Second Edition
Second Edition
PENGUIN BOOKS
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First published in the United States of America by W.W. Norton and Company Ltd 2002
First published in Great Britain by Allen Lane The Penguin Press 2002
Published in Penguin Books 2003
Second edition published in Penguin Books 2007
1
Copyright © Ed Moloney, 2002, 2007
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
Map on page 135 courtesy of Bob E. Hall, Center for Earth and Environmental Science, Indiana
University–Purdue University, Indianapolis. Maps on pages 36, 76, 94, 351 reprinted from
Provisional Irish Republicans by Robert W. White. Copyright 1993 by Robert W. White. Reproduced
with permission of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc., Westport, Conn.
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject
to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,
re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s
prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in
which it is published and without a similar condition including this
condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
EISBN: 978–0–141–90069–8
This book is dedicated to
all the people who lost their lives
in the Northern Ireland Troubles.
PART TWO: Taking On the Old Guard
Twelve: “The War of the Twilight”
Thirteen: The Derry Experiment
Seventeen: The Point of No Return
Epilogue: “Turning the Titanic in a Bathtub”
Appendix 1 Special Sinn Fein Ard Comhairle Meeting, April 12, 1980
Appendix 2 TUAS Document—Summer 1994
Appendix 3 Post–1996 Convention IRA Constitution
Appendix 4 IRA Executive Chairman Sean McGrane’s Speech at the 1997 Convention
Appendix 5 IRA Chiefs of Staff
Appendix 6 The Mitchell Principles
Appendix 7 Letter from Father Alec Reid to Charles Haughey, May 11, 1987
Appendix 8 “Concrete Proposals” and “Stepping Stones”: two undated documents by Father Alec Reid
Appendix 9 IRA Statement Ending its Armed Campaign against Britain, July 28, 2005
Glossary of Terms and Abbreviations
IRA operational areas—Northern and Southern Command
History, Stephen said, is a nightmare
from which I am trying to awake.
—James Joyce, Ulysses
It is to the enormous credit of Penguin Books and my editor there, Simon Winder, that I have been given the opportunity to update A Secret History of the IRA. The first edition ended just after the IRA’s first act of decommissioning in the autumn of 2001, following the September 11 attacks in the United States and the arrest of IRA personnel in Colombia a month beforehand. This edition brings the story to what I would argue is the definitive end of the Provisional IRA as an instrument of armed and revolutionary resistance to British policy in Ireland. With that event, I believe, it is now also possible to say that the Troubles have ended.
The ending was signaled in two ways. First, by the IRA statement in July 2005 that formally announced that its armed struggle against Britain was over; and secondly by the completion of the decommissioning process the following September. Doubtless the IRA retained some weaponry to protect its leadership and key members against rivals and enemies but the destruction of its Libyan-supplied arsenal robbed the IRA of the capacity to wage war. Not only that but the act itself was replete with symbolic meaning, indicating a wish to eschew armed struggle in favour of political methods from thereon. The event was unprecedented in the history of Ireland’s struggle for independence.
This point came after five long and often turbulent years which saw the downfall of the Ulster Unionist leader, David Trimble, and his replacement as unionism’s leader by his party’s long-time loyalist critic and rival, Ian Paisley, leader of the Democratic Unionists and permanent Moderator of the Free Presbyterian Church. Nationalist politics were refashioned in an equally radical way with the IRA’s political partner, Sinn Fein, replacing the SDLP as the dominant party and Gerry Adams displacing John Hume as nationalism’s leader.
With that, the moderate center-ground of Northern Irish politics—in as much as it had ever existed—disappeared and potential executive power was transferred, as one acerbic critic put it, into the hands of a theocrat and an autocrat who might or might not agree to exercise it in the best interests of all the people of Northern Ireland.
That this state of affairs was brought about by the handling of IRA decommissioning is beyond dispute. It is a central thesis of the second edition of this book that the IRA could have decommissioned all its weapons much sooner, but chose instead to prevaricate and thereby to inject an even more virulent strain of sectarianism into Northern Irish politics. In such a way were Trimble and the SDLP destabilized and Sinn Fein catapulted to political and electoral success. It is surely no coincidence that once the process of destroying Trimble and sidelining the SDLP was completed, all the IRA’s objections to final decommissioning suddenly vanished.
The plaudits that came the way of the British prime minister, Tony Blair, and his Irish counterpart, Bertie Ahern, in the wake of the IRA finally completing the decommissioning process are understandable. The two leaders had worked for years for this day to dawn, but any credit that they are due should, however, be balanced by the knowledge that it was they who facilitated this Sinn Fein strategy and it is they, ultimately, who bear responsibility for this triumph of the extremes in Northern Ireland.
At the time of writing, the DUP and Sinn Fein were still squabbling about the one issue remaining in the way of their sharing government: Sinn Fein’s acceptance of the policing and criminal justice system. It remains to be seen whether their differences, which concern the practicalities rather than the principle of the matter, can be overcome but of a number of things there can be little doubt. One is that the Provisional IRA’s war is over for good. Another is that the politics of Northern Ireland have been changed forever and in a way no one could have predicted. Whether this will be for good or ill is a verdict only the passage of time can deliver, but the democratic record of Northern Ireland’s new potential political leadership gives little cause for optimism.
Penguin’s decision to publish the second edition of this book has enabled me to tell that tortuous if significant tale in two new chapters—Nineteen and Twenty—as well as in an Epilogue which takes the story up to the Assembly election of March 2007. I have also been able to correct some errors and compensate for some omissions in the first edition and add new information about the betrayal of the gun-running ship the Eksund and the attitudes of different Army Council members, including Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, towards it. Fresh information has come to light about Adams’s IRA career after his release from Long Kesh in 1977 and that section of the first edition had been amended accordingly. The sad death of former Fianna Fail taoiseach Charles Haughey in June 2006 also releases me from the pledge of confidentiality I gave him while researching the first edition. Haughey played a crucial and often undervalued part in the genesis and evolution of the peace process and I believe that without him the birth of the peace process would have been much more difficult. At this point I should put on record that Haughey, who was in the early stages of the illness that claimed his life when we first spoke, did not search me out but rather was a reluctant and often grudging source. “The stage,” he once grumbled in the face of my persistence, “is already overcrowded with people attempting to claim credit.” It was I who deduced that he had played such an important role and it was I who sought him out. Only after numerous and lengthy visits to Kinsealy was I able to persuade him to tell his part in the story. I am now very happy to be able to acknowledge all this.
One key part of his story, and in its own way an extremely valuable historical document, is the letter of May 1987 written to Haughey by Father Alec Reid, seeking a secret dialogue between him and Gerry Adams and setting out the terms for an IRA cessation that Adams would find acceptable. I was able to read and fully transcribe this letter in Kinsealy. It is compelling and extraordinary evidence that, many years before the Irish public and the bulk of IRA members and leaders learned of the peace process, the Sinn Fein president was seeking to end the IRA’s war on terms little different from those implicit in the Good Friday Agreement. I am now able to reproduce this in full along with other documents pertaining to the early part of the peace process.
Father Reid himself has also started to acknowledge that the peace process began much earlier than any of the participants were previously prepared to admit. In a BBC Radio Four interview in November 2006 with Olivia O’Leary, the Redemptorist priest conceded that he began his discussions with Gerry Adams not long after the abduction and killing of a UDR soldier in South Armagh, an event that took place in the autumn of 1982 and was described in detail in the first edition of this book.1 This is a welcome and overdue sign that the information permafrost surrounding the peace process is beginning to melt. It is of exceptional historical importance that those who were involved in the IRA during this time also begin to put their accounts and memories on record. History should not always be written by the victors.
By the time the second edition of A Secret History of the IRA is available on the bookstands, Gerry Adams’s prediction that there will be a united Ireland by 2016, the centenary of the Easter Rising, will be only nine years away. We will not have to wait long to discover whether that statement was the product of irrational exuberance, political expediency or an accurate assessment of constitutional possibilities.
Ed Moloney
New York
December 2006
There were never any strategic considerations at stake, like those in the Middle East, for example, nor did the killing ever approach the carnage or savagery of the Balkans or Rwanda. There were no oil fields or gold mines to be captured, or any ideology to be overthrown or vindicated. But the Troubles in Northern Ireland had one quality that marked the violence there as special, and that was the sheer length of the conflict—that and the fact that no one could really see an end to it.
By the time of the first IRA cease-fire of 1994, the Troubles had lasted for a quarter of a century, so long that the violence had become an almost permanent feature of the world’s political landscape. Other conflicts would erupt, climax, and then fade away, their names soon forgotten, but the bombing and shooting in Belfast, Derry, and South Armagh seemed to last forever.
The Troubles were at or near the bottom of the list of significant global conflicts, a low-intensity war that occasionally exploded into spectacular bursts of violence but more often was characterized by a killing or two a week, deaths that by the end had become so routine that they scarcely merited a headline outside of Ireland. But the violence devastated a whole society, scarring two generations of Irish people, the baby boomers who came of age when the Troubles began in the late 1960s and their children, who grew up knowing only instability and bloodshed.
More than 3,700 people were killed in the violence, an average of just over two a week for the thirty years that the conflict lasted. Almost as many people died within a couple of hours in lower Manhattan on September 11, 2001, but to conclude therefore that the Troubles were a petty affair would be a mistake. Had a similar conflict consumed the United States, the equivalent death toll would have been over 600,000; in Britain, 150,000. Nearly 1 in every 50 of Northern Ireland’s 1.5 million people, some 30,000, were injured in the violence. The comparable figure in the United States would be 5 million; in Britain, just over 1 million. Very few people in Northern Ireland did not personally know someone who had been killed in the Troubles, and many knew several. There are many definitions of a civil war, but that is surely one of the most compelling.
Thousands were caught up in the Troubles in a more intimate fashion, becoming members of groups like the IRA and, on the loyalist side, the Ulster Defence Association and the Ulster Volunteer Force, for whom they killed, wounded, maimed, bombed, robbed, and went to jail or early graves. Putting a figure to such numbers is by definition difficult, for these were not organizations that kept detailed personnel records. But Martin McGuinness, who has held virtually all the senior ranks in the IRA, once told the author that he reckoned 10,000 people had been through the ranks of the IRA over the years—and who could know better?—while at the height of its power the UDA could, given an hour or two of notice, put 20,000 men on the streets of Belfast. In all the important ways the Troubles pervaded Northern Ireland.
The conflict was not confined to the geographical boundaries of the state. It regularly spilled over into the Irish Republic, injecting an unwelcome instability into the body politic there and warping the institutions of the young state almost beyond repair, the media and the legal system in particular. Its effects were also felt farther afield, wherever the Irish diaspora had scattered its unfortunate people—in the United States, Australia, and Canada—and the violence was repeatedly exported to Britain, where scores lost their lives over the years in bombings and shootings, mostly carried out by the IRA.
The Troubles were, above all else, the latest and the most protracted phase in an Anglo-Irish conflict that had properly begun some four hundred years earlier, with the Tudor wars and plantations of the sixteenth century, although there had been resistance of some sort to the English presence ever since the Normans invaded in the twelfth century. Ireland was Britain’s first colony and one of its last. Resistance to occupation went through alternating phases of violence and politics, and each stage in the conflict brought Ireland a little nearer to complete separation from Britain. The culmination of all this was the Treaty of 1921, a settlement that paved the way for twenty-six of Ireland’s thirty-two counties first to govern themselves and then, in 1949, to declare themselves a republic while the remnant of the island in the North remained British.
Had the architects of the 1921 settlement set out to create an inherently unstable entity, they could scarcely have done better than to design Northern Ireland in the way they did. The state contained within its boundaries the seeds of its own devastation. Packed into its narrow confines were two troubled communities. One was the uneasy majority, the Protestants whose ancestors had planted or colonized native lands so as to make Ireland a safer place for Britain. But they paid a terrible price for their service to the motherland. They and their forebears lived in constant fear of retribution from the substantial minority of Irish Catholics in their midst, the native Gaels they had supplanted and whose land they had taken, while they came to distrust the British almost as much as they feared the Irish. The Protestants knew nothing but insecurity and learned to reject anything else as a distortion of the natural order.
Trapped in a state not of their choosing, the Catholics were bitter, resentful, and full of foreboding. Abandoned by their Southern co-religionists after 1921, confronted by arrogant, superior-seeming rulers, and subjected to intermittent salvos of pogrom-like violence, they knew they could look only to themselves for protection, and trust only their own. Each community feared and distrusted the other, and in such circumstances it would have been odd had bigotry and discrimination not shaped the politics of Northern Ireland or had this not, in the end, been the cause of a tremendous conflagration.
Thirty years after they exploded, the Troubles have ended in what is arguably a most definitive fashion, an ending that marks not merely the closing of a war but rather the conclusion of the historic conflict between Ireland and Britain.
They have ended with the leadership of the Provisional IRA accepting Britain’s neutrality in Northern Ireland. No longer do its leaders preach that London is a colonial, occupying power, usurping the right of the Irish people to decide their own future. Instead, the republicans have accepted a political process whose foundation stone is the principle of consent, an acknowledgment that unionists cannot be forced into a united Ireland against their wishes. In their turn, unionists, with varying degrees of commitment and enthusiasm, have accepted that Northern Ireland must become a warmer and more welcoming place for Catholics. In a sense the two communities have struck a bargain—the Catholics agreed to abandon the goal of Irish unity in return for a secure place within the state, while the Protestants consented to behave toward their neighbors in a more civilized way.
None of this would have been possible without the proactive cooperation of the Provisional IRA leadership. Indeed it is the central thesis of this book—and its principal revelation—that it was that organization’s dominating figure, Gerry Adams, who launched, shaped, nurtured, and eventually guided the peace process to a successful conclusion. Many excellent accounts have been given, in written and televised form, about the peace process; without singling any out for mention, it would be fair to say that they have all dwelt mostly on the negotiations and high-level talks that characterized the latter stages of the process. None have examined, or been able satisfactorily to explain, the events that took place much earlier within the IRA and Sinn Fein which made all this possible, or to tell how they happened.
This book attempts to redress that deficiency, tries to delve deep within the belly of the beast—or as deep as any outsider can go—to expose the entrails for examination. The conclusion is unavoidable. The Irish peace process was not a spontaneous phenomenon, tossed around by forces outside its control, nor was it forced upon its architects by the fortunes of war. The process was a little like a precooked dinner whose basic menu had largely been decided long before most of the diners knew the meal was planned, even if the table settings, the guest list, the size and shape of the crockery, cutlery, and condiments, and so on were not. The peace process was, in other words, an exercise in management toward an already decided outcome, as much as it was anything else. There were many delays and threats to the event, but at the end there was little doubt that people would sit down to eat, and eat well.
After twenty years of reporting on, writing about, mixing with, and observing the IRA at close quarters, I had come to a number of conclusions about the Belfast-based leadership that came to power in the 1970s. Principal among these was that the people guiding the organization were longsighted, bright, talented, dedicated, determined, pragmatic, cunning, and all too often duplicitous. They were also utterly ruthless in their mission, which above all else was to survive and prosper, and were devoted to their leader and inspiration, Gerry Adams. The idea that he or the people around him would allow any but one of their own to control and direct their journey was so absurd that it was not even worthy of consideration. The facts about the peace process revealed in this book substantiate that assumption.
A Secret History of the IRA is as much about Gerry Adams as about the organization he dominated for so long. He is, indisputably, one of the largest figures in Ireland’s long and sad history, a revolutionary leader who deservedly ranks alongside those competing founders of Irish independence Michael Collins and Eamon de Valera, and a man whose qualities, both negative and positive, are fit to be measured alongside theirs. Collins, de Valera, and Adams all left indelible marks on the Ireland of their day, but whereas the veterans of the 1916 Rising and the subsequent Anglo-Irish war could allow much of their story to be told while they were still alive, Adams has not been able to. In December 1998 the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded jointly to David Trimble and John Hume, the leaders respectively of Ulster unionism and the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP), for their contribution to the success of the peace process. Standing alongside them, sharing in the glory, should have been Gerry Adams and—arguably— Father Alec Reid, who between them kick-started and sustained the process. But while others have collected plaudits and the glittering prizes, Adams has been forced to stay silent, biting his lip lest by accepting the praise of the establishment he undermine the peace process in the eyes of his supporters. The truth was withheld to sustain the project, a fact to which Adams’s own less than enlightening autobiography pays painful testament. This book is also an attempt to rectify that, although not many of his friends will thank me for it.
I do not claim this work to be an exhaustive account of this extraordinary period in Irish history. Many blank spaces remain to be filled in, but perhaps now that task will look a little less onerous. The job of a correspondent, after all, is to inform and increase understanding. If this book has helped make the Irish peace process more intelligible to the outside world, then surely that can only be for the good.
Ed Moloney
New York
February 2002
This book has taken about four years to research and write, mostly in secret. I have little doubt that, had it been more widely known that I was involved in this enterprise, the research would have been made much more difficult to conduct, perhaps impossible, and the book would probably have been stillborn. I must, therefore, first of all thank those people who knew what I was doing but kept silent, and, equally, I must apologize to others I was obliged to mislead or behave evasively toward. This was done not out of any malice or lack of trust but in the knowledge that to ask a person to carry someone else’s secret is often to ask them to shoulder the most onerous of burdens.
Officially, the leaders of the Provisional republican movement did not cooperate in the research for this book, nor was their cooperation sought. They had made it abundantly clear to me, and to other journalists, on several occasions in the past that they had no interest in talking about, much less in assisting anyone in writing a book on, the genesis of the peace process. Having completed the research on this period, I can understand why. This work, however, is about more than the peace process. It is also a history of the Provisional IRA and as such reflects some twenty years of reporting the organization in Hibernia, Magill, the Irish Times, and the Sunday Tribune. For much of that time I kept notes of conversations and exchanges with many of the IRA’s current leaders, and these have proved to be an invaluable aid in this undertaking, not least in illuminating the explanation for the peace process which was deemed fit for public and internal IRA consumption. Those among them unhappy to see this book appear can at least console themselves with the knowledge that I have not betrayed their confidence after all these years.
Many republicans, past and present members of both the IRA and Sinn Fein, were, however, happy to speak to me, and it is no exaggeration to say that without the information and insights they gave me, this book would have been impossible to write. They all know who they are. They spoke to me in the greatest secrecy, and I pledged never to compromise them. For that reason they must be nameless here, but nevertheless I must acknowledge the debt I owe them. A number of past and present officials in, and members of, the British and Irish governments added hugely to this story, and their contribution was likewise invaluable. Tom King and Peter Brooke were both generous with their time and information, but others asked to stay unnamed and I must respect their wish. So did members of the British army, community workers, and clerical figures of both faiths in Northern Ireland who also helped me enormously. I thank them all. The day may arrive, perhaps, when such people will be able to speak freely and openly about the part they played in the historic events chronicled in this book. But I fear that day is still a long way off.
Thankfully there are some to whom I can express gratitude by name. Many of my former colleagues at the Sunday Tribune offices in Dublin gave support and encouragement to me both before publication and afterwards. To them and to Seamus Dooley of the NUJ, I express my gratitude. In particular I would like to thank the paper’s former news editor, Helen Callanan, whose decision to seek a more fulfilling life at the Bar has been a great loss to Irish journalism, who urged me to persevere at an early and critical stage, while Harry McGee, also of the Tribune, was generous with advice and morale-boosting comments. Dr. Anthony McIntyre gave me access to a number of embargoed IRA interviews he conducted for his doctoral thesis, which filled important gaps in the early history of the Provisionals. Frank Millar read the early drafts in London, and his positive response encouraged me to seek a larger publisher. Patrick Farrelly, Kate O’Callaghan, Sandy Boyer, and Terry Golway, all in New York, gave me encouragement, also at an early stage when it might have been easier to choose another path. Bob White and Kevin Mickey, both of Indiana University, helped obtain some beautiful maps, and while all the Irish photographers whose work is featured in the book were enormously helpful, I must thank Kelvin Boyes for going that extra mile. It is said that no book on the Troubles is complete without an acknowledgment of the part played in its production by the staff and management of the Linen Hall Library in Belfast. This book is no exception. In particular I owe much to the generous assistance of Yvonne Murphy and her staff in the library’s priceless political collection. Joan McKiernan worked hard and long to compile a most comprehensive index, and for that I thank her.
I have been extremely fortunate to have been published by two most distinguished houses—Penguin, in the UK and Canada, and W. W. Norton, in the United States. I would like to single out Simon Winder at Penguin in London for particular thanks. He was the first to recognize the importance of this book, and his support for it has been wholehearted. He is lucky to have such an impressive team to draw upon, and I would like to thank Ruth Killick, Rosie Glaisher, Jennifer Todd, Mark Scholes, Pippa Wright, Louise Wilder, Clare Needham, and Andrew Stephenson for their sterling work. My gratitude also to Cynthia Good at Penguin (Canada) and to my editor in Toronto, Michael Schellenberg. At W. W. Norton in New York, I am indebted to Bob Weil and Jason Baskin, who had the unenviable, day-to-day chore of dealing with the author. Fate and geography decreed that the daunting task of editing this book would fall to Bob Weil, and I wish to pay him a special tribute. His efforts, characterized by patience and good humor, transformed a passable work into something to which I am pleased to attach my name. His is a unique talent. W. W. Norton also provided an enormously impressive team and to each of them—to Otto Sonntag, Nancy Palmquist, Rene Schwartz, Andrew Marasia, Louise Brockett, and Dan Deitch—I give my thanks. To my agent, Jonathan Williams, in Dublin, must also go a special appreciation for tirelessly and so successfully generating interest in the book. It goes without saying that without him, none of this would have been possible.
Finally, I must thank members of my family who helped and encouraged me. My sister, Michelle, and her husband, Tom Bray—not to mention young Lawrence and Liam—were generous with their hospitality during my trips to England, while, as always, Joan and Ciaran were the lights in my life.
A
SECRET
HISTORY
OF THE
IRA
There was only one thought in Gabriel Cleary’s mind, and it chilled him. As he checked the firing unit linked to the twelve explosive charges placed beneath the Eksund’s waterline, the signs of sabotage were unmistakable. With a growing sense of horror the IRA’s director of engineering realized that the most ambitious gunrunning plot ever in the IRA’s long war with Britain had been betrayed.
Cleary’s fears had been growing ever since the Eksund had left the Libyan capital, Tripoli, some two weeks earlier, as he later told an IRA inquiry in messages smuggled from a French prison.1 The Panamanian-registered vessel had been loaded with some 150 tons of modern, sophisticated weaponry at Tripoli dockside by sailors from Colonel Qaddafi’s small naval service on October 13 and 14, 1987. Although that part of the operation had gone smoothly, Cleary was uneasy. This was the fifth trip since August 1985, but the four earlier cargoes, amounting in total to another 150 tons of weapons and explosives, had been safely and secretly transferred to IRA boats from a Libyan vessel off Malta, well out at sea and far from the sight of hostile, prying eyes.
This operation had to be handled differently. The Eksund’s cargo was as large as the four other shipments put together. The sheer size and bulk of weaponry involved meant that the loading process would be lengthy, and that made an operation at sea simply out of the question. With the CIA and other Western intelligence agencies taking an ever-greater interest in Libyan affairs, the chances of being spotted by satellite surveillance were too great. The Eksund’s manifest was breathtaking: 1,000 Romanian-made AK-47 automatic rifles, a million rounds of ammunition, 430 grenades, 12 rocket-propelled grenade launchers with ample supplies of grenades and rockets, 12 heavy Russian DHSK machine guns, over 50 SAM-7 ground-to-air missiles capable of downing British army helicopters, 2,000 electric detonators and 4,700 fuses, 106 millimeter cannons, general-purpose machine guns, anti-tank missile launchers, flame throwers, and two tons of the powerful Czech-made explosive Semtex. With a cargo like that to load there was no option; the work had to be done in Tripoli itself.
The Libyan harbor was a dangerous place for IRA men on a mission to smuggle weapons. The Tripoli docks were regularly jammed with ships unloading consumer goods, as a result of a massive oil-financed consumer boom; the bustling labor force was a mixture of Arabs drawn from nearly every country in North Africa and European expatriates lured by the high salaries offered in this former Italian colony.
Although the nearby British embassy was closed, emptied of its staff following a major diplomatic row with Qaddafi, everyone, IRA and Libyans alike, assumed that the British had left their spies behind. Some could easily be mingling with the crowds down at the harbor or at the nearby souk where traders bought and sold gold and silver and exchanged gossip.
The Libyans took precautions. The Eksund was loaded at nighttime to reduce the chances of being spotted, and the boat was moored in the military section of the dockside for added security. But even so, Cleary was glad when the Eksund finally weighed anchor.
Within hours of setting sail, however, the IRA commander’s doubts returned. A plane flew directly over the Eksund, and Cleary suspected it was an RAF spotter aircraft. Every day of the voyage thereafter a similar aircraft would perform the same maneuver. There seemed little doubt that someone was keeping a very close eye on the Eksund’s progress. Off Gibraltar the plane swooped down so low that the pilot was visible. Cleary grew more and more nervous.
As the Eksund passed the Brittany coast and veered left for Ireland, the boat ran into a different sort of trouble. The fifty-year-old vessel, which had shipped grain most of her life, had endured a difficult journey out to Malta. At one stage the vessel had to dock in England for engine repairs, and at another point the steering failed.
The steering problem struck again on October 27. The crew tried to make repairs but with no success, and the Eksund drifted closer and closer to the French coast. The next day Cleary realized the mission was doomed and took the fateful decision to scuttle the ship and sink its precious freight before it ran aground. His orders had been precise: on no account must the British learn of the IRA’s arms-smuggling operation; the very outcome of the war depended on secrecy being preserved.
As he assembled the crew on the top deck to prepare the inflatable dinghy that would take them ashore, Cleary started the process of triggering the timing device that would set off the bombs and slowly sink the Eksund. This was the job Cleary had been chosen for.
The colorful Dublin businessman Adrian Hopkins, who had found and purchased the Eksund, captained the vessel as he had the two other ships used by the IRA to facilitate the Libyan venture. The IRA had provided two sailors to assist him, James Coll and James Doherty, both of them County Donegal trawlermen. Hopkins’s friend and sometime business partner Henry Cairns, the man suspected of having introduced Hopkins to the IRA, was along for the ride.
Cleary had spent most of his adult life in the Provisional IRA and had become one of the organization’s most skilled bomb-makers. From the Tallaght area of Dublin, a vast sprawling working-class housing estate on the southwest edge of the city, he rose in the IRA engineering department, that part of the IRA which had the job of manufacturing homemade explosives and devising the organization’s impressive range of improvised and homemade weaponry. Although well known to the Irish Special Branch, he had managed to avoid imprisonment. Only once had the authorities come near to pinning him, and that was eight years earlier, in 1977, when he beat a charge of making bombs in Kildare. By the time he was appointed to oversee the Eksund voyage, Cleary had advanced to the top of the IRA’s military elite and was in charge of its vital engineering department. He was a natural choice to head the Eksund operation.
The Eksund’s ballast tanks had already been filled with water in preparation for scuttling. Cleary had crafted Semtex bombs that were just large enough to make holes in the vessel’s skin but not so large that the noise of the explosions would attract attention. French forensic experts later calculated that the Eksund would have sunk within seconds.
The IRA man had chosen a hole known as Deep Hurd in which to scuttle the Eksund. The plan was to sink the vessel and then head in the dinghy for the Brittany coast, after which the crew would catch a ferry back to Ireland without the authorities’ ever knowing about the IRA’s audacious plan. That was when he discovered that a traitor had wrecked his plan.
A cursory glance at the bomb mechanism told Cleary that the plan would have to be scrapped; the firing unit for the explosives had been sabotaged, its wiring damaged beyond repair. The device, known as a timing power unit (TPU), was simple to operate and safe enough for a child to use, but it was just as easy to put out of commission. Whoever had neutralized Cleary’s bombs would not have needed much training.
Cleary never got as far as even connecting the device. Instead the realization of treachery forced a number of thoughts to flash through his head, as he later told IRA colleagues. The British must have known about their plans all along, and soon the media would know as well. But the question that brought a cold sweat to his brow concerned the identity of the traitor. There was certainly a collaborator on board, but was there another one, someone back in Ireland who had betrayed the Eksund and its precious cargo?
Cleary knew that the TPU must have been tampered with after the Eksund had left Tripoli harbor and not before. The IRA man had made up the mechanism himself before sailing and had linked it to detonators fixed into slabs of Semtex not long after leaving the dock. The TPU had been in perfect working order. He had double-checked to make sure.
There was no time to repair the timing unit. The spotter plane had again flown overhead, and in the distance the crew could see motor launches speeding toward them. The net was obviously closing. Cleary watched the scene with a sense of grim satisfaction; his instincts had been right.
Within minutes the Eksund was surrounded and boarded by armed French customs men. Within hours a shocked and disbelieving public in Ireland and Britain would hear the news of the failure of this extraordinary smuggling venture. A few weeks later and the full scope of the IRA’s operations would be made public; everyone would know that the organization now had some 150 tons of explosives and modern weaponry, delivered earlier and safely stored away in secret dumps throughout Ireland. But the greatest secret of them all, that the Eksund had been betrayed, was to remain sealed.
THE STORY OF the IRA’s long relationship with the Libyan regime of Colonel Qaddafi is one of the most extraordinary and colorful tales to come out of the Irish “Troubles,” and the history of their partnership is almost as old as the events that brought both into existence. Now for the first time the story of the links between the oil-rich Arab country and one of Western Europe’s bloodiest conflicts can be told in full.
Both came into being in the summer of 1969. In Ireland the events that spawned the Provisional IRA began in August that year in the small streets that crouched beneath the towers of the Catholic Clonard Monastery in West Belfast, not far from where its future leader Gerry Adams had been born and raised some twenty years earlier.
In Tripoli, a few weeks after those violent events but some 1,500 miles away, Muammar Qaddafi, a young Libyan army officer only a few years older than Adams, led a group of soldiers to power in a bloodless coup that ended centuries of colonial rule in this large North African country. Neither man knew it at the time, but fate and a shared hatred of the British were to throw them together within a few short years.
By the summer of 1969 Northern Ireland had been simmering for months as Protestant resentment at a hugely successful civil rights campaign by Catholics, fueled by years of political and economic discrimination, threatened to spill onto the streets in violence. In August the cauldron boiled over, and the death and destruction began.
It was not long before the trouble spread to Belfast, the scene for over a hundred years of often vicious and regular anti-Catholic violence. The IRA had always been there to protect its communities, but in 1969 the IRA, by this stage a small, select, and secret body that was a shadow of the army that had fought the British to a standstill in 1921, stood by almost powerless to stop the shootings and burning.
By 1969 the IRA had come under the control of a group of orthodox pro-Moscow intellectuals and activists who had spent years patiently steering the organization away from the hallowed goal of driving the British out of Ireland in favor of a campaign to reform and modernize the Northern Ireland state.
In a process that uncannily echoes modern developments, the IRA of that day was slowly putting away the gun in favor of political methods, just as Gerry Adams was to do many years later. The ambition of the IRA’s then leaders in Northern Ireland was to replace national struggle with class struggle; they had no time for Belfast’s narrow sectarianism, no sympathy for armed struggle, no need for guns.
So when mobs of pro-British loyalists surged into the streets around Clonard, the local IRA had virtually no weapons with which to beat them off. An entire row of houses known as Bombay Street was burned to the ground, and a young boy was shot dead. When the IRA split acrimoniously later that year, the Belfast men who led the breakaway Provisional IRA swore they would never leave their streets defenseless again. For their icon they chose the phoenix, the mythical firebird rising in vengeance from the ashes of Bombay Street.
Within a few years those Belfast founders of the Provisional IRA, soon to be dubbed the Provos, were to turn to that small group of Libyan army officers and their leader, Colonel Muammar Qaddafi, for supplies of the guns and explosives they needed not just to defend their own streets but to use against the British army and Royal Ulster Constabulary in a twenty-five-year campaign of violence.
Libya had a history of colonial rule that surpassed Ireland’s. It had been first seized as far back as the earliest days of the Roman Empire, which had cultivated the country’s fertile coastal strip to feed Rome’s growing population, and had been occupied by outsiders more or less continuously ever since. In the twentieth century Libya was ruled first by the Turks and then by Mussolini’s Italy, whose grip on the country was maintained with brutal, bloody force. After the Second World War and Italy’s capitulation, the allies agreed to grant Libya independence, and it was ruled by the Idris family, which led one of the country’s largest and oldest tribal clans. But real power lay in the hands of the British, Americans, and French, who divided the country into spheres of influence and maintained large military bases to protect their political and economic interests in the region, especially vast oil fields that had been discovered deep in the southern desert. Oil wealth enriched the Idris family and the Western oil corporations, but little of the windfall made its way down to the ordinary population. Resentment at Libya’s festering poverty and the revolutionary gospel of Arab nationalism then sweeping North Africa and the Middle East inspired Qaddafi and his army colleagues to overthrow the Idris family and expel the Western powers.
Qaddafi and the leaders of the Provisional IRA were natural allies. Both blamed colonialism for their country’s miserable histories, and both believed that their occupiers must be ejected from their countries, by force if necessary. One of the first acts of the Qaddafi government was to order the British, Americans, and French to close their bases and leave. It would not be long before the new Libyan leader turned to the IRA as a way of doing one of Libya’s former rulers, Britain, even more harm.
In the wake of the split in the IRA, events in Ireland moved inexorably to conflict. In 1970 the Provisionals began organizing for war and within two years had launched a shooting and bombing offensive against the British army and the Northern Ireland state. As the conflict intensified, the need for modern weaponry grew.
It was, curiously, the Breton nationalist movement in France that was responsible for putting the Provisionals and the Libyans in touch with each other. In early 1972 a meeting was held between the Bretons and the Provisionals, one of a regular series of contacts with like-minded revolutionary groups opened up by the Sinn Fein president Ruairi O Bradaigh, who was particularly keen on finding common cause with some of Europe’s small and often exotic nationalist movements, such as those of the Basques, Corsicans, and Bretons. The contacts increased political cooperation and mutual understanding, but they also facilitated the mutual acquisition of weaponry and military expertise. During the 1972 meeting the Bretons suggested that it might be worth the IRA’s while to get in touch with Qaddafi’s government in Tripoli, a regime that had let it be known that it was ready and able to assist revolutionary movements willing to foment trouble for the old imperial powers that had once ruled the Arab Middle East. That duly happened, and in August of that year the contact was formalized when two members of the IRA’s ruling body, the seven-person Army Council, Joe Cahill and Quartermaster General Denis McInerney, flew out to Warsaw to meet agents from the Libyan Intelligence Service (LIS) in the offices of the Libyan trade mission to Poland. The IRA men knew they were plowing a fertile field as two months earlier Qaddafi, eager to cause trouble for Britain, had publicly thrown his weight behind the Provisional IRA.
The Libyan leader had chosen his own state radio service to tell the world of the new alliance. “At present,” he said in an address broadcast in June of that year, “we support the revolutionaries of Ireland who oppose Britain and are motivated by Nationalism and religion. The Libyan Arab Republic has stood by the revolutionaries of Ireland, their aims and their support for the revolutionaries of Ireland.”2
The Libyans agreed to supply money and weapons to the IRA, as long as a suitably secure smuggling route, or “line,” as the IRA called it, could be devised. The Libyans also offered to give the IRA semi-ambassadorial status in Tripoli. The IRA leadership readily agreed and set about selecting an envoy to send to the Libyan capital, where his task would be to liaise with Libyan intelligence and help set up the arms routes.
The man chosen to represent the IRA was, at the time, not a member of the organization but a strong sympathizer. A schoolteacher from the Border town of Ballybay in County Monaghan, he had already spent a year teaching English to Libyans and was back in Ireland on vacation when he was approached by a member of the IRA’s Army Council.
The Army Council member, a veteran activist from Coalisland, County Tyrone, won the teacher over and, using his background in teaching English language as a cover, this time supposedly tutoring the sons and daughters of the Libyan army officer cadre at the prestigious Tripoli College, the IRA’s newly recruited emissary flew out to the Libyan capital.
The man, known to his Libyan handlers as Mister Eddie, found himself housed in a splendid Italianate villa in the middle of Tripoli’s embassy district. Ambassadors from other European countries would soon be aware that they had an intriguing new neighbor. The Libyans, it appeared, wanted the world to know all about Colonel Qaddafi’s new friends.
Mister Eddie was put on a generous weekly wage and found that his villa had been sumptuously furnished. No luxury was spared; the crockery, stamped with King Idris’s crest, had come from the former royal palace. Every week he would meet with officers from the LIS to discuss the IRA’s needs and drink tea from an ornate china service.3
What the IRA got out of its first fling with Colonel Qaddafi is a matter of dispute. What appears certain is that in the three years of that IRA-Libyan liaison over $3.5 million ($10 million in current prices) was funneled via City of London banks to the IRA’s coffers, an invaluable supplement to the IRA’s income at a time when its campaign was at its height and its most expensive.
At least one shipment of guns and explosives was intercepted, but there are strong indications that perhaps three other shipments also got through to the IRA.4 One smuggling attempt was intercepted in March 1973 when the Irish navy captured the vessel Claudia not far from the County Wexford coast, packed with five tons of Russian-made rifles, pistols, ammunition, and explosives.
On board was a man who from then onward personified the IRA-Libyan links: the IRA’s then chief of staff and overall military commander, a West Belfast veteran, Joe Cahill. With him was the IRA’s quartermaster general, Denis McInerney, the figure who had charge of the IRA’s weapons department.
The first liaison between Libya and the Provisional IRA was, however, doomed and destined to break up in acrimony. The weak link in the relationship was to be Mister Eddie, who turned out to have more independence of mind than the IRA leadership would have liked.
In 1974 he organized a conference designed to bring the Provisionals together with the largest loyalist paramilitary group in Northern Ireland, the Ulster Defence Association (UDA), ostensibly an enemy of the republican group. The UDA had helped organize a general strike of Protestants earlier that year, which brought down a political agreement that had established a government in Belfast in which nationalists and unionists shared power and a Council of Ireland was set up, which was aimed at bringing the two parts of Ireland closer together.
According to those who knew him, Mister Eddie was intrigued by the loyalist leadership’s ideas for an independent Northern Ireland state and later became a close friend of the UDA supreme commander, Andy Tyrie. In the weeks after the general strike, Mister Eddie hit upon the idea of inviting delegations from the UDA and the IRA’s political wing, Sinn Fein, out to Tripoli along with businessmen from his native County Monaghan to discuss an economic aid package to facilitate the execution of UDA’s independence ideas.
He also had new ideas about the IRA’s relationship with the Libyans and proposed that, instead of receiving cash and guns from Qaddafi, the IRA be given exclusive rights to handle trade between Ireland and Libya. In view of Libya’s insatiable appetite for beef and Ireland’s thriving cattle industry, it was an arrangement he believed would swell the IRA’s coffers.
The problem was that Mister Eddie had arranged all this behind the backs of his IRA commanders in Ireland. When they learned of his plans, especially the invitation to the UDA leadership to visit Tripoli, they were furious.
The conference went ahead in November 1974 and was promptly leaked to the media back in Ireland. The Sinn Fein delegation refused to attend, and the UDA returned home to Belfast, triumphant and claiming that they had driven a damaging wedge between the Qaddafi regime and the IRA. The Libyans, they said, had come to see that the Northern Ireland problem was not as simple as the IRA maintained, that there was a majority in favor of the union with Britain in Northern Ireland. As result, the UDA claimed, the Libyans had said they were rethinking their relationship with the Provos.
The view that the UDA was responsible for terminating the IRA-Libya alliance has become widely accepted as the reason why Qaddafi ended his dealings with the IRA at that time. And there is no doubt that the relationship with Mister Eddie did end in dramatic fashion, when in May 1975 Libyan police picked him up from his luxurious villa and, with sirens wailing and lights flashing, drove him to the Tripoli airport, where they deposited him on a plane bound for Rome. The message to Tripoli’s diplomatic community was again clear.
But the truth about what happened was more complicated, as one IRA source explained: “The Libyans were always doubtful about [Mister Eddie] and wanted assurances that they were dealing with real Provos, which was why Cahill was on the Claudia. After the [UDA] conference the Libyans were furious with him and suspected him of being a British agent and even of having compromised our operations. They actually offered to bury him in the desert, but the Provos said leave him alone, he’s harmless but just foolish.”5 Even so, Mister Eddie could not relax. The last words he heard from his Libyan handler as he headed for the airport were ominous: “Beware the Irish, Mister Eddie. Beware the Irish!”6
Mister Eddie was eventually replaced as the IRA ambassador by a more loyal and reliable figure, but the experience had soured the Libyans. The public statements of senior Libyan figures thereafter painted a confusing and erratic picture of their links with the IRA, sometimes disowning the IRA, sometimes supporting it.
The truth was that the Libyans had put the relationship on the back burner, as the same IRA source explained: “The link with Libya that went back to Joe Cahill’s day… had never been broken, although there had been a period of quiet for a long time.”7 Libyan intelligence had been alarmed at Mister Eddie’s freelance antics, and the Qaddafi government had lost its trust in the IRA. They decided to keep the IRA at arm’s length.
The event that revived the Libya-IRA axis was the death on hunger strike in 1981 of ten prisoners from the IRA and a related republican splinter group, the Irish National Liberation Army, in the Maze prison outside Belfast. The death fast marked the culmination of a protest against the withdrawal of special category or political status, which had been granted to IRA and other paramilitary prisoners in the 1970s. The prisoners’ leader and the first to die was Bobby Sands, who had been elected a British MP before his death.
The 1981 hunger strikes received widespread international publicity and generated headlines around the world for much of the year. The Libyans watched with fascination and mounting interest. According to one senior IRA figure, “The Libyans saw the numbers coming out on the streets, the tens of thousands who came out for Bobby’s [Sands] funeral, for instance, and they thought the revolution was starting. They were also very impressed with the way the hunger strikers handled themselves. I think it had something to do with the martyrdom thing in Islam. Anyway that’s when the money flow restarted.”8
The two IRA men responsible for reactivating the Libyan link were both former senior figures in the organization—Joe Cahill, who had been the contact on the Claudia, and Daithi O Conaill (David O’Connell), a twenty-six-year veteran and strategist whose republican credentials were impeccable. Both men had known the Libyans since the early 1970s and were trusted by them. In late 1981, following a renewal of contacts with Libyan intelligence, Qaddafi agreed to help the IRA once again. But there were to be no arms shipments, only modest amounts of money. Over the next three years or so they sent some $1.5 million to the IRA, a fraction of their contributions in the 1970s. Qaddafi was being cautious.
The event that changed all that took place in London in April 1984 just yards from the Libyan embassy, in St. James’s Street off Hyde Park. A crowd of anti-Qaddafi dissidents from the National Front for the Salvation of Libya (NFSL) were staging a protest against the Qaddafi regime when all of a sudden a burst of automatic gunfire split the air. When the noise subsided, a twenty-five-year-old London policewoman, Yvonne Fletcher, lay dying.
The shots had been fired from within the embassy; of that there could be little doubt. British police then placed the embassy under a state of siege for eleven days, but because of its diplomatic immunity no policeman or soldier could enter the building. Eventually a deal was made, and as the siege ended thirty Libyans were driven to Heathrow Airport and a flight home to Tripoli.
Behind the shooting incident was a story of worsening relations between Libya and Western governments, especially those of Ronald Reagan’s United States and Margaret Thatcher’s Britain. The CIA, under the aggressive leadership of its director, William Casey, believed Qaddafi was sponsoring anti-American terrorism throughout the world—including hijackings of aircraft and ships and massacres in the Vienna and Rome airports. He and Reagan set out to undermine and overthrow the Libyan leader.
To Qaddafi the evidence that the West was plotting against him was obvious. A month after the killing of Constable Fletcher, anti-Qaddafi elements inside and outside Libya linked up in Tripoli and launched a fierce, but unsuccessful, military assault on the army barracks where the Libyan leader had his headquarters. The Libyans suspected that the dissident groups were being sponsored by CIA allies in Sudan, Egypt, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia and that Britain was giving them a secure base.
The evidence was strong. Four months before Fletcher’s death the Libyan ambassador to Rome had been assassinated by anti-Qaddafi elements, and the Libyan consulate in West Germany was bombed. When the Libyan embassy in London was besieged, the staff inside suspected it might be a cover for another attack and, according to Qaddafi’s own account, decided to strike first. Qaddafi had already demonstrated his willingness to hit back ruthlessly at his enemies; perhaps fifteen dissidents died in shootings ordered by the Libyan leader at this time.
Qaddafi’s war with the Western powers intensified in the mid-1980s. In 1985 the United States concluded that Qaddafi was subsidizing some thirty “insurgent, radical or terrorist groups” around the world and in June of that year decided to support exile Libyan groups in executing a strategy of sabotage, violence, and propaganda.9 Despite an earlier White House ruling forbidding political assassination, the various U.S. intelligence agencies hoped that “disaffected elements in the military could be spurred to assassination attempts… against Gaddafi.”10
U.S. warplanes twice attacked Libya, once in 1981, when the United States asserted its right to send military vessels into the Gulf of Sirte, and again in March and April 1986, when Tripoli itself was targeted. Nearly eighty people were killed, one of them Qaddafi’s adopted baby daughter, Hana, who died when the planes bombed the family home. On that occasion the U.S. jets took off from British air bases with the full approval of Margaret Thatcher.
The impact of all this on Qaddafi and his view of Thatcher’s Britain need not be guessed at. “Thatcher is a murderer,” Qaddafi protested. “She allowed planes to be sent from her country knowing that they intended to attack me, to attack my home and family…. Thatcher is a prostitute. She sold herself to Reagan and now she has sold her country too.”11
It was strong language, soon to be matched by deeds. The IRA and Qaddafi now had a common enemy in the British prime minister. Qaddafi accused her of complicity in the death of his baby daughter. The IRA loathed Thatcher too, blaming her for callously allowing the ten hunger strikers to starve to death.
In late 1984 and early 1985 the Libyan Intelligence Service moved to put the relationship with the IRA on an entirely different and much deadlier footing, this time offering the organization much more than cash to wage its campaign.
At this stage the IRA’s ambassador to Libya was Ivor Bell, a former chief of staff and a veteran West Belfast activist who for years had been a close political and military ally of Gerry Adams. An important IRA leader in his own right, Bell, along with Adams and Martin McGuinness, had been flown to London by the Royal Air Force for secret cease-fire talks with British ministers in 1972. He was an experienced and well-respected member of the organization.
Bell was working for the IRA’s GHQ and his job was to scour Europe for weapons, but when it came to the dealings with Libya, he reported directly to the chief of staff. The story of Bell’s relationship with the Libyans is a complex one that is still a matter of argument and debate within the IRA. Bell eventually fell out with Adams, and so the account given by the IRA leaders is tainted by their need to paint him in dark colors. The version they have circulated has Bell failing to get on with his Libyan contacts and, possibly for reasons having to do with his own leadership ambitions, refusing offers of weapons and explosives, much to the surprise and anger of Libyan intelligence.
The authorized version of events credits Joe Cahill with rectifying this state of affairs and for laying the foundations for the Libyan arms shipments. Whatever the truth of that, his links with Libya were long-lasting and deep; he would claim to colleagues that over the years he had become a personal friend of the Libyan leader, and according to this account, it was Cahill who asked the Libyans to come to Ireland to discuss the most ambitious arms-smuggling enterprise in the history of Ireland’s centuries-long conflict with Britain.12
The person Cahill invited to Ireland for face-to-face meetings with the IRA’s ruling Army Council was Nasser Ashour, the number three man in the Libyan Intelligence Service. Ashour was well known to British intelligence from the 1984 siege of the London embassy. He was the Libyan official who negotiated the safe departure of diplomats, including the gunman who had shot Constable Fletcher.
Ashour took a risk coming to Ireland, but he traveled on a false passport and under various pretexts, once to meet Libyan students studying in Dublin; on another occasion he pretended to be a trade official on a mission to negotiate a cattle deal with the Irish government. The ruses worked, and he was able to meet the Army Council without being detected.
The deal Ashour offered was extraordinary. The Libyans would give the IRA $10 million and three hundred tons of modern sophisticated weaponry, as long as both were used against Margaret Thatcher’s government. If the arrangement worked out, Nashour hinted, there could be more money and weapons and Libya might introduce the IRA to other sympathetic governments. Nashour’s offer was immediately and gratefully accepted. Not only would the money help relieve strains on the IRA’s always overstretched budget, especially as the Royal Ulster Constabulary Special Branch was then targeting some of the organization’s more dubious ways of fundraising, but the weaponry would put the armed struggle on an altogether higher military plane.13
At the moment Ashour turned up knocking at its door, the IRA was in desperate need of assistance. By the mid-1980s it was experiencing great difficulties getting its hands on the sort of weapons that could put the British under serious pressure. During these years the organization had two agents roaming Europe in the search for guns from sympathetic groups and often treacherous arms dealers, but their efforts met with mixed results. Weapons came in dribs and drabs, and frequently the arms dealers double-crossed the IRA, taking the organization’s money for weapons and ammunition that was either dud or mismatched and sometimes betraying entire consignments to the Irish or British authorities.
The only reliable source for guns was, as it always has been for Irish insurgents, the United States, where large Irish-American communities, especially on the East Coast, began providing generous amounts of sympathy, money, and guns once the “Troubles” broke out in 1969.
In those early days guns were easy to come by. The IRA had a network in place in the United States in the 1950s and it was a simple task to reactivate it when violence erupted in 1969. Headed by George Harrison, an IRA veteran from County Mayo, the network was headquartered in New York, where Harrison’s links to a Mafia-associated arms dealer introduced the IRA to a steady supply of guns and ammunition.14
Harrison was the single most important source of weapons in these years. His consignments, many of which had been sold to his contact in the arms business by soldiers stationed at the massive marine base Camp Le Jeune, in North Carolina were running at up to 300 guns a year. One estimate suggests that he sent a million rounds of ammunition to the IRA during his career, spent over $1 million of the organization’s money, and dispatched up to 2,500 weapons across the Atlantic. A key link man to Harrison was the ubiquitous Joe Cahill, part of whose job was to collect funds raised for the IRA in the United States and hand it over to the gunrunner.
In those early days the American security agencies, especially the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), paid little heed to the Irish-American communities and their political activities. It was not until the late 1970s and early 1980s that pressure from Margaret Thatcher on the Reagan White House persuaded the FBI to turn its attentions to the IRA.
Harrison’s network was the first casualty. It was rolled up in the summer of 1981 and some of its key members arrested and indicted. Although Harrison was acquitted, along with Michael Flannery, the eighty-year-old head of Irish Northern Aid (Noraid), the body that ostensibly raised money for IRA prisoners’ families, the network was lost for good. It was the first of a number of paralyzing blows. A year later the IRA’s commander in New York, Gabriel Megahey, and four other men were arrested as they tried to buy a Red-eye missile from an FBI agent posing as an arms dealer. Two years later an ambitious plan to smuggle weapons from Boston by sea foundered when a high-level informer in Southern Command, Sean O’Callaghan, betrayed it to the Garda Siochana, the Irish police.
After the destruction of the Harrison network, arms supplies to the IRA from the United States were infrequent and erratic. “There was very little stuff coming in,” recalled one veteran.15 All too often weapons, sometime purchased over the counter in gun shops, would make their way to Ireland in twos and threes, only to be intercepted or captured by the authorities, who would then be able to trace them back and arrest and charge the sympathizers responsible. The IRA was never again able to construct a network in the United States as productive as Harrison’s.
So when the Libyan Intelligence Service offered the IRA three hundred tons of the most up-to-date military equipment with no strings attached, it was the paramilitary equivalent of a lottery win. There could be no question of the IRA’s refusing the offer, but its leaders were troubled by other issues. The smuggling operation was bound to be highly dangerous, and questions surrounded the IRA’s ability to handle such a difficult enterprise. Even if the weapons were landed safely, the IRA then faced the problem of hiding vast amounts of equipment from the prying eyes of the security forces. But the biggest uncertainty confronting the IRA leaders was how to use such an enormous windfall to the best military and political advantage.
These issues raised a range of awkward questions, and the very first one was whether or not the quartermaster’s department was up to such an ambitious task. The weapons would have to be transported hundreds of miles by sea, across the Mediterranean, along the western coast of Europe, landed in Ireland, and then hidden. It was a complex, dangerous, and time-consuming operation and was going to require careful, detailed planning.
At the time the IRA’s Quarter Master General, the man who would have the job of organizing the enterprise, was Kevin Hannaway, Gerry Adams’s cousin, but there were doubts about whether he could handle such a big challenge. After Nasser Ashour’s negotiations with the Army Council, Hannaway had, along with Joe Cahill, traveled to Tripoli to view and select the weaponry that was on offer. But he was a poor traveler, and it soon became evident he was in bad health, the legacy of sensory deprivation during interrogations by police and army carried out when internment was introduced.
The Army Council decided to replace him and instead made him adjutant general. Not long afterward Hannaway quit the IRA altogether. For the new quartermaster general the Army Council turned to Micky McKevitt, a County Louth–born activist who by 1985 was the quartermaster for Northern Command, charged with ensuring that Northern IRA units were well armed. “McKevitt was younger [than Hannaway] and was full of fire,” recalled a contemporary, “and he had a big countrywide operation going. The [Army] Council believed he had what was necessary to do the job.”
McKevitt, who was in his mid-thirties at the time, agreed to take on the job and was soon traveling to Tripoli to assess the scale of the operation and his own needs. The same IRA source recollects, “When McKevitt returned, he was staggered at what was involved. But he cut a deal with the leadership and got what he wanted. If it hadn’t been for that deal, the IRA would have lost a great deal more than the Eksund.”16
The Army Council agreed to a simple plan. The entire operation would be run solely by the QMG’s department, and only it would be privy to the details. The Army Council would know in general what was happening, but precise arrangements—such as the landing spots, the modus operandi, means of distributing the weapons, and so on—would be known only to McKevitt and handpicked members of the QMG’s department.
The QMG’s department was split into two. One section would continue with its routine work, arranging other arms shipments, finding hiding places for guns and explosives, and transporting weaponry northward to the Active Service Units (ASUs). Another section, hidden from the rest of the IRA, would concentrate on the Libyan operation. Chief of Staff Kevin McKenna, a taciturn, guarded figure whose base was in County Monaghan, readily agreed to McKevitt’s scheme.
Through Henry Cairns, a forty-seven-year-old bookstore owner from Bray, County Dublin, and a republican sympathizer, the IRA made contact with the man who could supply them with vessels large enough to transport the Libyan weaponry. Adrian Hopkins, then fifty-two, was a man whose business had gone bankrupt, a man who was in great need of money.
In the mid-1960s Hopkins had started a travel agency, Bray Travel, which for a year was a great success, but in 1980 it went bankrupt, stranding 6,000 Irish vacationers in the Canary Islands and costing a further 1,500 their holiday deposits. Creditors were owed some $1.5 million. The collapse hit Hopkins hard. Bray Travel had supported a comfortable middle-class South Dublin lifestyle. He was a trustee of Wicklow tennis club, refereed rugby matches, and was active in the social life of one of Ireland’s most affluent areas. He needed money badly to sustain all this.
The IRA gave Hopkins the chance to make a lot of money quickly. The deal he cut with the IRA earned him £50,000 for each shipment he organized, half paid up front, the rest when the mission had been successfully completed. He was also allowed to keep the vessels afterward and to pocket the proceeds of their sale. The operation began in a modest way. The IRA decided the wisest thing was to test its systems by sending a small consignment of weapons in the first shipment. If all went well, the next shipment would be larger, the one after that even larger, and so on until it was time for the Eksund’s cargo to arrive.17
Hopkins bought a sixty-five-foot Irish fishing boat, the Casamara, which he sailed to Malta in July 1985. The next three smuggling trips took more or less the same form. Each journey involved Hopkins’s sailing the vessel to Malta, where he picked up the IRA crew members. They normally made their way to Malta by circuitous routes, taking in several European capitals, notably Paris, Athens, and Belgrade, in an effort to throw off any surveillance.
Together they then sailed the boat out to sea, where they met a Libyan mother ship that transferred its weaponry to the IRA. On board the Libyan vessel was Nasser Ashour from Libyan intelligence to make sure everything went smoothly. Only the Eksund was loaded in Tripoli docks.
Each IRA ship then made its way back to Ireland, where off the east coast, at a beach called Clogga Strand, the weapons were transferred to inflatable dinghies powered by outboard engines. These ferried the Libyan arsenal to shore, where it was loaded onto trucks and then taken to dumps throughout Ireland.
The Casamara brought seven tons of arms, including Taurus automatic pistols and AK-47 rifles, on that first trip. The trip went smoothly, and so two months later the next shipment was dispatched, consisting of some ten tons of arms, including one hundred AK-47s, general-purpose machine guns, Webley revolvers, and several tons of ammunition.
Bad winter weather conditions, the small size of vessels at its disposal, and the need to maintain security meant that the IRA had a relatively small opportunity each year, between February–March and October, to bring over Qaddafi’s weapons. For that reason it was not until nine months later that the next consignment came.
Hopkins gave the Casamara the new name Kula for its July 1986 trip. Fourteen tons of weapons were shipped on that journey, including the first consignment of SAM-7 missiles. For years the IRA had sought the means to bring down the British army helicopters used to ferry patrols and supplies throughout rural areas of Northern Ireland, and now it was within its grasp.
For the next, much larger shipment, Hopkins found a bigger vessel, a former oil rig standby vessel called the Sjarmar, which Hopkins renamed the Villa. The Villa sailed in October 1986 with the largest shipment yet, a massive 105 tons of weaponry. On board were 40 general-purpose machine guns, 1,200 AK-47s, 130 Webley revolvers, over a million rounds of ammunition, 26 heavy Russian-made DHSK machine guns, RPG-7 rocket launchers with grenades, and more SAM-7 missiles. The most important item in the shipment, however, was five tons of Semtex, the highly destructive plastic explosives developed by the Czech arms industry.18
The stage was set to bring in the last and largest consignment, the 150 tons scheduled to be the cargo on the ill-fated Eksund.
As a result of detailed and careful planning and the failure of British or Irish security to detect the operation, the IRA had been able to get four shiploads of Libyan weapons safely into Ireland. The vital question, though, was what the IRA was going to do with them all.
British security sources estimated the value of the shipments at the time at nearly $40 million, equivalent to five times the IRA’s total annual budget. Allowing for attrition through accidental losses, usage, and security forces successes, the Villa’s cargo meant that the organization had enough weapons to keep going for a further twenty years.
The IRA now had the wherewithal to fight a really long war, as it had been committed to doing since the late 1970s. But the evidence was that even though it was not losing that struggle, it certainly wasn’t winning it. The truth was that though IRA violence by the mid-1980s was a major problem for the British it was on nowhere near the scale needed to force Britain into rethinking its presence in Northern Ireland.
The IRA leadership, represented by the seven-person Army Council, had a choice. The leadership could continue at the current, more or less containable level of violence for another two decades and hope that an unexpected event or piece of luck would transform the IRA’s fortunes. Or it could opt for something much more dramatic, a daring strike that would compel British public opinion to demand a radical change in their government’s Irish policy. It was this second option that the IRA chose.
So it was that, as the Libyan venture was being organized, the IRA set about planning a major escalation of violence, something that would jolt Britain into reconsidering its options. The plan was modeled on the Tet offensive launched by the Vietcong in January 1968, the lunar New Year in Vietnam, when guerrilla forces mounted a widespread and unexpected assault on U.S. forces throughout the country. The Tet offensive is credited with beginning the end of American involvement in that part of Southeast Asia by convincing a decisive section of U.S. public opinion that the war against North Vietnam was unwinnable. The IRA hoped to do the same with the British public.
The Army Council made a number of adjustments in its battle order to facilitate the strategy. In February 1985 the South Armagh IRA leader and cross-Border smuggler Tom “Slab” Murphy, a fixture on the Army Council for many years, was promoted to the post of director of operations and given the task of drawing up the detailed plans for the offensive. Over the next few months he traveled regularly to Libya to inspect the Libyan army’s arsenals and to assess which weapons were best suited for his plans. There was another key change. Martin McGuinness was promoted from adjutant of Northern Command to Northern commander, replacing Murphy. Although it would be his job to put Murphy’s plans into operation, McGuinness’s new job meant that he would have considerable influence over how and where the weapons were used.
The IRA Southern Command meanwhile set about making preparations for training IRA volunteers in the use of the Libyan weaponry. Sophisticated underground firing ranges, some lined with concrete and soundproofed, were constructed all over Ireland. When the Eksund was intercepted and the Irish security forces launched a nationwide search for the other shipments, a number of apparent “bunkers” were unearthed, and the assumption was that they had been constructed to store the Eksund’s cargo. In fact they were these meticulously prepared practice ranges.
Later, selected IRA operatives, perhaps as many as thirty, traveled secretly to Libya for training in specialized weapons like the SAM-7s, Ireland being judged too small to perform such training undetected. The arrival of the Libyan shipments was also staggered to dovetail into the plan. The first four consignments were dispatched to dumps in the most southerly, westerly, and northerly parts of the country, to be held in reserve for later use. “The principle was to start outwards and work in,” said one IRA source.19 None of the Libyan weaponry was to be used, the leadership decided, until all the Libyan shipments had safely arrived.
The first shipments were to be stored in reserve and the “Tet” was to be fought with the Eksund’s cargo. Once unloaded, it was to be stored temporarily in a single bunker in Arklow, County Wicklow, and then distributed to the ASUs who would lead the offensive north of the Border and elsewhere in Britain and Europe.
The thinking behind the offensive was to cause so much damage in the first two weeks that the momentum would keep the IRA going for another eighteen months. “The idea,” said one IRA Volunteer privy to the plan, “was to take and hold areas in Armagh, Tyrone, and Fermanagh and to force the British either to use maximum force or to hold off.”20 Four areas on the Border, security bases and posts, had been earmarked for IRA units to hold and, in theory at least, defend for days.
The SAM-7s were to be used against British helicopters, ideally cutting off South Armagh and leaving it under the effective control of the IRA. The threat against helicopters would force the British to ground their aircraft throughout Northern Ireland and to use armored ground transport, which, in rural areas especially, would be vulnerable to the heavy Russian machine guns and rockets now in the IRA’s hands.
Spectaculars were also planned: 106-millimeter canons, whose presence on the Eksund has never been acknowledged by the Irish or British authorities, were to be mounted on motorboats and used to bombard and sink the British naval patrol boat that policed the waters of Carlingford Lough dividing Northern Ireland from the Irish Republic. There were plans, too, to blow up a ship in Belfast harbor, thus blocking access to the city from the sea.
Later the campaign would be carried to military and high-prestige government targets in Britain and Europe. At one stage the IRA even contemplated launching rocket attacks on British embassies throughout Europe. But the real offensive was to be a short and very sharp affair in Northern Ireland.
The IRA leaders had calculated that the British would probably respond to their “Tet” by introducing internment without trial and would press the Republic’s authorities to follow suit. It was not the first time that the IRA had attempted to provoke the British into draconian and potentially counterproductive security measures. The organization had long believed that it thrived on British repression.
The offensive was daring and ambitious, but it suffered from a single flaw. Its success hinged on the IRA’s preserving the element of surprise—if the British ever got to hear of the IRA’s plans, all would be lost. For that reason the Army Council resisted the temptation to dip into its Libyan hoard until the Eksund had safely delivered its cargo. Not even Semtex, a relatively common explosive, was to be used, so eager was the IRA leadership to capitalize on the surprise factor.
“You were all supposed to wake up one morning, switch on the radio, and discover that mayhem had broken out everywhere,” recalled one IRA activist. “The impact was supposed to have been earth-shattering.”21
But whoever betrayed the Eksund robbed the IRA of a priceless asset; the surprise factor vanished the moment the French customs police boarded the vessel. Afterward Hopkins talked freely to his captors, giving them precious detail about the contents of the earlier shipments. The British soon knew exactly what weapons had been brought in, and they were able quickly to put countermeasures in place.
From there it was all downhill for the IRA. Not only had the Eksund’s precious cargo been captured and the weapons destined for the “Tet” campaign lost, but the Libyans reacted angrily to the discovery. They were particularly annoyed when they discovered that Hopkins and Cairns had not been members of the IRA. The agreement Libyan intelligence had reached with the Army Council was that only IRA members would take part in the shipments. Almost immediately after their arrest, Hopkins and Cairns confirmed Libyan involvement to French and Irish intelligence officers, much to the embarrassment of the Qaddafi regime.
The Libyan leader immediately canceled the promised cash payments to the IRA; half the promised $10 million had been paid, and the rest would have been sent once the Eksund safely made it to Ireland. Now the IRA’s coffers were suddenly empty, its ability to intensify its campaign severely curtailed by a shortage of cash.
When the IRA attempted to use some of the Libyan weaponry, it found out what the loss of the surprise factor meant. The SAM-7s had been rendered useless when the British installed electronic countermeasures on helicopters. Two SAM-7s test-fired in South Armagh whistled harmlessly past their targets. The IRA then attempted to compensate by deploying the Russian-made DHSK machine guns against helicopters, but this too was a failure. The weapons were far too heavy to be lugged around the countryside, robbing the IRA ASUs of vital speed and mobility. The British also took to flying their helicopters in groups of up to five, so that if one was attacked the others could respond. Moreover, they reinforced the armor on their vehicles to withstand the IRA’s new capabilities. The British knew the IRA was coming, and they were ready.
The only part of the shipment still of major concern to the British was the tons of Semtex explosives that the IRA’s engineering department proceeded to deploy in a series of improvised weapons. Infinitely malleable and virtually impossible to detect, Semtex was used in a variety of inventive ways ranging from coffee jar bombs and deadly mercury-tilt booby-trap devices that were attached to the underside of vehicles, to drogue bombs—small, hand-thrown parachute-guided devices that burned through armor plating.
While the security forces in both parts of Ireland were naturally concerned about the IRA’s new and staggering military strength, the IRA leadership was, as it is to this day, consumed with the search for the identity of the informer who had betrayed the Eksund and sabotaged the “Tet offensive.”
The task of unmasking the traitor was made all the more difficult by the variety of available explanations. It was possible, for example, that the British had just been good at their detective work. The Libyans left enough public clues lying around suggesting that they were once again dallying with the IRA, and it would have been seriously deficient of the various British and Irish intelligence agencies to have ignored them.
In June 1986, for instance, Qaddafi’s deputy Major Ahmed Jalloud told a group of German Euro MPs that Libya planned to resume aid to the IRA.22 In March 1987 Qaddafi informed the Observer newspaper in London that he had increased arms supplies to the IRA in retaliation for U.S. bombing raids the preceding year.23 The following month Qaddafi’s teenage son, Sadi, made it known at an international conference in Tripoli, to which Sinn Fein had sent two representatives, that Libya would open an office for the IRA in its capital.24
There was also a strong possibility that the authorities had simply guessed what was going on. A briefing paper prepared by the State Department in Washington in 1986, declassified and obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, shows Assistant Secretary J. Edward Fox noting with some perspicacity that Constable Yvonne Fletcher’s killing in 1984 “had increased [Libya’s] political motivation for supporting the IRA.”25 Fox also pointed to another piece of evidence suggesting that Libya had resumed giving weapons to the IRA. That was the discovery by Irish police in November 1985 of arms and ammunition on a Libyan-leased airliner at the Dublin airport.
If the authorities hadn’t guessed, they should have. In January 1986 Irish police raided a farmhouse in County Sligo and discovered a large haul of weapons, sixteen semiautomatic AK-47 rifles made in East Germany and fourteen made in Romania, along with bayonets, magazines, cleaning kits, and 7,560 rounds of ammunition, that had originated in Yugoslavia. The haul was packed into six boxes stored in the attic of the farmhouse and was marked with the words “Libyan Armed Forces” and “Destination Tripoli.” In two other related raids at separate locations in Counties Roscommon and Sligo, police unearthed another eighty rifles and handguns and 12,000 bullets.
The weapons were part of the August 1985 consignment smuggled on the Kula, and were on their way to hiding places in County Donegal when they were intercepted. In an incident that was later to cast a baleful light on Martin McGuinness, a member of the quartermaster’s department in McGuinness’s hometown of Derry had betrayed the guns. The British and Irish intelligence agencies should have explored the possibility that the weapons had come from Libya, but they were apparently thrown off the scent because among the weapons were ten West German–made Heckler and Koch rifles stolen in Norway. This and the fact that their informer, Frank Hegarty, who worked for the QM’s department in Derry, had been excluded from the Libyan operation and been given a false cover story to explain the origin of the weapons meant that the British missed the Libyan connection altogether.
Although there were compelling reasons to think the British or Irish authorities had chanced on the Libyan enterprise, the IRA automatically assumed that its secret had been betrayed, and the obvious suspects were the two non-IRA men on board the Eksund, Adrian Hopkins and Henry Cairns.
Both had reasons to betray the IRA. Cairns was penniless and may have been tempted to sell his precious information for cash. But an internal IRA inquiry concluded that Hopkins was the culprit. The Eksund’s skipper had two counts against him, not least that he had stolen IRA money. According to sources familiar with the details of his arrangements with the IRA, he had overcharged the Army Council for the Eksund, swindling the organization out of tens of thousands of pounds.26 It also became clear that he had talked freely to French and Irish police, telling them all about the previous shipments and pinpointing the Arklow bunker that had been built to hold the Eksund’s arsenal.
There were also signs that he had made a separate deal with the authorities when suddenly the French granted him bail, enabling him to flee to Ireland, where there were no extradition arrangements with France. The suspicions that a deal had been cut hardened when Hopkins came to trial in Ireland. Eleven of twelve charges against him were dropped, and he received a relatively lenient sentence, three years, compared with the five-to seven-year terms handed down in Paris to the Eksund’s other crew members.
Some in the IRA wanted to shoot Hopkins, but friends spoke up for him. The Villa had nearly sunk during a terrifying storm in the Bay of Biscay during its 1986 voyage, and but for Hopkins’s seamanship its cargo of 105 tons of arms and the IRA crew would have sunk without a trace. Doubtless conscious of the bad publicity that would attach to any effort to kill Hopkins, the IRA leadership let him off with a warning to abandon rumored plans to write a book about his exploits.
Nonetheless, the belief took hold among IRA leaders that Hopkins was the man who had put Gabriel Cleary’s TPU out of action, and that at some point in the affair he had been turned by either the Irish or the British authorities. But suspicions that the Eksund had been betrayed by another informer, a much more important figure at a high level in the IRA, persisted elsewhere in the IRA’s highest reaches long afterward, overshadowing and souring the movement’s tortuous trek on the peace process. The IRA leadership would later split and divide over the peace process, but the fault line can be traced back to the doubts and distrust generated by the betrayal of the Eksund.
In the immediate wake of the Eksund’s loss and long afterward both the IRA and the British and Irish security authorities behaved as if the informer was still around. The IRA leadership has never admitted that the vessel was betrayed and has done everything to encourage the view that its capture was a piece of bad luck. “It was kept very, very quiet,” explained one IRA source. “The Volunteers were just not told.”27
The IRA’s stance was understandable. To admit that an informer had gotten so close to the heart of such a vital operation would cause enormous embarrassment to the leadership, as well as the doubts at grassroots level that would inevitably grow, fester, and eventually sap morale. Saying nothing about the betrayal left the rank and file still thinking that, the loss of the Eksund aside, the Libyan venture had been a success. After all, the IRA had imported unimaginable quantities of heavy weaponry, and it was clear that the leadership had successfully managed to outwit the British for most of the Libyan enterprise. Only a very few activists would know that the loss of the Eksund had scuppered the “Tet offensive.” In the eyes of ordinary republicans and IRA activists, the Libyan operation had been a success. The 150 tons of guns and explosives meant that the war could be fought almost indefinitely.
Equally, the British and Irish authorities went to great lengths, and did so for years to come, to pretend that the capture of the Eksund was an accidental event caused by the vessel’s faulty rudder and a vigilant French customs service. At the time British army and RUC sources encouraged the media to take the view that this is exactly what happened, and they made no attempt to disguise their apparent surprise at the scale of the IRA operation. Some security force spin doctors even went so far as to suggest that the Eksund’s cargo was far too big for the IRA to handle and that it had to be sharing the consignment with another terrorist group.
A consensus emerged that was reflected in media coverage: the Eksund episode was a piece of pure luck, and the failure to detect the Libyan shipments to the IRA was a major disaster for British intelligence. One respected observer, reflecting a common media view, later wrote, “The shipments… revealed an international intelligence lapse of mammoth proportions.”28
Within the IRA suspicions of a high-level leak persisted, however. The problem was that Hopkins was too small a fry to deserve such an impressive level of official protection. In any case the ruse was clumsy; Hopkins was bound to be at the top of the IRA’s list of possible culprits, so why would the authorities go to such extreme lengths to protect him? Some IRA members asked another question: Would British or Irish intelligence really forgo the public credit for the Eksund’s capture, keep silent when accused by the media of incompetence, just to shield a relatively low-level agent who was the IRA’s number one suspect anyway?
These were not the only reasons for suspecting that the real informer was not Hopkins. In late 1986, not long after the IRA leadership had decided to try to ship the last 150 tons of weapons, there were two serious lapses in the security surrounding the Libyan venture. They happened when Martin McGuinness, chairman of the Army Council and the IRA’s Northern commander, sought and obtained permission from the Council to give two crucial briefings and by so doing broke the strict rule of secrecy that had been agreed and imposed on the operation.
An IRA source explained, “The agreement was that people outside the Army Council would not be told anything about the Libyan shipments until the Eksund was in, but when Slab [Murphy] and Micky [McKevitt] were out of the country on one of their mysterious trips, the Council gave the go-ahead. When they got back and heard what had happened, they were livid.”29
McGuinness gave the first briefing to the IRA Executive, the thirteen-member body elected by the rank and file at IRA Conventions, the occasional conferences that determine both the IRA’s politics and its military policy. The Executive chooses the members of the Army Council and selects replacements when vacancies occur; but its more important role is to act as the voice and conscience of ordinary IRA Volunteers. Most of its members were new to the job; the bulk of the previous Executive had resigned from the IRA in protest against a decision to recognize the Irish parliament in elections, and McGuinness was addressing a group whose loyalty to the Adams leadership was still untested. The split had sapped morale and McGuinness had cited the need to lift the Executive’s spirits when he sought the Army Council’s permission to tell it about the Libyan weaponry.
McGuinness was given the go-ahead, but in the circumstances the Army Council’s decision was extraordinary. By the time the briefing was arranged, the Army council had learned to be circumspect in its dealings with the Executive. There were strong suspicions that there was an informer in its ranks, and the Council had decided to carefully control what its members were told about IRA policy and decisions. The suspicions were well-founded, for in 1994 an MI5 agent on the Executive was exposed. A Sinn Fein councillor and adjutant of Southern Command, he was spared execution because of the public embarrassment to the republican leadership that would follow his exposure. In that context the decision to brief the Executive about the Libyan shipments was an astonishing lapse.
McGuinness’s briefing included the revelation not just that shipments had arrived safely but that the biggest prize of all was on its way. “He told the Executive that a lot of gear [weapons] had come in, but that the cream on the cake was still to come,” said the source.30
The next briefing was given in County Donegal to the small group of IRA commanders who had been chosen to lead the IRA’s Active Service Units (ASUs) into the “Tet offensive” after the Eksund had safely delivered its cargo. They were from all over the North, and their job would have been to liaise with the ASUs and outline the operations to be carried out. The briefing, also given by McGuinness, covered the quantities and type of weaponry that would be available and detailed the cargo that was supposed to come on the Eksund, the weapons that would give the “Tet offensive” its cutting edge.
Once again McGuinness was addressing a group with a link to an informer. Among those briefed was an IRA veteran from the St. James district of West Belfast called Harry Burns. His career in the IRA went way back to the start of the Troubles when he was interned on the Maidstone, a ramshackle prison ship docked in Belfast harbor which had been pressed into service when the numbers of IRA suspects being arrested far exceeded the ability of the Northern Ireland prison system to house them. Burns was trusted, but not so one of his associates. A close friend of “Big Harry,” as Burns was known to his IRA colleagues and friends, was Joe Fenton, a West Belfast real estate agent and wheeler-dealer, who turned out to be one of the most important agents ever recruited by the RUC Special Branch. Fenton was so close to Burns and trusted by him that, contrary to the organization’s strict security regulations, he would regularly drive him to supposedly secret IRA meetings.
Fenton came under suspicion when the leadership first began shipping the Libyan weapons to the Northern ASUs. A number of consignments headed for Belfast were mysteriously intercepted by the RUC, and it was obvious that an informer was at his or her work. The common link in all the losses was Fenton, who turned out to have been directly or indirectly involved in the purchase or acquisition of the vehicles used to transport weapons from Southern dumps.31
Eventually, in February 1989, and only after he had fled to England but then inexplicably returned, Fenton was arrested by the IRA’s security unit, the specialized team whose job it was to ferret out informers from the ranks of the IRA, interrogate them, and, if it found them guilty, shoot them dead. What happened after Fenton’s arrest has taken its place in republican legend as one of the most far-reaching and squalid scandals in the history of the Belfast IRA.
Fenton was abducted by the security unit and held for interrogation in a house in Andersonstown, West Belfast, but after only two days he was taken out and shot dead. His body, with a single bullet wound to the head, the IRA’s customary punishment for those caught informing, was dumped in an alley in nearby Lenadoon.
The speed with which Fenton was killed caused a major row within the IRA. An informer as important as Fenton should have been taken away for lengthy interrogation and debriefing so that the damage he had done could be assessed. Fenton had been working for the RUC Special Branch since at least September 1984, when in an attempt to ingratiate himself with the IRA’s Belfast Brigade (BB) and apparently on the instruction of his Special Branch handlers, he betrayed two other informers, a young married couple, Catherine and Gerard Mahon, who were shot dead by the IRA for betraying arms dumps.
Fenton had a great deal to tell his interrogators, but he was never given the opportunity. Said one angry Belfast IRA member, “Fenton was a huge fish, and the BB squandered a great opportunity to uncover a network of agents. Through his estate agency he was getting homes for people and arranging fraudulent mortgages, helping people to defraud Building Societies by manufacturing income statements for people who were registered as unemployed. The [Special] Branch would have had a field day blackmailing his clients into becoming informers.”32
It also emerged that Fenton had been supplying allegedly “clean” cars to members of the IRA’s England department, that section of the IRA which was responsible for carrying out bombing missions in England. He had also provided safe houses for the IRA in Belfast where meetings were held and presumably bugged by the Special Branch. Between one activity and another Fenton provided the police with vast amounts of priceless intelligence.
When questioned as to why Fenton was killed so quickly, the Belfast Brigade claimed that a huge manhunt mounted by the RUC and British army was closing in on the house where Fenton was held and that there was no time to arrange his transfer to South Armagh, where his interrogation could be carried out in a more leisurely manner. But there were suspicions that Fenton was killed for other reasons, that senior figures in the Belfast Brigade and elsewhere did not want the full story of his dealings with them to be revealed to the rest of the organization.
Fenton had performed various private favors for selected Belfast Brigade staff, one of which was to provide meeting places, usually vacant houses he was trying to sell, where secret love affairs could be consummated. One such tryst was between a former Belfast commander and the wife of one of his senior staff officers. The estate agent cum informer would give the senior IRA man the keys of a house he had on his books, and the pair would meet. It can only be presumed that the RUC Special Branch recorded their exertions and used the tapes productively. There was every possibility, in other words, that Fenton had helped the RUC to “turn” very senior Belfast Brigade figures.
There are also strong suggestions that Fenton and the IRA commander took part in a freelance, unauthorized jewelry robbery in County Fermanagh that also involved loyalists and criminal elements in Drogheda, County Louth, and Dublin. If IRA weapons had been used in such an unauthorized operation, the consequences, under the IRA’s rulebook, could have been severe for the former commander. Although rumors and allegations about the commander’s activities were rife in the Belfast IRA at this time, nothing was ever done. The former IRA commander had powerful family connections in the republican movement. That his brother sat on the Army Council and was a senior member of Sinn Fein may have saved his life.
Whatever the reason, Fenton was condemned to an early death, and the IRA’s security unit never got the chance to properly question the informer about his long and eventful career as a Special Branch agent. Nor was it able to quiz him about his knowledge of the Libyan shipments and in particular whether or not “Big Harry” Burns had let slip any of the contents of the briefing he and the other IRA specialists had been given by the Army Council figure. Burns always denied he had said anything to Fenton. Burns, who had been severely injured some years beforehand when a mortar bomb he was attempting to fire exploded prematurely, died of cancer in February 1999. Ironically he died a fervent supporter of Gerry Adams’s peace strategy.
But afterward, when the dust thrown up by Joe Fenton’s killing had settled, the IRA’s security unit conducted a more thorough investigation of the informer’s activities and found a sophisticated bug hidden in a light fitting in the front room of Burns’s house. Someone in the world of British intelligence was very interested in what Harry Burns was up to.
The net effect of the two briefings was that when the Eksund was betrayed, the suspicions about the identity of the traitor were more generalized. Since the circle of knowledge about the Libyan shipments had been widened beyond the Army Council, so too had the range of candidates for the role of informer. In fact, by mid-1987 the circle of knowledge had expanded to include a group of activists sent to Libya for training in the weapons as well as a small number of key personnel whose support for major political shifts was needed by the Adams camp.
The special briefings nonetheless sowed distrust in the IRA’s higher reaches. But they were as nothing compared with the subsequent suspicion that the real culprit responsible for giving up the Eksund and with it the IRA’s war plans may have been at the very top of the organization.
“The October [1987] trip was not the first time the IRA tried to bring in the Eksund’s cargo,” said one knowledgeable IRA source. “The original plan had been to bring it in all in one go sometime in April or May, in the spring of ’87. But in February that year the IRA got information that Free State army units had been put on standby from Cork to Carlingford in anticipation of an arms ship coming in sometime in the coming weeks. Someone had leaked the operation. The Free Staters didn’t know where it would land, but they knew something was up. The IRA had no choice but to postpone the operation.”33
When the Eksund was captured, it therefore came as no surprise to the IRA leadership. As a result of the February leak, it was half expecting the venture to fail.
The question then became this. If the Irish government had a rough date for the spring 1987 plan but no precise intelligence about where the cargo would be landed, who in the IRA was in possession of just that level of information? The answer appeared to rule out Adrian Hopkins as the main suspect. He knew exactly where the planned shipment was to be off-loaded—at Clogga Strand on the Wicklow coast, where the other four shipments had been unloaded and where the Eksund was headed some five or six months later. If Hopkins had been the informer in February 1987, the Irish authorities would have had no need to put their forces on alert along the entire eastern coast; they would have known exactly where to go.
These claims appear to exonerate Hopkins, although he was still suspected of being the man who tampered with Gabriel Cleary’s timing power unit. “Some believe that [it was only] after the February leak [that] Hopkins was turned by the Brits,” said one IRA source.34
The finger of suspicion for the source of the February leak, the main informer, appears to point elsewhere, to someone whose knowledge of the February plan was much less specific, whose information, although priceless, could not pinpoint the cargo’s destination.
Among those who knew that the last cargo was on its way but were unaware of the details of the operation were those members of the Army Council not involved directly in organizing the Libyan shipments. The Council members’ state of knowledge was this: they were aware that a boat was moored in Malta awaiting final arrangements to bring the last shipment to Ireland and that it was due sometime in the late spring. They needed to know that in order to make plans for the “Tet offensive.” But they were unaware of vital details, such as the precise destination of the cargo, the spot where IRA members would unload it.
Ironically the Eksund’s fate was sealed by an uncharacteristic act of recklessness urged on their Army Council colleagues by Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness. Against the advice of even those most intimately involved in planning the Libyan adventure, both men insisted that the Eksund’s deadly cargo be transported to Ireland as quickly as possible, and in one shipment, so that the “Tet offensive” could go ahead on schedule. Others on the Council counselled that a wiser course would be to transport only a small part of the Eksund’s payload to Ireland. If it got through safely, then the IRA could be confident that there had been no serious infiltration and the Eksund could set sail as planned. If it was intercepted then they would know for certain there was a traitor in their midst, while the loss of weaponry to the IRA would be minimal. Alternative plans could then be drawn up to bring the rest of Eksund’s cargo to Ireland at another time and by a different way. But both Adams, whose customary caution in all matters was legendary, and McGuinness argued successfully that the IRA’s urgent need to launch the big military push demanded otherwise and that the Eksund’s voyage should proceed as planned. They got their way, but had they not prevailed then the story of the IRA’s war against the British— and with it the peace process—might have been very different indeed.
The question of who betrayed the Eksund has never been satisfactorily settled, but suspicions that there was—and possibly still is—a high-ranking traitor in the IRA have nevertheless festered for years, poisoning relations and fueling distrust as the peace process gathered pace.
THE YEAR 1987 ended on a disastrous note for the IRA. In November, only days after the capture of the Eksund, an IRA bomb exploded at the cenotaph in Enniskillen, County Fermanagh, as local Protestants gathered to remember their war dead. Eleven were killed and over sixty injured. The bomb helped ratchet up public hostility to the organization in the Republic to unprecedented levels.
In the wake of the Eksund’s capture, the Irish government ordered a nationwide search, code-named Operation Mallard, for the four other shipments. Some sixty thousand homes and farms were raided and searched. Although none of the weaponry was discovered, the IRA nevertheless suffered several other serious setbacks. The officer in charge of training ASUs in the use of the Libyan arms was captured, and documents unearthed during the search led the FBI to a key IRA operative in the United States, Richard Johnson, a skilled Boston-based electronics engineer with federal security clearance who was helping the IRA develop homemade surface-to-air missiles.
The mood of the IRA as the year turned was mixed. Recalled one activist:
Despite the Eksund and [the] Enniskillen [bombing] the mood of the rank and file was quite good. They knew, thanks to Hopkins, what had come in—they were especially delighted to get the AK-47s—and they were upbeat, even jubilant. Don’t forget, for years the cry had been to get heavy gear in, and here it had happened. From mixing with the leadership, however, you could see things were very different there. The mood was much more somber. They knew they had lost the vital element of surprise, and it was back to the drawing board.35
The betrayal of the Eksund condemned the IRA to military stalemate with the British. The successful Libyan shipments certainly made the IRA a more dangerous enemy than it had been for years, dangerous enough eventually to persuade the British that talking to the IRA might be more productive. But the chance of securing a decisive military advantage over the British—the aim and purpose of the “Tet offensive”—had been lost forever.
It was in such an atmosphere that the idea that politics might be an acceptable, even unavoidable, alternative to armed struggle took hold and was nurtured. When Gabriel Cleary inspected the sabotaged firing unit on the bridge of the Eksund and realized that its precious cargo was doomed, he was not to know that the spy who had betrayed his mission had also boosted another secret operation then under way, an operation that not even the Army Council knew about but which the world would soon know as the Irish peace process.