by Kevin Fulton
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank Nic Robertson and Henry Schuster of CNN, Trevor Birney of UTV, Chris Anderson, Liam Clarke of the Sunday Times and Kathryn Johnston, Neil Mackay, Greg Harkin, Martin Ingram, Stephen Dempster, Hugh Jordan, Tommy, Mark Birdsall, Jane Winter, also Jock and Gerry, Jim and Henry. Thanks also to Toli and Carol for their help and friendship over the last few years.
Most of all, I would like to thank all former and serving members of the security forces who assisted me with this book, but who I cannot name in case they lose their pensions. Thank you, each and every one of you, for your help and support over the years. Special thanks to S and A, the PSNI and to the one person who has saved my life on a number of occasions, and without whom I would not be here.
Last, but not least, my family.
The authors would like to salute all those individuals who risked so much and sacrificed so much to help us. Most of all, we would like to thank our families for supporting us during the researching and writing of this book.
CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
FOREWORD
PREFACE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
EPILOGUE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
COPYRIGHT
FOREWORD BY MARTIN INGRAM
The world of a double agent is a dangerous one, and a complicated one. But there are basic rules. Rules that should be adhered to by agents, and by their ‘handlers’ – the men charged with plotting their progress. These basic rules are in place to ensure that agents and their handlers are aware of their limitations, limitations imposed by common law and decency. In the case of Kevin Fulton, these rules were flouted, again and again.
Put simply, the role of an agent is to protect life and property by gathering intelligence about a particular target – be it an individual or a grouping – in this case, the Provisional IRA. The role of the agent’s handler is to maximise this gleaned intelligence, and to use it against the specific target. But the handlers in the case of Kevin Fulton broke the rules of common law and decency. And because they broke the rules, so too did Kevin Fulton.
Kevin Fulton was a British agent actively encouraged to take part in operations that were immoral, and illegal. In effect, he was handed a licence to kill by British military intelligence, through its secret wing, the Force Research Unit (FRU). When you read this book, be under no illusion that Fulton took part in operations that resulted in murders, with the full knowledge of FRU. His police handlers knew it. His military handlers knew it. The British State knew it. And, later, so did the families of his victims.
Legally, Fulton can’t directly admit to his role in murdering people while employed by the State. To do this would be an invitation for the State to lock him up and throw away the key. As you will deduce from this book’s devastating revelations, the State would like nothing better than to lock up Kevin Fulton, and to throw away the key.
For his part, Fulton would like nothing better than to tell the whole truth about the terrorism he wreaked with the full knowledge of British intelligence. He’d like nothing better than to fully expose the truth about Northern Ireland’s ‘Dirty War’, and how agencies of the British State encouraged his illegal action. Most of all, Kevin Fulton would love to reveal the full truth as to how these agencies conspired with other agents to have him killed, once he’d served his purpose.
He can’t tell the whole truth. One day he will. In the meantime, in Unsung Hero, Fulton goes further than any other agent in describing the horror of Britain’s Dirty War in Northern Ireland.
And he’s telling the truth. How do I know? Because I used to work for his employer, the British army’s disgraced Force Research Unit
I first met Fulton at the Shelbourne Hotel in Dublin in 1999. I was asked along by Liam Clarke, the Sunday Times Northern Ireland editor. Clarke had asked me to meet with Fulton to see if I could help him gain compensation from the Ministry of Defence for the work he’d carried out as a double agent. I had my own motivations for meeting Fulton. I was desperate to hear more and learn more about the IRA’s security department. I was able to corroborate his claims with key sources within British intelligence, within Northern Ireland security services and within the Provisional IRA.
It quickly became clear that Fulton is telling the truth.
Initially, I have to admit to feeling sceptical about meeting with this murderer. Even today, we continue to disagree about the politics of Northern Ireland. That said, Fulton has never lied to me. He has never exaggerated or diminished his own role in any terrorist operations. I am also happy to record that I like Kevin Fulton as an individual.
I soon realised that Fulton’s singular fault lay in his conviction that, as an agent of the Crown, he did have a licence to kill. I try to tell him he didn’t, but I’ve come to the conclusion that, such was Fulton’s trust for his handlers, that, when they told him he had a licence to kill, he believed them. He believed them because, for 15 years, he’d put his life into their hands.
Then, when he was no longer of use to them, he was betrayed and abandoned. He remains abandoned to this day.
Why is the State so keen to abandon Fulton to the murderous whim of former members of the Provisional IRA, who Fulton helped to convict? After reading this book, you’ll discover the answer. Amid the swirling murk of Northern Ireland politics, it is clear and it is depressing.
The public doesn’t realise is that, without Fulton, the truth about the Omagh bombing would not be known. And countless murderous Provisional IRA operations would not have been thwarted. For these reasons, he deserves what his former employers promised, but then denied him – the security of life away from constant death threats, displacement and an inability to secure any kind of proper job.
He has been shafted by the very people for whom he risked his life, daily. Whether or not one agrees with the tactics used by his employers, Kevin Fulton deserves to be protected.
Martin Ingram, ex-officer, Force Research Unit
PREFACE
My wife always knew me as an IRA man. Nothing else. Twenty-one years on, I finally told her the truth.
She thought I was joking.
Nobody – not my closest family, not the highest figures within the IRA – had the slightest inkling of my true identity. Twenty-one years of living a lie. During all that time, I was really working for the British intelligence services. I was a double agent within the world’s most feared terrorist organisation.
I’m not a grass. I’m not someone who crossed over to the other side to save my own skin. I was a British soldier, actively recruited by British military intelligence for the specific task of infiltrating the IRA and working my way up within the organisation. Which is exactly what I did.
Such was my efficiency as an IRA man, I was eventually promoted to the ‘nutting squad’ – the terrorist organisation’s feared internal security unit charged with rooting out and killing informants. Some say that my promotion was testament to my steely nerve and to the skill of my handlers who delighted in the rich irony of this role; others insist that I was actively encouraged to go too far to maintain my cover as a top IRA operative. They say that, in the interests of keeping me on side with IRA chiefs, I was allowed to carry out morally reprehensible acts against my own people.
It is true that, as an agent for t
he British Crown, I helped shoot and kill British soldiers, police informants and members of the Royal Ulster Constabulary.
People on my own side.
I played a key role in the slaying of army comrades and decent law-abiding members of the police force. It gnaws at my nerves and haunts my every thought. After all, these were people striving for everything I believed in. A night will never pass without stabbings of guilt, without my brain being pulled under by great waves of confusion and doubt.
So why did I carry on? Because, all the while, I was being assured that my work was saving more lives than it was costing. That people’s lives hinged on my soldiering on. That the British prime minister, no less, was being kept abreast of my great work. All along, I was being assured of something else, too. Over and over again, I was assured that if it all went wrong – if the IRA discovered my true role as a British agent – I’d be pulled out and given a new identity, a new home abroad and a lump sum.
Then my usefulness ran out, and I was dumped. Sacrificed. After dedicating my life to British intelligence, they tried to get me whacked. When that didn’t happen, I was abandoned. No new identity, no new home abroad, no lump sum. I was left to fend for myself. I now live life on the run, under a death threat from the IRA. Needless to say, I can’t go back to Northern Ireland where my wife and family still live.
To this day, British intelligence agencies refuse to acknowledge the full extent of my role in the Dirty War. In truth, they’d like me dead. I’m a nuisance. Along the way, I’ve also earned the wrath of the RUC and leading dissident IRA terrorists.
In short, I don’t expect to live long.
So why am I telling my story? They all counted on me disappearing, on running for my life. But I don’t have a life. I’ve got nothing left to lose.
CHAPTER ONE
All I ever wanted was to be a British soldier.
As a young boy, I loved war movies and guns and tanks and soldiers. But, whereas most boys had to rely on the cinema for their military fix, I had the real thing, both at home and at the end of the street.
At home, my grandfather regaled me with tales of derring-do at Dunkirk. Steel Chest McGuinness they called him, on account of the shrapnel that stayed lodged near his heart until the day he died. Like many thousands of Northern Irish Catholics, he had fought in the British army in World War II and was proud of the fact.
He had a rapt audience of one: me.
Before the so-called Troubles, it wasn’t unusual for Catholics to join the British army or the Royal Ulster Constabulary. I had a cousin in the RUC and another in the Royal Irish Rangers, a famous British army regiment. As I would find out later in life, many senior Republicans served in the British army too. As an apprenticeship in warfare, British army training is considered second-to-none.
I was certainly impressed with the British soldiers I saw daily at the end of my street. I must have been eight or nine when they first came to my home town, Newry in County Down. It was the late sixties and, to us kids, the strutting, mean-eyed men in uniform were an exotic diversion. We were as transfixed by their sub-machine guns as they were bemused by our hero worship. Eventually they gave in and let us try on their helmets and look through the sights on their machine guns.
My love of all things military was sealed.
And then it all changed. After one particular Sunday afternoon, nothing was ever the same again, and the cocky, funny-sounding soldiers stopped being our friends. The day had got off to an odd start. I was the second youngest of six kids, and a real handful, and my parents were only too happy to see me running off out to play with my pals. But on this particular Sunday, they had plans for me. Dad insisted I come with him to help wallpaper a friend’s sitting room. That was the day’s first surprise.
I remember the house. It was close to the gasworks overlooking the town. We were munching on ham and tomato sandwiches when I heard the sound down below. It was like a crowd at a football match, but this was no football crowd. This noise had no swell or ebb, no bursts of joy or dismay. This was a constant marching rhythm, an angry heartbeat which thumped louder and louder as the day went on.
It must have been three hours later when, from the Derrybeg Estate, came the shouting and the charging and the screams of women; glass was smashing, and everywhere there was the eerie rumble of human chaos. And then a sound I’ll never forget, a sound that stopped my dad dead in his tracks: gunshots crackled across the valley. Veils of smoke rose like ghosts from below, and my eyes started to sting. ‘It’s just the fumes from the wallpaper stripper,’ said Dad, but I knew it was something else, something that, at a stroke, had tamed the raging streets.
All the next day, St Patrick’s primary school was abuzz with tales from the civil rights march. The Derrybeg boys spoke of petrol bombs and baton charges and plastic bullets and barricades and tear gas. How I envied their luck at being there, on the frontline.
Back at home that evening, my enthusiasm for civil unrest was met with short shrift. My family is strictly non-political. Civil rights were the concern of other people. Dad’s homeware business was doing nicely, and, sure, weren’t some of our best clients Protestant? The Fultons saw no point in rocking the boat. Things were different for the people of Derrybeg, one of the hardest estates in Newry, a bogeyman neighbourhood where, somewhere along the line, grown-ups had somehow convinced me that bad things always happened.
Then Kevin Heatley got shot, and it all changed again.
It was a Saturday night in Derrybeg in 1973 when a group of British soldiers went charging through the estate, blowing whistles and roaring their heads off. Locals came out to have a go, and suddenly a shot rang out. A British soldier had opened fire. Kevin had been sitting on a wall near his home when the bullet struck him in the head. He died later that night.
Kevin Heatley was thirteen years old – the same age as me.
That finished my parents off. From that night on, I laboured under an inflexible curfew of seven in the evening, school nights, weekends and holidays. It pained me: all the excitement happened at night when the streets bristled with clandestine subversion and, every now and then, all-out anarchy. While my friends relished nightly games of guerrilla warfare, I lay in my bedroom reading my Boy’s Own magazines and military adventure books, dreaming that one day I’d be in the thick of the action. I wanted to join a British army regiment that didn’t serve in Northern Ireland. In my dreams, I’d be on a frontline in some far-flung exotic place – perhaps a steaming Asian jungle – fighting on the side of good with honour and courage, far away from the mess of Northern Ireland.
Each morning on my way to town, I made the detour past the army recruitment centre on Cecil Street to stare at the model of an amphibian army truck in the window. It was a glorious creation with a huge mounted machine gun and massive tyres. To me, that model truck embodied the brutal perfection of army life, and reinforced my dream of one day wearing the uniform.
I must have been twelve when they blew it up. I was at my auntie’s when news came through on the radio. I ran all the way to Cecil Street, praying that my truck had survived. Amid the inevitable chaos, I fully intended to duck in under the incident tape and rescue it. Of course, the army recruitment centre had been flattened. Not one discernible shred of my Jeep remained. I vowed there and then that, one day, I would drive a real one. No matter what.
It was 1974, and even naïve, non-political, fourteen-year-old me realised that my ambition to join the British army would not be well received. Indeed, many in Newry would consider it outright betrayal of my Catholic roots. If people were to find out, then at best my family would be ostracised by the more Republican-leaning people of the town; at worst they would be persecuted and vilified. After all, Newry is 95 per cent Catholic. There was only one thing for it. I had to keep my plans to myself until such time that I could make a clean break from Newry. One day, I saw my chance.
In 1977, aged sixteen, I decided to join the merchant navy. OK, it wasn’t the military, but it seemed
the next best thing for now. It promised adventures and foreign travel, real Boy’s Own stuff. My parents were delighted. They were desperate to get me away from Newry. After all, career prospects were non-existent. A lack of focus in life saw half the young lads I grew up with drifting into Republicanism. If you are congregating there on street corners, it’s inevitable you get drawn in too. You start off ducking and diving and into petty crime, and suddenly you’re in the lair of the Provisional IRA. The merchant navy would take me away from these dangers and give me the stimulation my hyperactive character so craved.
Wearing the black merchant-navy uniform, learning how to fight fires, sleeping in a dormitory, I found my twelve-week training stint at the National Sea Training Centre in Gravesend, Kent, military heaven. Gung-ho for action, I signed up for a six-month voyage on the Cunard steam ship MV Andria. I was sixteen and in for a shock.
I travelled to the United States, Japan, the Panama Canal and Chile, but soon one port looked the same as the next. It was boring. I didn’t drink – I was still a child, after all – and was happy to miss out on the boozing, fighting and shagging that erupted whenever we docked at some unsuspecting port. In between these uneventful stops, I encountered a tedium that only the Ancient Mariner himself could have fully appreciated. For day after day after day, there was simply no action and nothing to see but sea and sea and more sea.
I disembarked after six months with £1,000 and a determination not to set foot on a ship again for quite some time. For months, I lived the life of Riley back home, inevitably squandering the money I’d amassed on the high seas. Soon I was seeking out a new career.
The only work going in Newry was in the meat factory. At some stage, everyone worked in the meat factory. It is as tedious as it is gruelling and depressing. Surrounded by death, morbid thoughts are an occupational hazard. Every minute of every day, automated rails of staring carcasses ghost by to the squelching soundtrack of butchery. It forces you to think about the fragility of life, and how easy it can be snuffed out. Mind you, there was plenty happening outside the slaughterhouse to remind you of this, too.