Double Agent: My Secret Life Undercover in the IRA

by Kevin Fulton

  Someone in MI5 did their homework and discovered a store in New York that sold exactly the type of infrared slave unit that we required. I told senior IRA figures in Belfast about the New York store. Days later, I was handed £2,000 to travel to New York and buy two models.

  When I told Bob and Pete about my proposed trip to New York, they recognised the opportunities straight away. That the infrared threat was being taken seriously was confirmed at our next meeting when Bob and Pete announced that they would be making the trip to New York as well, along with a man from RUC Special Branch.

  I was handed a US mobile phone number. It would be Bob’s number in New York. All I had to do was purchase the component part, ring Bob and meet him and Pete at a secret location in New York. However, my work for them in the Big Apple wouldn’t end there. They wanted me to help them find someone in New York – someone whom I had once known extremely well.

  The man I have been referring to as Johnny was my fellow bomb-making graduate. A year earlier, a senior Provo in South Armagh handed me four small photographs of him and told me to get him a fake passport in a hurry. He told me Johnny wanted to start a new life in New York with his common-law wife and young daughter. However, because of convictions for possession of explosives and assaulting a policeman, he wouldn’t be granted an entry visa to the Land of the Free. I didn’t ask why it needed to be done in a hurry. With the full backing of my handlers, I produced a fake passport within three days. It bore Johnny’s picture and the name of my unwitting and totally innocent brother-in-law.

  I assumed that our ruse had worked and that he had made it into the US, as I hadn’t seen him or heard from him since. The trouble was, nor had the FBI – and it had been tasked with keeping tabs on Johnny. They photographed him for a few weeks but then lost him. Now they were desperate to locate him again, though they didn’t say why. Would I be able to help?

  I assumed that, to warrant such attention from the FBI, Johnny had been implicated in something very serious. I decided to play along with the sting. I rang his father in Kilkeel and told him I was heading to New York for a short break. Could I meet up with Johnny?

  ‘Of course,’ said the poor father, ‘he’d be delighted to see you. He’s so grateful for what you did for him.’

  ‘Oh, it was nothing,’ I said.

  ‘Ring me when you’re over there and I’ll get in touch with him then,’ said the father cryptically. ‘He’ll meet you somewhere for a drink or a bite to eat.’

  ‘Great,’ I said, but I felt sly and sneaky. I snapped out of it quickly though. I reminded myself that, even though I liked Johnny as a person, he was an IRA bomb-maker. He deserved what was coming to him.

  It was the day after St Patrick’s Day when we flew into Newark Airport. My handlers had already been there a few days. I envied them their lives. New York was covered in fresh snow and felt magical. Then I remembered all the cynical exercises I had to complete during my two-day stay, and those magical feelings dissipated like the vapour from my mouth. There was to be no time for sightseeing, that was for sure.

  Snow proved the perfect backdrop to a slapstick road crash. My tender-necked associates acted their little hearts out. One of the ‘victims’ got out of the taxi and genuinely slipped heavily on the snow, spraining his left arm. The others had to work very hard not to laugh.

  I checked into my hotel, a low-grade dump. My room was on the twelfth floor but there was no view. Cramped and stifling hot, the view was a stretch of grey wall four feet from the glass. I rang Johnny’s father. I told him where I was staying and said I would love to meet Johnny the following night as I was flying back to Ireland the next day. His father said I would be hearing from one of them.

  The following morning, I headed to the specialist store to purchase the infrared remote system. To my horror, the shop was closed for a Jewish holiday. I knocked and knocked and knocked but nobody emerged. I couldn’t believe it. I had no back-up plan, no alternative store lined up just in case. I rang Bob.

  He laughed, which was a relief. He told me to come to their hotel just off Times Square to discuss the plan for Johnny. I arrived in a plush and vast reception area to find my four handlers sitting in leather couches. A man was playing ‘The Good Life’ on piano. Fucking right, I thought to myself.

  ‘Jesus, you want to see the dump I’m staying in,’ I said when I got close.

  They didn’t seem remotely embarrassed.

  ‘Jewish holiday!’ I said. ‘Can you believe it?’

  They didn’t seem overly concerned.

  ‘Doesn’t matter,’ said Bob.

  They didn’t appear at all worried. Bob changed the subject to Johnny. I was to invite him to dinner at a grill on 43rd Street. The table had been booked. All I had to do was get him there. They would do the rest.

  ‘You’re not planning on charging in and arresting him, are you?’ I asked. I didn’t want it to look like I had set him up. Word would get back.

  ‘We want to find out where he lives,’ said Bob, ‘that’s all.’

  When I got back to New York’s worst hotel, the slouching receptionist told me that Johnny had called and left a number. I went up to my room, switched on the TV and rang him. The news was all about Northern Ireland. Gerry Adams was holding secret meetings with John Hume, the leader of the SDLP. Commentators speculated as to whether they were drawing up a plan for peace. Johnny answered the phone. He sounded genuinely pleased to hear from me. Of course he would come to dinner, as long as he could pay. It was the least he could do.

  I got there first and waited at the bar. I inspected every wall and corner. Nothing looked remotely untoward.

  ‘Kevin!’ Johnny’s voice startled me. We shook hands. I could tell he fancied a beer. I thought I had better get him down to our table. I assumed we were being bugged or filmed. If he got comfortable at the bar, there was every chance we would end up sat there all night. After the day I’d had, I wasn’t prepared to take any chances.

  ‘Let’s eat,’ I said, and led the way.

  We sat down. He sipped beer and told me excitedly about his new job as a carpenter, his flat in Queens and his new role training a Gaelic football team. He looked years younger than the haunted man I last saw back home. I told him as much and he said he was ‘glad to be away from it’.

  I was flabbergasted by his openness and lack of suspicion. He didn’t even ask me why I was in New York. Had he given up his IRA career completely? I decided to find out. We tucked into a pair of pan-sized steaks, which must have weighed a pound each. While we washed them down with a few beers, I told Johnny why I was in New York.

  His eyes lit up at the barbaric possibilities of infrared. Once a bomb-maker, I thought to myself …

  I took out the £2,000. ‘Could you buy the stuff and send it back?’ I asked.

  ‘No problem,’ said Johnny, but declined to take the cash.

  We left the grill laughing at some old tale or other. We shook hands and assured each other that we would stay in touch, which we knew we wouldn’t. I turned away and set off for my hotel. The snow looked brown and scoured. Steam rose like ghosts from the pavement vents. Maybe Johnny was genuinely trying to make a fresh start, a clean break from the Provisional IRA and the Troubles. Now, thanks to me, he wasn’t quite out of the woods yet. By purchasing the infrared systems and sending them back to Northern Ireland, he was still aiding and abetting the war.

  A few months later, I found out the fruits of my duplicity with Johnny. He was tapped by the FBI to become an informant. A man approached him in a bar and introduced himself as an FBI agent. He flashed his badge and told Johnny he would be getting a visit from Immigration and Naturalisation Service (INS) officials next week.

  Johnny knew that his illegal status in the US had been rumbled. In a state of panic – and desperate to escape – he left and walked into the next bar he saw. The agent followed him in. He told Johnny he was willing to strike a deal. If he co-operated with the FBI, arrangements could be made to secure his residentia
l status in the US. The FBI wanted him to spy on pro-IRA activists in the Irish-American community and to report back. Johnny told him to fuck off.

  On leaving the bar, Johnny was arrested by three INS agents. He spent several weeks in custody. Eventually, he was sent back to his old life in the Republic of Ireland. During my steak dinner with him, I couldn’t tell for sure whether or not he was really trying to make a fresh start away from the Provisional IRA. If he was, then maybe the Provos would have let him walk away. One thing was for certain, the other side wasn’t going to let him walk away from the war just like that. The intelligence services – those full-time professionals whose business is war – wanted their pound of flesh. I couldn’t understand their thinking. Was it not enough for them that an IRA man was walking away from the war? Not for the first time, I found myself baffled by the motives of the intelligence services. It was clear to me that they weren’t interested in peace in Northern Ireland – they wanted to win the war.

  There were elements within the Provisional IRA that still wanted to win the war too. While the Hume–Adams initiative was gaining momentum, elements within the IRA were actively plotting to bring mayhem to the mainland.

  In February, three bombs exploded at a gasworks in Warrington, Lancashire. As one senior IRA man told me, this attack got more publicity and political attention than if three people had been blown up in Northern Ireland.

  Almost a month later, on 20 March, a bomb planted in a bin in Warrington killed three-year-old Jonathan Ball and twelve-year-old Tim Parry. More than fifty people were injured, some seriously. According to the security services, the IRA had given ‘an inadequate warning’. Within the IRA, the common myth peddled again and again was that warnings were cynically ignored by the security services to ensure more casualties and, as such, generate more adverse publicity for the Provisional IRA. I didn’t buy that for one second.

  A month after that, on 23 April 1993, a bomb ripped through the City of London, the capital’s financial centre, killing one person and injuring thirty more.

  Two IRA men who I cannot identify but will give the names Liam and Jimmy believed that the campaign on the mainland was finally getting the Provisional IRA the attention it deserved. Furthermore, with all these rumours of peace initiatives, attacks on the mainland were timely reminders that Sinn Fein’s election manifesto promised the ballot box and the bullet.

  ‘You’re back and forward to England a lot,’ said Jimmy to me one day. We were sitting with Liam in Jimmy’s home.

  ‘Aye,’ I said, ‘every few weeks.’

  ‘We’re keen to keep the momentum going there now,’ said Jimmy. ‘It’s only when your average Sun-reader starts to worry about bombs going off in his back garden that you really start putting pressure on the Brits.’

  He had a point there. ‘I suppose you have some operations in mind,’ I ventured.

  ‘Major public events are the way forward,’ said Jimmy.

  Liam nodded enthusiastically.

  ‘What sort of thing?’ I said.

  ‘The Grand National, for one,’ said Jimmy.

  ‘And Wembley Stadium,’ added Liam. ‘We had a good scout there. There’s a long concrete walkway up to the stadium, the Wembley way. You’ve seen it on the telly, a massive walkway. It’s the only way in and the only way out. Jesus, they’d be like sitting ducks.’

  ‘There’s the ring of steel in the City now,’ said Jimmy, ‘but Canary Wharf’s an attractive proposition. Stuck out there in the middle of nowhere. Packed full of workers. That’s another place we’re having a good look at.’

  I nodded thoughtfully. ‘So,’ I said, ‘what do you want me to do?’

  ‘We want you to sink a couple of arms dumps over there,’ said Jimmy. ‘You think you’re up for it?’

  ‘Yeah, of course,’ I said.

  ‘London’s going to be our main target,’ said Jimmy, ‘but it’s a bit easier in the North of England. We’ve had some good results there.’

  I waited.

  ‘We need a dump on the outskirts of London,’ he said, ‘and another one in Scotland. You’re back and forward to London all the time. Sink one somewhere on the outskirts that you can get to easily. As far as Scotland goes, you can get over and back there on the ferry handy enough, or fly to Glasgow. Sink one somewhere outside Glasgow, somewhere you can pick stuff up on your way down to England. Think you can do that?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘I’ll start booking something up.’

  ‘You know the rules about arms dumps, Kevin,’ said Jimmy sternly. ‘You sink them, then you’re the only person who knows where they are, you understand? You’re the only one who can gain access to them.’

  That’s what scared me about England. Operations on the mainland are so tight. When people start getting caught in England, it really does cause problems. If it goes wrong, only a few people have been involved, so the spotlight lands on each one of you. In Northern Ireland, there were loads of informants and loads of people connected to an operation. You could never pinpoint the tout – or at least it was very difficult to prove.

  For a double agent, England is your last job. I didn’t like it. I knew my time was coming near.

  Of course, my handlers didn’t share my concerns about safety. They were elated at this latest march forward in my IRA career. Bob said this represented my best chance yet of stopping a major atrocity.

  ‘You stop an atrocity on the mainland,’ said Bob, ‘and we all look good.’

  At our next meeting, they had it all planned out. They had sourced two specific areas where they wanted me to sink the dumps. They would meet me over there and help me sink them. They had even booked my flights and accommodation for the trip.

  Jimmy handed me £1,500 for the mission. I flew to Prestwick Airport, a good twenty miles outside Glasgow, and spent the night in a Holiday Inn. The next morning, I was met in the hotel reception by Bob from MI5, Pete from the military and a man called George from Special Branch. I told Bob to drive me to a DIY store. The others followed in a second car. I had sunk several arms dumps in the Republic before, so I knew exactly what I needed. I bought a large cool box, rubber seals, heavy plastic covering, a spade, a pair of wellington boots and a roll of black bin-liners. The women on the tills didn’t bat an eyelid as three men in smart suits helped me wheel my shopping out of the store.

  We took the A77 towards Stranraer, then the A714 inland. Wooded mountains loomed high to my left. I kept my eyes peeled for landmarks, making a list of distances and turnings in a notebook.

  We took a temporary road into dense wood, drove slowly for about four minutes, then got out. Experience taught me that an arms dump needed to be well away from the roadside, but there was no point trying to sink it in dense forest as everywhere looked exactly the same. Besides, these were commercial trees that could be mown down at any time. If the trees went, then so did my reference points. Worse than that, heavy machinery might uncover the arms dump.

  ‘Can we drive on a bit?’ I asked.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Bob, ‘it’s up to you now where you sink it.’

  We came to a nature reserve. This was more like it. The sign announcing the reserve was fixed and an ideal reference point. I checked a compass and headed due west into less dense deciduous forest. About half a mile in, I marked a spot in between three very distinctive trees. I measured the spot from each of these trees.

  The car was driven up to the edge of the woods and I set to work. While I lugged the equipment into the forest, Pete filmed me and Bob took photographs. When I started to dig, they just stood around, smoking and joking. I should have bought more spades, I thought to myself.

  It took me three hours to dig the hole. Tree roots made it a real struggle. All the soil had to be shovelled into a black bin-liner and spread out somewhere else. You didn’t want park rangers wondering why someone had dug a large hole. At least my handlers had the decency to hold the bags open for me while I filled them with soil. However, they made it clear they didn’t want to g
et dirty, so I had to haul the bags into the woods and empty them myself.

  The plastic sheet which covered the dump was just five or six inches underground. Using my hands, I buried the spade last. If, by some amazing quirk of fate, the trees were felled or knocked down by a hurricane, the spade would be my insurance. I would be able to locate it with a metal detector. I carried the bin-liners back to the car, threw them in the boot and threw myself wearily into the back seat. I felt knackered.

  ‘What’s next?’ I groaned.

  ‘We’re back to Prestwick,’ said Bob. ‘We’re all flying down to Stansted this evening. We’ll get you something to eat at the airport.’

  For once, I wasn’t stopped at the airport, but as usual I stayed in a different hotel to my handlers. As I lay on my single bed, surveying a curious stain on the ceiling, I pictured them clasping brandy tumblers in the foyer of some plush hotel up the road. I was a lowly private and they were the officers. I was growing a little tired of this.

  My mobile phone rang and made me start. It was Jimmy wanting to know how it had gone.

  ‘Well I’m not in prison, am I?’ I joked.

  He said he would ring again the following afternoon. He made it clear that the news he really wanted to hear was that I had successfully sunk a dump near London. I sensed this had proven a real challenge in the past.

  The next morning, Bob drove me to another store and we repeated the exercise. We took the M11 to Harlow, and stopped at a Little Chef just outside the town. After breakfast, we strolled back to the car park.

  ‘This place looks as good as any to me,’ said Bob.

  We walked to the back of the car park, through a little play area into some woods. A public bridleway carried on up through the trees. I followed it until I was out of sight from the car park. I could still hear the traffic on the M11 thundering past. This was ideal.

  I made my way back down the hill and insisted they each carry something up with them. I measured a spot off a public-footpath sign into the woods and turned right into the woodland. I tramped over fallen twigs and undergrowth until I came to a circular dip between three trees, one of which was lying down almost horizontally. Three hours later, we emerged, me filthy, the other three spotlessly clean. God knows what people who saw us emerging from the woods must have thought.