Free The New Spymasters by Stephen Grey Page A

final say on an informer, whether that person lives or dies … Hegarty was an affront. He [McGuinness] took it very personally … There is something quite wrong with his head … He would be praying in chapel one minute, go outside and think nothing about ordering a shooting.’
    The reporter asked how he knew so much.
    â€˜Well, I was at the heart of things for a long time, right?’
    Scappaticci said he had served in the Northern Command, like McGuinness. 20 He also said ‘a friend of mine’ was supposed to interrogate Hegarty, but McGuinness and two others had interrogated him instead and then McGuinness had ordered him shot dead.
    If Scappaticci really was Steak Knife and really was an FRU agent, then the ‘friend’ who nearly interrogated Hegarty, his fellow FRU agent, was perhaps Scappaticci himself. It is easy to see why the incident might have affected him so deeply.
    After he was named in the press as Steak Knife, Scappaticci was asked about the Cook Report tapes. He said he had not realized he was being recorded. ‘In relation to the contents, you have to understand that when I spoke to the journalists, I had been out of the movement for about three years. I felt disillusioned and it’s fair to say that I left on bad terms. A lot of what I said was untrue…’ 21
    By the 1990s MI5 had taken over the handling of Steak Knife from the FRU. It was obvious that his handlers had not approved his approach to ITV. At the request of MI5, who told the Cook Report that Scappaticci was a valuable informer, the tape was never broadcast and lay buried for ten years, until the Steak Knife story emerged elsewhere.
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    While British operations in Northern Ireland may prove the value of human intelligence and provide a model for how spies can be recruited against terrorists, those wishing to apply the lessons elsewhere should realize, first, how spying almost always worked in combination with some form of technical intelligence and, second, how spying was a sword whose blade came to be blunted over time.
    Some of the technical methods used to support spying have been mentioned already. Together with tips from agents, the British were forewarned about numerous ambushes and bombs, and, with advance knowledge, were able to defuse bombs and arrest perpetrators. But technical methods also played a major role in suppressing attacks for which the spies had given no warning: for example, the invention of electronic jamming devices played a significant part in reducing remote-controlled bombs.
    Spying’s impact became blunted because spying was a victim of its own success. ‘It was like a soup of spies. So many agencies, so many agents. They were tripping over each other constantly,’ said one ex-FRU member.
    Giving evidence in Parliament, Lord Stevens described how things had got out of hand: ‘When you talk about intelligence, of the 210 people we [the inquiry team] arrested, only three were not agents. Some of them were agents for all of those … particular organizations [the RUC, MI5 and the army], fighting against each other, doing things and making a large sum of money, which was all against the public interest and creating mayhem in Northern Ireland.’ 22
    Many people used contacts with the British security services to their own advantage. In the case of men like Nelson, it was to collude in crime. But there were also positive purposes. The secret contact between the IRA leadership and SIS provided a channel that was ultimately used to hasten the peace process. But this was not spying. The IRA members involved – and the go-between, a businessman – were intelligence contacts, but they were not ‘agents’ – those who betrayed any secrets.
    There were many blurred relationships. Liam Clarke, a veteran journalist in Northern Ireland, explained how the term ‘agent’ came to mean different