Double Agent: My Secret Life Undercover in the IRA

by Kevin Fulton

  ‘Right, that’s that then,’ I said to Bob.

  ‘Not quite,’ said Bob. ‘We need you for another forty-eight hours. We need a full debrief about the arms dumps.’

  I turned on my mobile phone. There were two missed calls, both from Jimmy.

  ‘I told Jimmy I was flying back tonight,’ I explained. ‘How the fuck am I going to explain away two extra days?’

  ‘Say you got some work or something,’ said Bob.

  ‘You don’t understand,’ I said. ‘I gave him my full itinerary for the trip. They get very jumpy about changes of plan. I’ll have to ring him and tell him something.’

  ‘Turn your phone off,’ said Bob, ‘until we think of something. But you’re coming to this debrief whether you like it or not.’

  We stopped off at some services so that I could clean up. I wondered how many more times Jimmy failed to get through to me. What must he be thinking? My excuse for disappearing had better be a good one, otherwise I might be digging a third hole in the woods – for myself.

  We got back in the car and headed into central London, Bob and Pete in pursuit. Bob explained that a conference room in a West End hotel had been booked for the next two days for my debriefing. When we pulled up outside, I asked Bob what I should do about Jimmy. He was expecting a phone call tonight and a meeting tomorrow.

  ‘Whatever you do, don’t ring him,’ said Bob. ‘I don’t want you to fuck things up. Leave it to me. I’ll think of something.’

  The debriefing was as intense as always. It became very clear very quickly that a bombing threat on the mainland was taken much more seriously than any planned operation in Northern Ireland. We went through every single detail again and again. I kept being told the same thing, over and over: ‘Make sure no one else in the IRA finds out where these dumps are. You’ve got to be solely in charge of them.’

  That evening, Bob told me he had worked out a way of deflecting Jimmy’s suspicions.

  ‘Say that, when you went to board your plane at Heathrow, you were arrested,’ said Bob, ‘and carted off to Paddington Green police station where you were held for forty-eight hours.’ Paddington Green police station is where high-risk terror suspects are held.

  I wondered aloud if Jimmy would buy it.

  ‘Tomorrow night, we’ll put you up in a hotel in Heathrow. Ring him from there and tell him what happened. We’ll see if he swallows it.’

  ‘He’d better,’ I said.

  ‘We’ll run through your story tomorrow. Make sure you can give him some details about Paddington Green that only someone who had been there could know.’

  I still wasn’t satisfied.

  ‘If Jimmy starts asking awkward questions,’ said Bob, ‘tell him to get a solicitor to check the custody records, which they’re perfectly entitled to do.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘and what will that prove?’

  ‘I’ve got someone putting your name in the Paddington Green custody book right now,’ said Bob. ‘That’s all the proof you’ll ever need.’

  We ran through my story again and again the next day. That night I rang Jimmy from my hotel bedroom in Heathrow. My handlers had a special attachment device which allowed them to listen in to the conversation.

  ‘Where the fuck have you been?’ was Jimmy’s opening gambit.

  ‘You won’t fucking believe it,’ I started, and off I went, telling him the entire fictional story in graphic and vivid detail. By now, I almost believed it myself.

  He sounded dubious, so I hit him with my biggest shot.

  ‘Get a solicitor to check the custody records if you don’t believe me,’ I said. ‘I fucking stood there and watched them write my name in.’

  That appeased him no end. When I met Jimmy the next day, he greeted me like a conquering hero. Of course, he wanted to hear all about it, but I could tell he was no longer suspicious. I handed him his change and launched into my tale one more time. This was becoming easy.

  Jimmy told me that I might have to return to my dumps very soon. A package of Semtex and some Kalashnikovs were on their way to the UK. Was I around the following week if I needed to go back to England?

  ‘Of course,’ I said.

  ‘Maybe it would be better if we put someone else in charge of them,’ said Jimmy. ‘Now that they’ve pulled you into Paddington Green, they’ll be waiting for you next time.’

  ‘No, no,’ I said, ‘leave it with me. Where I put these dumps, no one could follow me.’

  It was the autumn of 1993. Over the following weeks, John Hume and Gerry Adams made two joint statements and announced the completion of the Hume–Adams initiative for peace. The British and Irish governments confirmed that they were holding secret talks with Sinn Fein, aimed at bringing about a cessation of the Provisional IRA’s military campaign.

  Like a glutton confronted with the threat of a diet, Northern Ireland’s paramilitary organisations launched into an orgy of killing. On 23 October, a Provisional IRA bomb in a fish shop on Belfast’s Protestant Shankill Road exploded prematurely, killing a bomber and nine innocent Protestants. A week later, on 30 October, the Loyalist Ulster Freedom Fighters opened fire on drinkers in the Rising Sun bar in Greysteel, County Derry, shooting dead six Catholics and one Protestant. One of the gunmen was heard to utter the words ‘trick or treat’ before unloading machine-gun fire on a pub full of innocent drinkers.

  The British and Irish governments ploughed on regardless. On 23 December 1993, John Major and Albert Reynolds, the Irish Taoiseach, issued a joint declaration which became known as the Downing Street Declaration. It was a road map to peace.

  Over Christmas, everyone on TV and radio talked about the ‘Peace Dividend’. I figured that I possessed one of the biggest dividends of all. If peace broke out – and it seemed inevitable now – my work as a double agent would be complete. I could look forward to a pay-off. I had been told that I had the best part of £200,000 in my secret bank account for work completed on behalf of the British government. I dreamed of a new life away from Northern Ireland, away from suspicion and death. Surely, it was only a matter of time before I got my just desserts.

  CHAPTER TEN

  On 29 January 1994, Gerry Adams was granted a visa to enter the US by Bill Clinton. His rehabilitation from terrorist to international statesman was complete.

  Less than a fortnight later, I put his cousin in prison.

  In January 1994, Jimmy asked me to get hold of a ‘basher’ for him. A basher is a cloned mobile phone – the bill for the calls goes somewhere else, such as a large company, so the person using it can’t be identified.

  My handlers told me to go ahead and get one for Jimmy, but with one proviso. They wanted me to give it to them first, just for a couple of days. I didn’t ask why, but it was fairly obvious. They planned to bug the phone, or insert some sort of tracking device.

  I tried all my usual sources, but to no avail. When a week passed by, my handlers became worried that Jimmy would source a basher from someone else, thereby spoiling their plans. They told me to do whatever I had to do to get a phone, and to bring it to them first.

  I saw no option but to go to a friendly mobile-phone shop and buy a new model. I bought the phone in my wife’s name. She was totally unaware of the fact, but my handlers knew. I told them as much when I handed them the phone later that day. Two days later, I presented it to Jimmy. It really didn’t seem much of a big deal.

  A few days later, Jimmy got on to me again. The previous night, an IRA unit had been moving some gear when it crashed a car. Could I find him a replacement car? I said I would see what I could do. Again, I contacted my handlers. They told me to go ahead and buy a car for Jimmy, but to make sure to tell them the make, colour, the registration number and the time and place of delivery. Again, this was run-of-the-mill activity.

  I bought the car from a second-hand-car dealer in Belfast for cash. He knew me as an IRA man from previous dealings, and always offered an excellent deal. I delivered the car to Jimmy.

  Two days
later, I was to go and see Jimmy at his home just off the Antrim Road, near the Waterworks park. When I turned into his street, I could see police officers and soldiers swarming all over the place. It was clear Jimmy’s home was being raided. I drove past. I rang my handlers and told them I thought Jimmy had been arrested. They told me to sit tight. They would find out what was going on and ring me back.

  At about half past eleven that morning they called me back. They said they wanted to meet me immediately. We picked a rendezvous point in a quiet car park around the back of a hospital. I got there first and waited. A Toyota van pulled up. I waited for the all-clear to approach. I got the signal and walked over to the van. I slid open the side door and got in. We drove to a safe house. Bob and Pete were waiting for me there. They told me to sit down. Then they told me what had happened …

  In the early hours of that morning, 10 February 1994, the RUC had intercepted an IRA unit in the Belmont area of east Belfast. The unit was on its way to murder a senior RUC man called Derek Martindale. Next came the bad news.

  The mobile phone used on the job was the one I had supplied. The getaway car was also the one I had supplied. My handlers told me not to worry. They had it all under control. They then told me that my wife had been arrested an hour earlier. My home was being raided as we spoke. The RUC wanted to arrest me too.

  My handlers told me to stay at the safe house for the day while they sorted things out. They would make some calls. The following day, I would have to be arrested too, otherwise my disappearance might look suspicious. Later that day, I was briefed about what would happen once I was under arrest. I would be taken to a Belfast holding centre. I was told to say nothing to the police, as they had no idea that I was an agent. My handlers said they would keep a close eye on everything that was going on. They would have the inside track.

  The next morning, I returned home. Hours later, I was arrested by the RUC.

  ‘You’re going to Castlereagh,’ said one officer, referring to the interrogation centre in Belfast, notorious to all Nationalists for its brutality.

  I was driven there in a police car.

  Once there, I was taken by two police officers down a long grey corridor into a gloomy interview room. The air was heavy with stale cigarette smoke and sweat. I sat down and waited.

  In a matter of minutes, two detectives walked in. They sat down opposite me. One looked at his paperwork. The other one looked up at me and smiled. ‘Who the fuck do you work for?’ he said, sneering.

  I didn’t have to feign the look of surprise.

  ‘Who the fuck do you work for?’

  This time I stayed stony faced. I stared at a spot on the wall, over his shoulder.

  The other cop looked up from his papers and spoke up for the first time. ‘We need to know who you’re working for,’ he said in a softer voice, ‘because it is all pointing at you.’

  I said nothing.

  ‘Come on, Kevin,’ said the first officer, ‘you set the whole team up. We couldn’t have done it better ourselves.’ Next thing, he started to sing. I recognised the tune immediately, ‘There May be Trouble Ahead.’

  I sat there, emotionless. Part of me desperately wanted to speak, to tell them that my wife knew nothing, and played no part in it. However, I knew that to talk would be a disaster. There is an IRA expression: ‘Silent for seven days or porridge for seven years.’ At best, I would talk myself into the conspiracy to kill Martindale and face a lengthy spell in prison. At worst, I would reveal myself as a double agent. How long before that hot snippet of news leaked out? I would be down a hole in a matter of days.

  ‘To be honest, Kevin,’ said the second cop, ‘we’re not going to bother asking you any more questions.’ He took his papers up in his hands, bounced them a couple of times on the desk like a newsreader at the end of a bulletin, smiled at me and then stood up. ‘What’s the point? We know you’re working for us, one of our agencies, as a grass or a mole. We know. And, if we can work it out, so can the Provos.’

  With that, his colleague mockingly performed another rendition of ‘There May be Trouble Ahead’.

  The air in my lungs emptied all at once. That knot in my stomach was back. It did all point to me. I supplied the mobile phone and the car for a major IRA operation. While the unit is on its way to carry out this operation, the RUC suddenly appears out of nowhere. Clearly the IRA would realise it had a mole, an informant, a ‘tout’ on the inside. As the newest face, and the man who supplied vital equipment, I’d be in the spotlight. How the hell was I going to get out of this one?

  The officers were as good as their word. They didn’t question me again that day. Or the next, or the next. I was left to stew. All I could do was worry myself sick about what might happen next. I felt fear now. Real fear. Fear for my life and for the safety of my wife. I hadn’t been able to speak to her since she had been arrested. What must she be going through?

  ‘At least she knows nothing,’ I told myself over and over again, ‘at least she knows nothing.’

  Finally, after four nights in Castlereagh, I was released. My wife was let out at the same time. My heart sank as I watched her emerge dazed and pale from the gates of this fierce and intimidating building. It was like watching her emerge from the mouth of a monster. I felt sick with myself. This was all down to me. I had put her through this ordeal. We hugged. She felt frail in my arms.

  I decided there and then that my handlers had to pull me out this time. As soon as I got home, I rang them. I was desperate for reassurance.

  ‘You’re all right,’ said Pete, ‘we’ve got the inside track on it. You’re not the prime suspect at all. You’ll be fine.’

  ‘But it all points to me,’ I said. ‘The phone, the car – it can only be me.’

  ‘No, listen,’ said Pete, ‘how many times have we been in this situation? Have we ever made a bad call before? Anyone connected to that op could have talked, Kevin, and you know it. The man who sold you the car might be a tout. The man who sold you the phone might be a tout. They can’t prove a thing.’

  These words provided relief. In a way, Pete was right. It would be hard for the IRA to prove that the leak came from me. If I didn’t confess to anything, I would probably be OK. Despite this, I still felt fear. I knew the call would come from the IRA. I knew I would end up being quizzed for hour after hour in a darkened room. I knew that one slip would be potentially lethal. Dread hung on my every thought and action.

  Of course, I couldn’t tell my wife the truth. In fact, I told her nothing at all. I said it was all a misunderstanding. I followed a procedure that I had followed for so long now I did it instinctively. I told her not to ask me to tell her anything, and I told her nothing. If it all went horribly wrong, her complete ignorance would be her salvation.

  I didn’t sleep that night. I kept running everything through my mind, again and again, over and over. Would I be OK? Should I believe the handlers? What if the IRA found proof? Would they kill me even if they didn’t have the proof? All it took was for three judges – each one far from independent – to decide I was a tout, and that would be that. They would probably play with my balls for a few days first, find out all they could. Then I would be found dead in a ditch.

  Morning, the only respite to a sleepless night, arrived like judgement day. The sound of the front-door bell made my heart sink to the floor. It was the brother of an OC whom I had helped put away three years earlier. ‘Well?’ I said. ‘What can I do for you?’

  ‘You’ve to go up to Belfast straight away. Security unit want to have a chat with you.’

  ‘No problem,’ I said, leaning against the door all casual.

  ‘You’ve to bring your wife too,’ he said.

  ‘Ach, she knows nothing about anything,’ I said.

  ‘Bring her too,’ he said, ‘or we’ll get a team and fucking drag her to Belfast. Understood?’

  ‘Right,’ I said. ‘And where are we to go exactly?’

  ‘Go to Unity Flats, they’re expecting you at two
o’clock.’

  I told my wife the news. She visibly trembled.

  ‘We’ve nothing to worry about,’ I said as convincingly as I could. ‘Nothing whatsoever. You’ll see.’

  I really wanted to convince her that everything would be OK. She managed a faint smile, but I knew that she knew something was seriously wrong, that I was in deep trouble. At least I knew she would stay strong. I knew she would stick by me no matter what. I knew she would be astute enough not to get hysterical, and not to demand answers. She understood how things worked.

  I drove to a familiar phone box and called my handlers.

  ‘They won’t be able to prove anything,’ said Bob. ‘Just tell them you did what you were told by the IRA. You knew nothing about the Martindale operation, and you’ve no idea what’s going on. OK?’

  ‘Yeah, Bob,’ I said, ‘I know the drill. I’m just not sure it’s going to wash. What if they’ve already made up their minds?’

  ‘If they’d plans for you, Kevin,’ said Bob, ‘they wouldn’t have told you to bring your wife along, would they?’

  This was true. I started feeling a little better.

  ‘Don’t start thinking like that, Kevin,’ said Bob. ‘You’ve got to stay strong here. You’ve got to brazen it out. You’ve been through worse than this and come out the other side.’

  My brain seized on the ‘you’ in Bob’s last statement: ‘You’ve been through worse than this and come out the other side.’ Bob and Pete had always spoken about what ‘we’ve’ been through: ‘We’ve been through worse than this before.’ It always used to irritate me. Now suddenly he had reverted to using ‘you’. Was I on my own now? Did he know something?

  I dismissed this as paranoia. I decided to dwell instead on all the close scrapes that I had survived in the past. As we drove up to Belfast in silence, I thought about all my narrow escapes. There was the incident in Dundalk when I was ordered to get on my knees and say an act of contrition. There was the time we pulled straws to decide who would execute a tout. There was the time I narrowly prevented two IRA men opening fire on a British army patrol.