An English career criminal has claimed he was recruited to murder five people on behalf of MI5 in the early days of the Troubles.
The startling hit-man admission has been made in a sworn affidavit by convicted killer Paul Cleeland.
The 82-year, who lives in England, claims he was recruited to MI5 in the late 1960s and was later flown to the north on five occasions to murder both republicans and loyalists.
The pensioner says he has broken his silence to help the families of 21 people killed in the Birmingham pub bombings.
Dozens of people were also injured when explosions ripped through two pubs in November 1974.
While it has never claimed responsibility, the IRA is believed to have been behind the bomb attacks.
Six Irishmen, known as the Birmingham Six, were later falsely accused of involvement and served lengthy sentences.
Relatives of the dead and their supporters continue to call for a public inquiry into the lethal attacks.
In his affidavit, Mr Cleeland claims a man, who was also a state agent, he met while serving a prison sentence confessed that he planted the Birmingham bombs on behalf of British intelligence.
The pensioner also claims the same man, whose identity is known to the Irish News, was involved as a getaway driver in the series of murders he carried out in Belfast more than half a century ago.
Mr Cleeland, who describes himself as a career criminal, reveals that he was recruited after his release from Wormwood Scrubs in prison in the late 1960s after being given a telephone number by a senior prison official and told to call it.
He reveals that after calling the number he was told he would be contacted by an officer from Hertfordshire Constabulary.
He claims he was later contacted by a Special Branch officer and was subsequently recruited into the “security services” - also known as MI5 - adding he was singled out because of his contacts in organised crime.
Mr Cleeland said the covert agency wanted to “understand and control organised crime in the UK”, particularly the drugs trade.
The former gangster said his role was not that of an informer but as a “source of information” and “talent scout” for criminals that could be of use to MI5 and Special Branch.
He said that at the start of the Troubles he was brought to an address in England by a policeman and introduced to an Irishman named ‘Jake’.
There he was told that his brother, who was Royal Marine, was to be posted to the north as the Troubles erupted in violence and asked if he was prepared to keep his sibling and other British soldiers safe.
“I asked him how could I help and he said ‘to kill those bastards IRA’,” he said.
He claims that as a test of his willingness to kill he was taken to a nearby pigsty where he was handed a revolver and ordered to shoot a drunk man he describes as a “tramp”.
“I did what he told me and shot the tramp in the head,” he says in the affidavit.
He claims he was also trained in the use of firearms and in subsequent months was flown to Belfast on five occasions.
He was then hooded before being brought to a “safe house” where he was shown a photograph of the “target” by Jake.
“I was told to study the photograph or photographs of the IRA victims,” he said.
“On two occasions the victims were UDA or UVF men.”
He said that when attacks were being carried out he and Jake would travel in a car driven by a third person.
Mr Cleeland said it is the driver of the car, who he believes was working for MI5 and Special Branch, is the person he claims later admitted to involvement in the Birmingham bombings.
In 1973 Mr Cleeland was convicted of the murder of his business partner Terry Clarke in England a year earlier.
He claims he was “framed” for the murder after he was “of no further use to the intelligence branches”.
Sentenced to life, he served 27 years.
Mr Cleeland continues to insist he is innocent of the murder of Mr Clarke more than 50 years ago.
He says that as a ‘Category A’ prisoner he met several IRA members and the man who had been his driver in the early 1970s.
Mr Cleeland said it was during a chance meeting in Gartree Prison, in Leicestershire, in the 1980s that the man admitted his part in the Birmingham attacks.
The man claimed to have been serving a sentence under an assumed name for selling equipment to republicans.
He claims that in the affidavit that a prominent IRA man who was being held in the prison at the time suspected he knew the man’s true identity.
Mr Cleeland claims that during a jailhouse meeting between him, the IRA man and his former ‘driver’ the latter admitted “that he planted the bombs in Birmingham on the order of the British intelligence”.
The former lifer claims the ‘driver’ told him and the IRA man the Birmingham operation was set up to damage support for the republican movement and disrupt fundraising in England.
Mr Cleeland says that a short time later he was “suddenly transferred” from Gartree prison.
He claims that while his has never seen the ‘driver’ since their prison encounter, he later had links to a prosecution witness in the Birmingham Six trial.
He added that the man “not only acted as a driver for myself and Jake in Belfast when I carried out the killings of IRA men, but later admitted to the planting bombs and carrying out terrorist attacks on behalf of the British intelligence,” while in prison.
