Fifty Dead Men Walking

It’s 8.30am in the morning of 17 June 1999 and 29-year-old Martin Ashe walks out of his home in Whitely Bay to take his Ford Focus for a spin up the Northumberland coast. Yet Ashe never gets as far as the garage door. Without warning a series of gunshots ring out and Ashe crumples to the floor in a pool of blood with five bullets lodged in his stomach.

Hours later, Ashe is in a stable condition in hospital. But by no means is he out of danger. You see, Martin’s real surname is McGartland and throughout the late 80s and 90s he was ‘Agent Carol’, a key British spy in the clandestine war against the IRA. During the later stages of the troubles he is reckoned to have saved the lives of at least fifty people by taking huge risks to reveal the IRA’s plans to the RUC and MI5. Having been recruited by Special Branch at the age of 17, McGartland was also a trusted member of an IRA active service unit and one of the Provos most valued intelligence officers.

This came to an abrupt halt in August 1991. Having been summoned to meet Podraig Wilson, the head of IRA discipline, McGartland found himself bound and gagged in a four-story block of flats in the Broom Park area of West Belfast. With a handgun pushed against his head he heard the chilling words, ‘Provisional IRA. You’re under arrest.’ McGartland had fallen into the hands of the IRA Civil Administration Team, a brutal gang of torturers who specialized in cigarette burns, electric shocks, iron bar beatings and a horrifying method of water torture where you’re repeatedly dunked headfirst into a bath until you confess or collapse. The ultimate outcome would be a bullet to the back of his head.

Yet for hours nothing happened. And having spent most of the day on the floor, McGartland needed the toilet. As the IRA men shuffled him towards the urinal, he came face to face with a freshly filled bath. It meant only one thing: the ‘administration’ would start soon. ‘At that moment I preferred to take the odds of leaping through the window,’ says McGartland in his book Dead Men Running. ‘I had no idea what was below the window – concrete, grass, parked cars, trees or shrubs. Suddenly, it didn’t seem to matter. Here was a possibility of escape. I glanced into the kitchen and saw three of them talking quietly amongst themselves. “This is your only chance, Marty,” I said to myself. “Go for it, go for it, go for it.”’

With his feet still bound McGartland frantically hopped across the hallway and towards a closed window in the sitting room. Terrified that the IRA men would spot him he shuffled faster and faster until he got within a couple of feet. ‘I leapt as high as I could, hurling myself head-first through the pane. I don’t even remember hitting the glass,’ he says.
McGartland has no idea how many floors he fell. All he knows is that his next few months were spent drifting in and out of consciousness in hospital. The government then stuck £100,000 in his back pocket and flew him to the mainland to start a new life.

It was eight years later – in June 1999 - that the gunman caught up with him in Whitley Bay. While the IRA are the most obvious culprits, McGartland has also suggested that it was actually an MI5 plot – the organisation were allegedly none-too-pleased after he disclosed secrets in his book Fifty Dead Men Walking, which has recently been adapted into a movie starring Ben Kingsley.

Today, McGartland is living safely at an undisclosed location in the UK. He has disowned the movie for being ‘entirely false’, calling it ‘an insult to the victims of IRA terrorism’. He has also asked Gerry Adams when he can safely return to Belfast. The Sinn Fein president blankly replied that it is a matter between McGartland and the IRA. In other words: never.