Four Shots in the Night: A True Story of Spies, Murder, and Justice in Northern Ireland

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. Agent: George Lucas, InkWell Management. (Apr.)