Fifty Dead Men Walking

by McGartland, Martin

  Making big bombs, designed to cause massive damage to town centres, such as those which exploded in the City of London and Canary Wharf, was a perennial problem for the IRA bomb-makers. This was due to the time needed to grind the fertiliser and pack the explosive material into lorries, vans or cars. Usually, this would be carried out under cover of darkness, which added to the problems.

  After much consideration, it was decided to follow the example of the Viet Cong and construct an underground bomb-making factory. It took months of painstaking intelligence work to find a suitable site, as the IRA leadership decided that it had to be based in the countryside but not too far from Belfast. It also had to be located in an area where the local population would not become suspicious. At the beginning of the 1990s, with no sign of a ceasefire, the IRA believed it would continue its major bombing campaigns in Belfast and elsewhere, and that it would need a location where its bomb-makers could work in secret.

  Usually, the IRA bomb-makers worked under pressure. Accompanied by gunmen, they would take over a house for the night, forcing the occupants into a single room where they would remain with an armed guard. The bomb-makers would then work throughout the next eight to ten hours, hurrying to complete the bomb before daylight. It would then be transferred, often in a wheely-bin, to a waiting car or van. A house with a rear kitchen was often chosen, so that the RUC would not be alerted by lights being on throughout the night.

  Eventually, a near-perfect site was found on a deserted farm between Glenarm and Carnlough near the coast, twenty-five miles from Belfast. The farm had an old barn big enough to hold a lorry and one or two cars, which could be parked out of sight of the general public and army reconnaissance helicopters.

  The plan was to construct a shaft beneath the barn which would lead down to a well-built, well-equipped small factory, where a group of IRA members could make various sizes and types of bombs without the worry of a knock at the door. Most IRA bombs had been assembled in sympathisers’ homes or lock-up garages where problems inevitably occurred.

  The new factory was to be equipped with industrial coffee-grinding machinery to handle the fertiliser, and work benches with lathes, vices, power drills and other essential tools. These could all be powered by on-site generators, concealed below ground to dampen the noise. The team of workers would have the comfort of heating and lighting, and would enter and leave the site after dark.

  Money was never a problem for the IRA. From enquiries I made from various high-ranking IRA personnel, it appeared that between US$10million and US$12 million a year was pouring into the coffers of the organisation every year during the late ‘80s and early ‘90s.

  Most of this money would be laundered through European banks and invested by professional investment managers, some of whom had no idea that the funds they were caring for were associated with the IRA. I was aware of one senior IRA official who lived and worked as an accountant in Belfast and another, whose name I could never trace, live in Dublin. These funds had been built up over many years, mainly from North American sources sympathetic to the cause of a united Ireland, and it seemed that the money never entered the Republic of Ireland or the Province, but would be invested mainly in Europe.

  There was also income from protection rackets, bank robberies, post office raids, black taxis, DSS scams, video and CD pirating, fruit machines, republican clubs and pubs and local collections among sympathisers. This money would be collected and handled locally to buy guns or ammunition, getaway cars or trucks, as well as to pay full-time IRA staff who were too busy to hold down regular jobs. It would also be used to take care of the families of IRA men serving jail sentences, as well as to finance recently released IRA men who had served long prison sentences and had little or no chance of securing a proper job.

  The IRA needed to keep its tills ringing to cover its considerable overheads. All IRA cell members received £10 a week, and the cell commanders received between £30-£50 per week. The great majority of the IRA’s income, however, went on intelligence gathering, and organising and carrying out active service missions. Occasionally, money would be needed to buy second-hand cars, pay for transport, food and lodgings outside Belfast. Sympathisers who agreed to hide arms and ammunition in their homes and garages would also be paid, not only to ensure that they kept their mouths shut, but also because of the considerable risks they faced.

  The construction of small arms dumps in Belfast and ‘Derry would go on for about a year. The RUC and the Army were always on the lookout for arms dumps, so it was necessary for IRA teams to move the weapons continually to and from different locations, and to build more secure and secret hiding places. If the Special Branch ever suspected that a house had become an IRA arms dump, the place would be ripped apart, every floorboard would be pulled up, the walls would be left with gaping holes and all the kitchen, bathroom and bedroom cupboards would be taken apart. The house would, literally, be trashed, and made virtually uninhabitable until major repairs had been carried out.

  Most flats and houses were quite small, ordinary council-owned homes without much space. As a result, an average arms dump, possibly secreted behind a false bathroom wall, might contain three AK-47 rifles, two hand-guns and 5lb of Semtex. Sometimes, the IRA had great difficulty of persuading people to allow their homes to be used as a dump, as the occupants would be fully aware of the threat of long jail sentences if the weapons were ever discovered in their homes. Consequently, many of those who agreed to hide weapons were widows or young, unmarried mothers who desperately needed the money.

  Most of the IRA men who handled income from whatever source seemed to be meticulous in their accounting. There were also examples of punishment beatings handed out to those few who misused IRA funds for their own ends. Those men would not only be beaten but would also earn the scorn and contempt of their IRA mates, friends and often their families.

  Throughout the years I worked with the IRA, I was left in no doubt that the cardinal sin, above all else, was the betrayal of the cause.

  And yet many people, including escalating numbers of former IRA personnel, did betray the cause by volunteering to work for the RUC, the British Government and, occasionally, the Security Services. Some of those would be police informers, others intelligence agents like me.

  During the 25 years since the Troubles began in earnest, hundreds of people have happily worked for the Government in a desperate bid to end the violence and the killings, the bombings and the shootings, which have made life so miserable for the entire Northern Ireland population.

  And a few hundred people, who risked their lives working for the Government or the RUC, have been pulled out of the Province because their undercover work had been detected by the IRA. It is always necessary in such situations to pull out the person immediately, and often their families as well, and re-settle them in different locations throughout the mainland. They are then given houses or apartments, new identities and sometimes a job. Often, as the IRA keeps up its attempts to find and target these families, they have to be moved three or four times in an effort to keep them one step ahead of the gunmen. I understand that these rescue missions, which are still carried out, have so far cost the British taxpayer between £75-£100 million.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  MY INCREASING CONCERN OVER SUSPICIOUS IRA MEMBERS began to make me feel nervous, but I would tell myself that I had to look forward and get on with the task in hand, maintaining my apparent enthusiasm for working with the IRA, as well as trying to do all I could to frustrate their murderous intentions.

  Though I would sometimes have sleepless nights worrying that my cover would be blown, I did try to ensure that many of the IRA operations I thwarted were ones in which I had only been one of many people involved in their planning.

  My handlers would impress on me, time and again, to be vigilant, to keep a low-profile, and never to take risks which might expose me as an agent working for the Special Branch. And the more intelligence I supplied, the more they would seek to prote
ct and advise me. In my naivete, I sometimes thought they were being excessively cautious.

  ‘Remember, Marty,’ Felix would stress, ‘It’s not only us who need your help, it’s all those other poor bastards who might be on the receiving end. Promise me that you’ll take care. Remember, never take risks; too many people rely on you … but they will never know.’

  Many of the operations I helped ruin had been brought to my attention because of my position as a member of the IRA Intelligence wing, a position far removed from the actual Active Service Unit that would carry out the task. On a number of occasions, I was one of 20 or 30 people in the chain of command with knowledge of a particular operation and, as a result, escaped suspicion.

  I would also deliberately loan out my Special Branch car, with the secret tracker bleep attached, to anyone who wanted to borrow it. As a result, these personnel would be automatically tracked by the Special Branch and some of their nefarious activities ruined by some unknown intervention which no one could pin-point. I did not know about those operations, but it was obvious to those involved in the IRA’s internal security network, the men constantly watching for agents and informants, that I had nothing whatsoever to do with many of the jobs that were ruined before they ever reached fruition.

  My first real concern for my position occurred after I was drafted into Spud’s IRA cell. From that moment, I became intimately involved in direct action, gaining first-hand knowledge of potential targets and operational details at the point of execution.

  There were only eight of us in the cell with that privileged knowledge, and whenever I provided the intelligence that scuppered an operation, I knew that suspicion of having betrayed the cell’s plans would initially point to one of the eight, including me.

  From the moment I joined Spud’s cell, I realised that my life was at risk; yet I knew that I could not permit an innocent man or woman to be targeted and murdered without trying everything in my power to stop it. And whenever I did prevent a bombing or a shooting, I knew that I was one step closer to having my cover blown. On Saturday, 15 September 1990, an RUC detective, Louis Robinson, aged 42, who had been with the force for 20 years, was kidnapped on the border at Killen, Co Armagh, as he returned from a fishing trip in the Republic. Dressed in jeans and a Guinness T-shirt, Detective-Constable Robinson, who had been on sick-leave for three years, was travelling with some friends, serving prison officers, when a gang of eight armed IRA men ambushed their vehicle at a bogus checkpoint.

  D/C Robinson’s abduction had been planned by the IRA’s Belfast Brigade after they received information that the officer was planning the fishing trip to County Kerry. The IRA intelligence wing passed the information to an active service unit in Armagh, an area where the IRA retained a deadly freedom of movement in the Irish border hills. Some years before, the British Army had been forced to abandon movements of troops by road for it had become too risky. Since that time, the Army had relied on helicopters to ferry them around the border area because of the high risk of ambush. Even then, the IRA continued to harry the army, staging lightning attacks on the army helicopters, firing at them with automatic weapons as they landed and took off from exposed places.

  Within hours of her husband’s kidnap, Ann Robinson appealed to the IRA to spare her husband’s life, claiming he had been ill and off duty for three tears, suffering from depression. The Catholic Bishop Cahal Daly, describing the abduction as ‘repugnant’ and ‘an outrage to all humanitarian feelings’ called for the IRA to release the officer unharmed.

  In fact, D/C Robinson’s abduction, and the appeals for his release, caused problems for the IRA leadership in South Armagh. Robinson had been seized because the Belfast leadership believed he could point the finger at RUC officers known to be particularly hard on IRA men arrested and taken to Castlereagh for questioning. They hoped to uncover identities, addresses and movements.

  D/C Robinson, a powerfully built man, was put through hours of interrogation and torture. It had always been the IRA’s intention to find out what they could and then shoot their prisoner. His fate had been sealed from the moment he was taken, but appeals from the Roman Catholic clergy caused concern. Factions inside the IRA High Command believed that they should heed appeals by Roman Catholic clergy, for fear of alienating Catholics who had nothing whatsoever to do with the IRA but who were, nevertheless, sympathetic to the IRA cause. For the IRA, however, there could be no turning back. The appeals from Church leaders had come too late to save Robinson’s life, because by then he had seen the faces of a number of his interrogators. He had to die.

  One of the names Robinson was forced to reveal would be a serving member of the CID in Belfast, who had a reputation for intimidating and terrorising suspected IRA men brought in for questioning. Hi name was immediately placed at the top of the IRA hit list.

  My Belfast cell was given the task of checking that the information Robinson had given was correct. We had been informed that the officer lived in Garnerville Road, near Belfast City Airport, drove two cars and never revealed, not even to friends or neighbours, that he worked for the RUC. Most of the time he drove around in a battered 1979 Toyota, but he also kept a new Renault which he garaged some distance away from his home. We were told that he played golf with other police officers at Helen’s Bay, near Bangor. One plan under consideration was to target the man’s car while he was playing golf, placing a charge under the vehicle which would explode when he drove away.

  I was detailed to survey the officer’s home, check out the information and report back. As soon as I saw the man’s house and the old Toyota standing in the drive, I realised that the information the IRA had acquired from Robinson was accurate. I knew the IRA intended to place a bomb under his car within the next couple of days, if not the following night. As soon as I had checked his home, I immediately phoned Castlereagh because I realised this was a matter of urgency.

  ‘Carol speaking,’ I told the Castlereagh operator. ‘It’s urgent.’

  Thirty minutes later, I met Felix and Mo in knocknagoney Park, a few hundred yards from the man’s home.

  ‘Can you take us to the house?’ Felix asked.

  ‘Jump in,’ I said.

  As I slowed down and drove past the front of the man’s house, Felix said, ‘My God, Mo, do you realise who lives there? We know that man, Marty, he works at Casrlereagh. We had better do something, and fast.’

  Felix decided that the only way we could save the man’s life and keep my identity safe would be to pretend that I had accidentally driven into a police checkpoint. Felix told Mo and me to wait in the car park while he returned to Belfast and picked up and RUC form demanding that I produce my driver’s documents at a police station within five days.

  When Felix returned, I drove them back to Belfast and immediately went to see my cell commander, Spud, reporting everything I had seen.

  ‘Good,’ he said, ‘that’s OK.’

  ‘But I had a problem,’ I added, ‘I got stopped at a checkpoint.’

  ‘You fucking what?’ he exploded. ‘For fuck’s sake, Marty, tell me you’re joking?’

  ‘It was not too far from his house,’ I said. ‘Are you surprised? For fuck’s sake, there is an RUC training camp just up the road from his house.’

  He began to lose his temper, shouting at me. ‘What the fuck is this, Marty?’ he said. ‘Every time you get involved in a job it’s a fucking disaster. How the fuck did you get stopped at a sodding checkpoint?’

  ‘What the fuck did you expect me to do?’ I said. ‘What did you want me to do, do a handbrake turn and speed away? I had to just fucking stop, like all the other traffic.’

  I could tell he wasn’t very happy, but I had to continue with my story. ‘The RUC man gave me this form, telling me to produce my licence and insurance at New Barnsley police station.’

  He looked at the evidence I produced, realising I was telling the truth. His temper subsided but he seemed far from happy.

  As I drove back home that night, I fe
ared that someone within the IRA organisation might begin to suspect that there was a connection between me and all the operations that had gone wrong whenever I had become involved. As I approached my home, parked the car and walked inside, I also realised how vulnerable I was if the IRA ever wanted to pick me up.

  Only a couple of weeks later I would become involved in another IRA operation where, once again, I would have to risk exposure to save the lives of two RUC men.

  IRA intelligence had learned that two RUC officers, stationed at Antrim, would stop at a take-away Chinese Restaurant every Saturday night. They drove an ordinary, unmarked blue Ford Sierra without bullet-proof glass or reinforced steel doors, as there was little IRA activity in that area.

  My cell commander told me to check the following Saturday night to make sure that the two RUC men still called at the Chinese Restaurant on their way home. I knew that if I was involved in another operational disaster my integrity would be called into question, my identity put at risk. So I phoned Felix and told him I needed to discuss a new situation with him.

  The following night, we met as arranged and I told him of the IRA plan to kill the two Antrim officers, emphasising that there was a real possibility of the attack being organised for the coming Saturday, two days away. I also told him that I felt Spud and certain other cell members may have begun to suspect me and that if he wanted to protect my identity, he should take preventative measures.

  ‘What have you in mind?’ he asked.

  ‘I believe you should tell the two officers from Antrim that the IRA have targeted their Saturday night visits to the Chinese Restaurant, and tell them to stay away from the place from now on.’