Collateral Damage

It's a scene Australians know well – mums and dads, waiting in their cars just before 3pm for the kids to come out of school.

But there's one woman, sitting in a blue 4WD, who we are interested in. She looks your typical suburban mum. However appearances can be deceptive. We are in a town called Newry, in Northern Ireland, close to the Irish border. This is a place that used to be a hotbed of IRA terrorism ... and two decades ago, the woman sitting in that car was one of the heroes of supporters of the provisional IRA.

Twenty years ago, Donna Maguire was one of the most feared women in Europe – known as 'the Angel of Death'. She was one of the members of an IRA active-service-unit hit-team, dispatched to Europe to kill British soldiers at army bases there.

We have been watching her for days, building up an idea of her movements – and it's incredibly hard to reconcile the woman we see here with the young woman who did such terrible things all those years ago. As we discretely drive past one of her family houses in a nearby Newry suburb, she is leaning against a doorframe laughing as her kids play in the street outside. Donna Maguire clearly adores family life and loves her children, just as much as Queensland mother Beverley Melrose loved her son Stephan, who was murdered by members of Maguire's hit-team in May 1990. Donna's failed to respond to our request for her to speak to us but we've decided we owe it to Bev and Roy Melrose to not let the matter rest. Which is why we are here.

Keeping surveillance on someone like this, who was undoubtedly trained to spot police and intelligence agencies watching her, is extremely difficult. We intend confronting Donna – but we want to do it in a place which is safe for us, because we don't fancy the reaction from Newry locals when they realize that one of their heroes is being approached by an Australian TV crew anxious to talk to her about her terrorist past.

Our very presence here has been noted by locals. Four tall and tanned Australians, with watchful eyes, are soon the subject of hard return gazes from locals. One man pretends to be fiddling with something in his boot as he scans us sitting in our car, and he then sits down in his seat and makes a note of registration plate. This is a town well used to spooks and coppers, watching them – and they're not intimidated. They just haven't worked out yet who we are here to watch.

When I finally tap on Donna Maguire's car window and ask her to offer some sympathy to the Australian family of Stephan Melrose, there is a microsecond before Donna realizes that her past has caught up with her. Her face initially has a friendly greeting, and she then flashes recognition and turns her head away from our camera. Twenty years on, is it shame? We hope so.

I wasn't surprised that Donna didn't want to speak to us, but I was sad about it. This might sound hopelessly naïve but I had genuinely hoped there might be an opportunity for the former members of the IRA hit team to sit down with the Melrose family and say sorry. Dutch police and the former prosecutor who took the four terrorists to court in 1991 have assured us the team cannot be re-tried for the same offence, so there was no risk of Donna compromising herself if she had found it in her heart to sit down with Bev and hold her hand and apologise.

As journalists, we've seen the power of truth and reconciliation commissions around the world, in countries like South Africa – where former BOSS spooks admitted in front of the families of the people they tortured and killed, the terrible things they had done. I have seen similar moments in East Timor. It's not going to bring loved ones back but it has a powerful healing effect, purging a community of dark and painful repressed memories. And there’s no shortage of those in Northern Ireland, where attempts to get a Truth and Reconciliation Commission up and running have been resisted. No-one, it seems, on either side of The Troubles wants the full truth of what happened here during this dirty war to be told just yet.

The most confronting aspect of this whole shoot for us has been the back-story behind the murder of the two Australians, which suggests there are very powerful reasons why the British intelligence, police and military also have no interest in seeing the full story told of what happened here in Northern Ireland.

Our investigation took us to a former British army spy inside the IRA, known by the pseudonym Kevin Fulton, who was a member of the British Army but a local lad from Newry. Early in his British Army career, he was approached by the British spooks and asked to work for a shadowy military unit called the Force Research Unit (FRU). And then, later on, when his penetration of the IRA became so effective in providing useful intelligence, his intelligence handler was a senior member of the British domestic secret service MI5.

We were initially skeptical about Fulton. His story, told in his book Unsung Hero seemed too shocking to be true. For Fulton says he was allowed to commit terrible crimes while working for British intelligence inside the IRA. He made bombs and accompanied fellow IRA members on operations. And, even though he would never admit his role in murders – it is very clear that Fulton killed people to preserve his IRA cover. Perhaps the most shocking revelation from Fulton is that he tipped his British intelligence handlers that a massive bomb was being prepared just before the notorious Omagh bombing, which killed many innocent civilians. The awful question hangs, if the British knew about it then why didn't they stop it?

He and other intelligence sources also told us how British intelligence would have known a lot about Donna Maguire's IRA active service unit in Europe because the British were told that a notorious IRA hard-man, Desmond Grew, was being sent across to mastermind the operations. Fulton knew Maguire and another of her IRA colleagues, Gerard Harte, well. Harte, he says, used to boast of how he enjoyed telling his victims to 'Stare down the dark black hole' – a reference to the muzzle of his gun. As we spoke to Fulton and other people with knowledge of the intelligence wars back then, it became painfully clear to us that British spies must have known a lot about the IRA active service unit of which Maguire was a part. There are now estimates that as many as one in three IRA volunteers were actually British agents or informers; and that, at a senior level in the IRA, it may even have been as high as one-in-two! The more we speak to Fulton and other former British spies with knowledge of those years, the more the awful question hangs in the air: Why didn't British spies stop these European attacks when they had the chance to take these IRA volunteers out early in their operation?

Kevin Fulton and other intelligence sources tell us it was because the British placed a high priority on maintaining their agents inside the IRA; and that, to act on the information they received about impending terror attacks, may have jeopardized the safety of those spies. In the long run, it was all about penetrating the IRA from within, turning the organization into such a hot-bed of paranoia that the IRA would eventually be forced to the negotiating table.

For years Fulton provided the British with useful intelligence which did also help stop some IRA terror attacks, but as author Ed Moloney, who wrote a definitive IRA history called The Secret History of the IRA, told us, there came a time when the British penetration of the IRA was so effective that there is a question of who was fighting who? Were British spooks, in place in the IRA, ordering attacks that killed not only British troops but innocent civilians? Were the British effectively fighting the British with the extent of their penetration of the IRA? Had an awful line been crossed where, to win this dirty war, the British Government was prepared to commit awful crimes to paralyse the IRA from within? By turning the IRA on itself, allowing their IRA double-agents to order the killing of other IRA people they falsely accused of being British 'touts', the British spooks forced the IRA to a peace deal.

But it also made agents like Fulton expendable. He alleges his MI5 handler, now a very senior member of that secret service, knowingly sent him to a certain death by assuring him his interrogation by an IRA internal security unit squad would be ok. Fulton knew his cover was blown. He ignored that assurance, and lived. And it later turned out that the very head of the IRA 'nutting' internal security squad was himself a British agent known as STAKEKNIFE. Fulton believes the British knew full well that he would be killed by Stakeknife, as a British spy inside the IRA, and that would have preserved the credibility of their most valuable agent inside that terrorist organization.

They are incredible allegations but it's clear to us, no one in the British establishment will ever want that story told. If true, they are just as criminal and worthy of full investigation as the terrorist atrocities perpetrated by the IRA over the years of the Troubles.

You can hear Kevin Fulton's allegation to UK Police about the British agent Stakeknife's crimes here:

Kevin Fulton Complaint to police about Stakeknife: Complaint video

And this link will give you the terrifying audio confession of another British informer inside the IRA. Incredible and as awful as it may seem, the person who directed this interrogation was Stakeknife, a British agent:

John Dignam Confession to IRA: Confession video

And here, you can actually listen to Stakeknife, covertly recorded by British journalists:

Covert recording of Stakeknife informing to ITV (about army council of IRA, Martin McGuinness) Covert recording