The Murder of an IRA Spy with Henry Hemming

Andrew Hammond: Welcome to "Spycast," the official podcast of the International Spy Museum. I'm your host Dr. Andrew Hammond, the museum's historian and curator. Each week we explore some aspect of the past, present, or future of intelligence and espionage. If you enjoy the show, please consider leaving us a five star review. It will take less than a minute of your time and it will really help other listeners find us. Coming up next on "Spycast."

Henry Hemming: One in three senior IRA figures were being run as agents, were compromised in some way. All the indications are that certainly within the IRA there was a really significant degree of penetration. [ Music ]

Andrew Hammond: This week's episode is a recording of a previous public program held here at the International Spy Museum. I was joined by Henry Hamming, author of the new book "Four Shots in the Night: A True Story of Spies, Murder, and Justice in Northern Ireland." Henry is a prolific espionage author writing books on the second world war including "Agent M" on the grit, MI5 spy master Maxwell Knight, "Agents of Influence" on William Stephenson, and "Churchill's Iceman" on the one man think tank Geoffrey Pike. "Four Shots" tells the true story of the murder of a British spy within the IRA, the Irish Republican Army. In our conversation you learn about espionage within the troubles, the story of Frank Hegarty, a British spy working in London Derry or Derry, Freddie Scappaticci AKA Stakeknife, and Operation Kenova, and the role of MI5 during the war in northern Ireland. The original podcast on intelligence since 2006, we are "Spycast." Now sit back, relax, and enjoy the show. It's a pleasure to speak to you, Henry.

Henry Hemming: Andrew, thank you for inviting me. It's really good to be here.

Andrew Hammond: Thank you. So I think one place and that I just wanted to start off, it seems to me that there's a puzzle. There's a twist at the heart of your story which you tell very beautifully. So I just wondered if we could unpack that one stage at a time. So first off could you just tell us a little bit more about Frank Hegarty. This is the person. This is the character that really intrigued you and you saw as being central to the book. So I'm just going to read out a brief passage. So he's found on May the 25th, 1986 on a remote roadside near Castlederg. His hands had been bound behind his back. His eyes were taped. And he had been shot four times through the back of the head. Tell us a little bit more about him. Who was Frank Hegarty?

Henry Hemming: Frank Hegarty was a Catholic. He was living in Derry when he first -- when his life changed and he began to work for the British army as an undercover agent. And this is back in 1980. So we're in the middle of the troubles in northern Ireland. And Frank is a family man. He's got one child already. He's about to have another child when he's first approached by the British army. He's also someone who's extremely fond of greyhounds. So he's a greyhound trainer. His own greyhounds for as long as anyone can remember. He's often seen down at the local greyhound track. He's also someone who's extremely well connected within his neighborhood in Derry. He's one of these people who has a lot of friends, a lot of connections. And he used to before the troubles began he had a job driving civil lorries around Ireland and northern Ireland. So he's someone who's well connected. He's someone who knows the back streets and the small byways and country lanes of the island of Ireland. And these were all some of the details which contribute to the decision on the part of the British army to help take him on. But I guess one of the other questions you ask is what drew me to him. Where does this book come from? And I guess this book, "Four Shots in the Night," it's different to other books I've written in that the -- I remember the kind of the genesis of it and the starting point was one conversation which I had about five/six years ago. I don't remember exactly. But it was with somebody who knew a great deal about intelligence and he said to me something like, "You do realize that the biggest story in the history of British intelligence over the last 70 years is one that's hardly been told." And it's the story of spies inside the IRA and the role they played in helping to bring peace to northern Ireland. And I'll be totally honest. When I first heard this it wasn't something I was aware of. It wasn't something I knew a great deal about. I was skeptical as well. It sounded a bit too neat. And I began to do more research into it. I began to read what there was, what had been written about this. But I also began to have conversations with people who had experience of either serving in northern Ireland or people from northern Ireland, people who could shed a bit more light on this story. And it was during the course of this initial research that I kept coming across the story of Frank Hegarty. And for reasons I think we'll get on to and reasons that become clear in the book I think the story of Frank Hegarty comes to symbolize. It's a microcosm, if you like, of so much of what was going on in northern Ireland in this secret war. So in this hidden intelligence operation that was going on.

Andrew Hammond: Are you able to share with us the person that you were speaking to five or six years ago that gave you this idea?

Henry Hemming: I can't because it was an off the record conversation. This is -- but this is something I've become really, really used to. I mean look. I'm working on canard which I kind of even before the book came out I've had this -- this has become an issue. So Frank Hegarty his body was found in 1996 and there's an allegation that he was killed by someone in the IRA who was also a British agent, someone code named Stakeknife. He's been widely revealed to be a man called Freddie Scappaticci who died last year. And there's been a police investigation into this. It's called operation Kenova. And I still remember the time two years ago when I spoke to the detectives in Operation Kenova. And being an optimist I remember when they set up this meeting I was hoping this would be something where I could find out all sorts of things which I hadn't yet been able to find out about the investigation. But instead they just wanted to ask me about the source of a particular piece of information that I'd passed on to someone. And I had to explain that it was off the record. And yeah. It was an uncomfortable conversation to begin with, but they then they respected that and we moved on and we talked about other things. But yeah. This is something which I've come across a lot when researching and talking about this subject, that some conversations have to remain confidential.

Andrew Hammond: Yeah. So you mentioned Freddie Scappaticci there. So Stakeknife. And Operation Kenova. So as I understand it this is the largest murder investigation in British history. There's been a few murder investigations. So maybe we can explore the other side of that puzzle, that twist at the center of your book that spoke about it. So we have one British agent, Frank Hegarty, who's murdered by another British agent, Freddie Scappaticci. So tell us a little bit more about Stakeknife, the infamous Stakeknife.

Henry Hemming: The infamous Stakeknife was recruited in the late 1970s and it's an interesting story. There's been a lot of speculation about exactly how he was recruited, who took him on. And in the book I've been able to explain for the first time exactly what happened. And Freddie Scappaticci at the time in the late 1970s was he'd been kicked out of the IRA. So he had been in the IRA in the early 1970s. He'd been kicked out after he'd sounded off against some of the most senior figures in his local brigade. And he's really cross about this. And at the time he's involved in a tax scam and the local police found out about this. They brought him into the police station. They gave him a choice. Either you work with us, you begin to supply information about other people taking part in this tax scam, or you're probably going to jail and probably for a long time. So Freddie Scappaticci becomes a police informant, but he's not passing on information about the IRA. This is fairly low level stuff about other people who might be fiddling their tax forms at the end of each financial year. And the police handler who's looking after him has a friend and this friend is a soldier. And the soldier is a guy called Peter and this is someone who he's on an emergency tour. He's somebody from the west country. He's someone who he's got huge charisma. He makes friends almost wherever he goes. One of his friends is this police handler who's looking after Scappaticci. And the police handler says to Peter one day, "Why don't you come along and meet this guy? I think you might get on." So Peter goes along to the police station one day and he meets Scappaticci. And it's really important to stress that there's no precise plan because this is a moment that will be picked over in years to come. There's no precise plan in place, but Peter gets on with Freddie Scappaticci. They begin to form some kind of friendship. Then Peter finds a way to bump into him again in the weeks and months that follow. And eventually they agree to go for a drink. And this then becomes something which happens several times. They have a variety of drinks. And they become more friendly. They talk about what they have in common. They talk about women. They talk about football. They talk about music. Peter is someone who loves all of his things. He has a lot to say. And it's only after about a year of this friendship that Peter eventually persuades or asks Scappaticci to work for him as an agent. And there's some lovely things that Peter has gone on the record as saying about how important it is not to proposition someone you're trying to recruit. And I think with the recruitment of Freddie Scappaticci it was I think in the book I compare it to the kind of espionage equivalent of grandmother's footsteps where you have to move incredibly slowly and get to the point where Scappaticci had all but agreed without actually saying, "I'm going to work for you as an agent and you're going to pay me money and I can risk my life by doing this." So and this is something I found interesting because it reminded me of so many other things I've written about and I've been writing about spies and the second world war with spies in other parts of the world. This relationship between agent and handler is so important. And it defines a lot of what follows. And in this particular case the relationship between Peter and Freddie Scappaticci was unusual because it really was rooted in this sense of friendship. And Scappaticci eventually he agrees to become an army agent. He then agrees to try and rejoin the IRA and he successfully does this. But several years after this, maybe months, we don't know, but at some point after rejoining the IRA everything changes because Scappaticci is told slash asked -- it's hard to know whether you can refuse something like this. But he's basically moved to a part of the IRA called the internal security unit. And the nickname for this unit is the nutting squad. It's called the nutting squad because to nut someone in northern Ireland means to shoot them in the back of the head. This unit is dedicated to hunting down spies inside the IRA and this unit only came about in the late 1970s and it's part of this new strategy that the IRA had begun to implement, something called the long war strategy. And this was an idea that the organization's going to become leaner. It's going to become more professional. And there's an understanding that if it was going to succeed, if it was going to remain active for a much longer period of time than they previously imagined, they had to make sure there were no spies in their midst. So this is why this new unit came into being. And I guess what's really important to stress is that this new unit would not just hunt down spies, but would make a point of killing people who were accused or found out to have been spies or suspected to have been spies. It's worth adding as well that many of the people who were killed by the nutting squad are not believed to have been spies. So sometimes these are people who'd fallen afoul of someone else within the IRA. Sometimes it was internal politics which led to someone being accused of being a spy. So Scappaticci joins this terrifying unit called the nutting squad. And he eventually becomes the number two figure inside this unit. And the allegation which has come to light very recently is that he could have been involved in as many as 14 murders during his time inside the nutting squad. Originally people thought it might have been as many as 50 murders, but that number's been revised down to about 14. And the paradox here is Scappaticci as a result of his position inside the nutting squad is providing the army with incredibly valuable intelligence. And so a decision is made by some people inside this agent running unit to keep him going. And I suppose it's up to us as historians, it's up to us as just citizens, to try and get a sense of whether that was the right decision. Is it morally okay to keep someone in a position like that to keep taking intelligence from them if you understand the price that's being paid involves a serious crime such as murder? And this is one of the questions that runs through "Four Shots in the Night" and it's one of the questions that was examined by a police investigation that began in 2016, an enormous inquiry which involves 72 detectives, costs many millions of pounds. It had access to a huge number of previously classified government documents, those from the ministry of defense, those from MI5, those from the local police in northern Ireland. And this police investigation was dedicated to one thing, and it was finding out what Freddie Scappaticci might have done inside the nutting squad. And what's been fascinating for me as an author has been following this investigation, seeing what they've come up with, and only recently have they begun to reveal some of their conclusions from the seven years they've spent investigating it. So that's a brief intro to Freddie Scappaticci and the investigation into him.

Andrew Hammond: And just to clarify, so the 14 murders, were they all members of the IRA?

Henry Hemming: They were. Yes. They were all people who were either members of the IRA or in Frank Hegarty's case very close to the IRA. So Frank Hegarty had not actually been as they put it green booked. He hadn't actually taken the oath of allegiance to the IRA. However he was working for the IRA and that's why he was interrogated by them.

Andrew Hammond: It's sort of like the mafia when you get the mid man and then you get their sources that are not made, but they work alongside them.

Henry Hemming: Exactly. Yeah. That's a good way of putting it. [ Static followed by a beep ] [ Typing sounds ]

Andrew Hammond: And I think it would be quite interesting now just to -- just to walk back and have a think about how this puzzle at the center of your book came to be. So we have Scappaticci and then we have Frank Hegarty. How is Frank Hegarty recruited? Let's get the other part of the story.

Henry Hemming: So Frank Hegarty is walking his dog one morning in 1980 and it's a cold morning. He always goes out very early. And Frank is a man of routine and we know this because the army had been studying his movements and they'd been really carefully trying to see what he would do every day so they could predict when he would be out. So every morning crack of dawn he's out walking his dog. And he takes the same route every day. And unbeknownst to him there's an operation in play to try and recruit him. And it begins several weeks before he's actually approached, before he's actually targeted. And what happens is that the person who's eventually going to speak to him is told to walk along the same route that Frank always takes, to have a dog with him so he looks like a fellow dog walker, but to remain just out of earshot. So maybe 60 yards ahead of him. Something like that. So he's walking on the same road. And there in that way Frank Hegarty can then he can begin to get used to the sight of this person. So he's beginning to wonder to himself who is this, this dog walker. I keep seeing him every morning. I don't know him, haven't spoken to him. So it plants a seed of curiosity in Frank's mind. And then on the day of the actual meet or the approach the man with the dog -- the man is actually a soldier. He begins to walk a little bit closer to Frank. So he's still ahead of him, but while he's walking along he slows down until Frank gets closer and closer and closer. And eventually halfway along this route that Frank always takes the soldier turns around. Frank walks up to him. And the soldier's able to start talking to Frank. And immediately he can demonstrate to Frank that he knows a lot about him. So he knows his name. He begins by saying, "All right, Frank." He talks about his dog. He talks about how his dog performed in a race recently on the nearby greyhound racing track. And he talks about Frank's family. And this is designed to do several things. I mean at the kind of very, very baseline level it's designed to create more curiosity in Frank so that Frank is thinking, "How does this person know this? Why does he know so much about me? What does he see in me that other people might not?" And we don't know the exact details of what follows, but we do know that they have a conversation and that at the end of it a van pulls up and the soldier says to Frank Hegarty, "We'd like to continue this conversation somewhere else. Will you come into the van with us?" Or words to that effect. And we also know that Frank agrees. Franks agrees. He gets into the van. He gets his dog with him. And they go to a nearby hotel and they continue the conversation. So this is the moment where Frank's life begins to change. This is when he steps into a new world, if you like. And I think it's really -- it's really interesting to work out why anybody would agree to become a spy and in particular why Frank would agree to work with the British. And there's all sorts of different reasons. I don't think there's any one reason that we can single out, but I think it's worth -- you can talk about some of the different things that might have been in his mind at that time. So one of them is I think just the idealistic sense that he wants the violence to end. And this is something that he spoke about at the time and he would speak about in subsequent conversations with his new army handler. He was sick of the troubles. He was sick of the murder. He was sick of the punishment beatings that took place as a result of the IRA. He wanted to do something to try and bring peace to the region. So that's one of the reasons. I think another one of them was the fact that there'd be a little bit of money involved. He needed money. He didn't have a job at the time. He'd do odd jobs here and there, but if he could earn a bit on the side then a lot of the time he would. So this was a way to do that. There's also the possibility that the army handler who approaches Frank on this particular day refers back to something in Frank's past, something, an incident when Frank had been part of a different faction of the IRA, something called the official IRA, something from early on in the troubles. And there seems to be a good chance that he might have referred to this as a way of just implying to Frank "We have leverage over you." Okay? "We have information about you and maybe one day we could use this against you. But of course if you work with us, if you agree to come and supply information, we won't do anything with this." And I don't think this is direct as him saying to Frank, "You need to come in the van with us now or else we're going to prosecute you for your alleged involvement in this incident many years ago." But I definitely think by hinting at this, hinting at some kind of knowledge, that would have created some sort of pressure which would have influenced Frank as he made the decision to step into the van. So those are some of the things that were going on. But I think the other thing that's worth adding, and this is -- this brings us in a way back to Peter and Scappaticci. It's that they'd chosen. The army had chosen someone that they knew would get on with Frank. Someone who came from a similar kind of background, who had a similar interest in animals, who was a similarly quiet kind of person, but chatty, if that makes sense. Who had a kind of slightly sometimes diffident manner. But also a certain kind of authority. And it seems that Frank and this handler clicked. It seems that they began to form a friendship. They saw eye to eye, if that's a better way of putting it. And this I think was another part of the reason that he agreed to step into the back of the van. So those are just some of the things that played a part. And maybe the last thing to add is the fact that because of the way this meet had happened Frank is the one who'd actually walked up to the army handler because of the way the whole thing had been staged. So Frank had curiosity about the handler. He wasn't just suddenly ambushed by someone who's saying, "Hey, we need to talk to you." Frank had already decided in his mind just as he walked up to this person that he wanted to speak to him. And I think in terms of just some of the tiny, tiny decisions and factors that play a part in something like this I think that's also significant.

Andrew Hammond: I really liked in the book the way that you inject happenstance back into things that went on. I think historians quite often seen intentionality, but Frank Hegarty getting in the van with many of the other things that you portray in the book sometimes people are just winging it. They're just making it up as they go along. So I thought that that was quite interesting and also you mentioned there the recruitment process. So much psychology can go into this. So much nuances and subtleties and approaching them obliquely so you never see them coming and so forth. So really, really fascinating stuff. So we've got this puzzle at the heart of the book, but I think it would be interesting to start embedding that in a deeper context now. So let's just start at the broadest level. So the troubles. Just for people that are not up to speed with this or for some -- for people that want to hear an encapsulation of the troubles by someone who spent many years researching them, give us just a few sentences on the troubles. What are we talking about here

Henry Hemming: We're talking about a conflict that has three really different ingredients. And I think I always find it helpful to think of them as distinct. It begins as a civil rights campaign and it begins with Catholics next to protestants campaigning in northern Ireland for one thing. They want to end discrimination against Catholics in northern Ireland. So it's a single issue campaign. It's inspired hugely by what's going on in America. It's inspired by Martin Luther King. It's inspired by all sorts of things that they're reading about in the newspapers and seeing on the news. And that's one of the ingredients. And there was at the time huge discrimination against Catholics in northern Ireland in terms of housing, in terms of jobs, in terms of even voting rights. And very soon after that it becomes something else. There's this second ingredient which comes in and that is a sectarian conflict. So the mostly protestant police begin to clamp down on the civil rights campaigners and you have the outline of a much more tribal conflict between Catholics and protestants. And they're not arguing about the kind of the details or the particulars of biblical references. This is just kind of us against them. This is about people wanting to stand their ground. This is about people being afraid of losing power and status. That's at the heart of it. And the third ingredient comes after this sectarian conflict begins to get out of hand and the violence becomes something that the local police cannot keep control of. And that's when the British army is sent in to the region and they begin to be deployed on to the streets of northern Ireland. And I think it's worth stressing they don't have a clue how to do this. They've got no experience of policing their own streets. And as a result mistakes begin to be made. And a lot of the tactics they're using are inappropriate, like completely inappropriate for that particular situation. And that begins to fuel the growth of a new part of the IRA and this is called the provisional IRA and the provisional IRA has one aim which is to bring about the unification of the island of Ireland. And it wants to do that by defeating the British army in northern Ireland. And so that is the third ingredient. You've got an insurgency essentially. And at different times in the troubles these three different things take on different importances, if that makes sense. Some are more prominent than others. But you've got enough with these three different ingredients to fuel a conflict indefinitely. I think it's really important to stress that even as late as the early 1990s there were people who were predicting that this conflict can just run and run and run. There's no obvious end to it because there's so much which is fueling it. So that's yeah. That's a way in to the troubles.

Andrew Hammond: Okay. So we have the troubles. Give us an overview of the shadow war, of the intelligence war. So not the individual stories and so forth, but I'm just thinking about the first 10 years then the change in strategy. More so, [inaudible 00:29:08] this kind of shift to covert special operations forces, intelligence, penetrations and so forth. So just give our viewers an overview of that intelligence war against the IRA or that the IRA fought against the British.

Henry Hemming: So to begin with when the army's first sent out there's their intelligence is terrible. They have very few resources devoted to gathering intelligence. And it's worth adding that a lot of people in the army at that time did not think highly of intelligence. They thought of people who were dedicated to intelligence as sometimes a bit strange, a bit weird, a bit sort of ineffective. They couldn't really understand the point of --

Andrew Hammond: Not necessarily wrong.

Henry Hemming: Yeah. Maybe. And I mean at the same time MI5. MI5 is devoted -- is an amazing fact. It had just two people on this northern Ireland desk at the start of the troubles. So MI5 in a very similar sense has almost no interest in what's going on and there's this famous moment where the prime minister at the time asks the director general of MI5, "What can intelligence do to help end the conflict in northern Ireland?" And the director general of MI5 says, "Nothing. This is like -- this has nothing to do with us. This is a matter for the police and it's a matter for the army. Leave us out of it." And there is -- the army begins to develop slightly better intelligence gathering structures in the years that follow, but it's still on the periphery. It's not -- it's not a priority. Towards the end of the 1970s this is when it begins to change.

Andrew Hammond: Just very briefly, Henry, before I forget, one of those two people that's assigned to northern Ireland is Stella Rimington. Is that correct?

Henry Hemming: Yes. It is. Yeah.

Andrew Hammond: Who goes on to be the director general of MI5 and who's on the spy museum board at one point.

Henry Hemming: Yes. She's -- And I think her story is fascinating. Brilliant. And she's also a wonderful spy novelist now. And --

Andrew Hammond: Sorry.

Henry Hemming: No, but this is also searching as well as listening to a podcast recently with Eliza Manningham-Buller who's another female director general of MI5 and she was talking a lot about just how hard it was to be a female intelligence officer in MI5 at that time. And just the extent of the misogyny and sexism that you would face. So Stella Rimington is an impressive and brave woman. She was one of only two people on the northern Ireland desk, but she later becomes one of the key figures after this kind of big shift towards intelligence. She becomes one of the key figures looking after this much larger intelligence effort run by MI5 focused on people like Martin McGuinness which begins later. So 10 years after the troubles have begun you have this shift and the army, MI5, to a smaller extent MI6, also the local police, they all begin to put much more emphasis on gathering intelligence. They begin to realize that having more soldiers, having more policemen, that in itself is not going to bring the IRA to a standstill. And that in itself is not going to bring about a political solution. These are the two things that the British are trying to achieve or at least some people on the British side are trying to achieve. And so there is this enormous shift. There's a former MI6 director who comes over, Maurice Oldfield. He's there to oversee this new intelligence gathering effort. And many more agents begin to be taken on. And one of these is Frank Hegarty. So he represents part of this big shift towards intelligence. And this is around about the same time that Scappaticci is also taken on. So he's another one who's taken on in the late 1970s. And I think what happens in the 10 years that follow is remarkable. And is a story which I've begun to tell in "Four Shots in the Night." I think it's a story which we're going to continue to find out more about in the years and the decades to come and one day there will be a far more comprehensive and detailed account of it. And I guess what's interesting about this is very simply the scale of this operation. And it's only recently come to light just how big it was. There's somebody called Father Dennis Bradley who was part of the consultative group on the past and he back in I think 2008 was shown classified government intelligence which revealed to him roughly how many agents there were being run within northern Ireland at any one time. And he went on the record to say it was as many as 800 agents which given the size of northern Ireland, given the size of the adult population at that time, that's a staggering figure. You know we've all heard of the Cambridge Five. We haven't heard so much about the northern Ireland 800. And you think of not just the 800 agents, but all of -- for each of those agents you have a handler. You have support staff. You've then got people who are not necessarily running agents, who are just doing surveillance operations, who are doing signals intelligence. It's a vast operation. Nothing on this scale had been tried before in northern Ireland. And there are good things that come from this. There's more intelligence than they've ever had before. It begins to slow up parts of the IRA. It begins to help accelerate Sinn Fein shift towards being this viable and incredible political force. But there's a flip side. And the flip side to all this is that you have all over northern Ireland you have agent handlers being faced with these incredibly difficult decisions about exactly what they should do with the intelligence they're receiving. And sometimes there are times when they receive intelligence which tells them about a forthcoming attack, tells them about the locations of weapons. And there are times when they choose not to act on that intelligence because they think that acting on that intelligence will endanger the source, will endanger their agent, or lead to the person who supplied the intelligence being killed. And this is where it becomes morally much more complex. And I guess what's also difficult, and this is something that I get into in the book, is that most of the handlers who were faced with these decisions didn't have adequate training. They didn't know what the law said. They didn't know exactly what the limits were to what they could and could not do. And a lot of the time they were as I alluded to earlier on in the talk just making it up as they went along, trying to use common sense, trying to do what seemed to be the most sensible thing. And certainly as we're beginning to find out mistakes were made. [ Static followed by a beep ] [ Typing sounds ]

Andrew Hammond: I mean these ethical quandaries come up all the time in the history of intelligence and espionage. Right? The Zimmermann telegram. We want to tell the Americans, but we don't want to tip our hand, let the Germans know that we've cracked their codes. Or the enigma machine. You know, there's this amount of people that will die if we don't do this, but there's even more people that will die if we do do this. So these things come up all the time and they're very, very fascinating. And I think they're one of the things that makes intelligence so rich. It's like humanity encapsulated in this very intense magnified kind of area. So I just wanted to ask a quick question as well about the level of penetration. So can you tell us a little bit more about tactical level, the operational level, even the strategic level agents of influence? So we've got Scappaticci. We've got Dennis Donaldson. And we've got Willie Carlin. We've got like how -- how deeply and thoroughly was the IRA penetrated let's say in the mid 1980s?

Henry Hemming: That's a really good question. I mean I can give you two quotes from former senior intelligence professionals that I refer to in the book. One of them was that the majority of the IRA army council, so these are the seven people at the very top of the IRA, the majority of the people on that council were either being run as agents or they had someone very close to them who was being run as an agent and could supply reliable, accurate, timely intelligence on what that person was doing. So that's one quote which is astonishing. Another quote is that one in three senior IRA figures were being run as agents who were compromised in some way. And again it's extremely hard to verify that. I hope in the decades to come we'll find out more about this. But all the indications are that certainly within the IRA there was a really significant degree of penetration. And part of the thing to add is that this wasn't just one intelligence organization. You had three. You had MI5. You had the local police. And you had the army. So they were each after different kinds of intelligence. So MI5 was more interested in strategic intelligence. It wanted to know more about what the senior IRA leaders were thinking. Which one of them was most likely to start pushing for a political solution? And also who was more likely to start pushing for military victory or a military solution? And people in the army generally wanted tactical intelligence. So the information about where a bomb was going to be planted, where weapons were being stored. And that's largely true also with the police in terms of the informants that they were running. But they also had different techniques, different ways of approaching possible agents, different ways of running them. And it's partly through these three sort of very different approaches that you have such an extraordinary degree of penetration. I think at the same time you can go too far with this. You can imagine that the IRA was being controlled by the British which it was not clearly. And I think there's certainly a tendency -- and I know this from so many conversations I had with people doing my research for "Four Shots in the Night." There is a tendency especially among disgruntled republicans or former republicans to imagine that the IRA was completely infiltrated. It wasn't the case, but there certainly was an extraordinary level of infiltration and more than most people realized at the time.

Andrew Hammond: And correct me if I'm wrong, but some of the rural cells of the IRA they continued to be more effective because they were more difficult to penetrate whereas the IRA in Belfast, for example, was much more compromised.

Henry Hemming: So some of the more rural units, but also some of the units operating in England were for whatever reason much harder to penetrate. And as a result the IRA continued to be effective as we know right up until the year -- the late 1980s and even parts of it beyond. So it's important not to I think succumb to the kind of mythology of the British completely controlling the IRA. That simply wasn't true. At the same time there were many agents inside and a lot of valuable information was being passed on.

Andrew Hammond: I mean it's astonishing really the level of the penetration. This leads on to the question. So, you know, you rightly caution there, you know, the IRA wasn't by any matter of means controlled by the British, but how much or what level of emphasis would you put on intelligence as a decisive factor in bringing an end to the troubles? So, for example, we can talk about Martin McGuinness and one of the IRA and Sinn Fein leaders, but to what extent were people like him just cashing in their chips? Were losing the war. One in every three operations is being broken up or compromised or the special air service are killing IRA members and so forth. So to what extent was it just this is not going well, let's cash in our chips? I know that's difficult to disassociate yourself from because when you spend years researching this you want to give weight to the stuff that you've been researching. But I just wondered if you could take a step back and say, "Here's a sober minded analysis of the role that intelligence actually played in bringing an end to the troubles in northern Ireland."

Henry Hemming: It's such an interesting question. I think the best way to think about it is in terms of what Martin McGuinness had to lose. And it comes a point in the early 1990s where he's beginning to think about his legacy. He's beginning to think about what he's achieved. And I think as early as the -- from the early 1980s he's beginning to talk about there being a non military solution. So it's clear that this is an idea that he's entertained. I think the kind of the best shortest answer I can give to your question is that intelligence was a catalyst. It wasn't -- it didn't create in Martin McGuinness or in Gerry Adams a new idea. It didn't persuade them to do something which otherwise they would not have done. But it accelerated a process. And it allowed McGuinness and Adams to get to a point where they felt that they had almost no other option than to try and move towards a political solution. But beyond that I think it's really important and I hope it's something which comes across in the book -- it's important to stress that both McGuinness and Adams took huge personal political risks to bring about the peace. And of course they contributed a huge amount to the conflict in the years before that. But they risked a lot in order to try and drag the IRA, especially the hard liners, especially the so-called army men, to drag them towards what became the good Friday agreement in 1998. And no matter how many agents you had around them, no matter how brilliant the intelligence was, they couldn't create that result. They couldn't create that courage to make those decisions on the part of McGuinness and Adams. So intelligence could only ever be a part of it. It could only ever be a catalyst of a process that was already underway. And as early as 1982 when Sinn Fein begins to go back into electoral politics that's when there's something to work with. There's something that can be accelerated. There's a process that the various agents and intelligence structures can begin to work with. So I mean I hope that's clear. Intelligence work accelerated a process that was already underway. And I think without -- let's imagine the kind of counterfactual in which there's simply zero intelligence. The army has no agents. MI5's not involved. The police decides, right, "We're no longer running agents." I think it's extremely likely that the hardliners inside the IRA would have taken control at some point. I think it's extremely likely that McGuinness and Adams might have been ousted, might have been moved to one side. And at the same time that the IRA would have done better militarily. There would have been a stronger argument for keeping going. And I don't think there would have been the same desire to bring about peace by the late 1990s. In other words the troubles would have kept going for longer.

Andrew Hammond: So just one final line of inquiry before I hand over to Amanda. So I just want to a little bit of a fast ball. You know a skeptic looking at Operation Kenova, so we have Scappaticci, British agent involved in 14 murders -- a skeptic would say that the largest murder inquiry in British history, 40 million pounds are being spent on this, these were all people that were probably going to have been killed anyway even if Scappaticci wasn't there. The order to kill them wasn't made by Scappaticci. It was made by people like Martin McGuinness. So skeptics could think well like why are we doing this. I know that Operation Kenova's very family centric. Well, what about the Omaha bombing, 29 dead, 200 injured? Jean McConville, a Catholic woman with nine kids who's disappeared. Her kids all get put into the care of foster and adoption facilities. Some of them are, you know, abused and religious [inaudible 00:47:00] and so forth. So I mean the one thing about the troubles is the suffering is spread quite widely. So why from a skeptic's point of view -- why are we spending 40 million pounds and making a family centric inquiry of people that were in the IRA when there's all these other people that were literally 2 year old kids or 12 year old boys like in Warrington that, you know, why don't we have something for them? Why are we not spending $40 million on them? So I just wanted to since we're in America and baseball season had just started wanted to throw that fast ball at you to see what your thoughts were.

Henry Hemming: I totally -- and I totally understand where you're coming from. I think it's a really important question to raise. Why -- I think at the heart of it, to give a kind of here is the most succinct answer, is the moral element of having a British agent who carried out those murders because I think when you take a step back as you just have done, when you look at the other cases that could have been investigated instead, and when you also look at the number of murders involved, to begin with Scappaticci was thought to have been associated with 50 murders, 5-0. And but it has, yeah, been revised down to 14. I don't want to say just 14 because that's still a huge number, but it is all the same 14. And I think it's a possibility that there were people working for the British government who knew about these murders. That's what changed it. And whether that was the right decision, whether or not in fact it shouldn't have been as important as it was made out to be, I don't know. But I think that's the main part of the reason why this is given such emphasis. And I think another part of the reason why this investigation lasted as long as it did, why it had access to so many government documents, why it ended up being 72 detectives working on it is to do with the man running it. And Jon Boutcher at a fairly early stage -- he's now the chief constable of the police service or northern Ireland. But at a fairly early stage he got his teeth into this. He really wanted to take it as far as he could possibly take it. And there were several moments early on when he could have not so much reduced the size of the investigation, but he could have -- he could have made for a less impactful investigation. He could have backed up at several points, but he chose not to. And there was quite an interesting moment. There's an interview that he gave. I think it's about three years ago or four years ago where he talked about why he was putting so much effort into this, why he was doing what he was doing, why he was speaking out, going on the record, speaking out against MI5, why he'd had Scappaticci arrested and why he was going so far to try and seek more information and persuade more witnesses to come forward. And he said something like the way we respond to moments like this in our past is what defines us as a country and as a democracy. And I think that sort of hints at something else that's going on here. This idea that there's an element of shame and it's important to address it, to have it laid out in the open, to pick over everything that happened in order that something like this does not happen again. And even if Scappaticci died before charging decisions could be made, the various case files that were handed on, I think the fuller impact of this investigation can be seen in the changes to the British law. So there are two acts of parliament that came in. One which has changed the way that agents can be run, but the other has to do with legacy in northern Ireland. So this -- I think yeah. The full impact of this investigation it will take some time for historians to pick over. But I think we need to look beyond just the criminal justice element of it. We need to look at the wider impact and I guess yeah. That would be the short answer to your question is it's because of the moral element. That's why it was given such emphasis. [ Music ]

Andrew Hammond: Thanks for listening to this episode of "Spycast." Please follow us on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoy the show, please tell your friends and loved ones. Please also consider leaving us a five star review. Coming up next week on "Spycast."

Speaker 1: We know the CIA investigated the Kennedy assassination, the Miami station. We know they didn't believe the lone gunman scenario. Not for a second. And here's the thing. We got the document. We know there was an investigation. The CIA never shared the results with anybody. So we don't know what they concluded.

Andrew Hammond: If you have feedback, you can reach us by email at spycast.spymuseum.org or on X at intlspycast. If you go to our page at thecyberwire.com/podcast/spycast you can find links to further resources, detailed show notes, and full transcripts. I'm your host Andrew Hammond and my podcast content partner is Erin Dietrick. The rest of the team involved in the show is Mike Mincey, Memphis Vaughn the Third, Emily Coletta, Emily Rens, Afua Anokwa, Ariel Samuel, Elliott Peltzman, Tre Hester, and Jen Eiben. The show's brought to you from the home of the world's preeminent collection of intelligence and espionage related artifacts, the International Spy Museum. [ Music ]