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CHAPTER 2

BACK HOME IN DERRY

T.E. Lawrence, better known as Lawrence of Arabia, was one of the famous old boys of Bovington Camp. His Dorset retreat at Clouds Hill cottage was located just behind the barracks, and I had often visited the place because of my interest in the legendary British spy and Arabist – whom Peter O’Toole immortalised on film in David Lean’s epic biopic of his extraordinary life. Lawrence had rented the cottage in 1923 after returning from the Middle East, and he was killed nearby in a motorcycle accident twelve years later. It was here in this most apposite of spots, inside his beloved country hideaway, that I was recruited by MI5.

My commanding officer, Colonel Green, was aware of my wish to leave the army and return to war-torn Derry. He had passed on this request to a friend of his who called himself Captain Thorpe. It was Captain Thorpe who suggested we meet for coffee at Lawrence’s cottage, ostensibly to discuss what to do with the rest of my life once I left the regiment.

Two days after his call I sat in my car watching the junction where we’d agreed to meet. Right on cue a green military Morris Countryman arrived driven by a tall man in army uniform. He motioned me to join him and Captain Thorpe drove to a remote area at the back of Clouds Hill, where we waited on the open road. A black Mercedes pulled in behind us and the captain asked me to get out and meet the driver. A man in civilian clothes emerged from the Mercedes and introduced himself as ‘Alan’, removing his black leather gloves. He was very well-dressed and spoke with a very soft English accent. He led me away from Captain Thorpe, as if he wanted our conversation to be private and out of earshot.

‘I’m not in the army so you don’t have to call me Sir,’ he said. We walked and talked and he told me that his organisation had a special project on the back burner that they were now seeking to activate. He informed me that they had trawled the Officer Training College at Sandhurst looking for ‘the right person with the right credentials’ without success. My file had ended up in his office for an entirely different reason and had been brought to his attention. He told me his boss was surprised to find someone with my record and background serving in the British Army. They had checked my file at the Ministry of Defence, my confidential reports, qualifications, my personal skills, and agreed that I might be a right ‘fit’. For what? I wondered.

He then said something that left me perplexed. Alan referred to the letter from Derry which stated that a certain ‘Paul’ had made it clear to my family that even as a former British soldier I would still be safe to return home to Derry. ‘The person referred to in this letter as “Paul” is Paul Fleming, from a well-known republican family in the Waterside, Londonderry.’ Alan was remarkably well informed about who was who and the rising stars of the republican movement in Derry. Nonetheless, he went on to describe how bad the intelligence was in the area, particularly political intelligence. ‘Despite what you might read in the papers or hear in the mess, the republican movement in Londonderry is not Communist or Marxist. There is no “Danny the Red”. In your city, ever since the Para’s fucked up on Bloody Sunday, they’ve had more recruits join their ranks than the entire Infantry Corps of the British Army.’ Alan stressed that the organisation was still open for infiltration, adding these chilling words, ‘Which is where you come in.’

I protested, ‘There must be some mistake. I’m only a clerk from Bovington Camp.’

‘No you’re not,’ he said, ‘you’re a nationalist from Creggan Estate. Your family has already been affected by the Troubles and I’m not just referring to your sister. Your brother’s niece, Annette McGavigan, was shot dead by British troops in very dubious circumstances. So, listen to me Willie, we’re not looking for an SAS type. Besides, there will be an operation run by the army which targets the IRA. But understand this, that’s not what we want you to do. On the contrary, we would prefer you didn’t get involved with the gunmen. We’re interested in the “politics” of the Troubles, to run alongside another initiative which should be up and running by November.’

We’d been talking for over twenty minutes when I stopped him. ‘Look. Who are “we”? I mean, who are you?’

He explained that his name was Alan Rees-Morgan and then said, ‘Let’s just say we’re the agency who advises the Minister of Defence and the Prime Minister’, who, he added incidentally, ‘won’t be around for much longer. There are a lot of changes coming here on the mainland. There could be a Labour government by next week and they’ll want to try to resolve the situation, which we believe will have a negative effect on the unionists.’ He continued, ‘Our estimation is that the Troubles are going to get worse, with more rioting, more divisions and more opportunities for someone like you to get involved locally.’

I was in a state of shock. He gave me his phone number and asked me not to tell anyone else about our conversation. He said he would give me a few weeks to think about it and reminded me that my role (if I accepted it) would be strictly to do with politics and that in no way was I to get involved with the IRA or any other paramilitary organisation. ‘Leave that to others,’ he said. ‘Don’t get involved. And if you do come across personnel or details of an action, you must not pass it over, we’re not interested. Keep it to yourself. Remember, my policy is that the best way to keep that kind of secret is to tell no one. Okay?’

Alan got into his car and drove off, leaving me standing on my own a few hundred yards from Captain Thorpe’s car. ‘How did you get on?’ he asked, as I got into the passenger seat.

‘I don’t know,’ I replied. ‘I’ve either just been blackmailed or wound up big time.’

‘Look William,’ said Captain Thorpe, ‘that gentleman comes direct from London. He’s the real McCoy. His organisation doesn’t officially exist. They’re a secret and they are interested in recruiting you. You must be very special because they normally recruit from Oxford or Cambridge. I’ve been in the Intelligence Corps for fourteen years and only ever met two of them. If I were you I would jump at whatever he offered.’

‘Well, he didn’t offer me anything. Just gave me information about the situation in Northern Ireland.’

‘I don’t want to know!’ the captain interrupted, raising his left palm outwards towards my face. ‘Just phone him and give him your answer. Don’t tell anyone about this meeting, especially Colonel Green and definitely not your wife’.

It wasn’t long before I was back at my desk trying to get my head around what had just happened. Over the next two weeks I tried to figure out what to do.

As Alan had predicted, Prime Minister Edward Heath resigned on 4 March 1974 and was replaced with a Labour government making all sorts of noises about Northern Ireland, including pulling the troops out – much to the anger of the unionists who were threatening to bring down the Northern Ireland Executive. Alan had been right so far and in the end I phoned the number he had given me. He called back but declined another meeting, saying, ‘If you’re interested, I’ll tell you the next step, if not we forget about it. No hard feelings.’ I sat and thought. On the one hand I didn’t want to leave the army, on the other hand Mary desperately wanted to go home. This whole exercise sounded like an undercover mission, the kind of thing you only read about in spy novels or saw at the cinema.

‘You see, Alan,’ I said, ‘it’s all a bit scary and to be honest, whilst I’d love to say yes, I’m a bit afraid.’

‘Look, Willie, I’m not going to lie to you. What we want you to do is very, very dangerous. You could get killed. It’s a very volatile situation over there but we think that between your confidence, your connections in Derry and our guidance we might be able to make a difference. Let me make it clear to you. You’ll have to live the life. You’ll have to try to become a republican – one of them. You won’t be armed and the army won’t know about you, nor will the RUC. You’ll be on your own. You will get occasional financial assistance and your salary will be put aside for you should you survive. If we find out that your life is in danger, we’ll pull you out. However, if you’re caught, the government will deny all knowledge of you because they don’t know about this project. You will in fact be a secret.’

The proposal from this man, whom I didn’t know, was for me to go to live in Derry, unarmed with no backup, and spy for the intelligence service. I could be killed, and no one would ever acknowledge my existence in a city at war. By 1974, the year of our return home, there had been 3,208 shootings and 1,113 bombs across Northern Ireland with 220 dead including 13 in Derry. ‘If I agree,’ I asked, ‘when do you want me to start?’

‘As soon as your baby is born,’ he answered.

***

On 1 April 1974 our son Michael was born. Mary was a little disappointed that we didn’t have a little girl, but she was over the moon about us leaving the army and returning to Derry. She came out of hospital the next day and on 3 April 1974 we were on the motorway heading for Ireland and a new life. I didn’t tell Mary the real reason for my change of heart because as much as she wanted to return to Derry even she would never have agreed with what I was about to do. I had just given up a brilliant career, and here I was driving my wife, my 4-year-old son Mark, and a 3-day-old baby to Derry and into real danger. Worse still, all I had was a phone number in London and the word of someone I didn’t even know. I was supposedly a paid employee of the Ministry of Defence, but in some nebulous, unspecified secret role.

In early May 1974, Mary and I were allocated a house at Rose Court in Gobnascale, a small nationalist housing estate in the mainly Protestant Waterside. Compared to nearby Irish Street it was a fairly newish estate with about 500 families. I’ve read that ‘Gobnascale’ is an old Irish word for ‘Hill of Stories’, and during my time living there on that hill there would be many stories to tell. It was a bit scary at first, as night after night the republican youth of the estate rioted at the junction of our street and the Trench Road just a few yards from the house. On two separate occasions we had our main window shot in by plastic bullets when the RUC fired at rioters, who often took refuge in our garden. I was living next door to the Breens, a republican family, and four doors away from the very same Paul Fleming who had given my sister the green light, presumably from the IRA, that I was safe to return.

Things were mostly quiet on the little housing estate of Gobnascale, but that all changed one morning just a few weeks after we arrived. ‘Dolly’ Shotter, as she is still known, was a young woman in her twenties married to a local man. She was known as Dolly because of her good looks, her long blonde hair, and her love of country music and Dolly Parton. She lived at the time with her husband and her father-in-law, Alfie, in a little bungalow at the edge of Strabane Old Road and Corrody Road. The Nash family and the Shotters gave support to the local IRA volunteers, more out of fear than any belief in what they claimed to represent. Unlike the Derry side there were no senior IRA men in the area, and most of the volunteers on the Waterside were still in their mid-teens. With access to guns and explosives they were dangerous to be around, with no telling what they would get up to or who they would hurt in the process.

Two such volunteers were Paul Fleming (the young man who Alan Rees-Morgan had spoken about back at Clouds Hill), who lived adjacent to me in Rose Court, and young Liam Duffy, whose father was a member of the Peace Movement. Liam’s father would have erupted in anger had he known that his schoolboy son was a ‘would be’ volunteer. Both of them could often be seen running across the open space behind Anderson Crescent. My sister Doreen and Paul were still good friends; like a lot of young girls, she had joined Cumann na mBan (the IRA’s female armed section) and she helped Paul Fleming and other volunteers when she could. Paul would often drop into my mother’s in Anderson Crescent to see her. On the face of it, he appeared to be a nice young man who I remember being well mannered. He had a lot of time for my mother and father, as they had for him, though I noticed on more than one occasion that he would no sooner sit down in their house than a foot patrol would pass by. He’d obviously spot them on his way somewhere and didn’t want to be stopped so he would just drop in to my mother’s so as not to be seen. He would stay awhile and then leave when the coast was clear.

I was at my mother’s one morning when the RUC and the army arrived to raid the house. It was that day that I saw first-hand what it was like to be raided by the British Army. Two young soldiers wrecked my mother’s living room, smashing her little china cabinet as they searched for weapons or explosives. Upstairs they threw my brother’s CB radio against the wall, smashing it as they went through his room. In my parent’s room, one soldier pulled out all the drawers in my mother’s dressing table and, finding my father’s Second World War medals, threw them out of the window into the garden below. To me that was tantamount to a blasphemous act.

They took Doreen’s room to pieces, ripping up her jeans and holding up her underwear and laughing at one another. They violently overturned her little dressing table, smashing the glass plate that sat on top of it. They had a sniffer dog with them, which peed on the landing before they left. After finding nothing in the two hours they were there, they issued my father with a ‘Confirmation of Damage’ certificate so that he could claim compensation from the State. It took us hours to calm my father down as he cursed the English pigs for the chaos in his home.

Later that afternoon, as I helped Doreen put her room back together, she laughed as she sat on the floor lifting the bits and pieces that had earlier been neatly laid out on her dressing table. ‘What are you laughing at?’ I asked.

‘Bloody stupid cunts. They wouldn’t know a safe house if it jumped out in front of them!’ Asking her what she meant, she lifted a container of Avon talcum powder and tipped it out on the floor. I nearly died when I saw several rounds of 9 mm ammunition lying amidst the fragrant white powder.

‘Jesus Christ, Doreen. Are you mad?’ I exclaimed. ‘You could have been caught. Do you not realise that if the army had found these you and everyone in this house would have been arrested and you would probably have gone to jail for years?’

‘Listen Willie, those fuckers would need to get up early in the morning to catch me and they would need a better sniffer dog than that thing they had with them.’

I didn’t know whether to laugh at her daring and cunning or be angry over her recklessness. Later that night, Paul Fleming called in to see my father and hear all about the raid. Of course, he nipped up to Doreen’s room to see her and presumably took his little ‘arsenal’ with him when he left.

On this particular day in May 1974, Paul and Liam spent most of the afternoon in Paul’s garden. I saw them once or twice as I looked out of the kitchen window and they were obviously up to something, because they would stop talking when anyone walked past the garden, which was next to the park. I never saw either of them again, but a few days later as I was passing Strabane Old Road there was an almighty bang and everyone ran out into the street. Smoke could be seen rising above Dolly Shotter’s bungalow. People began to run towards the scene of the explosion and I could hear someone in the distance calling for help. Within minutes it was emerging that Dolly and her father-in-law had been blown up and it was being said that Mr Shotter was dead. This was clearly a bomb that had gone wrong, it couldn’t be anything else. Someone ran past me and shouted, ‘It was that wee fucker Fleming!’

By the next afternoon, even the dogs in the street seemed to be barking Paul Fleming’s name. Apparently, Dolly had spotted Paul and Liam out of her kitchen window putting something into her dustbin. She never said anything but became anxious after they hopped over her fence and left. Dolly guessed there might be something ‘stashed’ there and assumed that they would come back later and lift whatever it was. Like most people, she knew that the IRA moved weapons and explosive devices around when foot patrols were in the area. Alfie Shotter, a frail man in his fifties, had no time for republicans, especially Paul and Liam, whom he’d often chased from his yard. Unlike Dolly, he was not afraid of them and had often rebuked her for putting up with them. Dolly made her way out of the kitchen, only to be met by Alfie, who walked past her, opened the back door and stepped out into the yard. Dolly froze, hoping he wouldn’t go near the bin. As he approached the bin she ran out and shouted at him, ‘Alfie! Don’t go near that bin!’ As he started to lift the lid she grabbed him by the arm, struggling with him as she did so, but it was too late. The bomb exploded as soon as he lifted the lid. Alfie Shotter was killed outright and Dolly was flung across the yard, losing a leg in the blast and sustaining horrific facial injuries. The Army and the RUC, who regularly patrolled Gobnascale on foot, had a habit of checking back yards, hedges, outhouses and sometimes even dustbins, something that hadn’t gone unnoticed by Paul and Liam.

I was due to meet Alan a week or so later and I thought he would want to know about the bomb – not to act on my information but more out of establishing the facts. But such was the talk round the estate that there was no need. Within seventy-two hours, Paul Fleming and Liam Duffy were arrested and held at the RUC’s interrogation centre at Castlereagh for seven days. Both of them were eventually charged with Alfie Shotter’s murder. At just eighteen years of age, Paul Fleming was sent to jail for twenty years. Liam Duffy, sixteen years old, couldn’t be dealt with by the courts and was instead detained in prison at ‘the Pleasure of the Secretary of State’.

***

In the summer of 1975, Mary discovered that she was pregnant. We were delighted, even more so when she came back from the hospital one day with the news that she was expecting twins. It had been confirmed by a scan and she even had a little black and white photograph showing them in her womb. I spent the next two months showing anyone who would look the little photo and felt really proud of myself. Father Duffy, our local priest, told us that ‘this is God’s way of rewarding you for past pain and suffering’. Then, a few weeks before Christmas and a month before the babies were due, Mary was admitted to hospital in severe pain. Dr Martin was in charge of her treatment and he organised some kind of injection so that the babies would stay in her womb and not be born prematurely, at which point she went into renal failure and a helicopter was placed on standby to take her to a hospital in Belfast. During the night the babies were born and immediately placed in incubators because they were very weak and gravely ill. The two little boys were christened in the morning by the visiting priest. Little William and Thomas Carlin were fighters, and Mary sat by their incubators and prayed that God would not take them from us. Sadly, they died that afternoon and left us all devastated. It was a horrific replay of how we had lost little Sharon back in England years earlier. I could not believe or comprehend that it was happening to us all over again.

In the mourning period after the boys were buried it struck me that I had been back in Derry since 1974 with little to show in terms of my new job gathering intelligence. Over the first twelve months of my new undercover career I only met with Alan three times, and I still wasn’t sure what I was supposed to be doing. This feeling reached frustration point by early 1977, when things appeared to quieten down in Derry. But it was only a brief hiatus of inaction for me. Alan and MI5 knew that we had a telephone in our hall and I had mentioned that the Fleming family would often ask to use it to speak to family and friends at home and abroad. My handler provided a mini tape recorder, which was slotted into the phone, and it would record the Flemings and another republican family as they talked about IRA bombs in England and how the Provisional’s economic warfare would ‘make the Brits sit up and notice us a thousand times more than any bombs exploding in the centre of Derry’.

Another handler, ‘Andy’, eventually took over Alan’s role and let it be known that the strategy of bombing economic and strategic targets – particularly in London – was the brainchild of Martin McGuinness. However, the IRA’s strategy was not solely confined to planting bombs in large English cities. By 1977, the organisation was moving into a ‘leftist/anti-capitalist’ phase when it also targeted rich industrialists and multinationals on the island of Ireland. Some were to be kidnapped, especially in the Republic, while others in the North would be assassinated. Even more than McGuinness, his partner in the axis dominating Northern Command, Gerry Adams, had fallen under the influence of ultra-leftist Trotskyite thinkers, who goaded the IRA into committing ‘anti-capitalist acts’ of terrorism. The net result was a number of squalid murders of businessmen, including the shooting dead of Jeffrey Agate, the managing director of the American multinational Du Pont, in Derry in February 1977. Du Pont wasn’t just a factory, it was a massive plant just outside Derry, spread over several acres overlooking Lough Foyle. They employed hundreds of workers, mostly Catholics, and brought in millions of pounds to the local economy. There had been a number of attacks on businessmen in the past, but the lRA’s justification for these was that they were either members of the UDR or worked with the RUC or British Army. Jeffrey Agate didn’t appear to fit any of these categories. This looked like another cock-up and I could just imagine the outcry that would follow, let alone the reaction of the RUC and the army in our area.

On the night of Jeffrey Agate’s murder I was at home when my neighbour, Colm Dorrity, appeared in my hallway with a young boy dressed only in a white shirt, black trousers and black shoes. He had no jacket and was visibly shaken, not to mention the fact that he was bitterly cold. He looked about seventeen years old. ‘Wullie,’ said Colm, ‘this wee man here is looking for your Doreen. He called at your father’s first and your father sent him over to you except he knocked on my door by mistake.’

Colm was anxious to leave so I said, ‘Okay, leave him with me.’ I showed the boy into our living room and Mary immediately rose to get him a blanket and some coffee. It soon became clear to me that this young boy must have been up to no good somewhere because he was from the Derry side and was totally lost. ‘I’m Willie and that’s Mary. What do you want me to call you?’

‘Everybody calls me Shorty.’

‘Shorty, you need to calm down and relax, you’re in safe hands now and I think you should stay here the night. We’ll get you sorted in the morning.’ Later, I got into bed and realised, ‘That wee man must have been involved in the explosion at Agate’s home and lost the team he was with.’ By the next morning, the news of Agate’s murder had reached London and across the world to the White House, given that Du Pont was American owned. On every TV and radio station north and south of the border, politicians and ordinary everyday people were demanding revenge for his murder. Ian Paisley added more fuel to the fire, threatening to bring Ulster to its knees by organising an impromptu loyalist workers’ strike.

The Peace Movement, which had marched with thousands of women in Belfast the previous year demanding an end to the war, was now talking openly of marching in Derry. The Bishop of Derry, Edward Daly, called Agate’s killers ‘cold blooded murderers with no sense of shame.’ Jimmy Carter, then President of the United States, speaking from the White House said, ‘Mr Agate’s murder was a senseless act on a businessman who represented an American Company and whose only crime was to bring employment to the city’. He added, ‘the manner of his death will only further divide communities in Northern Ireland and bring unwarranted shame on all good, decent Irish Americans.’ Trade Union representatives at the plant were planning to hold a protest strike. The only people who were silent were the IRA.

I decided to leave the house for a while and called London to let them know about my lodger. They viewed the matter with great concern and Andy agreed to fly over the next day and meet up with me in Portrush on the northern coast.

‘Well, well,’ said Andy, after I had explained everything to him, ‘this is going to be tricky. Look, Willie, you and I both know that it’s 99 per cent certain that this little shit was implicated in some way in the murder of Mr Agate. However, knowing it and proving it are two different things. Furthermore, how would you explain your house getting raided when it’s never been raided before?’

‘That’s easy,’ I replied. ‘All you need to do is arrange for every house in my block to be hit, starting with next door to me, and it will be thought that he was found by accident.’

‘Okay, and what do we do after the RUC charge you with harbouring a terrorist and implicate you in the murder? Sorry Willie, but you’re not thinking straight, so this guy gets off. While he’s under your stewardship and being monitored by the IRA, you’d better pray that the RUC don’t stumble over him or that some informer doesn’t give you away.’

After several hours discussing the matter it was decided that the information would be logged but not passed on because it could incriminate me and, worst of all, blow my cover, which London did not want. I was to get rid of Shorty as soon as possible, but only when it was safe in the eyes of the IRA. After that, Shorty could be picked up at some other time well away from me.

A week went by and we did our best for Shorty, but he was becoming a nuisance and a real pain in the arse. Deep inside he was a cocky wee shit who spent most of the time admiring himself in the mirror. He also had his fair share of drink every night and would often get very cheeky in our conversations. A few nights before he left us, he and I were having a beer and the conversation led to God and the church. He was slightly tipsy because he couldn’t really drink that much. Mary felt sorry for him no matter what he’d done, because as far as she was concerned he was some mother’s son. As a keep safe, she had bought him a St Joseph’s prayer on the way back from the chapel. He laughed at her and asked her, ‘What good is this going to do me?’ Mary explained that it would keep him safe and read the inscription on the back, which said that saying the prayer regularly would keep the person safe. She read out that it had often been carried into battle and the holder would never fall into the hands of an enemy nor would poison ever have an effect on them. Shorty got up, weaved his way past us and went into the kitchen, bringing back with him a bottle of bleach. He thumped it down heavily on the coffee table and challenged Mary, ‘Go on then, drink that, missus, and show me how powerful your prayer is!’

Mary was embarrassed and left the room, taking the bleach with her, while I stood there shaking with anger. I could have planted one on him right there and then. He seemed to lose control because he got up, went to the bottom of the stairs and put on the jacket that had been sent over to him. ‘What are you doing?’ I said.

‘I’m goin’ down to Annie’s Bar to get a fuckin’ drink,’ he replied, belligerently. Part of me wanted to open the door and kick him the fuck out into the street, but the sane part of me said I should stop him. I grabbed him around the shoulders and tried to persuade him that it was foolish to go to the pub; besides, the word hadn’t come from the Derry side that he could leave the house. He became aggressive and lashed out at me. I was about to grab him again but decided to hit him instead, then I hit him once more just for Mary and St Joseph. He was now trying to kick out at me so I threw him onto the stairs and grabbed him by the throat.

‘Listen to me ya wee cunt, you don’t seem to realise the trouble you’re in. Just about every policeman, every soldier and every informer in Derry is looking for you and if they don’t get yee, half the population of Derry will string you up by the balls for the fuck-up you and your friends made out at Altnagelvin last week. On top of that the word amongst the boys is that you and your friends weren’t supposed to do what you did.’

He tried to speak but I was choking him. As I eased my grip he wheezed, ‘That’s a load of shite. The job was given the go-ahead.’

I told him I couldn’t care less but he was going nowhere. I let him up and ordered him back into the living room.

‘I’ll get you fucking shot for this,’ he said, looking into the mirror at the blood on his lips and nose.

‘Finish your drink and get to sleep.’ I wasn’t sure of the importance of what I’d just heard or the ramifications of beating up an IRA volunteer. As I went to sleep I decided this guy had to go. Doreen and the boys had all steered well clear of my house because of the danger of being seen coming and going, which was good security but didn’t help me when I needed to speak to them.

The next day I walked down to Fleming’s to see if Lynn Fleming was around. She and Doreen were good pals and I felt sure that she was bound to know that I was keeping someone from over the town. Luckily, Lynn was coming around the corner and I stopped her. ‘Lynn, I’m having problems with the young guy I’m looking after,’ I said. It was Lynn who suggested that to get Shorty sorted out I should go over the town and see Martin McGuinness.

***

When I knocked on the door of his Brandywell home, Martin McGuinness was sitting on the sofa with a pink safety pin in his mouth, changing his baby’s nappy. The famous Derry IRA commander spoke through his teeth as he enquired how he could help, and I wondered how many times in these typical domestic situations McGuinness had to deal with callers making some kind of complaint, seeking advice or looking for help from the IRA. I had been lucky to catch him, so to speak, as the legend went that he was more often than not on the run across the border from the Brits and the cops. To get an audience with him was fortunate.

I briefly explained the problem with Shorty, who was still billeted in my house even though he was currently Derry’s most wanted man after the Agate murder, and outlined our problems, including my scuffle with him the night before.

McGuinness immediately understood the gravity of the situation and put the baby down on the sofa, keeping a close eye on it. He turned to me and said with a smile, ‘So, you want rid of him, do you?’

I thought for a second and then replied, ‘No! Not until it’s safe for him. But he needs to be told that he can’t go to the pub or be seen in the area.’ I also explained how Shorty had threatened to have me shot for restraining him.

Martin stood up and ushered me to the door. ‘What’s your name again?’ he enquired.

‘Willie Carlin,’ I replied.

‘Anything to John Carlin?’

‘No, but I have heard of him.’

‘So, you’re not in Sinn Féin?’

‘No.’

‘Right, Willie, leave that with me and I’ll see somebody after and get it sorted out for yee, okay? In the meantime, you tell him that if he attempts to leave your house again, he’ll be in deep trouble.’

I realised immediately that McGuinness meant what he said; one word from him and for us the Shorty problem would quickly be over.

At half past ten that night, a man came to our door and asked to speak to Shorty alone. Mary and I sat in the kitchen with Mark, who had become friendly with Shorty because when he was sober and not being cocky, he was quite likeable. After a short while, Shorty and the man came into the kitchen.

Shorty put out his hand and shook Mark’s hand. Then he turned to Mary and said, ‘Mary, I’m sorry about the other night, it was only the drink talkin’.’ He then produced the St Joseph’s prayer from his jacket and asked her if he could keep it. Mary smiled and nodded. He came around to my side of the table and put his arms out to give me a hug. I stood up and put my arms around him. I patted him on the back. ‘You take it easy.’

For a brief moment I thought he was going to cry. The man who had come to collect him thanked Mary, winked at Mark and within minutes they left by the back door. At last we were over our ordeal.

Over the following days, the protests and marches subsided. Jeffrey Agate’s funeral was a very sad affair. The sight of his poor wife standing by his graveside will be ever fixed in my memory. She was just an ordinary working-class girl from Newcastle in the north east of England, thrust into this extraordinary situation and consumed by grief. As I watched, I just couldn’t get my head around the reason for his murder. For a murder it was, and even ordinary nationalists, who whilst not agreeing with the IRA could sometimes understand their rationale, did not agree with this killing. After all, the IRA claimed to be protecting the people of Derry from the British Army and the RUC. However, the reality for Derry people was that far from protecting them from these occasional thugs, anyone in Derry, even unarmed businessmen, were fair game to be murdered so long as it suited whatever screwed-up strategy the IRA thought they had. The IRA never admitted its involvement in Agate’s murder, but later in the year they made a veiled attempt to explain the thinking behind it. The killing only strengthened my resolve to keep working in my undercover role, which was still tentative at this stage.

On 14 March 1977, another business manager, James Nicholson, was murdered as he visited the Strathearn Audio factory, in west Belfast. Like Agate he was English and, like Du Pont, the factory employed mainly Catholics. The outcry that followed led the IRA’s Northern Command to issue a notice in Dublin through The Irish Times, stating, ‘In all cases, those executed by the IRA played a prominent role in the effort to stabilise the British-oriented Six County Economy.’ The notice added, ‘Those involved in the management of the economy served British interests.’ However, there is no denying this was yet another squalid murder in the IRA’s leftist phase, when they behaved like the ultra-left gangs causing mayhem in Europe such as Germany’s Baader–Meinhof group. They imagined that by killing the odd businessman here and there they were somehow striking a blow against the entire capitalist system. It was pathetic, stupid, cruel and insane.

***

In the spring of 1977, the Reverend Ian Paisley – one of the men I personally blame for the eruption of the Troubles – was threatening a replay of the 1974 Ulster Workers’ Strike. Three years earlier, an alliance of unionist politicians, loyalist paramilitaries and pro-British trade unionists overthrew the first ever power-sharing executive at Stormont. Paisley was now leading from the front, whipping up the likes of the Ulster Defence Association for a second general strike. This time it was in response to what he claimed was a deteriorating security situation, though many saw it as an attempt by Paisley for a putsch. Although I had nothing but contempt for Paisley and his sectarian form of politics, his strike would provide the inroad for me into Sinn Féin activism and unintentionally beat a path towards Martin McGuinness.

The strike began on 3 May 1977. The next day Mickey Roddy, who lived beside us on Rose Court, called in to see me, ‘We’re trying to organise cars to go over the border to Buncrana and bring back necessities for the people in the area.’

‘I’m up for that, Mickey,’ I said. Mickey originally came from Bishop Street, on the Derry side. He was an ex-Official IRA member and was now a member of Sinn Féin. He was a decent bloke and I had a lot of time for him. We called on Colm Dorrity, who had also expressed an interest in doing something to help ‘stock up’. Colm had collected money from various families and pensioners who were worried that the power would go off, and a lot of them were scared because of their experiences of the 1974 strike. We visited bakeries and grocery shops across the border in Donegal, buying up reserves of staple foods in case supplies were cut in the North due to blockades by the loyalists. The IRA even saw to it that I was paid for the petrol I used going back to Donegal for torches, batteries, paraffin heaters and candles. I was becoming known in the district as a community activist.

The power workers on the east coast of Northern Ireland pulled the plug on the regional electricity supply. With no power and no television, the residents in Gobnascale became used to sitting around the fire at home trying to find things to talk about. Tommy McGlinchey, the local coal merchant, saw to it that Gobnascale was well supplied with coal and told people they could pay when they could afford it. Out on the streets the residents were already used to having no streetlights and walking around at night in the dark. Even the local bar was open, so you could go there at night and have a drink by candlelight; needless to say that never really caught on. There were intermittent power cuts, but it wasn’t as bad as anticipated and this time the strike didn’t succeed. Roy Mason, the hard-headed Labour MP and Northern Ireland secretary, refused to give in to Paisley’s many demands – as was widely predicted at the time – and the strike collapsed after just thirteen days.

By the summer of 1977, our family life hit an all-time high. Mary and I had decided to try one more time for another baby, though after our experience with the twins I was very apprehensive. Still, I shouldn’t have been because on 3 July at Altnagelvin Hospital, Mary gave birth to a little girl, who we named Maria. Mary and I were over the moon and I remember being so delighted that as I drove back home to tell Mary’s parents, I went around the roundabout at the hospital four times, whooping and yelling out of the window. For the next eight or nine months I was totally dedicated to Maria, and it seemed everybody was really pleased for us given what had happened to Sharon and the twins. Maria was the apple of my eye.

***

By the following summer I was back to my old routine again, and it was in late September 1978 that I was invited to a republican meeting in Gobnascale to discuss the forthcoming march celebrating the tenth anniversary of the Derry riots. The ‘boys’ from the IRA were the main representatives, but it was here that I met Eddy McGowan, a painter and decorator by trade and a committed Sinn Féin activist who lived with his wife Maeve and family on the estate. Also present were John Carlin (no relation), Mickey Roddy and Tommy McGlinchey. Tommy had been the victim of a UVF car bomb attack at his home on Fountain Hill. He had lost both legs, but that didn’t stop him from leading a full life and driving a specially modified car. He was an active member of Sinn Féin, was well respected by the people at the Top of the Hill, and held a lot of sway in the Waterside. The meeting was a fairly quiet affair as we planned a strategy for the march from the Waterside railway station up Duke Street and over the Craigavon Bridge. Ian Paisley and the loyalists of Derry were adamant that the Waterside was a Protestant area and that the march was an aggressive action designed to upset the unionist population. They made it quite clear that they were going to hold a counter demonstration and prevent the Sinn Féin march from taking place. (At this stage I was still a ‘civilian’, not a member of Sinn Féin but someone who sympathised with them.)

As we left the station on 8 October 1977, we were about to become involved in one of the bloodiest riots the Waterside had ever seen. The rally was attacked by loyalists from Bonds Hill and from behind Nixon’s garage on Spencer Road. In fairness to the RUC commander in charge, he did his best to organise protection for our march. However, a lot of the young RUC men sympathetic to the unionists weren’t so protective as they joined in ‘baton charging’ the march, leading to running battles with them as well as attempts to defend ourselves from the loyalist crowds. It took over an hour to march 150 yards to the bridge and a further hour to cross it. Even as we reached the Derry side, we were attacked by gangs from the Protestant Fountain Estate. All in all, over one hundred marchers were injured and seventy RUC men were left maimed, with most of their injuries being sustained as a result of being bottled and stoned by loyalists. Ironically, later that evening at the casualty department of Altnagelvin Hospital, RUC constables sat united with republicans as they all waited to be treated for their injuries.

***

Over the previous four years I had met quite a few men from MI5, all of whom didn’t really have a clue as to the grit and determination of the republican movement in Derry. But they were beginning to understand – partly, I hoped, through my political reports – that whilst not giving total support to the IRA, ordinary decent nationalists had no time for the British government, the British Army, and least of all the RUC. One critical fact I relayed to MI5 was that, contrary to their belief, not all IRA volunteers were ‘unemployed, mindless thugs’. Indeed, a lot of them were either employed or attending some form of further education, and some of them were quite astute in their thinking. I had also reported that one of the ‘boys’ in the Waterside was talking about a new structure which would see them form into small 4–5 person groups known as cells that would make it harder for informers to penetrate (or so they thought). My handler Andy assured me that he would pass on the information about these new cell structures to the army. Yet with no clear role for me as a ‘spy’, and feeling no sense of achievement, I drifted into the public domain in an entirely different manner.

I was singing in pubs and clubs and making a few extra pounds to help supplement our income. I was quite popular out of town in what were known as ‘singing pubs’. Most of the lounges would have a group who would play from 9 to 11.30pm. I would be announced as the guest artist and would sing and play guitar from about 10 to 10.30pm. Singing was my hobby and it wasn’t long before I became ‘Billy Carlin’ the country singer and found myself in some demand. Within two years I was fronting my own group, Billy Carlin and the Envoys, which toured around Donegal as well as Derry. I loved country music and I felt happy on the road, away from the political maelstrom; it was a welcome hiatus in my secret life as an agent.

The covert world, however, was never far away and my meetings with MI5 contacts were becoming more frequent, especially since I had a new handler who called himself ‘Ben’. The location of our conversations had also changed. Before they were held in car parks and picnic areas, but now we had a house at our disposal in a spot outside Limavady on the road to Castlerock. I would enter the house through the back door, which led straight into the kitchen, where I would usually find Ben waiting for me, notebook at the ready and coffee brewing. At first it was interesting working with him. He appeared different from the others, more open and down to earth. He had a very low opinion of the army and said of the RUC, ‘I wouldn’t trust them as far as I could spit.’ He was a Catholic and an only child, and his parents, whom he would visit quite often, lived in England. At only 5 ft 5 in, he wore a tweed jacket, corduroy trousers, glasses and smoked a pipe. He wasn’t the usual MI5 ‘type’ I’d been used to dealing with. The other thing he did was drink, and whiskey was his favourite tipple.

We wouldn’t meet at the house very often, instead Ben would arrange for us to go to a hotel or somewhere on the coast. His favourite was the Londonderry Arms in Carnlough on the Antrim coast. He preferred lunchtime meetings, which was good for me even though it meant that I had to sit and watch him consume large quantities of Bushmills whiskey. I wondered why, with a house at our disposal, Ben preferred to meet at other venues, and I was soon to discover the reason. I was on my way to meet him on the Antrim coast one lunchtime and as usual turned right to head up the coast road out of Limavady, which went straight past the house. As I drove up the road, a red Peugeot came out of the gates of the house and headed back into Limavady, coming straight towards me. I had the shock of my life, for there in the passenger seat was Martin McGuinness, bent forward as if he was reading or looking at something on his knee. I quickly looked the other way in the hope that the driver (whom I couldn’t place) didn’t recognise me. As I drove towards Carnlough I could feel my right foot shaking on the accelerator and sweat running down the back of my shirt. A little further on, I stopped at a layby and got out to catch my breath. What the hell was Martin McGuinness doing coming out of an MI5 house? I was late for my meeting with Ben, who by now had consumed a considerable amount of Bushmills, and I didn’t share with him what I had just witnessed. However, a few weeks later I had an even bigger shock.

One afternoon after seeing Ben I was heading back to Derry to attend a meeting on Cable Street when I spotted Ben sitting in his car outside Martin McGuinness’s house. Ben had often told me that if he could meet McGuinness he ‘could put him wise’ and let him know what was really going on ‘behind his back’. I thought it was just the drink talking but here he was outside Martin’s house with no telling what he would do or say if challenged. He stood out like a sore thumb, and I knew that if Ben was caught it would only be a matter of time before he told his interrogators about his work, and of course about me. I drove past him, turned around and parked a few yards behind his car. I ran to the driver’s door and beckoned him to wind down the window. Immediately, I could see that Ben was very drunk!

‘Listen, Ben,’ I said with some urgency, ‘you’re sticking out here like a sore thumb and it won’t be long before someone arrives and will challenge you. So, for fuck sake get out of here before you get us both killed.’ That seemed to sober him up a bit because he started his engine and left.