hardest men, a skilled and ruthless commander who was as determined a revolutionary as existed anywhere in the IRA—but like many military-minded men he had a weak spot in his vanity, and Molloy’s handlers in British intelligence exploited this flaw with consummate skill.

The problem for the British was simple but not straightforward. Molloy had been picked up by the military and had quickly broken during interrogation at Castlereagh RUC station in East Belfast, which was fast becoming the major holding center for IRA suspects, and had agreed to work for military intelligence. But if he was to be of any value to the authorities, he had somehow to be put back into circulation, back into the IRA’s higher circles in Belfast—and fast. The difficulty was that too many of Molloy’s senior IRA colleagues knew he had been arrested, and since the fate of most IRA men who fell into the hands of the authorities was usually immediate consignment to an internment cage, Molloy’s reappearance in West Belfast would automatically attract suspicion. A way had to be found to explain away his safe return from Castlereagh. Molloy’s handlers devised an audacious cover story that worked only because Brian Keenan fell for it, although it required nerves of steel on Molloy’s part when he explained it to the IRA’s quartermaster general. The story concocted by British intelligence was extraordinary: Molloy would tell his IRA colleagues that during a break in questioning one of his interrogators had carelessly left the key to his cell in the lock on the outside of the door. He had spotted this, he said, slipped a sheet of paper taken from the detectives’ carelessly discarded notepad under the door, and using the policemen’s similarly abandoned pen then worked the key free, and fortuitously, it fell onto the paper. He slid this back, unlocked the cell door, and calmly crept out of the station unnoticed by any of his jailers. It was a measure of the hold that his captors had over him that Molloy was prepared to return to the IRA with such a fanciful tale. But incredibly it worked. “Keenan gave him a clean bill,” recalled a colleague.¹

At the time of Molloy’s arrest and “escape,” Brian Keenan was already one of the IRA’s most important leaders and a key ally of Gerry Adams. Throughout his long IRA career, even during fourteen long years spent later in the high-security sections of various British jails, Keenan, whose IRA nickname was “the Dog,” would stay loyal to Adams and was always there to give support to whatever new direction Adams was advocating. At one point in the peace process he appeared to back dissidents who were plotting Adams’s downfall, but this, it later appeared, was a ruse devised to infiltrate and undermine the Sinn Fein president’s enemies. This hard-line image was a huge asset to Adams. When it came to selling a strategy that filled the republican grassroots with doubt and uncertainty, Keenan’s support helped to win over skeptics. Had he seriously opposed Adams, the outcome of the peace process might have been very different.

Born in Swatragh in rural South Derry in July 1940, Keenan had been in the republican movement since his early twenties. He came from a much more eclectic background than most other Northern republicans of his time and was certainly more politically aware than the scores of recruits flooding into the organization after 1969. The son of a junior member of the British Royal Air Force, Keenan left home when he was just sixteen and emigrated to England, where he worked for a while as a television repairman. Accounts of his early life conflict. One version says that when he went to England he joined the Communist Party and embraced left-wing politics, while another says that he got the name for holding Marxist views only because he was a Goulding supporter when he joined the IRA in the early 1960s.

Much has been written about Keenan’s links to radical Middle Eastern and former Soviet satellite countries in Eastern Europe—he is said to have had extensive links with East German intelligence, for example— but little has ever been substantiated in the way of definite links to such regimes. He has often been portrayed as the sole, uncompromising Marxist revolutionary in the IRA leadership, but this portrait suffers from one major flaw. It was the Goulding group, the Official IRA, which obtained political, financial, and other assistance from the Soviet Union and its allies, not the Provisionals. The Officials received cash, guns, and other aid both from East Berlin and from Moscow, but no evidence has ever been produced to indicate that the Provisionals enjoyed such generosity, which presumably would have been the case had Keenan been as close to these governments as has been suggested. Occasionally Keenan revealed his politics publicly. In an article written in the February 1988 edition of the IRA prison journal Iris Bheag, Keenan, writing under the penname Pow-Wow, revealed that he got his real political inspiration from the neocolonial struggles of South and Central America rather than from the dull orthodoxy of Eastern Europe.

At thirty years of age Keenan was considerably older than most other IRA recruits when he switched to the Provisionals, but he quickly rose through the ranks. By 1971 he had become Belfast quartermaster and two years later was made quartermaster general, succeeding the rebel Catholic priest Father Patrick Ryan, who had been promoted when Denis McInerney was captured on board the Claudia as it made its way from Libya packed with Colonel Qaddafi’s weapons. Keenan’s elevation was another piece of evidence that Northerners were not as excluded from the IRA’s upper reaches in those early days as the Adams camp would subsequently claim. His appointment as QMG also gave Adams another important ally at leadership level, one who was also in charge of a crucially important IRA department.

Keenan’s impact was felt very quickly. While his predecessors in the QM’s department had mostly turned toward conservative Irish-America, the Clann na Gael, and other support organizations for supplies of arms and cash, Keenan was not afraid to seek assistance from revolutionaries elsewhere, even those in strange foreign lands. He was one of the first to realize that the strongly anti-British regime of Libya’s Colonel Muammar Qaddafi could be a rich and regular source of weaponry. By 1972 Keenan was importing RPG-7 rocket launchers and missiles from Libya to add to the IRA’s already fearsome arsenal of Armalite rifles, car bombs, land mines, and endless supplies of homemade explosives.

Keenan had overseen and approved Eamon Molloy’s rise through the quartermaster’s department, from deputy QM to brigade QM, and in 1972, after his arrest and apparently remarkable escape from Castlereagh police station, cleared him of all suspicion of treachery, apparently unwilling to believe that someone he had mentored could turn against him. The British double agent was now free to wreak havoc on such a scale that within two years his activities played a major role in forcing the IRA to call a cease-fire.

Molloy’s treachery led to important arrests. In February 1974 Ivor Bell, Adams’s successor as Belfast commander, was arrested in Andersonstown on the basis of information that was subsequently shown to have come from Molloy. Bell soon escaped by swapping places with a prison visitor on April 15 but was recaptured less than a fortnight later, hiding out in a flat in the affluent Malone Road section of South Belfast. In December 1973 Brendan Hughes also managed to escape from Long Kesh, hidden in an old mattress, and returned to active service as Bell’s adjutant. When Bell was captured, Hughes took over the Belfast command and moved into the IRA’s operational headquarters in Myrtlefield Park, also in the Malone area, where he posed as a toy salesman. He lasted until May 10, a fortnight or so after Bell’s second arrest. The IRA later learned from Molloy that the British had placed Hughes and the Myrtlefield Park house under constant surveillance and could have moved against him at any moment—but did not.

This aspect of Molloy’s spying activities convinced Adams, Hughes, and Bell that the British were using his information to shape and mold the composition of the Belfast Brigade staff to their liking. This was done, they suspected, to boost elements in favor of a cease-fire, by releasing more pragmatic figures from internment while simultaneously rounding up the IRA’s so-called Young Turks, those identified as hard-line associates of Adams, Bell, and Hughes. That way the brigade staff would be composed of figures more amenable to a peace settlement. The evidence for that, they later claimed, was the cease-fire of December 1974, a disastrous cessation that helped seriously debilitate the IRA. That cease-fire opened a fault line between the Belfast IRA and the national leadership, the basis for which was the conviction in the Adams camp that the new Belfast Brigade leaders and the national leadership of the IRA had been the victims of a British intelligence sting.

The British, however, may have had other reasons to put the youthful militants behind bars. In late 1973 the unionist leader, Brian Faulkner, had agreed to share power with the moderate nationalist SDLP and the middle-of-the-road Alliance Party and also to establish a cross-Border Council of Ireland to foster cooperation between the two parts of Ireland.

The Provisionals opposed the deal, known as Sunningdale, after the English civil-service college where the parties hammered out the deal, seeing it as something that had the potential to sideline and defeat the IRA— but it was also bitterly opposed by hard-line unionists who saw the deal as a plot to destroy Northern Ireland. There was widespread agreement within the republican movement that the IRA had better move to kill off Sunningdale before Sunningdale killed it, as a key strategist of the time recalled: “Our objective was to ensure that the Sunningdale Agreement would not succeed. [Daithi] O Conaill was pushing us to blow up [the] Stormont [parliament] with a massive bomb and the Belfast leadership was trying to devise a method of getting a bomb onto a ship and blow it up in order to block the main channel in Belfast harbour. We wanted to make our presence felt as a force without which there could be no solution that was not to our liking.”2 But before these plans could be put into place, the British, very possibly armed with intelligence from Molloy, moved against the Belfast Brigade. Just four days before loyalists began a general strike aimed at killing off Sunningdale, the Myrtlefield Park headquarters were raided and troops arrested the brigade commander, Brendan Hughes.

The timing of Hughes’s arrest convinced the Adams camp that the British were manipulating the IRA leadership in Belfast and elsewhere. The Young Turks later discovered that secret contacts with the British were being opened behind their backs, contacts that eventually formed part of the negotiations for the 1974 cease-fire. Hughes learned that Jimmy Drumm, a veteran from the 1950s and a member of the IRA Executive, was talking indirectly to the Northern Ireland Office; Drumm was arrested by the Belfast Brigade and questioned, but he denied the story. Nevertheless Hughes complained directly to the Army Council. A week later he was arrested.3 Among the Adams dissidents the view hardened that Hughes had been kept under surveillance but removed only when he started to threaten the British plans for the new cease-fire.

The conspiracy theorists found evidence from elsewhere to support their suspicions. From inside Crumlin Road prison—then a peeling, overcrowded Victorian hulk used to hold paramilitary remand prisoners—it emerged that the MRF, the British undercover group, had re-formed and was once again dabbling in black operations in a bid to destabilize the organization. The IRA staff in the jail uncovered what they were convinced was evidence of a plot to poison senior IRA figures who were in the jail awaiting trial, as well as plans to sow suspicion and distrust within the ranks. The story began when a young remand prisoner confessed that he had taken part in a number of MRF-type operations carried out on behalf of British intelligence. “They were involved in dirty tricks, MRF sort of stuff designed to get a sectarian war going or to discredit the IRA,” recalled a source familiar with the episode. “They planted a bomb in Corporation Street in a Protestant bar that killed two children and that was wrongly blamed on the IRA. A woman was raped and shot, garages robbed, and so on, all of which was blamed on the IRA.”⁴ The remand prisoner, eighteen-year-old Vincent Heatherington from Andersonstown, claimed that British intelligence had trained and armed him and then given him, along with other double agents, a free hand to carry out shootings, bombings, and robberies that would be blamed on the IRA.

Heatherington named his alleged co-conspirators to the IRA leadership in Crumlin Road, many of whom were interned or imprisoned in Long Kesh. His claims were believed, and a reign of terror began in the jails. Those named by the young prisoner were tortured into making confessions to even the most far-fetched wrongdoings against the IRA. “They created paranoia in the ranks…,” admitted one of those involved in the affair.⁵ It was of course a classic sting operation, as the IRA staff in Crumlin Road and Long Kesh eventually realized. The aim was to set the IRA prisoners at each other’s throats, and the ploy worked.

The British operation did more than that. Outside the jail it divided the IRA leadership in Belfast between those who took Heatherington’s allegations seriously and those who were either deeply skeptical or who believed that torturing people into confessions was fundamentally counterproductive. This division coincided with the fault line that had long existed in the Belfast leadership and that was now, as the 1974 cease-fire approached, asserting itself with a vengeance. The split was between those associated with Adams, Bell, and Hughes, who had all fallen for the British sting, and Billy McKee, at this point commander of IRA prisoners in Long Kesh, who had tried but failed to stop the torture and mistreatment of the IRA inmates named by Heatherington. The effect of the British operation was to discredit the Young Turks and strengthen the traditionalists who proposed and supported the coming cease-fire. When, in September 1974, McKee finally came to the end of his sentence on the 1971 arms charge and was released, he was not interned, as happened to many released IRA prisoners, but allowed to return to the IRA, where he slipped easily and unopposed back into command of the Belfast Brigade.

Eamon Molloy’s activities were meanwhile having a devastating impact on the IRA’s ability to sustain its war effort in Belfast. The loss of hard-to-smuggle weaponry in particular enervated the organization, and the ceasefire came as something of a relief, as one former IRA officer recalled:

The cease fire was a godsend. We had no weapons. In the Second Battalion of the Belfast Brigade there were three weapons. In fact the situation was so bad that at the start of 1975 while we were still waiting on [a] shipment [from the Irish-American gun-running ring] to come in we went to a member of the Sticks [Officials] and we told him that we felt there was going to be a repeat of the 1969 pogroms but on a larger scale. We asked him for weapons which he refused to part with. We told him that it would be on his conscience if such a situation developed. He then agreed to sell us twenty weapons without the knowledge of his leadership.6

The cease-fire arrived hesitatingly. Secret contacts with the IRA leadership were opened up by a group of liberal Protestant clerics, and there were other indirect conversations between the Army Council and the British government, mostly though its Secret Service, MI6, which produced a shortlived truce over the Christmas holiday of 1974 and early new year of 1975. The cease-fire was renewed in early February 1975, and there were reasons to believe that this time it would not be like 1972, and that the British wanted to hold serious talks. Although the IRA was not able to raise its violence to the levels of 1972, when nearly five hundred people had died, 1974 was nevertheless a bad enough year. Killings had risen by nearly 20 percent compared with 1973, and the notion that, in the bleak winter of 1974–75, in the wake of the collapse of Sunningdale and with no other viable options available, a frustrated British government might seriously contemplate talking to the IRA about withdrawal was not that far-fetched.

IF THE IRA LEADERS agreed to the 1974–75 cease-fire with high expectations that it would end with a British commitment to withdraw, they were to be sadly disappointed, although it was easy to see why at the time the Army Council might have entertained such thoughts. The collapse of the Sunningdale agreement sent British policymakers into despair. The power-sharing deal had offered something to everyone, yet it had been decisively rejected both by the Protestant working class—and less ostensibly by much of the unionist middle class as well—and by the supporters of the Provos. In a way the collapse of the Sunningdale experiment seemed to symbolize to the outside world the addiction of the parties in Northern Ireland to their ancient quarrel and spoke to an almost inherited inability on the part of the belligerents to entertain reasonable solutions. With IRA and loyalist violence continuing apace and no political settlement in sight, the British might, it seemed, be inclined to contemplate even the most extreme solution. So it was when, at Christmastime 1974, Sinn Fein’s president Ruairi O Bradaigh received an extraordinary message from an intermediary in Derry that the British wanted to talk about ways of disengaging from Northern Ireland, the Army Council did not hesitate in recommending that the advance be followed up.

As things turned out, the cease-fire was to be just another punctuation mark in a long story, a pause during which the British regrouped their forces and improved their intelligence in preparation for an assault on the IRA that very nearly brought its total defeat. But the cease-fire was to have other unexpected consequences, the most significant of which was that it paved the way for Gerry Adams and his allies to take control of the IRA.

Adams and a small group of like-minded activists grouped around him in jail led the opposition to the cease-fire, and the manner in which they did so created one of the most abiding myths of his career—that he rescued the IRA from the near defeat precipitated by the cessation. The Adams camp would argue that the Army Council of 1974 foolishly led the IRA into a carefully laid trap, the objective of which was to tempt the IRA into lengthy and inconsequential talks designed to buy the British enough time to construct the method of the organization’s downfall. From the confines of their cages in Long Kesh, Adams and his supporters not only put forward the political arguments against the cease-fire and those who had advocated it, but, the myth continued, they designed the practical changes and political-military strategies needed to drag the IRA back from the edge of the abyss.

A crucial part of their case was that the blame for the cease-fire disaster lay with an Army Council that was dominated by Southerners who had no feeling for those fighting the war in the North. But the facts suggested a massaging of the truth. Of the seven Army Council members who sanctioned the 1974–75 cease-fire, no fewer than five came from the North. These included the chief of staff, Seamus Twomey, who had been Belfast commander when Adams was his number two, while another key Council member, Joe Cahill, was a family friend and an ex-Belfast commander who had been particularly close to Adams. There were three other Northerners on the Council: J. B. O’Hagan from Lurgan, Kevin Mallon from Coalisland, County Tyrone, and Seamus Loughran, from West Belfast. The anti-Northern accusation was a potent, if unfair, charge which greatly appealed to the prejudices of those who made up the bulk of the fighting units north of the Border, while serving to undermine the position of Army Council members Daithi O Conaill and Ruairi O Bradaigh, two of the three major IRA figures who stood between Adams and his supporters and their bid to win absolute control of the organization. The third member was Billy McKee, who rejoined the Council upon his release from Long Kesh late in 1974 and who was a figure with whom Adams had repeatedly clashed ever since the Ballymurphy riots of 1970. That McKee was a fellow Northerner and a West Belfast veteran was later forgotten as Adams and his allies portrayed the struggle for the IRA’s soul as a battle between compromising, armchair generals pontificating from the safety of the South and those who actually had to take on the British in the mean streets of Belfast and Derry.

Adams exploited the divisions within the IRA to his own advantage, but so too did the Army Council in its efforts to commence talks with the British. In the run-up to the cease-fire the Army Council held discussions with a group of liberal Protestant clerics in the County Clare village of Feakle, and one of the clergymen vividly recalled the IRA leaders playing the Adams card: “O Conaill told me at the time that we would have one bite at the cherry, no more. He said, ‘That’s because behind every one of us on the Army Council there’s a young man with a gun in his hand who still has to make his name for Ireland and write his name in the history books. And when they take over there will be no more cease-fires.’”7

The 1974–75 cease-fire had three major negative consequences for the IRA, each of which would be critiqued by Adams during his subsequent bid to capture the organization. The first was the debilitating effect on the organization caused by both the sheer length of the cessation and the failure or refusal of the British to put flesh on the bones of the secret offer to talk about “structures of disengagement” from the North, as O Bradaigh had been promised by the Derry intermediary.8

Talks took place between the two sides, but nothing concrete ever seemed to emerge. There were three levels of contact. At the lowest level, incident centers were set up that linked Sinn Fein and British government monitors in Belfast, where there were seven such offices, and in Derry, Armagh, Newry, Enniskillen, and Dungannon. These were supposed to monitor the truce to ensure there was no 1972-style breakdown. Sinn Fein figures and British officials, communicating mostly via telex machines, would try to make certain that small problems did not become big ones. The enterprise was given an appropriate code name, after the mock-Gothic pile, Stormont Castle, which housed the British administration in East Belfast. Operation Ramparts conjured up a picture of British spies crouched over keyboards at the top of spiral stone staircases as they waited for the latest message of complaint from their IRA counterparts.

At the next level there were regular meetings in Belfast between the IRA Executive members Jimmy Drumm and Proinsias MacAirt and British officials that were held at a British government house called Laneside, in the affluent County Down seaside town of Hollywood. The Laneside talks happened quite frequently, much more often than the highest level of talks that were held in Derry between Army Council delegates, O Bradaigh and McKee, and senior officials from the Northern Ireland Office (NIO). One authoritative account of the contacts depicts the British as quite open about their wish to withdraw but reluctant to spell out the details, even resorting to evasion in response to IRA questions.⁹ There were constant squabbles and complaints about breaches of the terms of the cease-fire by either side. The British could produce only one piece of evidence to support the notion that they wanted to be out of Northern Ireland, and that was the exclusion from British plans to nationalize the shipbuilding company of Harland and Wolff, the Belfast shipyard where the Titanic had been built some sixty-five years before. Nonetheless the Army Council perservered.

The British failure to make good on the secret promises gave the Adams camp powerful ammunition. The allegation he and his allies leveled was simple: the Army Council had been fooled into taking part in bad-faith negotiations and tricked into calling a cease-fire that was designed to last so long that it seriously eroded the IRA’s fighting ability. The result was that the British were given a breathing space in which to devise ways of inflicting even more damage on the IRA. With IRA members relaxing visibly as the cease-fire dragged on, the British built up their intelligence on the organization in preparation for major changes in security policy, the central feature of which was that control of operations against the IRA passed from the British military to the Royal Ulster Constabulary and a new emphasis was put on legal methods to put IRA members behind bars. The use of internment was phased out, and instead more conventional judicial methods were employed, primarily the processing of IRA suspects through the courts, albeit courts that had no juries and in which verdicts and sentences, fashioned by a barrage of new antiterrorist laws, were handed down by a single judge. The change affected the prisons as well; special-category status, which had been granted to IRA prisoners as part of the 1972 cease-fire deal and which recognized a political motive for paramilitary activity, was scrapped, and instead IRA inmates were to be officially regarded and treated as common criminals.

The British strategy was known variously as Ulsterization, normalization and criminalization, but whichever word was used the result was the same. The British had put in place a system that, from 1976 onward, saw IRA suspects trundled along a sort of conveyor belt that began with arrest and lengthy questioning in new RUC interrogation centers where confessions would be extracted, often amid claims of brutality. The next stage was in the courts, where, despite their often dubious integrity, the confessions were invariably accepted, and the last stage was in the Maze prison, the renamed and rebuilt Long Kesh camp but soon known to the world as the H Blocks, where IRA prisoners were to be treated in the same way as thieves and rapists. The new security policy cut swaths into the IRA, bringing it to the verge of defeat. The fault for this, the Adams camp was to insist, belonged to those who had negotiated the cease-fire.

Terrifying and cold-blooded loyalist violence, most of it directed at ordinary Catholics, particularly in Belfast, was the second result of the 1974–75 cease-fire. Unnerved by the IRA’s contacts with the British, loyalist paramilitary groups began murdering Catholics in an often gruesome fashion and in a way that challenged the Provisionals’ claim to be the defenders of their community. As the loyalist killing increased, the pressure to hit back in like manner intensified.

The loyalists’ logic was terrifyingly simple: the more Catholics they killed and the more horrible the manner of their deaths, the stronger the pressure would be on the IRA to stop its activities. The cease-fire was the trigger for the bloodshed. When the British and the IRA announced the terms of their truce, the loyalist groupings, especially the UVF, reacted with unusual violence. Within seven days they had killed five Catholics, and many more were to follow.

AS 1975 UNFOLDED, Northern Ireland, and Belfast in particular, entered what is arguably the darkest period of the Troubles, nearly two years of slaughter in which the loyalists and the IRA vied with each other in an often indiscriminate sectarian killing game, the latter refusing to admit its activities or seeking refuge behind fictitious cover names, the former glorying openly and proudly in the carnage. These were the years that saw the rise of chilling loyalist gangs with names like the Shankill Butchers, a group of UVF killers who specialized in cutting their victims to death with surgically sharp knives and axes. The IRA responded with bombings of Protestant pubs that invariably killed uninvolved civilians. Increasingly the IRA imitated the loyalists by kidnapping and killing innocent Protestants. The violence spread to rural areas of Tyrone and Armagh, where IRA members using cover names such as the South Armagh Republican Action Force to disguise their bloody deeds enthusiastically joined the slaughter. By the end of 1976 loyalists had killed nearly 250 people, most of them innocent Catholics, while 150 Protestants, similarly unconnected to those who were directing the murder campaign, had also met violent deaths, a majority of them at the hands of the IRA, however disguised or renamed.10

The upsurge in loyalist killing put the IRA in a quandary. To respond in kind threatened to drag republican values into the gutter, making a nonsense of IRA claims to be a nonsectarian movement in the tradition of the Protestant founder of republicanism, Wolfe Tone. Yet if the Provisionals stood aside, this would be to deny the atavistic forces that had brought them into being in the first place, the need to defend their streets and communities. Most Provisionals agreed, some with less enthusiasm than others, with the view of one IRA leader of the day: “Republicans had to hit back at the Loyalists. It was as simple as that. They were slaughtering the Nationalists. There was no other way round it.”¹¹

The Adams camp chose to see things in a more negative light and courtesy of the same conspiratorial prism through which they had viewed the arrests of Hughes and Bell and the treacherous activities of Eamon Molloy and Vincent Heatherington. The sectarian warfare, they claimed, was being sponsored by the British, whose aim was to pull the IRA into a brutal but diverting tribal conflict in which the British could depict themselves as “the piggy in the middle,” as neutral arbiters, whose only interest was to stop the irrational violence of mad Irishmen. For this state of affairs Billy McKee, the defender of St. Matthew’s and once again Belfast commander, was held to blame. His motives were regarded as beyond justification. “McKee just wanted to get into a war with the Orangies,” concluded one of the Adams camp at the time.12

The third consequence of the cease-fire was an outbreak of vicious feuding between rival republican groups, a hangover from the split of 1969, but something the Adams camp also maintained to be in the British interest. Billy McKee was, in their mind, guilty of allowing the IRA to get involved in sectarian killings, and they blamed him for the feuding as well. The worst piece of internecine slaughter between Provisionals and Officials broke out in Belfast at the end of October 1975. It started with around a dozen attacks mounted by the Provisionals in the course of an evening during which one member of the Official IRA was killed and sixteen were wounded. Up to ninety Provisional IRA members were said to have been involved in the night’s violence. The feud ended a fortnight later with a total of eleven dead, including a six-year-old girl, fatally shot during an attack aimed at her father, a member of the Official IRA. Feuds between the Provisionals and the Officials were not unknown, but this was by far the most serious outbreak of such violence. McKee justified the attacks by arguing that the Officials were acting as an arm of the British in areas controlled by the Provisionals, passing on information about IRA activists, facilitating British community policies, and undermining Provo influence. But the feud, coming on top of the loyalist onslaughts, was deeply demoralizing inside nationalist areas, and Adams seized on this to criticize McKee, as he later recorded: “Republican feuding contributed significantly to feelings of alienation on the part of the Nationalist people, who had long provided the essential support for the IRA. It also coincided and dovetailed with a sustained British propaganda campaign to portray IRA members as ‘common criminals.’”¹³

The long-standing hostility between Adams and McKee, which had its roots in the Ballymurphy riots of 1970, came bursting to the surface again but this time in surrogate form. Even so, the dispute can with hindsight be seen as the first shot fired by Adams in his campaign to oust McKee and to engineer his takeover of the republican movement.

The target chosen by Adams was David Morley, the commander of IRA prisoners in Long Kesh. The former leader of the Provisional IRA in the County Down Border town of Newry, Morley took over the job of camp commandant from McKee just prior to McKee’s release in the autumn of 1974. The two men were on close terms, and when McKee assumed command of the Belfast Brigade and rejoined the Army Council, Morley became the principal point of contact between the leadership and the Long Kesh prisoners.

Largely because of McKee’s patronage, Morley had been elected camp commander by the rank and file in the jail, but his style was not universally popular. “Morley came from a British army background and ran the prison, much as McKee had done, on very militaristic lines,” remembered one former IRA prisoner who supported the Adams line. “There were roll calls, parades, tight discipline, and so on, all of which rankled with many people, especially young lads. Morley introduced a new IRA salute, two salutes to the head rather than one, so as to distinguish the IRA from the British army. Staff members wore Sam Browne belts and a holster with a wooden gun stuck in it.” Adams would describe it all as a cross between George Orwell and Spike Milligan.14

To the astonishment of many in the camp, Morley told the prisoners that McKee wanted them to scrap existing escape plans and not to bother hatching any more. “The Army Council told us that we were all going to get out, internees and sentenced men,” recalled one former prisoner. “First there would be 50 percent remission, then two-thirds, then all out.”¹⁵ This was, the Morley-McKee critics complained, the ultimate in naïveté for at the same time this advice was being given, the IRA leadership was fully aware that the British were planning the construction of a brand-new prison, the H Blocks, to house IRA inmates. Morley had toured the first H Blocks, so named after the shape of the cell wings, and could see they were intended for something much more permanent. He was also allowed out of the jail on parole for talks with Jimmy Drumm and with British officials. “Mixing at this level with senior Brits went to his head,” suggested one critic.¹⁶

Morley’s elevation coincided with changes to Adams’s own prison circumstances. He had initially been housed in the internee section of Long Kesh, in Cage 6, which he shared with some one hundred other inmates in three huts. But after two unsuccessful escape attempts, Adams was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment and was moved to the sentenced-prisoner section of the camp, into Cage 11. Coincidentally, hostility to the leadership line had been growing over the cease-fire and the leadership style in jail; a large number of prisoners had been suspended from the IRA for disputing Morley’s authority. When Adams arrived in Cage 11, it was decided that a challenge should be made against the camp leadership, and Ivor Bell ran against Morley in the election for camp commander and fared surprisingly well. “The purpose of the exercise was to show there was unease with what was happening,” recalled an Adams supporter. Morley won but by a margin of just a handful of votes. Adams later stood in a separate poll and again ran Morley close, so close that the result badly scared the IRA leadership.17

One outcome of the election was that the Army Council changed the rules governing the selection of prison OC. From then on the rank-and-file IRA inmates could nominate whomever they liked, but there would be no election. Instead the Army Council would choose the commander it wanted out of the list of candidates submitted by the prisoners. The idea was to prevent splits from coming out into the open, but it enormously strengthened the leadership’s hand in the jail; ironically, this was later to greatly benefit Adams when he assumed control of the IRA and wanted to be sure of the loyalties of the prison leadership. Although he had been a victim of the change, he made no alteration in the rule when he and his allies assumed control of the IRA.

From early 1975 until Adams’s release in February 1977, two cages in Long Kesh were the focus for dissident criticism of the leadership in Dublin. One was Cage 11, where first Adams and then Brendan Hughes was OC, and Cage 9, commanded by Ivor Bell. But as the new British security strategy swung into action and the Castlereagh conveyor belt gathered speed, disgorging more and more IRA members into prison, Cages 11 and 9 also became think tanks devoted to planning new structures and policies designed to rescue the IRA from what every activist, inside and outside the jails, could see was imminent defeat.

The period was vividly symbolized by the British Labour government’s choice for Northern Ireland secretary in 1976, a blunt and diminutive former coal miner called Roy Mason, who saw his job in simple terms. He had come to Belfast not to indulge in dangerous political experiments like power-sharing but to crush the IRA. In one of his earliest public pronouncements he delighted unionists with a promise to roll up the IRA like “a tube of toothpaste.” And such was the initial success of the new police interrogation centers at Castlereagh, at Strand Road in Derry, and at Gough Barracks in Armagh in extracting confessions from IRA Volunteers that he felt strong enough to predict, “My view is that [the IRA’s] strength has waned to the point where they cannot sustain a campaign.”¹⁸ The security statistics appeared to support his boast. The death toll for 1977 went down to 116, about a third of what it had been the year before. Even though this reflected a lower level of loyalist activity, there was no doubt IRA operational capacity was being undermined. Shooting incidents in 1977 were down 45 percent from 1976 and bombings by more than half.¹⁹

IRA MEN have always used their time in prison well. After the 1916 Rising in Dublin the defeated rebels were jailed in Britain, and one of their leaders, a young Michael Collins, used the time, leisure, and opportunity provided by his spell in the Frongoch internment camp in Wales to restructure the Irish Republican Brotherhood in preparation for the coming conflict with Britain. Gerry Adams, Ivor Bell, and Brendan Hughes spent their days in Long Kesh sixty years later doing something remarkably similar for the Provisional IRA. There was one major difference, however. The ideas produced in Cages 11 and 9, many of which Adams outlined in a lengthy report to the IRA leadership in 1976, were more than a rescue plan for the IRA; they were also a blueprint for his takeover of the movement. Their significance does not stop there. Within the plans can also be found the seeds of what, only a few years later, would become the Irish peace process, although it is doubtful if any of those responsible for drawing them up could see that at the time.

The conceptual foundation stone of the takeover plan was the doctrine that the war against the British was going to be a long-drawn-out affair and that the heady days of 1972, when the IRA could realistically imagine forcing a speedy military defeat on the British, were gone forever. As with other controversial ideas, Adams employed junior allies to float the notion first, a ploy that allowed him to gauge grassroots reaction before declaring his own hand. In this instance his choice was Danny Morrison, a bright young West Belfast IRA member who had been interned but then released as part of the 1975 cease-fire deal. Morrison, who had initially backed the McKee leadership against Adams and then switched sides, eventually replaced Daithi O Conaill as the IRA’s director of publicity and went on to become a strong ally of Adams on the Army Council.

One IRA activist of the mid-1970s can remember when Morrison first expounded Adams’s “long war” doctrine.

He was the first I heard it from sometime in 1975. We had one or two mini- [IRA] Conventions, one in Clare and one in Donegal involving twenty-five or thirty of the top people, and Morrison was saying we have sold the people a false bill of goods with slogans like ‘Victory in 74!’ and so on. People were getting cynical, and we would have to say instead that it is a long war. It grated with a lot of us. None of us believed it would be a long war. We were of the opinion that we could win it, we could force the Brits to pull out. We were young and in our twenties, we had seen the fall of Stormont, burned down the British embassy in Dublin, ran the Brits ragged in the countryside. We were of a generation that had seen Saigon fall and the U.S. defeated in Southeast Asia.20

The “long war” became IRA policy, but estimates of just how long the Long War would have to last varied enormously. Writing in the Belfast IRA paper under the pen name Brownie, Adams envisaged the conflict lasting for just seven more years, that is, until 1983.²¹ But privately he and his allies talked of a twenty-year conflict.

Whatever the reservations, the “long war” doctrine was really just a statement of the obvious. Roy Mason had nearly defeated the IRA, and it was going to take years of careful rebuilding before it would again be in a position to challenge the British, if ever. The signal that this had been formally accepted by the Army Council as IRA policy came only four months after Adams’s release from Long Kesh, at the Bodenstown commemoration of June 1977, the highlight of the republican calendar. Adams’s choice of speaker to give the address sent its own signal. Jimmy Drumm, who had been one of the senior IRA figures involved in the secret Laneside dialogue, climbed the podium beside Wolfe Tone’s grave to declare that he and the other leaders associated with the 1974–75 cease-fire had all been wrong. In a script composed by Adams and Morrison, Drumm declared, “The British government is not withdrawing from the Six Counties. Indeed the British government is committed to stabilising [them] and is pouring in vast sums of money… to assure loyalists and to secure from loyalists, support for a long haul against the IRA.”²²

The speech crafted for Drumm went further and contained a hint of what was to come, although few of those present at Wolfe Tone’s graveside that day would have realized the full significance of his remarks. “We find,” he went on, “that a successful war of liberation cannot be fought exclusively on the backs of the oppressed in the Six Counties, nor around the physical presence of the British Army. Hatred and resentment of the army cannot sustain the war…”²³

Heavily coded though these remarks were, the import was clear. The first message was that if republican activists wanted to sustain the war effort, they would have to expand their support base in the North by becoming politically active. Adams had already described how he saw this being done, in a series of articles written in Long Kesh and published weekly in Republican News under the Brownie pen name. Dropping abstentionism, recognizing the partitionist parliaments, and running for office, at least in the North, was still forbidden territory, but Adams nevertheless put the idea onto the Provisionals’ agenda, albeit in a more subtle way. He called his approach “active abstentionism,” a philosophy that in theory involved republicans’ building alternative governmental structures and becoming relevant to the needs of ordinary people.

Borrowed from his days as a Goulding republican, “active abstentionism” was just another way of encouraging political activity in an organization in which “politics” was still a dirty word. The plans to construct alternative structures never really got off the ground, but the idea that republicans should “do things for the people” took root and later found more tangible expression when Sinn Fein started to fight elections and in an approach that was christened the “Armalite and ballot box” strategy. The really significant feature of the move was the way Adams sold it to his colleagues, largely on the basis that increasing political support would enable the IRA to intensify and sustain its war effort. It would not be the last time that he justified political activity in military terms even if, in the end, the effect was to undermine the IRA’s war effort.

The same military argument was used to justify another major theme in the Drumm speech, the idea that the republican movement should try to build political support in the South. Increasing political support south of the Border, Adams argued, would translate into more safe houses for the IRA to use, more money, and more recruits. The argument was uncritically accepted internally, even though it flew in the face of the reality of the Ireland of the mid-1970s. The truth was that by that point in the Troubles, the conflict in the North was something most Southerners wanted nothing to do with, and no amount of political work by Sinn Fein was likely to change that. Nevertheless the Adams dictum became IRA policy, and with hindsight it seemed a highly significant move. Its effect was to introduce a contradiction into Provisional politics that played a major role in the evolution of the peace process. Political ambition south of the Border and armed struggle in the North were mutually exclusive. One or the other could prosper but not both. The contradiction was sharper in the South but it also restricted Sinn Fein’s room for growth in the North, even though the IRA’s campaign had created a sizable support base. Adams had set the republican movement on a journey that would eventually reach a crossroads, where it would have to choose between politics and the gun.

When it came to putting flesh on the theory of “active abstentionism,” Adams and Bell turned to the Libyan regime of Colonel Muammar Qaddafi for inspiration. Qaddafi had outlined a system of people’s committees or popular congresses to help govern Libya. Organized in a pyramidal fashion, the people’s committees oversaw different aspects of government and elected delegates to a general people’s congress, Qaddafi’s version of the Libyan parliament. This system, Qaddafi wrote, is “the only means to achieve popular democracy.”24 Adams and Bell copied the idea and suggested that people’s committees be established separately from British government structures in republican areas of the North. Adams extolled the idea in a Brownie article: “We need an alternative to the British administration in our country. Especially now in the 6 Counties and when the Republican movement has control and administration to some degree in all the Nationalist areas. So why not cement this into local government structures. In Belfast alone could not the three or four big Nationalist areas be organised into community councils?”²⁵

The concept of people’s committees made a brief appearance after Adams’s release from jail, but by mid-1979 talk of building alternative government structures had virtually disappeared. The reason given was the arrest of the group of Sinn Fein activists charged with bringing them into existence, but the idea had proven to be simply impractical. One bit that did survive, however, was the Civil Administration, or Administrative IRA, which was created to police the areas within which the IRA had influence. With the Troubles now nearly a decade old, law and order had broken down in many nationalist districts and established value systems had been upturned. Crime, vandalism, and joyriding were endemic, and there was a demand for a policing system. Rather than see the RUC back in their areas, the IRA began to dispense its own system of rough justice and to mete out punishment shootings, beatings, and expulsions.

While it appears that some of Adams’s associates, Bell in particular, were motivated by an admiration for Qaddafi, the Long Kesh dissidents were also trying to ingratiate themselves with the Libyan leader in the knowledge that he had the wherewithal to arm and finance the IRA beyond its wildest dreams. This consideration was evident in two other structural changes advocated by Adams and Bell.

One was the Revolutionary Council, which came into being in 1976–77 and took its name from a central part of the Libyan system of government. In Libya the Revolutionary Council was the executive branch of government that sat atop the people’s committees. It consisted of Qaddafi, a general people’s committee chosen from the People’s Congress, and the ministers of the principal government departments. The IRA’s version was a sort of mini-Convention, a sounding board of IRA opinion representative enough of the grassroots, yet small enough to be able to meet safely. The regular IRA General Army Convention could draw as many as a hundred delegates, and the risks attached to convening such a large gathering were considered too great in the mid-1970s. The last Convention had met in September 1970, and much had changed in between. Adams and Bell saw the Revolutionary Council as a way of bringing the IRA leadership into touch with the rank and file, among whom their influence ran strongly.

A mini-Convention held in late 1976 agreed to set up the Revolutionary Council and determined its makeup. It would consist of the seven-man Army Council, the GHQ staff, and the commander, adjutant, and quartermaster of the Belfast, Derry, Mid-Ulster, East Tyrone, South Derry, and South Armagh Brigades. Allowing for overlapping at Army Council and GHQ level, the Revolutionary Council had perhaps thirty to thirty-five members.

Bell had intended the Revolutionary Council to effectively replace the Army Council as the IRA’s primary decision-making body. As a radical— some would say a Marxist, others an anarchist—Bell distrusted the middle-aged conservatives who dominated the Army Council, and he wanted to sideline them by subjecting them to IRA democracy. Adams, however, used the Revolutionary Council in a very different way, to control and bend the Army Council to his way of thinking but not to replace it. In his hands the Revolutionary Council became an instrument for taking over the leadership of the IRA, but the Army Council, a smaller body and thus easier to manipulate, remained, under his direction, the supreme decision-making body. The Revolutionary Council was phased out when Adams’s control of the Army Council was complete, although it was revived, to perform a similar function, during the peace process many years later. “It was at this stage that a gap started to open up between Adams and Bell,” observed a contemporary.26 While Bell wanted to broaden and radicalize the IRA, Adams sought merely to curb and then control the Army Council.

Qaddafi had outlined his political philosophy, a compromise between communism and capitalism that he termed “the third way,” in a three-volume publication called the “Green Book,” so called because green is the color of Islam. Again in imitation of their putative arms supplier, Adams and Bell proposed that the IRA should have its own “Green Book,” which all IRA recruits would be obliged to read and digest before being admitted as full-fledged Volunteers. Thereafter such IRA members would be described as having been “Green-Booked.”

A cross between a political manifesto and a training manual, the hundred-page “Green Book” set out the IRA’s fundamental beliefs and political and military strategies. It also included a copy of the most up-to-date IRA constitution, often an extremely sensitive and revealing guide to the organization’s political disposition and intentions, which IRA leaders strove to keep secret. The result was that the Green Book’s circulation was unnecessarily restricted, bestowing upon it, in the public mind, a sense of mystery and importance beyond its merit. The IRA, it said, was the lawful inheritor of the First Dail and was the legal government of Ireland. The Dail in Dublin and any parliament at Stormont were thus bogus and illegal, the “puppet governments of a foreign power and willing tools of an occupying force,” according to the text.27 The IRA’s long-term aim was to create a democratic socialist republic, and Volunteers had the moral right to kill to achieve it, not least because they were acting on behalf of the true Irish government. IRA strategy would be based on a number of tactics, the Green Book said, including a war of attrition against “enemy personnel,” a bombing campaign to deter inward investment, opposition to all attempts to create internal political stability, and a propaganda campaign in Ireland and abroad aimed at broadening support for the war effort.²⁸

To most rank-and-file IRA members, however, being “Green-Booked” really meant they had gone through training in the anti-interrogation techniques outlined in the manual. The RUC’s holding centers at Castlereagh, Gough barracks, and Strand Road were having a devastating impact on the IRA, and there was an urgent need to instruct Volunteers in ways of resisting police questioning, as one member recollected: “Men were breaking in the police stations. We’d hear of people handing over twenty-five to thirty names at a time. In the first twelve to eighteen months of Castlereagh we suffered great damage.”²⁹ The lectures in the “Green Book” on anti-interrogation methods, which basically boiled down to tutoring IRA members—seasoned activists as well as novices—in how to remain silent during questioning, came into effect around late 1978 and early 1979. From then on the only defense that an IRA member could make to a proven accusation of informing was that he or she had not been “Green-Booked.”³⁰

The Army Council chose a brutal way of demonstrating to Volunteers the importance it attached to the “Green Book” and its admonition to stay silent during interrogation. In July 1979 Michael Kearney, a twenty-year-old IRA Volunteer from Lenadoon, was found dead near Newtownbutler in County Fermanagh with a bullet wound to the head. In a statement the IRA said he had been killed “for breaches of general army orders in that he imparted information of vital importance to the British war machine.”³¹ Later the organization’s spin doctors suggested Kearney had betrayed a major bombing operation in East Belfast aimed at destroying oil depots and industrial plants. But within the IRA the strong belief was that Kearney had been killed only because he had broken during RUC interrogation and that his death was meant as a warning to others. A few years before, when such examples of weakness had been commonplace, the worst that most IRA members could expect was to be boycotted and isolated by colleagues in jail. Kearney’s death was intended as a signal that this leniency had gone and that others should take the “Green Book” with deadly seriousness.32 In September 2003, the IRA finally admitted that Kearney had not been an informer, thereby implicitly conceding that he had been killed only because he had violated the Green Book’s admonition to stay silent during police questioning.

British informers were high on the dissidents’ target list. In their reorganization scheme, Adams and Bell suggested the creation of a specialist counterintelligence unit, known as the security department, which was initially charged with debriefing IRA members who had been in police custody with the aim of discovering whether they had talked to their interrogators or been turned by them; initially confined to Belfast, the security department was eventually extended to Northern Command and, over the years, its powers to probe IRA affairs were expanded. The security department was also responsible for arresting, interrogating, and ultimately arranging the deaths of informers, a great number of whom would end their days hooded and trussed at lonely roadsides in places like South Armagh. After 1977 the number of deaths of alleged informers rose steeply; one estimate suggests that as many as 70 percent of all informers caught by the IRA during the entire Troubles were killed after that date.

The security department proved to be a double-edged weapon, however. Infiltrating the new department became a priority for the RUC and British intelligence for one very simple reason. The security department’s members knew many of the IRA’s most intimate secrets, including the identity of key gunmen and bombers, and a double agent placed within their ranks could cause havoc. The years since the department was set up have been characterized by persistent suggestions that this is just what happened.

The idea for the internal security department came in part from the special “unknown” cells set up by Adams in 1972. Part of the task of “the unknowns” had been to lure alleged informers to their deaths and to engage in counterintelligence work. “The unknowns” were also the inspiration for another part of the reorganization plan, and that was the refashioning of the IRA into secret cells and the dismantling of the old company and battalion structures. Modeled on the British army, the IRA’s old system of companies and battalions were based in well-defined geographical areas, and this made it relatively simple for the British to work out which units were responsible for what operations. The structure also made easier the task the RUC Special Branch and other intelligence agencies faced in mapping and identifying the IRA’s battle order so that when the interrogation centers swung into action the organization quickly buckled.

Adams was asked by the Army Council to design the reorganization plan, a draft copy of which was found by the Gardai when they arrested Chief of Staff Seamus Twomey in Dublin in December 1977. The kernel of Adams’s scheme was the creation of secret, four-man active-service units (ASUs), which would specialize in activities such as sniping, bombings, assassinations, and intelligence work. They would have a roving commission and could operate anywhere in the IRA’s war zone so that the British would find it more difficult to identify which ASU had been active where.

The restructuring of the IRA, its new political-military strategy, the “Green Book,” the internal security unit, and the course of anti-interrogation lectures for recruits and veterans were all parts of a strategy designed to facilitate the conduct of the “long war.” The theory was that between them the changes would enable the ASUs to ward off penetration by British intelligence and resist RUC efforts to force confessions out of the activists, thus enabling the IRA to survive and fight for years to come. At the same time the IRA’s new political activism would, again in theory, expand the support base and provide a steady supply of new recruits, safe houses, and so on.

On top of all this Adams proposed another major innovation, the idea that the IRA should have “permanent leadership” at all levels. The argument put forward in favor of this innovation was that the IRA lacked consistency at the commander level and was too easily disrupted by arrests and harassment. Since the start of the IRA campaign, Adams and his allies argued, there had been too many chiefs of staff, too many changes in Army Council and GHQ personnel, and, lower down too high a turnover at the brigade staff level. Each time a top commander was arrested and jailed, valuable talent was lost, and precious experience and knowledge would disappear and have to be replaced in a lengthy and often difficult process.

Adams’s proposal was backed by a powerful group of activists, including Danny Morrison, Brian Keenan, Martin McGuinness, and Adams’s cousin Kevin Hannaway. They got their way, and while the change was not always implemented, where it was enforced it did not come cost free. In an important way the concept of “permanent leadership” made the IRA more vulnerable to British penetration; a commander turned by the RUC or MI5 could be in place for a very long time. There was another unforeseen consequence. In practice the only way “permanent leadership” could work was for commanders to become operationally inactive so as to avoid any risk of arrest. That was a significant break with Provisional IRA tradition and practice, in which leaders had often led by example, fighting alongside Volunteers. One outcome was the development of a self-perpetuating elite at top- and middle-level ranks whose composition was often the result as much of loyalty to the political strategy of the Army Council, and ultimately to Gerry Adams, as of battle skills. The concept, the fact that leaders put away their guns, also paved the way for hitherto secretive senior figures to emerge as public personalities, an essential prerequisite for a successful electoral strategy.

Much of the Adams-Bell blueprint was beginning to be implemented before Adams’s release from Long Kesh. With Adams, Bell, and Hughes in jail, the task of selling the restructuring plans both to the Army Council and to the middle leadership fell in part to Martin McGuinness, the Derry IRA leader who had spent much of the cease-fire period in Portlaoise prison after a conviction for IRA membership. But it was mostly Brian Keenan who toured the country preaching the Cage 11 gospel to IRA members. “More than anyone else,” remembers one former IRA man, “Keenan was a roving ambassador for Adams.”33

The most important and meaningful part of the restructuring scheme was also its most controversial. Adams proposed the division of the IRA into two separate geographical entities. A Northern Command would be set up, comprising the six counties of Northern Ireland and five Border counties in the Irish Republic (Louth, Cavan, Monaghan, Leitrim, and Donegal), an area that coincided with what was effectively the war zone where military operations were planned and carried out. A separate Southern Command was proposed in the remaining twenty-one counties that would specialize in providing the logistics necessary for conducting the campaign in the North. The Southern Command would supply three essential elements: most of the IRA’s arsenals would be hidden there, most of the “factories” churning out homemade explosives and the IRA’s often ingenious improvised weaponry would be based there, and so would the organization’s training camps, often situated in isolated mountainous countryside or in underground firing ranges painstakingly excavated in lonely farmland and forests.

Important though these functions were, there is little doubt that the proposal for a Northern Command would herald a significant switch in the internal balance of power. The IRA’s principal business was to fight a war against British forces in Northern Ireland, and those who controlled how that war was conducted—and those who appointed them—would inevitably wield the greatest influence in the organization. The Northern Command would have its own staff, which would shadow that in GHQ, which promptly lost its responsibility for conducting operations in the North and was thus weakened. Thereafter GHQ’s direct military role was confined to the IRA’s international activities, principally in Britain and Europe. The construction of a Northern Command would make the position of Northern commander one of the most important positions in the organization. Not least of the Northern commander’s powers would be that of having a major say—in later years the final say— in deciding who became brigade commanders and who made up their staff.

The idea of creating a Northern Command was always going to be a contentious proposal, and so it was, especially with older republicans who had bitter memories of the last time, aside from the brief period before and after the 1969 split, when the Northern and Southern parts of the IRA had gone their separate ways. A Northern Command, composed of the six Northern Ireland counties and County Donegal, was established in 1939 just after the outbreak of the Second World War when cross-Border communication difficulties made the change necessary. The IRA had begun a bombing campaign in England around the same time, but within two years arrests by the British police had brought it to a halt. The IRA in the South, meanwhile, was enfeebled by arrests and arms seizures. The police forces in Ireland and Britain clearly had good intelligence, which the Northern commander, Sean McCaughey, and his allies suspected was being supplied by a traitor in the Dublin leadership. They kidnapped the chief of staff, the Wexford man Stephen Hayes, and held him for several weeks, during which time he was tortured, starved, and repeatedly questioned about failed operations and alleged Garda successes. After a court-martial, which predictably convicted and sentenced him to death, Hayes was forced to write out a lengthy confession. He managed to drag this out until an opportunity arose to escape. Hayes turned himself in to the Gardai and survived the ordeal, but McCaughey was captured and later died on a hunger and thirst strike. The Hayes affair and its consequences deeply divided the IRA on North–South lines. Many activists of the day blamed the Northern Command experiment for the acrimony and vowed never to repeat it.

The “Forties men” were the strongest opponents of Adams’s proposal, among them Joe Cahill, Proinsias MacAirt, and Billy McKee, who was probably the most bitterly against the idea. Their common fear was that a Northern Command would precipitate a split. But Seamus Twomey, the chief of staff and, in the words of one IRA militant, “Adams’s pet Rottweiler,”34 backed the proposal, and Brian Keenan did the rest. Most of Belfast supported the idea, as did Martin McGuinness in the Derry Brigade, while Keenan, still the IRA’s QMG, won over crucial middle leadership people in three other vital areas, South Derry, East Tyrone, and South Armagh. Keenan’s argument was simple: a Northern Command would be responsive to the needs of the men who were fighting the war. “He told us we wouldn’t have to wait to see someone from Kerry,” explained a Northern activist. “We asked would a Northern Command mean that we would get more gear, and Keenan would say bigger, better, longer guns and then it was okay.”35

Another rural Northern IRA member takes up the story:

Adams was still in jail at this time, so Keenan was really the John the Baptist to Adams’s Christ. Into our midst during our perennial quest for gear would come Brian Keenan. Unlike other leaders he was an activist. He would arrive in jeans and denim jacket and would sleep in the ditches along with the Volunteers. He was good fun, clever, likable and would always arrive with a bit of gear wrapped up in plastic, fifty or a hundred rounds for some weapon. Brian could always turn up stuff for esoteric weapons. I remember we had a Chinese version of the AK-47 called the SKS, which used short 7.62 mm ammo as opposed to the British-NATO standard long round, and he got some for us. He would sit and talk things over with us; we’d go and get a carryout to eat; he charmed us and won us over.³⁶

Keenan and Adams were knocking at an open door, and the establishment of the Northern Command became a foregone conclusion. In late 1976 a meeting of the Revolutionary Council passed a resolution recommending to the Army Council that the change be made; faced with the united voice of the fighting units in the North, the Army Council had little choice but to agree. Martin McGuinness was appointed the first Northern commander but on Billy McKee’s insistence the powerful Belfast Brigade was excluded from the new arrangement. McKee was still OC of Belfast Brigade, albeit hanging on by his fingertips, and correctly saw Northern Command as an effort by the Adams camp to extend their power base. Only when Ivor Bell took over from McGuinness, when he was appointed chief of staff in early 1978 in succession to Gerry Adams, was Belfast integrated into Northern Command.

The creation of the Northern Command had important and long-lasting consequences for the IRA. Not only did it facilitate coordinated Northern Ireland-wide attacks and make rapid alterations in military tactics more feasible, it established and refined central control over the IRA’s cutting edge. This was especially the case outside Belfast in militant areas like East Tyrone and South Armagh where the local IRAs were really under the control of clan chieftains—Kevin Mallon in Tyrone and later Tom “Slab” Murphy in South Armagh were examples—rather than part of a structured, centrally directed organization. “The leadership would never try to give them orders,” recalled a rural activist. “There was virtually no control from the center. They mounted operations against the British, and the job of leadership was to provide resources, training guns, explosives, etc. You just could not guarantee that they would vote at a Convention for the leadership’s political strategy. That independence all but disappeared with the Northern Command.”37 Creation of the Northern Command marked a vital staging post on the road to Adams’s establishing control not just of the IRA’s military tactics but of its political direction as well.

The new structure also standardized the IRA in another important way. Prior to the Northern Command each area in the North had organized its own training camps and procedures. Separate camps had existed for Belfast, Tyrone, Derry, and Armagh IRA units, but after the change training was centralized and procedures regularized and, inevitably, improved. This development had its negative side. If a training camp was stumbled upon or betrayed to the Garda, Special Branch surveillance would now reveal much more about the IRA than before.

There were other adverse consequences from the creation of the new body. The IRA lost a great deal of the spontaneity and unpredictability that had made it such a difficult quarry to corner in the early 1970s. After Northern Command was set up, Adams sent emissaries throughout the countryside to propound the new gospel, with the result in some instances that well-protected safe houses were revealed and local command structures disclosed to outsiders. Some areas were forced to share hitherto jealously guarded technology. The IRA in South Armagh, for instance, had developed radio-controlled bombs but had refused to allow other areas to use them, for fear that the British would capture them and work out countermeasures. Once the Northern Command was set up and the technology shared, that is precisely what happened.

IN FEBRUARY 1977, after the best part of four years spent in the Long Kesh prison camp, Gerry Adams was released into the loving arms of Colette and Gearoid, his three-and-a-half-year-old son, who had been born while he was in jail. Adams had seen his young son grow up but only in the visiting rooms of the jail and under the watchful and often intrusive eyes of the prison guards, the hated “screws.” Now for the first time they could be a proper family, inasmuch as an IRA leader ever had a proper family life. Despite the risks associated with the IRA lifestyle, at least they knew that the fear of arrest no longer hung over the head of the family. The phasing out of internment meant that if the British wanted to put Adams back in jail, they would have to assemble a case that would pass the scrutiny of a court, even if it was one where only a single judge also acted as the jury.

Adams could be well satisfied with the fruits of his work in jail. Given the agenda devised in Cage 11, the IRA had been set on a course that would have lasting consequences for Anglo-Irish politics and for Adams himself. Reorganized to revive its flagging military fortunes, the IRA now had a political program to guide it, one that would ultimately propel it into electoral politics. It also had a structure that would inexorably and increasingly concentrate control and power in the hands of Gerry Adams and those he chose to have around him.

Adams did not emerge from Cage 11 and return to his IRA comrades empty-handed. As far as some Army Council members were concerned, the disastrous cease-fire of 1974–75 had been partly forced on the leadership by a weapons shortage in the Belfast Brigade area that was so severe that many doubted if the organization in the city could conduct anything approaching a sustained campaign. Within weeks of Adams’s release, however, a cache of sixty Armalite rifles, a batch smuggled by Irish-American sympathizers, was being distributed to grateful and astonished active-service units in the city. The sudden abundance of weaponry was credited to their released leader. To many activists, it seemed that Gerry Adams had not only the ideas to rescue the IRA from defeat but the means as well.

What none of them could have known was that the Armalites had arrived in Belfast well before the weapons famine hit the IRA in the city, before the resulting cease-fire, and had been secreted in five sealed dumps under the supervision of Brian Keenan and hidden even from Eamon Molloy’s prying eyes. The weapons had been put aside in case of an upsurge in loyalist violence, but when Adams was arrested and imprisoned along with many of his brigade staff, and eventually replaced by Billy McKee and his allies, no one told the new Belfast leadership that the weapons existed. Had they known about the guns, it is almost certain that the pressure to call the cease-fire would have been considerably less than it was. And if there had been no cease-fire, Gerry Adams would have been deprived of the cause around which to build his bid for control of the IRA.38