Stakeknife’s Dirty War

Caoimhin O’Muraile ☭ This work by Richard O’Rawe is an excellent exposure of the IRAs Internal Security Unit, often referred to as the “Nutting Squad” by those who hoped they would never have dealings with it.

The British Army and the ‘Force Research Unit’ in particular were guilty of sending men and women, many of them totally innocent of being a ‘Tout’ or Informer, to their certain deaths as their man inside the ISU, Freddie Scappaticci, went to work using his interrogation techniques and methods of torture to extract confessions from people. His methods and those of them under his command were brutal and primeval to say the least. My thoughts immediately on reading Richard O’Rawe’s graphic work cast my thoughts back to documentaries about 1645, England, during the first English Civil War.

What have the events in England 340 years before the Scappaticci reign of terror got to do with anything in Belfast and the six counties during the ISU time of torture? Well, nothing and everything! Nothing other than that the deeds carried out by a certain Mathew Hopkins, the self-styled ‘Witch Finder General’, were done during the ravages of a civil war between the Parliamentarians and the Roundheads. Everything in regards the methods used by Hopkins to force people into admitting cohabiting, one confessing to having ‘marital relationships’ with Satan, having being tortured and other forms of Witchcraft were admitted to. Here is where parallels can be drawn between Hopkins and Scappaticci. Both men used torture to extract confessions from people to perceived crimes which they had not committed. In many cases it was a case of ‘saying or confessing to anything to stop the torture’. Just as Freddie Scappaticci stalked the six counties on behalf of his British handlers seeking out victims so too much earlier did Mathew Hopkins stalk East Anglia, Essex, Norfolk and Sussex during his reign of terror. When the first English Civil War ended in 1646 so too did Hopkins. Scappaticci reigned much longer until he was finally exposed as a British Agent in 2003.

Hopkins would, as part of his interrogation technique, often tell his helpless captives, usually young women, though not exclusively - his first victim, Elizabeth Clarke, was elderly and blind with one leg and therefore severely disabled, but Hopkins still had her tortured into confession - the supposed Witch, if they confessed freedom awaited. What the ‘Witch Finder General’ really meant was the gallows awaited! This system of interrogation was used by Scappaticci over three hundred years later, but reference to Hopkins as an example and comparison is highly unlikely. It is also more than unlikely Richard never even considered Mathew Hopkins as a historical parallel to gauge Scappaticci by, it is purely my own comparison.

Richard O’Rawe exposes the extent to which the British had penetrated the IRA right up to the highest level. It could be argued that many of the attacks involving bombings and shootings carried out by the IRA were in fact done with the full knowledge of the British. The British Army at the highest level might just as well have given the order to carry out these attacks resulting in many civilian deaths. In fact the British Army could, albeit on tenuous ground, be accused of carrying out a war against the peoples of London, Manchester, Birmingham, Warrington etc due to their refusal to prevent such attacks had they known of them!! Failure in order to protect their agents placed high up in the IRA? Due in no small part to this penetration they were de facto running the Internal Security Unit for the IRA, or more appropriately, for themselves using the IRA.

This penetration of the republican movement as a whole could be likened to the British capture of the German ‘Enigma’ machine during World War Two which gave away all the Axis moves before they even began! The modern ‘Enigma’ machine was a human being called Freddie Scappaticci!

How high the British actually had penetrated the IRA is difficult to say, but they were certainly high enough up to influence republican strategy. In their book; Stakeknife: Britain’s Secret Agents in Ireland, Martin Ingram (AKA Ian Hurst) and Gregg Harkin compliment Richard O’Rawe’s analysis of Britain’s penetration of Irish republicanism. The British would allow lesser agents, ‘touts’, to be executed to save bigger fish. They would know, via ever ready Freddie, who was going to be ‘topped’ and when. They would decide whether to intervene and save a life or let the ISU continue and execute the victim now surplus to requirements. Many of Scappaticci’s victims were not informers or ‘touts’ in any way yet, once Frederick had them in his captivity these people succumbed to torture and would admit to anything just to have the pain ended. Like Hopkins centuries earlier Freddie would often tell his victims that ‘if they confessed, they were free to go’, he’d even drive them home! While driving the grateful victim to where they thought was home Scappaticci kept them blindfolded to maintain ‘security’. Once they arrived at their destination, not the victim’s home as the hapless soul thought, but their final destination in life, Freddie would watch them stumble along blindfolded before he shot them in the back of the head. He would then on occasions laugh about his trickery and skill at getting confessions and how his victims, ‘thinking they were going home’ would stagger about ‘blindfolded in the dark often stumbling over’ before he shot them.

Not all Scappaticci’s victims died, most did but there were exceptions who lived to tell the tale. One such survivor was Paddy McDade who gave a harrowing account of his experiences with the ISU. Despite being hooded McDade could see his torturers through the thin fabric, they were two notorious thugs called “Burke and Hare” probably named such after the 19th century body snatchers. McDade was given no break, it was relentless torture:

See during the whole thing, it was like a day out to them. Nothing. It was a normal thing to do that. And the wire, the clothes wire they had tied me up with, I was still tied like that for three days, into my arms, into my ankles excruciating it was.

Paddy continued:

Twenty-four-hour interrogation. All night. Bollock naked. I shit and pissed in the sleeping bag they made me lie in, upside down. The sleeping bag covered the top half of me upside down, and it was tied at the bottom. (P133).

Interrogatees were stripped and burnt with cigarette ends while tied up sometimes with “wire”. They were waterboarded, and countless other painful methods were used to extract a confession. Like the ‘Witch Finder General’ centuries earlier it did not matter one jot about a person’s guilt or innocence: all that counted was a confession. Under such pain and suffering, in both cases, torture by Hopkins or Scappaticci, with the promise of the suffering ending and a return home who would not admit to a little witchcraft or touting? Anything to stop the pain and ongoing suffering which increased in severity by the day. Of course, some of Scappaticci’s victims were informers who had caused a lot of damage to the republican cause and for these people little sympathy should be shown. But many, probably a majority, were innocent of anything and they along with the guilty had to go through this hell and, usually, death! Images of Orwell’s Animal Farm are conjured up as Napoleons Kangaroo Courts sent the ‘innocent with the guilty’ to their dooms! Many of the guilty were fellow British agents who the British side were prepared to sacrifice in order to protect other higher placed spies. All very James Bond like but, unlike Ian Fleming's less than convincing rubbish, this was real life.

Scappaticci had two sets of master to please. Firstly his role in the IRA was to sniff out informers which, from their point of view, he did successfully. This should perhaps tell us all something about the nature of that organisation and its methods. An organisation which genuinely set out to ‘free the Irish people and Ireland’ became in time a tyrannical group almost as bad as their opponent’s, the British occupiers! The second and equally important people Scappaticci had to satisfy were his British handlers. Whether he knew it or not he, himself, could become surplus to requirements any second to his British employers! There was less chance of him becoming a surplus item so long as the bodies came off the Scappaticci conveyor belt and his fellow agents were thus protected.

Richard O’Rawes book highlights the severity of the two equally ruthless organisations who were at war, the IRA and British Army. The British as many people will be aware were more than capable of shooting down innocent men and women in the street. I cite the ‘Ballymurphy Massacre’, Belfast August 1971 and Derry, January 1972, ‘Bloody Sunday’, as two examples of many British Army killings of civilians in cold blood. The IRA were, in theory, supposed to be freeing the Irish people from such atrocities yet, it would appear, they too were capable of carrying out such evil deeds! If you cannot trust those tasked to liberate then who can the oppressed trust? The IRA often likened themselves, at times with much justification, to the French Resistance against Nazi occupation and terror during the Second World War. Did the French Resistance torture suspected informers? Yes, to a point until it became obvious a person was innocent at which moment in time the interrogations, severe as they were, would stop and release was forthcoming. Wars are brutal affairs which, it is true, do make people act out of normal everyday character. As Richard O’Rawe highlights in the case of ‘Agent Stakeknife’ to Scappaticci this appears to have been everyday life! Early on in the book Freddie was described as “a bully” and a “violent man” so this kind of work would have, it would seem, be second nature to him. As for scruples and honour, like the sickening dual part he played working for the occupying forces, for him such scruples and honour were words for other genuine and honourable volunteers. Scappaticci held no scruples, no honour, no pride in himself, just pure nastiness and treachery as his surviving examples would, as did Paddy McDade, testify.

Richard O'Rawe, 2023, Stakeknife's Dirty War: The Inside Story of Scappaticci, the IRA's Nutting Squad and the British Spooks Who Ran the War. Merrion Press. ISBN-13: ‎978-1785374470.

Caoimhin O’Muraile is Independent Socialist Republican and Marxist.