Bed of Lies · The Telegraph

Legacy | 9

April 11, 2025·1 hr 9 min·6 clips

In Belfast, towering Peace Walls still lock communities apart every night, decades after the conflict ended.

Fog hangs over Belfast. The reporter rides with Trevor through retired black-taxi tour territory, with the mountains low in the weather and communities still marked off from each other. Protestant and Catholic areas keep their lines, and that makes the Stakeknife revelations feel less like old paperwork and more like unfinished business. Then the files arrive. MI5 first finds a few new records, then hundreds of pages connected to Stakeknife by the end of 2024. These are not loose scraps from a forgotten box. They include intelligence reports, Army handling records once believed destroyed, and MI5 documents found during digitisation. The picture gets harder to dodge. The files show MI5 knew far more about Freddy Scappaticci than it had said before. Its denials start to fall apart. In the material described here, MI5 had handled him, tasked him, and known about him before resettlement became necessary. Operation Canova has to wait while investigators go back through evidence that may have mattered from the start. One source says the records could have changed the chance of prosecutions if they had arrived earlier. No one has been prosecuted. The episode leaves that fact sitting beside the silence around Stakeknife, the IRA, and the Nutting Squad. Families are still stuck in it. Bereaved relatives have mostly stayed quiet while informers still carry stigma in Republican communities.

As heard by us

A restrained Belfast investigation that turns MI5 file revelations into consequences for waiting families.

Bed of Lies treats Belfast as more than backdrop. The black taxi Troubles tour and the city’s divided communities give the reporting a lived-in setting, while the Stakeknife affair unfolds as a slow account of what was hidden and how long families have been left waiting.

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Why you'd press play

For a Belfast true-crime chapter where new MI5 files reopen a long-silent Stakeknife case.

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