Spy story

Thatcher’s Spy: MI5’s man in Sinn Féin looks back over his shoulder

History is, in many ways, a series of stories. Historical perspectives depend on who is telling the story, and on who is hearing it. Willie Carlin, the MI5 agent who worked within Sinn Féin in the 1970s and 1980s for the benefit of Margaret Thatcher’s government, is telling this particular story, and he tells it well, insofar as a story of troubled times can ever be well told.

Billed as a real-life tale of espionage worthy of John le Carré where the Cold War meets Northern Ireland’s so-called “Dirty” War, Thatcher’s Spy details Carlin’s existence in two worlds; the covert world of MI5 and the political and paramilitary realities of Sinn Féin and the IRA.

Carlin grew up in a working-class republican family in Derry but swam against the cultural tide of his peers and followed his father into the ranks of the British army in the 1960s. In the early 1970s, he made his return to his home city after numerous postings abroad, and was quickly embroiled in the conflict and chaos ravaging not only the city but the lives of his family, his friends and the wider Derry community.