Cover

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A new investigative series from the production team behind ‘Where Is George Gibney?’

This new series will focus on another figure who lived a double life and was eventually forced to live under cover. And it’s a story, like the George Gibney one, that many would prefer was never told.

So, from this point on, this feed will be renamed ‘Cover.’ Series 1 one of which was ‘Where Is George Gibney?’ and series 2 is Stakeknife.

In Northern Ireland from 1978 to 1994, the IRA killed over 40 alleged informers; people accused of passing information to the police and the British Army. But the man who often found, tortured, and sometimes killed these men and women was himself an informer, a secret British Army Agent with the codename Stakeknife.

Using secret recordings, reporter Mark Horgan traces the astonishing double life of Freddie Scappaticci. Why was he protected? How did he walk the tightrope between the IRA and British Army intelligence for so long and when murders, often of entirely innocent people, were sometimes allowed to take place despite state security force surveillance, who gets to play God?

This series is about far more than just one man; it’s about the state structures that protected him. From the production team behind the international award-winning ‘Where Is George Gibney?’, Stakeknife tells the story of one of the most-contested and darkest episodes of the Troubles. When neither side wants the story of Stakeknife to come out, how does society try to reconcile the truth about what happened?

You can continue to contact our production team about either series via our new email cover@bbc.co.uk and rest assured, any significant future movements in the story of George Gibney will also be covered right here. Talk to you again next week.

• No. of episodes: 20
• Latest episode: 2024-12-20

Where can you listen?