PROLOGUE
‘They’ll never find it’ get rid of something – my detailed source notes relating to the break-in at a police Special Branch office at Castlereagh in Belfast and the political intelligence-gathering scandal that came to be known as ‘Stormontgate’. In 2002 the IRA was linked to both events and denied involvement in both. I didn’t believe them then. I don’t believe them now. Some years after these events, the British Security Service, MI5, was seeking pre-publication access to a book I was writing at that time. There had been correspondence, and I had taken advice. It was 2008, three years after I had felt the need to escape from the story of our past, and I was back in a tug-of-war. There could be a raid or a search of my home. I was told to get the information out of the jurisdiction. In my continuing research on those 2002 events, I had obviously trespassed into the intelligence world, discovered too much about a bugging and surveillance operation that was part of the response to Stormontgate, and found I NEEDED A FRIEND TO
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