One of Britain’s most important agents inside the IRA has been linked to 18 murders and was provided with an alibi by a senior police officer to avoid getting him arrested during the Troubles, it has emerged.



The Guardian can also reveal that the informer codenamed “Stakeknife” reported directly to the late Martin McGuinness in the 1980s and 90s when the man who would become Northern Ireland’s deputy first minister was the IRA’s northern commander and army council member.

Stakeknife, whose real name is believed to be Freddie Scappaticci, was the IRA’s chief spycatcher, briefing McGuinness, all the while betraying some of the most important secrets to the British army.

Further light is shone on the career of Stakeknife in the BBC Panorama documentary titled The Spy in the IRA to be broadcast on Tuesday night.



The programme focuses on Scappaticci’s role as head of the IRA’s so-called “nutting squad”, whose task was to smoke out, interrogate and in most cases kill members suspected of being informers.



Panorama claims to have linked Stakeknife directly to 18 murders of IRA members accused of being agents, with Scappaticci’s unit responsible for 30 deaths overall.



In the film, a retired Royal Ulster Constabulary DI, Tim McGregor, claims that a superior officer in the force thwarted his and his colleagues’ efforts to arrest Scappaticci. McGregor and fellow RUC officers wanted to question Scappaticci after a forensic investigation found his thumbprint in a Belfast house where the police believed one of their agents was about to be shot by the IRA.

The programme alleges that an army report stated a senior police officer told Scappaticci’s handlers about the pending arrest and an alibi was concocted by them to prevent Stakeknife being taken into custody.



McGregor tells Panorama that without that alibi Scappaticci would have been arrested and charged in connection with the other informer’s abduction.



Northern Ireland’s director of public prosecutions, Barra McGrory, who was once a solicitor for the president of Sinn Féin, Gerry Adams, described any move to “allow” certain informers to die in order to promote and protect Stakeknife within IRA’s ranks as having “driven a coach and horses” through the criminal justice system.

McGrory refused to comment on allegations aired in the programme over the retirement of the deputy director of public prosecutions after reviewing her decision in 2007 not to prosecute Scappaticci over claims he committed perjury in court. The Belfast-born son of Italian immigrants denied in court he was Stakeknife.



The then senior DPP lawyer, now deputy DPP, who made that decision was Pamela Aitchison but her former boss McGrory tells the programme he could not discuss “personnel issues”.



A former RUC assistant chief constable, Raymond White, also declines to state how many of his agents or informers he lost while Scappaticci led the IRA’s internal security unit.

Meanwhile, the whistleblower who first exposed the existence of Stakeknife back in 2003 accused the agent’s associates of “turning a blind eye” to the corruption of the criminal justice system.



Ian Hurst, a former military intelligence operative for the army’s Force Research Unit, told the Guardian: “The political class created this and other similar intelligence problems. That said, they needed and relied upon weak-minded or selfish people in sensitive positions to facilitate cover-ups.

“The aim of the state cover-up was to degrade the available evidence and make it almost impossible to portion blame upon culpable individuals. The state succeeded on both points,” he said.

The “Stakeknife” scandal is being investigated by an independent police team led by former counter-terrorism detective John Boutcher, now chief constable of Bedfordshire. Boutcher’s Operation Kenova has a budget of £30m but has so far been unable to interview Ian Hurst, the man who first made public the existence of Stakeknife.

A Ministry of Defence court injunction still bars Hurst from talking to police officers about his knowledge of Stakeknife from his time as a FRU officer.



Another military intelligence officer who operated in the region when Stakeknife was being managed as a high-grade agent, compared the IRA relationship between Scappaticci and McGuinness respectively to that of the “operation manager” and the “managing director” in terms of deciding on the approach to suspected spies and their fate once unmasked.