Four Shots in the Night, Part 2: The Spymaster's Dilemma | Northern Ireland
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I'm Rhiannon Needs, and this is True Spies from Spyscape Studios. Four Shots in the Night, Part Two. The Spymaster's Dilemma. The year is 1984, and Frank Hegarty, a new recruit of the Provisional IRA's Quartermaster Division, has just been given an assignment.

So the first job Frank is given is to hide a small number of rifles and some ammunition somewhere in Derry. And this is really difficult because he obviously he can't just dig a hole in his garden or put it somewhere where he thinks the police or the army might find it. What makes Frank's decision even more difficult is the little detail of his collaboration with the British army. By hiding the weapons somewhere they might be discovered, he could risk exposure.

The spy needs to get this right. And he thinks and thinks, he speaks to his handler about this, and they come up with the idea of building a place, building what's called a hide, where they can store these weapons. Obviously, they've got to keep them dry so they can be used. And they had the idea of building a hide in the local cemetery in Derry. A plot as brilliant as it is brazen.

A cemetery containing so many casualties of the Troubles will be considered hallowed ground by both sides. No British force would dare search such a place for fear of the uproar. Frank goes in there, he begins to build this and then stores the weapons in this place. When Frank next meets with his handlers, he tells them the exact location of the cache. In doing so, he places his future in their hands.

And this brings us to something that I call in the book the spymaster's dilemma. And this is something which is as old as espionage and will continue for as long as there are people running spies. And the spymaster's dilemma boils down to one simple question. Will I save more lives if I act on this piece of intelligence? Or will I save more lives if I do not? And that's the question that the people running Frank ask.

were trying to answer when they found out about these rifles if frank's handlers decide to remove the weapons then perhaps they'll avert an attack they might save lives but they'll also compromise an asset one who has only just been ushered into the inner circle of the ira

And what makes it so difficult, this calculation they're trying to make, is that the picture is never complete. So they don't know who's going to be using these weapons, where they're going to be using it, what the target is, etc.

Similarly, there is no telling how useful an asset might continue to be in the future. In an organisation as volatile as the IRA, fortunes and favour shift at the drop of a hat. You don't know how much information your agent is going to supply, how many lives they could save in the future if they stay on.

and get past this first particular hurdle, whatever it is. That's just kind of the bare outline of this dilemma that the spymasters were facing, the people running Frank had to resolve. And on this occasion, they decided to keep these weapons in play. A decision that cannot fail to have consequences. Not very long after, someone who's close to the IRA comes up to him and says, we need one of those rifles. We need one of those rifles for a job that's coming up.

Doesn't say what the job is, doesn't say what the target is, anything like that. But Frank Dooley gets one of these rifles, supplies it to this intermediary, and that appears to be the end of it. Except, of course, it's not the end of it. Not even close. This rifle is then handed to a local IRA volunteer. His nickname is Nelson. And that's because he's only got one eye that works, and he lost the other one early in the troubles to a rubber bullet.

On Easter Monday of 1984, Nelson is amongst a small group of IRA soldiers who ambush two military Land Rovers driving down a street less than a mile from the cemetery. Petrol bombs are hurled at the vehicles, causing one to catch a flame.

In the chaos, a 20-year-old British soldier by the name of Neil Clarke desperately swings open his door and leaps out of the blazing vehicle. And Nelson puts his good eye to the telescopic sights on this rifle and he takes aim. Nelson pulls the trigger and he kills Neil Clarke, the young soldier. Up to this point in Frank Hegarty's career as a spy, his contributions to either side of the conflict have been difficult to quantify.

A tip-off about a personnel change here, a shipment of smuggled booze there. But now, Frank's infiltration has entered the realms of life and death.

His actions have a body count. This is a really difficult moment in terms of the morality of what's going on here. The death of Neil Clarke is traumatic for his family, for the people who knew him, for the people who were serving alongside him. It's traumatic in a different way for the people who are running Frank and who've made this decision to keep these weapons in place. With the murder of a young soldier on a Belfast street...

the scales of the spymaster's dilemma have tipped. - What this meant for Frank was that there was more pressure on him in many ways to supply information that would save more lives in the years to come. - In the first part of this story, the author Henry Hemming introduced us to Frank Hegarty as he walked his dog early one morning in 1980.

As dawn broke over Derry, he encountered a stranger who offered him a part in a battle to bring the troubles to an end. When Frank accepted that offer and began spying on the IRA, the trajectory of his life changed dramatically.

At first, he offered only what intelligence he could gather from the conversations he overheard in Republican pubs or his encounters with IRA men at the track where he raced his greyhounds. But in 1984, he was called upon to do more. There's some key context to that request, which we have so far only skirted around. It has to do with one of the most storied figures in the history of the IRA. It has to do with a man named Bobby Sands.

Bobby Sands was a young IRA volunteer and he was caught up in a gunfight with the police and he was sent to prison as a result. It was in a prison known as The Maze that Bobby Sands would etch his name in the history books with a hunger strike.

And the hunger strike was designed to achieve a series of things. But the thing that everybody remembers is the right for people who belong to the IRA, who've been imprisoned, to wear their own clothes and not to be treated as criminals, not to be treated as ordinary prisoners. They wanted to be treated as prisoners of war. And this is something that the British government at that time decided they weren't going to budge on.

This standoff quickly escalated into a media frenzy, and the IRA saw an opportunity in that.

Bobby Sands, very soon after he went on hunger strike, a by-election was called for one of the constituencies within Northern Ireland. And someone in the IRA had the idea of putting up Bobby Sands as a candidate. And this is what went ahead and happened. Bobby Sands, still in jail, still on hunger strike, becomes the candidate in this by-election and he wins.

This became a galvanising moment for the Republican movement. This becomes a huge story all over the world. And not long after this, Bobby Sands, who is still refusing to eat and the government is still refusing to back down, he tragically dies. And the reaction to this was enormous. It was global. It was angry.

For the British government, this was a spiralling catastrophe, one they needed to contain as quickly as possible. And at the same time, what's so interesting about this whole episode is that around about this time, secret conversations are beginning between the IRA and the British government. Conversations that would not become public for many, many years. So just after Bobby Sands has died...

The government begins to negotiate with the IRA via a middleman. There's an MI6 officer and a local businessman in Derry who coordinate the exchange of messages and information. And there's a really interesting moment where there's an offer from the British government which is accepted by the hunger strikers in the prison. A deal that would stop the ongoing hunger strikes in their tracks, giving the British government respite from the onslaught of bad press.

But, and this is alleged by one of those people who was there at the time, Gerry Adams on the outside did not want the deal to go ahead. He saw, it's alleged, that the hunger strike was having such a positive impact on the standing and the popularity of the IRA and Sinn Fein that it was better to let the hunger strike continue. So it did. A total of 10 people died as a result of the hunger strike and then it ended.

This, on the face of it, was another painful failure for the government. But the emergency negotiations that precluded it opened the door to a new path, one previously thought impossible. Part of the fallout from this was that the British government began to understand that there were some people in the IRA with whom they could possibly negotiate. In other words...

Rather than a purely military solution to the troubles, what if a political one could be found? And there's a really interesting document that I found when I was researching Four Shots in the Night. And it's the most senior MI5 figure in Northern Ireland writing to the Prime Minister, to Margaret Thatcher. And in it he says he believes that Martin McGuinness and Gerry Adams...

a people who could be encouraged, as he put it, to enter to a political solution. And this is really significant. He doesn't specify exactly how this encouraging could happen, but it's one of the first times we have documented instance of encouraging

someone in MI5 saying, we think these are the people to focus on because they seem to have both the political clout within the IRA, but also the mindset and the intelligence and the flexibility to bring something like this about. And it's a huge development. And it's not one that everyone in MI5 suddenly comes around to, but this is where it begins. And this idea slowly gains traction in the years that follow.

Eventually, that idea will filter into the operational practices of all the intelligence services working in Northern Ireland, guiding their hands as they make strategic decisions. They would spend the next years attempting to get as close to the two most powerful figures in the IRA as they could. It is in that context that Frank Hegarty is instructed in 1984 to join his local IRA and get as close to Martin McGuinness as he possibly can.

It also relates to the operations of another British spy, 70 miles away in Belfast, a man who considered Gerry Adams a close personal friend. She's made up her mind.

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When we last saw Freddy Scappaticci, he had successfully regained entry to the IRA after being unceremoniously kicked out. Now that he's back on the inside, he wastes no time climbing the ranks.

So Freddy Scappaticci soon becomes established within the IRA. He becomes extremely trusted. And he also becomes a member of something called the Nutting Squad. And this is the unit within the IRA whose job is to interrogate spies. And if the order comes back from the top brass of the IRA to have that particular person killed, then usually the job is given to the Nutting Squad. When it comes to spymaster's dilemmas,

Few could be starker than this one. If Freddy Scappaticci is to join the Nutting Squad, he will be expected to kill. - So when Scappaticci's handlers first hear that he might be joining the Nutting Squad, they immediately think about ways that they can reduce the risk of their agent being involved in any kind of murder. That's the thing that they're clearly worried about. - And in fact, there are certain measures they can take to protect against that possibility.

They make sure that there is a device in Scappaticci's home disguised as a radio, which can eavesdrop on what's going on. In case someone from the Nutting Squad comes into his house, gives details of an upcoming operation, they can overhear it. There's also a button that Scappaticci can press to send a kind of panic signal to his handlers. There are also pills that they give Scappaticci, which he can take, which will make him sick about half an hour later.

And the idea there is that he could say, "Okay, fine, I'll come along, do the job, take one of these pills while no one is watching." Then half an hour later, start vomiting, in which case they say, "Right, we don't want you involved in this. Off you go."

But even with those tricks up his sleeve, Freddie will almost certainly only be able to avoid his duties for so long. There'll be occasions when he's probably going to be involved, and I think his handlers would have known that. But then, on the other side of the coin, there are the lives he might be able to save, lives he does save.

once he's been sworn into the ira's dedicated execution unit freddie scabatici is someone who hears about spies that are about to be interrogated before they're actually taken away and one of the times he hears about someone who's about to be picked up by the ira is in 1985 when he hears about willie carlin who's just been accused of being a british spy which indeed he is and

Scappaticci passes this on straight away to his handler and this information is then passed on to Willie Carlin's handlers and Carlin himself is given a call and he's told, "Look, you've got 24 hours to get out of your home because the IRA are coming for you." - Willie Carlin begins hastily dissembling the life he has built in Northern Ireland. The frenzied conversations with family, the cherished belongings shoved into suitcases,

You can hear from Willie himself in the True Spies episode, Blood on the Waterside. And Scappaticci, meanwhile, because he's part of the Nutting Squad, one of the things he also does is try to slow down the Nutting Squad to buy more time for Willie Carlin. So he tries to delay the moment that they actually go to Carlin's house. And this means that when the Nutting Squad eventually arrive at Willie Carlin's house, there's no one there.

And Carlin has been relocated with his family and he starts a new life overseas. So Freddy Scappaticci saved Carlin's life on that occasion. A British spy saved from certain death. Consider Carlin's life a return on the investment in Scappaticci. And over the years that followed, that investment would continue to pay dividends.

As soon as Scappaticci becomes established within the Nutting Squad and eventually he'll become the number two inside this unit, the amount of information and the quality of information is unlike anything else that the British have. It was proven to be a valuable part of the intelligence picture. And I think what's also interesting is just...

how long he was able to provide information for, but just the volume. There was so much of it, and that's what really set him apart. He wasn't just doing it in a half-hearted way. He wanted to get across as much information as he possibly could, and that's why he became such a valuable source to the British. But Freddy Scappaticci is far from the only spy generating solid intelligence in Northern Ireland during this period.

there is another agent climbing the ranks, some 70 miles away in Derry. And though neither of them knows it yet, they are already moving towards one another with a terrible inevitability. It is only a matter of time before their worlds collide.

So in 1985, Frank becomes involved in the biggest IRA operation he's ever been aware of. And this is to do with some arms all the way from Libya, which had been sent by Colonel Gaddafi, the then leader of that country. And these are a gift to the IRA. And it's a huge cache of weapons. It involves explosives, rifles, ammunition, enough to arm a small terrorist organization, according to one military source.

There is only one condition to Colonel Gaddafi's magnanimous offer: the weapons must be used in attacks against Britain. The IRA are all too happy to accept those terms. But accepting Gaddafi's gift is one thing. Actually smuggling it into Northern Ireland, under the watchful gaze of the British military, is something else altogether. The vast shipment will need to be handled with the utmost sensitivity.

So the idea is the IRA are going to smuggle all of these arms into Northern Ireland. And in order to do that, they need to find a series of safe houses just over the border in the Republic. And from there, they will slowly smuggle these arms into Northern Ireland. But they also need someone who can look after these weapons while they're in the safe houses. And Martin McGuinness decides that that person should be Frank Hegarty.

Remember, Frank Hegarty is still a relatively new recruit to the IRA's quartermaster division. Someone whose trustworthiness has been directly questioned by senior leaders of the IRA. This is a huge job and I've spoken to a lot of people who recall the sense of shock that someone like Frank was given such an important role.

For Martin McGuinness to entrust this task to Frank Hegarty speaks to the depth of the bond that has formed between them. On one particular occasion, he goes with Martin McGuinness to go and look at the different places where the arms are going to be stored. And they agree on the exact location of where these weapons should be held. And then they go back to Derry. When Frank gets home, he dutifully reports the various locations of the arms caches to his handlers.

Just as with the cemetery store, they now have a profoundly difficult decision to make. So the British are now aware of where this enormous stash of weapons are. And this is off the scale compared to anything else they've heard about before. It's the first time they're aware there being this shipment of Libyan weapons. And they're really worried. They're really worried about what could happen if they get into Northern Ireland. And at the same time,

They know that if they were to act, if they were just to tell the Irish police, there's a really good chance that their agent, Frank Hegarty, would be in trouble. In the best case scenario, Frank would have to leave his lifelong home at the drop of a hat, never to return. I need not even mention the worst case scenario.

So this is the dilemma that's beginning to face the British. What do they do with this information? And then, in many ways, the decision is taken out of their hands. In November 1985, the British government had sought to reach a new understanding with the Republic of Ireland, one that would see the two governments cooperate to bring about an end to the Troubles.

The basis was to be an open exchange of intelligence. And yet, as the year drew to a close, almost nothing of substance had changed hands.

And as a result of a political process which centered on the Anglo-Irish agreement, the British government feel they need to give the Irish some kind of amazing piece of intelligence in order to get an intelligence sharing relationship going between the two countries and to show the world and show especially Protestants in Northern Ireland intelligence.

that this new relationship between Britain and Ireland is working. This agreement is a good thing. Someone somewhere decides they're going to pass on the location of Frank's arms dumps. In the upper echelons of government and security, it is decided that all three of Frank's stores will be raided in one swoop at the end of January. Yet scarcely a thought is given to the safety of the agent who has made this PR victory possible.

And just before the police raid these three safe houses in the Republic of Ireland, Frank Hegarty is told by his handler that they need to meet. And this is serious. They meet. The handler explains the situation. One imagines that the handler must have felt a great deal of guilt as he delivered the news. You must leave your home immediately. There is no time to gather your family or your beloved dogs. You must go now.

He's then taken away and he's flown over to England. And suddenly Frank has left behind his life in Derry. And it's a traumatic, really upsetting moment because he hasn't had a chance to say goodbye. He didn't see this coming. This is an enormous shock. And now he's in a safe house in England and he's trying to work out what to do next. Not that Frank has many options to choose from.

Frank's options are essentially whether to stay or to go, whether to stay and try and build a new life in England. He's been offered money by the British. They can buy him a house. They'll give him money to start a new job, a new career, a new life. But there's also part of him, the things, maybe I can talk my way out of this. Maybe I can actually go home. I can see my mum again. I can see my partner. I can see my kids again.

Maybe I can persuade Martin McGuinness that it wasn't actually me. Or if it was me, it was not something I meant to do. I was forced to do it, that kind of thing. At the center of this fantasy sits Martin McGuinness, the IRA leader who has vouched for Frank time and time again.

And on one of the occasions that he's on the phone to his mum, Martin McGuinness is in his mum's house at that time. And the message that McGuinness has been giving Frank's mum is really simple. The message is this. Frank can come home. Frank will be safe. You can trust me. You can come home. This will all be sorted out. He's absolutely safe to come home.

And on one of these calls where Frank is speaking to his mum, his mum passes the phone over to Martin McGuinness and McGuinness says to Frank directly, come home, you'll be safe. Whatever you've done, we can work this out. This is the message that Martin McGuinness gives Frank, a man who sits in a safe house in Kent, wondering if he will ever know home again.

A huge part of the problem here is that Frank cannot imagine for himself a new life outside of Derry. Derry is such a part of who he is. And at the same time, he feels lonely and adrift living in this army safe house in Kent. He's no longer got his friends, his family, his dogs, anything that's familiar to him. And it's certainly possible to understand the extent of the loneliness he felt and the extent of his desire to

to try and get back to what he knew and back to what he loved. And so Frank makes the most pivotal decision of his life. He decides to trust Martin McGuinness. ♪

Frank was living in a safe house down in Kent, but he was not being held there. He was not a prisoner. He had a couple of soldiers living with him, but they did not have instructions to detain him. And it was relatively easy for Frank to disappear if he really wanted to. And eventually he decided that he did.

And he made his way from there up to Scotland. He took a ferry over. He met someone in Scotland who he'd known for a long time. And they travelled together back to his mother's house, the house which he'd spent most of his life living in. When Frank arrives at his mother's door, he is a hollowed-out shell. He heads directly to his childhood bedroom and collapses.

And very soon after that, Martin McGuinness hears about what has happened. And he comes around and he knocks on Frank's mum's house's door and he demands to see Frank. And his mum says, says, no, you can't. He needs he needs to rest. Come back in a couple of days. So eventually he does. And this time Martin McGuinness brings with him a solicitor. Martin McGuinness tells Frank that he just wants to get to the bottom of what's happened.

He wants to understand how the IRA's weapons cash ended up in the hands of the authorities. And they record a statement, they put together a statement from Frank, in which Frank says that he never did anything of his own volition, he was coerced into this, and that anything he said about the IRA was given under duress and therefore has no legal standing in court. When Martin McGuinness leaves that day...

It's as if a crack of light has broken through the cloud. For a moment, it seems as though Frank has made his way through this, that there is a way out. But Frank has yet to be officially pardoned. He knows he is still in a vulnerable position.

And he spends the next few weeks living in his mother's house, not going out very much, still very much in fear of the reaction to him if he were to step outside and just go down for a drink in a local pub. And the problem is he can't continue his life until someone like Martin McGuinness has exonerated him, has said, it's OK, we forgive this guy. Or indeed, it's OK, it was a mistake, he was never a spy.

He dwells in this limbo for what must feel like an eternity. And there comes a point several weeks later when Frank is told in order to iron this all out, he has to go and speak to three senior IRA men over the border. Frank Hegarty must understand that he is being asked to attend a trial, but he has the promise of the most senior man in the IRA that no harm will come to him.

So he willingly crosses the border. He goes to see these three people and he's interrogated. He gives the same story. He says, you know, it was a misunderstanding. I'm not a spy, etc. He's then taken out of the room and the three senior IRA men, one of whom is Martin McGuinness, make a decision. And the decision they make is that Frank is going to be killed. Martin McGuinness has campaigned to bring Frank Hegarty home with the assurance of safety. And now...

he will send him to his grave. What's interesting is the question of who was given the job of needing to kill Frank Hegarty that particular day. This story began in part one on a damp night at the border of Ireland with a car idling in the dark, a man stumbling from a vehicle, his hand reaching out for support. Now we have arrived at the scene once again.

The man with taper of his eyes in the middle of the night, that summer's night in 1986, is Frank Hegarty. Frank Hegarty has been told that he's going home and he's walked to a spot on Country Lane where he's stopped and he's then shot. Soon, word will reach Frank's mother, his partner and his children. Lives altered forever.

In the press, his name will be added to the long list of casualties in this brutal conflict. And when this comes to be reported in newspapers, on the radio, in the TV, it's described as there having been one shot in the night. There was one shot because one bullet was found at the scene. And this is the story that continued to be told for many years after.

It's only many years later, after the Good Friday Agreement has been signed and the troubles that plagued Northern Ireland for so many years have been declared over, that this story, the story of one gunshot piercing through the night, comes undone. It happens when a TV news team hunts down a former IRA man, now embittered and isolated, by the name of Freddy Scappaticci.

Scappaticci's interview with the Cook Report is fascinating and is tantalising because he unburdens himself of a huge amount of information about how the IRA works, about what standard practices were, but also he keeps circling back to the murder of Frank Hegarty. Something about this killing has had an effect on him. When Freddie speaks of the murder, it's to illustrate the extent of the IRA's ruthlessness.

He suggests it's something he knew about only from a distance, but there is one detail that doesn't add up. Freddie talks about not one gunshot that killed Frank Hegarty, but four. So there have been four shots. And this obviously is different to what all the media reports suggested. And you might sort of ask yourself how he could know that or why he would say that, why he got it wrong or where this information came from.

The answer to that inconsistency would arrive years later when Henry Hemming began digging into the story of a spy with the codename of Steakknife for a book he was researching. What I found really interesting is when I was able to look at the post-mortem report of this murder, which was only released a few years ago.

It describes how many bullets were used in this particular incident. And yes, one bullet was found at the scene, but crucially, three bullets were found in the body. So in total, there were four shots fired that night. And this to me strongly suggests that Freddy Scappaticci was someone who at the very least had heard those four shots as they were fired in the night when Frank Hegarty was murdered. We may never know whether he actually pulled the trigger himself,

whether he fired two of the shots, one of the shots, another shot, all four of the shots. But there seems to be an extremely good chance that he was there when this murder took place. Is that the ominous figure of Freddy Scappaticci we see standing over Frank Hegarty's body on that rural path? In 2016, a police investigation named Operation Canova was launched to investigate the activities of the British agent codenamed Stakeknife.

Though his true identity has never been officially confirmed, it is widely believed to be the alias of Freddie Scappaticci. And this became one of the largest murder investigations in British history.

He was looking into as many as 100 cases of murder and abduction and was trying to find out which of these Scappaticci was involved in, what he might have done. There was a team of ultimately 72 detectives working on this. They had access to a huge number of previously classified intelligence records. They interviewed many people in the region and outside it, people who'd been running Scappaticci, people who'd known some of his victims.

When Operation Canova's interim findings were released in 2024, it made clear the bargain that had been struck when Scappaticci's handlers allowed him to enter the IRA's nutting squad.

For them, the ends had always justified the means. It's a really interesting and contentious question, how many lives were saved as a result of Scappaticci's work, if you like. We'll never know the exact answer. There is no exact number we can put on it. He directly led to 10 occasions when other people's lives were saved, and that was as a result of intelligence that only he had.

But there are also other ways in which he saved lives. And often he would corroborate information that came from somewhere else. And that led to a life being saved. And I think in another way, his information helped to create a sense of paranoia within the IRA, which led to more and more operations being called off towards the end of the troubles. Such conjecture is difficult to quantify. But on the other side of the scales, the picture is clearer.

We can be a bit more precise now about how many lives he may have been involved in taking. And it's clear that there's good evidence that he was involved in as many as 14 murders and abductions. And this has come out as a result of the police investigation into his activities. And this is part of the price that some people felt it was okay to pay in return for his intelligence.

While the police investigation has not named those who died at steak knife's hands, Henry Hemming believes that Frank Hegarty is one of those victims. He believes that something about this particular murder haunted Scappaticci for years after the fact. We may never know precisely what that was, but it seems really clear from the pattern of behaviour, from other things he's done, other things he's said, that he would have wanted to save Frank's life if he could have done it.

And we know this because only the year before he saved Willie Carlin's life when a similar thing happened. So he understood that Frank Hegarty was a spy like him. And I think this created an even greater sense of sympathy. It was perhaps this regret that caused him to speak to those TV reporters in 1994.

an interview that would prove crucial in the belated investigation into his crimes decades later. The story that Freddy Scappaticci told when he was speaking to the Cook Report producers was that a friend of his, and I think when he says a friend of his, he basically means himself, imagined that they were coming over to interrogate Frank Hegarty. That would have given him time to pass on to his handlers the location of the interrogation and maybe to intervene in some other way to make sure that Frank was not killed. But instead...

When this so-called friend of Freddy Scappaticci's, in other words, probably Scappaticci, when he turns up, he's told, oh yeah, the interrogation has already happened and the decision has been made. You need to go and kill him. And it was this point in particular that seems to have chewed away at Scappaticci's conscience over the years.

I think also by this point, Scappaticci was just really, really determined to get Martin McGuinness in trouble. So he kept stressing that the order for Hegarty's death came from Martin McGuinness. Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. I don't know if you knew this, but anyone can get the same premium wireless for $15 a month plan that I've been enjoying. It's not just for celebrities. So do like I did and have one of your assistants assistants switch you to Mint Mobile today. I'm

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While Freddy Scappaticci would eventually be investigated for the crimes that he participated in, the same cannot be said of the man who stood behind him. Henry Hemming believes that Martin McGuinness had gone out of his way to coax Frank Hegarty home with false assurances, and then he had ordered his murder. Why was he not held to account?

It's really important to add that at the same time that Martin McGuinness is taking part in a decision like this, he's ordering the murder of someone he's known for a long time, Frank Hegarty. He's someone who is beginning to be protected by the British. He's someone who the British want to see in control of the IRA. He's someone who is a Sinn Fein politician who's becoming an increasingly respectable figure. He's someone who, several years after this, the British will begin to negotiate with.

And this starts when an MI6 officer has a long conversation with Martin McGuinness and they agree to start discussions between the British government and the IRA. There would be no criminal investigation into Martin McGuinness's own body count. But the ghost of Frank Hegarty would haunt him too, in a different way.

This one particular murder becomes an albatross around McGuinness's neck. It's something that he can't escape from. And in the years after the Good Friday Agreement, as McGuinness becomes a politician, he becomes more established. He presents himself as a man of peace and someone who's out to protect all people in Northern Ireland.

The story of what happened with Frank Hegarty becomes almost like a shorthand for McGuinness' involvement in the IRA. So it's brought up in Parliament. It's something which people ask him about in interviews. And to begin with, he just, he refuses to talk about it. It's almost as if he's not ready to address his past. That only begins to change in 2011, when Ireland is preparing for a presidential election.

And amazingly, Martin McGuinness is one of the candidates. He's standing to be president of the Republic of Ireland. And up until then, things have been looking good. He's the frontrunner in the polls. And then the family of Frank Hegarty work on a piece with the journalists of the Daily Mail, essentially saying, this is what happened to our beloved Frank. He trusted Martin McGuinness. Please, people of Ireland, don't make the same mistake. This man is not who you think he is.

The article has a devastating effect on McGuinness's campaign. He ends up finishing fourth. With the defeat comes an understanding. Try as he might, he will never be able to escape his past. And what I found really moving when I was researching Four Shots in the Night is getting a sense that in the two or three years after that, something changes for McGuinness. And he begins to talk about his past in a completely different way.

He acknowledges for the first time some of the things that happened during his time in the IRA. And he also acknowledges

essentially asks for forgiveness. He acknowledges the pain that has been caused by some of what he's done. And this is a huge moment. It's a really telling shift. And it's after that that he agrees to meet the queen. It's after that that he has a different approach to the past. I think he begins to understand that he can't hide it. He needs to acknowledge it and to get through it, he needs to talk about it. And this is what begins to happen towards the end of this man's life.

Martin McGuinness died in 2017. Freddy Scappaticci followed in 2023, before the findings of Operation Canova had been brought to light. And in some respects, you could say he made a final escape in death. So he never appeared in court, even though this appeared to be on the cards.

For the hundreds of people affected by these deaths, and so many others like them, the investigation into Stakenife did, at least, offer an answer to a question that had lingered unanswered for decades. Where does the true culpability for each of these murders land? That's a question that was asked and answered in the interim police report that came out not too long ago. And the answer was really, really clear.

According to John Boucher, who's led this investigation, he believes the majority of the responsibility lies with the IRA. The IRA that ordered these murders and that ensured that they were carried out

and would kill people sometimes only on the slightest accusation of them having been a spy. In other words, a large number of the people who were killed by the Nutting Squad were not working as agents, which is not to imply for a second that someone who was is somehow... that murder is justified.

But I suppose what's the tragic quality of this is the number of times that people were killed as a result of a petty grievance or some kind of disagreement within the IRA. For Boucher, the buck stops with the IRA and its leaders, men like Martin McGuinness, who determined that there could be no peace without bloodshed first. But Henry Hemming sees more nuance to the picture. Scappaticci must also be held accountable.

Of course the responsibility lies with the person who pulls the trigger. It's not just an organization that is at fault. And Scappaticci was passing on information to the British, but he was never controlled by them. And yet, who would Scappaticci have been were it not for his relationship with the British? It was at their behest that he rejoined the IRA. It was with their blessing that he entered the ranks of the Nutting Squad. It was with their implicit acceptance that he killed.

The fact that he had this relationship with the British made him more confident, made him feel that he was invincible, made him feel that he was above the law. And that was a huge problem and that influenced his actions in a big way. And so a measure of the responsibility must sit on British shoulders too. It's a profoundly complicated ethical problem and one that Henry Hemming doesn't shy away from in his book, Four Shots in the Night.

Retrieving Frank Hegarty's story from the murky waters of the Troubles was no easy feat, but the work has given something powerful to Hegarty's family, who, for too long, had hunted for answers and received nothing but silence.

and the police would not engage with them in the way that you might expect, partly because of the stigma attached to having a loved one being accused of being a spy. There is a stigma that goes with that, both in Northern Ireland and in the Republic.

And that's one of the reasons why some of these families were, in some ways, victims twice over. They'd lost a loved one, but then in the years that follow, they become known as someone who had a spy in the family. And there's a pain and a pressure that comes with that. And so, while Operation Canova has so far failed to hold Scappaticci, his handlers or his masters in the IRA to account, it has succeeded in something else.

It has, at long last, offered a glimpse of the truth.

This investigation has begun to bring some kind of closure for the families of some of the victims because what it's done is it's brought out a lot of the truth about what Scappaticci might have been up to. And the families of these victims have been approached individually by the police working on this investigation. And they've been given as much information as the police have on what happened to their loved one. And this is a huge shift.

Tune in next time for another top secret rendezvous with true spies. Disclaimer. The views expressed in this podcast are those of the subject. These stories are told from their perspective and their authenticity should be assessed on a case-by-case basis.

There's a civil war that goes on between the Greek government and the Greek left. The Greek left is defeated. And then the US basically creates a huge apparatus in Greece.

which was very much geared towards defeating the left and making sure that the communists would never take over. So the CIA had a very strong presence here in Greece. A lot of it was Greek Americans, actually, people who spoke the language and so on, and had been hired through OSS before, during the war. And the main purpose was to make sure that Greece would never fall into communist hands.

True Spies, The Debrief from Spyscape Studios. Search for True Spies wherever you get your podcasts.