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THATCHER’S SPY
Willie Carlin was born and raised in Derry. Joining the British Army in 1965, he was recruited by MI5 in 1974, and later the Force Research Unit, to infiltrate Sinn Féin. Over the next 11 years, he built up close contacts with Martin McGuinness and Mitchel McLaughlin, becoming one of Britain’s most valuable long-term agents in Northern Ireland. His cover was blown by a former handler in 1985, and he and his family were extracted to a new life with new identities. He continues to live outside Ireland to this day.
THATCHER’S SPY
MY LIFE AS AN MI5 AGENT INSIDE SINN FÉIN
WILLIE CARLIN
First published in 2019 by
Merrion Press
An imprint of Irish Academic Press
10 George’s Street
Newbridge
Co. Kildare
Ireland
© 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
Prologue: ‘You’ll Be Dead by the Morning’
1. From Holy Orders to Battle Orders
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
