Martin Dillon

More than half a century after his death, Lt Col. Robert Blair Mayne is still regarded as one of the greatest soldiers in the history of military special operations. He was the most decorated British soldier of the Second World War, receiving four DSOs, the Croix de Guerre and the Légion d'honneur, and he pioneered tactics used today by the SAS and other special operations units worldwide. Rogue Warrior of the SAS tells the remarkable life story of 'Colonel Paddy', whose exceptional physical strength and uniquely swift reflexes made him a fearsome opponent. But his unorthodox rules of war and his resentment of authority would deny him the ultimate accolade of the Victoria Cross. Drawing on personal letters and family papers, declassified SAS files and records, together with the Official SAS Diary compiled in wartime and eyewitness accounts from many who served with him, the picture emerges of a soldier who, although a flawed hero, was unquestionably one of the most distinctive combatants of the campaigns in the Western Desert and Europe.

In The Trigger Men, bestselling author Martin Dillon delves into the dark and sinister world of Irish terrorism and counter-terrorism. Over three decades he has interviewed and investigated some of the most professional, dangerous and ruthless killers in Ireland. Now Dillon explores their personalities, motivations and bizarre crimes.Many of Ireland's assassins learned their trade in fields and on hillsides in remote parts of Ireland, while others were trained in the Middle East or with Basque separatist terrorists in Spain. Some were one-target-one-shot killers, like the sniper who terrorised the inhabitants of Washington State in the autumn of 2002, while others were bombers skilled in designing the most sophisticated explosive devices and booby traps. Another more powerful group of 'trigger men' were the influential figures in the shadows, who were experts in motivating the killers under their control. All of these men, whether they squeezed the trigger on a high-powered rifle, set the timer on a bomb or used their authority to send others out to commit horrific and unspeakable acts of cruelty, are featured in this book. The Trigger Men takes the reader inside the labyrinthine world of terrorist cells and highly classified counter-terrorism units of British Military Intelligence. The individual stories are described in gripping, unflinching detail and show how the terrorists carried out their ghastly work. Dillon also explores the ideology of the cult of the gunmen and the greed and hatred that motivated assassins in their killing sprees. There are penetrating insights into the mindset of the most infamous assassins: their social and historical conditioning, their callousness......

Robert Maxwell -- ruthless, volatile, defiant; a man of gargantuan appetites, for food, wine, women, power, money -- unabashedly bared his ambition to the world, as he strove to build a publishing empire. But, throughout his career, Robert Maxwell also nurtured another, more driving, and -- until now -- altogether hidden ambition, and that was to spy for Israel's Mossad. In the end, as Gordon Thomas, an author who has long been trolling the murky waters of international intelligence, shows in this gripping narrative, the conflict between the tycoon's public interests and spy's secret pursuits led to his mystifying death, officially by drowning, in November 1991, offshore of the Canary Islands. According to Thomas's well-placed sources in Israel, Washington, and London, Maxwell first came into Mossad's orbit in the 1970s, when the crack Israeli spy organization stole from the United States its most sophisticated piece of intelligence-gathering software, Enhanced Promis. Of it Mossad made an electronic Trojan horse, secretly amassing strictly classified information from inside the very organizations worldwide to which they were selling it. Mossad's representative for these extremely sensitive transactions costing tens of millions of dollars in China, Russia, India, and twenty other countries was Robert Maxwell. Only Maxwell was also helping himself to some of Mossad's profits -- as well as 750 million from his employees' pension fund -- in desperate attempts to maintain his empire and to meet the demands of increasingly intolerant creditors. Aboard his yacht that November night in 1991 Maxwell no doubt still clung to the hope of a bailout by Mossad. But Mossad's spy masters could not afford to smile on blackmail. This book reveals all the shocking reasons why. Eight pages of black-and-white photographs add to this astonishing tale of international intrigue, espionage, the Mossad, and murder.

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.

First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

In this enthralling and controversial book, Martin Dillon, author of the bestselling The Shankill Butchers, examines the roles played by the Provisional IRA, the State forces, the Irish Government and the British Army during this troubled period.

The bestselling investigation of one of Northern Ireland's most brutal and infamous murder cases'Makes for gripping but altogether terrifying reading' Washington Times'Dillon is recommended reading for anyone wishing to understand the complexities of British-Irish politics. He stands alone as one of the most creative writers of our time' Irish Times________________________________'This was the ultimate way to kill a man.'In the 1970s, in some of the most violent days of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, a group of Protestant paramilitaries embarked on a spree of indiscriminate murder in the Shankill area of Belfast, leaving thirty Catholics dead. Their leader was Lenny Murphy: a fanatical Unionist whose childhood was marked by sectarian violence, Murphy swore revenge on all Catholics, and with his gang wreaked havoc onto an already fractured city.Not for the squeamish, The Shankill Butchers is a horrifying and detailed account of one of the most brutal series of murders in the history of Northern Ireland - a phenomenon whose real nature has been obscured by the troubled and violent context from which it sprang.