Ian Hurst

Ian Hurst in Fermanagh, around 1988.

Ian Hurst is a former British Army soldier. He served in the Intelligence Corps and in the Force Research Unit. Under the pseudonym Martin Ingram he publicised claims that Freddie Scappaticci was an IRA informer codenamed Stakeknife.

Army

Hurst joined the army as a private soldier in 1980. He completed his Intelligence Corps training the following year and was promoted to lance corporal.

3SCT

He was posted to Northern Ireland in late 1981 and worked in the special collation team which was transferring intelligence material on to the then newly introduced computer database. According to the Sunday Times the unit was known as 3SCT and the database was Crucible.

121 Intelligence Section

After three months he moved to 121 Intelligence Section at Head Quarters Northern Ireland (HQNI), where he worked as a collator. According to the Sunday Times, he was involved in producing intelligence reports for Major-General James Glover in this role.

The Sunday Times also claimed that at both 3CST and 121 Section, Ingram/Hurst had access to RUC, MI5 and MI6 intelligence as well as Military Intelligence Source Reports.

FRU Collator

In autumn 1983 he was posted to the Force Research Unit. he was employed by the FRU for just under a year as a collator, during which time he was promoted to corporal.

Return to Great Britain

From 1984 to 1987, he was employed in Great Britain, including a six month tour abroad. He was promoted to sergeant in 1986.

FRU Fermanagh

In late 1987, he was posted to the FRU in Northern Ireland as an agent handler. he served in this role for just under three years.

Defence Intelligence Staff

His final posting was as a collator in the Defence Intelligence Staff in the Ministry of Defence. he left the Army in 1991.

"Martin Ingram"

According to Hurst, he decided to write a book in 1997, "to highlight aspects of my service which had a genuine public interest". He subsequently surfaced in the media under the pseudonym Martin Ingram.

Times Articles

The first Martin Ingram articles by journalist Liam Clarke appeared in the Sunday Times in August 1999. The paper stated that Ingram/Hurst "approached the Sunday Times because of his anger at what he believed were misleading television reports of FRU activity in the wake of the case of Brian Nelson, a former soldier who infiltrated the Ulster Defence Association.

Gerry Adams claims

According to Liam Clarke:

The alarm bells started to ring at Whitehall after we published an article on August 1 in which Ingram described how FRU, a section of military intelligence responsible for the handling of agents within loyalist and republican paramilitaries, allowed an attack on Gerry Adams to go ahead but doctored the bullets to increase his chances of survival.

"Steak Knife" claim

Ingram/Hurst claimed to be aware of a high-ranking army agent in the IRA:

Martin Ingram was on night shift at the British military intelligence headquarters in Northern Ireland when one of the phones rang. It was the hotline - a number known only to and reserved for Britain's most cherished agent, a man known by the codename Steak Knife.

Steak Knife was and is the crown jewel of British intelligence in Ulster, a man at the heart of the IRA's war effort who had to be kept happy at all costs. His source reports were read by ministers. His output was, and remains, so prolific that two handlers and four collators work full-time on them.

MI5 Gardai claims

The initial 8 August 1999 stories also claimed that MI5 had an agent network in the Gardai Siochana:

"MI5's best man was a senior member of the gardai who was codenamed 'Eamon'. He frequently met his handlers in Dublin airport," said the soldier, who asked to use the pseudonym Martin Ingram. "MI5's main targets appeared to be gardai and they weren't particularly hard targets to crack because they were basically law-and-order people opposed to the IRA."

The Sunday Times stated that Ingram/Hurst "ruled out the possibility that meetings between MI5 officers and gardai could have been a legitimate exchange of intelligence".

Sinn Fein claims

According to the Sunday Times, Ingram Hurst claimed that "a leading Sinn Fein figure was on the MI5 payroll, providing a steady stream of internal policy documents and reports on republican thinking on the move into politics after the 1981 hunger strike."

Frank Hegarty claims

In a Sunday Times story by Liam Clarke, published on 22 August 1999, Ingram/Hurst claimed to have known IRA informer Frank Hegarty as agent 3018.

About a year into his [Hegarty's] new life, the Force Research Unit took over his case. The FRU had been set up to streamline agent handling as a result of an intelligence review in the wake of the massacre of 18 soldiers in an IRA gun and bomb attack at Narrow Water, Co Down, on August 27, 1979.

The FRU north detachment set up a "research office" in Derry, at Ebrington barracks, with eight handlers, six support staff and an generous budget. All that was missing was agents with real access to the IRA. "We needed RUC permission to proposition new people and that was generally refused, so we started looking back over the lists of people who had been in contact with the army before, some of them went back to 1969," said Ingram, who served in Ebrington from 1981 until 1985.

Liam Clarke's story added:

McGuinness called the house to reassure his mother that her son was happy. He said he was at that very moment eating a Chinese carry-out and watching television in Donegal. "Don't worry," he said. "I will bring him home to you."

The next Mrs Hegarty heard of her son was when the police called to say that his body had been found.

To this day his mother and sisters refuse to believe he was an agent. They maintain that he had been made a fall guy to protect some higher-level informer.

Arrest

Following a series of articles in The Times in 1999, Hurst was arrested by Special Branch police officers in connection with alleged breaches of the Official Secrets Act. He was not charged but was subject to an injunction.

Hurst moved to France in 2004.

Computer hacking

Hurst was allegedly hacked by private detective Philip Campbell Smith on behalf of the News of the World in the summer of 2006.

Hurst later stated:

I now cannot recall whether I opened an email from a bogus address in 2006. However, I can say that ~ would have been much more likely to have opened an email that had come from a trusted contact rather than an unfamiliar or unknown name. I do know that an email was sent to me by a trusted media contact within Times Newspapers Ltd around the time the Trojan became active and was collecting information from my computer. I have recently seen evidence that this individual was in email contact with X regarding my activities during these months, something which had previously been denied.

The 'X' referred to was Philip Campbell Smith.

The police first became aware that Hurst's computer had been compromised during an arrest in 2007.

The police allegedly obtained further information about the hacking of Hurst's computer following the arrest of Philip Campbell Smith in 2009.

According to the The Guardian:

MI5 became aware that Smith had targeted Hurst's email in an attempt to find the location of Scappaticci. They made no approach to Hurst, apparently on the grounds that he was preparing to write an unauthorised book about his experience in Northern Ireland and could not be trusted. They may have taken steps to alert Scappaticci. They then asked the Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca) to investigate.

In late December 2010, Hurst was approached by Stephen Scott of Panorama with evidence that his computer had been hacked.

Hurst subsequently confronted the alleged hacker in a meeting that was secretly filmed by Panorama. he told the Leveson Inquiry:

During the course of our meeting, X stated that he had placed a computer Trojan on my hard drive (by sending me an email from a bogus address which t then opened) and had, over a three month period, obtained all email traffic which was sent and received by me.

Hurst was not informed of the hacking by police until October 2011.

External Resources

• "Martin Ingram" Witness statement, Bloody Sunday Inquiry.
• Oral Testimony, Day 329, Bloody Sunday Inquiry, 12 May 2003.
• Evidence: Ian Hurst, Leveson Inquiry, 28 November 2011.
• ReadNotify tracking journalists and their sources, or being used for disinformation?, Spy Blog, 29 October 2006.
• Barry McCaffrey, PSNI gets limited access to army intelligence says former soldier, The Detail, 14 March 2011.
• Mark Hennessy, Irish editor accused of spying on ex-agent, Irish Times, 15 March 2011.
• Roy Greenslade, An overlooked Panorama scoop as a British soldier breaks cover, Greenslade Blog, guardian.co.uk, 16 March 2011.
• Paul Larkin, The Guardian continues its “battle” with Sinn Féin, fadooda.com, 18 September 2011.
• James Cusick, Intercepted intelligence could not have been published, says witness, Independent, 29 November 2011.