by Kevin Fulton
This wasn’t the first time I had saved lives, nor would it be the last. Worryingly, though, I knew that the chance of me contributing to the death of innocent people was as present as ever. I was still working for the IRA’s bomb-development team. By the early 1990s, we were immersed in a technical battle with the British army’s bomb-disposal experts – a battle they were winning. They had made radio-controlled bombs a thing of the past. For a start, they were continually improving the protective radio-wave shields they had now flung around every police station, army base and military vehicle. This shield blocked signals between radio-controlled devices – no matter how sophisticated – anywhere in the vicinity. Bombs simply couldn’t be detonated anywhere close by.
Once an IRA radio bomb had failed to detonate, the army could retrieve the weapon and identify the radio code on the receiver, thus neutralising all bombs using the same signal. When this occurred, the IRA could spend months trying to find a new signal that would break through the shield.
To add to our woes, patrolling soldiers carried radio-wave disruptor packs on their backs, spoiling everyone’s TV reception and jamming up the IRA’s radio-signal communications. The army had also developed a scanner capable of detecting radio emissions instantly, thus pinpointing devices and the personnel planning to press the button. In short, we needed to work out a way of detonating a bomb from a distance that didn’t involve using a radio signal.
I can’t remember who came up with the idea first, but one of the team knew a stills photographer. That photographer explained how, instead of erecting lights for some studio shoots, he set up a system of slave-unit flashguns which simultaneously triggered each other off. Once you fired one flashgun, it then triggered off all the others.
This got the team thinking. We quickly worked out that, by attaching a flashgun slave unit to a detonating system, detonation could be triggered by simply aiming a flashgun at the slave unit and flashing it once. After days of fevered experimentation, we realised that a bomb could be detonated this way from a distance of 100 metres. To detonate the bomb, all that was required was a bog-standard flashgun and a slave unit that could be bought over the counter in any photographic shop on the high street. The flashgun system of detonation was simple, cheap, effective and impossible to jam. In short, without a state-of-the-art lab, a huge budget or any academic credentials between us, we cracked it.
The more we experimented with the flashgun device, the more we realised its devastating potential. On learning that a local milkman was delivering produce to the RUC station in Newry, the local IRA came up with a breathtakingly ruthless plan to announce the new flashgun detonation system to the world.
The plan was simple. Early one morning, an IRA unit would go to a house on the Armagh Road to which the milkman delivered milk daily. The owner of the home – a middle-aged woman who lived on her own – would be taken away and held at a safe house. The rest of the unit would wait for the milkman to call. When he did, he would be dragged into the garage of the house and executed. His body would then be laid out on the hall floor. Next came the really clever part.
The milk inside six cartons would be emptied out and replaced by Semtex and a flashgun slave unit. The six cartons would be resealed and left beside the milkman’s dead body in the hallway. The IRA unit would then leave.
Eventually, someone would call at the house and see the body, or a neighbour would ring the RUC on account of the fact that a milk float had been sitting outside the house for several hours. The RUC officers would walk in through the front door and find the body. They would call for back-up and for a forensics team. A scene-of-crime officer would arrive to take photographs. As soon as his camera flash went off, the whole house and everyone inside it would go up.
I warned my handlers about the plan and left it to them to do something about it. I learned some days later that the milkman suddenly announced his retirement. I had saved his life, but I knew that Conor and the team were still desperate to christen the flashgun device. My new handlers were equally desperate to be briefed about it so that they could somehow combat its simple genius.
By now, the latter part of 1991, I had two new handlers – one from the Force Research Unit (FRU) and, for the first time, a handler from MI5. Clearly, the information I was now supplying had been judged of national importance. Officers from RUC Special Branch were invited to sit in on our meetings in case anything of direct relevance to them came up. However, the men who planned my every move were Pete from FRU and Bob from MI5. They did things very differently. There were no more meetings in lay-bys or games of pool or trips to a shooting range. I met Bob two or three times a week, every week. I travelled all over Northern Ireland for our rendezvous – always well away from Newry. We had four favoured places to meet – in Dromore, Hillsborough, Newtonards and Dundonald Hospital. To thwart anybody bugging our calls, we coined these locations spots one, two, three and four. The beauty of mobile-phone technology was that we could select any of these locations for our meeting at very short notice. To further guarantee my personal security, I was armed with a pager.
On arriving at one of our locations, I would be helped into the side door of a blacked-out van and whisked off to a secret location – not for a chat but to be debriefed. This was truly the stuff of a John Le Carré novel.
The places I was brought to all had integral garages with doors leading directly into the building. I would be led along the hallway of a very expensive home towards a dining room or a sitting room. I remember one of these homes sporting expensively framed caricatures of leading British politicians all the way up the hall. The house’s owner – who never showed his face – used to whip up the most spectacular curry dishes for us to eat while we got on with our business. In my head, I had an image of the man as a sort of red-faced, brandy-swilling major who listened to BBC Radio 4 and spoke endlessly about his military service in India.
Occasionally, when there was something of particular significance to discuss, Bob from MI5 would call me on the mobile phone and tell me an airline ticket to London was waiting for me at Aldergrove Airport. In late March 1992, I was put up in a flashy central London hotel for one such visit, having informed my handlers that Conor was planning an attack using a flashgun and doodlebug. For two days, I was debriefed by military intelligence, the Home Office, the Anti-terrorist Branch, RUC Special Branch and MI5 about the new flashgun device that I had helped to develop. They seemed, by turns, horrified and deeply impressed by its barbaric simplicity. Little did I know that as we spoke in the boardroom of a posh London hotel – the room had been booked under a false business name – the flashgun device was being dusted down for a horrific attack.
I got back on Friday, 27 March. In a grim twist of fate, the flashgun device was used in spectacular fashion that very night. While I was briefing the British security forces, it was being used to attack two of their employees.
A large hole had been sawn out of the side of a car boot – the rear right-hand side to be exact – with an angle grinder. The hole was disguised by paper sprayed the same colour as the car. In the boot, facing that hole, lay a primed horizontal mortar, also known as a Mark 12 rocket. Shaped like a missile, the mortar had a copper coned warhead stuffed with a kilo of Semtex.
On the windscreen of this car sat a photoflash slave unit and a trigger mechanism. A wire ran from this slave unit through the dashboard and out through the back seat of the car, all the way to the mortar in the boot.
The car was parked on Merchant’s Quay in Newry, alongside the canal. One hundred yards away stood an IRA man with a flashgun. He spotted an unmarked police car driving along the quay. As the police car drew alongside the booby-trapped car, he flashed the flashgun at the windscreen. An electrical circuit was created, triggering a detonator which then set off the missile. The police car was only a few feet away when the missile slammed into its side. The bang shook the glass out of every window on the street. The car careered into a line of parked cars. It took ambulance men and the fi
re brigade fifteen minutes to cut out the two officers inside. Surgeons fought for several hours to save the life of Constable Colleen McMurray. They failed. She was thirty-four and recently married. Doctors pumped sixty-six pints of blood into her colleague, Constable Paul Slaine. It was pouring out as fast as they were pumping it in. He survived, but lost both legs. His throat was slashed. He was a twenty-eight-year-old father of three.
When I called down to a bar in Dundalk two nights after the attack to see Conor, they were still joking about it. More than once, a drunken IRA man came up behind Conor, tapped him on the shoulder, waited for Conor to turn and then pretended to take his photograph. ‘Say cheese, motherfucker!’ he roared to howls of hilarity. Conor joined in and it became clear that everyone in this bar room believed that he had been the man who had activated the flashgun on Merchant’s Quay.
These days, I feel terrible about the death of Constable McMurray and the injuries suffered by Constable Slaine. To be honest, though, back in 1992 I felt very little. In my full-time role as a double agent, I was losing any sense of myself. When I was with my comrades in the Provisional IRA, I morphed into a character I no longer felt any emotional attachment to. I was so in character that I stopped feeling the pain and the doubts and the anguish – all those emotions which would hinder my efficiency as a double agent. I was becoming de-sensitised, de-humanised, robotic. This seemed to suit everyone. Especially me.
That said, there was no danger of me ‘turning’. I still knew which side I was on and, before 1992 was out, I would tilt the balance back in our favour. Firstly, I saved another life.
For the first time ever in my IRA career, I was ordered to kill someone in cold blood. Luckily, I wasn’t bounced into the shooting. Instead, I was instructed to observe the daily habits of an elderly cleaner who worked at Newry’s Edward Street RUC station. I quickly discovered that this man was a creature of habit and, as such, the most vulnerable of targets. You could set your watch to his routine. At the same time every morning, he collected the newspapers for the station from Thompsons newsagents in Sugar Island just around the corner. To buy time, I told IRA bosses that the man varied his routine and his route each day, and seemed on a high state of alert. This gave my handlers time to warn the man that his life was in danger. Suddenly, like the milkman, he retired.
Some months later, I spotted the man that I should have shot dead in a different newsagent’s in Newry. He was buying sweets for an adoring grandchild. He never knew that, if it hadn’t been for me, this child would have been deprived of her grandfather. I felt like a guardian angel.
By now, Sean Mathers had taken over as Newry OC. Back in 1986, I had used my ice-cream van to smuggle a revolver to him on behalf of Conor. It seemed like several lifetimes ago. Mathers and a man called Matty ‘Hitchy’ Hillen had hatched a plan to blow up soldiers during a charity cycle event.
The route of the so-called Maracycle went past a chapel at a junction on the main Newry to Dundalk road. Every year, army and police patrols tended to loiter around the chapel’s black metal railings as it provided an excellent vantage point in several directions.
Days earlier, a piece of black tubular steel containing Semtex had been attached to the railings. It blended in perfectly. A detonating wire had been run down the inside of the tubular steel frame, into a culvert under the road, out the other side of the road and into a wooded area. As it was buried in shallow mud, nobody was going to stumble across this wire. At an appointed time that Sunday, Mathers and Hillen would be standing at the end of that wire, unable to see the church railings and waiting for a signal. Once the signal was given, they would press a detonating button and everybody within 100 yards of those railings would be cut down.
Of course, I tipped off my handlers. The army was thrilled and said it would be pulling out all the stops for this. Nailing Newry’s IRA OC in the act of detonating a bomb was considered a massive PR coup.
The task of giving the signal to Mathers and Hillen fell to a man called Philip and myself. We would be on a high vantage point overlooking the railings – ostensibly watching the Maracycle but really waiting to alert Mathers and Hillen as to when an army patrol was passing. The signal would be relayed to them via CB radio. The agreed word was ‘Cortina’. I would be chatting away to them about this and that. As a patrol approached the spot, I was to say, ‘My brother’s got a new car, it’s a Ford …’
That was the signal to switch on the power. ‘What type of Ford?’ Mathers would ask.
‘It’s one of them, oh, what do you call them now, a Ford … Cortina.’
Bang.
The unit for the operation agreed to meet in the early hours of that morning. There was still work to do and technicalities to be checked. Philip and I waited for Mathers and Hillen for hours. They didn’t show. I decided to make a visit to Mathers’s home to see what was up. His wife answered the door and said he had been out all night ‘on an operation’.
‘Some operation,’ I mumbled to myself. He had obviously been otherwise engaged.
‘Right,’ I said to Philip, ‘the op is off.’
He agreed and we went home. I was drinking tea when I heard that a bomb attack on the Maracycle had been thwarted and two suspected IRA men arrested. I found out later that Mathers and Hillen turned up late. They had obviously decided to press on with the operation regardless of the lack of support. Clearly, one of the men would be the lookout, the other the ‘button-man’. The trouble with having one lookout, as they discovered that morning, is that they can only look in one direction. Mathers and Hillen didn’t see the undercover army unit creeping up on them.
Sean Mathers was sentenced to twenty years for conspiracy to murder members of the security forces and conspiracy to cause an explosion. Hillen got twenty-one years.
It was so obvious that the security services knew about the bomb plot. I felt nervous. Only a tiny number of people were privy to this plan. Now top operatives had been arrested. There would be a thorough investigation, probably involving the dreaded IRA internal security unit, the nutting squad. The last thing any volunteer wanted was to be questioned by the nutting squad. They say you’re never the same afterwards.
Before that, I would have to write down everything I knew. I would have to detail who I had spoken to in the days leading up to the operation, and on the day of the op itself. In the Provisional IRA, everybody suspected everybody else of being an informant. However, an internal investigation into a compromised op tended to turn the spotlight directly on to those involved. I worried that the nutting squad might start looking at my previous record on operations. I was worried they might detect a pattern.
‘Kevin Fulton, a lot of operations you’ve been involved with have gone badly wrong …’
The security unit sent down a top operative from Belfast to conduct the inquiry. Apparently, the story that Philip and I told ‘sounded like a different operation’ to the story told by Mathers and Hillen, which had been sneaked out of prison via coms. Attention soon focused on Mathers and his ‘missing hours’ in the middle of that night. The man from Belfast suggested to me that Mathers was more afraid of his wife than the Provisional IRA, and left it at that.
I was in the clear. Being completely cleared of any suspicion by the nutting squad emboldened me to take more and more risks. I got wind of an attack being planned on an army patrol in Newry town centre. The team planned to hide a two-kilo Semtex bomb next to a gate in the Patrick Street area of Newry. A detonation wire would be run from the bomb, through a derelict builder’s yard, to a quiet backstreet. From here, the bomb would be detonated. The button-men would be in contact by mobile phone with a spotter who would have a good view of the gate. When an army patrol got as close as possible, the spotter would give the verbal signal and the bomb would go off. At least that was the plan.
I told my handlers. The army set up surveillance in the derelict builder’s yard. They secretly filmed two IRA men burying the detonation wire in the yard. They observed the men awaiting the
signal to press the button. No army patrol came that day. The two button-men were in position again the following afternoon. Again, no army patrol materialised.
The bombers must have been getting suspicious because, the day after that, they started to dismantle the bomb. The army surveillance unit surfaced and the RUC moved in. Jervis Marks, twenty-seven, from Newry was sentenced to fifteen years. Colm Coyle, twenty-two, also from Newry was given fourteen years. The latter had been a member of the Provisional IRA for four months.
I was sure that my information in this instance had saved the lives of British soldiers. I should have felt elated. Instead, I felt a sort of numb exhaustion. My role as a double agent had completely taken over my life. I lived every minute of every day either plotting with the IRA or debriefing my handlers. The rest of the time, I slept only fitfully. I lived every minute of every day with the terror of being shot by a Loyalist death squad or by the SAS. I lived every minute of every day being harassed, threatened and abused by the RUC. They had the manpower and the resources to haunt my every living hour, waking and sleeping. I began to receive death threats on the phone at all hours of the day and night.
‘We’re getting closer to you, you Provo cunt.’
‘Watch your back tomorrow, IRA scum, we’re going to fill you with holes.’
Was it any wonder I was finding it hard to sleep?
They raided my home at breakfast, at lunch, at dinnertime. During each and every raid, they expertly rifled through every one of our personal possessions. Whenever I left my home, I was shadowed by one or more police cars. Repeatedly I was stopped and searched, and during every search the seats and spare wheel and anything in the boot would be hurled into a ditch. For the duration of the search, an officer would cover me by pointing a rifle directly at my head. When the search was over, an officer would tell me that they were getting closer. ‘And remember,’ an old adversary said to me once, ‘we only have to be lucky once.’