Among those queuing outside Derry bookshops to buy the Troubles best-seller Lost Lives on the day it was published in 1999 was local 18-year-old Ryan Hegarty, who wanted to know why his father was murdered by the IRA.
As a five-year-old Ryan had seen his father, Frank, pull a ring from his finger and hand it to his partner to mind until Ryan was older. Days later, Frank’s bound and blindfolded corpse was displayed on the BBC TV News after it was dumped on a country lane 100 yards inside the Northern Ireland Border.
Britain’s security services alerted prime minister Margaret Thatcher when Frank Hegarty went missing in early summer 1986. As “Agent 3018″ he was “’an extremely high-priority target” for the IRA. Mrs Thatcher underlined the warning that he would “probably be killed”, UK National Archives show. “In the eyes of the IRA he committed the ultimate crime, but in my eyes he saved people’s lives,” Ryan said later.
This book builds on the widely-accepted belief that IRA leader and future Northern Ireland Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness lured Frank Hegarty back to Derry from the safe house in Kent where he was living after being exposed as a British agent. It also asserts that McGuinness ordered his execution and it suggests strongly that the four shots that killed Frank Hegarty were fired by Belfastman Freddie Scappaticci, aka “Stakeknife”, a long-time IRA interrogator, confidant of Gerry Adams and reputed “jewel in the crown” of the estimated “hundreds” of British agents in the IRA.
Attempts to investigate the murders committed by Scappaticci and other British agents within the IRA have been frustrated – Operation Kenova employed 72 detectives for seven years, cost £40 million and was “the largest murder investigation in British history”.
[ Freddie Scappaticci: The life, activities and murders of an IRA double agentOpens in new window ]
Though containing “nothing damaging to national security”, the 41 short, crisp, screenplay-like chapters in this superb and chilling book constitute a sordid thriller.
Among the questions it raises is: would Martin McGuinness have been elected President of Ireland in 2011 if Frank Hegarty’s mother, Rose, had not fearlessly condemned his “evil” and murderous past on widely-viewed BBC TV programmes.
