Double Agent: My Secret Life Undercover in the IRA

by Kevin Fulton

  On completing my journey into town, I would be followed around on foot, shop to shop. Sometimes, as a little joke, they would ring up the shop manager and inform them that an IRA man was on the premises. I would be followed round by a member of staff until I left.

  On the journey home, the whole charade would be repeated.

  I felt utterly shattered. Spent. I had been living this life now for ten years, seven days a week. With so many illusions to keep up on so many fronts, I needed to feel strong. Instead, I felt in a state of near mental collapse. I feared that fatigue would make me vulnerable. I couldn’t afford to start making mistakes. I desperately needed a long holiday.

  I had gone to a job agency called Mivan Overseas with a view to getting some mindless work away from Northern Ireland for a few months. The only skill I could offer was painting, and not the artistic variety. The agency said it would alert me if any short-term contracts came up. I thought I had better mention my plan to Conor. He understood. In fact, he said it was a good idea. He thought I hadn’t been myself for a few months. I had seemed strained.

  ‘Go away and sort yourself out,’ said Conor.

  A painting job came up at Eurodisney in Paris. The contract was for twelve months, with a possible option for an extension. I signed up straight away.

  The Provos might have appreciated my urge for a break but, to my amazement, my handlers were far less sympathetic. Bob and Pete, full-time dogs of war, just couldn’t comprehend my desperation for complete and utter change. I was holding up their project – or at least that’s how they made me feel.

  I shrugged off their disapproval and, in August 1991, headed out to Paris. My task was to paint the Big Thunder Mountain theme ride. The days were long and tedious – just what I needed. By the end of the first week, the tension that had strangled my every thought and feeling and action for so long had melted away. Fresh air, sunshine, a straightforward task – I felt euphoric. I felt like I had just stepped off Big Thunder Mountain after a ride lasting ten years.

  I started to imagine life free of the Provisional IRA and free of British intelligence. I started to imagine normal life. Perhaps this was what my handlers were scared of – that I would get a taste for it and want more, that I would quit my role as a double agent and get my life back. As every day passed, I became increasingly attuned to normality. I felt myself being lured away from my old life of lightning meetings and clandestine phone calls and murderous plotting. Trust fate to spoil my Damascene moment.

  I was relaxing in my living quarters one Sunday afternoon, two weeks into my contract, when my phone rang. It was my wife. ‘Have you seen the papers?’ she asked.

  ‘Hardly,’ I said. ‘Where would I find the Irish papers in Eurodisney?’

  ‘Try to get a copy of the Sunday Express,’ she said. ‘You’re on the front page.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Get a copy,’ she said. ‘You’ll have to see it to believe it.’

  I got a fellow workman to drive me to a newsagent’s near the city. I picked up a copy of the Express and baulked at the headline: IRA INFILTRATE DISNEYLAND. I read on feverishly. The Sunday Express reported that it had identified ‘prominent’ IRA members amongst the 600 people employed at Eurodisney, including ‘some with convictions for serious terrorist offences’. It named three: Joe Haughey, John Gillen and Kevin Fulton, ‘a prominent Provo from Newry’.

  I paid for the paper and got back to the living quarters as quickly as possible. I decided to seek out my fellow ‘prominent IRA men’. I tracked down Joe Haughey on the other side of the workers’ compound. He was a big man with large, rounded shoulders, missing teeth and a flushed face. He read the paper with his mouth wide open. ‘How the fuck …?’ he said in a strong Belfast accent.

  We sat in his room and chatted. Haughey hailed from the notorious Unity Walk in west Belfast, and was known as the Hawk from the Walk. He had survived several seven-day detentions in RUC interrogation centres and so had a catchphrase: ‘The Hawk from the Walk don’t talk.’ He made no secret of his IRA connections and nor did I. What was the point?

  A week or so later, we were dismissed from our jobs. I headed back to Newry and into the arms of my handlers. I couldn’t contain my anger. They seemed delighted. ‘Look at it this way,’ said Pete, ‘it’s great for your cover, and it’s helped you befriend a leading Belfast Provo. It’s worked out quite well.’

  It would be many years later before I’d find out the truth about the Sunday Express story. The security services tipped off the newspaper about the presence of Joe Haughey and myself at Eurodisney. They deliberately leaked the story to the Express to force me back to Northern Ireland, and back into my role as a double agent. Little did I know just how much I was being manipulated by my handlers, men who I trusted so much.

  Perhaps they knew that the IRA was about to give me a promotion.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  It took a few seconds for Conor’s words to register.

  I was driving towards a blazing low early-morning sun, squinting hard. I sensed Conor watching me expectantly from the passenger seat. He had been acting cagey, and a little smug, since I had picked him up from an IRA safe house earlier. Was it the sun dazzling me, or the shock of Conor’s announcement?

  ‘You’ve been chosen to become a member of the security unit.’

  The security unit, the IRA’s internal police, the nutting squad, charged with rooting out and killing informants and double agents. Christ, I thought to myself. Some supernatural force is mocking me now.

  I could sense Conor scrutinising my face. He must have read my look of disbelief. Perhaps he assumed I was struggling to register the shock of such a sudden yet glorious promotion. ‘Well,’ said Conor, ‘what do you think?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said vaguely, maintaining a nonchalant façade. Inside, thoughts strobed through my mind quicker than the white road-lines flashing under my car. I thought I had better say something. ‘So how would it work?’

  ‘Well,’ said Conor, ‘me and Niall are basically the security unit for Dundalk, Armagh and South Down. We handle things in our area, though of course we come under the command of the main IRA security unit in Belfast. Anything serious and they get involved. You’ll be meeting some of the main players from Belfast.’

  ‘Right,’ I said. I could certainly see the benefits to this. The IRA’s power base was in Belfast. Getting involved with senior IRA men from there would put me at the very heart of the IRA. My handlers would be thrilled. But what exactly would I have to do to gain the keys to this black kingdom?

  ‘We vet new recruits,’ said Conor, ‘we debrief volunteers who have been interrogated by the security forces, find out if they’ve talked and, if so, what they’ve said. Of course, this is a breach of discipline. You’ll be part of any inquiry into breaches of discipline.’

  I couldn’t bring myself to ask the question I really wanted to ask. I knew Conor would get to it eventually. ‘Anyone suspected of breaking the rules of the Green Book, you’ll be part of the team that’ll find out the truth of the matter. And you could find yourself having to punish transgressors. Volunteers might be suspended. They might get a court martial and be expelled …’

  I bit my lip. The bottom line was coming.

  ‘Sometimes people will have to be punished. You may have to dole out the punishment yourself. You might find yourself carrying out punishment shootings, Kevin,’ said Conor, still scrutinising my face. ‘Think you’re up to it?’

  ‘Oh yeah,’ I said, ‘damn right I’m up to it.’

  ‘And then there are informers,’ Conor went on animatedly. Clearly, he loved working for the security unit. ‘Sometimes they get an amnesty, but, where a death sentence is recommended by the court of inquiry, a member of the Army Council makes the final decision.’

  I turned to see Conor relishing the moment, smiling at me as if I had won some sort of prize.

  ‘You could find yourself executing touts.’

  My arms were a dead weight on the s
teering wheel. I realised I had been in a sort of trance for several minutes, driving on autopilot as if I was no longer in control of the car. Somewhere along the line, it had taken over. My head was bulging.

  A punishment shooting was one thing. Shooting dead a man with his hands tied behind his back, begging for mercy, was an altogether different proposition. I knew that, by accepting this promotion, I could be ordered at any time to stiff a tout after a kangaroo court. There would be no time to ring handlers, no time to ensure some dastardly stroke of ill-fortune scupper the crime in hand. Surely, I thought, surely my handlers won’t sanction this promotion. Surely, it was time for me to disappear.

  I couldn’t have been more wrong.

  ‘This is a remarkable breakthrough,’ said Bob from MI5. ‘This is precisely why you were hand picked for this job. You are now in the inner circle. Well done!’

  ‘Think about it,’ said Pete. ‘You’ll be meeting some of the main players from Belfast. Some of the absolute top men. You’ll be close to the real movers and shakers, the people who sanction the real major-league stuff.’

  ‘You want to stop an atrocity?’ said Bob. ‘Well, it’s only by getting in with these people that you can even become party to operations of that scale.’

  ‘But what if I have to execute someone?’ I said. ‘I mean, surely this is overstepping the mark.’

  ‘No, look,’ said Bob, ‘we’ve managed to get other people into positions like this. Use your common sense. If it isn’t you putting the bullet into that tout’s head, it’ll be someone else. At least you know that somewhere down the line, it’ll pay off for us. You must think of the bigger picture. If you don’t do it, someone else will. There’s no point trying to save any of these people anyhow. They’re only IRA scum after all.’

  ‘Another IRA person gets shot,’ said Pete, ‘so what? Another dead Provie is hardly bad news for anyone, is it? And it’s the ultimate cover for you. Who’d ever suspect that someone executing informants is an agent?’

  The message was clear – the priority for my handlers was saving their colleagues in the army and the RUC. Their secondary concern was saving innocent people. They didn’t give a damn about anyone else. I suppose this had been obvious for some time and came as no real surprise. What did surprise me though was Bob’s admission that they had other agents at this level within the IRA. Were these men still active in the organisation? How many were there? Were they planting bombs and shooting people on behalf of British intelligence?

  For the first time, I began to wonder who controlled people like my handlers. I began to wonder if, to them and their colleagues in MI5 and the Force Research Unit, Northern Ireland was one big elaborate playground where they had carte blanche to do exactly as they pleased. They seemed a law unto themselves.

  I began to wonder who was running the war in Northern Ireland. I began to wonder if it was in anyone’s interest for the war to cease. Without the conflict, what would people like Bob from MI5, Pete from military intelligence or Conor do with themselves? If the war ended, so would their power, status and influence.

  ‘You’ve got to do it,’ said Bob. ‘We’ve gone too far to pull out now.’

  ‘Do it,’ said Pete. ‘Give it a few weeks and we’ll see how it goes. We can always pull you out if it gets too hot.’

  I decided to go along with it just as I had decided to go along with everything since I had become a double agent – reluctantly and in a state of utter dependency. I relied on someone else making the decision for me, and someone else saving me if it all went wrong.

  Perhaps my handlers sensed my gloom. At our next secret rendezvous, they announced a new improved pay deal. Bob detailed our lucrative new arrangement in the manner of an indulgent sugar daddy. ‘Your basic will stay the same, £130 per week in your hand. But we’re going to put £300 per week into a secret savings account which you can access once your career as a double agent comes to an end,’ said Bob.

  Pete took up the reins. ‘Any time your information ends in a conviction, we’ll put a lump sum into your account. The amount will depend on who has been convicted, but, if it’s a known IRA man, you’ll get between five and ten grand. Not bad, eh?’

  ‘Not bad at all,’ I said grinning. After all, this was one job with no pension scheme and no real future.

  Their largesse didn’t end there. I was handed a bag stuffed full of banknotes. ‘There’s five thousand in there,’ said Bob. ‘This is to pay for your new car. It’s waiting for you at a garage near London. You’re expected to pick it up later this week.’

  ‘They won’t accept Northern Ireland notes,’ I said, speaking from previous experience.

  ‘Oh, this garage will,’ said Pete knowingly.

  I was handed my itinerary – fly into Luton Airport, hire a car and drive to a garage in Dagenham, Essex. There I’d ask for a man called Bob. Bob would hand me the keys to the car – a year-old Peugeot 405 – in exchange for the cash. I asked them if I could take along my brother-in-law. I could use a map-reader, and some company. He also knew a bit about cars, so I figured I could get some cash knocked off. They agreed.

  A few days later, I was presented with two one-way tickets to Luton Airport and two ferry tickets from Stranraer in Scotland to Larne, near Belfast.

  Amongst my IRA cronies, travelling to England to buy a car aroused no suspicions. Lots of people bought cars on the mainland at that time, simply because second-hand models tended to be cheaper and of better quality.

  As usual, I got stopped at the airport. That was one of the down sides to being an IRA man. After the standard strip search and verbal abuse, I was asked what I was doing with five thousand pounds in cash. I told them I was buying a car, but they were having none of it.

  ‘No garage over here will take Northern Ireland notes!’ said a customs man triumphantly, and I had to laugh.

  After more than an hour of detainment, I was allowed to make a phone call. I called my handlers. To my amazement, they had already been alerted to my presence at Luton Airport. Of course, they couldn’t tell airport officials that I was travelling at their behest. Instead, my handlers told HM Customs thay would arrange to get a surveillance unit to tail me from the airport, and asked them to hold me at the airport for another hour.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Pete, ‘we’ve told the garage you’re going to be a few hours late.’

  ‘Can you not do something about this,’ I said, for I was truly sick of being harassed.

  ‘We can’t tell them to let you go, can we?’ barked Pete. ‘They’d smell a rat then, wouldn’t they? Word would get out. It wouldn’t look too good for you, would it? Being miraculously released after a phone call. No, no, we’ve got to play the game.’

  ‘No, no, no, Pete,’ I said sarcastically, ‘I’ve got to play the game. You just sit on your fat arse.’

  I hung up and counted down the minutes to my release. I struggled to keep up the smiles and the smart-arse wisecracks. I was growing very weary of this game.

  Finally, I got out. It seemed no time until a skyscape of pencil-thin high-rise blocks announced Dagenham. Our appointed garage was just off a main road. As instructed, I asked for Bob.

  Bob was bald and cagey. I said I was looking for a car.

  ‘How much?’ he said.

  ‘Five grand,’ I said.

  ‘This one will suit you,’ said Bob, leading me to a grey Peugeot 405.

  It was immaculate. Low mileage. One previous owner. I figured it was worth a good deal more than five thousand. So did my brother-in-law. Whenever Bob wasn’t looking, he would lean into my ear and say, ‘You’re getting it for nothing!’ I was sure Bob could hear him. Some fucking negotiator, I remember thinking.

  ‘Five grand, you say?’ I said.

  ‘Five,’ said Bob.

  ‘Four six,’ I ventured.

  ‘Five,’ said Bob.

  ‘Four eight,’ I said, smiling.

  ‘Five,’ said Bob, not smiling.

  ‘Ah, c’mon,’ I said, ‘you
’ve got to give me some slack!’

  He remained stony faced.

  ‘What about five two?’ I said.

  My brother-in-law coughed dramatically.

  ‘Five,’ said Bob.

  ‘Five four? I tell you what, I’ll give you six!’

  ‘Five,’ said Bob, eyeing me to say in no uncertain terms that he wasn’t enjoying this particular game one bit.

  ‘Agreed,’ I said, mock-spitting into the palm of my hand. By the time I offered it, Bob was halfway to his office.

  ‘What the fuck are you playing at?’ gasped my brother-in-law.

  All the way to Stranraer, my driving partner wondered aloud why Bob had let the car go so cheap, while I wondered privately what the catch might be to this amazing deal. I soon found out.

  As Bob and Pete ran through the car’s clandestine functions, I felt like James Bond being briefed by Q. The car contained a satellite tracking device and a bug. Both had been hidden deep within the car’s dashboard. ‘You’d have to strip the entire car to find anything suspicious,’ explained Pete, ‘so don’t worry about the police or the army coming across anything during a search. It won’t happen.’

  The tape recorder was controlled by two tiny pins under the steering wheel. One switch activated a microphone, the other the bug itself, which recorded every word uttered inside the car. My handlers urged me to lend the car to my IRA connections at every given opportunity, and to be sure to alert them whenever I did.

  It was in my new car, with the bug activated, that I told Conor I was willing to join the security unit. Just for the record, I asked him again what my duties would be. I then insisted he tell me about the occasions when he had executed touts.

  My first task as a fully fledged member of the nutting squad was to observe Conor vetting three new recruits. One by one, they gave the same reasons for wanting to join: they had been harassed by the police; a family member had been insulted/injured/killed by the British army; they were sick of being victimised for being Catholic by the British State; they wanted to even things up – why should Protestants get the best jobs and houses? Each one of them expressed complete and utter disillusionment with the status quo, and alienation from their own society. I realised that the Provisional IRA benefited from a fathomless pool of potential recruits. I realised that, to stop people dying, we would first have to give them good reasons to live.