Tuesday, May 13, 2003

Where's Freddie?

Just a brief followup post today about Alfredo "Freddie" Scappaticci: lots of people want to know where he is. What makes it curious is that there is no "official" account of what happened; the UK government side of the story is being told by unnamed sources. But their version of events remains as we posted yesterday: That Freddie was spirited to England when it became clear that his cover as a British agent in the IRA had been blown, and that he is currently under heavy guard at a military base in an old monastery building haunted by nine ghosts. However, there is no actual confirmation of any of this (not even the ghosts) and Irish PM Bertie Ahern was given the runaround when he asked the British government about it, or at least that's what he told the Irish parliament today:

he was not sure the British political system has any particular information about the matter, as it seemed to be a British Army operation.

In that same story to which we just linked, you will see that there is another version of events, being put out by Freddie's representatives and Sinn Fein: that he never left Belfast, he was not a spy, and that someone is out to get him. This suggests another theory arising from a standard trick that we see on the detective shows when the police have a suspect in custody but they can't prove he did it. So they say to him "all right, we're letting you out, but wouldn't it be dreadful if word got out to your criminal buddies that you had sung like a canary while you were in here -- not that we would do anything like that." Suspect confesses. So maybe the security forces are putting the heat on Freddie to get him to confess to something, or more cynically still, to protect an even higher placed mole in the IRA. Hmmm.