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1. Scappattici, a sexually deviant, sadistic torturer and mass murderer.

The Operation Kenova Inquiry took seven years to complete. It looked at a string of murders committed by Alfredo ‘Freddie’ Scappaticci.

Scappaticci was a cold blooded killer without a single redeeming feature. He was an ideal asset for an organisation such as MI5. He lusted after children and spent hours masturbating in front of pictures of extreme pornography, some of which involved animals.

Richard O’Rawe, a former IRA hunger striker turned author, published, Scappaticci’s Dirty War, in 2023. One IRA man interviewed by O’Rawe told him:

 I think Scap was turned because of a lust for young children … he was reported to the RUC for having abused a child in west Belfast, but they never acted upon it.’

Scappaticci was convicted at Westminster Magistrates Court in 2018 after he admitted two counts of possessing extreme pornography.

The Kenova report states that:

As part of the Kenova investigations, Freddie Scappaticci was first arrested on 30th January 2018 in relation to offences connected with the Kenova [terms of reference]. A search warrant was executed at his home address following his arrest. Searching his property, we recovered numerous exhibits including electronic devices.

A laptop recovered from the sitting room at his address contained 329 images of an extreme pornographic nature. Kenova officers and Hi-Tec crime forensic experts were able to prove that Mr Scappaticci was responsible for accessing and downloading these images.

On 1st February 2018, while in police custody, we further arrested Freddie Scappaticci for being in possession of extreme pornographic material contrary to section 63 of the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008. Mr Scappaticci admitted viewing the material but not storing the images, he accepted that he was the sole user of the laptop. He was charged with two specimen counts of possession of extreme pornographic images contrary to section 63, covering a period from October 2015 to January 2018.

On 4th December 2018, at Westminster Magistrates’ Court in London, Mr Scappaticci pleaded guilty to possessing extreme pornographic material. The Chief Magistrate sentenced him to three months in custody suspended for 12 months. In sentencing, the Magistrate said, “You have not been before the court for fifty years and that’s good character in my book”. These remarks frustrated many victims and families who have engaged with Operation Kenova and I can understand why.

2. MI5 controlled Scappaticci. Kenova has ignored his real – and barbaric – value to MI5.

Scappaticci was handled by the Force Reconnaissance Unit (FRU) of the British army. It worked closely with MI5. The Kenova Report discloses that:

A former Commanding Officer in the FRU has stated that everything it did was done with MI5’s knowledge and consent. [67.2]

MI5, a notoriously deceitful and dishonest organisation, tried to distance itself from Scappaticci by responding to what the FRU officer revealed thus:

Senior MI5 officers and the various [directors-general of MI5] I interviewed deny this categorically. [67.2]

The most damaging service Scappaticci performed for MI5 was to destabilise the IRA by spreading rumours about the infiltration of the organisation by British agents or ‘moles’. This was followed by the framing, torture and murder of loyal members of the IRA, a strategy that probably paved the way for the promotion of actual FRU-MI5 moles. The Kenova Report ignores this aspect of Scapatticci’s function as a British agent. The first person to make this accusation was Ian Hurst of the FRU. It is also a view held by senior Gardai.

Boutcher is now Chief Constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI).

Boutcher did at least recognise that:

an environment [was allowed] to evolve in which people were tortured or killed without efforts being made to protect them or to bring agents responsible for serious crimes to justice.

A former D-G of MI5 alleged to Kenova that the FRU had an attitude that was ‘gung ho, not well managed, with little meaningful oversight’. This is little more than manipulative deflection. Scappaticci was well managed. People died because Whitehall, the Northern Ireland Office (NIO), Ministry of Defence, MI5 and the FRU wanted to eliminate them.

Overall, the Kenova report is flawed because Boutcher – a decent man – failed to appreciate the deeply criminal nature of MI5, the FRU and RUC special branch.

Boutcher was faced with the clear and obvious fact that the UK State’s security forces repeatedly withheld – and did not action – information about threats to life, abductions, and murders of IRA members. Looking at MI5, FRU and RUC in a benign and favourable light, Boutcher concluded that this was done in order to protect secret agents such as Scappaticci from compromise. He concluded that:

As a result, murders that could and should have been prevented were allowed to take place with the knowledge of the security forces and those responsible for murder were not brought to justice and were instead left free to reoffend again.

Boutcher could not fail to notice that more lives were lost than saved by Scappaticci, and has acknowledged this much as fact. Yet, he did not deduce from this that Scappaticci was tasked with the elimination of IRA members, not the saving of lives.

Circumstances also arose where Scappaticci was permitted to murder British moles in the IRA to preserve his cover. MI5 undoubtedly calculated that this was a price worth paying. The torture and execution of moles served to enhance Scappaticci’s reputation as a trustworthy member of the IRA.

3. The MI5-RUC-FRU murder machine.

There is an overarching naiveté to the Kenova report. At one point Boutcher was critical of how Scappaticci was run without any regard to the European Convention on Human Rights or the rule of law. The NIO and MI5 engaged in widespread criminality during the Troubles. Criminal organisations do not believe in human rights. The murder of Patrick Finucane by agents of MI5 and the RUC is testament to this. The victims of the Miami Showband massacre were given over £1,000,000 in compensation by the NI State because it knew British operatives organised that atrocity and was afraid to let the scandal go to trial. Whitehall, the Ministry of Defence and the NIO, lied for decades about what happened on Bloody Sunday and during the Ballymurphy massacre.

Scappaticci was one side of a tarnished MI5-RUC-FRU coin. Brian Nelson, the Director of UDA Intelligence, occupied the other face. Nelson’s job was to line up IRA members for assassination with the assistance of his FRU-MI5-RUC puppet masters.

John Stevens led a number of inquiries into the FRU and UK State-Loyalist collusion. His team discovered that 203 Loyalist paramilitaries were on Britain’s pay roll. See the short clip below:

It is not logical to contend that the ruthless British officials controlling the UDA’s assassination programme – via Brian Nelson – failed to deploy Scappaticci for the same purpose.

Scappaticci was the intelligence dirty trick equivalent to a poison which they injected into the body of the IRA.

The Kenova report makes excuses for choices and actions (and inactions) of Scappaticci’s handlers. None of them are going to be prosecuted despite the long list of those Scappaticci killed.

4. ‘The sickening crimes committed by the ISU’ of the IRA.

The Kenova report is also highly critical of the IRA’s utterly repugnant Internal Security Unit (ISU):

The sickening crimes committed by the ISU against those accused or suspected of being agents represented the worst of what one human being will do to another.

David Burke is the author of ‘Deception & Lies, the Hidden History of the Arms Crisis 1970’ and ‘Kitson’s Irish War, Mastermind of the Dirty War in Ireland’ which examines the role of counter-insurgency dirty tricks in Northern Ireland in the early 1970s.

His third book, ‘An Enemy of the Crown, the British Secret Service Campaign against Charles Haughey’, was published on 30 September 2022.

These books can be purchased here:

https://www.mercierpress.ie/irish-books/kitson-s-irish-war

https://www.mercierpress.ie/irish-books/an-enemy-of-the-crown

https://www.mercierpress.ie/irish-books/deception-and-lies

His next book, ‘The Puppet Masters’, will be published later this year.