Double Agent: My Secret Life Undercover in the IRA

by Kevin Fulton

  ‘God,’ said Andy quietly.

  It was me who broke the silence. ‘So, what about Captain Nairac?’ I said.

  ‘Oh, well,’ said Gerry awkwardly, ‘seems almost sick to bring it up now, but he was trying to infiltrate the IRA. Of course, it was hopelessly misguided. I mean, he was English, for Chrissakes.’ I could see where this was heading. ‘So there’s a new policy now, a far more sensible policy. We want people from Northern Ireland, Catholics, to get inside the IRA for us, to work up through the ranks, even if it takes years.’

  ‘I see,’ I said.

  ‘You’d be perfect,’ said Gerry. ‘You’re a Catholic from Newry. Your family is non-political. They could check you out and you’d come through, no problem.’

  ‘Well, yes, that’s probably true,’ I said hesitantly.

  ‘Think you could do it?’ said Andy.

  ‘God, I don’t know,’ I said, and I really didn’t. All I could see were deadly risks. All I could feel were terrified thoughts. I thought it was a good time to vent them. ‘Surely they’d find out I was a British soldier. They’d put two and two together and that would be the end of it.’

  Of course, Andy and Gerry had it all worked out. Joining military intelligence would mean leaving the army and returning to Newry. They agreed that news of my military career would inevitably become common knowledge, but they could fix that. I would be issued with a dishonourable discharge. They would dream up a suitably convincing story as to why I had been booted out of the British army. In disgrace. That should please the locals. From then on, I’d be a double agent. Secretly, I’d still receive my army wage each week, in cash. My new task would be to work my way into the lower levels of the Provisional IRA in Newry, then slowly, slowly work my way up the ranks. It would be a real slow burner – fifteen to twenty years – all the while providing British intelligence with vital information. The work would be exciting, important and, best of all, I’d be personally responsible for saving countless lives. I would be a hero.

  ‘But surely,’ I countered, ‘as soon as an operation goes wrong because someone has talked, they’ll suspect me. I’ll be in the fucking mincing machine then.’

  Gerry and Andy assured me that this simply would not happen. They would act as my handlers, and my security would be their uppermost priority. Under no circumstances would they risk my safety. They already had agents inside the IRA, some of whom had been there for ten or fifteen years. Andy and Gerry had ensured no harm came to them – they were simply too valuable to be compromised in any way. If it did go wrong, they could pull me out in an instant and spirit me away to a new country with a new identity, a new home and a lump sum, where I could live out the rest of my days. More than once in the recent past, they told me, they had had to do just that to save the bacon of one of their prized agents. It is, they insisted, a contingency plan that can be exercised at a moment’s notice.

  ‘Think about it,’ said Gerry, but I was incapable of thinking about anything else. What they told me was impressive. They were impressive. But I couldn’t help thinking about Nairac and how easily it could all go wrong. I certainly knew only too well the calibre of the people I’d be messing with. If they were somehow to uncover my true motivation, death, when it came, would probably be a relief.

  They sensed my reluctance and insisted that I wouldn’t have to do anything I didn’t want to. Having by now served a full year in the British army, this was a level of personal freedom to which I was no longer accustomed. The fact that I wouldn’t have to do anything I didn’t want to was probably the single most persuasive factor of all.

  The seduction carried on for many weeks. They knew about my passion for guns. One Wednesday, as a special treat, they whisked me off to a shooting range in the middle of nowhere and let me play with Kalashnikovs and Remington Wingmasters. ‘Come and work with us,’ said Andy, ‘and you can have access to these every day. None of your standard-issue army rubbish.’

  Driving past a barracks one day, they really made me think. ‘Look at that soldier there,’ he said, pointing at a chubby man marching across the square. ‘What good is he doing his country, eh? Plodding around a parade ground in circles?’

  ‘But I like being a British soldier,’ I said.

  ‘You’d still be a British soldier,’ said Gerry, ‘but you’d be a soldier on a very special mission.’

  I could recognise another bonus in working for Andy and Gerry – a quick-fix solution to a problem that was really wearing me down. I’d be able to tell my mother that I’d left the British army. What a weight off her shoulders that would be.

  But leaving the army was still a wrench. The camaraderie, the physical challenges in which I revelled, the danger and the promise of live combat one day – how could I turn my back on everything I’d dreamed of since childhood?

  By this stage, a short-term solution to my mother’s woes had arrived in the shape of a transfer. In the autumn of 1980, I joined the first battalion of the Royal Irish Rangers in Berlin. At least no one from Newry will spot me here, I remember thinking. But the seeds of my dissatisfaction with army life had been sown by Andy and Gerry; they blossomed in the sub-zero winter temperatures of Berlin. I was bored and cold and lonely. When an FRU officer began making overtures to me about returning to Northern Ireland to work for military intelligence, he didn’t have to work too hard. It was the solution to all my woes – the cold, the loneliness, the threats to my family’s safety and the overbearing boredom. I would be back with my family. My neighbours would think I had been booted out of the British army and, as such, I would be welcomed back into the bosom of latent Republican life in Newry. Best of all, I would have an exciting and important new role about which only a select few would know.

  To be fair to the liaison officer, he did warn me of the down sides. ‘There’s no medals for this work, Fulton,’ he said grimly one night, ‘no official recognition. If you’re found dead in a ditch, we won’t claim you. We won’t be telling them that we managed to get someone inside their organisation. You’ll die an IRA terrorist.’

  The irony of this new reality really stung me. All I ever wanted was to be a British soldier.

  CHAPTER TWO

  On 26 May 1981, I was demobbed from the British army. It was three weeks to the day since IRA prisoner Bobby Sands died in the H-block of Long Kesh Prison after sixty-six days on hunger strike. I returned to a very different Newry, a very different Northern Ireland. The death of Bobby Sands pulled the pin out of the grenade.

  I had been away with the merchant navy when it all started in the spring of 1978, three years earlier. Republican prisoners had been stripped of their special-category status as political prisoners and ordered to wear regulation prison clothing. They refused, claiming it categorised them as ‘ordinary criminals’. In protest at the loss of special-category status, which they had retained since 1972, they took to wearing only blankets in their cells – this group became known as the blanket men. They soon escalated their campaign by refusing to wash or to use the toilets; they smashed up the furniture in their cells and smeared the walls with their own excrement. The Dirty Protest had begun. By the time I returned in May 1981, Bobby Sands and two more so-called blanket men had starved themselves to death. Their sacrifice had inspired a vast wave of support throughout the nationalist community in Northern Ireland, particularly in Catholic towns like Newry.

  I returned to Newry the day they buried the third dead hunger striker. Raymond McCreesh was from Camlough in South Armagh, just a few miles from Newry, and had been educated at St Colman’s, a Catholic secondary school in the town. The black flags draped from every building summed up the mood of the town.

  All of Northern Ireland’s repressed nationalist rage seemed bottled up in Newry that afternoon. It felt as if the town itself was ticking, like a primed bomb. I felt nervous. Conspicuous. If word spread amongst these mourners that I was a British agent, I would have been lynched there and then. To these people, my people, I was the enemy. It would have don
e me no good whatsoever explaining to these wounded Catholic souls that I actually had some sympathy for the hunger strikers. Before then, I’d always considered IRA members to be mere gut Republicans, an Armalite in one hand and a set of rosary beads in the other. But the men of the H-block seemed different, idealistic. However, these sympathies were tempered by the knowledge that days earlier, on 19 May 1981, five of my British army comrades had been blown up by an IRA landmine just a few miles from Newry – five working-class boys just like Bobby Sands and Raymond McCreesh, except that these five dead soldiers hadn’t been politically motivated, and they hadn’t chosen to die.

  And so I didn’t skulk past these mourners with my head down. Instead, I took a deep breath and vowed to myself that I would avenge the deaths of my five army comrades by infiltrating the very organisation that had murdered them. For the first time since I had agreed to work as a double agent, I felt not just excitement and terror. I felt confidence. For a start, I was returning to my home town of Newry and to people I knew and understood. Bizarrely, I had more in common with the local corner boys who were desperate to become IRA volunteers than with my fellow British soldiers. I knew I would have no problems presenting myself to senior IRA figures as yet another disenfranchised raw recruit. I suppose that’s why I had been hand picked for the job.

  And that was the second major spur for me. Here I was, a lowly teenage squaddie with no formal qualifications, being groomed for a role as a special agent, chosen by military intelligence to become their man in Newry, and getting paid my army wage to live out this Boy’s Own adventure! That I had been singled out by Andy and Gerry – two men of unquestioned calibre and standing – made me feel ten feet tall. I was bowled over.

  So, while Newry marched sombrely behind Raymond McCreesh’s coffin, I embarked on my new life. Special Agent Fulton met Andy and Gerry every Wednesday afternoon. Even these meetings were the stuff of spy movies. We always met at a lay-by or in a car park. I would drive past first to check no other vehicle was loitering. If it was all clear, I would pull in and call my special number from the phone box. Within minutes, an unmarked saloon car with tinted windows would pull in. An unnamed intelligence officer would jump out, hop into my car and drive off, and I would join Andy and Gerry.

  I was driving to yet another clandestine meeting one Wednesday when I suddenly noticed something sinister. At a junction, a man sat in a stationary car watching me intently as I drove past. At the next junction sat another motionless car containing another solitary figure seemingly intrigued by my passing. At the next junction, another. Then another. Struck by paranoid terror, I skidded to a halt, wheeled round and headed straight back home. Sick with panic, I ran in and dialled the number to my handlers. I’d been rumbled already. They had to get me out.

  Gerry laughed for what seemed like several minutes. He finally recovered enough to tell me that the men in parked cars were on our side. They were intelligence agents. They had been there every Wednesday, observing my passage to our secret meetings, ensuring I wasn’t being tailed. It had taken me several weeks to spot them. I felt myself blushing, not out of embarrassment but out of pride. In all my life, I had never felt so important. All this effort every single Wednesday, just to preserve my safety!

  Typically, once we had safely negotiated the rendezvous, the three of us would head off for the afternoon. I never knew where we were going or what was planned, but I was never disappointed. In five-star hotel rooms, they taught me the black arts of counter-surveillance, covert photography and lock-picking while I helped myself to room service. I was presented with an expensive camera and a state-of-the-art development kit, which they instructed me to keep in the basement room of a cousin’s house. I was given a set of skeleton keys and taught how to open any standard five-pin tumbler lock or padlock. All this I grasped quickly and easily. I believed myself a natural. I wanted to get out there straight away and start snapping terrorist suspects and breaking into their illicit weapons dumps. But each week, I was told I wasn’t quite ready yet. After about three months, I was growing impatient.

  ‘What are you talking about?’ I demanded to know one particular week. ‘I’ve mastered all the skills! What’s there to wait for?’

  ‘You can’t just go rushing in there, Kevin,’ Andy said. ‘They’ll smell a rat and you’ll be down a hole.’

  Looking back, I wasn’t remotely ready for the challenge ahead. The gung-ho bravura of army life had no place in this new vocation of watching and waiting. I was still a soldier, as Gerry summed up one week in his own inimitable way.

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Kevin,’ he barked, ‘take the poker out of your hole. You look like your spine’s going to snap. Anyone can see you’re a soldier a mile off.’

  Getting me mentally right was the real challenge for my handlers. All I ever wanted was to be a British soldier. Now suddenly I realised that, to succeed in my new mission, I would have to become an IRA man. I’d have to live the lie twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. To the police, to my friends, to my own family, I would be an IRA man.

  Yet, by the same token, Andy and Gerry were insistent that I make no secret of my stint in the British army. I wanted to stick with my merchant-navy tale, but they figured that even the most rudimentary check would uncover my secret and I would be summarily executed. They decided instead to change the nature of my short but impeccable military career.

  I had received an exemplary discharge book from the British army, which I still cherish to this day. However, after my handlers pulled some strings, I was issued with a second discharge book from the Royal Irish Rangers. This alternative discharge book outlined how I was unsuited to army life, and how I had left under a cloud after disobeying orders. If further clarification was sought by anyone, I had my story ready. I had been caught drinking in a particular bar in Berlin. Back then, this bar was a notorious Republican pub that collected for the INLA and was strictly out of bounds for squaddies. If you got caught drinking there, you were out. Simple as that. At a stroke, my life story had been rewritten. Once again, it seemed to me that my handlers could fix just about anything. These boys could perform miracles.

  On one occasion, my CB radio was impounded at the border. I told my handlers and, next morning at nine o’clock, they delivered it back to me personally. On another occasion, Andy and Gerry asked me to check out the contents of a lock-up garage on the outskirts of Newry. They gave me an exact time to break in and, sure enough, at that exact moment, as if by magic, the streets emptied of soldiers and RUC officers, a set of roadworks appeared and all passing traffic was diverted well away from my handiwork. I was seriously impressed. So, when Andy and Gerry said that if it all went wrong they could pull me out of Northern Ireland in an instant, I believed them.

  I set about rehabilitating myself among the Republicans of Newry with that rescue package uppermost in my mind. Step one was to start hanging around a certain Republican drinking hole. Back then, this place in Newry was the focal point of all Republican activity. If there was a Republican march, participants would be invited to muster there. Known sympathisers and activists circulated here. It was a lavishly appointed three-storey building with a bar on two floors. The action was all up top in the snooker hall, which saw little snooker but a lot of card-playing, posturing and gossiping.

  One of the regulars there was a staunch Republican and an old family friend who would later become a Sinn Fein councillor. An introduction from him was an ‘open sesame’ to this inner sanctum of Newry life. The premise was simple: if you start hanging about with these people, you start to blend in and become one of them; hang about with bad boys and you become a bad boy. I started hanging round the bar every night.

  From the outset, I was really open about being kicked out of the army. I let it be known that I had only joined up in the first place to gain experience of guns and explosives, which I loved. Nobody seemed remotely bothered by this admission. If anything, I was disappointed by the lack of response. I was expecting to be challenge
d about my British army past, and so presented with the perfect chance to lay my IRA credentials on the table, as it were, to explain how I’d seen the error of my ways and now loathed all agencies of British imperialist might. But it never came to this. I was readily accepted as another disaffected local Catholic youth with typical Republican leanings. As such, it was only a matter of time before I was urged to come along to what constituted fun for the likes of us – Irish nights in the local town hall.

  Run by Sinn Fein, these Irish nights were orgies of Republican rabble-rousing. Revellers showed off their impeccable Republican credentials by collecting money for IRA prisoners, belting out rebel songs at full pelt and shamelessly schmoozing the guest – usually some forlorn, bearded former prisoner from Belfast. It was at one of these Irish nights that I first clapped eyes on Eamon Collins.

  I vaguely knew Eamon as an employee of Her Majesty’s Customs and Excise in Newry. Tubby and balding, he was every inch the civil servant. Imagine my surprise one particular night when he stormed up on to the stage triumphantly to announce the murder of an RUC man in South Armagh. Cue the deafening roar of approval, and demonic little Eamon punching the air and milking the applause. Newry? More like Nuremberg, I thought. With that, Eamon ran back out of the town hall again.

  ‘Holy fuck,’ I said to one of the drinkers, ‘doesn’t he work for Customs?’

  ‘Oh yeah,’ he said, ‘but he’s one of the top IRA men in Newry.’

  ‘I’d like to meet him,’ I said, feigning a sort of star-struck awe.

  ‘Ach, Eamon’s not the sociable sort,’ he replied. ‘To be honest, the bigwigs in Belfast think he’s a pain in the arse. If you left Eamon in a room on his own, he’d fall out with himself.’