which should be up and running by November.’
We’d been talking for over twenty minutes when I stopped him. ‘Look. Who are “we”? I mean, who are you?’
He explained that his name was Alan Rees-Morgan and then said, ‘Let’s just say we’re the agency who advises the Minister of Defence and the Prime Minister’, who, he added incidentally, ‘won’t be around for much longer. There are a lot of changes coming here on the mainland. There could be a Labour government by next week and they’ll want to try to resolve the situation, which we believe will have a negative effect on the unionists.’ He continued, ‘Our estimation is that the Troubles are going to get worse, with more rioting, more divisions and more opportunities for someone like you to get involved locally.’
I was in a state of shock. He gave me his phone number and asked me not to tell anyone else about our conversation. He said he would give me a few weeks to think about it and reminded me that my role (if I accepted it) would be strictly to do with politics and that in no way was I to get involved with the IRA or any other paramilitary organisation. ‘Leave that to others,’ he said. ‘Don’t get involved. And if you do come across personnel or details of an action, you must not pass it over, we’re not interested. Keep it to yourself. Remember, my policy is that the best way to keep that kind of secret is to tell no one. Okay?’
Alan got into his car and drove off, leaving me standing on my own a few hundred yards from Captain Thorpe’s car. ‘How did you get on?’ he asked, as I got into the passenger seat.
‘I don’t know,’ I replied. ‘I’ve either just been blackmailed or wound up big time.’
‘Look William,’ said Captain Thorpe, ‘that gentleman comes direct from London. He’s the real McCoy. His organisation doesn’t officially exist. They’re a secret and they are interested in recruiting you. You must be very special because they normally recruit from Oxford or Cambridge. I’ve been in the Intelligence Corps for fourteen years and only ever met two of them. If I were you I would jump at whatever he offered.’
‘Well, he didn’t offer me anything. Just gave me information about the situation in Northern Ireland.’
‘I don’t want to know!’ the captain interrupted, raising his left palm outwards towards my face. ‘Just phone him and give him your answer. Don’t tell anyone about this meeting, especially Colonel Green and definitely not your wife’.
It wasn’t long before I was back at my desk trying to get my head around what had just happened. Over the next two weeks I tried to figure out what to do.
As Alan had predicted, Prime Minister Edward Heath resigned on 4 March 1974 and was replaced with a Labour government making all sorts of noises about Northern Ireland, including pulling the troops out – much to the anger of the unionists who were threatening to bring down the Northern Ireland Executive. Alan had been right so far and in the end I phoned the number he had given me. He called back but declined another meeting, saying, ‘If you’re interested, I’ll tell you the next step, if not we forget about it. No hard feelings.’ I sat and thought. On the one hand I didn’t want to leave the army, on the other hand Mary desperately wanted to go home. This whole exercise sounded like an undercover mission, the kind of thing you only read about in spy novels or saw at the cinema.
‘You see, Alan,’ I said, ‘it’s all a bit scary and to be honest, whilst I’d love to say yes, I’m a bit afraid.’
‘Look, Willie, I’m not going to lie to you. What we want you to do is very, very dangerous. You could get killed. It’s a very volatile situation over there but we think that between your confidence, your connections in Derry and our guidance we might be able to make a difference. Let me make it clear to you. You’ll have to live the life. You’ll have to try to become a republican – one of them. You won’t be armed and the army won’t know about you, nor will the RUC. You’ll be on your own. You will get occasional financial assistance and your salary will be put aside for you should you survive. If we find out that your life is in danger, we’ll pull you out. However, if you’re caught, the government will deny all knowledge of you because they don’t know about this project. You will in fact be a secret.’
The proposal from this man, whom I didn’t know, was for me to go to live in Derry, unarmed with no backup, and spy for the intelligence service. I could be killed, and no one would ever acknowledge my existence in a city at war. By 1974, the year of our return home, there had been 3,208 shootings and 1,113 bombs across Northern Ireland with 220 dead including 13 in Derry. ‘If I agree,’ I asked, ‘when do you want me to start?’
‘As soon as your baby is born,’ he answered.
***
On 1 April 1974 our son Michael was born. Mary was a little disappointed that we didn’t have a little girl, but she was over the moon about us leaving the army and returning to Derry. She came out of hospital the next day and on 3 April 1974 we were on the motorway heading for Ireland and a new life. I didn’t tell Mary the real reason for my change of heart because as much as she wanted to return to Derry even she would never have agreed with what I was about to do. I had just given up a brilliant career, and here I was driving my wife, my 4-year-old son Mark, and a 3-day-old baby to Derry and into real danger. Worse still, all I had was a phone number in London and the word of someone I didn’t even know. I was supposedly a paid employee of the Ministry of Defence, but in some nebulous, unspecified secret role.
In early May 1974, Mary and I were allocated a house at Rose Court in Gobnascale, a small nationalist housing estate in the mainly Protestant Waterside. Compared to nearby Irish Street it was a fairly newish estate with about 500 families. I’ve read that ‘Gobnascale’ is an old Irish word for ‘Hill of Stories’, and during my time living there on that hill there would be many stories to tell. It was a bit scary at first, as night after night the republican youth of the estate rioted at the junction of our street and the Trench Road just a few yards from the house. On two separate occasions we had our main window shot in by plastic bullets when the RUC fired at rioters, who often took refuge in our garden. I was living next door to the Breens, a republican family, and four doors away from the very same Paul Fleming who had given my sister the green light, presumably from the IRA, that I was safe to return.
Things were mostly quiet on the little housing estate of Gobnascale, but that all changed one morning just a few weeks after we arrived. ‘Dolly’ Shotter, as she is still known, was a young woman in her twenties married to a local man. She was known as Dolly because of her good looks, her long blonde hair, and her love of country music and Dolly Parton. She lived at the time with her husband and her father-in-law, Alfie, in a little bungalow at the edge of Strabane Old Road and Corrody Road. The Nash family and the Shotters gave support to the local IRA volunteers, more out of fear than any belief in what they claimed to represent. Unlike the Derry side there were no senior IRA men in the area, and most of the volunteers on the Waterside were still in their mid-teens. With access to guns and explosives they were dangerous to be around, with no telling what they would get up to or who they would hurt in the process.
Two such volunteers were Paul Fleming (the young man who Alan Rees-Morgan had spoken about back at Clouds Hill), who lived adjacent to me in Rose Court, and young Liam Duffy, whose father was a member of the Peace Movement. Liam’s father would have erupted in anger had he known that his schoolboy son was a ‘would be’ volunteer. Both of them could often be seen running across the open space behind Anderson Crescent. My sister Doreen and Paul were still good friends; like a lot of young girls, she had joined Cumann na mBan (the IRA’s female armed section) and she helped Paul Fleming and other volunteers when she could. Paul would often drop into my mother’s in Anderson Crescent to see her. On the face of it, he appeared to be a nice young man who I remember being well mannered. He had a lot of time for my mother and father, as they had for him, though I noticed on more than one occasion that he would no sooner sit down in their house than a foot patrol would pass by. He’d obviously spot them on his way somewhere and didn’t want to be stopped so he would just drop in to my mother’s so as not to be seen. He would stay awhile and then leave when the coast was clear.
I was at my mother’s one