Henry Hemming

I started reading Henry Hemming’s excellent new exposé of British agents in Northern Ireland on 5th April 2024, 26 years after the signing of the historic Good Friday agreement. It was also 38 years since I had served as a British Army officer, running operations between the army and the RUC in the Falls Road area of West Belfast, scarcely aware of the undercover operations divulged in this extraordinary book, despite my weekly meetings at RUC Headquarters in Springfield Road.
Hemming’s early chapters succinctly cover the events leading to The Troubles. Northern Ireland went from being one of the safest countries in the world in the 1950s to a place where in the summer of 1969, seven people were killed within two days in Belfast and more than 1,800 families, mostly Catholic, were given just hours to clear out of their homes before they were set alight. With the violence becoming increasingly sectarian, the British Army’s peacekeeping mission in August 1969 soon began to look like a success with local Catholic communities seeing the army as a buffer between them and the RUC. Soldiers were being fed ‘Ulster frys’, sugar buns and cups of sweet tea by the grateful locals and they were soon patrolling the streets without having to wear helmets or body armour. However, by the end of 1969, a younger and angrier faction called the Provisional IRA (PIRA) splintered away from the original organisation.
The chaos and bloodshed inflicted by PIRA throughout the early 1970s is well documented. Bloody Sunday, on 30th January 1972, acted as a clarion call for IRA recruitment. There had not been more British people killed by their own armed forces since the Peterloo Massacre in Manchester in 1819. By the end of 1972 both Catholic and Protestant paramilitary organisations were larger than ever: 501 people were killed that year, including 81 British soldiers. The Army had found itself in a Catch-22; they could only leave Northern Ireland once peace had been restored but for that to happen they themselves needed to leave.
In November 1978, Brigadier James Glover was at the Ministry of Defence as the most
senior British officer working on intelligence in Northern Ireland. By then the number of IRA attacks had fallen dramatically: one Northern Ireland Secretary thought that ‘the tide has turned’, while his successor announced that the region was ‘almost permanently free [from] terrorism’. Glover was sure that they were both wrong, certain that the IRA had undergone a silent metamorphosis and that, under leaders such as Martin McGuinness, it was becoming a more disciplined organisation that would be almost impossible to penetrate and was preparing a series of sensational attacks which Glover called ‘spectaculars’.
Glover’s classified report found scant favour with the newly optimistic government but his forecast turned out to be little short of clairvoyant. In November 1978 the IRA detonated bombs in 16 towns across Northern Ireland before moving on to targets in England, murdering the British ambassador to the Hague and his valet, while in the same month, the splinter group INLA killed the Conservative politician Airey Neave. Glover was sent out to Northern Ireland in February 1979 as the new Commander Land Forces to take control of the army’s day-to-day operations with a clear idea of how to solve the conflict. More volunteers with no previous history of violence were joining the paramilitary ranks, which in turn meant that more individuals than ever knew things that could be turned into intelligence and then used to prevent future attacks and save lives. Glover wanted intelligence to become the priority for security forces in Northern Ireland.
The August bank holiday of 1979 provided the tragic catalyst for Glover to accelerate his plans. The murder of Lord Louis Mountbatten was followed hours later by the Warrenpoint bombs, which killed 18 Parachute Regiment soldiers. These horrific events convinced Margaret Thatcher to commit fully to Glover’s intelligence-gathering plans, resulting in the formation of an elite new agent-running unit called the Force Research Unit (FRU). It was on a wintery day in 1980 that a member of the FRU first approached a nondescript unemployed man walking his dog on the outskirts of Londonderry with the greeting ‘Alright Franko’.
Four Shots in the Night follows Franko Hegarty’s journey from this first incongruous meeting to when he was found six years later by the side of a muddy lane, shot dead, a rope tied around his wrists and masking tape covering his eyes. It exposes how Hegarty became close to Martin McGuinness and was entrusted with covert IRA operations while at the same time providing information to British military intelligence and the role agents played in ending The Troubles. Each undertook the most extraordinary risks to relay critical information to their handlers, knowing that discovery would lead to a visit from the ‘Nutting Squad’ - the IRA’s assassins. Their intelligence handlers in turn had to play ‘God’ every day deciding whether the lives of their agents might be worth sacrificing in order to save countless others. The book questions why McGuinness was never prosecuted for Hegarty’s murder and poses the morally shocking question of whether he had been killed by another undercover agent code-named ‘Stakeknife’ and if so could one of two British agents working inside the IRA have been ordered to kill the other, leading one determined detective to open one of the largest murder investigations in British history.