sirenianshores

A MOVIE to be made by the actor Leonardo DiCaprio about British spies infiltrating the IRA is being threatened with legal action.

The Hollywood star is working on the drama for Warner Brothers, with a script based on an American magazine article that told how British intelligence planted spies in the terrorist organisation.

DiCaprio’s film company, Appian Way, is one of three producers that teamed up to make The Infiltrator after each sought the film rights to the article. The 31-year-old star of Titanic, who later portrayed Howard Hughes in The Aviator, has first option on playing the lead role.

The companies are working for Warner Brothers, which optioned the rights to the cover story in April’s Atlantic Monthly of an interview with Kevin Fulton, a former British soldier who turned bombmaker but spied on the IRA. Now he is threatening legal action if the movie goes ahead.

The companies are working for Warner Brothers, which optioned the rights to the cover story in April’s Atlantic Monthly of an interview with Kevin Fulton, a former British soldier who turned bombmaker but spied on the IRA. Now he is threatening legal action if the movie goes ahead.

Last week he told the movie companies that he would sue them, and Matthew Teague, the author of the Atlantic article, for copyright theft. Fulton said the writer did not have permission to sell the film rights.

He warned Warner Brothers by e-mail that he had not signed a waiver in relation to the magazine report, and strict instructions were given to Teague that no further media rights were available.

In the article, Fulton said that MI5 arranged a weapons-buying trip to America in which he obtained detonators later used by terrorists to murder soldiers and police. He alleged that the FBI and British intelligence co-operated to ensure that his trip to New York in the 1990s went ahead without incident so that his cover was not exposed. The trip will feature in Fulton’s own account of his double life, his autobiography, Unsung Hero, to be published on Friday.

A separate legal action is also threatened against the movie studio by the authors of Stakeknife: Britain’s Secret Agents in Ireland, who say their book was a source for much of Teague’s article. The story of Freddy Scappaticci, the British agent at the heart of the IRA, also featured in the Atlantic Monthly story, entitled Double Blind: The untold story of how British intelligence infiltrated and undermined the Irish Republican Army.

Freddie Scappaticci is probably having enough trouble at the moment keeping a low profile without Hollywood trying to make a big movie about his past.

Scappaticci was one of British intelligence’s most highly valued informers within the IRA. As a member of the IRA’s internal security unit (aka the ‘Nutting Squad’), he was one of the most feared men in the IRA. His task in the unit was to vet potential recruits and to root out spies within the organization. The fact that, ironically, Scappaticci himself was a spy is something that even Hollywood would be hard pressed to make up. His boss in the Nutting Squad was a man called John Joe Magee – who was an ex-member of a British special forces unit – the SBS (Special Boat Squadron). By most accounts he wasn’t an informer and had not maintained his links with the British army after he left the unit and joined the IRA. Although some in Republican circles have speculated that he too may have been an informer along with Scappaticci.

With Scappaticci’s position in the IRA, British intelligence could ensure that spies would be saved and that real IRA volunteers would be killed. His military handlers allowed him to carry out up to 40 murders to keep his cover and keep passing information. Part of the reason why Scappaticci went undetected for so long was because the IRA had fatally underestimated the British in assuming they wouldn’t use murderers as spies within the organization.

The British took the long view that by preserving the cover of agents within the IRA (even if it meant they would be involved in murder), they would end up saving lives in the long run by reducing the IRA’s effectiveness, and allowing the British to exert a certain degree of control over the organisation’s direction. Moderates like Gerry Adams were protected while British intelligence facilitated the deaths of more hard-line members by using their agents on the loyalist/Protestant terrorist side. In one particular instance, Adams’ life was saved when British agents sabotaged the bullets (by reducing the amount of propellant in the cartridges) in the handguns used in an assassination attempt on him by loyalist terrorist. Adams was still injured, but he would almost certainly have been killed had the bullets not been defective and had a nearby security patrol not intervened in just in time.

British intelligence’s infiltration of the IRA at the highest levels also had a positive effect on the peace process in the way that it allowed the British government to gain an insight into the leadership’s and grassroots’ views on what the long term strategy of the movement should be. This gave the British government a certain degree of confidence in taking Gerry Adams’ word as genuine when he said he meant peace.