IRA Death Squad Was Closing In
LONDON—MI5's top deep-cover agent in Northern Ireland has been snatched to safety as an IRA assassination squad prepared to murder him.
In an operation, which had all the elements of a Cold War thriller, McShane was bundled into a specially prepared van driven over from England to Belfast by a female MI5 operative. He was picked up at a prearranged point on a city street and driven south to Dublin, where the van was driven onto the night ferry to the Welsh port of Hollyhead with McShane still hidden in the back. From there it was driven to an MI5 safe house near Manchester.
It was the start of a new identity for the 58 year-old divorced father of four and the end of his dangerous double life as a spy.
During that time he had been Gerry Adams personal chauffeur and bodyguard, as well as driving top IRA leaders. His unique position enabled him to attend every key meeting in the Republican movement. Held in back street rooms filled with tobacco smoke or in IRA safe houses along the border with the Irish Republic, the meetings were to discuss a variety of matters: the repositioning of IRA arms caches, attacks on British army posts and the sentences of death on those whom an IRA court decided had betrayed the organisation.
There were also official closed-door meetings between Gerry Adams and U.S. and European diplomats struggling to bring peace to Ulster. At each meeting McShane stood behind Gerry Adams.
What Adams did not know was that McShane had undergone a secret course run by MI5, after he was recruited, to bolster his already excellent memory. He also learned how to reduce to code what he had heard.
These messages were left for his MI5 controller in dead-letter boxes around Belfast. Transcribed in London, they were sent to Downing Street where the prime minister at that time, Tony Blair, used them to shape his political approach to what eventually led to the Good Friday Agreement in 1998.
Long before then the dapper, fast-talking McShane was so valuable to MI5 that his stipend as a spy had been increased to Pondsoign 2,000 a month. The money was paid out of a secret slush fund by the Security Service into a deposit account in a Swiss bank.
McShane, a fastidious man with a liking for fish-and-chips and a pint of beer, continued to act and dress like the IRA loyalist he had once been. He wore the organisation's dress code of beret, white shirt, black tie and black trousers.
Recordings
The car he drove, bought for Adams by Sinn Fein, became McShane's listening post. MI5 had given him a bug which enabled all conversations in the vehicle to be recorded.
It was those recordings which enabled MI5 to learn:
—The role the IRA had played in sending three of its members to help train the Colombian terror group, FARC. Later caught and sentenced to a prison term in Bogota, the trio escaped.
—There had also been discussions in the car about the assassination of Lord Mountbatten, who had been murdered while on holiday in County Sligo on the north-west coast of Ireland in August 1979. The IRA bomb hidden in his boat had also killed Mountbatten's 14 year-old grandson and his aunt, Baroness Brabourne.
—It was McShane who told his MI5 controller about the mastermind behind the deaths of 18 British soldiers at Warrenpoint, the IRA's largest atrocity shortly after the Mountbatten murder.
—He described the routes by which huge stocks of weapons were smuggled from Libya—revelations that later enabled the British government to confront Libya's leader, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi and eventually force him to give up supporting terrorism.
Knowledge of all this, and more, made McShane a key informer for the Security Service. When not driving the elite of Sinn Fein and the IRA to meetings, McShane lived a quiet life in Belfast's Lower Falls republican district where he was known as "a working-class foot-soldier" and "Roy the Rat" for his driving skills at avoiding British Army patrols in the city.
Friend Assasinated
His closest friend had been a senior member of Sinn Fein, Denis Donaldson, until he was suspected of betraying the IRA. He fled from Belfast to a remote cottage in the mountains of County Donegal. He was traced there by an IRA squad and shot dead after he had admitted he was a British spy.
McShane survived an interrogation by the IRA partly because some of those he drove for were reported to have spoken in his defence as a loyal Republican.
But sensing the net was closing in on him, McShane sent a prearranged signal to his MI5 controller to be brought in from the cold.
By the time he was whisked out of Ulster, over Pondsoign200,000 had been deposited in his secret bank account—the largest sum MI5 has paid to an informer in Northern Ireland.
But the unmasking of McShane has hardened suspicions within Sinn Fein and the paramilitaries that his most controversial role in his years of spying was placing listening devices in the Catholic churches the IRA leaders regularly attended—and where they held secret discussions in the belief the Security Service would not bug them in such sacred places.
A former military intelligence officer, who specialised in "Black Ops" in Ulster, said: "I would be naïve to really think that the Security Service were noted for their political correctness in what was a very nasty war. For instance, it is widely accepted that IRA hunger strikers close to dying had their confessions to priests bugged."
Another MI5 officer, who had served in Belfast, admitted: "There were occasions at times, no matter how sacred the environs, it was vital we knew what IRA men and women were plotting."
Who Else?
Today, McShane is in an MI5 safe house ignoring the words of a Sinn Fein spokesman: "He is under no threat from Republicans. If he wishes to return, it is up to him to make peace with his community and, in particular, his family." But given the fate of his friend, Denis Donaldson, it is unlikely McShane will take up the offer.
The white-haired McShane knows his spying role has caused fury among many Republicans, making them wonder what the "war" was about and if the IRA leadership was really in control despite not being able to spot who was genuine and who was a British "tout."
"The man took the Queen's shilling and betrayed all he should have believed in," said a source close to Adams.
He may not be the last to have done so. Sinn Fein and the paramilitaries have now begun to comb through their files to see who else could be suspect.
Gordon Thomas is the author of Secrets & Lies: A History of CIA Mind Control and Germ Warfare (Octavo Editions, USA) and the forthcoming Inside British Intelligence (JR Books, UK).
Copyright G-2 Bulletin, Washington D.C., USA, and Gordon Thomas.
