The BBC has announced the release of Assume Nothing: The Stormont Spy Ring, a new eight-part series for BBC Sounds and BBC Radio Ulster.
The series tells the story of Denis Donaldson – once a key figure in Sinn Féin – who was found murdered in Donegal in 2006 after it emerged that he had acted as an informer for the police and MI5 for 20 years.
Stormont Spy Ring
In 2009, the Real IRA said it had killed Mr Donaldson, but many questions remain unanswered and nobody has been convicted for his murder.
Narrated by Blue Light’s actor Martin McCann, the series starts months before Denis Donaldson’s death when a raid at the Belfast headquarters of Special Branch, the police counter terrorism unit, led to a massive criminal investigation.
At the time, the finger of blame for this break-in had been pointed at the IRA. Police investigations into what had happened led them to the home of Denis Donaldson where they recovered material that they believed had been stolen from government offices.
Some of the documents were missing or incomplete and it was police efforts to recover them that turned a covert police investigation into a full-blown political scandal that threatened the future of Stormont’s power-sharing coalition.
Denis Donaldson was arrested, alongside three others, and a convoluted legal process followed with an outcome nobody saw coming.
When prosecutors dropped all charges against the men who had been accused of running a republican spy ring in government, Denis Donaldson made a confession that he had been supplying information to MI5 and the police.
Shortly afterwards, he disappeared from public view.
Denis Donaldson had moved to a remote, whitewashed stone cottage in Donegal and it’s there that he was murdered several months later.
Twenty years on, Denis Donaldson’s murder remains unsolved. One potentially important piece of evidence, a journal that he was supposedly writing around the time of his death, is being held by Irish police. His family want it returned, but their efforts have so far been unsuccessful.
The series includes contributions from journalists, those in security services, and others close to the story.
Assume Nothing: The Stormont Spy Ring is now available on BBC Sounds.