'Golden egg' How brutal enforcer was protected to the end

When Freddie Scappaticci, 77, suffered the stroke that would kill him on the morning of 16 February 2023, he had not worked for two decades.

- Daniel Boffey

Scappaticci was known locally in West End, a village outside Woking, Surrey, as Frank Cowley, a retired property developer, who lived in a spacious four-bedroom detached home with a sprawling garden.

But he was, as a final report by Operation Kenova effectively revealed, for a long time Britain's most valuable spy inside the IRA during the Troubles, once described by an army general as the "golden egg" of the intelligence services. More pertinently to his victims, he was a sadistic murderer, who had been in the pay of the British state.

In his dual role, as a British agent and head of the IRA's "nutting squad", an internal security unit dedicated to rooting out informants, Scappaticci would threaten to string up and skin his victims before offering to let them go if they confessed. Then he would order or personally carry out their execution. He would play taped confessions to families left behind and he would tell the British intelligence services all about it.

Operation Kenova reported yesterday that MI5 were aware of pretty much everything.

Scappaticci grew up in the Markets area of south Belfast and was a talented footballer, trialling with Nottingham Forest in 1962 as a 14-year-old. He was also an early volunteer for the nascent provisional IRA.