Freddie Scappaticci has spent the week denying that he has betrayed the IRA for the British army. So who is the informer? Ed Moloney reports
There are, according to one student of the subject, about 1,800 people of Italian descent in Northern Ireland. The past week has been a welter of speculation about the activities of just one of them, Alfredo "Freddie" Scappaticci, the west Belfast republican who emerged on Wednesday to deny last weekend's newspaper report that he is the mysterious IRA double agent known as Steak Knife (as the agent was originally code-named by Britain's Ministry of Defence).
Like most Irish people of Italian extraction, Scappaticci's ancestors came here towards the end of the 19th century as economic migrants, seeking a better life. Mostly of peasant stock from the area between Rome and Naples, the Italians who ended up in the North settled first in the south of England. They were joined by relatives and grew in number. From there they are thought to have moved northwards, first to Manchester and Liverpool, then across the Irish Sea.
In Belfast, they opened fish-and-chip shops or ice-cream parlours. A community of Italian emigrants lived in the York Street area of the city, a district that was for a while called Little Italy. Like their Irish Catholic neighbours, Italians were sometimes subjected to hard-line loyalist hostility. In June 1959, for example, a Shankill Road rally addressed by a youthful Rev Ian Paisley degenerated into a riot when some in the crowd attacked an ice-cream shop owned by an Italian family, the Fortés, because of their religion.
About a third, some 600, have retained their links to Italy: they still speak Italian, carry Italian passports and visit the country regularly. The remaining 1,200 have become thoroughly assimilated, losing touch with their old homes and becoming indistinguishable from their neighbours, except for their surnames and, as in the case of Scappaticci and his brother Umberto, first names.
Scappaticci, a bricklayer by trade, belonged to this category. He could not, for example, speak Italian, much to the surprise of his teacher when he signed up for an Italian course at Belfast Institute of Further & Higher Education last year. And such has been the degree of assimilation that some in the Italian community have adopted the North's brutal conflict as their own.
Over the years of the Troubles, members of at least five families of Italian extraction have become active in the Provisional IRA or the Official IRA.
The authorities in Belfast clearly regarded Scappaticci as an IRA activist of some stripe, for he was arrested in 1971 and interned in Long Kesh for a while. Since then, other members of his family have served lengthy prison terms for Provisional IRA activity. Scappaticci himself went on the run in January 1990 rather than face, alongside Danny Morrison, then Sinn Féin's publicity director, charges that he helped to abduct and interrogate an alleged IRA informer. That was at about the time he now claims he ceased his activities "in the republican movement".
Another family of Italian origin strongly involved in republican politics are the Notarantonios, from the IRA redoubt of Ballymurphy, in west Belfast. For many years, those in the family who were active in that way were loyal to the Provisionals, but with the advent of the peace process some of them came to sympathise with dissident groups opposed to the policies of Gerry Adams and the wider Sinn Féin leadership. One younger family member, Joe O'Connor, was shot dead in October 2000, at the age of 26, allegedly because his membership of the Real IRA put him at odds with the Provisionals.
It was, though, the equally violent death 13 years earlier of O'Connor's maternal grandfather, Francisco Notarantonio, which in the past week or so has caused Scappaticci's world to collapse in a mire of claim and counter-claim about the now notorious Steak Knife.
The story of how the activities of this extraordinary double agent became public began back in August 1999, when a former soldier attached to a section of British military intelligence known as the Force Research Unit, or FRU - pronounced frew - began telling his story to journalists in Dublin and Belfast.
The trigger, if that is the right word, for his whistle-blowing was the growing controversy over the assassination of the Belfast lawyer Pat Finucane by the loyalist Ulster Defence Association in February 1989. By the time the former FRU soldier began talking to the press, 10 years later, two vital and disturbing aspects of the Finucane killing had become known.
One was that the lawyer's murder had been facilitated by Brian Nelson, the UDA's chief intelligence officer, who had been unmasked as an agent working for the FRU. The other was that William Stobie, the UDA quartermaster who had supplied Finucane's killers with their weapons, was an agent for the RUC Special Branch who was claiming that his warnings about Finucane's impending murder had been ignored by his handlers.
These two factors seemed to hint that Belfast security authorities had colluded or connived in murder.
During the last quarter of 1999, the former FRU soldier began to tell his extraordinary story. He called himself Martin Ingram in public but supplied reporters with evidence of his real name and of his service in the FRU, including photographs of himself with FRU colleagues and commanders. The FRU was the section of military intelligence that recruited and handled agents in republican and loyalist paramilitary groups active in Northern Ireland. Ingram, a warrant officer, was involved in recruiting and running several of them.
He had served twice in the North, once in Derry and once in Co Fermanagh, but he left the FRU and the British army in the early 1990s. It was during his stint in Derry that he came across the existence of Steak Knife. He was, he recalled, sitting in the FRU office in Ebrington Barracks when the phone rang. At the other end was a junior police officer who said a man in RUC custody had given them the number after claiming that he worked for a soldier identified as an agent handler in the FRU. Ingram consulted the FRU's files and quickly confirmed that the arrested man was who he said he was. He was released.
The arrested man was Steak Knife, whom Ingram described as possibly the most important IRA informer ever recruited by the authorities in the North - so important that the RUC Special Branch constantly tried to poach him. The phone call that night was evidence of another unsuccessful attempt.
In the parlance of the intelligence world, Steak Knife was a walk-in. The vast bulk of informers are blackmailed into service; walk-ins volunteer. Ingram did not know what motivated Steak Knife to offer his services but speculated that it was down to greed or a grudge. He was paid, at that time, about stg£60,000 (€85,000) a year, transferred into a secret account.
By the time Ingram was briefing the media about him, Steak Knife was a wealthy man who yearned to leave Ireland to enjoy his money. Ingram said he wanted to tell the world about Steak Knife because he symbolised the moral sewer the intelligence agencies had created in the North in their pursuit of the Provisional IRA. Steak Knife, he said, had been given carte blanche by his FRU handlers to murder almost indiscriminately. He estimated that several dozen people had died as a result of his activities.
He then told the story of how Francisco Notarantonio (66) met his death, how he had been sacrificed to save Steak Knife. It was a chilling tale. It began with a warning from Brian Nelson, the UDA double agent, that his colleagues planned to assassinate Steak Knife, whom they had identified as an important IRA figure. Alarmed, the FRU's senior officer convened a case conference with colleagues from MI5 at Thiepval Barracks, the British army's HQ in Lisburn, south of Belfast.
They all agreed, said Ingram, thatsuch was his intelligence value that Steak Knife must be saved at all costs and that the UDA should be steered to another target instead, who would be presented as a more important IRA figure. Notarantonio, a friend of Gerry Adams's father and an IRA member in his youth, was chosen. Notarantonio had long ceased to be a significant IRA member, and whether the real reason he was chosen was because he had an Italian name, and whether the UDA was told it had chosen the wrong Italian, can only be matters of speculation.
According to Ingram, the FRU-MI5 decision was endorsed by a senior British army officer unconnected to the intelligence world and by MI5's then Northern Ireland controller. Notarantonio's fate was sealed. At 7.30 a.m. on October 9th, 1987, UDA gunmen broke into his Ballymurphy home and shot him dead. Locals commented that the usually heavy security presence was strangely absent from Ballymurphy that morning.
Ingram has always refused to identify Steak Knife, but he has excluded certain republicans, an important point given the widespread speculation that someone involved in shaping the IRA's peace strategy was the double agent. Steak Knife, he always said, was not a public figure, an assertion given credibility by the UDA's willingness to switch its attack to Notarantonio.
But republicans and their sympathisers have gone to great lengths to puncture Ingram's claims, not least because of the perceived link between Steak Knife's sabotage of the IRA and the peace process. In Ingram, however, they have chosen a target who is difficult to discredit. He has publicised many embarrassing and damning details of the FRU's handling of Nelson and of its efforts to impede the investigation of Finucane's death. The UK Ministry of Defence has gagged his memoirs in the High Court in London, British intelligence has burgled his home and he has given evidence at the Saville Inquiry challenging military claims that the IRA planned to fire on troops on Bloody Sunday. These are hardly the actions of a person motivated by a desire to advance the interests of the British security establishment.
And his claim that Steak Knife exists has now, after years of official obfuscation, been supported by Sir John Stevens, the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, who has said he wants to question Steak Knife as part of his investigation of security breaches in the North, and by the British Defence Secretary, Geoffrey Hoon. So it seems Steak Knife exists, but his identity, after the week's confusing events, is as uncertain as ever.
It was, though, no surprise in republican circles that in the past seven days suspicion has grown that Steak Knife worked in the IRA's security department, the section of the organisation tasked with rooting out and killing informers throughout Ireland.
The security department, whose two leaders were for years known by the fearsome nicknames of Burke and Hare, after the 19th-century Scottish bodysnatchers, was set up in the late 1970s as part of the reorganisation of the IRA into cells.
Until then, counterintelligence was the job of local intelligence officers, but the function was centralised and its members given extraordinary powers. The department vetted every IRA recruit and so knew the entire make-up of the IRA. It was also empowered to investigate every failed IRA operation and interrogate operatives for signs of treachery - hence the fear and distaste with which other IRA members viewed it.
One way or another, the department had intimate knowledge of the IRA's activities and command structures. This gave the security department great sway over the IRA, but it also turned it into the organisation's Achilles' heel. A well-placed agent in the department's ranks could devastate the organisation and give the British (and Irish) authorities enough information to recruit scores of operational informers.
Yet the IRA's commanders never took two elementary precautions against the subversion of the department's leaders.
The same people, more or less, ran it from its inception, meaning if one of them was an agent, he would be a very long-term and well-informed one. And its leaders were invariably middle-aged men whose days of active IRA service had ended and whose vulnerability to the threat of lengthy imprisonment was great. Also, the IRA leadership had never resolved a potentially deadly dilemma: the security department vetted the IRA, but who would vet the security department?
Suspicion the department had been penetrated by the British was for years rampant at all levels of the IRA. It surfaced acutely in the winter of 1987, not long after Steak Knife had joined the FRU's team of agents. Armed with tons of smuggled Libyan weapons, the IRA planned to launch a huge offensive in Ireland, Britain and Europe, beginning with the assassination in Brussels of Sir Geoffrey Howe, then Britain's Foreign Secretary, followed in December that year by the bombing of Gibraltar, Britain's quaint colony at the tip of Spain. The same IRA team had been chosen to carry out both attacks.
But the attempt on Howe's life had to be abandoned on the day chosen for the killing when his regular route to a NATO meeting was suddenly changed. The attack on Gibraltar was similarly called off when the target, a weekly parade by a British army band, was abruptly cancelled. It should have been the security department's job to investigate both operations, but in the case of Gibraltar there was neither an inquiry nor any effort to link it to the failed attack on Howe's life.
Three months later, the IRA relaunched the Gibraltar attack. Three of its most valued activists were shot dead in the colony by the SAS. The IRA's new offensive had got off to the worst possible start, a dramatic high point in a series of military reverses suffered by the IRA in these years, theultimate effect of which was to make an alternative peace strategy attractive.
With hindsight, it was clear informers were at work elsewhere in the IRA; they had warned the British of both attacks, giving the SAS time to prepare for the IRA's return to Gibraltar. But the IRA would not have gone back to the colony had the security department done its job. This ability to divert or distract internal suspicions, to exonerate real informers and disguise their treachery, is the real reason an agent in the security department would be so valuable.
The shadow of Steak Knife has hung like a black cloud over the peace process for years, threatening to destabilise the Adams leadership in the Provisionals and to embarrass the British. But the past remarkable week has ended happily for both. If Scappaticci is not Steak Knife, as he claims, then the real double agent is free to resume his activities, more secure than ever and less likely to discomfit his handlers. On the other hand, the doubts and claims of dirty tricks surrounding Scappaticci enable the Sinn Féin leadership to dismiss the episode as the result of the inventions of British intelligence and the gullibility of the media. This may just have been Steak Knife's finest hour.
• Ed Moloney is author of A Secret History Of The IRA