Four Shots in the Night

Starred review from February 19, 2024
Historian Hemming (Agents of Influence) begins his riveting account of espionage during the Troubles with the 1986 discovery of the dead body of Frank Hegarty, a spy for the British embedded in the Irish Republican Army, in a farmer’s field in rural Northern Ireland. The story of Hegarty’s murder by the IRA was more complex than a case of a spy caught and executed, and only emerged fully in 1999, when a former MI5 spy handler told a reporter: “One British agent inside the IRA” had “murdered another.” Frank Hegarty had been killed by Freddie Scappaticci, an IRA enforcer—part of the mole-hunting team known as the Nutting Squad—who also was an informant for the British. As Hemming slowly peels back the layers of these spy machinations, he raises troubling questions for both sides of the conflict, chief among them whether Scappaticci was ordered by the British to kill another British informant, and whether the end of the Troubles can be, to some extent, attributed to the massive subornation of the IRA from the inside. (The Scappaticci revelation led the IRA to make a 2002 covert raid on a Belfast police station, where, according to Hemming, they found documents hinting at such total infiltration of their organization that they declined to publish them, fearing for their own credibility.) It’s a mind-bending deep dive into a shadowy world of government secrets. Agent: George Lucas, InkWell Management.

March 15, 2024
A swift-paced expos� of the Northern Irish Troubles and the fraught interactions among British intelligence and the Irish Republican Army. Hemming, the author of Agent M and Agents of Influence, delivers a true-crime tale narrated with the skills of a whodunit pro. The author opens with the murder of a British agent, his body left beside a country lane. The British agent was also a member of the IRA, with responsibilities that included storing weapons used in the war against Britain. He was killed, Hemming charges, by another IRA member, possibly on the orders of Martin McGuinness, who became a prominent politician in Northern Ireland and was famously granted an audience with Queen Elizabeth II, an interaction that speaks to the well-worn observation about Northern Irish politics: "If you're not confused, you don't know what's going on." The killing, notes the author, was marked by "savage intimacy," carefully planned from start to finish; the IRA leadership surely knew about it beforehand, but MI5 may have had an inkling before the fact as well. Hemming writes confidently of matters that the IRA has surely tried to keep silent--not just political murders but also everyday tactics, such as the use of dog and horse transports to move weapons around, those transports being difficult for British canine sniffers to expose. One extraordinary revelation is that British intelligence had so thoroughly infiltrated the IRA that the organization was brought to an effective standstill, its stalwarts not knowing whom to trust. One British handler reveals that military intelligence wanted to force the IRA out of the military and into the political arena, against the wishes of the British government--even if Margaret Thatcher, Hemming notes, did authorize secret negotiations to curb the bloodshed. A riveting tale of bad guys all around, engaging from start to finish.

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Starred review from March 29, 2024

Hemming's (Agents of Influence) true crime tale of murder in Northern Ireland delves into the shadowy world of Republican paramilitary organizations and spies run by the British Army and MI5. He peels back layers of secrecy and betrayal to discover who murdered Frank Hegarty, a member of the IRA's Quartermaster Unit, which handled the hiding and distribution of weapons used for various attacks. Hegarty's body was dumped along a lonely country lane. Using a variety of declassified government papers, memoirs, and historical accounts, the author discovered that the "Nutting Squad," a feared IRA unit that murdered accused spies and enforced IRA death sentences, likely murdered Hegarty after the Irish police seized weapons based on information the murder victim had supplied. The author reveals British controlled IRA agent, codenamed "Stakeknife" and implicated in dozens of other IRA murders, participated in the killing at the behest of IRA chief and future Irish politician Martin McGuinness. Hegarty's family publicly rebuked McGuiness after he promised that Hegarty would not be harmed if he returned to Northern Ireland. VERDICT Readers interested in the Troubles will be intrigued by this dive into violence and secrecy surrounding the IRA.--Chad E. Statler

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