Four Shots in the Night
A True Story of Spies, Murder, and Justice in Northern Ireland
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $24.99
Publisher Description
Four Shots in the Night is the story of a political murder: the killing of an IRA member turned British informant.
The search for justice for this one man's death—his body found in broad daylight, with tape over his eyes, an undisguised hit—would deliver more than the truth. It exposed his status as an informant and led to protests, campaigns, far-reaching changes to British law, a historic ruling from a senior judicial body, a ground-breaking police investigation, and bitter condemnation from a US Congressional commission. And there have been persistent rumors that one of the country’s most senior politicians, the Sinn Fein leader Martin McGuinness, might have been personally involved in this particular murder.
Relying on archival research, interviews, and the findings of a new complete police investigation, Four Shots in the Night tells a riveting story not just of this murder but of his role in the decades-long conflict that defined him--the Troubles. And the questions it tackles are even larger: how did the Troubles really come to an end? Was it a feat of diplomatic negotiation, as we've been told--or did spies play the decisive role? And how far can, or should, a spy go, for the good of his country? Four Shots in the Night is a page-turner that will make you think.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian Hemming (Agents of Influence) begins his riveting account of espionage during the Troubles with the 1986 discovery of the dead body of Frank Hegarty, a spy for the British embedded in the Irish Republican Army, in a farmer's field in rural Northern Ireland. The story of Hegarty's murder by the IRA was more complex than a case of a spy caught and executed, and only emerged fully in 1999, when a former MI5 spy handler told a reporter: "One British agent inside the IRA" had "murdered another." Frank Hegarty had been killed by Freddie Scappaticci, an IRA enforcer—part of the mole-hunting team known as the Nutting Squad—who also was an informant for the British. As Hemming slowly peels back the layers of these spy machinations, he raises troubling questions for both sides of the conflict, chief among them whether Scappaticci was ordered by the British to kill another British informant, and whether the end of the Troubles can be, to some extent, attributed to the massive subornation of the IRA from the inside. (The Scappaticci revelation led the IRA to make a 2002 covert raid on a Belfast police station, where, according to Hemming, they found documents hinting at such total infiltration of their organization that they declined to publish them, fearing for their own credibility.) It's a mind-bending deep dive into a shadowy world of government secrets.
