Historical Dictionary of British Intelligence

STAKE KNIFE• 519

their duties. The objective was to provide a secure safety valve for

officers such as Cathy Masiter who had no confidence in her manage-

ment chain of command when she had reservations about the legiti-

macy of telephone intercept warrants being applied for. WhenDavid

Shaylerfailed to air his grievances with the staff counselor, then Sir

Phillip Woodfield, he claimed the confidentiality of his complaint

would have been compromised and disadvantaged him. The current

staff counselor isSir John Chilton.

STAFFORD, SIR EDWARD.Appointed Queen Elizabeth I’s ambas-
sador to France in 1583, Sir Edward Stafford sold political informa-
tion to the Spanish, but his treason was discovered by her secretary
of state,Sir Francis Walsingham, who placed Stafford under sur-
veillance and used him as a conduit for deception. Walsingham moni-
tored Stafford’s duplicity through an agent named Rogers, who
receivedsecret service funds, and allowed him to maintain contact
with the Spanish. When he died in 1605, Stafford had not been
charged with any crime, so he may have acted as adouble agent
controlled by Walsingham.

STAKE KNIFE.Code name for a very senior, long-term source within
the ProvisionalIrish Republican Army(PIRA) run by theForce
Research Unit(FRU) from 1976 to 2003.stake knifewas identi-
fied by a renegade FRU agent handler in May 1993 as Freddie Scap-
paticci, a Belfast builder with a reputation of having been a PIRA
‘‘enforcer’’ responsible for weeding out and eliminating informers
within the organization’s ranks. According to the FRU source, Scap-
paticci originally had volunteered his services to the police after his
brother had suffered a kneecapping. After he was named publicly,
Scappaticci denied the allegation and brought an unsuccessful legal
action against theNorthern IrelandOffice for a statement exonerat-
ing him.
According to Scappaticci’s police record, he had been charged in
January 1990 with abduction and assault in connection with the inter-
rogation of a suspected informer, Sandy Lynch, who was rescued by
theRoyal Ulster Constabularyfrom a house in Lenadoon, West
Belfast. On that occasion Scappaticci had been acquitted for lack of
evidence. In February 2004 a former FRU handler, ‘‘Martin In-