After two years on the run - including UK taxpayerfunded visits to prostitutes - a secret, long-lost memo reveals how MI5 hatched a brazen four-point plan to get double agent Stakeknife back at the heart of IRA operations

Published: 23:20, 15 July 2026 | Updated: 23:20, 15 July 2026 By 1992, Freddie Scappaticci had been on the run in the Irish Republic for two years following the rescue of police agent Sandy Lynch from 124 Carrigart Avenue, Lenadoon on 7 January 1990 where he’d been held by the IRA. Scappaticci had secured Lynch’s confession through psychological torture, and the branch had been warned that he was to be executed that day after dark.  Danny Morrison, four other members of the IRA, the two householders, James Martin and his wife Veronica, and their son Liam, were arrested when the police broke into the house at 5.10pm.  Morrison denied he was there to sanction the death sentence, but to assess whether Lynch was sufficiently credible to put in front of a press conference.  Nonetheless, Morrison was charged with conspiracy to murder. At his trial, he was given the benefit of the doubt on murder, but was sentenced to eight years for falsely imprisoning Lynch. As Morrison and the others languished in jail, nursing a deep sense of betrayal by IRA men unknown, Freddie Scappaticci was becoming homesick and severely despondent as he whiled away his days in the suburban village of Clondalkin, on the outskirts of Dublin.  He continued to report to his handlers at meetings along the border despite there being a warrant out for his arrest for conspiracy to murder and false imprisonment. His intelligence was limited to whatever fragments he was picking up about the different departments in the PIRA’s GHQ operations based in Dublin city, the priority being the quartermaster’s department, which was responsible for the supply of weapons.  He also provided intelligence about IRA fugitives from the North. To keep his spirits up, with MI5’s knowledge, the Force Research Unit (FRU) took him for a couple of R&R breaks in Britain, resting up at hotels where he is reported to have got together ‘with hookers’, conceivably all at taxpayers’ expense.  Freddie Scappaticci continued to report to his handlers at meetings along the border despite there being a warrant out for his arrest for conspiracy to murder and false imprisonment He was clandestinely removed from Northern Ireland via RAF Aldergrove, where he was given a military identity. As with Brian Nelson, the FRU had promised him he was bomb–proof, yet here he was on the run with an RUC warrant for his arrest hanging over him on charges for which, potentially, he faced life imprisonment.  The repeated harbouring of a wanted offender is a serious crime.  That, of course, is not how the FRU saw it, and his spymasters had not been idle. With the apparent approval of the then head of the Belfast CID, Detective Chief Superintendent George Caskey, senior FRU officers had hatched a plan to get Scappaticci back to operational life as an agent.  The FRU appears to have secured Caskey’s agreement to improperly interfere with the CID’s investigation into Scappaticci’s role in the abduction and interrogation of Sandy Lynch by ensuring that, upon his return to Belfast, he would not stand trial.  Or, to put it more bluntly, by flagrantly conspiring to pervert the course of justice. The plot also meant that the suspicions of those Scappaticci had helped put in prison as a consequence of tipping off the FRU about Sandy Lynch’s imminent execution needed to be assuaged.  That opportunity came at Sinn Féin’s eighty–sixth annual conference – or Ard–Fheis – in February 1992 in Ballyfermot, Dublin, where Scappaticci bumped into Veronica Ryan. She’d been paroled the previous autumn from her three–and–a–half–year sentence. ‘Veronica, I’m sorry about what happened,’ Scappaticci told her, adding with a straight face, ‘it had nothing to do with me.’  He said he was desperate to get back to Belfast and that he was missing his wife and children. It appears that at that stage Ryan gave Scappaticci the benefit of the doubt, for she would become a willing accomplice in the plot cooked up between the FRU and Caskey that succeeded in preventing him from being charged when he finally crossed back over the border into Belfast eight months later, in October 1992. Senior Force Research Unit officers had hatched a plan to get Scappaticci back to operational life as an agent The details of the FRU–Caskey plot were laid out in a FRU document dated 19 November 1990, which minuted a meeting between several FRU operatives and Caskey.  It was unearthed in early March 2004 by the ever–diligent Detective Sergeant Andy Ansell, a member of the Stevens 3 Inquiry, as he leafed through an army file.  So brazen was the plot as outlined in the document that it left Ansell trying to catch his breath.  ‘Governor, come here!’ he called to Detective Chief Inspector Phil James. ‘Take a look at this!’ At a subsequent meetings with the DPP, the officer then leading Stevens 3, Commander Dave Cox, did not mince his words.  He told Sir Alasdair Fraser that the FRU and Caskey had engaged in an ‘overt official operation to pervert the course of justice’ aimed at ‘deceiving your office by concealing or falsely representing facts, ensuring a direction of no prosecution against the agent’. It involved Scappaticci being given a false alibi for the thumbprint that the CID had found on the bug detector battery.  Fraser is understood to have been aghast at the betrayal of trust by a senior police officer, particularly by one he regarded as a friend and knew not just professionally but also socially as they were members of the same golf club. Caskey had enjoyed a reputation as a diligent detective, a bit ‘pompous, but a good boss’, as one of his colleagues put it, and an officer with integrity.  In 1990, he had, for example, valiantly encouraged BBC reporter Chris Moore to expose MI5’s obstruction of his 1980s investigation into sexual abuse at the Kincora boys’ home, where at least one member of staff – the paedophilic housemaster William McGrath – was also an MI5 asset. McGrath, the so–called ‘Beast of Kincora’ was leader of the far–right loyalist quasi paramilitary group Tara, and had presumably provided MI5 with insights into its ‘doomsday’ plan to help prevent Northern Ireland from being taken over by republican forces and also, as Moore says, to find out if his fellow loyalists ‘shared his sexual predilections’.  Caskey told Moore how, time and again, a senior MI5 officer had avoided his attempts to interview him. Yet while Caskey was admirably pursuing MI5 for obstructing his investigation into Kincora, he appears simultaneously to have been colluding in a criminal conspiracy to assist another branch of the intelligence services to pervert the course of justice.  It seems Caskey saw no contradiction in this. Presumably in his moral universe, Caskey regarded both as serving the greater good: on the one hand, exposing MI5’s unconscionable obstruction of a criminal inquiry into vile sexual abuse of boys, while on the other, fighting the IRA by helping the army to keep in play a valuable agent, albeit one whom Caskey must have suspected was involved in the murder of fellow agents.  Yet if ‘noble cause corruption’ was indeed what had persuaded Caskey to assist in ensuring that the charge against Scappaticci went away, it is unlikely to have been the first time this senior and very seasoned detective had crossed the line. The plot involved Scappaticci being given a false alibi for the thumbprint that the CID had found on a bug detector battery As set out in the documents as discovered by Detective Sergeant Ansell, the FRU–Caskey plot to ensure that Scappaticci evaded prosecution involved four elements: 1) to keep Scappaticci out of Northern Ireland until the trial and any appeal by Danny Morrison et al. was concluded; 2) to manage the timing and circumstances of his arrest when he returned to Belfast; 3) to coach him on the false alibi to explain away his thumbprint on the bug detector battery; 4) to ensure that Sandy Lynch did not give evidence against him. The false alibi required the assistance of Veronica Ryan, who, in the autumn of 1992, was approached by the daughter of the IRA’s former OC in Lenadoon, Con McHugh. Known as ‘The Bald Eagle’, McHugh was a close friend of Scappaticci.  ‘My daddy wants to speak to you,’ Ryan was told.  When they met, McHugh told her that ‘Scap was looking to come back’ but needed an alibi for his thumbprint.  Could she ‘alibi’ Scappaticci by saying he’d been doing some ‘electrical work’ at 124 Carrigart Avenue?  It would at least carry a ring of truth, since Scappaticci was a builder by trade. With the appeal of Morrison and others having concluded in failure in July 1992, the way was now clear for Scappaticci to make his return to Belfast, which he did on 6 October with very deliberate visibility.  That day Detective Chief Inspector Tim McGregor was told by his boss, George Caskey, that word had reached him that Scappaticci was back in town, working on a building site in the centre of Belfast. McGregor had been the Senior Investigating Officer in the case against Morrison and the others, so Scappaticci was on his wanted list. McGregor says that at no stage was he ever told by Special Branch or by Caskey that Scappaticci was an agent, nor had Caskey confided in him the plot to get him off the hook. Having been directed by Caskey to put an arrest package together, McGregor dispatched uniformed officers to the building site.  The officers found Scappaticci with a bag containing two spare pairs of underpants and ‘toiletries’, clear evidence that he’d been tipped off to expect an arrest that day and to be prepared for a few days in custody. That was not the only intimation of a secret pre–planned deal between Caskey and the FRU.  Events would show that what the FRU documents discovered by Detective Sergeant Ansell said would happen, happened almost to the letter. McGregor’s police diary shows that on 6 October he and a detective sergeant interviewed Scappaticci at Castlereagh.  Scappaticci refused to answer any questions except those relating to his thumb print on the bug detector battery.  He explained that the battery had been in the TV remote, which he said Veronica Ryan had asked him to fix on a different day from when Lynch was being held captive at her home.  Ryan subsequently corroborated this in a witness statement to McGregor and the DPP ruled there should be no prosecution. Scappaticci’s delighted handlers congratulated Caskey for their agent’s ‘enhanced’ status.  But if military intelligence thought it was back to business as usual, the IRA leadership had other ideas.  Deeply suspicious that he’d betrayed Morrison and others in the Sandy Lynch disaster, Sean ‘Spike’ Murray, a senior Belfast–based member of Northern Command made it clear to Scappaticci that his time in the ISU was over and that he was to depart the IRA stage quietly but decisively. But if military intelligence thought it was back to business as usual, the IRA leadership had other ideas BBC veteran investigative journalist John Ware, whose book lays bare the depth of involvement of UK state intelligence in the Troubles Sorry we are not currently accepting comments on this article.