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Introducing... Stakeknife

A man tasked with finding and killing alleged informers for the IRA was an informer all along. Mark Horgan traces the story of the secret British Army Agent known as Stakeknife

In Northern Ireland from 1978 to 1994, the IRA killed over 40 alleged informers; people accused of passing information to the police and the British Army. But the man who often found, tortured, and sometimes killed these men and women was himself an informer, a secret British Army Agent with the codename Stakeknife.

Using secret recordings, reporter Mark Horgan traces the astonishing double life of Freddie Scappaticci. Why was he protected? How did he walk the tightrope between the IRA and British Army intelligence for so long and when murders, often of entirely innocent people, were sometimes allowed to take place despite state security force surveillance, who gets to play God?

This series is about far more than just one man; it鈥檚 about the state structures that protected him. From the production team behind the international award-winning 鈥榃here Is George Gibney?鈥�, Stakeknife tells the story of one of the most-contested and darkest episodes of the Troubles. When neither side wants the story of Stakeknife to come out, how does society try to reconcile the truth about what happened?

Credits

Reporter: Mark Horgan
Produced and written by: Mark Horgan and Ciar谩n Cassidy
Co-Producer: Paddy Fee
Editing and Sound Design: Ciar谩n Cassidy
Composer: Michael Fleming
Sound mixing: Ger McDonnell
Theme tune by Lankum
Artwork by Conor Merriman
Assistant Commissioners for 成人快手: Lorraine Okuefuna and Sarah Green.
Commissioning Editor for 成人快手: Dylan Haskins

Stakeknife is a Second Captains & Little Wing production for 成人快手 Sounds.

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3 minutes

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