When Freddie Scappaticci, 77, suffered the stroke on the morning of 16 February 2023 that would kill him, he had not worked for two decades.
It was nevertheless in a spacious and comfortable home, known as Homeleigh, that he fell ill; a four-bedroom detached property with a double garage and a large, if dated, kitchen that led through French doors to a sprawling garden, with a wendy house half buried in the lush green hedge at the back.
He was known locally in the village of West End, on the outskirts of Woking, Surrey, as Frank Cowley, a retired property developer. He had changed his name by deed poll.
He was instead, as a final report by Operation Kenova effectively revealed without officially doing so on Tuesday, for a long time Britain’s most valuable spy inside the IRA during the Troubles in Northern Ireland, once described by an army general as the “golden egg” of the intelligence services.
More pertinently to the torment of those related to his victims, he was a sadistic murderer who had been in the pay of the British state.
In his dual role, as a British agent and head of the IRA’s so-called “nutting squad”, an internal security unit dedicated to rooting out informants, Scappaticci would threaten to string up and skin his victims before offering to let them go free if they confessed.
Then he would order, or indeed personally carry out, their execution. He would play taped confessions to the families left behind. And he would tell the British intelligence services all about it, before finally being assisted to leave Northern Ireland as his identity was being revealed.
Operation Kenova reported on Tuesday, in a final report after nine years of investigation, that MI5 had been aware of pretty much everything.
They had not only allowed it all to happen, but in the 1990s – before the valiant efforts in 2003 of Irish and UK newspapers to out the identity of “Agent Stakeknife”, after which Scappaticci fled to England – there had been discussion within the British army about a “farewell dinner” after some unwelcome speculation about his identity. A guest list was organised and a venue pinpointed.
On Tuesday, the families of his victims further learned that, for all the talk of transparency and justice, the British security services had successfully argued within government, against the appeals of various senior police officers, that they should persist with the policy of neither confirming nor denying the identity of Stakeknife.
The report did all it could. “The claims about this have been seen as authoritative and credible and are almost universally treated as true,” it said.
Scappaticci grew up in the Markets area of south Belfast, an area known as Little Italy, and was a talented footballer, trialling with Nottingham Forest in 1962 as a 14-year-old but returning home after three weeks due to home sickness. He was an early volunteer for the nascent provisional IRA, and was known for having a short fuse.
After being interned in the 1970s, when the British started locking up suspected IRA members without trial, he moved up the ranks, becoming first the head of the Belfast brigade, then number two and leader of the internal security unit charged with flushing out informers.
Scappaticci was, it is said by almost all those who knew him, a monster in the role, seemingly taking pleasure in killing “touts”.
Operation Kenova established that his cultivation and recruitment had begun in the late 1970s and he had been a British agent into the 1990s.
According to Kenova, his motivation for wanting to become an agent appears “to have been linked either to a risk that he was facing criminal prosecution or a desire for financial gain”.
They found that his “military source record document” listed a number of other reasons for his continuing to work for the security forces, including a wish for the armed conflict to end, a persistent dissatisfaction with the IRA hierarchy and a desire to protect his family.
On first being approached by army agent handlers, Scappaticci was reported as saying that he had wanted to assist the security forces for some time but did not know how to go about making contact.
Within the IRA, Scappaticci was known as a “bully” about whom “no one had a good word to say”. He was also long known to be a “porn fanatic” with a taste for the extreme.
Despite the best efforts of British police in recent years, he only once saw the inside of a courtroom, let alone a prison cell. That was in December 2018, when he was described by the then magistrate Emma Arbuthnot as being in very poor health and living a lonely existence.
Westminster magistrates court had heard that Scappaticci, wearing a grubby blue fleece and green tracksuit bottoms, had used a laptop seized by police earlier in the year to search for information on “cars, the British army, maps, combat, football and politics”.
There had also been 13 searches for extreme pornography. Some of it had included animals.
Scappaticci had told police officers in mitigation that he was depressed, a condition with which he had suffered for a number of years. He said he was not really interested in animals that way, and that he preferred women with big breasts. It was “not doing anyone any real harm”, he vainly claimed.
The court sentenced Scappaticci, then 72, to a three-month suspended jail term. He left the court on London’s Marylebone Road a free man. “You have not been before the court for 50 years – and that’s good character in my book,” Arbuthnot had told him.
Good character? Certainly he had been well compensated for his work over the years. Kenova reported that a number of financial incentives had been offered during his time as an agent, from the “equivalent of an average wage to lump sums of tens of thousands of pounds”.
He was protected to the end. In an act peculiar only to the royal family until now, publication of his will was blocked.
“Operation Kenova was unable to ascertain how much money the agent was paid in total,” the report published on Tuesday said. “However, it is well documented that when he was finally resettled in Great Britain he was accommodated in a detached property, with a car, and was able to enjoy a social life with people who had no idea of his past life. It is also known that he had limited contact with members of his family. There is no evidence that he participated in any paid employment after his move to Great Britain.”
