Martin Dillon

Life
1949- ; b. Belfast; educ. in England; live in France; returned to Northern Ireland and joined The Irish News before moving to the Belfast Telegraph; also freelanced for other British and American papers; issued Political Murder in Northern Ireland (1973), an authoritative study; wrote Rogue Warrior of the SAS, a biography of the Second World War hero, Lt. Col. Robert Blair Mayne; called the ‘greatest living authority’ by Conor Cruise O’Brien; wrote The Dirty War (London 1990); The Shankhill Butchers, A Case Study of Mass Murder (1989) and God and the Gun: The Church and Irish Terrorism (1997); also wrote a novel as The Serpent’s Tail (1995) and collaborated with with Richard Cohen on The Island (1995), being the story of an SAS-inspired sting in the IRA, based on true events; winner Cannes award as film script, 1993; several plays for BBC radio and television and Northern Ireland editor of numerous BBC current affairs programmes; employed by BBC History Unit in London.

Bibliographical details
The Trigger Men: Assassins and Terror Bosses in Ireland (Mainstream 2003), 320pp. CONTENTS [chaps.]: ‘King rat’; ‘Undercover trigger men’; ‘Assassin in the ranks’; ‘The teflon don and the political hitman’; ‘Paedophile terrorists’; ‘Dominic “Mad dog” McGlinchey’; ‘Legal trigger men’;

Crossing the Line: My Life on the Edge (Kildare [Ireland]: Merrion Press 2017), q.pp. [see contents] Half Title; Author Biography; Title Page; Copyright; Dedication; Epigraph; Contents; Foreword by Tom McGurk; Prologue; Part One; 1. Belfast - Early Family Roots; 2. Ancestral Eccentricities; 3. Gerard Dillon: The Making of an Artist; 4. George Campbell's 'Non-Heads'; 5. My Life in a Seminary; 6. Fathers and Sons; 7. Coming of Age; Part Two; 8. The Troubles and Journalism Beckon; 9. Setting the Record Straight; 10. A Surreal, Violent Landscape; 11. Balaclavas, Breadcrumbs and Romper Rooms; 12. The BBC Years; 13. Irish Literary Giants and a Stray; 14. Challenging the BBC's Ethics. 15. Genesis of the Peace Process: Hume v Adams16. Time to Talkback and Natural-Born Killers; 17. The Joker Club; 18. Agent Ascot: Paedophile, Terrorist and British Spy; 19. Murderous Choices: Getting Rid of 'The Monkey'; 20. Counterterrorism's Moral Ambiguity; 21. In the BBC's Crosshairs; 22. Legacies of Home; Epilogue; Index; Plates [‘Killers in the family’; ‘Terror bosses’; ‘Stone cold assassin’; ‘Johnny “Mad dog” Adair’; ‘A murderous military agent’; ‘Memories dark and bloody’]

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Criticism
Danny Morrison, ‘Dillon’s Wonderland’, scathing review of The Serpent’s Tail (Richard Cohen Books 1995), in Fortnight Review, Jan. 1996, p.35.

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Notes
Stone Cold: The True Story of Michael Stone [...] (1992) - In March 1988 three unarmed members of an IRA active service unit were shot dead by SAS operatives in Gibraltar in a secret operation which became a political "cause celebre". At the funeral for the dead men at the Milltown Cemetery in their native Belfast, Michael Stone threw grenades and fired into the crowd of mourners, killing three men and wounding several others. He was captured, interrogated and confessed to a list of killings which have put him in the Maze Prison under a life sentence. Drawing on his conversations with Stone in prison and a network of informants right across the Irish political spectrum, Martin Dillon presents a portrait of a killer: charming, boastful, meticulous, sentimental and lethal. Dillon investigates his abandonment by his mother, his upbringing by Protestant relatives in Belfast, his wives and friends and his early involvment in street violence leading to his career as a freelance killer associated with many of Ulster's political or para-military organizations. A direct consequence of the Milltown Massacre was the killing of two British soldiers caught up in the funeral cortege for one of the Milltown dead - one of the most brutal instances of mob violence in recent Irish history. In this book Dillon makes a revelation about the two soldiers. (Publisher’s notice on Amazon.)

God and Gun: The Church and Irish Terrorism (1999) - In this astonishing and at times terrifying book, acclaimed writer and political commentator Martin Dillon examines for the first time the true role of religion in the conflict in Northern Ireland. He interviewed those directly involved - terrorists like Kenny McClinton and Billy Wright and churchmen like Father Pat Buckley - finding that the terrorists were more forthcoming than the priests and ministers. Dillon charts the history of the paramilitary forces on both sides and exposes the shocking covert role of British intelligence. He finds that, ultimately, both the church and government have failed their communities, allowing men and women of violence to fill a vacuum with bigotry and violence. (Publisher’s notice on Amazon.)

The Serpent’s Tail (1995) - Two young Belfast Catholics who are recruited as informers and find themselves at the heart of a ''sting'' inv olving the IRA, the SAS and MI5. (Thriftbooks online; listing all editions.)

The Serpent’s Tail (1995) - The true story of an SAS inspired sting against the Provisional IRA which almost destroyed the organisation. The IRA later admitted that the operation was a brilliant piece of planning by the SAS and the British Intelligence Agency, MI5. Its success was, however, short-lived leading to the sacrifice of many agents and the emergence of a more determined and ruthless IRA leadership. In the style of Le Carré and Deighton, this book tells for the first time the story of the shadowy world of agents and double agents, the ruthlessness of both sides in the undercover war, the naïvety of the British political and military Establishments, how and why the Provisionals took their campaign to mainland Britain, and bombed their way to the conference table and the White House. (Publisher’s notice at Google Books.)

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