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Shortly before retiring from MI6 in 1991, Michael Oatley received a call in from a trusted contact in Derry asking him to attend a meeting. The invitation was from Brendan Duddy, a businessman, who for almost two decades had kept open a back channel for secret communications between the government and the Provisional IRA.

Oatley, who has died aged 90, maintained the relationship over that period despite repeated denials by prime ministers of any talks or negotiations with “terrorists”. Codenamed “Mountain Climber” – a tribute perhaps to the uphill task of attempting to end the Northern Ireland conflict – Oatley was eager to preserve the clandestine link for future use.

When he arrived in Derry that February, Oatley, Duddy and Duddy’s wife Margo went to a nearby house for dinner. The neighbour was Bernadette Mount, who had driven IRA leaders across the border during the 1975 ceasefire for earlier covert discussions.

There was a rap on the back door and in walked Martin McGuinness, the organisation’s commander in the city. Duddy had known McGuinness since the latter was a teenage trainee butcher delivering beefburgers to Duddy’s chip shop.

According to Peter Taylor, who made the 2008 BBC documentary The Secret Peacemaker, “Oatley and McGuinness talked by the fire in Bernadette’s back parlour for two hours. Oatley said it was ‘rather like talking to a ranking British army officer of one of the tougher regiments, like the Paras or the SAS’. He found McGuinness ‘a good interlocutor’.”

It was a pivotal moment in the Troubles, restarting a dialogue that led on – after Oatley had retired and introduced his contacts to an MI6 successor – to the peace process and eventually to the Good Friday agreement in 1998.

Oatley, who used coded language in calls with Duddy, repeatedly risked his life. At 6ft tall, erudite, good looking and independent-minded, his appearance encouraged some to describe him as a James Bond-type figure.

Oatley was born in London. His father, Sir Charles Oatley, as he became, was a physicist who developed radar during the second world war and later pioneered electron microscopes as a lecturer in electrical engineering at Cambridge University. His mother, Enid (nee West), was the daughter of the headmaster of Bedford modern school, where Charles had been a pupil.

Michael, the younger of two sons, was educated in Cambridge at the Leys school and at Trinity College, Cambridge. He completed two years’ national service in the Royal Navy from 1953 before graduating. He joined the Foreign Office in 1959 and was recruited into the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, also known as MI6), initially serving in African diplomatic posts, including in Ghana and Uganda.

Returning to Europe, he was posted to Dublin and then in 1973 to Northern Ireland at the height of the Troubles. His cover role was as assistant political adviser to Willie Whitelaw, the Northern Ireland Secretary in Ted Heath’s Conservative government.

Oatley, like others in MI6, believed that talks with the leadership of the Provisional IRA should be pursued as a more effective means of ending the violence. He sought to redirect the republican movement into politics.

His predecessor in the job, Frank Steele, a one-time colonial officer, had first established contacts with the IRA. Face-to-face talks with the government at Cheyne Walk in Chelsea in 1972 – the worst year of the conflict when more than 470 people were killed – delivered a brief ceasefire.

Oatley inherited Steele’s network of intermediaries. Among them was Duddy, a republican who was also a pacifist. He soon became the key contact trusted by both sides as the main channel for secret communications.

Their first success came in helping deliver a longer IRA ceasefire in 1975-76, which was coordinated with talks between Protestant clergymen and the Provisional leadership. The truce eventually broke down following loyalist paramilitary attacks.

In 1975, Oatley left Northern Ireland for intelligence posts around the world. He became successively MI6 controller for the Middle East, controller for Europe and the agency’s director of counter-terrorism.

The back channel was active again in 1980 and 1981 during IRA hunger strikes in the Maze prison. Despite Margaret Thatcher’s public insistence on no negotiations, Oatley carried messages between the government and the IRA leadership.

After retiring in 1991, Oatley went into the private security business. He worked with Kroll Associates, specialising in asset recovery investigations and led the hunt for Saddam Hussein’s wealth. He also set up Ciex Ltd with another former MI6 senior officer. They were employed by the South African government in 1997 to recover misappropriated state funds during the apartheid era.

Oatley retained a keen interest in Northern Ireland. When the peace process faltered over the decommissioning of IRA arms in 1999, he published an article in the Sunday Times: “Circumstances have allowed me an occasionally intimate view of political developments within the republican movement,” he observed. “I have no doubt at all of [Gerry Adams’s and Martin McGuinness’s] commitment to finding a political way forwards ... Decommissioning is [portrayed] as the central issue in the peace process. It is not. The true issue is politics or violence.”

After Sinn Féin eventually entered into power-sharing government with Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionist party in 2007, Oatley remarked that he was “delighted” and “a happy man” to witness McGuinness become deputy first minister of Northern Ireland.

Oatley was appointed OBE in 1975 and CMG in 1991. In 2017, he attended Duddy’s funeral in Derry. He remained close to the Duddy family, serving for several years as a director of their hotel company.

He was a member of the Chelsea Arts Club in London, and lived in Nunney, near Frome, Somerset, from where his father’s family originated. Oatley’s first wife was Pippa Howden, with whom he had two sons and a daughter. He subsequently married Mary Jane Laurens; the couple had a son. She survives him along with his children.

• Michael Charles Oatley, intelligence officer, born 18 October 1935; died 29 June 2026