Spies, Murder and Justice In Northern Ireland with Henry Hemming and Rossa McPhillips

Do you love spy books, movies and television? Then the spyb podcast is for you. Hello and welcome to episode 236 of the Spy Bri podcast. Today we are talking about a book titled Four Shots in the Night. It is a story that begins with the 1986

murder

of a British spy within the IRA. No one was arrested at the time, but his death set in motion a process that led 30 years later to the largest

murder

investigation in British history. . His target is another British spy named Steak Knife who is believed to have carried out the murder and this murder and dozens more Henry Hemmings Four Shots in the Night is the story of what happened that night of the murder the role played in all of this by Martin McGinness and the broader narrative of British intelligence in North Iceland and during the Troubles is about trust and betrayal Love and death a familiar search for the true truth and how far any spy should be allowed to go in the search for intelligence over the last decade Henry has written three other books about

spies

, but this one is very different, he says that I have never before explored a subject that is so contemporary and so raw, nor have I tackled a story that moves me as much as this one in ways that I'm still trying to figure out.

Joining us on spyb today is Sunday's best-selling author, Henry Heming. welcome Henry thanks for having me Shane really good to be back fantastic uh We've also recruited a spyb contributor, Rossa mcfli mcflips, to host this Rossa received an MBE for his time in British Military Intelligence and is now an advisor intelligence technician for TV shows including the upcoming ITV series Red Eye, he is also a comic book author and scriptwriter and when you say comic book author you mean the Commando books, right, which I loved as a kid, do those Do you remember, Henry, yes, completely? no, I kept those things growing up, so Rossa is writing some of them now that are very funny, but we are here to talk about four takes in the night Rosser, I will hand it over to you, sir, thank you Shane and you know, thank you.

Henry, for agreeing to do this, you know, I read the book and I have to say you know I was a little impressed by it in terms of the emotion, but also how you weaved the different um threads into this story and that how is this Murder is on many levels, um, but I guess you addressed this on the front of your book, basically you know books about the Ni Island comes with, you know, it comes pretty loaded, you know it comes with a certain suspicion that there might be some agenda. , you know, whether it's rewriting the story or acknowledging it or whatever, so you know, the first question.

Do you know which side you're on with Henry? Where are you coming from when writing this? Yeah, well, that's actually a very good question and, first of all, thank you for what you just said about the book, which means a lot. especially coming from you, given your experience and your understanding of the history of The Wider and everything that goes with it, whose side I'm on in this is pretty funny. The question I was asked repeatedly when I was researching this book, it's been about five years since I started having interviews with people, talking to them about their memories of that time and their reflections on what happened and I'll be totally honest.

I mean, to begin with, I went into this thinking I'm just not going to do it. take a side, I'm neutral, I'm the objective historian here and I suppose that's because in the past, with other books where I've been writing primarily about

spies

operating during the 1930s and 1940s, I haven't really had have to address that because It's been pretty obvious that the bad person is that you know the Nazis and you side with anyone other than them. This is totally different and I originally thought I would be totally unbiased but I realized that if I did that that would also not allow me to do the story

justice

and I think in my mind what I was trying to do eventually was be partial to both of them. sides or more than that with all the different players and perspectives within this story because I think that unless you open yourself up to what the different players were thinking, what drove them, what their emotions were at different points, then you will never get into the skin of this, so whose side am I on?, if it is possible to say so.

This without sounding ridiculous, I'm on everyone's side and I hope that allows me to provide some kind of balanced understanding of what happened, yeah, no, I think that's a pretty fair interpretation, you know, and I think there's obviously, I think most historians. I recognized that there were bad things on both sides and you know, and a lot of work that was done behind the scenes that you talk about in the book, but this wouldn't be the first book that focuses on the steak knife, but I think. In terms of what makes this book to a higher standard than the books that have come so far, is that you've focused on one of Stak Knight's victims, um, and the story, and like we said, the things that They came out of that, can you tell?

I because? Because obviously Stak Knife is an interesting kind of person to focus on. Why did you want to focus on Frank? Yes, it is a very good question. I came into the whole topic from a different perspective. I had a conversation with someone. Who said where the effect is? You must realize that the most important story in the history of British intelligence of the last 70 years is that of the spies within the IRA and the role they played in bringing about peace and achieving the Good Friday agreement and at that time, This was news to me, I was skeptical, it wasn't something I had read enough about, so my journey started with that and very quickly when I came across Frank Hegy's story I realized that it was about a particular story. that seemed to encompass all the different threads that are contained in this much larger tapestry, this larger narrative and the moment I understood that was when I wanted to know more about this particular murder and then you know this is something that Shane alluded to .

I think beyond that, I connected with this story. I was moved by what happened. There was something about Frank's journey, what happened to him, that I found tragic and that I wanted to describe to do it some kind of

justice

as well. I mean, I think from a storytelling point of view, if you're going to make sense of this huge narrative, it's only possible if you focus on something pretty specific, so I knew from the beginning that I wanted to focus on just this. This Frank Hegy story, I want to go into it in more detail.

I think the reason I was so drawn to it is because here is someone who is being run by the military by the military, but he is someone who is getting paid. MI5 is an everyman, so he is someone everyone can relate to, but he is also someone who starts outside the IRA and then moves to be very close to it, so he is someone who is asked to infiltrate the organization, but he is also one of the There are very few exfiltrated agents who go through this process of being expelled from the region and then, on top of that, make the decision to return to the region, so There are already so many different things in his story that are interesting, unusual and then finally you have the state knife element and that really confirmed it for me and made me think this is the story I want to tell.

I was reading about Ian Hurst, the soldier who in 1999 was the first person to do it. becoming a whistleblower and uncovering the story of the state knife and in the advice he gave after that, he always said that part of the reason he did it was because of how he felt about Frank Hegy because he had gotten to know Frank Hegy. while he was in the safe house in Kent, so it was at that point that I realized that many parts of the story go back to Frank and Frank's death and its aftermath, that's when I realized that this is the story I want. to tell it and I think I think you know how to discuss the book with shame because the fact that after Frank has been exposed he was used as an informant or you know an agent within the IRA, you know he's on the run, he's looked after by the Army Investigation Force .

Unit and then come back, you know and because you know people have said listen, it's okay to return that element that you're shouting at the book saying Frank, stay where you are, you've been taken care of, you know I can do it. I can see when his wife was like no, blah, blah, blah, people, I need to stay with the other kids, blah, blah, blah, but just him coming back, it was a very emotional, heartbreaking moment, you know, do you know how you felt when regard? you talk to the family about that moment you know how it happened to you yes, it is a tragic moment and at the same time I think the only way to understand it is to realize that for him his life was If he stayed where he was, he couldn't imagine a new one life outside of Derry and that says a lot about how close his ties were with his family, his mother especially and um and also in a broader sense with Derry. the landscape to the city to everything that's there and it's something I mentioned in the book, obviously during the troubles there is a huge immigration rate of people leaving the region and going to start new lives in the United States and Australia.

Name it and Frank was never one of those people, he was never one of those people who dreamed of starting over abroad and I think the best way to understand what happened to him is that he was in shock, he was deeply traumatic. Suddenly they took him away from everything he had known, everything he loved and he found himself in this cold army safe house. I don't mean physically cold, but just compared to what he was used to, he's no longer around his partner in children and uh, I think it's just when you stack all those things up, then you can understand why he would take what he At first glance it's not a good decision, yes, I think you know that and you touch on this in the book too, you know, I think certainly, based on my knowledge of Irish family background, you know that the rat that is the informant is under so many things, you know, you know, in Ireland it's throughout history, you know if you're a rat, you know, if you're a pigeon within any kind of structure within Ireland, you're seen as the worst of the worst, as if the British soldier was obviously the enemy of the IRA, but the informant within the IRA was even more so. hated and I'm wondering if you think there's some kind of trauma throughout the story with Rand, especially when it comes to informing or do you think it's something that many countries share because I get the feeling that it's very like the Irish to hate to the person inside, I think it is more international, I think it is broader, it is deeper than we sometimes say.

I mean, yeah, a lot has been written about the role of the informer in Irish history in Irish culture as this kind of folk devil and at the same time, the moment you start to see what happens to traitors or enemies inmates or informants in other contexts and other cultures, many times the punishment is death, so it is not unique to Ireland, but at the same time, I think it is. I think there is a different weight given to what it means to be an informant in Ireland and I think a lot of that has to do with the relationship with Britain and the degree to which the informant becomes the scapegoat. kind of person that you can try to blame for everything that's going on and this and this idea that was current in Republican circles certainly during the '70s and '80s, which was that if it weren't for the whistleblowers, we would all have been independents ago. a lot of time they're the ones to blame they're the ones holding us back it's not so much the British but these internal traitors and um and it was really interesting for me to learn more about the role suddenly played by Michael Collins in terms of just adding an edge to that image. of the Informer and making it acceptable for someone accused of being an Informer to be taken out and shot and I think that changes things from what happens during 1919 to 21 onwards, yeah, I think you know, I think Collins had seen, you know for the history, that you said the history experience of informants and nationalist movements and he was able to eliminate many informants, they certainly have a better place, um a A kind of counterintelligence structure around that and, as you say, a sort of punishment for those informants which then had a deterrent effect and possibly led the British to the stal in stal in 192021 22 um, you know what it is, I guess, considering? you order him to be shot, I think that probably leads us to discuss Martin McGinness, who obviously figures very prominently in your book, who was a very interesting character, you know, obviously, very, um, you know that he himself had been on a trip, um, some people. road to Damascus um, but you also know, as you say in your book, his alleged complicity in Frank's death, if you had known it would extend to the end of his life, you know what your opinion of McGinness is.

I think of all the people I've tried to write about it's the most difficult, the most conflicting and the most intriguing, I think I mean in most realms of the stories we consume, whether in the news, whether be it in the history books, nowbe it on television, most of the people we see presented. to us they are pretty good with some flaws or pretty bad and McGinness is deeply unusual in terms of having parts of his story and his personality is exceptionally bad, he is capable of savage brutality, he is responsible for a large number of deaths, sometimes they are people who he really knows personally and at the same time, maybe not so much at the same time, but later in his life he is certainly capable of extraordinary bravery and does a lot to lead the IRA towards a political solution and is someone who also does a lot to maintain the fragile peace that begins to exist after the Good Friday agreement of '98 and I mean, suddenly, to begin with.

I found that confusing someone is both very good and very bad and since you say you go on a journey, I think you have a sort of Road to Damascus moment and I think it's after this failed presidential bid in 2011 and this is one of It's not one of the first times it happens, but it's one of the moments where he thinks he can escape his past. He thinks he can just dismiss all the questions about this and you know, if it comes up during a radio interview, he will. he simply dismisses a question about his past from Ira, but he can't and it comes up more and more.

One of the triggers for this is the collaboration of Frank Heger's sisters. No, that sounds like it. It is a word loaded with work with the newspaper's journalists. a story about the death of Frank Heck and uh and this seems to trigger something from other people who follow this uh this news and um and it's only in the years since that McGinness seems to have a change of heart and I have, yeah, that's One of the things that I found exceptionally moving when I was writing four takes a night was seeing McGinness finally reach this moment of resolution, yeah, I mean, if I had said in the mid-'90s that we would see McGinness and Ian Paisley running Northern.

Ireland, you just think I'm barking like a madman, right? And as friends too, yeah, you know, but you know there have been a lot of, you know, books on the stake knife seem to have created, which I would say from the beginning. I don't think, I think it's just um, it's kind of paranoia and you handle it very well in the book. Accusations that McGinness was a spy and agent. Know? Want? Do you want to talk about that? I mean, like I said, I think it's paranoia, I'm crazy, but I want to know what your point of view was personally, yeah, I guess there are three ways to approach this, I mean, the first is, I mean, let's call it the Pearl Harbor.

So obviously there is this theory. I'm not going to call it a conspiracy theory, but a theory that says that the British and the Americans knew that P har was going to happen before it happened and there was a massive cover-up and the difficulty. The thing is, not a shred of evidence has come to light, there's no leaked government document and there's no person involved in this big cover-up of who's who and I guess what I mean by the Pearl Harbor type of argument is that for something of this scale for Martin McGinness to have actually been a British agent, something would have come to light, there would have been a person who was aware of someone who worked for the British government in some way who would have said something that would be paper than that.

It came out by mistake and yes, from a historical point of view, I believe in screw-ups and mistakes, and I can imagine that if that had been the case, something would have come to light, so that's an argument. I guess the next argument is whether he is the sort of person the army or MI5 or even the police would ever want to target as an agent. Do they have a history of trying to take on people at the top of an organization like McGinness was? And again, this is the problem. There is no precedent for MI5 or the police or the army trying to take on top players like McGinness.

They're constantly more interested in the secretaries, the drivers, the people on the periphery, the kind of mid-level players they can get. There's more chance of going unnoticed, so yes, that's another important part, but I think the third thing to say is that almost as interesting is the idea that the British decided on in the early 1980s, when I say "The British, I mean, not me." I'm not just talking about all wings of the British Security Forces, but some people working for MI5 became familiar with the idea that, from the early 1980s, it might actually be in Britain's interest. keep McGinness in control of the IRA and then maybe if he is in control instead of someone else there is a better chance of peace being achieved so what can we do to keep him there?

What can we do to clear the way for him to remain in charge and also to steer the organization toward a political solution? So what I argue in four takes is that it's much more likely that this happened, yes, you know, I think it's completely sensible what you're saying is that basically there was a relationship in terms of the gauze operation side, meaning the secret. back Channel talks about peace talks behind the scenes and you also know MI5, as you said, leading the IRA towards the Path of Peace without recruiting Martin M himself, but recruiting people around him who could push him down that path. and I think that's much more plausible than him having an agent.

I guess we should really discuss the Canova operation report that recently came out in the last week or so that I've read. Yes, unfortunately not so. Make it not as interesting a book as yours, and I think we'll have to wait on the narrative side, in terms of the story of the Stak knife, but you know, in terms of what the report says, meaning the knife for meat probably killed. more people than he saved, what is his opinion on this?, what is his opinion on the OVA interim report? Yes, I was in Belfar for the publication of the report and I found it fascinating because I think you like it.

A lot of people were expecting more of a story, more of a narrative, something that described how he was recruited and how he was led and things like that and there was nothing and that was one of the tangent things which is one of the things in my book that I found really interesting. They were reconstructing the story of exactly how it was interpreted over what really happened in those early years because I think that sets the tone for much of what follows. but to your question, the report itself and in particular the headline that said more lives were taken than saved.

I was very surprised by your definition of a life saved when I say that I am referring to John Boucher, he is the author of the Operation Canova report and it is a very conservative view of saving a life. Yo, he talks about when agents were redeployed or a direct threat to life was averted because of something the State Knife had said, but what he doesn't include are times when the State Knife conveyed something. verbally and no record was kept of it, but he is also not taking into account the type of broader impact of his intelligence, so he sometimes corroborated information that had come from another source that would then encourage security forces to act consequently. but I think it's also very important to consider the deeper impact of having so much intelligence from State Knife leading to more and more Wrath operations being shut down.

There are some surprising statistics or analysis in terms of how many of these Ira operations have been canceled in places like Belfast and Derry in the early 1990s and some people estimate that up to nine in 10 operations were being canceled and that the majority of Sometimes that is due to some type of intelligence success. So I find it really interesting and if that happens consistently within an organization that is really going to change people's perspective in terms of whether a military victory is possible, I think state intelligence saved lives in the sense that it demoralized some. of the Asus within the IRA canceled so many operations that more and more people within the IRA began to believe that a political solution was basically the only show in town and in that sense it is a catalyst for ending the conflict and in that sense.

It saves lives, but I also accept that you can't put a number on it, that it's really very difficult to measure, so I understand where John Bout is coming from at the same time. In fact, I believe more lives were saved as a result. of state intelligence from what Boucher understands, yes, I think Boucher is coming from an evidentiary standpoint, obviously he's a police officer, you know, he wants to see that kind of paper trail, the evidence, the trail to prove those things. I think Stevens had been misled previously when someone told him, oh Brian Nelson, who was in the UDA, he saved all these lives and then Stevens said, I don't think he did it, so I think there was that suspicion that, that kind of what the Force Investigation Unit believed about their MI5 Agents, you know what they believed about people like the steak knife, totally, you know that sort of thing, but I think and also what you're saying is that you know. towards the end, but basically this is the North Island, the so-called problems.

It was basically a war of intelligence and intelligence was the key as opposed to any pitched battle like, say, the World War, you know, etc., and you know, I think there's a lot to say about it, but I just want to understand your reasoning. for thinking that intelligence was the integral part of this war, if you will, my reasoning has to do with, I'm just talking about the kind of scale of the intelligence operation and I mean, we've all heard different numbers, I think the number The one I always refer to is the advisory group on Father Dennis Bradley's past and and uh and they showed him classified government records and as a result of seeing that he told a reporter from um, I think it was a featured program. that in the early 1990s there were up to 800 government agents targeted at any one time, yes, and what I also found interesting is the reaction to that figure from a former intelligence professional, which meant it was more than that. and um, so the scale of this is deeply unusual and if you look, you know that if you take into account just the population of Northern Ireland, the adult population of Northern Ireland at that time, it's a significant proportion and something that emerged in Canova .

The report was uh I think Boucher said at one point that the overwhelming majority of agents working for the British have never been discovered and, um, and I hope they never are, so scale is the main reason why I say that, I think also the Reflection. Some of these senior military officers, looking back on what happened, have also supported this idea that without intelligence they couldn't do much, it was a critical part, but I think it's also the contrast with There are other conflicts around the world in which that intelligence is usually on the periphery and this is, I mean, it's very important to see the other side of the coin, yes, intelligence played a much bigger role in this, but at the same time It meant that there were many more occasions in that the Army handlers, the MI5 handlers, the police handlers, were faced with incredibly difficult moral and legal decisions about basically what to do with this intelligence and that to me is the interesting part because there was no precedent, so many Sometimes people were working in no man's land, trying to discover something that hadn't been discovered before and yeah, I mean, it's far from us to participate in a philosophy conference here. but obviously there is, and as you say in the book, there is new legislation on the enforcement of officers, the criminal conduct law that says that you know that officers can, to some extent, engage in criminal activity, but they can still be prosecuted for it, you know, in one case. for example, what you know, what Henry's opinion of the whole thing is, you should know if the agents should know if it's Frank Heery who was on the periphery or if he's Stak Knife.

What you know is at the forefront, do you think? You believe that it is the right thing for agents to commit crimes if they are in criminal groups, terrorist groups or whatever. I basically agree with the legislation, I think it can be justified and I think the only thing that is really encouraging about that legislation is that the 21st Law, I think so, is the extent to which there are now checks and balances and there are many more chances that they are being monitored and I think again this brings us back to the Canova report, one of What comes up again and again is that people are being asked to make these decisions without enough legal guidelines and without enough training, yeah, sure, yeah, and that's where mistakes can happen, that's where they can lose sight of exactly what they want. are doing and if they continue to do the right thing, so you know, bringing this almost full circle, then Henry in that logic, then was the death of Frank Frank Heger, um, necessary, it's a really difficult question and I don't want to say. yes or no and I'm sorry I don't want to say if it was necessary or not but what I can say is that if it had beenfreddy scapa and you will see in the book what I Think about it, but let's say that it would have been Freddy Scapa who pulled the trigger, if it hadn't been him, it would have been someone else and let's say that that other person was not an agent and I think the question more important is if the IRA had had an internal security unit that was dispensing that kind of justice and they should have been executing people that they accused of being informants or spies and um and for me the answer to that is very simple no, I don't think so that justifies that kind of punishment, yes, because I think even the Op Canova report, you know you have it.

About just saying that many of you know that many people in the IRA internal security actually use them to get rid of their rivals or even settle scores over adultery and stuff, so yes, they definitely had an abuse of power. So yes, those people in the internal security unit have cases to answer for, but again, I don't think many of them have been tried, no they haven't and I mean just bring it back to Frank Frank , it's family and to his son for a moment, Ryan, who is on record, says very simply, um, his father was not responsible for the loss of any life that he saved, one of the um, the reasons he was in trouble. with the IRA was that he revealed the location of a huge cache of weapons and um and the fact that they were taken out of circulation obviously led to fewer lives being taken and um and yes, his punishment in the eyes of the IRA was he was going to be murdered. , so there's a huge injustice there and I think it's important and it's good in the book to be able to repair that to repair the narrative that surrounded Frank Heti for so long, yeah, again, like I said before.

It was very, you know, novel and innovative to focus on Frank, you know, to make his story the center of it. And I think, you know, he gave the whole steak knife aspect, you know, another kind of edge. which was very, you know, emotional and very sincere and you know, I think the bouter said that he probably he wouldn't do it. You know there will never be prosecutions for those people who lost people through the activities of the Stak knives or these. kind of activities, um, do you think that your book, you know, will play a small role in helping families understand why and have a little bit of closure?

I really hope so, it wasn't something I was thinking about. before, but I think the more I got into this story, the more I understood that there was room for the possibility of telling this story of a spy trip from the beginning to the end and I think that when you are able to put What Happened to Frank as one of the victims of state I. When you can put that in its broader context, it is possible to make sense of it. It is possible to understand in a broader sense what was happening. Can you provide closure?

I don't know, can there be something that can provide closure that is incredibly difficult for me? I think one of the things that will also provide closure is the personal family reports that Canova is going to provide to each of the state ices. victims, what's happening has already started to happen and will continue to happen in the coming weeks and months, so that's going to make a big difference and speaking of closure, I guess the last question is okay, what's next for you? In terms of projects that you're working on, can you tell us or give us the gist of what it is, do you know what you're focusing on?

Do you know if again, if you can tell us if you reveal that, yeah, I really don't. I don't know and I'm getting better and better at not revealing the truth about who I've talked to or interviews I've done, but this isn't an example of that, I really don't know what I have. some ideas and um, but there's still a long way to go and I think the release of the Canova report just 10 days ago, um, that's been foremost on my mind. I wrote an article about it, but I also started talking. to people about four shots a night as um it's taken over for the moment so I haven't had the chance I really think it's fair to say yeah I don't know if you can see this hold on this is how I have a lot of tabs of things I learned in four takes because I wasn't taught much Northern Irish history at school. um, there were a lot of things here that I learned.

You know, some of the things I learned were that I always was. under the impression that the IRA was surrounding the British and reading this and learning about some of the clever successes, I would be surprised, but also the maneuvers to involve Shin Fein in the political process, you know, I grew up like a school. A kid who saw Jerry Adams on TV with a V where they slept and thought deep down we were trying to get them to run for office and it was a very slow process, but that was really something that I wasn't familiar with, I learned it from you and there's a lot more, as you can see in all these tabs, this is chol block great, you know the conversations you had, the research, you put into this how and I, so I.

I'm so glad you enjoyed it and found useful things in it and, um, look, I was in a very similar place five years ago when I started writing this. I was coming to this in a position of ignorance and desire. learning more and feeling like this was a big gap in my understanding that I needed to fill, so it's been a wonderful journey. The book will be available on April 2. Available in all good bookstores and online retailers. I'll add the links to that in our show notes which you can find on spy.com 236 Rossa excellent job, you're putting me out of a job here in the presenter's chair well done today Rossa I really appreciate it thank you all thank you Henry really, really I appreciate the talk, you know, it's a topic that interests me very much, very close to my heart, yes, yes, yes, and Russell, thank you, really, very good questions, very good at talking, talking about everything, thank you, thank you Henry .