![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I already can’t remember how I found this book and I am only vaguely convinced it was the LitHub newsletter, but I found myself putting in a library request for a new nonfiction release: Henry Hemming’s Four Shots in the Night: A True Story of Spies, Murder, and Justice in Northern Ireland. This book appealed to multiple of my interests, mainly Irish history and spy shit.
This book tells the story of Frank Hegarty, IRA quartermaster and British informer, and his murder, most likely by the high-ranking British secret agent codenamed Stakeknife. A double agent getting whacked by another double agent! Juicy stuff!
And it is juicy but it is also profoundly sad. Frank seemed like a nice, regular guy, not at all the sort of hardened psycho that you’d picture spending years as a double agent (Freddie Scappaticci does seem to fit that vibe a little more, though). He seems to have become vulnerable to something as taboo and dangerous as informing because he had actually lost faith in the IRA militants’ strategy of a “long war” and wanted the violence to stop, and genuinely thought that helping the British would save lives. There are strategic notes to be taken, here, about the cost of violence, and the limits on the efficacy of terror to achieve political goals, but mostly the note in question is this: the same thing that gives a terror campaign its efficacy–mainly, that it’s terrible–also means that even people on your “side” may run out of stomach for keeping it going. By the time the Troubles ended, the IRA was absolutely lousy with spies. Most notoriously, Agent Stakeknife, the Brits’ most valuable spy, was the most valuable spy because he had infiltrated the Nutting Squad, the internal enforcement unit tasked with identifying and eliminating spies.
Though most of the action in this book takes place over the course of the Troubles itself–which was certainly long enough, dragging on for about thirty years–Four Shots in the Night takes us all the way up to the present day, through the murder investigation known as Operation Kenova, an attempt by one high-minded (by police standards) faction of the British police to identify and expose Agent Stakeknife and, in essence, solve all the murders that were attributed to him. This operation in some ways succeeded, in that it gathered a lot of information, enough to put a case together against the man they’d identified. However, the other police units–mainly MI5, the infamously shadowy intelligence organization that wasn’t used to answering to anyone about anything–were less than cooperative, and after the case against Stakeknife was submitted to whatever government body decides if the state is going to prosecute the case or not (I returned the book to the library already, sorry), two things happened before a verdict could be rendered. One was that Stakeknife died, under completely non-fishy circumstances, due to just being old by this point. And the other was that the British government introduced a bill to essentially make it impossible to prosecute anyone of any faction for any crimes committed during the Troubles whatsoever. This has been highly controversial and fits within a longstanding and infuriating British tradition of doing a bunch of war crimes and then immediately getting all “let’s not bicker and argue about ‘oo killed ‘oo” about it and making it illegal to remember anything they did because, you know, these situations are very complicated and we’re terribly concerned about reopening old wounds and at some point we’ve all got to coexist and move on with our lives, and other sentiments that are both true and clearly being abused here.
This book follows well in the vein of Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Mystery in Northern Ireland and Rory Carroll’s There Will Be Fire: Margaret Thatcher, the IRA, and Two Minutes that Changed History. All three books are engaging narrative nonfiction that explore one notorious IRA action and trace its history throughout the entire development and resolution of the Troubles. Some familiar faces and events start cropping up once you’ve read more than one of these, but since they each focus on events that are far enough away from each other–the murder of Jean McConville in Belfast, the Brighton Bombing in England, the murder of Frank Hegarty right on the border in Derry–they don’t get too repetitive. After having read the other two, it was interesting to get a much deeper dive into the British infiltration operation and into the IRA’s Nutting Squad, both of which had been only briefly addressed in the other two books, focused as they were on people who were not spies (even the McConville story, in which she was accused of being a spy, could only get so deep into Nutting Squad lore, given that it’s almost certain she wasn’t a spy and the story was therefore not in fact about spies). Writing-wise I found this one a little bit less tight than the others–I don’t necessarily mind a book that bounces around a lot, especially when it’s detailing a complicated story–but the bits that seem to be overdoing the melodramatic stage-setting are few and far between compared to the amount of just genuinely dramatic material, and it didn’t get in the way of being able to follow the story. I think this book maybe does a little bit less hand-holding on the public parts of the Troubles than, for example, Say Nothing does, which is carefully written to be accessible to even the most geographically ignorant American who can’t find Northern Ireland on a map. Overall, I would highly recommend it to anyone who has enough of an interest in the Troubles that they already sort of know what they are, and especially to anyone who liked Keefe’s or Carroll’s books.
This book tells the story of Frank Hegarty, IRA quartermaster and British informer, and his murder, most likely by the high-ranking British secret agent codenamed Stakeknife. A double agent getting whacked by another double agent! Juicy stuff!
And it is juicy but it is also profoundly sad. Frank seemed like a nice, regular guy, not at all the sort of hardened psycho that you’d picture spending years as a double agent (Freddie Scappaticci does seem to fit that vibe a little more, though). He seems to have become vulnerable to something as taboo and dangerous as informing because he had actually lost faith in the IRA militants’ strategy of a “long war” and wanted the violence to stop, and genuinely thought that helping the British would save lives. There are strategic notes to be taken, here, about the cost of violence, and the limits on the efficacy of terror to achieve political goals, but mostly the note in question is this: the same thing that gives a terror campaign its efficacy–mainly, that it’s terrible–also means that even people on your “side” may run out of stomach for keeping it going. By the time the Troubles ended, the IRA was absolutely lousy with spies. Most notoriously, Agent Stakeknife, the Brits’ most valuable spy, was the most valuable spy because he had infiltrated the Nutting Squad, the internal enforcement unit tasked with identifying and eliminating spies.
Though most of the action in this book takes place over the course of the Troubles itself–which was certainly long enough, dragging on for about thirty years–Four Shots in the Night takes us all the way up to the present day, through the murder investigation known as Operation Kenova, an attempt by one high-minded (by police standards) faction of the British police to identify and expose Agent Stakeknife and, in essence, solve all the murders that were attributed to him. This operation in some ways succeeded, in that it gathered a lot of information, enough to put a case together against the man they’d identified. However, the other police units–mainly MI5, the infamously shadowy intelligence organization that wasn’t used to answering to anyone about anything–were less than cooperative, and after the case against Stakeknife was submitted to whatever government body decides if the state is going to prosecute the case or not (I returned the book to the library already, sorry), two things happened before a verdict could be rendered. One was that Stakeknife died, under completely non-fishy circumstances, due to just being old by this point. And the other was that the British government introduced a bill to essentially make it impossible to prosecute anyone of any faction for any crimes committed during the Troubles whatsoever. This has been highly controversial and fits within a longstanding and infuriating British tradition of doing a bunch of war crimes and then immediately getting all “let’s not bicker and argue about ‘oo killed ‘oo” about it and making it illegal to remember anything they did because, you know, these situations are very complicated and we’re terribly concerned about reopening old wounds and at some point we’ve all got to coexist and move on with our lives, and other sentiments that are both true and clearly being abused here.
This book follows well in the vein of Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Mystery in Northern Ireland and Rory Carroll’s There Will Be Fire: Margaret Thatcher, the IRA, and Two Minutes that Changed History. All three books are engaging narrative nonfiction that explore one notorious IRA action and trace its history throughout the entire development and resolution of the Troubles. Some familiar faces and events start cropping up once you’ve read more than one of these, but since they each focus on events that are far enough away from each other–the murder of Jean McConville in Belfast, the Brighton Bombing in England, the murder of Frank Hegarty right on the border in Derry–they don’t get too repetitive. After having read the other two, it was interesting to get a much deeper dive into the British infiltration operation and into the IRA’s Nutting Squad, both of which had been only briefly addressed in the other two books, focused as they were on people who were not spies (even the McConville story, in which she was accused of being a spy, could only get so deep into Nutting Squad lore, given that it’s almost certain she wasn’t a spy and the story was therefore not in fact about spies). Writing-wise I found this one a little bit less tight than the others–I don’t necessarily mind a book that bounces around a lot, especially when it’s detailing a complicated story–but the bits that seem to be overdoing the melodramatic stage-setting are few and far between compared to the amount of just genuinely dramatic material, and it didn’t get in the way of being able to follow the story. I think this book maybe does a little bit less hand-holding on the public parts of the Troubles than, for example, Say Nothing does, which is carefully written to be accessible to even the most geographically ignorant American who can’t find Northern Ireland on a map. Overall, I would highly recommend it to anyone who has enough of an interest in the Troubles that they already sort of know what they are, and especially to anyone who liked Keefe’s or Carroll’s books.