The Spy Who - The Spy Who Sold Peace to the IRA | Thatcher's favourite | 5

Episode Date: September 10, 2024

Why was Carlin considered Thatcher's favourite spy? What difference did he really make? And how did he cope when he became an exile?To find out more about Carlin's life and significance, Charlie Higson is joined by Aaron Edwards, the author of 'Agents of Influence: Britain’s Secret Intelligence War Against the IRA'.Listen to The Spy Who ad-free on Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Start your free trial by visiting wondery.com/links/the-spy-who now. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can binge full seasons of The Spy Who early and ad-free on Apple Podcasts or the Wondery app. From Wondery, I'm Charlie Higson and this is The Spy Who. Now, I have written many books, including several about James Bond. And to do that, I immersed myself in the world of James Bond and Ian Fleming, who obviously worked for British intelligence during the Second World War. So the world of spies is something that I'm absolutely fascinated in, and I think it's fair to say that James Bond works on a fairly sort of fantastical level. And the fascinating thing about Willie Carlin is when we see the reality of what spying is actually all about. Now, Willie Carlin was a man whose journey through the labyrinth of spycraft blurred the lines between loyalty and betrayal, identity and deception. In the world of espionage,

spies must often walk with a foot in both worlds, where every step risks revealing their true allegiance. For Willie Carlin, this journey took an unimaginable twist. The people he was asked to spy on were not faceless foes across borders. They were his family, his friends, his own community. And Carlin's story unfolds not merely as a tale of espionage, but as a profound exploration of identity. A journey where the lines between friend and foe blurred until they became indistinguishable. In this bonus episode, we do our best to unravel the complexities of Carlin's dual existence, as well as questioning what can be learned from the turbulent era known as

The Troubles. We also get a glimpse of what it was like to be in the company of the man himself by speaking with someone who knew him personally, author, academic and security analyst Aaron Edwards. So Aaron, hello and thank you so much for joining us. Hi Charlie, great to be here. Now you've spent an enormous amount of time studying, writing and teaching about the conflicts in Ireland. And you actually met Willie Cullen before he died in 2023. So I have to ask, you know, what was he like as a person? Well, he was a very sort of average kind of guy.

I suppose the best covert human intelligence source is always someone that you don't really glance at a second time. He was a small, wiry little figure, an ex-soldier. When I first met him, which was way back in 2018, the first time I met him, I actually heard him before I saw him. He had a powerful Derry, Londonderry accent. I had old grainy photographs of him, so I had an idea what he looked like. But certainly in person, he was much more affable and engaging and always made you feel like, you know, he had a really interesting story to tell. And that's really how we hit it off. You know, I was very receptive to his story about his life and about where he came from, what he did and how he was coming to terms with that later in life. What do you think there was about him that made him such a good spy?

I think it was his memory. In his debriefs, he would talk about everything from car registrations to who said what and what the kind of political thinking was within the Irish Republican movement. So a whole broad sweep of things. And he was very entertaining in terms of small talk because for a time he'd been a country and western singer. So in terms of that kind of environment of entertaining people, he was very entertaining and very personable. So he was very good at getting on the people's skin and appearing to be innocuous.

Absolutely, yes. Absolutely. Just another, you know, a bit of a wallflower, but at times could be, could turn it on. He had an interesting phrase that he used when he turned it on and became almost a human listening device. And he said it was like being in the zone. So he always said to me, you know,

when you know you're in the zone, you know you're in the zone. And he used to always have this catchphrase. In a number of interviews I did with him, he would say, never have a plan B, always have a plan A and stick to it. So he's a very brave man in many respects, but he was very psychologically, very focused on his task, which was to bring information from the front line, really,

to the British authorities. Let's just go back to the beginning and let's look at what his motivations were. So he was a British soldier and informant, and then the beating he received at the hands of a British soldier would harbour animosity in him, even in his later life. I mean, do you think this could have given authenticity to his efforts with Sinn Féin? He was a very complicated individual, and I was fortunate enough to cross-examine him on a number

of occasions over the years. And I wouldn't say that his initial motivation necessarily changed, but he put layers of different kind of justification on top of what he was doing. But really, on top of that, there was a little bit of coercion applied because apparently the intelligence officer said, look, we want you to go back and spy, but we don't want you to spy just on the Republican movement. We want you to spy on your family because his sister, his late sister,

she was involved with the Republican movement. And so he was, in other words, he was being asked to betray his own family, which I thought was an added layer. And then on top of that, of course, was the beating at the security forces. And then he received another one later on when he was undercover and derried by a police officer. And then he came to say, certainly in the interviews that I did with him, that he hated or he disliked the RUC more than the British Army in the end. So very, very complicated. And there were definitely reasons why he remained a spy for so long.

In some ways, his urge to become a spy, to do what he did, was at the core of it. And he sort of built up these stories around it to justify it to himself and to other people and to his own family. Yes, because I think that ultimately this kind of relationship, when someone is recruited to be an agent, it's how it's sold by the intelligence officer. And I think in his case, it certainly had a number of facets and he would have lent on one of them at different times. And I think he was always reinventing himself. His kind of character was, I wouldn't say ambiguous, I'd just say sort of multi-layered. He had that very public entertainer face,

and then he had another kind of side to him, which was that behind that mask was someone who felt that he was doing the right thing, but that he was really boxed into it. It wasn't done through free will entirely. So in terms of his ideology, what was he saying was the right thing? What was he wanting? He thought that what was right for him was to bring the violence under control or end the violence. And later on, and again, he would have said this, I think, in the 1980s in the context of the time, certainly in encouraging Martin McGuinness and others

to engage in politics in a much more full-time way, he would have seen politics as a peaceful way of getting to the ultimate endgame of ending the violence. So I think he was motivated by that in a lofty kind of way. But again, it's such an intriguing tapestry of his involvement in the cavalry regiment he was in, the army, and then

obviously as a member of the republican movement, Sinn Féin. He used to describe it as he was someone who had divided loyalties. So in a way you could see he was making those trade-offs on a regular basis. And so we would emphasize certain elements of his motivation at certain times to suit his reinvention of himself, ultimately as Thatcher's spy.

He's in a tricky position in that he can't trust and they can't trust him. It's kind of like he's stuck as a sort of very isolated figure there and playing them all off against each other. Yeah, and only he could reconcile the different relationships that he had with people in his own mind. And that's why there was always a nagging sense that he wasn't being quite truthful.

He was an expert liar. He would have said that, and certainly he wrote about it in his memoir. And when you talk to other people who could, you know, verify some of the things that he claimed, they never said that he was an outrageous liar or fantasist.

They would say that they probably didn't remember it quite that way. I mean, there were certain components of the story that I often thought were too coincidental to be true. So, for example, his number, he claimed that his agent number was 3007. And, you know, that's been disputed by people. But nevertheless, you know, I think that it suited his purposes to put himself in the ring as a proverbial man in the arena, to quote Roosevelt. So right up to the end, he was not really telling the truth to anyone.

I certainly walked away from almost every interview with him. I felt that he was being economical with the truth depending on what he was talking about, but not to the point where it was completely fiction. It was completely made up. Now, I mean, he wasn't a military informant. He was a political one. Were there many others like him?

How unique was he in that position? Well, I think that there were a small number. It's hard to know specifically. I think that there were many, many more who were turned from within the paramilitary organisations, whereas he was more or less inserted in. From the start. From the start and directed.

And that's very important because agents are directed, whereas informers could be casual in the sense of just giving information, you know, every so often and on very low level things. He was a political informer. He was very politically minded. But I think that the transition really from, he claims or claimed from being handled by MI5 in London, which was a sort of interesting way of describing his activities,

to being handled by the army on the ground in a specialist unit, which operated kind of in a way behind enemy lines, so I can kind of understand. But they were putting pressure on him to give up information about weapons hides and operations that he didn't have immediate access to. And he often said that when he did start to ask very pointed questions about military operations within the IRA,

that then they knew something was up. And so he was very subtle. He had to be very subtle. And when he was more obvious and blunt, then I think that things changed for him. So he was infiltrating politics, but also trying to influence politics. I mean, can you say, I mean,

were there any significant events that he can have direct credit for? Or is it too much of a grey area for that? I think that much later on, there is a correspondence that has been in the National Archives for quite a long time where they recognise, they don't name him, but they recognise him as being one of the best placed agents within the Republican movement, which is quite, and he claimed that that was him. And it tallies with the time.

So best placed agent, I think, means not just that he can report on things but also that he can influence and he is an agent of influence and I think that the attempts by the political authorities or some within the government and its agencies to try and incentivise the IRA

to abandon its armed struggle and enter politics. It's certainly a convincing line of argument that he made, that he was subtly feeding into the decision making by Martin McGuinness primarily. So, I mean, can he be credited for getting Martin McGuinness elected? I think that he can be credited with being on hand to persuade Martin McGuinness that that was a good idea. He talked about various occasions when McGuinness had thought about the alternative to the armed struggle, where he talked to Carlin, who was his driver on occasion, about these kinds of ideas.

They were no more than that. And Carlin helped the operationalize them and would say that this is, Martin has said that this is a good idea. And Martin would probably nod and say, yes, yes, yes. And I think that, so we see him around the fringes,

but his fingerprints were not all over this. And that's what makes it, I think, much more convincing and powerful than saying that he was there shaping the Sinn Féin strategy. not all over this and that's what makes it I think much more convincing and powerful than saying that he was there shaping the Sinn Féin strategy and so on or you know claiming that he fed into the IRA leadership which he didn't do because he said that he was there for you know political influence but in a sense you can see how that coincides in the early to mid-1980s with Carlin's tasking as an agent

because it coincides with the hunger strikes it coincides with the building up of Sinn Féin as an electoral force throughout Northern Ireland and yeah, I mean he had a hand in that of course he was a treasurer he knew where the money was going where it was coming from

so he definitely had his hand on the pulse in terms of financial side and about how much resources were being put into fighting the electoral battles. I mean, there seem to be so many aspects of his personality that seem to be classic aspects of what makes someone a good spy or what makes someone even want to become a spy in the first place. This sort of whole, almost relishing the idea of being a double agent or double, triple, however many layers you get in. But I mean, I cannot conceive of how stressful that must be.

And he's in a position there with his family. He's not the only one at risk, at threat. There's his wife and kids as well. I mean, how did he manage that side of things? I think he managed it by living on his wits. But the problem, I think, that ultimately the impact that the troubles had on anyone who was involved in the armed combat was that, and even indirectly, you know, just by living in the same street where an incident happened

the impact on their psychology was significant and that goes for almost everyone. I've interviewed former paramilitaries in different organisations and actually in the quiet moment, although they wouldn't admit this publicly they struggle with what they

did and I think with Carlin because he didn't necessarily get people killed or sanction killings or participate in that, he certainly passed on intelligence that was used in some security forces operations. And he felt a huge amount of guilt. And I think that that impacted on him and his family. And I think just in terms of the dynamics in the family home.

And tragically, his children all died of one, you know, fortunate set of circumstances or ill health. And I think that their health massively was impacted and his certainly was. And he didn't survive long COVID in the end. But I think that all of this had accumulating effect and although he was certainly he felt like he had a few narrow escapes quite a few narrow escapes and that he shouldn't probably have been alive to tell the tale but he was and that was very much an intriguing element of this for me that here was someone who participated in some of the

most extraordinary set of political circumstances in Ireland and he was there, he was at least in ringside and occasionally in the ring. so aaron you're an experienced academic so i'm sure you've heard all the interpretations of what fueled the troubles it has been described as a clash of identities by the british psychological society would you agree with that? Yes, I would. And I think that the identities that we're talking about here are not one-dimensional. So often you will hear the Northern Ireland conflict, the Troubles. They are usually described as a religious war

between Catholics and Protestants. But actually, on top of that, you also have a complete overlapping set of identities. So Catholics were nationalists, and some were Republicans, meaning that they wanted to see a united Ireland, an Ireland that was united on a geographical basis and a constitutional basis with its capital in Dublin. So Republicans wanted that to happen almost overnight. Constitutional nationalists, such as the Social Democratic and Labour Party, were quite well prepared to sit back

and wait for Protestants and Catholics to work out their differences and then join together and bring about a united Ireland. So it was much more aspirational. On the other side, you've got Protestants who are primarily Protestant by faith, although the growth of atheism within that community has seen Protestantism play less of a role than it once did. But undoubtedly,

they are looking to London, they are looking to Great Britain and the connection between Northern Ireland primarily and England, Scotland, Wales. So in a sense, they are still in a way diametrically opposed, but that's how they are normally explained as being conflicting identities or indeed two different traditions that cannot live peacefully. But again, you can certainly see it in a number of different ways because we've just lived through quite a serious upheaval,

referred to as the Troubles, and now we are living through much more of a peaceful period where politics and dialogue takes priority. We hope. We hope. And so where does Carlin fit in to all that? How did he see his own identity? He was an Irishman, he'd been in the army,

he was an informant for the British. Well, yes, I mean, in a way, his identity, you could probably best describe it as being like a Russian doll. So he was a dairyman first. That was a small piece. Then on top of that, he was an Irishman. On top of that, though, he was an Irishman with a difference, which is not something accepted by all Irishmen or women.

He was loyal to the crown in the sense that he joined the British Army. Okay, in one way, it was an avenue whereby he got out of grinding poverty, but he still had a loyalty there to his regiment, to the British Army, to sort of British way of life, and did not want to overturn that in any way, politically or violently. And then on top of that, then, you have very, very mixed layers indeed.

This is where it becomes much more difficult to pin him down. The outer skin of that onion if you like, is all about him being so loyal to the British that he was prepared to make it look like he was betraying them by joining Sinn Féin and the Republican movement.

And then the outer layer, which unfortunately started to shatter somewhat by the mid-1980s, was him as a Sinn Féin activist and as a committed supporter of the IRA. And I think that because they were all coexisting in that way, and once pressure was pushed from within the IRA, actually, who set about a kind of internal investigation. Once they got wind that Carlin was an agent, he was betrayed by his former handler, Michael Bettany. Then that started to crack and then it exposed, as I've said,

that uncomplicated sort of loyal to the British, ultimately, and an enemy of Ireland and an enemy of the IRA. And then he became a bit of a hate figure, a folk devil, if you like, to Republicans and he had to be exfiltrated from Ireland to live out his days in Great Britain. Now, you mentioned Michael Bettany there and for me, if there's any sort of villain in this place,

he doesn't come out of it very well. I mean, in some ways, he seems almost like a sort of more extreme version of Carlin, and an extreme version of that sort of spy mentality of, in the end, he's in it for himself. I mean, what do you think Bettany's motives were through all this? I think Bettany's motives were, even though he's an intelligence officer and even though he did courageous things at the outset of the troubles

by putting himself in harm's way to get information from people like Willie Corlin, I think that he couldn't live with himself because he was such a contradiction, a walking contradiction. He believed in the greater good, but ultimately he dragged everything down to his own self-preservation. He betrayed Willie Carlin because he thought that he would curry favour

with an IRA prisoner in jail and that they may not, I don't know, out of some mistaken belief, that they may come and get him in future, kill him in prison. You just don't know about the immediate motivations. But almost certainly, he had written this narrative of himself, a story he told of him being a campaigner against all the things that were wrong within the British establishment. And so he ultimately betrayed his country to the Russians as well, to the Soviets.

And did that stem from genuine left-wing ideals or was that just simply because he didn't like the British? I think that communism was certainly the ideological flag that he wrapped himself in. I think ultimately his grievance was with the security service. He did not feel that he was getting the recognition he deserved and that kind of insider threat threat as we might call it today was massively impactful

because not only did he betray his work in Ireland and those officers from the security service that were involved in highly dangerous work over there but he also jeopardised agents that were working on behalf of the UK overseas. So in the end, I think that he did betray his country. But whether or not that can be solely attributable to his commitment to communism or his drinking, he was an alcoholic, or indeed out of some sort of having to preserve his own safety and security in prison,

we'll not know, but he did do that. So whatever way we explain it, I think we have to look at the results, the impact and the consequences of his actions, and we can see very clearly that they were narrow in focus and they ultimately started and ended with him. I mean, there seems to be a certain level of sort of self-aggrandizement as well. This idea of, I'm fooling you all, I'm cleverer than all of you, which I think seems to be core to being a spy.

Yeah, I would agree with that. Now, talking about what we may or may not ever know, there is an interesting debate about whether Martin McGuinness was a spy. There was even a government probe that concluded that he was not working for the British. But some people, like Martin Ingram, a former soldier, refused to believe this. What do you think about all that? Well, there are a lot of unanswered questions about Martin McGuinness's actions, his decision making. And I think that those questions are much more powerfully asked by former members of the provisional IRA themselves,

who believe, not all of them, but some of them do believe that they were betrayed by Martin McGuinness. But almost certainly those around Martin McGuinness were, you know, in some ways working for the British, even if they didn't realise it at the time. And so they may have been targets of surveillance and so on. There's a whole range of information that we never see, never see the light of day. We focus on the human source, the two-legged source, but really a lot of these players,

a lot of these individuals were known to the british because we have evidence in the national archives of who they are someone must have given them that information it can only really come ultimately from uh you know eyes on the so-called sort of human listening device which willie carlin certainly was and he could have helped and did, and his own record is saying that he helped flesh out the kind of family tree, how these people connected into one another, and there was a great degree of coverage over them and many others. So that would lead me to infer that there were others like Carlin that played a kind of important role. And Carlin believed that Martin McGuinness was being protected by MI5. What could British intelligence have seen so early on that may have

caused them to make this tactical decision? I think that certainly talent spotting is something that intelligence agencies do around the world. And they need people that they can maneuver into place. There are two ways of looking at this, of course, that either McGuinness knew that he was being maneuvered into place or that he didn't know, but suddenly people were, as pawns on the chessboard, were removed. And that certainly happened. And some Republicans who were at one point loyal to McGuinness, who then turned against him, have said that it just didn't add up when individuals were removed from the positions of authority to enable McGuinness to reach the heady heights.

I mean, he was, from the 1980s onwards, the overall military commander for the IRA. And he knew everything that went on within that organization. And in fact, one provisional IRA member who I interviewed referred to him as the Enigma machine, the Provo Enigma machine. So he knew every single thing that went on within that organization, right down to the money and how weapons were being brought in, how many they had, how the units were organised,

the squads, the people who were, the IRA people who were going out and carrying out the attacks. He knew every single thing. And of course, why would you not put Willie Carlin beside someone like that?

That makes total sense. So I think that McGuinness certainly was for a long time an intelligence target. But whether he was being directed, that's impossible to know. So, Aaron, obviously the turmoil that the Carlin family went through when he was extracted must have been pretty awful. But, I mean, did he ever express to you a wish to have been able to continue?

You know, did he say that his work was not done, as it were? Yes, absolutely. Not only that, but a great personal risk to himself. And I think, you know, I can't take credit for this if I was Willie Cornyn I'm sure he might now go and take credit for it that I asked him so many searching questions that he actually went back

to Derry on two occasions at least one was to look into who he suspected to have been one of the great unsolved mysteries, the agent Infliction, who surfaces at the Saville Inquiry and the events of Bloody Sunday on the 30th of January 1972. Carlin believed that he knew who that was and he certainly told me that he had gone back to investigate that. So he couldn't leave certain things alone. And then, of course, he went back to visit his sister.

And sadly, she dies of cancer later on. For him, he was very sad about that. And it felt like unfinished business because he had been exiled. In a sense, he had been told never to come back. He didn't want to leave any sleeping dogs to lie. He certainly, he wanted to reconcile with his family because ultimately, and this is the crucial thing about Carlin, unlike some of the other agents that we know a lot about around the world,

he betrayed his family as well as his friends, as well as his community. And so, yeah, I mean, if he, I think there was part of him who if he had been allowed to retire in the obscurity as just another shin fein activist who doesn't bother anymore as i would say locally then he would have preferred that because i think it ripped him out of the only reality he knew and cast him adrift for many years. Was he in danger going back? He was a danger, absolutely. I think any of those individuals who had been involved, even

if they didn't have intimate details of what was going on, they certainly knew a lot. They knew probably too much. And so going back, because it's unpredictable, because of the threat posed by dissident Republicans, and there's undoubtedly evidence to suggest that some of these dissident Republicans were carrying out attacks on former agents, such as Dennis Donaldson, in a way that suited the agenda of the mainstream provisional Republican movement. So I think in my mind, certainly, and unfortunately at the time, I just started to get to know Carlin. One of my close friends, journalist Larry McKee, was murdered in Derry by dissident Republicans.

And it was dangerous. It was a dangerous set of circumstances to think that a 70-year-old man going back, who yes, undoubtedly lived through very dangerous times compared to today, but he was going back to make peace with his family even, I think was something I found really extraordinary. And I mean, you know, it's impossible to sort of do the what if thing, but if Bettany hadn't betrayed him and he hadn't been pulled out do you think he would have had a lot of influence out there or was it only really a matter of time before he would have to get out that something would give him away well just to go back to what i said about the words that he used he would have described himself as being in the zone and he said you couldn't live

like that forever and in fact some messages we had back and forth between ourselves, he would have said to me that things aren't coincidental. They happen for a reason. And he believed that that was something that happened for a reason. I think in his private moments,

he had a limited shelf life. All agents do. And he was no different. Now, as well as being a senior lecturer at the Royal Military Academy in Sandhurst you have held training sessions for high-ranking officials in government, police, military and intelligence all over the world. I mean what lessons can be learned from the conflicts in Ireland for contemporary intelligence and defence practices? That's a great question. It's a big question. It's a big question.

It depends on the context. It depends on the circumstances. It depends on where we're talking about because there are places in the world where they do have a terrorist problem. They do have issues around, you know, very dedicated kind of insurgency. And when, you know, you talk to them about the Irish case study,

they will make comparisons, but they will also tell you about the contrasts. And wherever I've travelled to, wherever I've talked to individuals, mainly military, but again, others, police and intelligence folk, they really understand the conflict. I think that Northern Ireland is one of the most written about conflicts in history.

And so you don't really need too many introductions. You just have to clarify the terminology you're going to use. But I think that I wouldn't say that it's either an escalation or a de-escalation in dialogue. It depends. I think that every society that's going through conflict and dealing with armed conflict knows where the tipping point will be.

And sadly, there are places where that tipping point just has not been reached. Whereas in Northern Ireland, it almost certainly was reached in the early 1990s. Because it's a small place, and a lot of huge chunk of the population were affected by the Troubles, I think that it was much easier to make that persuasive argument that perhaps we should solve our differences peacefully.

And I certainly, in the work that I did before going to work for Sandhurst, I worked on Track 2 diplomacy, which is about informal peace building work, and talking to former Republicans and Loyalists. When I took them out to the Middle East, to Israel-Palestine, we talked to people from Sri Lanka and so

on, they would have seen those places as not being ripe for a kind of conflict resolution that they had gone through. So I think that there's a certain degree of humility in what I'm saying, but you never tell someone that this is the template, this is someone I work with, conflict mediation used to say, if we could bottle this up and sell it, wouldn't it be a wonderful,

wonderful gift to impart to the world? But ultimately, I think that Northern Ireland is an example of where intelligence and having information on your opponent, and that's primarily from the UK's perspective, enables politicians primarily, but also policymakers to make the best decisions to de-escalate the situation and enable peace to take root.

So, I mean, you know, the situation in Ireland has been very difficult ever since the English started going over there and trying to claim it for their own. And obviously, we had the Irish Civil War in 1922, and then all the way to the early 90s, and then post the Troubles, Ireland has been fractured by ideology and identity. I mean, do you feel that these issues persist today? Certainly at a much lower level. I think that we see a reasonably successful peace process and political process. There are difficulties. You know, there are quite a number of people who live in disadvantaged areas who don't really see a huge transformation

in their circumstances. They still see paramilitaries strutting around, you know, having some sort of coercive control in their communities. But actually, when we think about the broader picture in terms of Anglo-Irish relations, I guess we could say, they, I mean, clearly at the moment,

they're going through something of a renaissance and kind of getting back to the good spirit of the Goofredi Agreement. I think people are optimistic about the future. But we've gone through a period where there was certainly over the past 10, 15 years an elation about where politics was going because the problem with the Northern Ireland Assembly

and Parsha and Executive is you still bring those disagreements and disputes into the political arena. And sometimes if they boil over, then you see a collapse of the institutions. Now they are back at the moment, but it's been start, stop. So people get their hopes up.

They dream of a better future and then suddenly crash because of the diametrically opposed identities that we see there so yes it's it's still alive and well to an extent but it is manifesting itself in political discourse and dialogue and and toing and froing over the interactions between Sinn Féin the DUP and and so on but I think that the reason why we don't see a sort of relapse back into conflict is that people still believe in some of the kind of values and principles and norms of the 1990s the late 1990s which was a very optimistic period of time and they certainly remember at least the older

generation of what it was like before the peace came dropping slow and no one really wants to go back to that. There's no serious kind of call for resumption of violence on a mass scale and that's to be welcomed. Well I think that's a very appropriate way to end this conversation and thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us today Aaron. I found that really fascinating. Thank you. So if you're interested to know more, Aaron has written some brilliant books on the subject, including UVF, Behind the Mask, and Agents of Influence, Britain's secret intelligence war against the IRA, in which Aaron uses the Willie Carlin story as a way in to finding out so much more about what was going on in Ireland at the time. Thank you for listening, and do join us for the next season, The Spy Who Started the Cold War, hosted by Indira Varma.

Next time, we open the file on Klaus Fuchs. It's the 1940s, and Britain hopes to beat the Nazis by making an atom bomb. But there's a traitor in the ranks, Klaus Fuchs, a German nuclear physicist and communist who is secretly working for the Soviet Union. Follow The Spy Who now, wherever you listen to podcasts. Wondery Plus subscribers can binge full seasons of The Spy Who early and ad-free on Apple Podcasts or the Wondery app. From Wondery, this is the final episode in our series,

The Spy Who Sold Peace to the IRA. This bonus episode of The Spy Who is hosted by me, Charlie Higson. Our show is produced by Vespucci for Wondery, with story consultancy by Yellow Ant. The producer of this episode is Natalia Rodriguez. Our senior producer is Rachel Byrne. Our sound designer is Ivor Manley. Music supervisor is Scott Velasquez for Frisson's Sync. Executive producers for Vespucci are Johnny Galvin

and Daniel Turkin. The executive producer for Yellow Ant is Tristan Donovan. Our managing producer for Wondery is Rachel Sibley. Executive producers

for Wondery are Estelle Doyle, Chris Bourne, Morgan Jones and Marshall Louis.