LITMIR.BIZ

      First published in 2019 by

      Merrion Press

      An imprint of Irish Academic Press

      10 George’s Street

      Newbridge

      Co. Kildare

      Ireland

       www.merrionpress.ie

      © Willie Carlin, 2019

      9781785372858 (Paper)

      9781785372865 (Kindle)

      9781785372872 (Epub)

      9781785372889 (PDF)

      British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

      An entry can be found on request

      Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

      An entry can be found on request

      All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved alone, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

      Typeset in Sabon LT Std 12/17 pt

      Cover front: The Molostock/Shutterstock.com; Malivan_Iuliia/Shutterstock.com.

      Cover back: Gareth McCormack/Alamy Stock Photo.

      CONTENTS

       Acknowledgements

       Prologue: ‘You’ll Be Dead by the Morning’

       1. From Holy Orders to Battle Orders

       2. Back Home in Derry

       3. FRU for You

       4. Sinn Féin on the Rise

       5. A Rising Star in the Movement

       6. Martin Opens Up

       7. Gilmour Dropped and Ding-A-Ling Ditched

       8. My Cover Is Blown

       9. Haunted by the Past

       Epilogue: A Night at the Boxing

       Postscript: An Afterlife – of Sorts

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

      To Liam Clarke, my dear friend, who sadly passed away before this book was published. Liam was the Sunday Times journalist who befriended me and helped join the dots of my life as a spy. I miss him dearly.

      Hugh Jordan of the Sunday World is a journalist and a friend who has worked tirelessly over many years to keep my story in the public eye.

      My thanks to Henry McDonald of the Observer who worked endlessly on my raw manuscript and reshaped it into the book it is today.

      To Neil McKay of the Herald, simply the best journalist I’ve ever met.

      Jennifer O’Leary from BBC NI’s Spotlight team is a reporter whose courage I greatly admire.

      Bernie from the Kenova Inquiry team.

      Aaron Edwards. A colleague from Sandhurst.

      Imran Khan, my lawyer and friend, who has always been there for me and my family.

      To Conor Graham, Publisher with Merrion Press, for believing in me and risking his entire business in order to publish this book.

      Finally to my friends in Ayrshire, Scotland.

      This book is dedicated to all those men, women and children of Derry who lost their lives during the Troubles, and to all those who strove for peace, either openly or behind the scenes.

PROLOGUE

      ‘YOU’LL BE DEAD BY THE MORNING’

      By the mid-1980s my star was rising inside Sinn Féin. I was well regarded as a republican activist in Derry and was known to have the ear of leading republicans like Mitchel McLaughlin and Martin McGuinness. But there was another side to this story, for since 1974 I had led a double life, part Sinn Féin activist and part undercover secret agent for the British government, and to MI5 I was simply known as ‘agent 007’. This would all end abruptly when I was warned one day that if I didn’t leave Northern Ireland I would be ‘dead by the morning’. Before you dismiss the end of my covert life as a highly placed agent inside the Irish republican movement as a pale imitation of the spy fiction of Ian Fleming or John le Carré, please read on.

      It was thanks to a fellow spy, codenamed ‘Stakeknife’, and with a little help from one of British history’s most controversial prime ministers that I was spared interrogation, torture and a bullet in the brain. I really was within hours of summary execution by the IRA were it not for Margaret Thatcher and, more crucially, the Provisional’s spy catcher supreme, who, unknown to Martin McGuinness and the rest of the IRA leadership, was also a highly placed British agent operating at the heart of their organisation. Were it not for him I would have ended up dumped on the side of a lonely border road or in the back of an alley in Derry, my bloodied corpse left like a dog as a warning to others, killed for treachery by my old friends and comrades.

      The end arrived innocuously enough in March 1985. I was watching the television news at home in the Waterside in Derry, when I received a telephone call through from my handler, ‘Ginger’, who was stationed at Ebrington, a military-security barracks built in the nineteenth century overlooking the River Foyle. There was an unusual urgency in his voice as he told me to get to the base as quickly as possible. I could tell something was off when he offered to pick me up at the end of my street, not at our usual secret rendezvous point. As I entered the intelligence briefing room I was met by another British military intelligence officer, ‘Karen’, who looked at me gravely. ‘The Boss wants a word, Willie,’ she said, as a medium-sized stocky man with black hair, wearing a blue V-neck jumper and grey trousers, entered the room.

      The casually dressed spymaster looked at me seriously and bluntly laid out the situation, ‘Right Willie, I’m not going to beat about the bush, but I have to tell you. Your cover’s been blown.’ He went on to stress that my relationship with British military intelligence had not been compromised. However, it was my previous role working for MI5 from the mid-1970s that had been exposed. ‘We have intercepted an order from the IRA to lift and interrogate you. It’s our information that you will probably be taken away in about eight hours’ time,’ the head of the military intelligence unit continued. ‘Willie, you’ll be dead by the morning, so I’m pulling you out of here tonight.’

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