Sinn Féin official and former IRA prisoner turned British agent Denis Donaldson, shot dead last Tuesday in a Donegal cottage, leaves many mysteries, not least the question of why he left himself so vulnerable at the end.
By his own admission, Donaldson became a British agent in his early 30s. He survived for a quarter of a century undetected by his fellow republicans, many of whom had known him since adolescence. He must have been a superb actor. When first he was "outed", the adjective most often used to describe him was "inconspicuous".
A close colleague commented ruefully that people often stopped sensitive discussions in party headquarters as a door opened, then relaxed and said "It's only Denis."
He was born into a well-known republican family in Short Strand, the tiny Catholic district perched between Belfast city centre and sprawling Protestant east Belfast. At 20, he took part in "the battle of St Matthew's," an IRA-led defence of the parish church against loyalists, which was the first major confrontation of the Troubles in east Belfast.
As the long freeze of war ended, Donaldson was one of the earliest republican apparatchiks to be given a public role, with encouragement to make himself known to reporters. It seems unlikely that many cultivated him: he was too obviously on-message to be useful. A physically unprepossessing man, but with a cheeky, likeable smile, he had a reputation when younger as a something of a philanderer.
Donaldson went to St Malachy's grammar school in north Belfast, never a republican hotbed, but joined the IRA by his mid-teens and was soon local commanding officer. He was arrested trying to bomb a bottling plant and served five years of a 10-year sentence.
A jail photo with a smuggled camera showed the tiny Donaldson with his arm awkwardly across the shoulders of the much taller Bobby Sands, both smiling. The image became iconic after wide usage in 1981 when Sands was the first republican hunger-striker to die. Donaldson liked to point out his presence in the photo.
Within months of his release, he became active in the effort to develop Sinn Féin, standing for election and taking several hundred Short Strand votes in both Westminster and local government elections. According to his 2005 confession, this was also the period when he became an agent: "I was recruited in the 1980s after compromising myself during a vulnerable time in my life."
The rumoured reasons ranged from being caught by police in bed with the wife of an IRA prisoner to supposed arrest while attempting to shoplift in Marks and Spencer. A more decorous version had him turning spy to somehow protect a family member.
His circle noticed nothing. Donaldson continued to rise in the IRA, becoming steadily more valuable to the republican leadership as emissary to groups abroad. He made several trips to to the Middle East, including Lebanon, and was once arrested - though not charged - at Paris's Orly airport for using a false passport. Security sources were quoted as claiming that he had admitted attending a PLO training camp.
Years later Sinn Féin sent him back to Lebanon to try to secure the release of Brian Keenan, who said later that Donaldson and former hostage Terry Waite had been the "two human beings who put their lives at risk on my behalf".
Unlike others in the enclosed world of the IRA, he apparently always relished foreign travel. Otherwise sour, Irish-American reminiscences of his stint as a leadership emissary in New York recalled him walking from the Bronx to Manhattan and back to take in the sights. Donaldson came with his family to live in the Bronx, arriving in 1988 as the fund-raising group Noraid began to fracture over Sinn Féin's developing emphasis on politics and what was seen as a diminution of the IRA. After his exposure, some, including former leadership ally Martin Galvin, said that they had always suspected him.
A friend remembered "taking him down to jazz clubs in Greenwich Village. He revelled in it, and he loved the Italian neighbourhoods and all the types of food from all the different ethnic groups".
But it was "Stormontgate" in October 2002 that pushed Donaldson centre-stage. First Minister and Ulster Unionist leader David Trimble had said he would shortly resign unless the IRA decommissioned. Then police said early morning searches had uncovered evidence that republicans had been spying inside Stormont, on other parties as well as Northern Ireland Office ministers.
Three men arrested were identified as Donaldson, head of Sinn Féin administration at Stormont, a relative of his and a messenger. There followed a televised police raid on the parliament buildings.
Republicans insisted that the entire episode had been choreographed and was black propaganda. It was followed by Trimble's downfall and the emergence of the DUP's Rev Ian Paisley as the leader of the largest unionist party, and renewed emphasis on IRA bad faith.
By the time the charges against Donaldson and his co-accused were withdrawn last December, explained in court as "in the public interest," charge and counter-charge had so muddied the story that many despaired of it ever being clarified. Donaldson appeared with Sinn Féin's leader Gerry Adams and its chief negotiator Martin McGuinness on the steps of Stormont to denounce Stormontgate as a fiction created by police Special Branch to "save Trimble" from blame for bringing down powersharing.
A week later he appeared again in a Dublin hotel, reading a statement which began "My name is Denis Donaldson" and went on to declare that when the Stormont raid took place, and since the 1980s, he had been a British agent.
Sinn Féin said he had been expelled. Adams said Donaldson was not at risk from republicans and he disappeared from public view, until a Sunday World reporter doorstepped him in Donegal last month.
He is survived by his wife Alice, daughter Jane and sons Pearse and Denis jnr.
Denis Donaldson, born 1950, died April 4th, 2006.