OPERATION GEORGE

An inside account of an elaborate undercover police sting that snagged a Northern Irish terrorist.

For almost two years, William James “Jimmy” Fulton, a suspect in the March 1999 murder of a Catholic lawyer in Northern Ireland by Protestant paramilitaries, thought he was part of a criminal gang, or “firm,” operating in South West England. He worked as the driver for the gang’s boss, socialized with its members, and helped them in varied other ways. But he was actually the main target of “Operation George,” an elaborate and audacious undercover sting by British police that recorded almost his every word on audiotape and resulted in his arrest in June 2001. “Just like Jim Carrey’s character in The Truman Show, Fulton’s environment had been controlled and his life manipulated,” co-authors Dickens (a pseudonym) and Bentley, both former undercover officers, write in this rare and at times compelling window into the murky world of undercover policing. Fulton was not charged with the slaying of lawyer Rosemary Nelson, but Operation George amassed enough evidence to get him convicted of 48 terrorist offenses, including the murder of a grandmother. Dickens and Bentley are at their best in describing the intricacies of the sting and the tightrope the undercover officers walked as they fraternized with Fulton in the hope he would spill the beans on his criminal activities in Northern Ireland. “They were living and working in a stress-filled atmosphere laden with potential danger to themselves,” the authors write. Fulton’s boss had to time bathroom breaks on their road trips to coincide with changing the tape in his listening device but made sure to use different locations so “Jimmy didn’t start forming a pattern in his head,” and when the officers went out drinking with Fulton, they had to find ways to dump their drinks to manage their alcohol consumption. Such details make the first half of the book worthwhile. But the second consists of a dry compendium of excerpts from Fulton's taped admissions to the undercover officers and the judge’s ruling at his trial—a trove of documentation that might have made for a more absorbing story had the authors incorporated the right material into a single coherent narrative.

A sometimes-interesting undercover crime story undermined by its fragmented structure.