Double Agent: My Secret Life Undercover in the IRA

by Kevin Fulton

  I was to be in charge of two more gunmen and a driver. The IRA meant business: a GPMG and two AK-47s were produced for the job.

  The OC outlined the plan. The night before the attack, we would take over a house near the RUC station. We would research which house to take in advance. However, it would need to have two cars sitting in the drive, as we needed two for the operation.

  ‘Try to aim for the home of an SDLP supporter,’ said the OC, ‘as we put our own off when we steal their cars for operations.’

  From an IRA point of view, targeting SDLP supporters over those of Sinn Fein, the IRA’s party, held other key advantages. The SDLP (Social Democratic Labour Party) is the more moderate Catholic party, supported by educated middle-class Catholics. As such, SDLP people tended to live in large, private detached homes that offered more seclusion for the impromptu terrorist visit. And they were more likely to own two cars.

  The getaway driver would bring the first car to a secret spot where we would rendezvous after the attack. The following morning, the other two gunmen and I would drive the second family car to a building site directly across the road from the RUC station. We would use disguises to get into this building site – again, we’d have to use our own initiative – but, once inside, the half-built homes would provide perfect cover for a gun attack. After mowing down as many building workers as possible, we would make our getaway. We would drive to a certain street where we would meet the driver of the second stolen car. He would drive us to an agreed safe house. We would lie low there for a few hours, then head home, making sure we had copper-bottom alibis worked out in advance.

  After some research, we selected our host family. The man of the house was deceased; his widow shared the home with two grown-up children. That evening, we tiptoed past two glistening saloon cars to the front door.

  When confronted by masked men, ordinary people get such a shock that they tend to put up no resistance whatsoever. Most don’t even check to see if you’re armed. While my sidekicks bound and gagged the quivering trio, I calmly assured them that they would come to no harm.

  I cut the telephone wires and we took it in turns to watch them throughout the night. There are strict rules when taking over a home for an op. If someone rings the doorbell – be it a pizza delivery boy or a family friend or a Jehovah Witness or Gerry Adams – you must take them in and tie them up too. Another golden rule is to avoid leaving any forensic traces. You don’t drink out of any of the cups. You keep your gloves and hat on at all times. You don’t use the loo.

  As nine o’clock approached the following morning, that old familiar knot took a firm grip on my stomach. I was treble-checking my machine gun when excited calls came from upstairs. I ran up to the front bedroom to find my two cohorts aiming their AK-47s out of the window.

  ‘What the fuck …?’ I spluttered.

  ‘Look,’ said gunman one, cocking his gun, ‘it’s like fucking Christmas!’

  A five-strong British army foot patrol was less than a hundred yards from the house.

  ‘Come on,’ he said, training his AK-47 on the soldiers and licking his lips, ‘it’ll be like shooting fish in a barrel.’

  Christ, I thought, how the fuck do I talk them out of this?

  ‘No,’ I heard myself saying, ‘we don’t know what’s behind them.’

  ‘What?’ said the gunmen together.

  ‘Look at them,’ said gunman one, still following the patrol with his weapon, his finger twitching on the trigger, ‘we can pick ’em off from here no bother, then get out through the back garden. Come on, it’s a gift!’

  ‘Look,’ I said, ‘the RUC station is two minutes up the road. We’ve no getaway planned. The safe house isn’t expecting us yet. Our getaway driver is parked up on a street somewhere.’

  ‘Come on,’ said gunman two, ‘let’s do it.’

  My mind was racing, boggling at this dilemma. There was no way I was going to let these two scumbags mow down five British soldiers. If they opened fire now, what would I do? I couldn’t shoot a British soldier. I would deliberately have to miss. What if the soldiers started firing back? Did I want to get into a gunfight with people on my own side?

  As my comrades for the day observed the soldiers, I observed them. Slowly, I raised my machine gun up to chest height. I wasn’t going to stand back and watch these men kill five of my colleagues. If it came to it, I’d pull my weapon on them. To hell with the consequences.

  ‘No,’ I said firmly, ‘we’re following strict orders. We must stick to the original plan.’

  ‘Forget the fucking builders,’ shouted gunman one, ‘we’ve got soldiers here in our sights!’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m in charge and I say no. That’s an order.’

  I had a firm grip on my gun, my finger fixed ready. They could have had no idea what was going through my mind when, reluctantly, they lowered their weapons. I wondered if they could hear my heart pounding. I wondered if this would get back to the OC. What would I say? What possible justification could I give for not availing myself of this golden opportunity to pick off a British army patrol? With the weapons at our disposal at that moment, we could have mown them down in seconds. No doubt someone like Conor would have taken their chances and gone for the soldiers. I thought I better have a damn good excuse ready.

  The spared foot patrol passed the house, oblivious to their narrow escape. We were headed to a building site and wanted to blend in. We also wanted to ensure we couldn’t be identified, and that we would leave no forensic evidence. A few days earlier, the white boiler suits seemed a good idea. So did the monkey hats and the fake moustaches. However, as we climbed into the family saloon, I caught a glimpse of us in the side window. We didn’t look like a crack IRA unit on a dangerous mission. We looked like a GameBoy Mario tribute act.

  When we got to the building site across the road from the RUC station, a group of idlers in hard hats stood smoking out the front. ‘We’re not ready for the painters yet,’ said one, as we marched into the site.

  Inside, four labourers nailing plasterboard ceilings looked down at us. ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ one of them guffawed.

  We produced our weapons and they stopped guffawing. Suddenly, the sound of tools dropping echoed across the site. It was about half past nine when we stood at an unglazed upstairs window, surveying the target some 600 yards away. A couple of days earlier, bricklayers in bulletproof vests could be clearly seen working outside the station.

  ‘Fuck,’ I said, ‘where are the builders?’

  We waited and waited. Of course, I knew there would be no builders working on the RUC station today. I had tipped off my handlers about the plan.

  ‘They’re probably inside,’ said one of the team. ‘What the fuck will we do now?’

  ‘We’ll shoot them inside,’ I said, raising the machine gun, ‘that’s what we’ll do now.’

  My handlers had assured me that the building site would be cleared for the day. I now had the chance to look dangerous, to impress my underlings so they would go back to IRA chiefs saying what a bold, brave, crazy, reckless motherfucker Kevin Fulton was. After my failure to portray myself in this way once today, I wasn’t going to let this opportunity slip.

  I started firing round after round at the building. To be absolutely safe, I aimed at the walls and over the building. The other two joined in.

  ‘Shit, what was that,’ said one of them and we stopped. Concrete snapped off in lumps behind us.

  ‘The fuckers are firing back!’ said the other one, pointing at bullet holes in the walls.

  I couldn’t believe it. My people had tipped off the RUC and what thanks did I get? Being shot at, that’s what. I was furious. I had taken a huge personal risk saving these people from attack. Now here they were trying to kill me.

  ‘Right, fuck ’em,’ I said out loud, and we laid into the building for a full five minutes. I must have fired off 200 rounds without ceasing.

  When we came out of that building site, the streets were
deserted. Suddenly, I heard the sound of cheering. We looked down the road and there, at the windows of the school next to the building site, stood hundreds of kids clapping and whooping at our escapade. We had to laugh.

  We drove to the back end of a council estate, jumped out and put our boiler suits, hats, fake moustaches and balaclavas in a heap on wasteland. Just then a girl I knew walked by. She decided not to look. A Lucozade bottle full of petrol was produced from the boot and the props set ablaze. We hopped back into the car and took a pre-planned back route to another estate. Here our driver was waiting in the second car. As sirens pierced the morning air, we abandoned the first car on waste ground, set it alight and jumped into the second car. Off we sped to another estate where we abandoned the second car and ducked into a safe house.

  Here we formed an orderly queue to shower and change clothes. As soon as we had got rid of all traces of the operation, we were free to go. Nobody could prove a thing.

  The next day, I found out that a round from a sub-machine gun had buckled a piano in a family home on the other side of the RUC station. Thankfully, the house had been empty at the time. Of course, the IRA boys thought this was hilarious and I had to play along. I certainly couldn’t admit that I had deliberately aimed high to avoid hitting anyone around the station.

  Away from IRA eyes, I was furious with myself. I had neglected to check out the other side of the RUC station in advance of the attack. I’d been careless. As a result, I had peppered a family home with machine-gun fire. I could have wiped out an entire family. I had come that close to killing an innocent person. What the hell was I thinking? I felt fate closing in on me. How many more times would I be that lucky?

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  On the morning of 7 February 1991, the British war cabinet met at the very epicentre of British political power: Number 10 Downing Street. Led by John Major, the cabinet had convened for urgent discussions about the ongoing Gulf War.

  Just after ten o’clock that morning, the windows shattered. Politicians and civil servants dived for cover. A mortar bomb had landed in the garden of Number 10. It had been launched from a firing position at the corner of Horseguards Avenue and Whitehall, hitting a tree and landing fifteen yards short of its target. Two more mortars quickly followed. Both overshot their target, causing damage to numbers 11 and 12.

  The attacks made headlines around the world. Britain was at war and in the throes of a well-publicised security clampdown, yet the IRA had managed to get within fifteen yards of the war cabinet.

  I was able to tell my handlers who was behind the attack on Downing Street.

  After all, it was well known amongst Provos that one man controlled all IRA terrorism activity in England and on the continent. For legal reasons, I cannot name him in this book; I shall refer to him as Stephen.

  Stephen and Conor went back a long way. Long before the Downing Street attack, I had told my handlers everything I had found out about Stephen from my IRA mentor. Quite what they did with this information I never knew.

  I explained how he sat on the all-powerful, five-strong IRA Army Council. The Army Council ran the Provisional IRA. Every decision – from overall strategy right down to whether or not a volunteer-turned-informant should live or die – came down to the vote of the Army Council.

  This man held a seat on the Army Council because he ran the South Armagh brigade of the IRA – the most terrifyingly efficient and close-knit unit in the organisation. If the South Armagh brigade recruited volunteers from another unit for an operation – such as it did for the human-bomb campaign – those volunteers wouldn’t be privy to the details of that operation until the final seconds. It was Stephen and his men who helped South Armagh gain its reputation as bandit country.

  Most crucially, I was able to reveal to my handlers that this man was the sole supplier of mortar bombs to the IRA. Building and launching mortars required a certain expertise. He and his team were the acknowledged experts. I knew this because I had heard Conor order three from him for a job in Newry.

  At the time, the Newry courthouse was being renovated. Anyone working on the building – that is, working for the security forces – was considered a legitimate target. The IRA dealt in terror, and slaughtering lowly workers going about their daily routine spread terror more efficiently than any other tactic. Ordinary workers held another attraction for these cold-blooded opportunists. Unlike soldiers, policemen and politicians, workers were not armed or protected. As such, they were easy meat. So the builders renovating Newry courthouse became Conor’s next target.

  To protect workers from potential attack, a massive blast wall had been constructed around the entire courthouse structure. A blast wall consisted of two breezeblock walls erected one behind the other, about four feet apart. The gap between the walls was packed with sand. The typical blast wall can withstand bombs, grenades, charging vehicles and gunfire.

  However, the one thing a blast wall can’t repel is a mortar bomb. I knew that mortars, if launched properly, could be propelled over the blast wall directly into the building site. The impenetrable blast wall would then act as a compression chamber, trapping the devastating power of the mortars inside its structure and creating a pinball machine of burning shrapnel. Nobody inside that blast wall would survive the rebounding aftershocks. Each day, about 100 workers toiled within the supposed safety of those blast walls.

  Conor was forthcoming about everything but the actual date of the attack. He told me that three massive mortar bombs known as barrack-busters had been commissioned for the attack. Barrack-busters were industrial gas cylinders weighing eighty or ninety pounds and packed with explosives. The mortars would be launched from a van parked in a car park across the road from the courthouse. The roof of the van would be cut out and replaced with paper sprayed the same colour. I had seen it done before. From a foot away, you couldn’t tell the difference. At least not until the mortars had ripped through it.

  Launched like rockets, mortars are uniquely difficult to control and aim. They are self-propelled. To hit the courthouse, they would have to get over the blast wall but not overshoot. The trajectory and distance would have to be worked out precisely beforehand. An inch in the car park translated as several feet across the road.

  Using a Trumeter distance-measuring wheel favoured by ordnance workers, the team had already calculated the exact spot in the car park from which the mortars would be launched. Conor was confident they would hit the target. The men tasked with driving the van to the car park and launching the mortars had already been on a detailed dummy run. Experienced in the delicate art of aiming mortars, the driver had apparently placed white marks on the windscreen that tallied with fixed points on the courthouse. On the day of the attack, he could use these marks as reference points to ensure that he had got the position of the launch van absolutely right.

  I knew that the attack was imminent, but I wasn’t able to give my handlers any idea as to exactly when it would happen. It could have been days, weeks or months. In terms of preventing the mortar attack, their options were surprisingly limited. The army could stake out the car park, but for how long? It couldn’t remain there indefinitely. That wasn’t the only judgement call that needed to be made. How many people would turn up as part of the bombing team? Would they be armed? To ensure the safety of the soldiers – and to prevent the embarrassment of being overpowered – the army would have to deploy a significant number of personnel. How could they do this covertly? No doubt, IRA spotters were already keeping a close eye on the car park.

  Besides, if the IRA unit was ambushed at the scene, I would be left badly exposed. Only Conor and the famously tight-lipped volunteers from South Armagh were privy to the exact details of the attack. In such a reputable chain, Conor would no doubt finger me as the weak link.

  While military intelligence pondered the dilemma, the RUC erected roadblocks on all routes leading to the courthouse. Of course, they couldn’t do this indefinitely, but it protected the workers for now and, crucially
, bought some time. However, we knew that, once the roadblocks were gone, the courthouse was vulnerable. There had to be some other way of preventing the attack.

  Desperate to thwart the bombers, my handlers sent a scout down to examine the car park. It was an inspired decision. That very evening, a height-restriction barrier was erected at the car-park entrance, preventing entry to all vehicles save cars and motorbikes. Clearly, IRA spotters hadn’t noticed the new height restriction. The next morning, the van carrying the mortars turned up at the car park.

  It couldn’t get in.

  Instead of turning away, the IRA unit drove to an industrial estate on the outskirts of Newry. From there, it fired the mortars at what was obviously a regular target – a poorly protected UDR station. However, having not worked out the trigonometry in advance, the mortars bounced harmlessly into a field. The attack had been thwarted without a single loss of life. Better still, the failure of the attack couldn’t be linked to me in any way. The sudden appearance of the height-restriction barrier was dismissed by Conor as ‘one of those things’. It was the worst kind of luck – nothing more.

  When I next met the handlers, we celebrated hard. This was a real result. We had saved lives for sure, maybe more than 100. In all my time as a double agent, this was a rare but glorious high point. Finally, all the years of lying and worrying and being party to terrorism seemed worthwhile.

  The elation never lasted long, though. The victories inevitably felt hollow, because I couldn’t share the joy with the person in the world who mattered most to me: my wife. I couldn’t bore her with the setbacks either. To her, I was an IRA man and so the work I did was not part of our everyday lives. She asked no questions about anything that happened to me from the time I walked out the front door until the moment I got back. It might sound shocking, but this was a war situation and this was how marriages survived the carnage. When my wife married me, she thought she knew what I was involved in and she accepted the inevitable secrecy and loneliness. IRA wives know better than to implicate themselves in any way. Their commitment to ignorance about what their husbands are up to is what keeps most IRA families together.