Voices from the Grave: Two Men's War in Ireland (40 page)

When Gerry Adams and Ivor Bell set about reorganising and reviving the IRA after their release from Long Kesh in the late 1970s, the guiding star in their journey was the concept of the ‘long war’, which brought along with it the necessity for a whole new and systematic way of dealing with British Intelligence’s penetration of the IRA’s ranks. The ‘long war’ idea was itself an admission that the violence of the early 1970s could never be repeated. It was also an acknowledgement that British Intelligence had put the IRA on the defensive, and between them the three groups ranged against it – MI5, Military Intelligence and the RUC Special Branch – had a better measure of the IRA than at any point before.

Although it was never explicitly stated, the ‘long war’ doctrine also seemed to be founded on the hope that if the IRA could survive long enough then something might come along to improve its fortunes in a dramatic way. As it turned out that was not a bad approach, the 1981 hunger strikes being evidence that this is exactly what did happen. But to do all this, the IRA had to pay closer attention to its internal security than ever before. It is an astonishing feature of the IRA’s story that for the first decade or so of its existence it had no dedicated section entrusted to countering hostile penetration. Keeping an eye out for treachery was a job performed by Company Intelligence Officers (I/Os) but that was only part of a brief that otherwise devoted more resources to collecting information for targeting purposes. Occasionally, as in the case of the Four Square Laundry operation, an I/O such as Brendan Hughes would hit paydirt, but as Gerry Adams himself admitted, the IRA ‘took their eye off the ball’ after that success.
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By the late 1970s the integrity of the Company structure had been undermined by British penetration, forcing Adams and Bell to propose a cellular structure for the IRA so as to make infiltration more difficult. Inside Long Kesh, Adams and Bell made the debriefing of new internees and sentenced prisoners mandatory. Newcomers to their cages would be closely questioned about their experiences at the hands of RUC interrogators for any clue that they might have been turned. Reports would be smuggled out to the IRA leadership for any necessary follow-up. This was the start of a much more rigorous and organised approach to counter-intelligence. When Adams and Bell had secured control of the IRA, by 1979 or so, this debriefing requirement was extended to every IRA member arrested for questioning by the RUC. To handle this task, the Security Department was established and the hunting of agents became a priority for the IRA. Initially the Department’s brief was confined to Belfast but gradually its reach was extended throughout the organisation, making the Security Department a larger and more powerful part of the IRA. As part of this process, the so-called ‘Green Book’ was drawn up to give IRA recruits lessons in how to
resist police interrogation and what the consequences would be if they failed. The manual instructed IRA members to stay silent during questioning, but it became accepted in the IRA that any recruit who had not been ‘green-booked’, that is who had not been given the chance to read what it said about resisting interrogation, could not be executed for informing. At its peak the Department had a staff of around a dozen and it had sweeping authority to investigate virtually any aspect of the IRA. And like all secret police forces, the Security Department was feared and hated in equal measure by those it kept under watch, not least because its members policed the IRA for signs of dissent.

The Security Department worked a little bit like an electrical junction box in the IRA. So many wires passed through the box, so extensive was the Department’s knowledge of activists and operations, that British Intelligence made penetration of this inner sanctum the highest priority, not just because of the information that would come its way but because this could help Intelligence Chiefs protect and advance agents in other parts of the IRA. Not surprisingly therefore, the story of the Security Department is replete with allegations of high-level treachery. At least two former Directors of the Security Department are suspected of having worked for the British over the years. The first to fall under suspicion was a former British special-services soldier, John Joe Magee, who headed the Department for around a decade. The extraordinary aspect of his tenure is that it should never have happened. Magee had been sentenced to death by the IRA in the mid-1970s after it was learned that he had been consorting with two members of the UVF and a number of prostitutes. He and the Loyalists were to be shot dead and the prostitutes given punishment shootings but the operation against them had to be postponed and then it was somehow forgotten. Magee rehabilitated himself and then made his way into IRA Security by joining a bombing team attached to the Second Battalion in Belfast that would later form the core of the new Security Department. During Magee’s time with the team a number of city-centre bombs failed to explode, creating the suspicion
that the devices had been tampered with. When he was put in charge of security in North Armagh, the IRA there ‘collapsed’.
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Those who oversaw John Joe Magee’s appointment, in the mid-1980s, would later claim they had known nothing of the IRA death sentence against him. In such a way, the person given the job of protecting the IRA from British infiltration had a track record sure to make any agent handler salivate in anticipation of what was possible.

While the case against John Joe Magee, who is now dead, was never proved, there is less doubt about the other Internal Security Chief named as a spy, Freddie Scappaticci. A member of one of several Belfast-based, Italian-Irish families that have been involved in the Provisional IRA, ‘Scap’ as his IRA colleagues called him, was John Joe Magee’s deputy and succeeded him as head of IRA Security. He joned the IRA in 1970 but was interned a year later. After his release in 1975 he got involved in IRA intelligence work and then moved into the Security Department when it was established. He spent the next fifteen years or so working for it. In 2003 he was outed in the Irish media as the infamous double agent known as ‘Steak knife’, about whose identity there had been feverish media and Republican speculation for some years. ‘Steak knife’ had been named as an agent working for a section of British Military Intelligence known as the Force Research Unit, which ran agents inside the IRA and Loyalist groups in conjunction with MI5 and the RUC Special Branch. ‘Steak knife’ or Scappaticci had been working for the British since the late 1970s and was a ‘walk-in’ agent who volunteered his services allegedly after being given a bad beating by an IRA colleague. Although Freddie Scappaticci denied claims that he was ‘Steak knife’, the assertion that he was had been made by a credible source: a former Force Research Unit NCO who had first revealed ‘Steak knife’s’ existence in 1999. ‘Martin Ingram’, the soldier’s pseudonym, claimed Scappaticci had been allowed by his handlers to get people killed in order to protect his cover. Some estimates put the number of his victims at fifty. Three years after he was exposed, the Belfast High Court heard that Scappaticci had
gone into hiding because of a fear he could be killed. The court imposed a media ban on revealing his whereabouts and banned the publication of recent photographs.

By the time Brendan Hughes took over, the Security Department had been well infiltrated by the British and the suspicion that the IRA, especially in Belfast, was being subverted by double agents was widespread elsewhere in the organisation. But the immediate problem facing Hughes was a very different one: to root out torturers in the Security Department, in particular a much feared duo known within the IRA as ‘Burke and Hare’, after the notorious nineteenth-century Scottish bodysnatchers. The pair routinely used violence and sensory deprivation against suspects and employed the IRA equivalent of water-boarding against some. Hughes got them court-martialled and thrown out of the IRA but they were soon allowed back into the Security Department, albeit at a lower level.

When Brendan Hughes agreed to take on the Security Department brief as well as GHQ Operations, he had unwittingly begun a journey that was to end in disillusionment with the IRA and flight from Belfast. Thanks to an incident so infused with chicanery and double-dealing that it could easily have leapt from the pages of a John Le Carré novel, his conviction grew that the IRA was thoroughly infiltrated by the British. He also suspected that a blind eye was being turned to corruption on the part of well-connected activists and that the leadership, for whatever reason, was not willing to do much about it all.

The figure at the centre of the drama was a gregarious thirty-five-year-old estate agent and wheeler-dealer by the name of Joe Fenton from the Andersonstown area of West Belfast. Although not an IRA member himself, Fenton was a friend to many people who were and had so fully won the IRA’s trust in the city that he had become a facilitator for the Belfast Brigade, providing cheap homes to well-placed figures, safe houses for IRA meetings or lovers’ trysts and empty houses whose floors could be opened to make hiding places for IRA weapons. His connections in the property business meant that for Republicans he was the person to go to if they
wanted a mortgage, especially when they were unemployed and not eligible for a home loan. Joe Fenton would happily forge evidence that the applicants held down good, well-paying jobs, even if this made the mortgage-holder guilty of fraud. He also provided the Belfast IRA with vehicles to transport explosives and weapons across the Irish border from mother dumps and fenced stolen goods for those IRA members who engaged in private-enterprise robberies on the side. All in all, Joe Fenton was a great friend and helper to the IRA in Belfast but he was also an agent working for the RUC Special Branch, possibly one of the most valuable ever. The homes and safe houses he provided were bugged; the weapons hidden in empty houses were ‘jarked’ so the security forces could keep track of them, and the vehicles used to ferry weapons put under close surveillance. As for those who had arranged fraudulent mortgages via Fenton, they were perfect candidates for blackmail by the police.

Joe Fenton survived as an informer because he had a powerful protector and sponsor in the IRA. Harry Burns was a scion of one of Belfast’s oldest and most respected Republican families, and he was related by marriage to Gerry Adams. From the St James district of the Falls Road, Burns had been badly disabled when a bomb he was carrying exploded prematurely. Whether it was due to his disability or because he so trusted his friend Joe Fenton, Burns would break IRA rules and get Fenton to drive him to supposedly highly secret IRA meetings. How much information he helped the Special Branch obtain in this and other ways, how many weapons and explosives shipments he helped betray and how many IRA members were blackmailed into becoming informers themselves because of his treachery can only be guessed at. When the Belfast IRA finally moved against Joe Fenton they killed him before he could be thoroughly interrogated and so his hugely valuable secrets went to the grave with him. Joe Fenton was killed before Brendan Hughes could properly question him.