The Watchman

by Chris Ryan

  "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 cafe in the Andersonstown Road. The Milazzo family were known to us because of Tina' sbrother Vince, who fancied himself as a hot-shot 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-~-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 instruct
ions 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, MI-5 had a man in the IRA."

  TEN.

  There was a lengthy pause. Dawn Harding, as if to make a tacit point about self-control, sat motionless and without expression. George Widdowes stretched in his chair and recrossed his legs. Rising and marching briskly to her desk, Angela Fenwick lifted the telephone and ordered sandwiches for four. From a desk drawer she took a clear plastic folder. Inside was a sheaf of photographs, which she handed to Alex.

  He examined them one by one. There was an early Meehan family shot taken in a kitchen: the father standing in his shirtsleeves, the blowsy bottle-blonde mother smoking by the stove and the pinched, worried-looking boy even then the image of his dad crouched over his homework. In the school photo, scrubbed and hair brushed young Joseph didn't look much happier, but he appeared to have cheered up a bit for the holiday snap in which, aged about eleven, he and his mother were sitting at a folding table by a river with a caravan in the background. Another shot, possibly taken on the same holiday, showed the boy triumphantly holding up a small trout. Almost a smile on his face.

  And then there was Meehan aged about fifteen taking part in a cross-country race. The seriousness and the pinched look were back by then, and had been joined by something else a tenacious ness a hard intentness of purpose. The same expression was waiting behind the level gaze as the sixteen-year old apprentice stood with his visibly frail father in front of their van ("Lawrence Meehan, Electrical and General Repairs').

  And finally as a squaddie. A formal sit-down shot of the battalion in shirtsleeve order. Meehan in civvies posing with two fellow privates in front of an armoured personnel carrier. Meehan in issue overalls doing something complicated at a workbench with a soldering iron.

  Meehan and a couple of mates brewing up on exercise beneath a rock face

  And that was it. A life in ten photographs. Not conventionally handsome, but intelligent-looking. Not naturally one of the lads, but the sort you could rely on to stand his round. Not a natural tough guy, perhaps, but a fast learner. And without question a bad enemy.

  A real implacability behind the pale, narrow features and the rain-grey eyes.

  "So this is him," said Alex eventually and, catching Dawn Harding's scornful expression, immediately regretted the statement's pointlessness.

  "This is him," said Angela Fenwick.

  "The Watchman. Our PIRA mole."

  "I'm assuming the story you're telling me has an unhappy ending," said Alex.

  "I want you to know everything," said Fenwick.

  "I

  want you to know exactly what sort of man we're dealing with. I want you to know everything we know."

  Alex nodded. He was busting for a piss. He said so and Dawn Harding stood up. En route, she officiously hurried him past several open office doors. For fuck's sake, he thought.

  "Aren't you coming in?" he asked her when they reached a sign marked Male Staff we.

  "Just in case I catch sight of something I shouldn't."

  "There won't be much to catch sight of," she said.

  When they got back to the deputy director's office the sandwiches had arrived. In Alex's place two files had been placed on top of the Meehan photographs.

  They contained ten-by-eight-inch colour photographs taken at the scenes of the murders of Barry Fenn and Craig Gidley, and the respective pathologists' reports.

  "None of these to leave the building, please," said Fenwick.

  "Dawn will show you a room where you can go through them when we've finished."

  Opposite Alex, Widdowes was galloping through his sandwiches as if fearful that they were going to be taken away from him.

  Alex picked up one of his own, and was about to bite into it when a thought struck him. He froze and Dawn Harding raised an eyebrow.

  "I've just realised something," he said.

  "Yesterday morning I left an RUF sentry who can't have been more than eleven tied to a tree. I meant to let him go when we pulled out."

  "Sounds to me he's pretty lucky to be alive at all," said Angela Fenwick.

  "I doubt he is still alive," said Alex.

  "The survivors of the raid will be looking for scapegoats."

  "Can't make an omelette without breaking eggs," said Widdowes through a yellow-toothed mouthful of bacon, lettuce and tomato.

  "Africa's a bloody basket case, anyway. It's not what the rest of the world does to them, it's what they do to themselves. God, the stories you hear."

  "Sally Roberts is apparently telling anyone who'll listen that she was carried to safety in the strong arms of the SAS," said Fenwick.

  "We told her we were Paras," said Alex.

  "Where did she get the SAS stuff from?"

  "She told the Telegraph's stringer that none of the men who rescued her had shaved or washed for several days and that they wouldn't talk to her in the helicopter. The Paras always chatted her up."

  The ghost of a smile touched Alex's face but he said nothing.

  "Right," said Widdowes, placing his sandwich plate on the carpet and wiping his mouth with a spotted handkerchief "Shall I take over?"

  Fenwick nodded and glanced quickly at Dawn. Alex sensed a current of empathy between the two women from which George Widdowes was excluded.

  To begin with, Widdowes explained, things had looked good. From Meehan's occasional brief reports to Barry, and from information provided by touts and informers, it was clear that he was serving out some kind of initiation period. He was regularly called out for driving jobs, moving other volunteers from area to area, and transporting punishment squads and their victims to locations where beatings and kneecappings were administered. The IRA liked its volunteers to have a clear understanding that severe penalties were handed out to those who disobeyed them.

  Meehan was also used as a 'dicker', standing on street corners looking out for manifestations of security forces personnel. Only the more experienced dickers, Alex knew, were used for 'live' operations. If a hit was planned on a border post a series of walk pasts would be organised in the course of which the dickers would look out for any of the tell-tale signs additional sentries, increased patrols and de fences that the operation was known about. A tout might have talked, anything might have happened, but the net result of a security lapse would invariably be the same: an SAS
killing team waiting in ambush and a series of funerals attended by Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness. The job of the dickers was a vital one to the PIRA and many operations were cancelled or postponed because of a dicker's instinct, honed to a sensitive edge on a thousand street corners, that 'something wasn't quite right'.

  The first indication that Joe Meehan was moving up the terrorist ladder came in August 1990 when he reported to his handler that he'd been asked to act as a dicker on a bank robbery in the Cliftonville Road. The Northern Ireland desk made no move to inform the local security forces and the robbery went ahead. A female teller suffered a badly broken nose when she was punched in the face after attempting to press a panic button and a little over X 8500 in cash was taken.

  After the bank job, things went very quiet. In a twenty-second call on a public phone the following morning Meehan informed Barry that he was now being watched round the clock, although he had given his fellow volunteers no sign that he was aware of this. As far as the serious players were concerned, he said, he was still very much on probation. A lot of the volunteers couldn't quite get their heads round the idea of trusting an ex-soldier.

  Somebody must have trusted him, however, for he finally got his turn. A three-man team was assembled to recover a weapon from a cache in a churchyard near Castleblayney and Meehan was one of them. Again, he was able to inform Barry of the upcoming operation and again MI-5 allowed it to take place unhindered. In the normal course of events the weapon would have been dug up by an SAS team, bugged for tracing purposes and rendered harmless 'jarked' in special forces parlance, then reburied and left for recovery by the IRA.

  On this occasion, however, it was decided that the risk that PIRA might discover the jar king and suspect a security leak was too great. No suspicion, however slight, must taint the Watchman. Whatever the cost, the weapon had to remain intact.

  And the cost was very nearly fatal. Within two days a Royal Welch Fusiliers patrol had come under fire in Andersonstown and their lieutenant had had the stock of hisSA 80 rifle shattered by a high-velocity round.