Gordon Carrera

You can see the army is like, this guy's kind of getting out of control.

And there's another thing going on.

which is there's been inquiries into what's called collusion in Northern Ireland.

Now, this is a kind of whole other set of podcasts we could do because that is the allegation that the security forces were working with Protestant paramilitaries.

So they're kind of

other side from the IRA and Scappaticci, and that in particular, there's one person who's Brian Nelson, who's a chief intelligence officer for a loyalist, so a kind of Protestant paramilitary group.

He's almost like a parallel to Scappaticci on the loyalist side.

And the claim is that he'd been run as an agent by the FRU, and the claim is that they'd been involved in passing intelligence to him for the purposes of targeting people to be murdered.

So targeting, you know, getting the loyalists basically to bump off Republicans, but using this kind of allegation of collusion, using their agent to do it.

So there's been an inquiry going on into this called the Stevens Inquiry, run by a former head of the Metropolitan Police, John Stevens.

Scappaticci isn't the target for this, so they don't know about Scappaticci, but it's kind of unearthing lots of information about what the army has been doing.

I mean, interestingly enough,

Stephen says at the start he didn't even know the fruit existed.

But then in this bizarre moment, his office that the inquiry is being run out of in Northern Ireland, which is on an official office building area, burns to the ground.

You know, which the assumption, I don't think it is very conspiratorial to think the FRU basically burned his office down and tried to destroy the evidence.

So this inquiry is running and getting pretty hot.

And, you know, Stevens is not onto Scappaticci, but Scappaticci is worried that he will be unearthed as part of this inquiry.

That, you know, stuff is coming out about what FRU and what British military intelligence was being done.

And so at one point, and we'll come back to this, a senior British military figure actually meets Scappaticci to reassure him that he's going to be okay, his name's going to come out, and that's going to prove to be another problem.

Meanwhile, outside of Scappaticci's small world, you've got a ceasefire, 94 breaks down briefly because both sides are realizing they're reaching a stalemate.