Freddie Scappaticci, suspected IRA informer, circa 1946 — 2023

Freddie Scappaticci — the icy IRA inquisitor who allegedly became the British army’s most valued informer during Northern Ireland’s Troubles — lived and died in the shadows.

Feared within the Irish republican movement yet protected by Britain at the height of the conflict, the agent known as Stakeknife died last week in his 70s in England, where he was reportedly living under witness protection.

He has already been buried, but a long-running investigation continues into his alleged double life as a murderer and a mole — roles he denied.

Scappaticci was a leading figure in the IRA’s notorious “Nutting Squad” — the grisly name for a unit that interrogated, tortured and disposed of “touts” — or informers, during Northern Ireland’s three decades-long conflict. After a couple of bullets to the “nut”, or head, the squad would dump the bodies of their former comrades.

The IRA fought a 30-year war against British rule in Northern Ireland and “Scap”, as he was nicknamed, was privy to its deepest secrets at a critical time.

That made him what General Sir John Wilsey, who was in charge of the British army in Northern Ireland from 1983-90, called “our most important secret . . . a golden egg” of military intelligence agents.

The short, stocky son of Italian immigrant parents who had moved in the 1920s to Belfast, where his father had an ice cream van, Scappaticci grew up in the working-class Markets area of the city. A keen footballer, he landed a three-week trial with Nottingham Forest in 1962, but a beating by the police turned him into a teenage republican radical.

As agent 6126, however, his intelligence was discussed in 10 Downing Street “over dinner with cigars and the Chablis”, according to the picture conjured up by Danny Morrison, a former IRA member and former publicity director for Sinn Féin, the party seen as the paramilitaries’ mouthpiece.

Scappaticci was interned without trial in 1971 when suspected Republicans were rounded up in a bid to crack down on the IRA. Three years later, he emerged from the Long Kesh jail a hardened IRA man.

He was drafted into the Nutting Squad, where he became invaluable. “He was judge, jury and executioner,” one IRA figure told The Guardian after Stakeknife was outed in the British press in 2003. “Whenever something went wrong, Freddie Scappaticci was sent for.”

Some remember Scappaticci as having an explosive temper, but also a chilling, ruthless demeanour that allowed him to dispatch IRA informants to their deaths — while evading the same fate himself.

The Nutting Squad “had the dubious task — almost Gestapo-like — of arresting members of the Provisional IRA who were accused of betraying their comrades,” said Aaron Edwards, author of Agents of Influence: Britain’s Secret Intelligence War against the IRA.

Ian Hurst, a former British military intelligence agent who served with the army’s Force Research Unit, which recruited agents, said Scappaticci had been a “walk-in” in 1978 — someone who voluntarily offered their services as an informant.

Writing in the book Stakeknife: Britain’s Secret Agents in Ireland under the pseudonym Martin Ingram, Hurst said Scappaticci turned tout after being beaten up by people within the IRA. Other accounts suggest he was seeking to evade prosecution for tax fraud; or was lured by an £80,000 salary; or that he had a penchant for pornography which made him a blackmail target.

His recruitment was “a massive coup,” Hurst said. And Stakeknife did not disappoint, delivering “high-grade intelligence” that made him “the jewel in the crown”.

His passion for soccer — he supported Manchester City — provided handy cover; his FRU handlers often arranged tickets for him at big matches in Britain, and used his trips as cover to meet.

But increasingly concerned that British intelligence was sanctioning murder by running Scappaticci as an agent, Hurst became a whistleblower.

Wilsey claimed Scappaticci’s intelligence saved hundreds of lives but “the problem was, Stakeknife could only shine if he immersed himself in the activities of those he was reporting upon,” Hurst wrote. That meant involvement in “regular murders”.

In a rare interview in 2003, Scappaticci denied carrying out 40 murders and spying on the IRA.

Operation Kenova — an independent inquiry led by Jon Boutcher, a former police chief constable — is investigating whether the British army allowed the sacrifice of IRA fall guys in order to protect their prized informant.

Scappaticci’s alleged double life appeared to have ended in the 1990s, and he was spirited away to the UK mainland after his outing as an agent in 2003. But he always insisted he was innocent, telling British detectives: “Look boys, I’m not the monster people think I am.”

Nevertheless, Edwards writes that Stakeknife “has taken a lot of . . . secrets to his grave”.