This is the story of a man who spent eight years as an undercover police agent inside the IRA. The account he provides of life with the Provisionals is of a dark and claustrophobic world, of an iron grip which they hold over their own communities - a grip as tight and vicious as any Mafia stranglehold - and of a ruthless and cynical disregard for human life. Gilmour tells of corruption and double-standards that see young volunteers knee-capped for petty theft, while the high-ups steal with impunity; and of the life of a man trapped in no-man's-land, in a dirty war in which both the IRA and the security forces exploit children trapped in dead-end estates.