NINE

‘TRAINING JOSEPH MEEHAN took six months,’ said Angela Fenwick, staring out over the grey-brown expanse of the Thames. ‘We would have liked to have given him more time, but we didn’t have more time, so we packed everything into those six months. He lived in a series of safe houses, always alone, and the instructors came to him. Without exception these were the top people in their respective fields and permanently attached to Special Forces or Military Intelligence institutions on the mainland. For obvious security reasons no serving personnel were let anywhere near him. To start with we put him in one of the accommodation bunkers at Tregaron. Isolation conditions, of course, and we bugged the room and tapped the phone.’

Alex knew Tregaron well. Two hundred acres of windswept Welsh valley, rusted gun emplacements and dilapidated bunkers, all of it behind razor wire. He’d blown up a few old cars there as part of his demolitions training. Bloody miserable place to stay on your own, especially in winter. ‘Who did you put in charge of him?’ asked Alex.

‘An RWW warrant officer, who provided us with progress reports and so on. We started off by getting a couple of the Hereford Training Wing NCOs to put him through their unarmed combat course, and sharpen up his advanced weapons and driving skills. Apparently he managed to bring the unarmed combat instructor to his knees by the end of the third session.’

‘Impressive,’ confirmed Alex. ‘I wouldn’t fancy trying to deck one of those guys.’

Fenwick nodded. ‘At the same time we had an instructor from Tregaron taking him through his surveillance and anti-surveillance drills, and generally familiarising him with intelligence procedures – drop-offs, dead-letter boxes and so on. After this we brought in a rapid succession of people to teach him individual skills like covert photography, lock-picking, bugging and counter-bugging, demolition and so forth. You probably know most of the specialists in question?’

‘Stew for locks?’ asked Alex. ‘Bob the Bomber for dems?’

‘Well, it’s not exactly how they were introduced to me,’ said Angela Fenwick with a smile. ‘But I think we’re probably talking about the same people. We had a couple of our own Service people bring him up to speed on computers, too. The technology was obviously less advanced than it is now but it was clear even then that the intelligence war was going to be fought every bit as keenly in cyberspace as on the ground.

‘Meehan learnt very fast indeed, especially the technical stuff. According to his service record he’d always been a natural with electronics and the SAS demolitions people described him as the best pupil they’d ever had. The usual routine was that he’d do the physical stuff in the mornings and the classroom stuff in the afternoon. The Tregaron people updated him on the geography of the province and told him the locations of all the drinking houses, social clubs, players’ homes, safe houses et cetera, to the point where he could almost have got work as a minicab driver, and at least once a day they ran him through different aspects of his cover story. Like all the best cover stories, this had the advantage of being ninety-five per cent true. Only nine months of it would have to be fictionalised. Nine months and a lifetime’s beliefs.’

Alex was impressed by Fenwick’s grasp of the salient details of the operation. She certainly seemed more on top of things than most of the MI5 agents he’d met in the field. He was also beginning to feel the beginnings of sympathy for Meehan. If the ex-Royal Engineer was twenty-three in 1987, thought Alex, he’s just a year older than me. We were probably learning much the same things at much the same time. The difference being that I was learning them in company with a bunch of mates and going out on the town on Friday nights and he was stuck in an isolated bunker in Tregaron with a tapped phone. Poor bastard.

‘Anyway,’ continued Fenwick, ‘the instructors hammered away at him pretty much full-time, seven days a week. We had a couple of the JSIW people come down and take him through his story until he was practically reciting it in his sleep. And, of course, we played the usual mind games, getting him to memorise complex documents, waking him up in the middle of the night to check minute aspects of his cover, that sort of thing. Every room in the house was plastered with pictures of IRA players, so even in his time off he was taking in information.’

She paused. To either side of her George Widdowes and Dawn Harding sat in trance-like silence.

‘After three months we moved him down to Stockwell for a couple of days so that the Watchman team could spend some time with him and from there it was on to Croydon for a couple of months of advanced fieldcraft training with our service instructors. By that stage we were very much concentrating on demilitarising him, on knocking the professional soldier out of him. For that reason his time at Croydon was deliberately made as unstructured as possible. We fed him junk food, beer and roll-ups, slowed his metabolism down, sent him on the sort of exercise that involves spending the day in a pub. There’s a test we set field agents that involves selecting a total stranger in a public place – pub, launderette, that sort of place – and seeing what information you can extract. There was a checklist we had – name, address, phone number, car registration number, job description, place of birth, spouse’s maiden name, credit card number … It’s not an easy skill but Meehan got to be very good at it indeed – and he always made the other people think that they were the ones doing the questioning. All in all, he was a natural. A fantastic find.’ She coughed and patted her throat. ‘Sorry, as you can see I’m not used to doing so much talking.’

Standing, she walked to a small table beside her desk and poured herself a glass of Evian water. George Widdowes half rose, as if about to pat her on the back, but caught Dawn Harding’s eye and sat down again. The room, Alex noticed, was becoming uncomfortably stuffy.

‘After Croydon,’ Widdowes said, ‘we put our man through his first real test. We sent him back to the Royal Engineers two weeks before the 14th Int selection course was completed – the course, that is, that we’d pulled him out of several months earlier – and told him to get himself kicked out of the regiment. Left it up to him how he managed it.

‘What he did was to go around telling everyone he’d been kicked off the 14th Int course because he was Catholic and Irish-born. He made it look as if this had really dented him – he started drinking a lot, picking fights, getting his name on charge sheets and so on. He’d already visibly put on weight and was a long way from being the lean, mean fighting machine the Engineers had originally sent up to Tregaron. There was an insubordination charge, a complaint of insulting behaviour by one of the civilian catering staff and some incident with a pub bouncer in Chatham – all slippery-slope stuff. The end came when one of the warrant officers discovered some detonator cord in his locker in the course of a room search. He claimed that it was a mistake, that he’d signed it out for instruction purposes and forgotten to sign it back in again, but the CO wasn’t having it and Meehan was out on his arse.’

Alex whistled quietly and Widdowes shrugged. ‘It was the only way. The whole thing had to be believable – we couldn’t risk asking the CO to fake up a dishonourable discharge. Enough people were in the know already.

‘Immediately after his discharge Meehan moved back to London and got a bed in a working men’s hostel in Kilburn. Within a couple of weeks he’d picked up work with an emergency plumbing and electrical repair outfit run by a local tough called Tony Riordan. He stuck with Riordan long enough to figure out all the scams and fiddles, and generally acclimatise himself in the role of jobbing electrician, and in the evenings, like any other twenty-three-year-old, he’d hit the bars. As we hoped would happen before too long in that area, he ran into a few exiles from Belfast and Derry, and picked their brains about job prospects over there. Wasn’t a political guy, he said, just had family over there and wanted a change.

‘He ended up being given a few names. Nobody who’d seen the quality of his work thought twice about recommending him. And finally, over the water he went.

‘The first thing he did over there was to visit his relatives. There was his mother, of course, still living over the pool hall in Bogside, and there were the usual uncles and aunts and cousins scattered around the place. He looked them all up, said his hellos, paid his respects. He didn’t advertise the fact that he’d been in the army, but he didn’t try to hide it either. Just told anyone who asked that he’d got fed up and left.

‘He saw his mother for the first time in more than ten years, but made no secret of how he felt about her walking out on the family. The boyfriend, by now a pissed old fart approaching sixty – bit like me – tried on a bit of Republican stuff, told him there were people he should meet and so on, but Meehan wasn’t buying. Didn’t want to know, he said. Wasn’t interested.

‘By the autumn he was living in Belfast. A cousin who was a chartered surveyor – highly respectable guy, married, kids, house in Dunmurry – offered to take Meehan in until he’d found his feet. Meehan stayed there for eight weeks or so, sorted himself out a job with the service department of a store in the city centre, a sort of Tandy-type place called Ed’s Electronics, and moved into a rented place a few streets away from his cousin. He also started seeing a girl, a hairdresser called Tina Milazzo. She was a careful choice – Catholic, clearly, but not part of any obvious player set-up. Her family were immigrants and her parents ran a café in the Andersonstown Road. The Milazzo family were known to us because of Tina’s brother Vince, who fancied himself as a hotshot driver and all-round dangerous dude, and liked to hang out where the players hung out. He would never have been allowed within a mile of any real action because he was a loudmouth, but he was tolerated.

‘After that, it was basically a question of waiting. We sent Barry Fenn out as his agent handler and Barry used that waiting period to run through the various communications procedures – something we always try to do if we can, because it reassures the agent in the field that the systems work. So we were pretty well informed about the assimilation process.’

‘Did Fenn handle anyone else?’ Alex asked.

‘No. He was Meehan’s dedicated handler. We didn’t tell Meehan that, though.’

‘Why not?’

‘Well, I suppose because we didn’t want to worry him by suggesting that PIRA might have sussed out the others. They hadn’t, of course, but we didn’t want him concerning himself for one moment with those kinds of issues. Anyway, once Meehan was in place we told him that henceforth the drops and meets would be initiated by him rather than by us, and that we’d be pulling Barry back – or ‘Geoff’ as Meehan knew him – until he reported that a definite approach had been made. We knew this was likely to be months rather than weeks, because we’d agreed from the start that Meehan would adopt a strictly “not-interested” posture vis-à-vis any Republican stuff.’

‘Wasn’t there a danger that PIRA would take him at his word and leave him alone?’

‘I think we pretty much made him irresistible. As well as working at the shop he let it be known that outside work hours he was happy to do repairs at home. Transmitter-receivers and computers that no one else could fix, that sort of thing. The more complex the problem, the better he liked it. It was only going to be a matter of time before the word got around that one of the guys at Ed’s was a circuitry wizard and a few quiet checks started to be made. And of course we also had Vince Milazzo shooting his mouth off about his sister’s new bloke who’d been in the army but had got pissed off and walked out.’

‘And they bit?’

‘Eventually they bit. To our relief, as you can imagine. It had been more than eighteen months since Enniskillen by then, and in that eighteen months we’d had eight soldiers killed in Ballygawley, six at Lisburn and two in the Buncrana Road. More than thirty-five men had been seriously injured and that’s just the army statistics. I can’t honestly remember how many civilians and UDR members had been murdered in the period, but the pressure on this Service to get a man in place was unbelievable.

‘The way it happened was that one evening in June 1989 a couple of fellows were waiting for Meehan when he finished work. Suggested he came for a quiet drink and drove him to MacNamara’s, which is very much a volunteer hang-out. Asked him if he took on private work. He said he did, but nothing political, which they seemed to accept. One of them then took him out to the car park and showed him an army Clansman radio. Asked if he could fix it.

‘Well, obviously he could have fixed it in his sleep, but he refused, said he wasn’t touching it. When they asked him why, he told them that he recognised the radio as army issue and wanted no involvement with that sort of business. Then he thanked them politely for the drink and walked off. They didn’t try to stop him.

‘But of course they were back a few days later, and this time it was six of them and they didn’t take him to a bar, but to the first floor of a house in the Ballymurphy area. They’d done some checking, they told him, and they had some questions that needed answering. They were still polite, but it was clear that if the answers weren’t good enough he was in serious trouble.

‘It was the moment he’d rehearsed a thousand times. Sure, he’d been in the British army, he told them, and he’d never tried to hide the fact. His family knew it, his girlfriend knew it and his employer knew it. He also told them what had happened to his father and how he had been chased from the country a decade earlier. With his father dead, he explained, he no longer had any family on the mainland, so he’d come home. All he wanted now, to be honest, was to carry on with the work he was doing, bank a decent salary and be left alone to get on with his life.

‘They heard him out. As a Royal Engineer, they said, he must have been involved in demolitions.

‘Sure, he told them, and for the first time allowed a note of bitterness to creep in. He’d been a qualified demolitions instructor and at one time had considered a career in the quarrying industry after leaving the army. With his dishonourable discharge, however, all that had gone up in smoke.

‘Tell us about the discharge, they said, so he did. He’d been stitched up, he explained, and all for a couple of lengths of det cord. All the instructors kept bits and pieces in their lockers – signing the stuff in and out every day took bloody hours. It wasn’t as if it had been drugs or live ammunition, they’d just had it in for him for being a Mick. But then that was the Brit Establishment for you – heads they win, tails you lose. But what the fuck, he still had the skills. No one could take the skills away.

‘They listened and then drove him back to his flat. Nothing much was said, but this time when they handed him the Clansman he took it. They gave him a number to ring when it was ready.

‘After this encounter, which he described to Barry in detail from a public phone near his home, the communications from Meehan via Barry Fenn almost dried up. It became clear to him that he was being watched almost full-time. He was certainly being tested; a few days after mending and returning the Clansman a woman called round at his flat at seven in the morning with an Amstrad computer in a plastic bag. It had crashed, she told him, and she needed a data-recovery expert.

‘He unpicked the mess, downloaded the data and discovered that it contained details of the security system of one of the city-centre banks. It was obviously a set-up: if the security was beefed up in any way they’d know he was a player for the other side. So we did nothing about it at all – didn’t even bother to tell the bank. And of course there was no raid.

‘A couple of weeks later the first two men turned up at his flat on a Saturday morning. As far as we can work out he was taken on some kind of tour of the city. Various introductions were made and the day ended at a drinking club.

‘Over the next few months a gradual process of indoctrination took place. The people that he met were low-level players for the most part, and I guess they flattered Meehan and showed him a pretty good time. A charm offensive, if you can imagine that. Our instructions to him, relayed via Barry, were to allow himself to be drawn out. We wanted him to give the impression of “coming to life”, both socially and politically.

‘Tina Milazzo certainly helped with this. Sources on the ground told us that she gave the impression of enjoying the nightlife and the conspiratorial atmosphere, and the company of the other girlfriends. She probably sensed that the other men were respectful of Joe, that they had plans for him and that this reflected well on her. Whatever, she fitted in. She helped the thing along.

‘Over the months that followed we heard almost nothing from Meehan. We wanted him to dig in, to live and breathe Republicanism, and we told him that he should only contact Barry if he had anything really vital to report.

‘Nothing vital came up. The killings of soldiers and others continued, but we considered it highly unlikely that Meehan was anywhere near the inner circles where such things were discussed and planned. It would be years, probably, before that would be the case. But he was on his way. Shortly before Christmas 1989 a seventeen-year-old named Derek Maughan was picked up by a team of volunteers after stealing a car and joyriding around the outskirts of the city. It was not the first time this had happened, it was decided to make an example of him, and he was driven out to waste ground and a nine-mil round was put through his kneecap. From the front, as he was just a lad, rather than from the back. Now as it happened, one of the volunteers on the snatch team was touting for the FRU and within a couple of days of the shooting we had the names of all those involved.

‘The driver was one Joe Meehan. That year this agency was able to give the Cabinet Office a very special Christmas present. The assurance that a sleeper was in place in the Belfast Brigade. That, finally, MI5 had a man in the IRA.’