Thatcher's Spy - Willie Carlin

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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

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