A Secret History of the IRA

by Ed Moloney

  FREDDIE SCAPPATICCI WAS one of the IRA’s most feared and disliked members, a man whose name could send a shiver of sheer terror down the backs of fellow republicans. It was Scappaticci’s work for the IRA that caused this type of reaction. Scappaticci, or “Scap” as he was known to fellow IRA men, had spent the bulk of his paramilitary career in the IRA’s security department, which had the job of rooting out British double agents in the organization, IRA members who had been turned by the police or military and were betraying secrets to the enemy. Scap eventually rose to the top, becoming director of security, from which position his vantage on the IRA was unprecedentedly extensive, his knowledge of its internal affairs impressive. The security department’s remit and powers were wide. Its task was to identify suspected informers, interrogate them, persuade the guilty to confess and then hand them over to others in the IRA who would courtmartial them and then, if convicted, despatch them with a single shot to the back of the head. Attracting the interest of the security department was not good for an IRA member’s health.

  Scap was a member of five families of Italian origin which had been involved with republican paramilitaries during the Troubles, one of an estimated 1,800 people of Italian extraction in Northern Ireland whose ancestors were late nineteenth-century economic migrants, mostly from the area south of Rome. They arrived in Belfast via northern England and opened fish and chip shops and ice cream parlors. Most were assimilated fully, invariably into working-class Catholic areas, and many lost their ability to speak the language and their interest in Italy. Sometimes the only link to their past was the Christian names their parents would choose. A bricklayer by trade who hailed from the Markets district of Belfast, Scap joined the IRA at the start of the Troubles and was interned in 1971; after release in 1974 he rejoined and worked in IRA intelligence. When the security department was set up, he gravitated towards it.

  The idea of the IRA creating a proper counterintelligence unit had its origins in Long Kesh in the mid-1970s when Gerry Adams and Ivor Bell began debriefing IRA members arriving in prison to discover what the authorities knew or wanted to know about the IRA. When the criminalization process began a few years later, and IRA volunteers started cracking under interrogation, Belfast Brigade set up a unit to debrief anyone who had survived police questioning without confessing or being charged. This was partly to discover what the RUC knew or was interested in, but also to look for clues that would suggest a volunteer had been turned. Thus was born the security department which grew in size and scope over the years, expanding to cover Northern Command’s area of operations and then all the IRA. The department was tasked with vetting recruits and investigating IRA operations that had gone wrong. Those who worked in the department, and especially those who led it, knew an awful lot about the IRA’s business.

  Not surprisingly, the British security authorities made a priority of infiltrating the security department and turning those of its members it could, and there are at least three instances where it is known or strongly suspected that they were successful. One was Brendan “Ruby” Davison, an uncle of Jock Davison of Robert McCartney infamy, who was shot dead by loyalists in the late 1980s. Another suspected traitor was the late John Joe Magee, a former British soldier who headed the department before Scap. The third was Freddie Scappaticci himself. Between them, these informers or suspected informers would have been able to give the British a priceless insight into the IRA.

  Scap’s role as an informer came to light at least in part thanks to the exertions of a former British soldier, a staff sergeant who had worked with military intelligence in Northern Ireland in the 1980s. He had come across Scap by chance, was deeply troubled by what he learned and when he left the army set out to tell as much of his story as he could to the media. The soldier, a chirpy, friendly native of Manchester who used the pseudonym “Martin Ingram”, worked as an agent co-handler in a special outfit called the Force Research Unit (FRU) whose headquarters were in Thiepval barracks near Belfast. One evening Ingram was serving as the duty officer in FRU’s headquarters when the phone rang. It was a policeman in Derry who had a Belfast man, Freddie Scappaticci, under arrest for drunk driving. Scappaticci had asked the police to ring the FRU who would vouch for him and extract him from his difficulty. Ingram consulted the files and contacted Scap’s handlers who arranged for his release.

  Ingram learned that Scap’s FRU code-name was “Steaknife”71 and that an official blind eye had been turned to the many executions Scap had engineered. Scap was a “walk-in”, someone who had volunteered their services rather than being blackmailed or bribed into service, as was usually the case with informers. In his case, Scap was allegedly seeking revenge for a bad beating at the hands of IRA colleagues. Ingram was appalled at the fact that, through the double agent, the British army was sanctioning murder and also by the possibility that some of Scap’s victims might have been innocents set up to die to give the informer credibility while others were genuine agents sacrificed to preserve Scap’s cover. Freddie Scappaticci was eventually exposed as a double agent by the media in May 2003.

  The IRA had known about Scap’s treachery for some years but had taken no action against him, despite the enormous damage he had done. Clearly the embarrassment would have been enormous had Scap been found, like many of his victims, dumped by the side of a road in South Armagh, his hands bound behind his back and the brains blown out of his head. Many questions would have been asked and some would have been directed at the Adams, leadership. Scap’s elevation in the security department, along with that of John Joe Magee, had been engineered in the mid-1980s by Gerry Adams, who had got their predecessors thrown out.72 The two men would be intensely loyal to Adams over the best part of the next two decades and many republicans suspected that part of their brief was to hunt down and expose internal critics of the leadership or its strategies, including of course the peace process strategy. Whatever the truth, the fact remains that the basic rule of counterintelligence, that key figures should be replaced or rotated regularly to minimize any damage caused by treachery, was not followed in their case. They stayed at or near the top of the security department for many years, causing incalculable damage to the IRA. When the IRA finally did come to suspect Scap, he was allowed to live and he settled in Andersonstown in the heart of West Belfast. When he was exposed, Scap denied everything, threatened but then abandoned court action to clear his name and finally fled to Italy, where he now lives.

  The Force Research Unit which ran Scap had agents in other Northern Ireland paramilitary groups, including the largest loyalist outfit, the Ulster Defence Association (UDA), a group responsible for many bombings and assassinations of Catholics. The key FRU agent inside the UDA was its head of intelligence, Brian Nelson, a former British soldier who had worked as a double agent in the UDA since the 1970s. By the late 1980s Nelson, who was from the fiercely loyalist Shankill Road part of Belfast, was living and working in Germany in the building trade, but in 1987 he was tracked down by MI5 and persuaded to return to Belfast to resume spying for the FRU. He became head of UDA intelligence, compiling information on republicans provided by his FRU handlers which he would hand over to the UDA’s assassination squads. In theory he would also inform his FRU handlers, who were supposed to tell the RUC so that murder plots could be intercepted and gunmen arrested. In most cases the army did nothing of the sort. Part of the reason for persuading Nelson to return to Belfast was, in the words of FRU’s commander, to “persuade the UDA to centralize their targeting through Nelson and to concentrate their targeting on known Provisional IRA activists,” and military intelligence had little interest in obstructing the UDA.73

  One of those set up for assassination by the UDA, courtesy of intelligence provided by Nelson, was the Belfast solicitor Pat Finucane, who was gunned down in his family home in February 1989. Nelson had told his handlers of the plot but they did nothing to stop it. Separately, the RUC Special Branch had learned that Finucane had been targeted from another UDA informer, Will
iam Stobie, the quartermaster who supplied guns to the assassination team. The police also failed to act, even afterwards when they could have caught the killers with the murder weapons. Finucane, who had been Bobby Sands’s solicitor, was the principal defence lawyer for arrested IRA suspects in Belfast and his family was steeped in republican activity. A brother John was killed on IRA active service in a car crash in 1972; another brother, Dermot, was on IRA GHQ staff, and a third brother, Seamus, was on the Belfast Brigade staff, at a time when the Brigade opposed the Adams peace strategy. While the UDA asserted that Pat Finucane was also an IRA member, this was widely denied, not least by the RUC chief constable. But his work on behalf of IRA clients meant that all the branches of British security in Northern Ireland had a reason to view Finucane with hostility.

  The FRU’s relationship with Nelson came to light when the UDA boasted about its improved intelligence on the IRA and released video footage of military security documents and photomontages to which it had access. A police inquiry by an English team led to Nelson who was charged with murder. At his trial he cut a deal with the prosecution and pleaded guilty. In return for a ten-year jail term he spared the British army days of embarrassing and revealing court testimony. The FRU’s commander, Colonel “J”, as he was identified, gave mitigating evidence claiming that Nelson had saved over 200 lives.

  In fact the English police inquiry had established that only two lives had been saved as a result of Nelson’s work with the FRU.74 One was Freddie Scappaticci, who was targeted by the UDA soon after Nelson became the group’s intelligence chief. According to “Martin Ingram”, the FRU stepped in to save their most valuable IRA agent and steered the UDA assassins away from Scap and towards another republican of Italian extraction, Francisco Notarantonio, an elderly IRA veteran from Ballymurphy who was duly shot in his bed in October 1987.75

  The other person whose life was saved by Brian Nelson and the FRU was Gerry Adams. The UDA had tried to kill Adams once before, in 1984, when he was ambushed by UDA gunmen in Belfast city centre in a plot reportedly known beforehand to British intelligence.76 Adams survived with remarkably light wounds. A second UDA plot to kill Adams was hatched around August 1988 when the group discovered that the Sinn Fein MP visited a public housing office in downtown Belfast on behalf of his constituents on the same day each week. At first they contemplated shooting him from nearby scaffolding but then the UDA learned that Adams’s armor-plated car had one weakness – the roof had not been protected. The UDA obtained a limpet mine and planned to draw up beside Adams’s car as he left the office and place the mine on the roof, as close to his head as possible, and set it to explode after five seconds.77 Nelson told his handlers about the plan. In 1984, British intelligence agencies may have allowed the attempt on Adams’s life to go ahead but this time they intervened to save him. The limpet mine was discovered in a police raid and the plot was abandoned. Nelson’s FRU handlers subsequently told him, according to extracts from his diary published later, that killing Adams would have been, “totally counter productive… Adams and his supporters were committed to following the political path.”78

  MI5 had a permanent liaison officer stationed with the FRU and would have been aware of the intelligence provided by Brian Nelson. By this stage Adams had, via Father Reid, opened a dialogue with the then Secretary of State, Tom King, in an effort to advance the peace process. Given the FRU’s decision to save Adam’s life, it seems reasonable to assume that British intelligence knew of these contacts and recognized the huge potential of the path Adams was taking. If the securocrats really wished to scupper the peace process, they had missed an ideal opportunity to strangle the infant at birth by turning a blind eye to the killing of its principal architect. At the very least one question remains unanswered: why did British intelligence allow Pat Finucane to die but not Gerry Adams?

  ANOTHER INTRIGUING EXAMPLE of securocrat benevolence towards the peace process came towards the end of 2005 when the Stormontgate scandal of October 2002 returned with a sensational vengeance. Three men, including one senior Sinn Fein official, fifty-five-year-old Denis Donaldson, had been charged with spying offences, but suddenly on December 8, the Public Prosecution Service announced that charges against the three men were being dropped “in the public interest.” Under new disclosure rules, the prosecuting authorities were obliged to reveal any relevant details to the defence and had only Donaldson been on trial no problem would have arisen. The difficulty facing the prosecution was that unless the presiding judge ruled otherwise, they would have to tell Donaldson’s co-defendants, one of whom, Ciaran Kearney, was his son-in-law, that the man standing beside them in the dock had been a British spy for around two decades. The judge refused an application from the prosecution to keep the information secret and, faced with the prospect that the trial would collapse in spectacular fashion, the plug was pulled.

  The detail of what happened next is far from clear but the events followed upon each other like scenes from a spy movie. On December 15, Donaldson was contacted by a Special Branch officer and shortly afterwards met Sinn Fein’s Northern chairman, Declan Kearney, to confess his secret past. Two days later Gerry Adams announced that Donaldson had admitted to being a spy while Donaldson himself read a statement to RTE television in which he denied there had been a spying ring at Stormont but admitted: “I was recruited in the 1980s after compromising myself during a vulnerable time in my life. Since then I have worked for British intelligence and the RUC/PSNI Special Branch.”79 Donaldson had a notorious reputation as a womanizer but his sexual appetite apparently ranged wider. According to a security source, the British recruited Donaldson when they found out about one of his sexual peccadilloes and blackmailed him. But for some time before Stormontgate he had “gone dead as an agent.”80 According to security sources, Donaldson was working for a GHQ intelligence unit headed by Bobby Storey, and ran the spy ring, using his post as Sinn Fein’s head of administration as cover.81 For reasons that remain unexplained, he had not told his handlers about the Stormont spying operation and a wish to punish their out-of-control agent was one reason why he was charged.82 Gerry Adams claimed that the PSNI had warned Donaldson that he was about to be “outed” by the media and it was this that caused him to confess to republican colleagues. It may have been that forcing Donaldson into the open was the Special Branch’s final revenge on their errant agent.

  The revelation that Donaldson had been a long-term traitor came as a deep shock to the wider Provisional movement and set off an almost hysterical bout of speculation about which senior figure would be exposed next. Donaldson, who was from the Short Strand area of Belfast, had been in the IRA from the outset. He was interned along with figures like Bobby Sands, subsequently rose in the IRA (this writer first interviewed him as a Belfast Brigade explosives expert in the late 1970s) and later was entrusted with delicate missions, such as a trip in the late 1980s to Lebanon for talks with Hezbollah in a bid to obtain the release of the Belfast hostage Brian Keenan (no relation to the IRA leader of the same name), held by Islamic Jihad for five years. By the time of Stormontgate, he was in the outer circle just beyond the Adams think tank, often charged with ensuring that leadership decisions were fully and properly enforced. His proximity to the inner circle was the reason for the widespread shock in the IRA and Sinn Fein since this opened up the possibility that British intelligence not only knew about the Adams strategy but had helped to shape it. Those who had dealings with Donaldson in the years before he was exposed as a spy knew him as a devoted disciple of the peace process strategy who would often become angrily defensive when others questioned where the process was taking republicanism.

  Donaldson’s outing provoked charges from Gerry Adams of dirty tricks by “securocrats” who were trying to provoke, he said, another peace process crisis by forcing the IRA to execute him for informing. But there was evidence elsewhere to suggest that British intelligence had used Donaldson in the past to advance the peace process rather than to undermine it.


  In the autumn of 1988, as the first public talks between Sinn Fein and the SDLP climaxed, Donaldson was sent to New York to be the IRA’s representative in the United States. From his very first night in the Bronx, where he was to live for the next year, Donaldson set about undermining figures who would later oppose the Adams strategy. The two principal people in his sights were the U.S. commander of the IRA, Gabe Megahey, a Belfast man who had lived in New York since the 1970s, and Martin Galvin, an Irish-American lawyer who was the publicity director of Noraid, the support group for IRA prisoners, and publisher of its weekly paper, the Irish People. Megahey once described himself as “a hard-liner”83 who was distinctly unenthusiastic about the republican movement’s political direction while Galvin was seen as an obstacle to Sinn Fein’s plans to leave its working-class Irish-American base behind and move into the American political and corporate mainstream.

  The night Donaldson arrived in New York, Megahey and Galvin took him out for a drink in one of the many bars in Bainbridge Avenue in the Bronx, then a largely Irish area known for its IRA sympathies. Galvin had another appointment and after a while he left Megahey and Donaldson talking and drinking. The next morning Megahey rang Galvin in alarm to say that Donaldson had told him that the Belfast leadership wanted Galvin out and his days were numbered. Donaldson denied this, suggesting Megahey had a drink problem, while Donaldson’s boss in Belfast, think tank chairman Ted Howell also denied it.84 (Later Megahey’s dislike and suspicions of Donaldson sharpened when he was seen buying drinks for FBI men in the same Bainbridge Avenue bar.) Donaldson then moved against Megahey, first introducing him to a Belfast man who had been thrown out of Ireland by the IRA as a security risk and then reporting Megahey to Belfast for consorting with him. The IRA’s commander in America was stood down and nearly court-martialled. Megahey, who had a fierce shouting match with Donaldson over the matter, later recalled the IRA representative’s penchant for creating dissension: “He was always saying things like: ‘Oh, Ireland doesn’t like this person, Ireland doesn’t like that person.’ These were very hardworking people in Noraid being sidelined.”85