Dead Man Running: A True Story of a Secret Agent's Escape from the IRA and MI5 (30 page)

Ironically, on this occasion, the police officer knew me, knew my identity and, I presumed, my background. It made no difference. Constable 5999 accused me of refusing to give my home address and called for assistance. Within minutes I heard another police siren and watched as the car came flying down the main shopping street weaving at speed through the traffic, the siren blaring, the blue lights flashing. People came out of the shops and the bank wondering what all the commotion was about, and a crowd gathered. The police car came to a sudden halt and PC 2630 walked over, leaving the car’s blue lights flashing. He, too, knew me well. He asked his colleague why assistance had been called for and was told that I had refused to give my address.

I showed the two officers an old ‘HORT/1’ form, which motorists are given when requested to produce their driving documents at a police station. That form, written out by another police officer, gave my solicitor’s address instead of my home address. On that occasion, that officer had accepted my solicitor’s address. I knew I was perfectly within my rights giving my solicitor’s address instead of my own.

‘
Nick him,’ said PC 2630 to his colleague. ‘Section 25, refusing to give his details.’

I was searched in front of the crowd of more than 50 who had encircled us. Then I was handcuffed before being arrested and led away. The actions of the police that day seemed extraordinary, designed to make me appear to be a dangerous criminal rather than someone who had been stopped for having a defective brake light. I knew that meant I was being arrested for failing to give my home address. As if to embarrass me further in front of so many people PC 2630 then lifted the bonnet of the car and checked chassis and engine numbers suggesting to everyone watching that the car I had been driving was a stolen vehicle. I was put into the back of the police car and taken to the station. I could not believe that all this palaver had taken place simply because I had a defective brake light. I knew that in the great majority of such cases police would simply advise a motorist to replace the bulb and leave it at that. But worse would follow. At the station I was, as is customary, taken before the custody officer and details of the offence were read out.

‘
Put him in a cell,’ said the custody officer.

‘
What?’ I asked, a note of startled surprise in my voice.

‘
Put him in a cell,’ repeated the officer.

I couldn’t believe it, shaking my head in disbelief as I was led away. For one hour I was detained in the cell and yet I had done nothing wrong. In law, I was perfectly entitled to give my solicitor’s address and those two officers had no right to arrest me. Fortunately, someone called a superintendent for advice and I was ordered to be released after receiving a verbal caution. The following morning I returned to the police station and asked Inspector Bray to check and retain the video from the council’s CCTV that monitored the area where the police had stopped me. I told him the video tape would provide full evidence of what occurred at the scene. He readily agreed to do so. What he didn’t know was that I had deliberately stopped my car under the CCTV camera so that it would record the actions of the police officers. My solicitor also wrote to the officer in charge of the station asking him to retain the video tape as evidence. Two weeks later I received a phone call from a police inspector saying that, unfortunately, the video tape had been recycled by accident a week after the incident and, as a result, the recording had been lost.

The following week I had to appear at Newcastle Magistrates Court to answer a charge of ‘using threatening, abusive or insulting words’ under Section 5 (1) during an incident which had taken place six months earlier at 1.55 in the morning in the centre of Newcastle upon Tyne in April 1998. During the day-long court hearing, both police officers gave evidence as well as my friend Usher, who had been driving the vehicle when we were stopped. But in court the police officers gave conflicting evidence; made to look fools or liars as they told stories contradicting each other.

Giving evidence on oath, PC 3586 Milne said the car was stopped because it was being driven ‘erratically’, and yet PC 335 Webster who knew me very well later told the court that the car was being driven ‘normally’ but had been stopped because he thought it was strange for two young men to be driving around the centre of Newcastle at that time in the morning. I had never heard anything so daft. On a Friday night the centre of Newcastle is crowded with young people, the streets busy with traffic. Then PC Webster came to the nub of the charge, claiming I shouted, ‘Don’t get into the car with those fucking pigs.’ As a result of that police allegation I was arrested for using abusive language.

The two officers were made to look rather foolish once more when they were asked how I was taken to the police station. PC Webster said that I was taken away in the back of a police van; PC Milne said I had been taken back to the station handcuffed to him and sitting in the back of the police car while PC Webster drove the car.

In evidence, I told the court that I would never use the words ‘pigs’ in relation to the police for one very good reason. In Northern Ireland we always called the police ‘peelers’; a ‘pig’ in Belfast is a vehicle called an APC – an armoured personnel carrier. I knew that on that occasion I had been arrested for no good reason whatsoever and yet I was taken to Pilgrim Street police station and left in the cells for three hours. But, I won the day. After retiring for 30 minutes the magistrates found me ‘not guilty’. I was in no doubt that the two officers had committed perjury that day.

But more disturbing was the action taken by the Crown Prosecution Service one week before that case came to court. In late September 1998, the CPS wrote to my solicitors advising them that they were laying a further charge against me which they would raise at the start of the hearing. No such suggestion had been made to my solicitor at any time during those previous five months. The CPS had suddenly decided to accuse me of ‘violent behaviour in a police station’ contrary to Section 29 of the Town Police Clauses Act of 1847. My solicitor was taken aback by this extraordinary news for hardly anyone has been prosecuted under that particular Act for decades!

By throwing that charge at me, however, the CPS were being both devious and shameless for it is a charge which a defendant finds almost impossible to win. A single police officer has only to state what he saw or believes and his evidence will automatically be accepted against the defendant’s word. No witness or corroborative evidence are required to support the police officer’s evidence. It was obvious the CPS believed they had found a way of winning a conviction against me and, thereby, blackening my name. But once again the magistrates proved their honesty and independence, refusing to give permission for the case to go ahead at such short notice. But what seemed extraordinary and disturbing was the very fact that the Crown Prosecution Service, or whoever advises them, should go to such lengths, using an outdated law in a desperate effort to win a conviction against me. I knew that I had used no violent language or behaviour in the police station. But always at the back of my mind was the question that I could not answer for sure; who were the guilty men prepared to go to such lengths to get me? I had my suspicions but no proof. But whoever was ultimately responsible, I knew those men needed to have extraordinary power if they could tamper so outrageously with the justice system, persuading, or perhaps ordering, the Crown Prosecution Service to take whatever action they requested or demanded. Sometimes I would lie awake at night believing I had become paranoid though my solicitor reassured me I had not.

But my stream of legal problems was as nothing compared to those that unintentionally I had inflicted on my family back in Belfast. Of course I had been riven by guilt when I heard how my courageous brother Joseph had been taken from his home by a PIRA punishment team, tied up and bundled in the back of a van; taken to a lonely spot; tied to a fence and mercilessly beaten with iron bars and baseball bats. The reason; he was my brother. Apparently, according to the twisted thinking of the PIRA discipline bosses, that was sufficient reason for these sick people to vent their anger on Joseph, simply because they couldn’t find me and kill me. The night I heard what happened to Joseph I cried like a small boy, feeling so helpless and so very, very guilty.

On the night of Wednesday, 7 October 1998, my sister, Elizabeth, was at her home in Moyard Crescent, West Belfast, with three of her six children asleep upstairs when a noise began outside her house. She heard the chant ‘Drug Dealers Out’, and went to investigate. Outside her home she found a group of about 200 men and women, some holding placards demanding ‘Drug Dealers Out’, and she asked them what they were doing chanting outside her home, waking her children. The crowd also chanted ‘McGartland Out’, using her maiden name, my name.

The demonstrators claimed they were holding a peaceful demonstration on the estate demanding that everyone involved in drug dealing must leave the area or take the consequences. No one, however, explained what those consequences might be. And yet Elizabeth recognised only one or two people from her estate; the rest were PIRA members or well-known Republicans. Fortunately, Elizabeth, who is 34, is a strong character who will take ne nonsense and she castigated the crowd, yelling at them that she had never taken a drug in her life and had never had anything to do with buying or selling drugs. She told them all to go away and stop their trouble-making. Hearing of the commotion, our mother Kate, now in her fifties and a grandmother ten times over, left her home and pushed her way to the front of the crowd, shielding her daughter from the mob. Kate confronted them. My mother has an awesome reputation in West Belfast, known for speaking her mind with authority and, if necessary, giving abuse to those who dare challenge her.

‘
Go to hell,’ Kate yelled at the crowd as soon as she arrived on the scene. ‘Leave my Liz alone,’ she shouted, ‘and fuck off back to your homes.’

It was only after Liz told the mob that she would move out the following day that they stopped their chanting and moved away. Later, Elizabeth told me how she had sat up all night fearing an attack from a PIRA punishment squad, scared that PIRA might deal with her or her children in the same way as they had smashed the legs and ribs of her brother Joseph. The following day Elizabeth and her children were escorted to a hostel and stayed there until alternative housing could be arranged. But her new address would not be revealed.

I knew that Elizabeth, who had recently left her husband, had never had anything whatsoever to do with drugs. The RUC also issued a statement saying they had never received any intelligence that Mrs Elizabeth Lindsay had any drugs connection. She had enough on her hands caring for six children, especially since splitting with her husband. I knew the cowardly Provisional IRA were behind the so-called demonstration. I was so convinced, and so were the Special Branch, that poor Elizabeth and her family had been targeted only because of me and I wondered when the IRA and its supporters would cease to target my defenceless family.

Six months after the Good Friday agreement had been signed by all parties adhering to the Mitchell principles of no attacks and no intimidation against any members of the community, the violent men continued their cowardly attacks with impunity. To many people in Republican areas of Belfast and Derry it seemed that nothing had changed, the hard men behaving the way they had for decades, policing and disciplining their communities with rods of iron and baseball bats. And their political leaders did nothing whatsoever to stop their wicked behaviour. Nor, it seemed, were those government departments responsible for implementing the Good Friday agreement prepared to take any action to ensure the men of violence finally stopped their punishment beatings. Indeed, it seemed that all the British government wanted was a political settlement, leaving the families of those people living and suffering under the paramilitary organisations, on both sides of the sectarian divide, to accept their wretched lives and fend for themselves. To many ordinary people living on the housing estates of Belfast and Derry, the Good Friday agreement seemed more like a sick political joke, and they were the hapless victims.

My battles to unravel the truth about the treatment and harassment I have experienced have continued unabated despite attempts by various authorities and their agencies who are seemingly doing their damnedest to conceal the facts and obstruct my legitimate demands. Even today, seven years after my alleged abduction, no one has the honesty or the courage to tell me why I have been singled out for such treatment when all I tried to do for four years was to save people’s lives on behalf of the British Government.

And today the various government agencies, in particular the RUC, probably orchestrated by MI5, are keeping up their war of attrition against me. I know I am still ‘at risk’ from certain elements inside the Provisional IRA who want revenge, but I also realise that I am at risk from those forces advising the British government, and their various agencies, who want to plague my life. I want both the Provos and the British government to realise one simple fact – that while I have breath in my body I will fight them at every turn.

Epilogue

Two years, one month, one day and twenty hours after the Northumbria Police revealed my real name and my secret address in open court an IRA active service unit struck.
I walked out of my house in Whitley Bay and checked the lane for strangers, but saw no one. I opened the up-and-over garage door and looked under the car checking for UCBTs – under car booby traps. But there were none. I had carried out this routine every morning since moving to the mainland from Northern Ireland in October 1991. I never got into the car without first checking for UCBTs; I never walked outside my front door without first checking if any strangers were about. I knew in my heart that one day the Provos would try to kill me. I hadn’t believed the Northumbria Police when they said I was in no danger of attack. I hadn’t believed Home Secretary Jack Straw who considered I was at ‘minimal risk’ of attack, nor did I believe the Crown Prosecution Service who revealed in open court that I was in little danger. But I had lived and worked with the provos for two years and I knew and understood their thinking and their determination to kill someone who had infiltrated their organisation feeding information to the Special Branch and thwarting their plans to shoot and bomb innocent people.
That Thursday morning in June I unlocked the car door, sat inside the car and started the engine. But before I could close the door I sensed someone was nearby. I looked up, saw this man wearing a green coat with a gun pointing at me. Instinctively, I lifted my right arm to protect myself. A split second later I felt two thuds hit my right side, the shock reverberating through my body.
I knew in that instant that this gunman was a Provo assassin and from the impact the bullets made on my body I guessed he was using a heavy calibre round, probably a 9mm fired from an automatic. But thank God my brain was still working and I knew that I had to stop him shooting me again. I knew he would go for my head; I knew he would have been told exactly where to target and what to do.
The power of the shots had thrown my body across the car seat to the passenger side and the gunman stretched out his arm so that his gun was close to my head. Before he could pull the trigger I somehow managed to grab the barrel of the gun with my left hand and it went off, the bullet ripping through my hand and lodging in my stomach.
I tried to keep hold of the gun. Something inside my head told me that I had to keep hold of that gun if I was to survive. I wanted to turn the gun so that if he pulled the trigger he would shoot himself. But my strength was fading fast. I felt suddenly powerless, almost at his mercy. I tried to hang on to the gun but I couldn’t. With a concerted tug he managed to wrench the gun from my hand. At that instant I believed I was a dead man.
But the will to survive, to live another day, took over and something stirred deep inside me. I wasn’t finished yet. I tried to lunge towards him again, to grab the gun, but I simply didn’t have the strength. He stepped back a pace and fired four more times hitting me twice in the chest, in the stomach and in the top of the leg.
I heard the ‘tap-tap’ of the automatic and two bullets thudded into my chest with real force. The pain surged through my body and the power of those bullets sent me sprawling backwards across the car seats. I thought he had shot me in the heart and I knew that would be curtains. Before I could sit up I heard the sound of two more ‘tap-taps’ and I felt the pain in my stomach and in the top of my leg. I could do nothing to protect myself. I couldn’t move. I was now at his mercy. This was the end.
I thought in that split second that I didn’t want to die, sprawled on the front seat of a car, my body punctured by bullets from a Provo gunman. My mind flashed to the number of times I had seen others killed in this way in Northern Ireland over the years, their dead, broken bodies sprawled grotesquely in the cars they were driving. Something told me that I had to survive.
For what seemed like seconds I waited for more bullets but there were none. I looked up and he had gone, disappeared from sight. Convinced that he had carried out his mission, certain that I was dead, the bastard had fled.
I realised that grabbing that gun had so disorientated the Provo gunman that he had panicked. I knew the Provo orders – always shoot people in the head because then we know they’re dead men. And dead men don’t talk.
It took me a couple of seconds to collect my thoughts. I guessed he wouldn’t return for he must have thought that with seven rounds inside me from something like a 9mm automatic I hadn’t a hope in hell of surviving. I wasn’t too sure myself at that stage. Now the pain began to take over, wracking my chest, my side, my stomach and my leg. I looked at my thumb hanging by a thread and repeated over and over, ‘fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck’. Somehow, swearing like that helped me get my head together.
I told myself that I was alive and that if I could stay alive until I got to hospital I would be okay. But how the hell could I get to hospital like this? I thought of trying to drive and then told myself I was being stupid. I hoped to hell someone had heard the sound of shots.
As I struggled to get out of the car, to get help, I felt again the thudding impact of the bullets each time they hit my body, knocking me backwards, knocking the stuffing out of me, preventing me from lunging at him and getting the gun. I managed to pull myself out of the car and then I collapsed onto the ground. I knew I had been shot six or seven times, but I was still breathing, though blood was pumping from my chest, my side and my stomach and my thumb looked as though it had been shot away.
My only fear was that I would lie in that garage and bleed to death. I put my arm across my chest to try and stop the blood gushing out but it was everywhere. I wondered if the Provo bastard had hit my heart or a main artery and realised that I had to stay conscious. I tried to feel my heart to see if it was okay and felt it pumping away. But I worried in case all the blood was being pumped out of my body rather than round my arteries.
I kept telling myself that whatever happened I must not fall asleep though I felt like closing my eyes and drifting off into oblivion. I kept talking to myself, saying over and over again, ‘If you fall asleep you will never wake again. If you fall unconscious you will simply die. Now, for fuck’s sake keep awake.’
And then I felt pain. A minute or so must have passed since the Provo bastard ran off, and, until that moment there had been little pain. Now the pain wracked my body, my chest, my side, my stomach, my arm, my hand. Shit, it hurt. I gritted my teeth to try and stop the pain hurting so much but I couldn’t. I kept talking to myself, telling myself that I could handle the pain as long as I lived . I tried telling myself that the pain wasn’t that bad but it was getting to me. I just wanted to curl up and sleep.
I also realised that if I didn’t get to hospital quickly I would die. I tried to shout for help but the words wouldn’t come. Somehow I couldn’t find the strength to shout for help, only moans came from my throat. Alone in that garage, with the blood pouring out of my body and with my chest, side and stomach pumping blood through my clothes and on to the floor, I felt my life was over. The bastard Provos had got their revenge. Then I heard voices shouting ‘Marty’ and it was the most glorious sound of my entire life. Now there was hope. I managed to open my eyes and through blurred vision I recognised my neighbours, the Connon family, bending over me asking if I was alright.
Jesus, it was good to see them; I could have cried when I realised they had come to the rescue; had come to help me. I knew the whole family. They were good, honest people and I knew in that instant that they would help me and save me. Somewhere in my mind I recalled that their elder son Adam, aged around eighteen, had studied first aid and that his mother Andrea was something to do with a hospital.
I heard them asking me questions and I can’t recall if I replied or not. My memory was going and so was my brain. I think I murmured ‘fucking Provos’.
‘Keep quiet, stay still,’ Adam said. ‘An ambulance is on the way. Just lie still and you’ll be okay.’
Adam took off my T-shirt and someone ran off and returned with cling film which he wrapped around my chest and my side in an effort to stem the bleeding. I remember him stuffing socks into my wounds trying to stop the flow of blood that was everywhere. I recall his mother Andrea cradling my head in her arms, talking to me, soothing me, keeping me conscious as we waited for the ambulance. I owe my life to that family and particularly Adam. If it hadn’t been for his quick thinking I would be dead.
The next thing I remember was waking in hospital some 48 hours later, drifting in and out of consciousness. My mother Kate, sister Lizzie and brother Joseph were there standing around my bed and I wondered why they were there as though this was all part of a dream. I couldn’t understand what they were doing there, standing at the end of my bed looking at me. I asked if I was going to live. They gave me the answer I wanted to hear and I drifted once more into unconsciousness.
Five days after the shooting I was still in intensive care guarded round the clock by seven armed police officers, all wearing body armour. Ten days later I was moved from hospital to a safe hose but I was still under armed guard. For two years I had pleaded with the Northumbria Police and the Home Secretary Jack Straw to give me some protection but they had always refused, saying I was in no danger from the IRA. They even refused to give me any CCTV system to check outside my house for any suspicious strangers.
And yet my former friends in Northern Ireland’s Special Branch knew differently. They knew my life was still under threat even though there was a so-called ceasefire, even though peace talks were due to start within days, attended by both Prime Minister Tony Blair and the Irish Taoiseach Bertie Aherne. The Belfast SB knew I was still high on the IRA’s death list. But the Northumbria Police and the Home Secretary chose to ignore their advice.
If they had listened to those senior officers who know the minds of those hard-line IRA activists, I would never have been shot because I would have had some protection. I was never cavalier about my security. I always knew that sometime, somewhere, they would have another go at me. And I was determined to make sure they didn’t get me.
After the Good Friday Peace Agreement was signed in 1998 I had high hopes that one day I would be able to lead a normal, ordinary life; get a proper job, enjoy my life a little without the constant worry of waiting for the unexpected, the knock at the door, a bullet in the back or a gunman waiting by the garage to kill me. The longer the peace deal was intact the more my hopes rose.
Then Eamonn Collins, a self-confessed IRA killer who turned against the terrorist movement, was murdered by the Provos. At the time of his shooting I made a statement saying, ‘Now I feel like I am waiting for someone to come to my house and shoot me.’