Double Agent: My Secret Life Undercover in the IRA

by Kevin Fulton

  Conor asked them all the same questions. Had they any known links with Sinn Fein or the IRA? Had they attended Republican marches or funerals? Had they criminal records?

  I found myself wondering if I could bring myself to execute one of these men. Suppose they confessed to being a tout? Could I administer the ultimate sanction, at the behest of an IRA kangaroo court? Listening to these men’s voices, hearing about their disenfranchised lives, I came to the conclusion that I just couldn’t do it. What would happen to me if I bottled it? A refusal to kill would invite derision and, worse still, suspicion. All my hard-earned credibility would be dashed at a stroke. By now, my thinking was so skewed I decided that maybe cold-blooded murder would be a natural progression for me. Maybe, in time, it would become run-of-the-mill, once I’d kneecapped a few people first.

  I felt confident that, if presented with absolutely no chance of escape, I could bring myself to administer IRA-style justice by shooting a bullet through the knee of a transgressor. I assumed that the victim would inevitably be someone I disliked – a terrorist or a drug dealer. And I assumed that the victim would have had ample warning to cease doing whatever it was that earned the wrath of the IRA.

  In short, I thought that people who got kneecapped deserved it.

  I was to discover that I was wrong.

  To senior members of the IRA, ordering a punishment shooting was easier than ordering a pizza. In the IRA’s arena of justice, the local sheriff was all powerful and any OC or senior IRA member could order a kneecapping, for any reason, without fear of censure. As a result, punishment shootings were doled out to anyone whose face didn’t fit. Knees were crippled purely to settle scores.

  The first time I was bounced into a punishment shooting showed just how petty these scores could be. I got the phone call early in the evening. From the tone of the voice on the other end of the line, you would think I was being dispatched to post a letter.

  ‘Fly up the road there,’ said a Provisional IRA OC, who for legal reasons I will refer to as Paul, ‘and meet me outside the Corner Bar in Rostrevor.’

  I arrived to find Paul and another man waiting in a car. I noticed both had AK-47s resting on their laps. I looked at the weapons with horror. It’s bad enough to be hit with a 9mm bullet, but an AK-47 was more likely to blow your leg off than make ‘a nice neat little hole’, as Conor was wont to put it. The men nodded as if to say, ‘Don’t start asking questions’, pulled down their balaclavas and got out of the car. I pulled my mask down and followed them through the front door of the pub. It was quiet; it became even quieter when we were spotted.

  Paul approached two young fellows at the bar. Both appeared to be in their early twenties. I felt myself sighing. The pair bolted to their feet at once. One word from Paul and they didn’t even look at each other before walking expectantly to the front door. Once outside, Paul told the men to put their hands on their heads and walk round the corner of the pub. I prayed they wouldn’t make a run for it. A pair of AK-47s would make a right mess if unleashed on a couple of runners.

  Slowly, the two men walked round the corner, the three of us following. I awaited the next order. I expected Paul to tell the two men to stop and turn around. Instead, two rounds rang out, hitting the men as they still walked. Blood burst, slapping the walls in loud splats. The squealing didn’t sound human. We turned casually and strolled back to our cars, as though we had just taken a leak. I really wanted to run. I stole a look back. One man was writhing on the ground, the other hopping about. Gingerly, one or two heads peeked out of the pub’s front door.

  ‘Shouldn’t we call an ambulance?’ I said.

  ‘Already done,’ said the second masked man.

  I climbed into my car and took one more look at the two men, now being tended to by the pub regulars. The scene was surreally calm, as if it had replayed itself a hundred times before. The two men, howling like maimed dogs, were never going to recover fully from the attack, mentally or physically. For the rest of their lives, every step they took would punish them anew for their misdemeanour.

  So what was their heinous crime?

  It was a day or two later before I found out. Both belonged to a one-time Republican family. However, it wasn’t the softening of the family’s political standpoint that earned the wrath of the IRA. Apparently, the family had been accused of stealing some scrap metal from the garden of an IRA man – a crime deemed to be of sufficient gravity to warrant a punishment shooting with a pair of AK-47s.

  That night, I took another long, hard look at myself in the mirror. I knew that, for the benefit of my reputation within the IRA, and for the amusement of my fellow volunteers, I would have to turn this horrific incident into a funny story. A witty anecdote. A belly laugh. I knew I would have to think up some good one-liners.

  I looked at the stranger staring back at me and took a long breath. I told this stranger that he was a British soldier on a very special mission. ‘You’ve got to go on,’ I told him over and over, ‘you’re saving lives.’

  The next recipient of IRA justice was a thief. Of course, the Provisional IRA didn’t object to thieving in principle. What senior IRA men did object to was someone stealing something from them, or stealing and not paying their cut.

  Nobody told me exactly which of these crimes the man was guilty of. All I was told was that he was a ‘tea leaf’, and that this was all I needed to know. Trouble was, I already knew the man. He was small fry, a petty crook. Clearly, this was another personal vendetta, a score to be settled or a reputation to be upheld – all under the veneer of IRA ‘housekeeping’.

  Six of us got bounced into the operation. After the punishment shooting that ‘went wrong’ in 1990, resulting in the death of an ex-IRA man, it was decided to tackle future assignments with a single weapon but with plenty of back-up. Apart from ensuring the safety of the volunteers, a show of strength spread more fear and terror. The Provisional IRA was in the business of spreading terror. It was also a good excuse to bring along some raw recruits and impress them with a display of IRA justice in action.

  The trigger-man was handed a Webley .455 for the job. Once again, I was flabbergasted by the choice of weapon. The gun was a weighty, ungainly contraption that fired lead bullets the size of bean cans. The volunteer carrying the gun joked that to fire it he would need someone else to hold the barrel. I dreaded the mess and wondered aloud why we weren’t given appropriate weapons for these assignments. It was not as if the Provisional IRA was suffering a shortage of revolvers.

  We pulled up outside the house. Quietly we clambered out and shuffled to the front door. At this moment, in the black silence, the butterflies did a quick practice lap around my stomach. After all, I didn’t quite know what to expect. It was a drab two-storey home with no doorbell, so I rapped on the frosted glass of the front door. A child answered.

  ‘We’re from the Irish Republican Army,’ came a voice, and in we barged.

  The front room was packed with the man’s children. Each of them froze stiff at the sight of us. Questions about the whereabouts of their daddy were met with ghostly stares. They were herded quietly into the living room. The plan was to babysit them there while the father took a couple of bullets in another room. Two of us slipped upstairs to seek him out.

  We crept along a landing, floorboards creaking beneath us. Quietly I pushed in the first door. Nothing. As we felt our way along the black hallway, a series of unmistakable sounds came from another room. Light framed the door. I nodded to my accomplice. We crept towards that light and the sounds got louder.

  As I pushed open the door to the master bedroom, the couple on the bed remained oblivious to our presence. As if entering a family home armed and masked wasn’t a sufficient violation, we now found ourselves strolling in on a married couple sharing a private moment. I felt mortified. Clearly, we couldn’t leave the room and wait until they had completed their liaison. It would have been foolhardy to take my eyes off him at all. So, like some flustered butler, I coughed politely.


  He froze. Ever so slowly, he turned his face towards me. ‘What the fuck …?’ he said, hopping to his feet and grabbing his privates. His wife grabbed at a sheet.

  I decided I needed to sound firmer. ‘We’re from the IRA,’ I said to the wide-eyed, naked man before me. ‘Put something on and come downstairs.’ As he climbed into a pair of white underpants in record time, I turned to his wife. ‘And you’d better put something on too.’

  Still wrapped in the sheet, she rose and made for her dressing gown hanging on a wardrobe door. As she went to put it on, the two masked IRA men in her bedroom looked away. This was a very Catholic crime.

  Dressed in only his underpants, he led the way downstairs. I followed, feeling like the director of some particularly sick and degrading pageant. Self-disgust swelled within me. As usual, I hid it by joining in with the puerile sniggering and the lewd comments aimed at the red-faced couple as they were led to their kitchen.

  Over and over, they asked after the kids.

  ‘They’re all right,’ I said. ‘They’re in the sitting room, safe and sound.’

  ‘We want the keys to your van, that’s all,’ said one of the masked men. Putting him at ease was the plan. In a house full of kids, the last thing you wanted was a gunman running round after a man wearing only underpants.

  ‘Sit down here,’ said the gunman to him, nodding towards a pine bench next to a breakfast table. ‘Listen carefully,’ he went on, ‘you’ve got twenty-four hours to get out of Ireland.’ With that, a shot rang out.

  Suddenly, he was hopping up and down on one leg, howling, his wife screaming, blood chasing across the lino. Another shot sounded. We all jumped as it bounced off the radiator behind him with a great clank. He was pogoing up and down so violently that the gunman completely missed him with a second shot. Now I could hear the kids screaming. It was time to bail out. We trooped out to the van and sped off.

  It was always the next day, when the adrenaline had levelled out, that the full horror of what I had been involved in hit home. The heady cocktail of guilt and shock made for the most debilitating hangover. To a soldier trained in warfare, these punishments seemed so cowardly and unjustified. A few days later, the injustice of this particular punishment shooting was confirmed. Out of the blue, the IRA reversed the expulsion order against him. Apparently, an IRA friend of his put in a good word with Conor and that was that.

  This proved to me that IRA justice wasn’t administered on the basis of what a person did or didn’t do. It was dished out to those who weren’t connected to the gilded circle, to those whose faces didn’t fit. The IRA was the playground bully and I was his sneaky little helper.

  However, the IRA wasn’t finished with this family just yet.

  A few months later, I was part of a team dispatched to punish his brother who happened to live near by. The front door was locked so I knocked. He emerged into a glass porch. He took one look at the team of masked men waiting for him and elected not to open up. He was turning to go back in when the glass shattered. I think I heard three shots. The dark-red bloodied holes in his ankles suggested he had been hit twice. I was able to make such a cold, detached forensic observation because I was growing used to people writhing about in pools of their own blood, squealing like pigs.

  In all, I played roles of varying significance in six punishment shootings. To protect myself against legal proceedings, and to protect my family members against reprisals, I can’t go into detail. The Good Friday Agreement protects terrorists, but it doesn’t protect agents who murdered and maimed in the name of the British Crown. I can’t go into the detail, but I can describe my transformation into a ruthlessly robotic IRA operative.

  I was so far gone by this stage – so hardened to barbarism, so de-programmed of natural human compassion – that the kneecapping of some lowlife IRA man or criminal associate didn’t really play on my conscience. I had convinced myself that anyone who aligned themselves to the IRA probably deserved anything they got. After all, I doubted if they shed tears over children killed by bombs or innocent workers slaughtered for doing their jobs. Why should I be tormented by feelings of guilt when dealing with people who never seemed to flinch from committing barbarous acts? I was now hardened to violence and this suited me fine. At least now I could look these IRA killers in the eye and beat them on their own terms. Or could I? The big test was still to come. And come it did. I was soon ordered to attend my first court of inquiry.

  A shipment of arms bound for the IRA had been found by the British army at a butcher’s shop in Castlewellan, near Newcastle in County Down; it had fallen through into the shop from the flat above. Everyone involved in the importation had been questioned. However, the nutting squad was still not satisfied. One volunteer in particular had failed to convince his interrogators that he was telling them everything he knew. He was facing an IRA court martial. The security unit’s top men from Belfast were on their way down to conduct the show.

  I was given the task of preparing a location for the court martial. A contact in Belfast rang me to arrange a meeting. There, he furnished me with the address where the court martial was to take place, a family home in Omeath. I was told that the home had hosted interrogations in the past. I will always remember what the Belfast man told me next. ‘There should be a roll of plastic floor-covering in the garage,’ he said matter-of-factly. ‘Can you check it out? If there isn’t, can you get hold of some?’

  ‘Sure,’ I said, and I shuddered at the humdrum practicality of death. The plastic covering could be for one thing only – to gather all the damning traces of forensic evidence in the event of an execution. The blood, the pieces of skull, the brains.

  ‘Good,’ said the man from Belfast. ‘We don’t want to be ruining their floors.’

  It was my first real operational contact with the Belfast IRA – a small but hugely significant development which my handlers would appreciate. I collected three days’ groceries and brought them to the house. I then set to work. I blacked out all windows visible to the world at large. We required one room for the interrogation, so I picked a medium-sized bedroom at the back of the house. Piece by piece, I took out all the furniture and stored it in the room next door, save for a single wooden chair. I hung a black drape on the window so that the room was dark and gloomy, but not pitch black. I positioned the chair so that it faced the empty wall. I sat in it to check it was solid. It was. I stared straight ahead at the wall. Just like they told you in the Green Book lectures, I picked a spot and stared hard. An icy draught played across my neck, making my shoulders fidget. The spot on the wall wavered and started inching closer. I felt hot now, hot and immobile, rooted to the chair. Helpless. I wanted to get up and leave this room instantly, but I didn’t feel able. It was as if my subconscious was forcing me to confront my greatest fear: was this a premonition of the fate that awaited me?

  I don’t know how long I sat there, transfixed by this fatalistic glimpse of terror, but I completely forgot to check if there was any floor-covering left in the garage. Fortunately, there was a roll left over from a previous interrogation. It seemed this house was used regularly.

  The following morning, I picked up Conor and Niall in a hire van. The man facing court martial over the intercepted arms shipment was to be waiting for us outside a hotel in Killeen.

  ‘He’ll hardly turn up, will he?’ I said.

  ‘Oh, he will,’ laughed Conor. ‘He’s no idea he’s facing an interrogation. He thinks he’s heading down south with us for a few days. To a training camp!’

  They both laughed.

  ‘The only place this poor fucker’s going is down a hole!’ added Niall.

  More laughter.

  ‘What?’ I said. ‘He’s been found guilty?’

  ‘He talked, so he’s facing court martial. The only thing left is to decide what happens to him,’ said Conor. ‘I’m one of the three judges and I’ve made up my mind.’ With that, he mimicked the action of firing a revolver.

  Niall laughed d
elightedly.

  I shuddered silently as I considered how men like this could be granted the ultimate power of life over death.

  When I pulled into the car park of the hotel, I was disappointed to see the poor man standing there, his travel bag at his feet as if he were going on holiday. As we approached, he smiled and waved at the van in case we might have missed him. I found myself laughing now. This was happening to me more and more lately. Where once such a sight would have thoroughly depressed me, it now made me howl with laughter. I was developing a taste for the very blackest of comedy. After all, I knew only too well that at best this man would be dismissed from the IRA in disgrace. He would be forced to leave his family and friends and life in Northern Ireland, and suffer a life of paranoid exile in the Republic. However, when weighed up against the alternative option – his body found in a ditch, a black bin-liner for a shroud – he would happily settle for exile.

  He was about thirty, and so broad that he struggled to get into the car. He greeted us all warmly and began to chatter. Clearly, he didn’t suspect a thing. I watched in the rear-view mirror as Niall pulled out a gun.

  ‘We’re from the security unit,’ said Niall sharply. ‘Keep quiet.’

  Cable ties were slapped on to his wrists. The reason for cable ties was explained to me later – in the event of us coming across an army or police roadblock, the cuffs could be cut off quickly with a pair of scissors. The security forces would be none the wiser. I felt like telling them that the security forces would be only too happy to see an IRA security unit hauling a volunteer off to exile or, better still, death.