After he left, the police raided the house and rescued Lynch. A fingerprint belonging to Scappaticci was found at the house, but he was never prosecuted. Some in the Belfast provos put two and two together.

They weren’t the only ones with suspicions. 

The South Armagh provos had long wanted nothing to do with Scappaticci, according to Richard O’Rawe, a former IRA man who authored the book  Stakeknife's Dirty War. They didn’t trust him.

So for some, it was no big surprise that maybe Scappaticci could be a tout. Despite that, he was not subjected to the appalling treatment visited on others who fell into that category, as documented in the Kenova Report published last Friday. Kenova doesn’t name Scappaticci as Stakeknife, the security forces’ highest-placed agent in the IRA during the Troubles, but that’s a mere formality.

Moral code

There had long been a code within the so-called Republican movement concerning informers. 

“PIRA’s response to those who were supposed to have informed against it was torture and murder,” Jon Boucher, who headed up Kenova, wrote in the report. “Statements from republican leaders supported these actions.” 

The report references the occasion when Gerry Adams said at a news conference held close to the family home of a man murdered for allegedly being an agent that he, “like anyone else living in West Belfast, [knew] that the consequences for informing is death".

Martin McGuinness told the BBC journalist Peter Taylor that “if Republican activists go over to the other side, then they more than anyone else are absolutely and totally aware what the penalty for doing that is".

Taylor asked if this meant death. “Death, certainly,” McGuinness replied.

So went the moral code in the Provisional IRA. And as the organisation styled itself as some form of socialist freedom fighting outfit, the code would have to apply from the top to bottom or it meant nothing. Yet for some reason, it didn’t apply to Scappaticci.

He, more than anyone, knew the code, because he enforced it as the main man in the Provos Internal Security Unit (ISU), designed to root out and punish informers. In that guise, he was responsible for at least a dozen murders, according to Kenova, and possibly over 30, according to Richard O’Rawe. 

He had a fearsome reputation as a torturer. Apart from that, some of those whom he tortured and murdered were not informers at all.

“The motivation that some people were agents was often linked to PIRA hierarchal disputes, clashes over PIRA criminal activities and, on occasion, even intended to eliminate partners for those involved in extra-marital relationships,” Kenova reports. 

The moral code in these instances was nothing more than a convenient cover for mafiosi-style murders. Once Scappaticci had “broken” his victims, whether or not they were actually were agents, he had confessions recorded.

“The audio and written statements of some ISU victims in which they apparently admit assisting the security forces should be disregarded,” according to the report.

“These people were under extreme duress, suffering physical mistreatment and torture to extract confessions. The ISU made some false promises that, should they confess to assisting the security forces, it would stop mistreating them. No one should be in any doubt that these crimes amount to some of the worst in the conflict.” 

Yet, when Scappaticci himself came under suspicion, he was not hauled in for torture and probably dispatch. His role was such that, if he was a British agent, he would have done the most severe damage to the Provos. But instead of torturing the truth out of him, and shooting him if he was found to be guilty, Scappaticci was simply eased out of the organisation where he could do no further damage. 

Had the IRA handed him the designated fate of informers, there would have been hell to pay in their own community. The idea that the man who had tortured and murdered all these people, often under a bogus premise and on behalf of the IRA, was a tout himself would have smashed credibility in the enclaves where the Provos writ ran. It was too much to bear, so they simply dumped the moral code and let him walk.

The case of Caroline Moreland

The moral code on informers was back in full force a few years later when a 34-year-old mother-of-three, Caroline Moreland, came under suspicion. 

She had allowed her home to be used for IRA meetings. In July 1994, she was turned by the British after they found an armalite on the premises. She was told to co-operate or she would be spending a long time in prison and her children would go into care. A month later, the IRA suspected she was a tout. She was abducted and held for 15 days while her fate was decided. This was a month before the IRA ceasefire, and plans were in train for a cessation of violence.

With the end so near, they could have allowed this woman, who had been used mercilessly by the British, to just go home. 

However, according to veteran journalist Ed Moloney, somebody on the army council decided she had to die, in order to send a message to the hard men in the organisation that despite the pending ceasefire, those in charge were not going soft. She was shot dead and her body dumped near the border in Fermanagh. 

“Nothing crystallises the wickedness of the IRA more than this appalling killing,” O’Rawe writes in his book. The moral code, suspended when expedient in the case of Scappaticci, was ruthlessly enforced here, a young mother nothing more than a pawn in the hands of these self-styled freedom fighters.

People as pawns

The British weren’t much better. 

Scappaticci is reputed to have warned his handlers on a number of occasions that an informer was about to be shot, but nothing was done. These murders “were or could have been the subject of advance intelligence and so could have been foreseen and prevented", Kenova points out. 

Some of these people were murdered under a false premise that they had been co-operating with the British.

Others were agents and had, for different reasons and under different pressures, informed on the IRA, provided a service to the British state and possibly saved lives. Yet they were expendable and allowed to be carried off to their deaths. For the big boys in the security services and the IRA, all of these people were just pawns. Whether they were foot soldiers in the conflict or the totally innocent, it didn’t matter. Their lives were considered the cheap price to get one-up on the other side.

And what was it all for? Last month, on The Late Late Show, Patrick Kiely broached this subject with his interviewee, Northern Ireland’s First Minister Michelle O’Neill. Kielty’s father was murdered by loyalists when he was 16.

“I know there’s a lot of families, mine included, who think that people died for nothing,” he said. 

O’Neill gave the stock Sinn Féin response about all victims and conflict is awful. Yet the more we learn about what went on, the more difficult it becomes to escape the awful conclusion that Kielty’s observation is horribly accurate.