The Spy in the IRA Panorama

In the Northern Ireland conflict, spying was a very dangerous game.

The IRA's chief interrogator explains how he extracted

confessions from informers, before they were shot.

This programme contains some strong language and some scenes which some viewers may find upsetting

Except that, for years,

the interrogator was himself one of Britain's most important spies.

Codenamed Stakeknife, he was unmasked in 2003,

real name Freddie Scappaticci.

Now Stakeknife and his spy masters are the subject

of a major criminal enquiry.

Were fellow spies sacrificed so that he could continue to spy?

Our Panorama investigation suggests they were.

This is Milltown Cemetery in Belfast.

The Northern Ireland conflict cost 3,700 lives.

Many are buried here, along with many secrets.

In one corner are the graves of those revered as heroes by the IRA.

Elsewhere, the graves of those shot by the IRA as British spies.

But in the murky world of agents and informers,

some things are not quite what they seem.

Officially, the Northern Ireland conflict was not a war.

In truth, it was sometimes waged

by the intelligence services as if it was.

This is the story of how far the intelligence services

compromised their peacetime values in an effort to beat the IRA,

a story that some have been determined

should never see the light of day.

The IRA spent nearly three decades

trying to bomb the British out of Northern Ireland.

This was the Markets area of Belfast,

a tight-knit Republican community where Freddie Scappaticci lived.

Freddie Scappaticci was a household name,

a very well respected figure in the Markets.

He would have been the commander of the provisional IRA

in the Markets area.

Anthony McIntyre joined the IRA under Freddie Scappaticci's command.

You knew he was in the room.

I mean, you could look around the whole room

and you would have stopped at Scappaticci,

because he was somebody who was looked up to,

somebody who was admired.

In you go.

When Republicans were detained without trial in 1971,

Freddie Scappaticci was one of them.

He was amongst the most senior IRA members to be held

and one of the last to be released four years later.

He was soon back in trouble with the law.

I've learned that Scappaticci got himself involved

in a large VAT fraud in the building trade.

He was a bricklayer by trade.

The police fraud squad arrested him, but rather than charge him,

he did a deal.

He agreed to become a police informer.

The IRA had also appointed him to a new unit to root out informers -

called Internal Security.

One of its first victims

was a young IRA volunteer called Michael Kearney.

I'm on my way to meet a close relative,

who was also in the IRA.

He wants to remain anonymous.

The countdown to Kearney's death began

when he and a friend were picked up by the army

and handed over to the police, the Royal Ulster Constabulary.

His friend later testified that he could hear Michael

getting a really hard time.

He seemed to be getting thrown against the walls

cos the walls were vibrating.

And they were shouting and screaming, banging tables.

Three days later, Kearney broke and disclosed to the police

the location of a small explosives dump.

The British Army and the RUC in a combined operation

raided the flat that night and recovered the explosives.

Instead of charging Kearney, the police turned him loose.

By lifting the dump, they were actually fingering him.

Basically sending word to the IRA to say,

"This is the one that lifted the dump."

Or, "This is the one that gave away on this particular dump."

A detective had warned that, if Kearney was released,

he risked being shot as a spy.

The police put it to the vote -

three to one in favour of his release.

Sure enough, within 48 hours,

Kearney was ordered to report to the IRA's Internal Security Unit.

He was driven south to the Irish border.

Kearney was questioned by a team of interrogators,

including Freddie Scappaticci.

After 16 days, he was released, or so he thought.

They actually had given him a drink.

They'd actually told him that he was going home to his mother

and he would be heading due north shortly.

Instead of heading north back to Belfast,

the van carrying Kearney headed west, along the border.

When they reached a place called Maguiresbridge,

it was there that he was told, quite candidly,

that he was to be executed.

-How do you know that?

-The IRA told me.

He got out of the vehicle and I've been told

he wasn't bound or gagged or hooded in any way.

His executioner said that he accepted it as a soldier.

Michael asked to say a prayer and he was allowed to,

while the guy loaded up.

And as he was praying, he was shot twice

in the back of the head at close range.

Michael Kearney had just turned 20 when he was shot by the IRA

after being interrogated by Scappaticci.

The IRA have since acknowledged he was never a spy.

With the blood of Michael Kearney on his hands,

two months later, Scappaticci graduated

from being an informer with the police fraud squad

to a paid agent with military intelligence.

The British now had a spy at the very heart of the IRA,

with unique access to its high command and its war plans.

I mean, the security department, they know everything about the IRA.

They are like an electrical junction box

through which every wire must flow.

If the British put somebody in there,

the British really have the wedding tackle of the IRA

firmly in their hands. I mean, it's a brilliant, brilliant strategy.

As a British agent, Scappaticci was given a number, 6126,

and a codename, Stakeknife.

He was now feeding back to his army handlers

what the IRA leadership were thinking and planning,

and which of their agents were at risk of being shot

by the Internal Security Unit,

otherwise known as the Nutting Squad.

Why the Nutting Squad?

Because everybody who ended up being shot dead,

a bullet in the head, a bullet in the nut,

had to pass through the security department

before they would end up getting killed.

Touting, or informing on the IRA,

was the most reviled thing that any Republican could do.

Who knows what motivated Freddie Scappaticci

to turn traitor to the Republican cause?

I gather he told his British Army handlers

that he disliked gratuitous violence.

Still, that doesn't seem to have stopped him

from preparing his fellow agents for death

and, sometimes, pretty barbaric deaths at that.

The next few years saw a sharp rise

in IRA executions of suspected informers,

which today are being investigated by Operation Kenova,

the £35 million criminal enquiry centred on Stakeknife.

The IRA would be saying,

"Scap's good for business, let's keep him," you know.

-Proving himself?

-Yeah, he's worth his weight in gold.

-He's bloodied?

-Yeah.

Vincent Robinson was another of the Nutting Squad's victims.

His battered body was dumped in the rubbish chute of a tower block.

The Scappaticci and the Robinson families had been neighbours.

The Robinsons insist Vincent was never a spy.

According to their lawyer,

Scappaticci assured them Vincent had not suffered in his final moments.

Some time after the killing of Vincent Robinson,

Mr Scappaticci gave an absolute assurance

that he wasn't subjected to any form of torture.

Kevin Winters represents many of the families

whose relatives were murdered by the Nutting Squad.

So the family took that at face value and accepted that,

and that was their understanding for a number of years.

Was it true?

Well, as it turns out, it wasn't true

because the inquest papers make it very clear

that Vincent Robinson was in fact

subjected to the most horrendous torture.

He was kicked in the stomach

and he was struck on the side of the head anything up to five times,

smashing in his skull.

I spoke to several ex-IRA men

for whom the name Scappaticci still spells dread.

I've come to meet one of them, who wants to stay anonymous.

What kind of reputation did Scappaticci have within the IRA?

It was massive.

It was big.

How did most IRA volunteers think of him?

-They were afraid of him.

-HE LAUGHS

-Absolutely.

-Because?

His interrogation tactics.

Hang you upside down.

Not allowed to sleep.

But he always seemed to get the job done.

Do you know people who were interrogated by him?

-Yeah, yeah.

-And what do they say about him?

They said he was a bastard.

Being a "bastard" was how Stakeknife maintained his cover.

We had to know where the threat level was,

the strengths and weaknesses

of the people we were actually dealing with.

For five years, Ray White headed Special Branch in Belfast,

working closely with MI5 and military intelligence.

Back then, spy technology was nothing like

as sophisticated as it is today.

The biggest reliance, actually, was

on having an individual within the organisations.

So the two-legged source, by and large,

meeting as it were with his handlers,

was our bread-and-butter.

Both security sources and former members of the IRA

here in west Belfast have told me

Scappaticci became head of the Nutting Squad

during the 1980s.

Culling agents was, of course, one of the squad's key tasks.

So Scappaticci's British Army handlers

can have been in absolutely no doubt

that he was involved in the murder of his fellow agents,

time and time again.

No matter what the handler basically cautions the agent,

once he steps back into the paramilitary world,

he has to be a model terrorist.

He has to abide by the instructions

that the organisation gives him in every respect.

The bottom line is, you don't get intelligence from milkmaids -

that seems to be what you're saying.

That is the aspect that even some of our colleagues today

find a wee bit hard to sort of come to terms with,

that you were actually doing deals with people who, as I say,

had blood on their hands.

A lot of blood while Scappaticci was in the Nutting Squad.

Operation Kenova, the new investigation into Stakeknife,

was triggered by Northern Ireland's Director of Public Prosecutions

on receipt of a classified report.

It made for very disturbing and chilling reading.

It paints a picture of an intelligence gathering operation

at the upper levels of the IRA

during which many, many terrible things happened.

Can you say...

..roughly, how many murders the evidence so far suggests

the agent Stakeknife was involved with or linked to?

To some extent or another, yes, there's a connection between

the agent known as Stakeknife and at least 18 murders.

That's a lot of murders.

It is a lot of murders and it goes back quite a period of time.

So you were in the Special Branch in Belfast for 11 years.

You must have lost some agents in that time?

We did.

Any...

-How many?

-Can't say.

We lost agents.

What was the loss of an agent like?

It was a hammer blow. It was a tremendous...

..as it were a psychological and emotional blow

to those people that were the handlers.

For the relatives of those shot as informers,

it's been a life sentence.

Ryan Hegarty was just five when his father was murdered.

He learnt about this from the television news.

-REPORTER:

-'Mr Hegarty was shot in the head.

'His hands were tied behind his back.'

Well, I recognised his clothes

because he was wearing the same clothes...

..when I had last seen him.

It has an imprinting factor on my life and also in my head.

It's been a living hell,

to be truthful with you,

because we've had to live with the stigma of what he was shot for.

Frank Hegarty was an Army agent

who gave the British the location of rifles and ammunition in 1986.

Nobody likes traitors or agents, informers or whatever.

And what were the sort of things that were said to you?

It would have been, "Up the IRA".

"Up the 'RA, we got your da."

-"We got your da?"

-Uh-huh.

-Taunting you?

-Exactly.

Yes.

Could Frank Hegarty's life have been saved?

Scappaticci has said he knew Hegarty was going to be shot.

Sometimes Scappaticci didn't tell his Army handlers all he knew,

but sometimes he did.

Are you able to say whether any of the agents you did lose,

intelligence services, were forewarned by Stakeknife

that they were at risk?

If I answered that question,

I would be identifying individuals that were there

and, as there's an ongoing investigation into those things,

that's an aspect I would just leave on the table.

At the heart of that investigation, Operation Kenova, is this question -

were British agents allowed to die to protect Stakeknife's cover?

Good morning, Bedfordshire Police, how can I help?

Former counterterrorism detective Jon Boutcher,

now Chief Constable of Bedfordshire, is leading a team of 50 detectives.

Is there any evidence so far

that suggests the intelligence agencies had the opportunity

to save their lives, but, for one reason or another,

didn't take that opportunity?

There are families that believe

that their loved ones' deaths could have been prevented.

There could have been state intervention.

Now, again, that's not straightforward.

We need to look at the circumstances of what may or may not been known

by those state actors, those state forces, when,

and what opportunities they may or may not have had to do anything.

Scappaticci was run by a special department

within British military intelligence

called the Force Research Unit, or FRU.

They regarded him as their golden egg.

The police, Special Branch, also ran agents,

and one of their agents, Joe Fenton, ran an estate agency around here.

The Special Branch paid Fenton to set up the agency, Ideal Homes,

to provide the IRA with safe houses, which MI5 then bugged.

This yielded arrests and weapons finds.

By the summer of 1988, the IRA was suspicious.

The Special Branch reported that

Scappaticci was going to lead an IRA investigation

into "every job Joe Fenton has been involved in over the years"

to establish whether or not he was a British agent.

I understand that Fenton was summoned to see Scappaticci

here at Sinn Fein's Advice Centre in Belfast's Lower Falls.

When Fenton emerged, he was dishevelled

and he told a relative, "If I go missing, call a priest."

Six months later, Scappaticci sent for him again.

On the Saturday morning, he told his wife that he was going on a message.

It turned out that he was going to a house in Lenadoon in West Belfast,

where he met a number of people, including Fred Scappaticci.

And as it turns out,

that was the last time that he saw his wife.

The owner of the house in Lenadoon was a Republican sympathiser.

He had been approached by the IRA

and asked would he make his house available for an interrogation,

which he agreed to do.

He provided a bedroom for them upstairs in his house.

Waiting to interrogate Fenton was Scappaticci.

Scappaticci was once secretly recorded

explaining his technique for extracting confessions.

The homeowner later described the scene to police.

You could hear banging, fighting,

and a lot of violence for a long time.

Fenton had put up one hell of a fight

before everything went quiet.

Presumably he'd been maybe gagged, bound, whatever.

Fenton was kept for another day

after Scappaticci had broken him into confessing

he was a Special Branch agent.

At 7pm, Fenton was led outside.

Approaching a footpath, he made a desperate run for it.

His executioner fired a shot that hit him in the back...

..then held him down

and shot him three times in the head.

I understand that Scappaticci had told his handlers

that he was going to interrogate Joe Fenton again

and warned them, "He won't survive this one."

Well, if that's the case, and if that's correct,

the obligation on the part of handlers or whoever else

was more than a moral obligation

to look after the life of that individual,

it went beyond that.

And if that's the case and there was prior knowledge,

and nothing was done to intervene,

well, that veers into the realms of criminal liability.

Do you know why Joe Fenton's life was not saved?

I'm not going to speak about specific cases.

That is one of the murders that we are investigating,

that's within the terms of reference of Operation Kenova,

but I'm not going to be able to discuss at this stage

the issues around that particular death.

While the Army's Force Research Unit, the FRU,

were responsible for Stakeknife,

the Police Special Branch were responsible for Joe Fenton.

Two British intelligence agencies with two different priorities.

Did Stakeknife's intelligence take precedence? I understand that

when the Special Branch received his intelligence,

the Army usually required this caveat,

"No action to be taken without direct reference to FRU."

FRU sources have told me that

Stakeknife was providing a continuous flow of intelligence

that was saving many other lives.

Does that become a factor?

In terms of your analysis, you know,

is there going to be a greater loss of life coming down the line?

It really is a moral maze and a moral conundrum

as to how you actually balance out.

There must have been occasions when members of the intelligence services

had to play God. You had to decide which life you were going to save.

Did you confront those decisions, sort of decisions?

Those decisions were there.

Thankfully they were, as it were, rare.

But in the one or two circumstances that, as I say,

that I do have a recollection of, as I say, we did our utmost.

And that's the question for Kenova -

did the intelligence services

always do their utmost for all their agents?

We need to understand what was

the rationale and decision-making

of one person being allowed to die

in order, potentially,

if this was the case,

that another person can live.

What do you say to those people now investigating the past

who weren't confronted with the sort of moral dilemmas you've outlined?

First thing is, consider yourself lucky

that you didn't have the decisions to make.

Ten months after Joe Fenton's death,

Scappaticci was back at the same house

interrogating another Special Branch agent, Sandy Lynch.

It was January 1990.

Lynch later described his ordeal to the police.

I heard a voice, who I believed to be Scappaticci.

And then he said, "Do you know who I am, Sandy?"

And I said, "Yes."

He said, "I don't give two fucks

"because, where you're going, you'll not be telling no-one."

Scappaticci told Lynch he'd end up dead, like Fenton,

if he didn't confess.

He said, if he had his way,

I would get a jab up the arse and waken up in God's country,

hung upside down in a cow shed,

that he'd skin me alive and that no-one would hear me squealing.

As with Fenton,

Scappaticci warned his Army handlers there was to be an execution.

But unlike Fenton, this time, the cavalry was sent in.

As dusk gathered, security forces rescued Lynch

and arrested five IRA men holding him.

What state was he in when you got to interview him?

He was exhausted. He hadn't been fed.

His eyes were...

He'd been blindfolded for almost all of the time.

Do you think the IRA did intend to shoot him?

I've absolutely no doubt about that.

The unanswered question is why this time was the cavalry sent in,

when, just as before with Fenton,

there was a direct risk to Stakeknife's cover?

All we do know is that, three months previously,

an English policeman had been called over to Belfast

to investigate the undercover war.

John Stevens was then Deputy Chief Constable of Cambridgeshire.

Mr Stevens, can you tell us how your enquiry is going at the moment?

Well, I was called over here to do a totally independent,

impartial enquiry into criminal allegations,

and it's progressing pretty well at the present time.

When do you expect to...?

The Army tried to put Stevens off the scent.

Did you know that military intelligence ran agents?

No, we were told the opposite when we first went into Northern Ireland,

we were told that the Army did not run any agents whatsoever.

-That was a flat lie?

-Yes.

Stevens' officers were finalising plans for a key arrest

when Lynch was rescued.

Do you think there might be a relationship between

the fact that, just as you were about to make an arrest,

the intelligence services put on a showcase performance

by rescuing Sandy Lynch?

I wouldn't like to speculate on that.

But all you can say is, when our activities took place,

there was a certain amount of panic going on

in the intelligence community, that's for sure.

That panic was the start of multiple attempts

by elements of the security services to cover Stakeknife's tracks.

When detectives searched the house,

they found Scappaticci's fingerprints on the battery

of a device he'd used to check if Lynch was wearing a bug.

So Scappaticci then went on your wanted list?

He went on the wanted list and disappeared from public view.

I'm told Scappaticci fled across the border to a Dublin suburb.

He was facing up to eight years in jail.

When you issued the warrant for Freddie Scappaticci's arrest...

-Yeah.

-..were you told by the Special Branch

or any of the intelligence agencies that he was in fact a British agent?

No.

There was, however, one very senior police officer

who did know all about Stakeknife.

Now he rode to the Army's rescue.

According to an Army report which I gather has been discovered,

this police officer suggested that Scappaticci should concoct an alibi.

So he sent a message to the joint owner of the house

where Lynch had been held, asking her if she would be

prepared to say that he'd been in her house doing electrical work.

She agreed.

False alibi now in place,

Scappaticci headed home, back to Belfast.

He was promptly arrested and taken to Castlereagh interrogation centre.

To my surprise, he actually spoke.

He denied being involved in the Lynch kidnapping

and interrogation, and he accounted for this thumbprint being there

and he said, "Well, I did electrical work."

Without the alibi, would you have charged...?

Yeah, Scappaticci would've been charged, yes.

Detectives investigating Nutting Squad murders

might also have been able to charge the gunmen,

had they known their names,

but this intelligence was often withheld...

..even though there were some 30 executions

during Scappaticci's time.

Well, what we're talking about here are almost parallel processes.

We have one in which there is a police investigation,

but all along there is an entirely secret dimension to these events.

Now, that drives a coach and horses through the rule of law.

That means that those who carried out these murders

were not properly investigated or brought to justice.

So, for me, that is an appalling vista.

Within the IRA's high command, the rescue of Sandy Lynch

had aroused deep suspicion of a traitor in their midst.

Scappaticci was a prime suspect.

I understand his position in the security unit

was reviewed by Spike Murray,

the IRA's most senior man in Belfast.

Scappaticci was removed.

-Why wasn't he shot?

-He was too big to fail.

They could not expose the fact to their volunteers

that the guy who was tasked by the leadership

with protecting the volunteers and security of the IRA

was doing anything but.

I also think that...

So there was a self-interest on the part of the IRA

in not exposing him and not shooting him,

because it would have invited an awful lot of questions to the IRA

and to the leadership that had held him in place for so long.

Out of power, Scappaticci took his revenge.

In August 1993, ITV broadcast

an expose about the head of the IRA's Northern Command.

'The man who controls the IRA, James Martin McGuinness.'

The next day, Scappaticci arranged to meet the programme makers.

Calling himself Jack,

he met them in the car park at this hotel just outside Belfast.

He arrived in a very crisp,

newly-ironed white shirt and dark slacks.

He's very self-assured, stocky, short, dark hair, receding hair.

Scappaticci then vented his anger on the senior IRA members

who were blocking his return to the IRA,

including Martin McGuinness, who's recently died.

Asked how he knew all this,

Scappaticci gave this wistful response.

We asked him how he felt about now not being at the heart of things

and he said, "There's more to life than killing."

You asked him if he'd actually ever killed anyone

and what was his reaction?

He was evasive

and we were all under the impression that he clearly had.

When the Special Branch learned who Jack was,

they told the journalists, if they broadcast his voice,

he'd be shot - so they didn't.

And there, Scappaticci's secret life might have stayed secret,

but for a former member of the Army's Force Research Unit.

Ian Hurst left the FRU in 1990.

Nine years later, inspired, so he says,

by a new moral imperative,

he told the Sunday Times the British had a major agent

codenamed Stakeknife.

I didn't join the Intelligence Corps...

..to conspire to commit criminal offences.

Nobody has that dispensation, nobody has a licence to kill.

Meaning?

Meaning, I suppose, the greater good,

which is the old adage of, you know,

you lose one life but you save a hundred.

It was 1999 and John Stevens was back,

investigating the undercover war.

Hurst was interviewed by Stevens,

who later sought access to Stakeknife's files

from Army headquarters, Northern Ireland.

The documentation was a limited amount of documentation.

Most of the documents had actually been destroyed,

the army said, through normal, regular procedures of

getting rid of documentation which they didn't need.

Mmm. Do you believe that?

Well, that's what they said and I don't know.

In 2003, Hurst upped the ante.

Now, he leaked Stakeknife's real identity to the newspapers.

Scappaticci was spirited out of Belfast and flown to England,

where I gather MI5 offered him protective security,

which he declined, confident he could bluff it out.

He calculated that the IRA had every reason to support him

if he denied he was a spy...

..and he was right.

The IRA and Freddie Scappaticci at that time

had a mutual dependence on each other

and a mutual interest in this story not coming out,

and in this story being rubbished.

Scappaticci flew back to Belfast -

there he sought a meeting with the IRA leadership.

They came to an understanding.

This led to a call to a BBC correspondent.

At the time, it all seemed a bit last-minute, spontaneous.

I went to West Belfast.

That's when I met Freddie Scappaticci.

He gave me a bit of a glance and a bit of a look.

Scappaticci portrayed himself as an ordinary citizen,

so insulted by the slur that he was a spy,

he'd no choice but to go to a solicitor.

My statement basically is that I am Freddie Scappaticci,

I'm sitting here today with my solicitor.

I'm telling you I'm not guilty of any of these allegations.

And I suppose my thinking about that now,

there was no sense of nervousness in his voice

because he's delivering a prepared script

that he knows people are on board for.

Why do you think this label Stakeknife has been attached to you?

I don't know.

And just one final question,

were you at any stage a member of the IRA

and involved in the Republican movement?

Erm...

I was involved in the Republican movement...

..13 years ago.

But I have no involvement...this past 13 years.

-And what about the allegations...?

-Sorry. That's us finished.

That's us finished. You got three.

The British Army's master spy had put on a bravura performance.

Just one thing I would like...

No, turn the camera off, please.

But then his performance had been choreographed by the IRA

from start to finish.

I'm told the IRA's head of intelligence was watching

from across the street.

I think it wasn't about saving Freddie Scappaticci's life.

I think it was about saving the skin of the IRA's reputation.

Normality had returned to Northern Ireland.

The IRA claimed to have fought the British to an honourable draw,

instead of being pushed into peace,

paralysed by the penetration of agents like Stakeknife.

They were lauding their peace process as a serious victory

and now we're seeing that the man who helped

make the peace process possible

was none other than Freddie Scappaticci,

a senior British agent at the heart of the IRA.

As for Scappaticci, his chutzpah knew no bounds.

Now he demanded ministers deny he was Stakeknife,

but the government wasn't about to end a decades-long convention.

Further comment was made about the question of Stakeknife.

Honourable members of the house will not be surprised if I say

that I will not comment on intelligence matters.

So Scappaticci took the government to court.

He lost. But, crucially, I understand he told a lie

by swearing on oath an affidavit to say he was not Stakeknife.

And then Scappaticci's nemesis returned,

demanding the police investigate him for perjury.

What was their initial reaction?

Indifference...

..bordering on incredulity...

..which culminated in,

once put under pressure to come to a decision,

which took an almighty amount of time,

quote-unquote it was "uninvestigatable".

How an allegation - because that's what it is,

it's only an allegation of perjury -

is "uninvestigatable" is beyond my comprehension.

It either is a fact or it isn't.

Reluctantly, the police conducted an enquiry,

which I'm told was cursory.

In 2007, they sent a file

to the Northern Ireland Director of Public Prosecutions.

The DPP decided not to prosecute Scappaticci for perjury

on the grounds that, even if he had lied to the High Court,

he'd genuinely feared for his life, leaving him no choice but to lie.

And yet Scappaticci had voluntarily returned to Belfast

to do a deal with the IRA

and he'd rejected MI5's offer of protective custody.

In 2015, the new DPP, Barra McGrory QC,

also seems to have noted a contradiction.

I have serious concerns in relation to this decision.

I understand a senior lawyer involved in taking that decision

was the DPP's deputy, Pamela Atchison.

She's no longer at her desk.

But can you say at least why your deputy director, as I understand it,

has been on gardening leave now for some months?

That's not appropriate for me to discuss

the deputy director's personnel issues.

In essence, is your concern that there was a yet further attempt

to protect this agent?

Well, that is the subject of a specific criminal investigation,

or a specific aspect of the ongoing criminal investigation,

so I think it would not be proper for me

to engage in discussion on that.

Much has been written about previous enquiries into

the Northern Ireland conflict,

but none of these enquiries pose a threat

to as many vested interests as Operation Kenova.

It goes beyond Stakeknife, military intelligence,

and even the Prosecution Service,

to those charged with the defence of the realm.

When the commanding officer of the Force Research Unit,

the military intelligence unit that ran Stakeknife,

was interviewed by the police, I gather he replied testily,

"Why are you interviewing me?

"MI5 was the recipient of our intelligence.

"We collected intelligence for MI5.

"They're the people you should be speaking to."

Kenova also extends to those IRA leaders

said to have authorised the executions,

some of whom are now senior politicians here.

If there's any group that might be uncomfortable

with this investigation it is the IRA

because, if there's an agent engaged in a series of murders,

then it was the IRA who sent him out to do them.

That is why this case disturbs me so greatly,

is because there was a potential complete corruption

of the judicial and legal process insofar as investigations,

prosecutions and trials were concerned.

I think Scappaticci has the potential to pull the roof down...

..on all sorts of people,

whether at the top of the Republican leadership

or whether within the intelligence community and beyond.

And I'll be amazed if we get to that point.

Because?

Because it's too damaging for too many people.

We'd like to have put the allegations in this programme

to Freddie Scappaticci,

but a court order prevents us from even approaching him.

The charge against the state is that blind eyes have been turned

to multiple murder, including fellow agents of the state.

So to whom will the state now give its ultimate allegiance -

agent 6126 or those he prepared for death?