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.’
I was speechless as he carried on with his ‘orders’.
‘What I want you to do is go home now, tell your wife and give her the choice of coming with you. But you must emphasise to her that her life will be in danger if you disappear on your own. I can have you and your family out of here in a couple of hours and I’ll take you all up to Belfast tonight where you’ll be safe, but we must move fast because I don’t know who else knows or who might move against you.’
Then he informed me that Margaret Thatcher herself was personally aware of the situation and was furious I had been unmasked as a traitor (in the Provisional IRA’s eyes), and that my reports of the political intrigue and machinations within Sinn Féin had been carefully read over the last few years by the Prime Minister herself in 10 Downing Street, ‘You can be sure of one thing though, the Prime Minister already knows and is said to be livid, so you can bet she will be asking questions. You don’t have to worry about being abandoned, you’ll be well looked after.’
Just before my exposure I had been rising up the ranks of Sinn Féin in Derry and was getting ever closer to Martin McGuinness, then the IRA’s chief of staff as well as one of the party’s key strategists, and later Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland. My briefings to my handlers in Ebrington included information on McGuinness’s internal battles with even more hardline republicans, as well as his thoughts, ranging from participation in elections to his hostility to the extension into Scotland of the IRA’s English bombing campaign. Some of the secret political intelligence I had provided was mulled over and analysed by the Prime Minister, as well as her Cabinet ministers; it gave them a unique insight into the evolution of Sinn Féin and, critically, McGuinness’s own thinking.
As the Troubles raged in Northern Ireland, the wider world in the mid-1980s was gridlocked by the new Cold War. The Soviet Union, with its massive nuclear arsenal, still posed an existential threat to the West. Meanwhile, Ronald Reagan fuelled paranoia not only in Moscow but on the streets of western European cities with his ‘Star Wars’ program to militarise space alongside his deployment of cruise missiles in the UK and West Germany. The secret spy war against the Soviets continued apace, which included KGB spies covertly working for the British and Americans while disgruntled MI5 officers offered up secrets of their own to the USSR. One such traitor on the British side was Michael Bettaney, or as I had once known him, ‘Ben’.
After I was recruited as an MI5 agent following my discharge from the British Army in the early 1970s, Ben had been my handler. In 1980, Bettaney was moved at my request from the north of Ireland to work in the security service’s Soviet counter-espionage agency, based at Gower Street in London. His critics later claimed that Bettaney was driven by alcoholism and anger after being passed over for promotion; his supporters on the British far left, who befriended him when he was eventually imprisoned, allege that the working class, Oxford-educated linguist was an idealist and only volunteered to help the KGB for ideological reasons. Whatever the truth about his motives, Bettaney was compromised thanks to one of the security service’s most valuable assets inside the KGB – Oleg Gordievsky. Bettaney had been trying to contact the senior KGB chief in the USSR’s London embassy, but his information was passed to another officer, Arkady Guk, who didn’t take any notice of his request and instead forwarded it to Oleg Gordievsky – the deputy head of the KBG in London – who was in fact an agent for MI6. It wasn’t long before Bettaney was trapped and caught. This Cold War drama set off a chain reaction which resulted in our flight out of Derry with the threat of death hanging over me and my family.
After being found guilty of spying for the Soviets, in 1983 Bettaney was sentenced to twenty-three years in jail. While in Swaleside prison he befriended IRA prisoners, including one of its most important leaders, Belfast man Brian Keenan, who had established links with Libyan dictator Colonel Gaddafi and the Assad regime in Syria. An ironic friendship built up between Bettaney and members of the IRA’s England department during their incarceration; after all, Bettaney had been badly injured in an IRA car bomb while working for MI5 in Belfast in 1976. What he had to tell the IRA inmates, and in particular Keenan, was sensational. After prison staff left Keenan alone with Bettaney at mass, the ex-British spook revealed to the IRA veteran that a highly placed informer had become one of Martin McGuinness’s most trusted allies, and this agent had been in place within Derry Sinn Féin since 1974.
At first, when the information reached Belfast, the IRA thought it was a wind-up. But when they discovered who Bettaney really was they began to pump him for information. The Boss made it clear that the IRA had worked out that Bettaney had identified me, Willie Carlin, as the informer at McGuinness’s side, and the IRA’s ‘Nutting Squad’ (also nicknamed ‘The Head-Hunters’) had been dispatched from Belfast to lift me and take me away to a certain death. Astonished and horrified by this news, I asked the spymaster how he knew the ‘Nutting Squad’ was on my tail, but I would only get an answer to that conundrum once I was safely spirited out of Northern Ireland.
As I travelled back home with Ginger on the night of the revelation that my undercover career was over he had some stern advice, pleading with me to get the family ready for a rapid exit out of Derry. Ginger promised that undercover security teams would flood the area at the time of our late-night departure, to ensure our safety, but we could not bring anything with us bar a few suitcases. We would be unable to ship our furniture over to a new location in England once we were resettled, and it would have to be a quick, clean break from the city where generations of my family had grown up.
Fortunately, I had a cover story for my beloved wife Mary, which, like most really good cover stories, was based on fact. Prior to being summoned to Ebrington, the IRA’s Derry Brigade had informed me that the loyalist Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), which had an armed unit on the mainly Protestant Waterside of the city, were stalking me for a planned assassination. I truthfully told Mary that we had to get out now because the UVF were coming to kill me, though at the time I could not bring myself to reveal everything about my fourteen-year undercover stint in the republican movement – first as an MI5 agent and then in Military Intelligence.
I looked around our living room at all the things Mary had struggled over the years to buy. I was heartbroken. We had a lovely home and now it was all going to be taken away from us. In a way Mary had more to lose than I did. I wasn’t that involved with my family, though I loved them very much, but she was the lynchpin of her mum and dad’s life. Mary fretted grievously about what would happen to her elderly mother and father once we left Derry; she visited them every day, did their shopping, organised their bills, looked after their pensions and often made meals for them. How they would survive without her and how she would cope not ever seeing them again played on my mind as we dressed the children and tried to get ready in time for Ginger’s call. Mary even rinsed the dishes and ran the cleaner over the carpet in the living room. My son Mark was not convinced about our story that we were all going on a holiday, though Michael was okay about it. As for my daughter Maria, she was only five and didn’t really understand. But she loved her ‘nanny’ and I wasn’t sure how she’d adjust, never seeing
