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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Chapter 2: How did the British security forces recruit agents during The Troubles?
How did the British security forces recruit agents during the Troubles? And how did the IRA try and hunt down those who would become informers? Well, welcome to The Rest Is Classified. I'm David McCloskey.
Chapter 3: What role did Freddy Scappaticci play in the IRA's internal security?
And I'm Gordon Carrera. And last time, we left off with Freddy Scappaticci, number two in the IRA's internal security unit, its counterintelligence function. It's the late 1970s. he is in charge of some pretty dirty work interrogating and in some cases executing suspected informants who are working for the British state.
But we left off last time with the revelation that Scappaticci himself had become an agent for the British state.
Chapter 4: What challenges did the RUC face in recruiting informants?
And that angle to the story is what we'll be looking at in this episode. Now, Bit of context, last time we briefly looked at different parts of the British security establishment who are operating in Northern Ireland. We have the RUC, the Royal Ulster Constabulary, or the police, which kind of has primacy in the area. Its special branch is tasked with collecting intelligence.
Just to set a bit of the table here for what this conflict felt like, if you were a member of the security forces or the IRA during... The late 70s and early 1980s. Interpol data in 1983 showed that Northern Ireland was the most dangerous place in the world to be a police officer. The risk was twice as high as El Salvador, which was the second most dangerous place at the time. So this...
Chapter 5: How did the Army and MI5 interact during The Troubles?
This world that Scappaticci is in, these security forces that are attempting to penetrate the IRA, the IRA that is attempting to weed out informants. This is a really high stakes intelligence game that is being played out on top of a really violent chessboard in the late 1970s and early 1980s. This episode is brought to you by HP.
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Chapter 6: What was the significance of the Force Research Unit (FRU)?
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Chapter 7: What were the complexities of running an agent like Scappaticci?
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So the RUC, the police force, is a target of the IRA, but it's also trying to recruit agents, but it is seen as close to the Protestant community, which makes it harder to recruit Catholics as agents. And so it doesn't really have the resources and the experience to run a large-scale intelligence operation. So other organizations are also going to get involved, particularly the Army.
Now, it's technically supporting the RUC, but in practice, they're often doing their own thing. They're much bigger. They have more resources. And inevitably, there's quite a bit of tension between them and the RUC. The Army see themselves as more professional, perhaps less inclined to use blackmail, able to run agents with a longer shelf life as well.
Chapter 8: How did Scappaticci's intelligence affect IRA operations?
Those are some of the tensions that exist.
One British security service that we haven't actually, we didn't talk about in the first episode, which maybe listeners will find surprising, is MI5. Yeah. Coming to this story, I would have presumed that a high level agent who is being run inside the United Kingdom, that this would be an MI5 story. Yeah. But it's not been to this point.
No, and I think it is fascinating when you look at this because actually MI5, by the time the conflict kicks off in 1969, actually has very little kind of access or agent or source network in Northern Ireland. And it's still primarily behind the scenes even at this point. So its role is primarily just supporting the RUC and army and running their agents.
And there's definitely tension there because, you know, going back to the tensions, the army tend to see MI5 as kind of soft middle class types who come up from London. The only agents that MI5 are supposed to be running and recruiting at this point are ones who can provide... strategic intelligence about threats against the mainland, against Britain or British interests overseas.
And even when it comes to countering terrorism on the mainland, that's actually the Metropolitan Police Special Branch, which has the primacy there. It's going to be much later that it takes over the leading role that it now has. Northern Ireland.
But at this point, its main job is actually installing and maintaining bugging devices and things like covert cameras for the RUC and to some extent the Army as well. So the Army is really the main focus, the military and military intelligence for this story. Which I agree, I think for a lot of people might be surprising.
But last time we talked a little bit about the Fred Force, which was the early form of group running agents. But once you get to the end of the 70s and the start of the 80s, you get a shift. in the way the intelligence game is being run to try and centralise the process a bit more. Part of that is because 1979 sees a series of major attacks.
You get the killing of Lord Mountbatten, a close relative of the Royal Family in August of that year, as well as almost simultaneously an ambush in Northern Ireland that kills 18 soldiers. Earlier that year, you've had an MP Airy Neve blown up as he leaves the House of Commons car park. Margaret Thatcher comes into office, 79. She wants to push the intelligence war harder against the IRA.
Interestingly enough, she actually recalls from an academic role the former head of MI6, Sir Maurice Oldfield. to be the security and intelligence coordinator on Northern Ireland, to beef up that role. He is the person who Alec Guinness models his portrayal of John le Carré's George Smiley on in the TV series Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, which airs on British TV around this time as well.
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