by Kevin Fulton
We parked up in the well-hidden rear yard of the house in Omeath. I followed the condemned man, Niall and Conor into the interrogation room. There, two men stood waiting. It was clear from the outset who was boss. Fat, but with a bolt-upright military gait, he looked every inch a British army officer. However, one thing gave his true role away: a copy of the IRA’s Green Book tucked under his right arm. As I found out later, he was John Joe Magee from Belfast, and head of the nutting squad. I cannot reveal the identity of the other man, so I will give him the name Michael, notorious to all volunteers as the security unit’s most ruthless interrogator, and the IRA’s most zealous dispenser of ‘justice’.
The condemned man walked in and, without being asked, sat on the chair facing the wall. In his Sunday-best jumper and ironed slacks, he looked like a man set to endure nothing more arduous than a game of golf. The chair was way too small for his frame, so he sat hunched up like an overgrown schoolboy, breathing heavily. Conor indicated that I should leave. He followed me to the hallway and told me to be at the pier in Omeath, just down the road, in two hours’ time. I said I would head there directly and wait.
I got to the pier and surveyed the breathtaking view of Carlingford Lough. I breathed the air in deeply. Seeing that wretched man hunched up in his seat made me appreciate being alive. I started to wonder if I would ever be in that position, sitting on a chair facing a wall, wondering if I would ever see my wife and family again. I comforted myself with the knowledge that Bob and Pete would pull me out long before such a scenario ever came about. That was my salvation, for I knew I wouldn’t be able to withstand a concentrated IRA interrogation. Who could?
Conor turned up early and told me the interrogation would continue the next day. The man had made certain admissions and, to Conor’s apparent delight, was ‘going down a hole’.
He waited until I started the engine, then said casually, ‘This might be your first execution.’
A knot of dread set like concrete in my stomach.
I was now well used to maintaining a façade of impenetrable hardness. My tone didn’t alter when I asked, ‘How is it decided, you know, who pulls the trigger?’
‘Well, he’s local so it’s going to be you, me or Niall. We’ll find some way of deciding,’ said Conor.
I unwound the window for some air. I desperately wanted to see the angles. Perhaps Conor was toying with me, testing me. I simply had to keep up the charade, at least for today. At least until I received instruction from my handlers.
That night I drove to a phone box a few miles outside Newry and dialled my exclusive hotline number to my handlers. Eventually, I got through to Pete. As ever, he made my dilemma seem banal. He rolled out the usual justifications. If the man’s going to get a bullet in his head anyway, what difference did it make who pulled the trigger? He made it clear that he was not going to pull me out on an outside chance that I might be ordered to kill an IRA volunteer. I was a soldier. I had been trained to kill. This man was the enemy. What could be more straightforward? What difference would it make if he had his hands tied behind his back? By executing this ‘murdering shit’, I would become utterly trusted by the Provisional IRA’s elite. ‘Surely that’s worth dispatching a bullet into the head of some IRA hoodlum.’
With no obvious way out, I convinced myself that Conor was testing my resolve. I had bluffed him out many times in the past, and I knew I could do it again. The following morning I returned to the pier at Omeath to meet him. Conor arrived at about half past ten with a com. It was to be delivered to an address in South Armagh. The man’s answers would be compared in minute detail to the answers he gave the previous week, and measured against the testimony of the other volunteers involved in the arms dump. It was a simple but devastatingly effective way of catching out a liar. I looked at the tiny piece of paper wrapped in cling film and saw a bullet.
After delivering the com, I returned to the picturesque little family home that doubled up as an IRA interrogation centre. Conor beckoned me in and led me into a garage. ‘Here, give me a hand,’ he said. He was unfolding plastic floor-covering. I grabbed one end and helped him lay it out on the garage floor. This could mean one thing only: the man was about to be executed here in the garage.
Niall strolled in.
‘Well?’ said Conor expectantly.
‘Still waiting,’ said Niall.
‘Waiting for what?’ I said.
‘The nod from on high,’ said Conor, and they pulled faces of mock boredom.
‘The decision to execute a tout has to come from someone on the Army Council,’ said Niall. ‘We’re waiting for the nod from South Armagh to give us the go-ahead.’
‘I wouldn’t anticipate any problem there,’ said Conor. ‘So who’s up for it?’
I smiled as hard as I could. I noticed a glint in Conor’s eye. As ever, Niall looked as cold as a snake. ‘Straws?’ suggested Niall.
‘Sounds good to me,’ I said.
With that, Conor called in a Belfast volunteer (who I’ll call Sean), who’d arrived with McGee that morning. Sean went back into the house. Seconds later, he returned. With a dramatic flourish worthy of a magician, he proffered his left hand, clenched into a fist. In the fleshy gap between thumb and fingers stood the ends of three cocktail sticks, equal in length. One was cut short at the other hidden end. Whoever pulled that short stick would have to stiff the big man here in the garage.
Niall said he would go first. You didn’t argue with Niall. He ran his finger through the space above the three ends like a psychic. He settled on the middle stick. Slowly, and with the gentle precision of a surgeon, he started to pull. The stick came and came and came. It wouldn’t be Niall.
Conor looked at me with a thin smile. ‘Go on,’ he said, ‘you go.’
Time stopped still. Seconds groaned by like whole days. I wondered if the others could hear my heart pounding. The beats were reverberating in the small of my ears. Fuck it, I thought in a fatalistic way, here goes. I went for the left stick. It felt stiff in Sean’s hand. I pulled it out with the dread of a man pulling a pin out of a faulty hand grenade.
It was long.
Sean opened his fist to reveal the last, shortened stick. Conor would be the executioner. He acted as if he’d won the pools. Of course, I should have known that he would react in such a gung-ho fashion, so I feigned disappointment. I told them I was really looking forward to ‘stiffing a tout’ and, in their warped minds, they couldn’t imagine why I would feel otherwise. I followed them back into the house and ducked into the bathroom. I leaned over the sink, splashed my face with water, stared at my image in the mirror and said a thank you to God. However, I knew I was on borrowed time. I couldn’t keep abusing my luck. How long could I carry on without being either found out or forced to kill someone in cold blood? Fate wasn’t so much closing in on me as wrapping its cold fingers around my throat.
Minutes later, the verdict came from on high. The man was to be spared. He was dismissed from the IRA in disgrace and ordered to go into exile immediately. Conor and Niall just couldn’t understand why. Such was the arbitrary nature of IRA justice that, on another day, this man would have been down a hole.
So why didn’t I bail out after this narrow escape? Because I felt like I had no choice but to carry on. It was like being stuck on a runaway train: there was no turning back and no easy way off, yet I knew that I was destined to hit the buffers at some point. Despite this, at times I revelled in the insane rush of the journey. Having spent the last ten years living like this, how could I return to normal life? How could I get a proper job? How could I explain to a potential employer what I had been doing for the previous decade? Besides, I felt that, as I moved up through the ranks of the IRA, I was getting closer to my reward of a new life away from Northern Ireland.
I knew my employers would only make good their promise to relocate me if I landed a really big prize for them. It might sound reckless, but I felt that, if I could earn the trust of men like John Joe Magee, I would soon
really be able to damage the Provisional IRA. My handlers agreed, and they dangled the carrot of a new life before me at every opportunity. They led me to believe that I was on the verge of earning my escape from this madness. I really hoped this was the case. I knew I couldn’t carry on indefinitely living this way.
I threw myself into my work for the nutting squad. Over the following months, I sat in on four interrogations. Thankfully, none ended in an execution, but I did get to know some of the major players from Belfast. I formed a particularly close bond with Magee, the man I have called Michael and another Belfast provie I have called Sean.
I came to learn that, like me, John Joe Magee had served in the British army. He had been in the Special Boat Squadron of the Royal Marines, no less. Though aged in his mid-fifties, overweight and a heavy smoker, Magee cut an impressive figure. He had a rare presence and tended to dominate a room. We swapped army anecdotes like old pals. It quickly became clear to me that, in his capacity as an IRA man, he had been deprived of the chance to talk freely and openly about his army days. He seemed genuinely grateful for the opportunity.
That was Magee the person. Magee the witch-hunter-in-chief was an altogether more formidable and terrifying beast. I watched him in action on several occasions, debriefing IRA men who had been interrogated by the RUC, and quizzing suspected touts. His thoroughness was what impressed me most. He set out to find the truth and, with an attention to detail that bordered on the pathological, he inevitably got to it. If Magee got even the faintest whiff of duplicity, he went after it like a bloodhound. People broke under the sheer pressure of his thoroughness. It was easy to see how he had risen to become head of the nutting squad.
Michael was Magee’s ambitious lieutenant. He was small in stature, yet his reputation within the IRA was legendary. While Magee went obsessively in search of the truth, Michael seemed interested only in someone’s guilt. Michael thought nothing of promising an amnesty to an informant during a court of inquiry, only to then renege on that deal once the accused had confessed. I wondered how many volunteers had been duped in this way and then paid with their lives. It seemed the lowest of low tricks.
He had a favourite story about one such victim (a now legendary story, which he told to many). After being offered an amnesty, the man confessed all. He assured the man that he had nothing to worry about. To show there were no hard feelings, he even insisted on driving him home. On arriving at the man’s home, Michael told him to keep his blindfold on for security reasons, and offered to guide him to his front door. He found the man’s pathetic stumbling hilarious. He even mimicked his voice as he struggled along. ‘Is this my house now? Is this my house now?’
‘No, not yet, keep going, you’ve to go a bit further yet.’
When the man had been lured around the corner to a secluded spot, Michael shot him in the head. He wasn’t setting an example to other potential informants – the two men were the only people there. He did it purely for his own pleasure.
In a strange way, there were very few people in the Provisional IRA for whom I felt genuine loathing and fear.
He was one of them.
CHAPTER NINE
Getting inside the Belfast wing of the Provisional IRA was the holy grail for me and my handlers. This was the power base of the organisation, after all. It was right there, in the black heart of the beast, that we would be able to wreak most damage.
With men like Michael, John Joe Magee and Tony Hughes to vouch for me, I set about getting to know anyone who was anyone within IRA circles in Belfast. I effected a reintroduction to my old friend from Eurodisney, Joe ‘The Hawk’ Haughey. Getting to know men of this pedigree was one thing; earning their complete trust was another matter entirely.
By now, I had worked out an effective way of winning IRA men over: by involving them in moneymaking scams. Almost without exception, IRA men were skint. IRA ‘staff’ got thirty or forty quid a week to supplement their social security. Volunteers got nothing at all. As such, even the most paranoid IRA volunteer was susceptible to a ‘nixer’.
I dreamed up and put in place every scam imaginable, and invited IRA men to assist me. We smuggled in fireworks – prohibited in Northern Ireland – from the UK and sold them in the weeks leading up to Guy Fawkes. We adapted and subverted the latest developments in telecommunications to rip off phone companies. We smuggled alcohol and cigarettes. We moved dodgy electrical goods. We burned counterfeit CDs. Once I became a partner in crime with an IRA man, I inevitably became a partner in everything else too. Out of mutual benefit came mutual trust and a bond. I set about becoming indispensable to these men. If they needed something – anything – I got it for them. Mobile phones, used cars, security cameras – if you wanted it, I was the man to ask.
Away from the Belfast faces, I carried on my work with the IRA’s explosives-development team. The success of the flashgun detonation device opened up a whole new world of destructive potential. We realised that the most mundane items of everyday life had the potential to detonate a bomb, and kill. Even the beep of a telephone answering machine had a frequency that could trigger a device.
The most terrifying new research, however, was into the use of infrared to detonate bombs. We discovered that photographic slave units existed that could be triggered by infrared, and this brought all sorts of advantages. When using a photographic flashgun to trigger a device, the button-man had to be about 100 yards from the slave unit. As such, the bomber was in the vicinity of the device and so at risk from flying shrapnel or the latest terrorist peril, CCTV. What’s more, a flash from a photographic flashgun is clearly visible. A soldier could immediately detect where it came from, turn and open fire. However, an infrared beam – such as that which turns over the channels on your TV – isn’t visible to the naked eye. It can carry much further than a flash, and there’s no way of scrambling it. In effect, a terrorist could trigger a bomb from half a mile away by simply directing the infrared beam in the right direction. The security forces would have no way of obstructing the beam or working out where it was coming from.
The potential for mayhem boggled the minds of my handlers, who debriefed me constantly about the progress of the infrared research. My meetings with them were now altogether more elaborate affairs. Gone were the days when I would pull into a car park, bundle myself into the back of a van and get driven off somewhere. By now, my face was familiar to so many IRA people that there was a very real danger I would be spotted by someone anywhere in Northern Ireland, or in southern Ireland for that matter. I had been to the mainland for occasional debriefings in the past, but now the decision was taken to fly me to London regularly. For each visit I would be given a reference number for a flight from Aldergrove Airport to Heathrow, and a pseudonym. My contact at the other end would be holding a card bearing this pseudonym. I would be driven to a hotel somewhere in central London – the Grosvenor in Victoria, another plush hotel in the Strand – checked in and told to attend a certain conference room at a certain time. As when I had been in London to discuss the flashgun development with my handlers, the conference rooms were invariably booked under a company name. It was no longer a good old natter over tea and biscuits. These days our meetings took the form of fully fledged debriefings lasting two days, sometimes three. They were painfully intense. Over and over again, I would be asked to go through every last tiny morsel of information in microscopic detail. Each titbit was devoured word by word, as if it was a new commandment from the Lord. I soon recognised the benefits of their devotion to detail.
Now that I was hanging about with the Belfast boys, I was picking up bits of intelligence about planned operations. Piecing together my titbits of information with other intelligence, my handlers were able to prevent countless IRA operations, both major and minor. Because of the way the intelligence was gathered, the Provos were never able to pinpoint exactly where the leak must have come from – at least, they didn’t seem to suspect me.
As far as they were concerned, I was travelling to and fro
m London to work. To ensure the ruse stood up to any checks by the IRA, I was registered with an employment agency near Victoria station. Travelling to work on the mainland was not unusual – work was so scarce in the North that thousands made the journey for work every week. Soon, however, I was making a far more glamorous journey. In 1993, on behalf of the Provisional IRA, I was sent to the United States.
I was told to recruit three suitable people to travel with me to the States and participate in the latest Republican fundraising wheeze. Once again, I told my handlers all about it. Three of our team would take a cab in New York. The fourth member would be waiting in a hire car. As soon as the driver of the hire car felt it was appropriate, he would smack good and hard into the back of the yellow taxi containing his three pals.
The three taxi passengers would prove to have very tender necks. Needless to say, the connection between the three whiplashed, dazed and mentally traumatised taxi passengers and the driver of the hire car would not be made known. At the first opportunity, the three accident victims would contact a well-known and particularly aggressive firm of New York personal-injury lawyers. The compensation – often six- or seven-figure sums – would be carved up between the participants of the scam and the Provisional IRA. This ruse made the IRA many millions.
However, setting up a fake car crash wasn’t the sole purpose of my trip to New York. Only two outlets in the UK sold the infrared slave units, and one was in Belfast. If we purchased a slave unit from either of these stores, it could be easily traced. From an IRA perspective, there was a risk that the security forces had placed both stores on alert to let them know if any purchase took place. Alternatively, the outlets could have been told by the security services to sell an infrared slave unit only in the event of the purchaser supplying full identification and paying by credit card.