Freddie Scappaticci’s final years in a sleepy Surrey town: Neighbours were ‘sickened’ when they found out who he really was

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 Scappaticc