As disguises go, it must rank as one of the most improbable. Not even the finest brains among the Provisional IRA, told to hunt down traitors, could have guessed that their quarry would go undercover and construct a new life as a Tory politician. In Croydon.

Maria Gatland yesterday resigned as Croydon council's education chief after she was revealed to have been a romantic companion of the Provisionals' leader and had later fled Ireland in disgrace.

The South London authority confirmed her departure with a brief statement. “The council has been advised Maria Gatland has resigned as a cabinet member for children, young people and learners. This follows emerging news of her connection to the Provisional IRA - which has come as a complete shock to Croydon. The council wants to make it emphatically clear it had no prior knowledge of her background,” it said.

The only comment from Ms Gatland, born Maria McGuire, was even more terse: “I have resigned. I'm not prepared to say any more at this stage.” Her Conservative colleagues were apparently unaware of her colourful past until yesterday.

In 1971 the leader of the Provisional IRA, Dave O'Connell, became sufficiently smitten with Ms McGuire to give her a .38 automatic pistol and to invite her on a ramshackle arms-procurement mission to continental Europe. The trip ended in disaster for the IRA - 166 crates of weapons, including Czechoslovak-made bazookas, rocket launchers, grenades, rifles and ammunition were seized by police at Schiphol airport in Amsterdam. Ms McGuire and Mr O'Connell watched it all on Dutch television before escaping back to Ireland.

Shortly after Bloody Friday in 1972, when the Provisionals killed nine people and mutilated 130 others in a series of 20 co-ordinated explosions across Belfast, she decided to quit. A British journalist helped her to escape from Ireland, dumping her Walther 7.65 automatic in a rubbish bin at Dublin airport, and in return The Observer newspaper got an exclusive report headlined “IRA gun girl flees”.

She was court-martialled by the IRA in absentia and sentenced to death. She was not prepared to disappear altogether and wrote a book, To Take Arms: A Year with the Provisional IRA, which gained terrible reviews. She was derided as a “guerrilla groupie” and briefed against by the Provisionals, who portrayed her as a fantasist. Yet the book contained compelling first-hand intelligence of the split between “doves” and “hawks” in the leadership.

After the IRA's failed secret talks with William Whitelaw, then the Home Secretary, in London in the early 1980s she described the “poverty of thought” in the Belfast leadership. “All along they believed - as I had - that by terrorising the civilian population you increased their desire for peace and blackmailed the British Government into negotiating,” she said. Gerry Adams was one of the leaders at the time who sided with the “hawks”.

Yet her unmasking was “a bit of theatre”, according to Peter Latham, a retired academic and member of the Communist Party of Britain who is leading a campaign against the Conservative-led council's proposals for community schools. “The only reason I did it was to help our campaign. I was told she had been in the Provisional IRA and I assumed that her Tory grouping were aware of that,” Dr Latham said.

He raised the issue at a council meeting and said that the Conservative members “obviously didn't know” about her past. “I am gobsmacked,” he said.

Dr Latham said that he had no regrets. “What is at stake is far more important than one Tory councillor's political career. Times have changed, she was only 23 at the time [when she was involved with the IRA] and young people do all sorts of things. I don't think she's in any danger,” he said.

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