cruising altitude my son Michael bounded out of his seat and made for the toilets. When he returned he elbowed his brother Mark in the side and boasted, ‘Mark! I just did a pee in Maggie Thatcher’s toilet. You should go and try it. It flushes itself when you put the seat down!’ Michael then kept asking me why Maggie’s loo was ‘tin’ and not white; he didn’t know that it was stainless steel.
About half an hour into the flight the RAF crew came around with tea and biscuits. I stared down at the blue carpet where Mrs Thatcher and her ministers had walked so many times before and was struck by the absurdity of it all. What the hell was I doing on her private jet? And what would the future have in store for us now that we were going into permanent exile? But there was another question that still burned in the back of my brain: How did the Boss, Karen, Ginger and the rest of the team know that I had come perilously close to execution at the hands of arguably the IRA’s most ruthless unit – its internal security team.
As we came in to land at RAF Northholt, some of Ginger’s words echoed around my head. He had uttered them as he drove me back to the house to tell Mary that we had to leave Derry for good, ‘You’ll look back on this moment and thank God for our man in Belfast because he just saved your life.’
The identity of the mysterious ‘man in Belfast’, who tipped off his own handlers that Willie Carlin was about to be picked up, questioned, beaten, psychologically tortured and then shot dead, would haunt me in exile for many years. But for now that was at the end of my time as a spy, an undercover life that began with a calling.
CHAPTER 1
FROM HOLY ORDERS TO BATTLE ORDERS
Prior to my decision to follow my father’s footsteps into the British Army I had another calling, and this one was from God. Just before leaving primary school in Derry I went to see the biblical epic King of Kings at the Rialto Cinema on Market Street. Moved and mesmerised by Jeffrey Hunter’s portrayal of Jesus, my best friend Michael Stewart and I talked about becoming priests. Shortly after Easter, we spoke to our parents about the priesthood and later were sent to a religious retreat across the border in Donegal, which was part of a special weekend for boys in their mid-teens thinking of entering Holy Orders. Although impressed by the selfless frugality of the monks at the Doon Well and Ards Monastery, the desire to become a priest had wore off by my final year in ‘big school’. In contrast, Michael entered the seminary in his early twenties, and eventually served in Nottingham and Derry before tragically dying at a young age from an undetected brain tumour.
I often wonder where my life might have taken me if I had trodden the same path as Michael and ended up in some Derry parish, or even in an isolated mission in a far-flung place on the other side of the world. But by my late teens there was a calling towards another life in uniform – the colours of the Queen’s Royal Irish Hussars.
Although born into a devout Derry Catholic family, it was not unusual for a family like mine to have strong, historic connections to the British military. At the time of my birth on 30 July 1948, my father Tommy Carlin was working at the local Royal Navy base, HMS Sea Eagle, on the Waterside. During the Second World War, Derry was an important naval installation for the British and later the American navies during the Battle of the Atlantic. German U-boats were scuttled in the Foyle after the defeat of the Third Reich, and the city was filled with tales of the Yanks who were based in Derry during the 1940s. Our history classes in primary school were full of stories of bad Nazis and the bold Americans who were sent to save us. There was never any mention of the IRA, the English, or the Troubles of the 1920s, and I knew where an exotic place called Burma was because I would tell my classmates and my teachers that this was where my daddy had been stationed during the war.
Tommy Carlin spent the post-war years working with the Royal Navy, this time as a civilian worker at HMS Sea Eagle, where he also played in the Navy’s football team – the Sea Eagle Rovers. I remember one afternoon watching his team play on the big sports ground at Clooney Park West on Waterside. After their 1-0 defeat, he and the rest of the Rovers retired to a place overlooking the Foyle called Ebrington Barracks on their way back to Sea Eagle. It was the first time I walked through the gateway of the nineteenth-century barracks and little did I know that this place was going to play a key role in my later life as a secret agent.
I finally left school at the tender age of fifteen in the summer of 1962, and within 72 hours of being out in the big bad world of work I got my first job. The Birmingham Sound Reproducers (BSR) factory manufactured record players and was situated in what we called the ‘new road’ that backed onto Bligh’s lane. I was almost immediately sent to work in the paint shop section of the plant where I learnt how to spray paint amid the deafening noise of the machinery and the endless banter of the older men on the production line. Although I was earning about a half-crown per week I didn’t like the job and was a bit spooked (given my priestly leanings and continued devout faith) at the filthy language on the shop floor; sometimes even fights broke out between grown men on the line. In fact, the only time I saw peaceful unity in the paint shop was when the news broke more than a year later that President John F. Kennedy had been shot dead in Dallas. To Derry Catholics, Kennedy was a cult hero, given his religion and proud Irish ancestry, and in many Catholic homes in the city images of him hung beside portraits of the Sacred Heart and Our Lady. Two days after his assassination the whole BSR factory downed tools, including myself, and we marched to Derry’s Catholic Cathedral for a memorial mass in JFK’s honour.
By the summer of 1965, I had become disillusioned with working at BSR and spoke to my father about trying again for the priesthood. When I was dissuaded against it I returned heavy-hearted to the factory gates to find the entire plant was on strike. The stoppage was a result of Derry workers going on a fact-finding tour of BSR’s factory in Birmingham, where they heard a rumour that its mainly female workforce earned more than us. The bitterness over the strike resulted in poor industrial relations and led to a series of one-day strikes and walk-outs. Eventually, the owners closed the factory, moved out of Derry and left 1,500 men and boys on the dole.
During the summer I befriended Davy McMenamy, the first Protestant lad I ever knew. We had met at BSR the previous Christmas and hit it off straight away. We hung out in some of the city’s dance halls and even attended dances in the Memorial Hall on Derry’s Walls, the social club run by the staunchly loyalist Apprentice Boys. There was no open sectarianism on the dance floor, though. Back then the only fights in the Memorial Hall were usually between two boys fighting over a girl. I drank my first ever beer with Davy at Butlin’s holiday camp across the border in County Meath in the Irish Republic.
Davy and I talked about what might happen once BSR shut up shop in Derry. My father had often told stories of his life in the army and he agreed to chat to us about the military. One night, Davy came over to our home and Dad regaled us with tales of drills and marches as if he was trying to put us off. However, he did suggest that a much better option for us would be an armoured regiment, where we would get to drive around in armoured cars and even tanks. My older brother Robert joined in the conversation and soon all three of us were hooked. Just after my seventeenth birthday, we visited the Army Recruitment Office on Derry’s Strand Road. There we met with Sergeant Derek Dunseith, the brother of the legendary Radio Ulster presenter, the late David Dunseith. After we had filled in our application forms my father signed the enlistment papers and off I went to England to join the Queen’s Royal Irish Hussars.
Within weeks of meeting Sergeant Dunseith at the recruiting office on the Strand Road, and after a medical examination in Omagh, Robert and I were on our way to the Royal Armoured Corps Training Headquarters at Catterick Camp in Yorkshire. The train left Derry at 5.40pm and my father chatted to us in the station as we waited to depart. It was one of those awkward Irish conversations between a father and his sons, peppered with banalities like ‘Don’t forget to phone’ and ‘Have you got your ferry ticket?’ Then he said what all Irish parents say to their sons who, deep down, they don’t really want to leave, and my father was no exception. He was very proud that Robert and I were following in his footsteps and joining the army, but at the same time he was very sad that we were leaving him. He kept saying, ‘Sure, it won’t be long before you’re back’. Soon, a whistle blew and we boarded the train. Within minutes we were waving goodbye to my father as the train pulled out of the station and we headed