Double Agent: My Secret Life Undercover in the IRA

by Kevin Fulton

  My secret life would have died with me.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  15 August 1998. 3.09pm. A date and time seared on my memory. But not one of those John F Kennedy moments. I don’t recall precisely what I was doing that sunny afternoon with the same far-removed enthusiasm that some people, as if participating in a mildly amusing national game, remember JFK’s assassination.

  I sometimes wish I could. Instead, every time I recall what I was doing that day – the day of the Omagh atrocity – my stomach tightens and I swallow hard. I remember the heart-quickening, blind panic. And I remember being seized by one thought: could I have done anything more to stop it?

  I also try to summon up images of those poor families ripped apart by the atrocity, the worst of more than thirty years of carnage. How did they feel? What of their pain now? Perhaps I do this partly to reproach myself for only seeming to dwell on how I felt when I heard the news. The thoughts compete inside my head. But, if I am honest, it is the selfish thoughts that always win; they are the ones that rise to the surface first. I put this down to human nature. Besides, how could anyone who hasn’t experienced it begin really to understand that depth of grief. Twenty-nine people were massacred that day in the most monstrous way. Blown to pieces while out shopping. Men, women and children. Catholics and Protestants.

  I was in Tenerife when I heard. I had flown there the day before on a family holiday. Two days before that, I had met a senior IRA figure. It was to prove a fateful, life-changing encounter, although it didn’t seem so at the time. I suppose they never do. At the time, he was a senior figure in the Real IRA. The Reals. The dissident Republicans who couldn’t stomach the Good Friday Agreement. As for myself, I was no longer the British army’s ‘brave’ double agent. Shunned by the IRA over the Martindale fiasco, dropped like a brick by my handlers who obviously thought I had become a liability, I was now operating, or rather scratching around, in a world where the distinctions between right and wrong, the good and the bad guys, were as blurred as ever.

  I had left the IRA and become a peripheral figure, floating around under the umbrella of the Republican movement, doing insignificant jobs for the cause. I was someone viewed with suspicion for whom there was no real place; tolerated, at best.

  I had escaped execution over Martindale because Michael and the boys hadn’t managed to secure a confession. Nor did they have any proof, and they needed one or the other. Some may find it surprising, but the IRA is rigidly strict about such matters.

  So, with a question mark hanging over me, I was cast adrift in choppy waters, one of the outsiders, a man not to be trusted. As far as the IRA was concerned, it was a case of out of sight, out of mind. I was now drifting between England, the Far East and different addresses in Northern Ireland, never staying in one place too long. My options were distinctly limited. I couldn’t have got a proper job even if I had wanted one. How could I? What would I have put on my CV? Try explaining my employment history to the man at Newry meat factory. I could picture the job interview. ‘I have been an IRA double agent for the last thirteen years, but I’ve always known that my true destiny lies in packing pork chops …’

  Inevitably, I drifted back into the one field I knew about – the spying game. To begin with, it was low-level work, nothing like the heady excitement of the old days. I was feeding stuff to HM Customs, details of IRA smuggling operations – mostly drugs and arms – that I had picked up from the past. In fact, a lot of it was information I had given my handlers a long time ago but which they hadn’t seemed interested in at the time.

  Because of the nature of the stuff I was supplying – it became too heavy for Customs, I suppose – I was passed to C13, the RUC’s anti-racketeering squad.

  During this period, I achieved some successes. It was my information, for example, that helped put away an Italian gangster called Luigi Marotta. He had tried to defraud the Ulster Bank in a £1.4 million scam using blank cheques from a liquor company based in Derry.

  It felt good for a while. I was enjoying the work. But it wasn’t the same as before. Sure, I was an agent of sorts, but I was no longer a soldier, and that hurt deeply. At the same time, I was consumed by bitterness at the way I had been treated. They – the British government, the Ministry of Defence, MI5, whoever it was that was responsible for paying me and arranging my relocation following the undercover work – still owed me. I had risked my life, after all, and I had saved lives. But at the heart of my predicament was the fact that I had been turned into a terrorist and got mixed up with murder and mayhem at the instigation of my handlers. No one was going to put their hands up to that.

  As well as the anti-racketeering squad, I was also working for other agencies, among them the RUC’s Criminal Investigation Department who assigned me handlers. They seemed happy with my pedigree and the extent of my contacts. They encouraged me to maintain and develop my contacts within the Real IRA, not least because its actions were at that time threatening to unravel the flimsy peace that existed in Northern Ireland.

  On 12 August 1998, I drove to Dundalk for a meeting with a top IRA man, who I cannot name. I can’t recall precisely, but I suspect I was simply thinking about my holiday. We were due to meet at midnight, a little dramatic perhaps, but the only time he could fit me in. Bang on time as always, I pulled up in the car park of the Claret Bar on the Crossmaglen Road and waited. His car eased into view a few minutes later and I got out of mine and into his. We were there to discuss a deal. He had asked me previously to provide guns for the Real IRA, but I needed more time and had called the meeting to tell him so. In the event, he didn’t seem very interested in what I had to say. He was nervous, edgy and was clearly in a hurry.

  But there was something else. Something unmistakable. I could see he had pink dust all over his pullover: it was fertiliser. There was something else too. When you make a bomb, the mix has a distinct, fusty, damp smell. It’s usually accompanied by the smell of diesel. I could smell both of these distinct but unmistakable smells on him. There was no doubt in my mind that he had been making a bomb, and it struck me at the time that he must have broken off from mixing it to make the meeting.

  ‘I can’t be long,’ he said. ‘There’s a big one on.’

  I knew better than to ask him to elaborate, but it was clear something was imminent.

  From my own experience, I knew that the time between making a bomb and detonating it is short. An assembled bomb retains its potency for a maximum of only seven days. Beyond that, the fertiliser becomes too caked and solid and has to be broken up.

  The meeting with him lasted a few minutes. He was indeed in a hurry and darted off. I went home to bed and woke up early. I rang my handler, told him about the meeting and briefly outlined my concerns. We agreed that we needed to meet face to face – and quickly. By eleven o’clock, we were sitting at a quiet corner table at the Baytree Café in Holywood, east of Belfast, a place we had used before. We ordered coffee and cinnamon scones. I wasn’t overly excited or dramatic. I was used to these meetings. I knew the score. I simply told him, clearly and concisely and without embellishment, everything I knew. I told him I believed something big was going down and told him exactly what was said at the meeting. I gave him the name of the man I had met – though he was aware of him and his status already – and his car registration number. I told him I didn’t know where the bomb was going to go off or when, but I warned him the attack was imminent and explained about the fertiliser.

  My handler, not one for theatrics, absorbed what I told him in a no-nonsense way. He pressed me for extra detail here and there, but was mainly content simply to sit and listen. I didn’t need any reassurances that the kind of intelligence I was imparting would be given high priority. It wasn’t my business, of course, but I imagined that it would be passed to those who needed to see it – to act upon it – immediately.

  My wife and I flew to Tenerife the following morning and spent the rest of the day settling in to the hotel, exploring and enjoying the sunshine. Bu
t I found it hard to relax – I always do on holiday, and this time I had good reason. The next day, I awoke and began to dwell on what the man I had met had told me, turning over his words in my mind, analysing them, looking for hidden meaning in the nuances of our brief conversation. I was always like this when I picked up serious intelligence – I wasn’t one simply to pass it on and forget about it. Later that day, I rang my father. Half of me believes, looking back, that I had some awful sixth sense about Omagh. The possibility of a bomb going off, and a big one, was definitely in the back of my mind somewhere. But the reality is that I simply rang the old fella to see if he was OK and to tell him about the holiday. I sat on the bed in my swimming trunks cradling the phone. Within seconds of the exchange of pleasantries, he delivered the savage news in his typical, unexcitable way. He told me that a car bomb had gone off in Omagh and that it had been a big one.

  I said something like, ‘You’re joking.’ Stupid thing to say. As if he would joke about a bomb.

  ‘Honest to God, I’m watching the news and there are bodies everywhere,’ came the reply.

  This was it – the bomb I had told my RUC handler about. I felt the blind panic rise up inside me. I was only half-listening to the rest of what my father had to say. As soon as I got him off the line, I rang my handler. I remembered that he played football on a Saturday afternoon and expected his mobile to be switched off. But he answered it. I didn’t have to say anything before he said, ‘Kevin, I fucking know.’

  ‘You did put that stuff in the system, didn’t you?’ I asked.

  ‘Thank fuck I did,’ was the reply.

  So we had both done what we had to do, but it hadn’t made any difference. I was devastated. What had happened to my information? How was it used? Was it used? Either way, there were, as my father said, bodies everywhere.

  From my time in the IRA, I had become anaesthetised to all the bombs and killings, despite telling myself every day that I wasn’t really part of it, that I was a soldier. I had become conditioned, programmed like a robot. Yet the Omagh atrocity took hold of you, grabbed you by the throat and made you try to understand. It brought all the madness into sharp focus and made you see it for what it was.

  When I asked my handler about putting stuff in ‘the system’, I was referring to the RUC computer which logs and records information from handlers and agents. In theory, a sensitive report about an imminent terrorist attack would be sent to an intelligence analyst who would grade the information for its quality based on the reliability of the source, then forward it instantly to the army and MI5.

  I have often been asked whether the man I informed on may have been making a bomb for somewhere else. But no other device went off before or after Omagh, and he is a known bomb-maker. I of all people knew that. I felt the security services or the RUC should have been watching him after my tip. He should have been put under twenty-four-hour surveillance to monitor whether anything was about to come over the border. That my information wasn’t acted upon in any kind of satisfactory manner has provoked considerable debate, argument, claim and counter-claim. It has also caused the victims’ families profound anguish. For my part, I am convinced that, if my information had been followed up, the Omagh atrocity could have been prevented.

  In the past few years, I have talked to my handler a number of times about Omagh. I’ve asked him if he was sure he had put the information in the system. My handler was someone who did everything by the book. He said he put it in the system and I believe him. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that he also believed the bomb that I told him about had been used at Omagh.

  Three months after the atrocity I was watching TV at home. The police had got nowhere and Detective Chief Superintendent Eric Anderson, the man leading the investigation, was holding a press conference, begging for help to find the bombers. At one point, he appeared to break down. God knows what kind of strain he was under. The whole world, it seemed, was looking to him for answers, for justice. I felt sorry for him and something made me ring the inquiry headquarters. I’m not quite sure why I did it, as I had done what I had to do when I tipped off my handler. But something was troubling me – I needed to know what had happened to my intelligence after it was put into the system.

  I arranged to meet Anderson at the Europa Hotel in Belfast the following day. We sat in the big first-floor bar overlooking the busy street below. I told him everything – my history, about how I had my meeting forty-eight hours before the bomb went off and about what he said. From his facial expressions, I could tell he seemed surprised. But, by nature a careful man, he didn’t let his words betray him. He certainly gave the impression, however, that this was the first he had heard of my warning. Not for the first time, I felt physically sick.

  At his request, I drove with Anderson and another detective across the border the following day to Carrickmacross in County Monaghan. The red Vauxhall Cavalier used by the terrorists which contained the bomb destined for Omagh was stolen from the town and I knew there was an IRA bomb-making factory in the area. I showed it to Anderson.

  He turned to me as we were driving back and said, ‘You know, this really is fantastic information. I can’t thank you enough.’

  What struck me as slightly odd at the time – but considerably less so now – was that I wasn’t formally interviewed by a member of his team or asked to make a statement.

  As the days went by, my concern about what I knew about Omagh abated slightly – only to resurface when the BBC programme Panorama broadcast its investigation into the bombing. Security sources gave the programme details of mobile-phone calls made to mobile phones used by the bombers in the Omagh area at the time of the explosion. Although the BBC did not know it, I knew that one of the numbers that made a call to one of the bomber’s phones at the time of the attack was the number of the man I had met. I was able to identify it when a contact on the programme asked me for help, but the request came after the programme was screened. That man’s call to one of the Omagh bombers lasted fifty-nine seconds.

  So the man I knew was becoming something of a common thread, and I began to suspect that he was not quite what he seemed. He hadn’t been pulled in for questioning over Omagh, an omission by the police and security services I found significant. That significance would magnify in the months and years to come. I learned later that he was never questioned about another murder. Was he, like me, a member of that rare protected species?

  I decided then that his fate was inextricably linked to my own. I never stopped asking my handlers about him. Were they still pursuing that line of enquiry? Yes, of course, was the stock response. But nothing ever happened. He was never questioned and neither was I. Despite the pressure the police were under to get results, despite their countless appeals for even the tiniest scrap of intelligence, my comparatively sizeable nugget of information was being completely ignored.

  But then something happened to change all that. A series of Sunday newspaper articles in Ireland in late 2000 blew my cover as a double agent within the IRA. To my horror, they detailed my work as a British agent both in the IRA and the RIRA. They didn’t name me, of course, but they didn’t need to. It would be obvious to the IRA. My cover had been blown. All those terrorists I had helped put in jail had been released under the Good Friday Agreement. Now they would realise it was me who got them caught. They were free but I wasn’t.

  My thoughts turned to my family: it would only be a matter of time before they learned about my double life. I decided I had better tell them the truth before they found out some other way. I started with my wife. One night around Christmas time, we sat watching a programme on the TV about undercover work. I blocked from my mind the knockout impact of what I was about to say, and just blurted it out. If I had thought too long about it, I don’t think it would have trickled out the way it did.

  ‘I’m one of them,’ I said, without lifting my gaze from the TV. And then I told her I had been a double agent. For twenty years, she had known me as an IRA man. Now I was
telling her that, well, I was an IRA man, but that I was really on the other side. The British side.

  Gradually, I unloaded my story – not every detail, that would have to wait, but the bare bones, enough eventually to convince her. I felt no sense of relief. I just delivered what I had to say as if being debriefed. Naturally – and I was expecting this – my wife’s incredulity gave way to fear. Her old man was a tout. He would end up dead. I told her I would go on the run and explained how I had been let down over my money and relocation and a new identity. I promised I would never give up fighting for what I was owed, what we were both owed and what we need to survive. I told her she had nothing to fear and that, whatever the IRA was, it wouldn’t allow her to be harmed. She had done nothing wrong. But she would have to face everyone – family, friends, workmates, shopkeepers, you name it. There would be those who would deliver direct insults, spit in her face with as much vitriol as they could muster. And there would be the less direct taunts, the darkly muttered name-calling from passers-by. People in Newry could handle my being in the Provisional IRA. What they couldn’t tolerate was the fact that I really worked for the other side. She would have to face all that, and so would our families.

  It should never have come to this, I thought, as I saw her looking at me as though I should be pitied rather than censured. God bless her. She was angry too, though. I was a fool, she said, for believing that they – the Brits – would look after me. She said she would stay behind, and bravely calculating that at most our windows would be done in – which as it transpired they were – she accepted my assurance that she would never be harmed.