The Sunday Life
How Denis Donaldson's treachery led to his lonely, brutal death
A new book lifts the lid on some of the most brutal murders to take place in Ireland in recent years, including the republican murders of south Armagh man Paul Quinn and Sinn Fein spy Denis Donaldson. Over the next four pages, read these exclusive extracts from Revenge: Twenty Cold-Blooded Irish Killings, by author Ken Foxe. ALL Denis Donaldson wanted as his life drew to a close was some "peace and quiet". The IRA double agent had moved to a pre-Famine era cottage in the wilds of Co Donegal where he lived without central heating or even running water.
At night he would read by the light of an old oil lamp and to warm himself he chopped wood and placed it on the fire at the centre of his living room. He drew water from a nearby well, which he stored and used for washing and cooking.
He knew nobody locally and lived a hermitical life, only ever leaving the house on short visits to a nearby town to collect provisions.
The so-called super-spy looked a shadow of his former self, sporting an unkempt beard and wearing worn-out combat trousers and an old navy blue shirt.
It was a far cry from his days in the corridors of power in Stormont, where he wore sharp suits and passed information on his Sinn Féin and IRA comrades to both MI5 and the Police Service of Northern Ireland.
In December 2005 he had been outed as a spy by Sinn Féin President Gerry Adams and in a statement read out to RTÉ had admitted he had been working as a mole.
From that moment Denis Donaldson was a dead man walking.
He left behind his life in Belfast and moved to his secret bolthole in Donegal. When a journalist tracked him down, Denis Donaldson claimed that he had been thrown to the wolves by his handlers in the British secret service.
Donaldson said: "That agenda is all too obvious. The plan was to collapse the institutions to save Trimble -- David Trimble was trying to out-DUP the DUP and in the end the DUP swallowed him up.
"The whole idea was to get Trimble off the hook and get republicans the blame. But it didn't work, because Trimble is history now."
Three weeks later, he was dead.
Denis Donaldson was born in the Short Strand area of Belfast in 1950. At the age of 20 Donaldson had his first serious run-in with the law when he was caught planting a bomb in a distillery in Belfast. He was sentenced to four years in jail. While in prison he became a close friend of Bobby Sands. On his release Donaldson quickly became a key figure in the IRA, and a trusted lieutenant of Gerry Adams.
In August 1981 Donaldson was arrested by police at the airport in Orly, south of Paris.
He had travelled using forged papers and admitted he had been at a training camp in Lebanon for several months. Donaldson was allowed to return home and was not prosecuted.
Donaldson also forged links with other terrorist groups including the Basque separatist grouping ETA and the Palestine Liberation Organisation.
In 1983 he unsuccessfully stood in local council elections and at some time around this period he was first turned by the British security services after, as Donaldson put it later, "compromising myself".
A story from the time suggests that he had been caught in bed with a local woman but his wife Alice already knew about it so the affair seems unlikely to have been the literal turning point.
There were dozens of other rumours of other indiscretions and of a "shoplifting" incident in Marks & Spencer, but none of them seemed sufficient to turn a man into a traitor.
Donaldson would have been a pivotal person in the armoury of British intelligence, with knowledge about the leadership of the IRA, its international contacts and, crucially, importation of weapons into Ireland.
He became a key backroom man in Sinn Féin as the party made its first tentative steps towards a political solution, leading to the first IRA ceasefire in 1994.
Donaldson also continued globe-trotting on behalf of the organisation, at one stage travelling to Lebanon in an attempt to have the Beirut hostage Brian Keenan freed from captivity.
Donaldson was then moved to the United States, where he helped pave the way for visits by Martin McGuinness and Gerry Adams.
By 2002 British intelligence had recruited another mole inside Sinn Féin, somebody not as highly ranked as Donaldson, but who was similarly well-placed. The new informant revealed that Donaldson, by now the head of the party's administration, was believed to have been at the heart of a Sinn Féin spying ring in Stormont, something which Donaldson had neglected to mention to his handlers.
On October 4, Donaldson and two other men were arrested on suspicion of intelligence-gathering.
Two computer disks were removed from Sinn Féin offices in Stormont while thousands of sensitive documents were also reported to have been discovered during a raid on Donaldson's Belfast home.
Two days after the raid Donaldson appeared in court, charged with five offences including providing information that could be used for the purposes of terrorism. Eight days after that the devolved government collapsed.
Three years later all charges against the three men were dropped without explanation at a court hearing when police were not granted a public interest immunity certificate, which would have protected the identity of the second informant. Donaldson was summoned to a meeting with his handlers and told that Sinn Féin were close to finding out about his secret activity.
Protection and the possibility of a new life abroad under an assumed name were offered.
Donaldson, however, decided he would take his chances and went public to admit he had been a spy.
The bespectacled informer said: "I was recruited in the 1980s after compromising myself during a vulnerable time in my life. Since then I have worked for British intelligence and the RUC/PSNI Special Branch.
"Over that period I was paid money. I deeply regret my activities with British intelligence and the RUC/PSNI Special Branch."
From there Denis Donaldson tried to drift into obscurity, moving into the family-owned cottage near Glenties in Co Donegal.
On Monday, April 3, 2006 two republican renegades came to the house, armed with a shotgun. Denis Donaldson attempted to bolt his front door. The killers used a sledge hammer to break through the door.
The assassins, hell-bent on revenge on the informer, entered the house. Donaldson did not shout or scream and knew the inevitable had come at last.
They shot at him at least four times, twice through the door and twice more when they got inside. They had used a shotgun, knowing it would prove difficult to do a ballistics trace on it.
The case remained cold until April 2009 when the Real IRA finally claimed responsibility.
In a chilling interview, a representative of the RIRA said: "The argument put forward among our leadership was that by executing Donaldson we could show -- unlike the Provos -- that we weren't prepared to tolerate traitors."
-Extract from Ken Foxe's book, Revenge: Twenty Cold-Blooded Irish Killings. It is published by Poolbeg Press and is available now, priced £8.99
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