Death of “Thatcher’s Spy”
Posted by admin978 on February 20, 2023 · Leave a Comment
Willie Carlin – the MI5 agent inside the IRA, whose autobiography Thatcher’s Spy was reviewed by Mark Cotterill in H&D #100 – died from CoViD complications on 6th February, though his death was only announced today. Carlin had been living under a new identity since 1985, when he was ‘exfiltrated’ from Ulster after being betrayed by a traitor within MI5, Michael Bettaney.
Coincidentally, Carlin died just a fortnight before the death of Henry McDonald, the Ulster journalist who edited Thatcher’s Spy for publication.
As Mark explained in his review, Carlin was a working-class Catholic who served in the British Army and was recruited by MI5 to infiltrate the IRA and its political wing Sinn Fein from 1974-80 then, after a short hiatus, from 1981-85. His work is credited with helping force the IRA away from terrorism towards the ballot box.
Of course, now more than ever, this can be seen as a mixed blessing. Carlin’s deployment coincided with a strategy pushed by MI5’s sister service MI6 (and carried out principally by MI6 officer Michael Oatley) which led towards the present attempts to surrender Ulster’s identity in favour of the ‘Protocol’ deal with Dublin and the European Union.
Carlin himself probably welcomed that process. We might never know (though we can guess) the extent to which senior IRA commander Martin McGuinness was also working hand in glove with sections of the secret state in London (themselves under pressure from ‘allies’ in Washington).
MI5’s intelligence successes against the IRA offered the opportunity to crush republican terrorism once and for all – an opportunity that sadly was ignored in favour of US-brokered ‘compromise’.
But recent weeks have shown that all is not lost. If the unionist and loyalist communities can unite, then the treacherous successors of those IRA terrorists who were exposed by Carlin, might yet be defeated.
