Untitled Document
Exclusive: confessions of a secret agent turned terrorist
KEVIN Fulton is very clear about where the orders were coming from. 'I was
told that this was sanctioned right at the top,' he says, sipping a Pepsi in
the bar of a Glasgow hotel. 'I was told 'there'll be no medals for this, and
no recognition, but this goes the whole way to the Prime Minister. The Prime
Minister knows what you are doing.'
This was 1980, and if Margaret Thatcher knew about the activities of military
intelligence agents such as Fulton, then she was also aware her own military
officers were planning to infiltrate British soldiers as 'moles' into the IRA.
These moles were ordered by their handlers to carry out terrorist crimes in
order to keep their cover within the Provos so they could feed information on
other leading republicans back to security forces.
For almost two years the Sunday Herald has been investigating the activities
of the FRU -- the Force Research Unit, an ultra-secret wing of British military
intelligence. Fulton worked for the FRU for much of his career as an IRA mole.
This unit, which has been under investigation by Scotland Yard commissioner
Sir John Stevens for more than a decade, was involved in the murder of civilians
in Northern Ireland.
Nicholas Benwell, a detective sergeant formerly attached to the Stevens Inquiry,
says the Scotland Yard team came to one conclusion: that military intelligence
was colluding with terrorists to help them kill so-called 'legitimate targets'
such as active republicans. FRU handlers passed documents and photographs to
their agents operating within paramilitary groups detailing targets' movements
and the whereabouts of their homes. Pictures were also handed over to help gunmen
identify their victims. But there was a problem. The targeting was far from
professional and many of the victims of these government-backed hit squads were
innocent civilians.
In 1989 the FRU passed information to the UDA which the loyalist gang used
to murder the Belfast solicitor Pat Finucane, who was shot dead in front of
his wife and children. Last week, Prime Minister Tony Blair pledged that the
Government was determined to uncover the truth about Finucane's murder. The
Canadian judge Peter Cory who was called in by the government to investigate
the case is expected to recommend a public inquiry. The Irish government is
also pressing for an inquiry of its own.
So who was the overall controller of the FRU with its 'licence to kill' republicans?
Until now it seemed that responsibility for the activities of the FRU rested
on the shoulders of one man -- Brigadier Gordon Kerr, the Scottish officer who
led the unit and is now the British military attach? to Beijing. A two-part
BBC Panorama programme, concluding tonight, much of it based on the Sunday Herald's
previous investigations, puts Kerr squarely in the frame.
But if Fulton's claims are correct, then Kerr, soon to be questioned by the
Stevens team, was just one link in a chain of command which went all the way
to the cabinet and the Prime Minister. As Fulton says: 'Kerr was just following
orders. Soldiers don't make up the rules, they just do as they're told.'
Fulton's story begins in 1979. He was 19, and had just enlisted in the First
Battalion Royal Irish Rangers. Kevin Fulton isn't his real name, but a pseudonym
used to protect his identity since turning whistle-blower on the activities
of the British military, the RUC and the security services in Ulster's 'dirty
war'. His work for military intelligence has been confirmed by FRU sources.
Fulton's military file quickly found its way onto the desks of the Intelligence
Corps, the regiment which includes the FRU. It made interesting reading. Here
was a Catholic from Newry, in the heart of a republican strong-hold, who seemed
a loyal servant of the Crown. After only a few weeks in the army, Fulton's staff
sergeant approached him. 'I was told that some guys from military intelligence
wanted to speak to me,' Fulton says. 'They asked me if I'd like to work for
them and I said 'no' as I wanted to remain in uniform. They told me to think
about the offer. They added that I shouldn't tell anyone about the visit and
that if I was asked I should say they were from a military welfare group. The
next time we met they asked me if I'd go to Newry with them. We looked through
pictures of local characters and I put names to faces, saying if they had a
republican background or not.'
The two FRU officers, one of whom was Scottish, continued to try and persuade
him to work with them. 'They confessed they needed guys like me -- Catholics
from that part of Northern Ireland -- in order to get inside the Provos,' he
says.
Fulton was still unsure, so the FRU asked him if he could help recruit a Catholic
civilian in Newry who might be willing to go inside the IRA. He did. It was
an old friend, who he refers to as Agent Washington. He and Fulton accompanied
FRU members to the army training camp at Ballykinlar in County Down. 'He was
given weapons training. They taught him how to fire an M16, AK-47s, Remington
wingmaster shotguns, Sterling sub-machine guns and a Browning 9mm,' says Fulton.
'Remember that this was a civilian going inside the IRA.'
Fulton finally decided he'd work with military intelligence. In 1981, he was
officially given a compassionate discharge from his regiment on the fictitious
grounds that his father was seriously ill. He also received papers claiming
he'd been thrown out for republican sympathies -- a great document to present
to the IRA men he would soon befriend.
From then until 1995, Fulton remained on full army pay as he worked his way
through the ranks of the IRA. He began drinking in republican bars in Dundalk
and socialising with senior IRA officers, including Patrick Joseph Blair, who
the Sunday Herald named this year as one of the men behind the Omagh bombing.
Blair later went on to became Fulton's 'mentor'.
Not long after his discharge, he told one prominent IRA man that he wanted
to join the organisation. He was taken to a room above a bar and confronted
by a number of men in balaclavas. 'I'd told them that I'd been kicked out of
the army and they started shouting at me saying 'So you're telling us you'd
shoot your f***ing comrades if you saw them in Crossmaglen?' I said 'Yes, of
course'.
'They started calling me a tout (republican slang for an informer) and saying
they were going to shoot me. Eventually, they dragged me outside. They told
me to kneel and say the Act of Contrition. I heard a huge bang behind me. It
was them banging a big bit of wood on the ground to pretend to be a gunshot.
They were testing me. They told me to come back when I was ready.
'My handlers thought this was great. I offered my services to the IRA saying
I'd help carry out robberies to fund them. This was all with the knowledge of
my handlers in the FRU. I made pals with a prominent Sinn Fein councillor in
Newry who suggested I hijack a lorry carrying TVs. I knew that this would give
me credibility, so that's what I did. I took a lorry in Belfast with about £100,000
of TVs inside.'
Fulton was later arrested for the robbery and served a year in the Crumlin
Road prison in Belfast. Because of his republican connections he was denied
the usual privileges of an ODC -- an ordinary decent criminal. This also gave
him additional credibility with the IRA.
Fulton was released in 1986 and inducted straight into the IRA. 'My handlers
told me to do anything to win their confidence. That's what I did. My brief
was that if I got into a situation where I couldn't get to my handlers but I
had to break the law, I was to try not to take a life. I was to shoot high or
blow up a bomb prematurely. But that isn't always possible. If I f***ed up all
the time, then the IRA would shoot me. Don't forget I also ran the risk of getting
shot by the army and the police. I mixed explosive and I helped develop new
types of bombs. I moved weapons. If you ask me, 'Did I kill anyone?' then I
will say 'no'. But if you ask me if the materials I handled killed anyone, then
I will have to say that some of the things I helped develop did kill.
'I reiterate, my handlers knew everything I did. I was never told not to do
something that was discussed. How can you pretend to be a terrorist and not
act like one? You can't. You've got to do what they do. The people I was with
were hard-hitters. They did a lot of murders. If I couldn't be any good to them,
then I was no use to the army either. I had to do what the man standing next
to me did.'
This took an especially dark turn when Fulton became a member of the IRA's
'internal security squad' -- also know as the 'torture unit' -- which interrogated
and executed suspected informers. 'I remember once when a guy had been questioned
for three days in a safe-house in the Republic,' says Fulton. 'They eventually
rolled out a sheet of plastic and decided we were going to 'nut' him. We drew
straws to decide on who would do the shooting. Luckily, I didn't draw the short
straw.'
In 1992, Fulton told his handlers -- this time in both the FRU and MI5, that
his IRA mentor Blair was planning to use a horizontally-fired mortar for an
attack on the police. His handlers did nothing. Within days, Blair fired the
device at an armoured RUC Land Rover in Newry, in the process killing policewoman
Colleen McMurray. Another RUC officer lost both his legs.
Fulton then travelled to the US and helped develop light-sensitive bombs, activated
by photographic flashes, to overcome the problem of IRA remote-control devices
having their detonation signal jammed by army radio units.
'I broke the law seven days a week and my handlers knew that. They knew that
I was making bombs and giving them to other members of the IRA and they did
nothing about it. If everything I touched turned to shit then I would have been
dead. The idea was that the only way to beat the enemy was to penetrate the
enemy and be the enemy. At the time I'd no problem with this way of thinking.'
The claim that the cabinet and Thatcher knew of these types of operations is
startling. Thatcher's office has refused to comment on Fulton's claims. It is
known, though, that intelligence supplied by other British army moles inside
the republican movement was being read at cabinet level. One such mole, Willie
Carlin, was flown out of Northern Ireland in Thatcher's Prime Ministerial jet
in 1985 after his cover was blown. As chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee,
which met weekly at Number 10, Thatcher was kept informed of FRU activities.
Whether this ran to the day-to-day details of agent-handling is not known. Thatcher
did grant the FRU extra funding to recruit agents in the wake of the IRA's Remembrance
Day bombing in Enniskillen.
Fulton split with both the IRA and military intelligence in the mid-1990s after
a number of terrorist operations went disastrously wrong. Once his handlers
told him to get a mobile phone and a car for a planned hit in 1994 on a senior
RUC officer in Belfast. The IRA team was arrested on its way to carry out the
murder.
Fulton believes his handlers thought he had outlived his usefulness and deliberately
linked him to the operation before tipping off the police about the plan. By
then, the army had secured a far more highly-placed mole within the IRA -- a
man still active and codenamed Stakeknife. Fulton is sure that he was compromised,
so the IRA would kill him and believe they were free of informers, allowing
Stakeknife to pass top-grade information to the military without risk of being
detected. 'If I was dead that would have been the end of it,' he says. 'There
would have been no embarrassment to the army.'
From 1995 until now Fulton has been fighting the MoD -- demanding they clear
his criminal record, give him a new identity, a relocation package and provide
a military pension. 'If they hadn't screwed me, then I wouldn't be screwing
them now,' he says. 'If the IRA ever find me I'm dead. I accept I'm a marked
man, but I intend to take everyone down with me who was in on this -- no matter
how high up the stink goes.'