Frank Conway’s neighbours on his quiet residential road in England didn’t know who he really was. To them, he was the portly Irish man who lived reclusively in a big house behind a high hedge on their smart road on the edge of Guildford, an hour southwest of London, deep in suburban Surrey.
Conway’s daily life was as nondescript as his surroundings. He mostly stayed inside. He walked his dog. He kept his head down. He lived alone.
His neighbours had no clue the Belfast man’s real name was Freddie Scappaticci, a brutal killer who also spent years spying for the British military inside the IRA’s internal security unit. He was the double agent known as Stakeknife.
Scappaticci, born to an Italian family that came to Belfast in the 1940s, grew up in the Markets area of the city and was an active IRA member from the 1970s. He became a paid spy for the British Army in the IRA some time in that decade.
By the 1980s, he was a central figure in the heart of the IRA, within the internal security unit, a position that involved flushing out informers but a role that also gave him access to IRA secrets. The British Army considered him a prized agent, its “golden egg” in the paramilitary group.
In 2003, he was unmasked as the agent codenamed “Stakeknife” by the media, working with a former British military intelligence officer. He denied being a double agent but fled Northern Ireland a year later, choosing a life of anonymity in England.
Operation Kenova, the British police investigation set up in 2016 to investigate Scappaticci’s activities, linked Stakeknife to at least 14 murders and 15 abductions while working for the British Army within the IRA.
Following a seven-year investigation, costing £40 million (€47 million), Kenova’s interim report last year found Scappaticci probably cost more lives than he saved and that British security forces failed to prevent some murders to try to protect their agents in the IRA.
British intelligence officers eventually hid him in Surrey, a few years after his cover blew in 2003. An incongruous aspect of the choice of location to stash the British army’s most senior mole in the IRA was that Guildford was also the site of one of the group’s most notorious pub bombings, in 1974.
Decades later, Scappaticci, as Conway, sometimes walked his spaniel in Stoughton fields near his house. But he was most often spotted at Whitmoor Common, a partly forested area a five-minute drive away, popular with local dog walkers. He rarely mixed with them. Some would pop into the Jolly Farmer pub on the far side of the Common afterwards, but never him.
“I’ve been drinking in here for 15 years and I never saw him in this pub once,” says a Jolly Farmer regular, giving his name as Dave, as he studies a photo of the former IRA man and tries to pronounce his real name.
He could recall, however, the time in January 2018 when the former IRA man was arrested by officers working for Operation Kenova. The inquiry is still examining allegations that police in the North colluded in IRA killings to protect Stakeknife’s cover. Its final report is due soon.
Unprompted in the pub, Dave opens up Google maps and zeros in on the house where Scappaticci lived, a detached Edwardian property fronting the main thoroughfare on the corner of a cul de sac. “Is that it?” he asks.
Dave’s house is nearby. He used to pass Scappaticci’s every day as he headed for the A3, the main road running southwest out of London to Portsmouth, on his way to work. He remembers the arrest; scores of officers formed a line at the front and the side of the house.
“They stayed there for about a week,” he says. “I passed them every day.”
One of Scappaticci’s neighbours across the road was on holidays when the arrest took place, but when he came back the area was crawling with officers. They only found out afterwards their neighbour was Scappaticci. He can remember speaking to him just once. The neighbour was getting his driveway cobbled and Scappaticci, a bricklayer all his life, wandered across to inspect the job and chat to him about it.
Dave suggests speaking to Alex, who owns the cafe across the road, to see if he remembers more of Scappaticci’s movements.
“Anyone who lived for years here would have been a regular in that caff,” says Dave. But Alex insists he wasn’t. Try the estate agents, he says.
The estate agent says he knows nothing about “Conway” or Scappaticci. He does suggest he may have been involved in a transaction on the house; he did not clarify whether for its purchase in 2008, before Conway’s use, or its sale in 2019, soon after Scappaticci was convicted of keeping extreme pornography found on laptops in the house in the Kenova raid.
The estate agent suggested he had dealt with a man who told him he was the son of the man involved in a deal, but it seems more likely that he could have been unwittingly dealing with a representative of the British security services.
Official records show that the house was bought in March 2008 for £350,000, a 46 per cent uplift on the price it had sold for just 12 months previously, suggesting the buyer might not have been too interested in market value. From soon after this, Scappaticci lived there until his arrest in January 2018 – it is not known where he lived after that.
He died in poor health in early April 2023, with scant details known. His former home in Guildford was sold in September 2019 for £443,000. Similar houses in the area sold for between £600,000 and £700,000 over the past year. When he lived there, Scappaticci had not hidden in a pit of penury.
Many of his other former neighbours are not keen this week to talk much more about the IRA agent who had lived secretly in their midst. The neighbour on one side says he is “sick of all this” when asked if he can recall “Conway”. One source, however, says his family cared for Scappaticci’s dog when he had been ill. They were “sickened” when they found out afterwards who he really was.
A woman in another adjacent house looks similarly exasperated when asked about him. Doors slam shut. Neighbours shake their heads. Doorbells go unanswered. Scappaticci’s former house is now occupied by a family who have nothing to do with any of this. The garden is adorned with accoutrements of everyday family life – a trampoline, a swing. Life has moved on, back to the familiar humdrum beat of middle-class suburbia.
There is a post office and a Co-Op supermarket around the corner from the house. Despite having such conveniences on his doorstep, Scappaticci was said to have often driven out of the neighbourhood.
There is also another pub, the Wooden Bridge, nearby. None of the locals in there this week know of Scappaticci having visited it. One man with a long beard, and a jacket-wearing dog named Diesel, says he knows nothing about any IRA agents. He used to be in the British army, he says, and served three tours in Northern Ireland.
“I think of that famous picture of Osama bin Laden hiding in that bare house in Pakistan, when he was filmed lying there watching telly,” says Richard O’Rawe, a former IRA prisoner-turned-author who in 2023 wrote the book Stakeknife’s Dirty War.
“I have this image of Freddie, living similarly, neglecting himself. He was very flexible, but his problem was that most of his family had cut him off. They didn’t bother with him a great deal in the end. But he would have been watching everything back home, from afar.”
People can only speculate about many of the details of Scappaticci’s Surrey life, says O’Rawe. But he believes he may have been preoccupied by a sense of betrayal by the British state, having been its agent for years, only to find Kenova agents coming after him. He referred to a recent book on Stakeknife by another author, Henry Hemming, who wrote that Scappaticci had apparently hinted to handlers that if he was going down, he was bringing them with him.
Anthony McIntyre, a former IRA prisoner who knew Scappaticci decades ago, says he might have lived a “lonely life” in Surrey but his “choices were limited”. Before Guildford, there were rumours Scappaticci had been hiding around Cheshire or Lancashire – he was a big Manchester City fan.
“Freddie had to live that lonely life,” says McIntyre. “He couldn’t let his guard down. He wasn’t going to make it easy for his enemies to get him.”
He says the relative domestic comfort in which it appears Scappaticci was hidden speaks to his seniority as an IRA mole for the British. McIntyre does not, however, believe Scappaticci was the British state’s most senior IRA asset – just the military’s top agent.
Belfast lawyer Kevin Winters of KRW Law, who represents more than 20 families of the victim’s of Scappaticci and his IRA “nutting squad”, last week wrote to Operation Kenova to suggest Stakeknife may not have been a single individual. Others such as McIntyre and O’Rawe do not agree with this.
Winters suggested the “industrial use” in the media of the name Stakeknife – he said it was not an official military code name – had served only to obscure some of the reality of the British state’s penetration of the IRA. He said Kenova’s scope of interest was too “Stakeknife-centric”, that there were many other agents and that more attention should be given to the fact that Stakeknife “was not alone”.
“If they are ever going to name Scappaticci as [the one and only] Stakeknife, the full background of it all needs to be laid out,” Winters said.
The families of Scappaticci’s victims want a public inquiry and to be given full details of what Kenova knows about what happened to their murdered loved ones. One of Winters’s clients is the family of Thomas Emmanuel Wilson, a Workers Party member who was killed, seemingly on Scappaticci’s order, in 1987. His family have always denied he was an informant.
The dead man’s son, Paul Wilson, recently visited Scappaticci’s base in Guildford with the makers of a BBC podcast series on Stakeknife. His impression was that the locals resented being deceived into having such a man hidden there.
“When I heard it was Guildford, I said ‘no way,’” says Wilson, drawing the link between its past as the location of a notorious IRA bombing, and its role as sanctuary for Scappaticci. He is also struck by how close it was to Aldershot Garrison, one of the army’s main facilities in southeast England, barely 15 minutes away.
Wilson just wants the British state to tell his family everything it knows about his father’s death. There also should be a public inquiry into Stakeknife, he says. While he believes Kenova investigators “did their job”, he fears the British establishment will intervene to turn the forthcoming final Kenova report into a “glossy piece of paper that says nothing”.
“If they’re redacting stuff, they’re telling me just enough to scrape by,” he says. “We want to know everything. If I have to, I’ll sign a nondisclosure agreement, I’ll sign anything. Just tell me who, what, why. Ultimately, the government will only tell you what they want you to know.”
By opening the inquiry, Wilson says, the British establishment has “opened a wound” for his family. He now fears “they are going to leave that wound open”.
