When Gerry Adams embarked upon the journey that eventually led to the end of the IRA’s violent armed struggle against Britain, he enjoyed one huge advantage. For all practical purposes supreme power over the IRA lay in the hands of one small body, the seven-man Army Council, which was perched at the top of the organization’s pyramidal structure. It was the one part of the IRA where Adams’s idea of permanent leadership found its clearest expression, and during the key decade of the peace process, from 1984 until 1994, the same men, with only one or two exceptions, sat around the IRA’s boardroom table and decided the direction and policy that the organization should take. Adams could count on the absolute loyalty of three of his six colleagues, and while that, combined with his own vote, gave him a simple numerical majority, practical politics dictated that to get vital and controversial decisions, such as calling a cease-fire safely through, he would need the support of at least one and preferably two more Army Council members. The story of how he did that can now be told.
The structure of the IRA’s government gave considerable leverage to those at its pinnacle, and the reason for that was not just that the IRA was a disciplined body whose members, although volunteer soldiers, readily obeyed orders. In their eyes the Army Council was not merely a military politburo that issued orders but the only rightful government of the stillborn Irish Republic, which, according to republican dogma, had been betrayed first by the followers of Michael Collins, who signed the Treaty in 1921, and then by Eamon de Valera, who abandoned the republican struggle in 1926 to enter constitutional politics. The Army Council may not have had the powers and control over society exercised by conventional governments, but its right came from a higher authority; it was spiritual, conferred by the blood sacrifice of those who had fought and died to attain the Irish Republic and by the will of the whole Irish people who had voted for it back in 1919. The status of government was bestowed upon the Army Council in 1938 when the handful of surviving anti-Treaty members of the Second Dail, the last all-Ireland and independent parliament, agreed to pass on their authority to its seven members for safeguarding, lest it disappear with their deaths. Thereafter when Volunteers of the IRA—known properly as Oglaigh na hEireann, or ONH in republican shorthand—swore their allegiance to the Army Council, it was really to this almost mystical administration that they pledged their loyalty. Under the guidance, pressure, and cajoling of Gerry Adams and his allies, it was this “government of Ireland” that would bring the IRA to peace. And it was because of the Army Council’s special, almost sacred status that so many of the IRA’s rank and file went along with a process that caused within many of them the greatest doubts and anxiety.
THERE WERE NO WOMEN on the Army Council, and there never had been. The Provisional’s Army Council had always been a decidedly male preserve, a not surprising feature of the IRA of the 1920s through to the 1960s, given the secondary role played by women in society at large in those days. But under the Adams leadership republicans had championed the concept of gender equality, and this was reflected in the IRA itself, where women were encouraged both to join the male organization and to regard themselves as being on a par with their male colleagues. At the 1986 Convention the IRA’s constitution had even been rewritten to excise sexist language. In the meantime women had become brigade commanders and had even made it to the staff of Northern Command but, curiously, never to the supreme decision-making body.
Although the Army Council determined IRA policy, operational control was in the hands of the chief of staff, who had at his disposal the service of a GHQ staff and a Northern Command whose task was to conduct the day-to-day campaign of violence against the British. In the years before the 1994 cease-fire, GHQ consisted of nine departments, each headed by a director who reported to the chief of staff. Each department carried out specialized functions and had its own identity, traditions, and culture. When it came to gauging sentiment in the IRA about political matters, such as whether or not a cease-fire should be called, departmental loyalties and differences mattered as much as, if not more than, geographical ones. Whether an IRA member was in the engineering or the finance department influenced his or her views as much as whether he or she came from West Belfast or East Tyrone.
The largest department in GHQ, accounting for perhaps 20 percent of the IRA’s manpower, was the quartermaster’s department. This department was responsible for acquiring and smuggling weapons into Ireland and then for finding secure dumps in which to hide the organization’s stores of arms and munitions. It also had the job of building arms and explosives supply lines to the ASUs in the North and to units operating in England and Europe.
The engineering department was possibly the next most important. It was responsible for mixing and manufacturing the huge amounts of homemade explosives that the IRA used each year. In secret locations, mostly in the Republic, the engineering department also invented, manufactured, and adapted the organization’s impressive array of detonating devices and improvised weapons, including a formidable range of mortar bombs. Since most of the engineering department’s product would be handled by the QM’s department, it was inevitable that these two sections would come to share a common view of the world and that their respective heads, the quartermaster general (QMG) and the director of engineering, would form an alliance.
Next in line came the operations department, which was responsible for overseeing IRA activity, in England and Europe in particular; two sub-departments handled operations in these two theaters, and their heads reported to the director of operations on GHQ. The six remaining departments were self-explanatory: intelligence, finance, training, political education, internal security, and publicity. Assisting the chief of staff was the adjutant general (AG), effectively his second in command, whose duties included ensuring that the chief of staff’s instructions were carried out, overseeing internal discipline, and making certain that the rank and file understood and implemented Army policy. The AG had more day-to-day contact with the rank and file than anyone else at leadership level and was often charged with assessing grassroots feelings, especially during the cease-fires.
Underneath GHQ, the IRA in Ireland was divided into two operational areas. Northern Command included not just the six counties of Northern Ireland but the five Border counties of Leitrim, Cavan, Louth, Monaghan, and Donegal as well. Beneath them were the various brigade areas and active-service units (ASUs). Only South Armagh retained the old battalion structure, the First Battalion around the Forkhill and Jonesboro areas and the Second based in Crossmaglen. The remaining twenty-one counties of Ireland were grouped under Southern Command, with a similar but much smaller brigade and ASU substructure. The QM’s department and the engineering department made up the strongest elements of Southern Command, since it was here that the bulk of weapons dumps and arms and explosives factories were to be found.
AT THE TOP of this structure sat the seven members of the Army Council, whose role and powers were strictly defined by the IRA’s constitution. The Council’s prime function was to “conclude peace or declare war,” and it could do so by a simple majority vote.1
The Council’s other important task was to choose the chief of staff and to ratify his appointments to GHQ and other key posts. It also drew up the IRA’s general orders, which governed the rules of engagement, and formulated membership regulations, a disciplinary code, and the procedures and penalties for courts-martial. Crucially the Army Council, by dint of its ability to “conclude peace,” was charged with negotiating with the British government if the need arose, although as far as face-to-face contact with the British was concerned, this task was left to the chairman of the Army Council, one of the seven members whose other task was to preside over the monthly Council meeting. Throughout the peace process this was a role performed by Martin McGuinness, chairman since 1982. His mandate for negotiations, however, was determined by the full Army Council, to which he had to report back regularly.
The Army Council was not, however, the supreme authority in the IRA. That was a status reserved for the General Army Convention (GAC), a delegate gathering of the IRA rank and file that was supposed to meet every two years. In practice it usually met only when the IRA was at peace or, if the IRA was at war, when the leadership so needed the endorsement of the rank and file for political changes that it was prepared to take the risk of assembling the IRA delegates. The 1986 convention, which endorsed the dropping of abstentionism, fell into this category. During those periods when the IRA was at war, and it was considered too dangerous to convene such a large meeting, the Army Council held all power in its hands. It was the Convention, theoretically representative of IRA structures and membership throughout Ireland, that alone and by the required two-thirds majority had the power to change the IRA’s constitution. But that was the least of its functions. By a complex but indirect process the GAC was also supposed to choose the Army Council, to which it technically lent its powers between Conventions. It did this by electing the twelve-member IRA Executive, whose first task was to choose, usually from its own number, the seven members of the Army Council. Once the Executive had voted for the Army Council, the seven vacated seats would then be taken by substitutes previously elected by the GAC. The selection of the Executive was thus the Convention’s most crucial act since the choice of Executive by the delegates would determine the leadership and therefore the direction of the IRA. It followed that the disposition of the delegates selected to attend the Convention was in turn vital to the process of shaping the political character of the IRA. This factor could and did determine whether the IRA opted for peace or for war, for abstentionism or against, for or against federalism, and so on. The selection of delegates and whether they actually managed to complete the often difficult and lengthy journey to the Convention were issues that assumed critical importance.
These two structures—an Army Council of seven members, and an Executive with twelve—were balanced, sometimes uneasily, at the very top of the IRA. This elaborate and often difficult relationship was the result of the IRA’s early history when the Executive was the much more important of the two bodies. The Army Council in the early days of the IRA was a subcommittee of senior military staff answerable to the policy-making Executive, whose membership was largely drawn from Sinn Fein’s ranks, but by 1938, when governmental authority was bestowed upon it by the remnants of the Second Dail, power and influence became concentrated in the Army Council’s hands, not least because it was the body running the day-to-day IRA campaign. As far as the modern IRA is concerned, the relationship between the Executive, which regarded itself as the repository of the republican conscience, and the Army Council, which jealously guarded its power and authority, has traditionally been a fraught one, and the last three splits in the IRA all came about because of friction between them.
The Army Council became even more powerful during the Provisionals’ campaign because it was often too dangerous to convene a Convention. The security risks attached to such an enterprise, which involved assembling between seventy and a hundred men and women, many of them “on the run” and wanted by the security forces North and South, meant that between 1969 and 1996 only four Conventions were held. Since elections to the Executive were few and far between, the Army Council became a self-replicating body. This in turn reinforced an antidemocratic and authoritarian tendency in the IRA leadership.
Gatherings of the Army Council were of necessity not easy to arrange. The logistical and security problems involved in bringing together some of the most wanted and watched fugitives in Europe were formidable. Meetings often had to be held in the most remote and least accessible spots in Ireland. The intricate journeys imposed on Council members meant that they would invariably arrive late at night at some damp farmhouse in the middle of a mountainous or isolated countryside with only a plate of cold ham sandwiches and a pot of tea to refresh them as they plowed through reams of documents in preparation for the following day’s meeting. This was a feature of Council meetings that was to prove crucial during the peace process. Not least it meant that those members who arrived fresh and already familiar with the stacks of documents dealing with the complex turns and twists of the peace process had a huge advantage over their other, less au fait colleagues.
Although Army Council membership was limited to seven, as many as ten people could sit around the table, all of whom could influence the Council’s decisions even if not all of them could vote. The chief of staff did not have to be a member of the Army Council, although the pre-1994 chief of staff was. IRA rules said that two other senior figures, the quartermaster general and the adjutant general, were entitled, if not already members of the Council, to sit in and contribute to its deliberations. That was the case before and after the 1994 cessation. An eleventh person, a secretary who minuted the meetings, would also be present. The record of Army Council meetings was possibly the most delicate and secret document in the IRA’s archive, and great care would be taken in storing and hiding it. The monthly meeting usually took up the best part of a day and would be dominated by two reports, one by the chief of staff who reported on military matters and another on political affairs given by the senior Sinn Fein figure, who during the peace process was usually Gerry Adams. Meetings were opened and closed by the Council chairman.
WITH THE EXCEPTION of the short period when he was held in jail after the La Mon bombing, Gerry Adams had been on the Army Council since 1977 and was one of its longest-serving members. Since his election first as an Assembly member for West Belfast in 1982 and then the following year as Westminster MP, Adams had held no military position in the IRA, making him the only Council member in this category. This decision was taken deliberately to ensure that he could never be put at risk of being jailed again. Of all the Army Council members, he was destined to be the most permanent.
Another figure who by the mid-1980s was working exclusively for Sinn Fein was the party’s Southern organizer, Pat Doherty, a close ally of Adams and identified as a senior Army Council figure by the IRA informer Sean O’Callaghan, a key witness in a celebrated libel action taken unsuccessfully in 1998 against the Sunday Times by Slab Murphy. Doherty’s rise to the heights of the IRA is the most difficult to explain. A Scot born in Glasgow in 1945, whose family hailed from County Donegal, Doherty, known to IRA colleagues as “Smiler,” is not known to have had any operational background, although a brother, Hugh, was a key member of the notorious Balcombe Street gang, which bombed and shot its way through London and southern England in the mid-1970s. A close friend of Martin McGuinness, Doherty, who was a civil engineer by profession, was famed for his ability to locate safe meeting places for IRA commanders and isolated localities for training camps in the wilds of Donegal. He also had the task of occasionally finding discreet and secure vacation homes for Gerry Adams and other figures from Belfast. Such is his knowledge of the more remote spots of Donegal that in the latter years of the peace process he was on more than one occasion made GAC convenor, charged with finding the appropriate premises for the delegates to meet.
After Ivor Bell’s fall, Doherty took on the task of building up Sinn Fein’s organization in the South, while the job of adjutant general was eventually filled in 1989, on Gerry Adams’s recommendation, by Gerry Kelly, a former London bomber and Ballymurphy associate of the Sinn Fein president from the days when Adams was Belfast IRA commander. Adams recommended Kelly largely because of his fearsome reputation in the IRA. Known as a ruthless and fearless IRA operative, Kelly had survived regular bouts of forced feeding in Brixton jail during a lengthy hunger strike. In 1983 he took part in a mass breakout of IRA prisoners from the Maze prison on the outskirts of Belfast. Those who made it to the Republic were given the traditional options: they could either return to active service or be smuggled out to the United States to a job and a new identity. Kelly unhesitatingly chose the former and went back on active service, although he was recaptured three years later in Holland, where he was involved in an elaborate plan to smuggle weapons and explosives to Ireland. Intensely loyal to Gerry Adams, few republicans could doubt his commitment to the struggle. When the cease-fire came, Kelly’s support for it was crucial in winning over the unsure and anxious.
Doherty could be depended upon to support Adams—as could Kelly, although he had no vote at Army Council meetings—and so, by and large, could a third member of the pre-1994 Army Council. Joe Cahill, a former Belfast commander and chief of staff who could trace his republican career back to the 1940s, was easily the oldest figure on the Council. A Ballymurphy-based contemporary of Adams’s father, Gerry Sr., he had been close to Gerry Adams from not long after the Provisionals were founded. Credited with forging the links with Qaddafi’s Libya in the mid-1970s, Cahill had, by the time the peace process picked up speed, effectively ended his operational IRA career and was in charge of Sinn Fein’s often parlous finances. His value to Adams and his colleagues was the continuity he represented. A founding member of the Provisionals, Cahill had credentials going way back to the famous Easter 1942 Milltown diversionary ambush. He had been sentenced to hang along with Tom Williams for the murder of Constable Murphy during that abortive operation but had been reprieved. Cahill’s emotional “I stood at the foot of the gallows for Ireland” speeches, usually in support of Adams’s latest ideological shift, were a regular feature of Sinn Fein Ard Fheiseanna and IRA Conventions.
Tom Murphy from Ballybinaby in South Armagh was without doubt the wealthiest member of the Army Council. By some accounts a millionaire several times over, thanks to his business activities in the lucrative cross-Border pig and fuel trade, Slab, as he was known by everyone in the IRA, was not and never had been a member of Sinn Fein. Until 1984 Slab had been Northern commander, but with the Libyan shipments due to arrive and the “Tet offensive” to put together, he was made director of operations. He was one of a breed of republicans without whom the peace process would have been impossible, the activist who despised politics and took no interest in it. Slab personified one of the major fault lines in the Provisionals, one that divided those who saw the future in terms of Sinn Fein’s electoral strategy and those who saw themselves exclusively as IRA “soldiers.” The story of the peace process is as much about the triumph of the former group over the latter as it is about anything else.
Martin McGuinness was the second-longest-serving member of the Council. He had taken over as Northern commander from Slab Murphy, and held the post along with the chairmanship of the Army Council. The move was actually a demotion for McGuinness since, after Ivor Bell’s removal as chief of staff, McGuinness had been made adjutant general. It was no secret in the IRA that he deeply resented having to give up the post of chief of staff when he ran for Sinn Fein in the 1982 Assembly elections, and promotion to adjutant general suggested he could be on the way back. To then be given the job of heading Northern Command looked to the untutored eye as if the Derry man was slipping down the IRA ladder. But the move made sense in terms of strengthening the forces in the leadership that were to shape the peace process. Control of Northern Command meant McGuinness decided which commanders got and which did not get supplies of the precious new Libyan weaponry, the IRA’s equivalent of pork barrel politics. As a way of rewarding allies and punishing opponents, it could hardly be bettered. Under his command, central control over the ASUs tightened. Before his appointment the local units were allowed to select their own commanders; under his direction, though, the ASUs could suggest candidates, but the final decision would be his. This brought predictable complaints, as one senior IRA source recalled: “From the late 1980s onward people were maneuvered into position who were loyal to Adams and McGuinness.”2 McGuinness’s appointment as Northern commander had another advantage. Since he was the man in charge of the day-to-day war against the British, his commitment to armed struggle seemed beyond doubt. So when McGuinness backed the peace process, many of the rank and file were prepared to follow.
There was a belief that for a long time Adams and McGuinness disagreed sharply about the peace process and that it was not until later on that the Derry man backed the Adams strategy. But those who observed both men close up say that was never the case. “He nearly always agreed with Adams except on small things, on details,” remembered one.3 Another recalls a figure who as far back as the early 1980s had admired and looked up to the Belfast man. “I remember Martin once saying that Adams articulates what he couldn’t put into words himself,” he said.4
McGuinness was respected by the rank and file and was popular in a way that Adams never could be. Not least there was the fact that McGuinness had an operational record, and his personal bravery had never come under question. Adams, by contrast, had no name at all as an “operator,” and while he was widely respected for his strategic and political prowess, nothing mattered more in the IRA than a person’s military record. Adams rarely socialized beyond a small group of confidants and was regarded widely as a somewhat distant and occasionally arrogant figure. His bad temper, which he could release on underlings without warning, was legendary.
A story told by one IRA veteran illustrates why McGuinness struck a chord with the rank-and-file Volunteer and Adams did not.
Dominic McGlinchey, Frank Hughes, and their gang were in Donegal hiding out for a while. They looked like mujahideen, longhaired, scruffy, heavily armed, driving wrecks of cars. They were fed up staying in cow barns when they heard Adams and McGuinness were on holiday in the area. They found out where Adams was staying and turned up at his chalet, where they were sniffily shown the door. There was no way Gerry and Colette would let that crowd darken their door. So then they went to where McGuinness was staying. He was annoyed and cursed them up and down, but he let them in and allowed them to stay.5
McGuinness’s second in command, the Northern adjutant, a well-known activist from South Armagh, was the sixth member of the Army Council. He had been promoted in January 1990 when the IRA’s director of publicity, Danny Morrison, was arrested in West Belfast while witnessing the interrogation of the IRA informer Sandy Lynch. Under IRA rules Morrison automatically lost his seat on the Army Council when he went to jail. The Northern adjutant’s presence on the Army Council meant that during much of the time that Gerry Adams and others like him were criticizing botched military operations and urging caution and prudence on the organization, two of the key figures on Northern Command in whose area of responsibility most of those “bad” operations took place regularly shared Army Council meetings with him. There was no need for Adams to make public speeches or give media interviews criticizing the IRA; all he had to do was to take McGuinness and the Northern adjutant aside and have a quiet but firm word with them.
The eighth person around the Army Council table was the quartermaster general, Michael “Micky” McKevitt, another South Armagh figure, who until 1984 had been quartermaster of Northern Command. The Libyan arms deal was the spur for his elevation. The QMG at the time the deal was negotiated, Kevin Hannaway, Gerry Adams’s cousin, had never recovered from the interrogation methods used on him by soldiers and policemen during the 1971 internment operation. Hannaway was judged too ill to handle such an ambitious enterprise and was quietly moved sideways and then eventually he was retired. Responsibility for getting the Libyan armaments safely to Ireland was given instead to McKevitt and Slab Murphy. McKevitt sat in on the Army Council’s deliberations and, like Gerry Kelly, could have a say but not a vote. His real influence was felt on the IRA Executive, of which he was a leading member. Like Murphy and the other South Armagh member of the Council, the Northern adjutant, McKevitt, had spent his entire republican career in the IRA and had never been in Sinn Fein, although as the peace process moved forward he was to play an increasingly political role.
The IRA’s military commander at the time of the 1994 cease-fire was the Tyrone man Kevin McKenna. Appointed chief of staff after the fall of Ivor Bell, McKenna became the longest-serving of all the IRA’s chiefs of staff, and his period at the top of the IRA encompassed the crucial transition from war to peace. Born on the family farm near Aughnacloy on the Tyrone-Monaghan Border in 1945, McKenna had been in the IRA briefly before the Troubles erupted in 1969 but had emigrated to Canada and missed key moments, such as the split between the Officials and the Provisionals. The introduction of internment in 1971 brought him back to Ireland and to the IRA, as it did scores of other young Northerners made angry at the turn of events and eager to help strike back. McKenna quickly made his mark and was soon a leading figure in the Tyrone organization, as a contemporary recalled:
His rise in the IRA was accounted for by the fact that back in those days there would have been three types of IRA men, the bulk were eighteen-to nineteen-year-olds, some in their fifties and sixties who were veterans of the ’56–’62 campaign and a small number like Kevin in their mid-twenties who were the right age to take the lead. He had come back from Canada with a bit of money, enough to buy a car. He was mobile, the right age, single and willing to work, and away he went.6
McKenna helped form an IRA unit around the Eglish-Aughnacloy area of Tyrone and afterward rose through the Tyrone Brigade. Kevin Mallon, the first OC of Tyrone, was succeeded by another figure known for his operational daring, Brendan Hughes, who was no relation to the Belfast figure of the same name. At the end of 1972, after Hughes’s departure, McKenna became commander of Tyrone but within eighteen months had been arrested and interned. Released in early 1975, he again assumed command of Tyrone, this time running the brigade from the distance of Monaghan, where he has lived ever since. The Northern commander immediately prior to Slab Murphy, McKenna was eventually elevated to the Army Council, and there was little doubt that, whatever his military skills, he was also put there to placate a Tyrone IRA made uneasy by Adams’s routing of Kevin Mallon in the wake of the disastrous Tidey kidnapping.
“McKenna would have been seen as keeping Tyrone out of politicking and troublemaking,” said one IRA veteran. “He’d be there to keep Tyrone happy, so they could say that their man was chief of staff. He would also empathize with the South Armagh men; he knew the price of cows and was happy wearing wellies.”7
The chief of staff was liked by his men even if his political analysis, like that of the other “soldiers” on the Army Council, was less than sophisticated, as the same IRA source recalled:
He is a very pleasant man to talk to, thoughtful, hospitable, and affable. He wasn’t a superior type nor stern, more an avuncular figure. While Twomey would be full of rage and almost physical retribution if you failed to carry out a mission, McKenna was more tolerant and understanding. If a unit was operating well, he would make sure it was well equipped. The fighting men had time for him; he was always there for them.
He had no well-defined politics as far as I could remember, and he was confused about the movement’s support for socialism. I remember at the time of the 1972 cease-fire him saying to me that he wanted the Brits out but he was not sure whether we needed socialism. I then saw him at a Sinn Fein Ard Fheis in the mid-seventies wandering around. A Portuguese army colonel had just spoken, and McKenna was in a daze saying this really is a revolutionary party. He was lost in terms of economics. He knew how to buy and sell cattle and would have made a good small businessman, but the macro stuff left him trailing.8
The Army Council was never an entirely united body, and personality clashes often soured its meetings. The squabbling between McGuinness and McKenna, a product of deep personal rivalry, was particularly serious. McKenna, who managed to be a most secretive and publicity-shy commander, resented constant media reports that McGuinness was the real chief of staff, and he suspected that the Derry man had done little to discourage them. There was a widespread suspicion that McGuinness desperately wanted his old job back and in particular to be chief of staff when the Libyan-resourced “Tet offensive” began. Before the Libyan weapons arrived, he launched a torrent of criticism at McKenna’s handling of the IRA’s campaign and, but for the support of Slab Murphy, the chief of staff might have succumbed. “Everything was thrown at him except a vote of no confidence,” recalled one source.9 Adams, by contrast, generally stayed above their conflict and refused to take sides, waiting to see who emerged victorious.
After the Libyan weaponry started to arrive, the rows between the two men worsened. As Northern commander, McGuinness and his staff had the final say on which units were to receive the new weaponry. But when it was discovered that arms were being sent to areas with inactive or small IRA units, such as Lurgan in County Armagh, or where training in the new equipment had yet to be given while other well-trained areas were ignored, McKenna angrily intervened. The problem was that the weapons were being lost by inexperienced units almost as quickly as they arrived, and the drain on the Libyan stores became so great that by the early 1990s McKenna gave an order to cease replacing lost weapons and issued instructions that existing stocks in Northern Command be moved around internally, with a consequent risk that guns and equipment would be bugged by the British. There were accusations that McGuinness was either attempting to curry favor with the rank and file or was just incompetent; relations between the pair became icy.
McGuinness and McKenna clashed again when more precious Libyan weapons were lost. This time the trouble broke out after Gardai discovered two plastic tanks full of automatic rifles, Semtex explosives, and ammunition hastily buried in the beach at Five Fingers Strand near Malin Head in north Donegal in January 1988. The weapons had been moved to Donegal on the basis of assurances from McGuinness’s right-hand man, an activist from the Inishowen peninsula, that the appropriate dumps had been located and readied. The assurance was bogus, and the arms had to be quickly buried on the nearest available beach as soon as they arrived. The van carrying the load was stopped by alert Gardai, who realized that the driver and passenger had republican records. The van was empty but there were traces of sand inside. On a hunch, a search of beaches near the driver’s home on Malin Head was ordered, and the weapons were duly uncovered. The Inishowen activist was sacked from the IRA at McKenna’s insistence, the episode being recorded as another black eye for McGuinness.
The biggest row between the pair, however, was over the activities of a well-placed IRA informer in the Derry Brigade, Frank Hegarty, who was attached to the quartermaster’s department. Hegarty had been seconded to work with Northern Command staff to help move part of the first Libyan shipment to dumps in the west of Ireland. The consignment, some eighty AK-47s that had come to Ireland as part of the Kula’s cargo in August 1985, was being moved by stages when in January 1986 the Gardai swooped. Two transitional dumps, one in Roscommon and one in Sligo, were raided and the weapons seized. The next day Hegarty disappeared from Derry, and it soon became clear not only that he had given the dumps away but that he had been working for MI5, the British Security Service, which had spirited him away, and that he was being kept in a safe house somewhere in the north of England.
Hegarty’s forced flight was a disaster for the intelligence community. An IRA member from the 1970s, Hegarty was Northern Command QM in 1982, when it was discovered that he was having an affair with the wife of a soldier in the Ulster Defence Regiment. His case went as high as the then chief of staff, Ivor Bell, who dismissed him from the IRA. Not long afterward Hegarty was approached by an arm of British military intelligence called the Force Research Unit who persuaded him to return to the IRA and work as a double agent. Inexplicably, Hegarty was allowed back into the IRA in Derry and made his way once again into the QM’s department with a brief from British intelligence to rise as far as he could, even as high as QMG. His handlers assured him that his IRA bosses would be removed one by one to smooth his way. British intelligence’s ambitious plans for Hegarty were, however, frustrated by the Special Branch in the Republic’s police, who insisted on moving in on the IRA dumps in Roscommon and Sligo as soon as the weapons arrived. Eager to strike a damaging propaganda blow against the IRA, the Gardai vetoed a British plan to bug and follow the weapons, and they moved to seize them. Fortunately for the IRA, Hegarty had been given a false story about where the weapons had come from; he was told that they had originated in Europe, and this, together with the fact that some Belgian FN rifles had been mixed in with the AK-47s, satisfied British intelligence. Nevertheless, the British had lost a potentially priceless agent as well as an opportunity to track the progress of the weapons.
The British had, though, come perilously close to discovering the Libyan link. Since most of the remaining Libyan shipments were still being awaited, including the Eksund’s 120 tons, the episode gave the IRA leadership a bad fright, and a high-level investigation was ordered. The first question to be resolved was how Hegarty had been allowed back into the IRA. Since McGuinness was Northern commander, it stood to reason that he must have known of Hegarty’s return, but he denied this and argued that the real informer had to be someone other than Hegarty.
During Hegarty’s period in hiding in England he was in regular contact by phone with his family in Derry. A month after his sudden disappearance Hegarty just as unexpectedly returned to Ireland, and so began one of the most controversial chapters in McGuinness’s republican career. Hegarty’s family would later insist that he had agreed to come back only after they passed on to him an assurance from McGuinness that he would not be touched. McGuinness has always denied this, but sources familiar with Hegarty’s subsequent interrogation at the hands of the IRA say that the informer repeated the claim while in the organization’s custody.
Hegarty also told his questioners that McGuinness had known and approved of his return to the IRA’s ranks, an admission that sparked a blazing row between the Northern commander and the chief of staff. Behind the row lay an unanswered question: why had McGuinness advanced Hegarty’s second career in the IRA’s quartermaster’s department when there had been so much doubt about his loyalty that he had previously been thrown out of the organization? In May 1986, just four months after the Gardai seized the Roscommon and Sligo arms dumps, Hegarty’s body was found on the outskirts of Castlederg near the Tyrone–Donegal Border. His eyes had been taped over, his hands tied behind his back, and a bullet wound to the back of his head indicated that he had received the punishment customary for those judged guilty of informing. The rivalry between McGuinness and McKenna would simmer on for years to come, but Hegarty’s death effectively marked the end of the Derry man’s ambitions to take over the chief of staff’s job.
THE QUARREL between McKenna and McGuinness was an important feature of the IRA leadership in those days, but it paled into insignificance compared with the much deeper division in the IRA leadership. That was the one that separated the Army Council into the complex political operators of the Adams and Doherty variety and the simple “soldiers,” like Slab Murphy, McKenna, and the Northern adjutant, all figures who never had and never would have any dealings with Sinn Fein. An understanding of how this affected the way the IRA Army Council did its business during the years of the peace process is vital to understanding how the Provisionals were brought to a cease-fire.
Contemptuous of politics, the “soldiers” paid little heed to the unfolding peace process until the cease-fire was almost upon them, and for a simple reason. They, along with much of the republican grassroots, proved to be exceptionally receptive to a steady diet of assurances from their political colleagues that Gerry Adams was only playing “word games,”10 as the phrase had it, with John Hume and the British, Irish, and American governments and that what was said to them by the Sinn Fein leader was not meant to represent the reality of the Provisionals’ politics. The strategy was disarmingly simple. The name of the game, they were told, was to forge a pan-nationalist alliance with the SDLP and Dublin that would put the British under pressure. This would supplement the IRA’s military campaign, and the combined pressure would force the British to move. But securing that nationalist alliance required two things. First the IRA’s military strategy had to be tailored so that it would not offend the rest of nationalist Ireland. That meant the IRA had to concentrate on hitting targets in England and military targets in the North while avoiding civilian casualties of any sort in Ireland. Meanwhile on the political front it was necessary to create the impression that republicans wanted to abandon military methods in favor of politics. The line given to the “soldiers” went something like this: to build that nationalist alliance, it would sometimes be necessary to say or do things that neither the IRA nor Sinn Fein really meant, including that a cease-fire might be possible, otherwise Dublin and the SDLP might balk at the relationship. Lies would have to be told, but the Army Council and the republican base could be sure that they were being told the truth, that the struggle was still what it had always been about, that is, securing British withdrawal. “All the time,” recalled one senior source, “Adams and Co. were telling people that the IRA didn’t mean it but that they had to say the sort of things they were saying. They kept assuring our people to ignore the public statements, that nothing short of British withdrawal would be acceptable.”11
DISSEMBLING had become part of the republican political arsenal long before the peace process assumed such an important part in Provisional politics. It began not long after the 1986 victory on abstentionism. “After the 1986 convention everything was sold as a tactic,” recalled one veteran IRA commander. “The use of language became a tactic, words didn’t matter, they were a means to an end.”12 The roots of all this actually reach back much farther, to 1982, when Sinn Fein first contested elections.
One of the difficulties presented by the electoral strategy was that it exposed Sinn Fein’s relationship with the IRA to a harsh and potentially dangerous spotlight. One election candidate after another would be quizzed by journalists about their association with the IRA, and each would have to deny it, even those like Adams and McGuinness whose role representing the IRA in talks with the British, for example, was well known and publicly recorded. Otherwise they could face charges of IRA membership, an offense that could mean up to five years in jail. To get around the problem, IRA members involved in Sinn Fein politics had been given a dispensation to deny their links. The rank and file knew what the truth was but accepted the need to deceive. It began at this level and the practice grew. Not meaning what was said increasingly became a defining and acceptable feature of republican political culture. It was to occupy a central place in the peace process strategy.
As Sinn Fein leaders moved rhetorically closer to accepting the ideas and principles of constitutional nationalism, their edgy, nervous supporters were constantly reassured. “They would keep on saying that these were tactical talks that meant nothing,” recalled the same source. “They would say don’t worry, what is being said is not meant, we have to say these things in order to talk to these people.”13 This message would be transmitted to rank-and-file Sinn Fein supporters and IRA activists alike and be repeated all the way up the ladder to the very top. Many, especially those who were fighting the IRA’s war, believed what they were told because they wanted to. The alternative opened up an appalling vista. Others believed because they had always believed. At the same time, the Irish, British, and American governments would be assured that Sinn Fein and the IRA were genuine and sincere but needed to manage carefully their difficult constituency. In this way the Sinn Fein leadership moved the peace process forward, entrusted by their supporters to take it to the next stage, while the governments waited patiently for results, secure in the knowledge that the farther the Provisionals traveled on this journey, the more difficult it would be to go back. Even so, it was often difficult to tell who was being lied to.
Occasionally, when their guard dropped, leadership figures would admit to the tactic. In September 1995, a year or so after the first cease-fire, the author had a lengthy session with one of Gerry Adams’s closest advisers, a figure who not long before had been released from prison. At the time, Adams was under enormous pressure from the Army Council’s “soldiers” to break the cease-fire, but he had a problem. Bill Clinton was coming to Belfast in a few weeks and he had just visited the White House to reassure the administration that, despite the difficulties, his commitment to peace was absolute. A detailed note of the conversation records the following: “[H]e admitted/claimed that they were lying to their new friends in the U.S. [i.e. Clinton] and elsewhere and that they could go back to war even though there would be, he admitted, a high price to pay… At one stage he said, ‘Your problem is that you mind too much about the lies’—he defended the tactic utterly, even though I said it only gets you into a wilderness of mirrors.”14