Dead Man Running: A True Story of a Secret Agent's Escape from the IRA and MI5

by McGartland, Martin

‘Do you fancy a drink?’ he asked.

  ‘No thanks,’ I said, not saying any more because I was keen to end this conversation.

  ‘Well, I’ll be away,’ he said, ‘but I’m still sure I know you. It’ll probably come to me later.’

  As he walked away I decided to go and buy another cup of tea. I realised my mouth was dry and my palms were sweating. I was convinced now that he was an IRA member and I wondered why the peelers hadn’t paid any attention to him. Ten minutes later my new-found friend reappeared and walked up to my table. ‘You’re Marty McGartland,’ he said.

  Chapter Twelve

  The IRA man turned on his heel and walked out of the cafe. I knew instinctively that he would go to a phone to call someone. Whom, I did not know but I’m sure my guess would have been pretty accurate. I realised it was his duty to arrest me, kidnap me or arrange for some of his IRA mates to pick me up and deliver me once again to the Civil Administration Team for interrogation. I also suspected that because of all that had occurred since my last abduction by the IRA word would probably have gone out to all members to kill me if they ever came across me. Sixty seconds after he left the cafe I followed, keeping him in sight, hoping that he hadn’t any of his mates on site at the Larne terminal. I thought it highly unlikely but I couldn’t be sure.

  I saw him walk to a telephone and begin to dial. I wondered whether I should try and stop him making that call but thought better of it. I couldn’t approach an RUC patrol, reveal my identity and suggest they arrest the man on the phone because I had no reason to give. I also had no idea of his identity though now I was convinced the man was IRA. As soon as he began to speak I disappeared, walking quickly away from where the ferries dock at Larne, as far away as possible from my IRA suspect.

  I guessed that he would never think I would return to Belfast but would be more than anxious to get the hell out of Northern Ireland back to the safety of the mainland. After using the phone I guessed that he would spend the time searching the departure area for me, angry at letting me out of his sight and, more than likely, waiting for one or more of his mates to join him. I realised that there was very little possibility of them trying to abduct me at the Larne ferry terminal but I guessed that if I had been on board the next ferry to Scotland they would have a crack at me either on board the ferry or after landing at Stranraer.

  As soon as I reached the other side of the terminal I went immediately to the bus departure point and bought a ticket for Belfast. This time luck was in my favour and after an agonisingly long ten minutes the bus set off for the city. I was sure that my IRA friend had not seen me and had no idea that I was at that moment heading back towards Belfast. About two miles down the road I asked the driver to stop to let me off and I alighted as if he was dropping me near my home. After the bus had disappeared from sight I walked across the road and began walking back towards the ferry terminal once more. But I had no intention of completing the journey to the mainland that night.

  As I walked along I wondered where I could sleep for I didn’t relish sleeping rough on a cold, damp, overcast night. I heard the wailing of police sirens and remembered not to look back as two RUC cars sped past me, seemingly en route to the ferry terminal. I wondered whether they were searching for me or the lad who had interrupted my return to the mainland. It seemed so strange not knowing what was going on and not sure whom I could trust. Having spent four years in the protective, all-embracing security of the RUC special Branch it seemed strange to feel so vulnerable, so lonely in the same country where I had felt safe and unassailable. There was even a certain fear that the world had been turned upside down and I was now in the run; my friends and comrades had now become my antagonists, my feared enemies. The siren noise had made me feel uneasy and at that moment I wondered why the hell I had taken such a risk returning back home. And for what?

  I vowed to myself that if I managed to escape from this predicament I would never return to Belfast again, not even if there was a peace settlement. As more RUC cars sped past me I began to concentrate on my immediate worries rather than think a load of nonsense. Where was I to sleep the night?

  Finally, as I realised I was getting closer to the ferry terminal and to possible danger I decided I had little option but to creep into a field and lie doggo till morning. Having checked the road was clear I nipped over a five-barred gate and, stooping below the level of the hedge, made my way along the side of the filed looking for a reasonable place to lay my head. Nowhere looked particularly inviting but I knew I had to grit my teeth and stop pussy-footing about. I found a reasonable patch of bare ground beneath the hawthorn hedge and settled down for what I knew would be an unpleasant, cold and damp night. But I knew it would be a fucking sight more comfortable than lying bound hand and foot on the sofa in an IRA flat being guarded by armed men while awaiting interrogation and torture.

  I had never realised the effect those seven hours of waiting for interrogation and torture had on me but shortly after my acquittal at Newcastle Crown Court I heard an interview with my neighbour who live in the flat below me. She said, ‘I had no idea of Martin Ashe’s background; I had no idea that he had been working as an undercover agent inside the IRA and yet I had worried about him because I heard him suffering terrible nightmares. And it was always the same one, shouting, “please don’t do it, please don’t do it”. The first couple of times I heard him yelling like that I thought, “God, that young man must be very disturbed” and I wondered what his past life must have been like. But the nightmares still continue to this day and it’s always the same one, the same screams, the same pleas.’

  As the hours rolled by, darkness fell and the cold of the night penetrated my very soul, I was still wide awake, unable to sleep in such an uncomfortable, damp hole. I thought how ironic it was that when I left Belfast for the first time I had been escorted by two armed SB officers, taken to the port in an RUC car and treated with kindness and more importantly, respect. Now, six years later, I was holed up in a cold, damp field with no cover and no protection, waiting for daylight so that I could make my escape like a fugitive running from justice. It brought a smile to my lips thinking how the cards fall, sometimes riding high, at others times caught in a web of deceit and lies while trying to do battle for justice. And I thought of the work that I had done in the past, work which usually resulted in praise, compliments and a pat on the back.

  But only a few had ever known the information I had gathered while working inside the IRA and those whose lives I had saved had never even been aware that they had been targeted by the IRA and their lives saved by a lad from Ballymurphy who had been brought up as a staunch Republican and whose teenage years had been spent baiting the RUC and the British Army. I’m glad those who had cheated death had no idea of what had really happened.

  As I lay curled up in a ball trying to keep warm my mind went back to those heady days when I would when I would live cheek by jowl with active service members of the IRA, drinking in Republican bars and clubs, rubbing shoulders with those IRA commanders who decided which targets should be bombed and which targets should be left alone. During my early days working with Davy Adams, before I had been officially recruited into the IRA, I would learn most of my information from driving him around Belfast and listening to his conversations with the people he was visiting. It was, in retrospect, the perfect job for the task I had been recruited to tackle, feeding everything I heard back to the Special Branch, for in his job as intelligence officer for the Belfast Brigade of the IRA, most of the planned operations passed through his hands. Later, when I became a fully fledged member, I would be permitted to hang around the clubs and bars where IRA members would spend most evenings discussing ideas and possible targets, planning their next bombing or attack on some poor, unsuspecting individual.

  The conversation I overheard and joined in would sometimes make me shudder for they would discuss the cold-blooded murders of police officers, prison warders or British soldiers as if they were of no consequence whatsoever,
with never a thought as to whether the men had wives, families or dependents. And the easier and more simple the selected target the more the IRA killers would gloat, even laughing at what they were about to carry out.

  After such an attack the yelps of joy could be heard in the club where the gunman had decided to celebrate his ‘hit’ with his mates. They would take a certain pride and a feeling of triumphalism in their achievement, describing in detail exactly what had happened and how the wretched man had reacted when confronted by a man with a gun. As I listened to these sickening tales, pretending to show enthusiasm, I would on occasions feel my stomach churn with nausea that young men could have such negative feelings towards a total stranger whom they had targeted and killed in cold blood. Though I had been brought up as a good Catholic boy and learned at my mother’s knee the treatment that the RUC, the Army and the Protestants had meted out to the Catholic minority for generations, I never for one moment believed I was betraying my fellow Catholics. I considered such horrific murders to be a stain on the reputation of the great majority of good Catholic people who wanted nothing to do with shootings and bombings of innocent people, killed solely because of their religious differences.

  During the summer of 1990 I heard from one of my PIRA pals with whom I was becoming increasingly friendly that his unit intended to go ahead and plant one-and-a-half pounds of Semtex under an RUC car attending the Radio One Road Show at Bangor in Northern Ireland. At the time he was chatting to a mate, another PIRA member, and saying that they had targeted the Radio One show the previous summer and intended to carry out the bombing this year. The plan was to build a bomb, the size of a video cassette, and stuff it with one-and-a-half pounds of Semtex, enough to wreck an RUC car and kill the occupants. Anyone else caught in the immediate vicinity of the explosion might also be killed or receive serious injuries.

  ‘Might you not kill a load of kids?’ I asked him.

  ‘That’s nothing to do with us,’ he replied, ‘we’re just after the peelers. If they get caught in the blast that’s their bad luck.’

  As I warmed to the plan I asked him, ‘How do you plan to put a UCBT on an RUC vehicle?’

  ‘Easy,’ he replied, ‘we rehearsed it last year. We went and watched how the RUC patrolled the show. The peelers parked their car not far from the stage and then got out of the vehicle and patrolled the area, searching for any troublemakers. The point is not only that the peelers left the vehicle for maybe ten to fifteen minutes, giving us plenty of time to plant the UCBT, but they never bothered to check for any bombs underneath the vehicle when they returned.’

  ‘How you will you set it off with the car parked near hundreds of people? I asked, as though totally innocent in the ways of PIRA bomber techniques.

  ‘Easy,’ he replied, ‘we’ll use a mercury tilt switch. When the peelers drive away the bomb will explode whenever the car goes uphill or downhill. One-and-a-half pounds can cause terrible damage, I promise you. They won’t stand a chance.’

  ‘But how will you get the bomb into the area?’ I asked. ‘I thought everyone was searched before they were allowed to enter the area where the Road Show was being held?’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘and this is where we’re clever. We noticed that nearly everyone turns up at the Radio Show with their ghetto blasters. Well, we’re going to buy a radio, strip it clean and out the booby trap inside. In that way we will walk in and no questions asked. Once inside we take out the bomb and attach it under the RUC car. Couldn’t be easier.’

  As my friend spoke I conjured up in my mind the devastation that such a bomb could cause in an area crowded by hundreds of teenagers enjoying the sun and the music. I couldn’t imagine how young PIRA members could even contemplate such a bombing, with total disregard for the young people who would be killed or injured in the blast. The one fortunate piece of information was that the bombing could only take place when the Radio Show was touring Northern Ireland, which meant that the RUC could be forewarned precisely.

  As always in such a case I contacted Felix as soon as possible and told him every detail of the planned bombing. I recall him shaking his head, as if unable to grasp that there were young people perfectly happy to let off a large explosion which would not only kill two RUC officers but also kill, maim or wound a number of carefree teenagers. Sometime later Felix told me that an order had gone out from RUC headquarters telling all officers never to leave their vehicles unattended, even for minutes at a time, for fear of UCBTs being attached. Whenever Radio One Road Shows were taking place that year I would make a point of listening to the news but I was thankful that I never heard of one being bombed. Such little pieces of information which I supplied and which helped save the skin of innocent people always gave me a warm feeling.

  It was in fact the only warmth I felt that night, lying under the hedge waiting for sleep to overcome me and thinking of a few of the escapades I had been involved in during my years inside the IRA. I recalled one of the most daring PIRA spectaculars which I heard about when a team of PIRA gunmen planned to use an RPG 7 – a rocket launcher – two AK47s and a Semtex coffee-jar bomb to attack a convoy of two RUC Land Rovers and an army jeep as they drove from the heavily guarded New Barnsley RUC station along the Springfield Road to the joint RUC-Army base at Springfield Parade a few miles down the road.

  The vehicles were taking RUC officers back to their cars which they left each morning behind the perimeter walls of the RUC base because it was considered far too risky for the RUC personnel to drive their own cars along the Springfield Road in the heart of IRA-controlled West Belfast. Most evenings at around 10.30, about 15 officers were taken at a time in the Land Rovers and jeeps. The PIRA planned to attack the convoy at the top of Springhill Avenue on the Ballymurphy Estate from where the attackers could make a quick escape back to their homes. Springhill was known among the Republicans of West Belfast as ‘Beirut’ because of its fearsome reputation and the number of attacks on the security forces through the years.

  I heard of the plans while chatting to a number of PIRA members in a local Republican club where they gathered most evenings for a few pints. I often called in because I found they would chat more openly after a few drinks and I could learn what was being planned.

  ‘We know exactly what time they pass by,’ one older PIRA man said as he explained the plan of attack in front of half-a-dozen of us eagerly listening youngsters. ‘We will first hit them with the RPG to immobilise the jeep then throw the Semtex coffee-jar bomb and pour in 120 rounds from the two AK47s with double magazines. That lot should give the black bastards something to cry about; they won’t know what’s hit them. If we don’t get a good result out of this one I’ll be quite surprised.’

  ‘How many men will we need?’ someone asked.

  ‘We’re planning the operation now,’ he said. ‘But what we do know is that this attack will be one of the most spectacular ever seen in Belfast. We’ll show that we can take on the might of the British Army and the RUC and knock the shit out of them. It’ll be great. If we can kill the fuckin’ lot, all the better.’

  ‘Do you know when the attack will take place?’ someone asked.

  ‘Aye,’ he replied, making a cardinal mistake in showing off in front of a group of young enthusiasts when he should have kept quiet. ‘A week tonight. It’s all planned.’

  As a result of the PIRA man shooting his mouth off I was able to give Felix precise details, dates and the exact time the attack would take place. British Army commanders and RUC chiefs were immediately informed and the area of the proposed attack was swamped by police and army personnel, blotting out any chance the PIRA gunmen had of launching any armed offensive.

  And there were many other PIRA plans I was able to thwart, though none of such a grand scale. In the spring of 1991, some four months before I was led to my entrapment, I was attending a meeting of my IRA cell in the commander’s home when someone mentioned that he had a possible target.

  ‘I’ve been watching this peeler,’ he sai
d. ‘I noticed one day that he was riding a motor-bike through the grounds of the City Hospital, taking a short-cut to work. I’ve been watching him every morning for the past five days and he’s as regular as clockwork. You could almost set your watch by his timing. I think he would be so easy to take out. He’s always on his own and I think we could take him either when he slows down to enter the hospital grounds or at the exit, when he drives across the footpath and on to the main road again. If someone waited at either end it would be so easy; a cinch.’

  There was general approval among the eight or so members present and the commander said that he would pass the idea to the ‘OO’ (Operations Officer), the man who took all the decisions of whether IRA operations went ahead or not. If given the go-ahead, plans would be drawn up for an early hit, maybe within the next few days. The IRA liked to act as quickly as possible when such targets were selected, for various reasons, and one of the principal reasons was that on so many occasions selected targets would simply vanish into thin air within days of being targeted by PIRA active service units. They didn’t like to think that, more often than not, the targets moved because someone tipped off the RUC that an attack had been planned. They preferred to think that it was simply ‘bad luck’ that the target had come to their notice too late, just when the quarry had decided to change his pattern of operation.