known in law enforcement circles for his own safety.
In the 1980s, the FRU had a special ‘HQ detachment’ at army headquarters in Lisburn. It answered directly to and worked closely with the director of intelligence, the Assistant Secretary Political (ASP), who was normally from MI5. The FRU was based in a Portakabin known as ‘the rat hole’ and almost its entire purpose was to handle Steak Knife.
Over time, Steak Knife extended his circle. He befriended most of the IRA’s leadership, certainly those in Belfast. They would drive around town chatting, not knowing that behind his car stereo was a sophisticated bugging device, recording every word. Steak Knife’s tapes of senior IRA commanders talking in his car would become an essential showpiece of a secret tour of army headquarters that was laid on for a visiting prime minister or for Whitehall officials with the highest of clearances. ‘Steak Knife was recruited for tactical intelligence, but over time his value became strategic,’ concluded one insider.
Once, when Steak Knife wanted to buy a new car, technicians from MI5 – known to the FRU for some long-forgotten reason as ‘the wasters’ – tried to remove the existing bug. Unfortunately, it fell down inside the chassis. To avoid its discovery, the entire car was blown up at an army range. Steak Knife was driven out to watch and was even allowed to press the detonator.
After a while, it became clear what was happening. Of the key motives for spying, ‘love of the game’ had taken over. ‘He loved the buzz and the deceit, the intrigue, the thought of knowing something that no one else knew.’
It was said later that Steak Knife had been motivated by money, but that seems unlikely. He was paid around £300 for a meeting, said one insider. ‘We used to see him about every ten or fifteen days, so maybe he got about £10,000 a year.
It was hardly a fortune. He didn’t do it for money. He just got to love the thrill of it.’
Contrary to honour and the rules, rival British intelligence agencies often tried to lure Steak Knife away from the FRU by offering him more money. In one case, he recounted, the RUC, who often arrested him, offered him over £250,000. But, like many Republicans, Steak Knife saw the army, as represented by the FRU, as inherently more reliable than the RUC. He said he wouldn’t work for the police – or ‘the peelers’, as he and other Republicans called them – or even for SIS.
Though he found it thrilling, sometimes the pressure of living on the edge got to Steak Knife. That was why, at one point, the army sent its top general in Northern Ireland, Major-General John Wilsey, for a secret thirty-minute meeting in a car park to thank and reassure him. But living a dangerous lie for years on end was exhausting, so much so that those who knew him would say that when the conflict officially ended Steak Knife was almost a broken man.
* * *
In what was probably the climax of the FRU’s operations in the mid-1980s, some of its key players crossed paths.
Steak Knife, as part of his Republican existence, was represented, like many other IRA members, by a feisty Belfast lawyer named Patrick Finucane. While he was on the run, he used to call Finucane regularly, anxiously hoping to hear that the charges against him had been dropped and he could come home. As revealed by British phone taps, Finucane’s main concern when talking to Steak Knife, who used to call from phone boxes in the Republic, was how long it would be before Steak Knife could return and fix the tiles in the lawyer’s bathroom (as part of his regular job as a builder, he had decorated Finucane’s house).
