Voices from the Grave: Two Men's War in Ireland

by Ed Moloney

  * * *

  By the spring of 1973, the Provisional IRA had been at war with the British for the best part of two years. Yet remarkably, given the IRA’s history, there had been no attempt to take the war to English soil as Michael Collins had in the 1919–21 period or as had happened on the eve of the Second World War. That all changed in London on 8 March 1973 when two IRA car bombs exploded, one in Whitehall, the bureaucratic heart of the British government, and the second near the Old Bailey, England’s Central Criminal Court. Two other car bombs, one outside Scotland Yard, the headquarters of the London police force, and the other in Dean Stanley Street, just down the road from the Westminster parliament, were discovered and their explosive contents neutralised. Two hundred people were injured in the blasts and one man, Frederick Milton, a sixty-year-old caretaker from Surrey, who was caught up in the Old Bailey explosion, died of a heart attack. Like Patrick Crawford, he does not appear in any of the death lists of the Troubles, although arguably he would not have suffered a fatal coronary that day but for the bombing. The explosions happened on the same day that in Northern Ireland people were voting in a British-sponsored referendum on the state’s constitutional status – asking whether its people would prefer to stay British or not. Nationalists of all stripes had agreed to boycott the poll and the results (58.7 per cent turnout and 98.9 per cent supporting the British link) suggested that most Catholics had ignored the referendum. The high level of Nationalist opposition to the poll added to the immediate suspicion of IRA culpability.

  Confirmation that the IRA was involved came later that day when seven men and three women were arrested at Heathrow airport as they were about to board a flight to Belfast – they were all Belfast IRA members and several of them had strong associations with Gerry Adams. Two of the women were Dolours and Marion Price, members of a renowned Republican family – their aunt, Bridie Nolan, was an tragic figure, a member of the women’s branch of the IRA, the Cumann na mBan; she had been blinded and lost both hands when a bomb she was carrying exploded prematurely in 1938. One of the sisters, Dolours, had been sent to collect Gerry Adams from Long Kesh internment camp when he was released as part of the 1972 ceasefire deal and drove him back to the city where he was reunited with the Belfast leadership. Another person arrested at Heathrow was Gerry Kelly, a member of Adams’s Ballymurphy unit, B Company, who later in his Republican career was variously a hunger striker, prison escaper and eventually a junior minister in the power-sharing government set up by the peace process. He remained a loyal ally of Adams throughout his political life, while the Price sisters angrily broke with Adams.

  All those caught at Heathrow airport were convicted and sentenced to between twenty years in jail and life imprisonment. In subsequent years there have been allegations from members of the team that the mission had been betrayed by someone in Belfast, although others dispute this. The Price sisters, Gerry Kelly and another member of the team, Hugh Feeney, went on hunger strike almost immediately after they were sentenced, demanding they be repatriated to a jail in Northern Ireland, nearer their families. The protest lasted over two hundred days, largely because the authorities force-fed them, but eventually they secured their return to Belfast.

  The striking aspect of the 1973 London bombings is how completely they were a Belfast Brigade operation. They were conceived in Belfast, planned in Belfast and carried out by Belfast members. The IRA Chief of Staff, Sean MacStiofain, gave the final go-ahead to be sure but in a sense that was a technicality and an acknowledgement that Belfast was the powerhouse of the IRA’s war. The dominating role of the Belfast Brigade in this operation was another sign of the tensions that had existed almost since the outset between Dublin and Belfast, South and North, tensions that had led the Belfast IRA to seek out Armalite rifles in New York and which much later would lead to the creation of a separate Northern Command. And the bombing of London also did little to harm the growing reputation the Brigade Commander, Gerry Adams, was building for strategic skills. As Brendan Hughes told Boston College, Adams was deeply involved in planning the first bombing of London.

  … up till 1973 we had been fighting the war within Ireland, within the six counties. But there were constant suggestions that we could be much more effective if we hit England, where the occupation forces had come from. They were raiding our houses, killing our people … And myself and Adams and the rest of the Belfast Brigade – and I must stress this as well – it was a Belfast Brigade initiative that brought about the London bombings. It was ourselves who planned, organised and recruited for the London bombings … the initial idea was discussed at Belfast Brigade meetings with myself, Gerry Adams, Ivor Bell, Pat McClure, Tom Cahill, basically that group of people. We would have been the main people in the Belfast Brigade at the time … No one dissented. At that particular period, everyone knew we had to step up the war and bring the war to England, and I can’t remember anybody dissenting from that … I can’t remember anyone.

  Once the decision was made, the next thing was to pick who would go … we ordered people from different units within Belfast to come to a call house in the Lower Falls … Myself and Gerry Adams were there and it was put to these Volunteers that there was a job planned; it was a very dangerous job … [it] would mean being away from home for a while; [it] would mean being out of Belfast for a while. They were not told that they were going to England [and] after the talk people were invited to either stay or leave. Twelve or so did. Those who remained were the two Price sisters, Hugh Feeney, Gerry Kelly, Gerry Armstrong and Roy Walsh. It was put forcefully to them that the operation was extremely dangerous, [there was] a possibility of their being killed, arrested and not returning to their homes. Then they were told what the operation was.

  They were then sent across the border for intensive training in explosives … weapons and so forth, for about three weeks. Then the cars had to be acquired – there was a special squad put together. Pat McClure was in charge of that, taking them across the border. After that, I had no contact with them because the operation was starting from across the border. I was [Brigade] Operations Officer at that time and once the people were picked, once they were moved across the border, Pat McClure took over …

  We didn’t intend to kill people in London. The intention was to strike at the heart of the British Establishment … if the intention had been to kill people in London, it would have been quite easy to do so, quite simple, but our intentions were not to kill people … what we should have done was to bury the team in England [afterwards]. When I say ‘bury the team’, we should have arranged hiding places for them there. The mistake we made was to get the bombs in and get the people out as quickly as possible. Unfortunately the British got onto the bombs too quickly and arrested our people coming back. Our idea was a simple one, get the people in, get the explosives in and get our Volunteers out … It was like that with the bombing campaign in Belfast or Derry or wherever: put the bomb in, run back, always plan your run back. And we went with that simple idea. In hindsight it was obviously the wrong one. [Maybe] if the British hadn’t got onto the bombs so quickly it would have been the right idea. But I think it was bad logistics. I don’t think that the operation was compromised. I have never come across any proof or evidence to say otherwise. There possibly may have been, but I’ve always put it down to the fact that one of the bombs went off prematurely and the British authorities automatically closed down the airports and the ports … But after saying that I would not be shocked if the operation was compromised. There’s always that possibility … But I’ve heard this so often before when jobs went wrong, that there must have been a tout. And that’s not always the case. I mean, the British have intelligence sources as well and they watch, they record intelligence, that’s their job. And operations can go wrong sometimes thanks to simple mistakes. And I have always believed that the simple mistake we made was that we tried to get the people out of England too quickly.

  The operation took weeks, months to set up. It was not set up to co
incide with the Border Poll, to my knowledge. I can’t remember the bombs going off that day for that particular reason … To me it was just a military operation that went drastically wrong …

  There was always from the early 1970s a confrontation between the Dublin leadership and the Belfast leadership. There was confrontation to the point that we believed, and this might have been an elitist thing, that we knew how to run the war, not those people sitting in Dublin in their safe houses; people like Daithi O Connail, Ruairi O Bradaigh, who were never in any danger. Daithi O Connail had not visited Belfast except during the [1972] ceasefire. I remember having arguments with him, that we knew how to run the war, and they didn’t … there was always that conflict between Belfast and the Dublin leadership especially with Daithi. He was a tall, good-looking, dashing figure who saw himself as – and he was – very articulate. But he was not involved in the war, not involved in places like Derry or Belfast or Armagh. He was sitting in Dublin directing. And there was a fair deal of resentment, not just from me, but from people like Adams and Ivor Bell and the rest of the leadership in Belfast at the time. And that developed into Northern Command, with people like Martin McGuinness also arguing for it. Before the Northern Command came into existence, there was just the Belfast Brigade, the Derry Brigade, the GHQ staff and the Army Council. Once the Northern Command came into existence that changed and the Dublin leadership faded into the background; they were more figures for the media than [people] running a war. They became the public face of the movement. I mean, Ruairi and Daithi were, as I say, very articulate, they were good on television and they could go on television and be safe.

  By July 1973, Gerry Adams had been out of Long Kesh for just shy of a year, while Brendan Hughes and Ivor Bell were well into their fourth year of uninterrupted but exhausting active service with the Provisional IRA. All three men had risen rapidly in the ranks of the IRA and it would not be an exaggeration to say that, thanks to their track record, they were, by the end of 1972, candidates for national leadership of the Provos. Adams had been arrested once already while Hughes had narrowly escaped both arrest and death. Bell, too, had avoided ending up in Long Kesh but in July 1973 luck ran out for two of them. Or rather, to be accurate, the British bested them. The Belfast Brigade’s strike at the MRF in November 1972 had proved to be just a temporary setback for British Intelligence. Within a few months the British were beginning to get the edge on the IRA thanks to the recruitment of high-level figures such as Eamon Molloy, the Belfast Brigade’s Quarter Master. Molloy would reveal the location of huge numbers of IRA weapons dumps in 1973 and 1974 and it is strongly believed in IRA circles that Molloy was responsible for divulging the location of a meeting of the Belfast Brigade staff on 19 July 1973, in a house in the Iveagh area off the Falls Road. Whatever the truth, it was a disastrous day for the Belfast IRA. British Army swoops netted Gerry Adams, Brendan Hughes and Tom Cahill at the Belfast Brigade meeting while in North Belfast virtually the entire staff of the Third Battalion was arrested. In all, seventeen senior IRA members were put out of action that day.

  … basically it was what we did every day, a meeting of the Brigade staff. Gerry was O/C, Tom was Finance Officer, I was Operations Officer. And the rest of the Brigade was there as well, but most of them had left by this stage; there was only the three of us left. We met every day, to plan what operations were going to take place, what robberies we were going to do; we basically pooled our ideas about where we were going; it was simply a military planning meeting to decide our next step in the war. That’s what we were doing the day we were arrested in 1973. Actually I believe the intention that day was to execute us because I was sitting in the house and I looked out the window and I saw a suspicious car. I left the house, went over to Beechmount, got hold of a Volunteer and told him to get a squad together and go and pull this car in. But one guy had got out of it with a briefcase, and walked down the street behind where we were. As I looked out the window I saw [our] two guys approaching the car and [then] the car speeding off. Now the two Volunteers didn’t know that we were sitting in the house directly facing them … what I didn’t know until later was that the guy in the car threatened them with a machine gun and when the Volunteers approached the car they didn’t have a weapon with them. And, as I say, the guy in the car was obviously in touch with … the other agent who had got out of the car and moved down the street behind us. Within seconds the house was surrounded and the three of us were arrested. They charged into the house, the British Army, arrested us, brought us to Springfield Road police station and basically … tortured us. I was tied to a chair and beaten with small hammers, and punched, kicked, interrogated. They were looking for information on dumps, other Volunteers, safe houses. They had me in one Portakabin and Gerry Adams in another and Tom Cahill in another. Tom had been pretty badly shot up a few years before and he was handicapped. So Tom wasn’t beaten. He was interrogated but they really went to town on me and Adams. Adams passed out, I think three times, and they revived him with buckets of water. Me, they just beat the crap out of. And then afterwards they put me into another Portakabin. The guys who interrogated us were in plain clothes; they weren’t uniformed. The interrogations … lasted about eight hours or so. I remember one particular guy walking in. He was a very tall, distinguished-looking character in a pinstriped suit, collar and tie, and a .45 in his belt. And he put the.45 to my head and cocked it and said he was going to kill me and throw me up onto the Black Mountain and put a statement out saying the Orangees†† had killed me. He could have done it, only for the crowd outside the police station, protesting. Gerry’s wife, Colette, was one of them. I was brought into another Portakabin and sat down beside uniformed British soldiers. They had rifles and I was handcuffed … but the soldiers were just curious and they took photographs of me handcuffed to a different soldier. I’ve never come across one of the photographs but I wouldn’t mind doing so. They asked me … what I was going to do. I was a trophy for them and I just said to them, ‘I’m going to escape.’

  … after the interrogation ended we were marched out, put into a Saracen, taken to Castlereagh [RUC station], put in a helicopter and flown to Long Kesh. And it was one of the great experiences, getting out of that helicopter and walking into Long Kesh. All the boys could see us, getting marched in, handcuffed to the British Army. All the boys were cheering. It was such a relief to get there … I was under so much pressure, it was an actual relief to get into Long Kesh. But as soon as I got there I started to plan my escape.

  Notes – 5

  24 http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/publicrecords/1972/index.html#210672

  25 Peter Taylor, Provos: The IRA and Sinn Fein, pp. 143–4.

  26 Sidney Elliott and W. D. Flackes, Northern Ireland: A Political Directory, 1968–1999, p. 184.

  27 http://www.amnesty.org/en/news-and-updates/news/perus-ex-president-convicted-landmark-case-20090407

  28 Author’s meeting with Linskey family members, May 2009.

  29 Gerry Adams, Before the Dawn: An Autobiography, p. 213.

  30 Operation Banner: An Analysis of Military Operations in Northern Ireland, paragraph 308.

  31 Ibid.

  32 http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/written_answers/1994/mar/15/ military-reaction-force

  33 Washington Post, 5 October 2008.

  34 McKittrick et al., Lost Lives, p. 274.

  35 PSNI Ombudsman report, August 2006.

  36 The Sunday Times, 26 November 2000.

  37 Belfast News Letter, 4 June 1973.

  38 Father Denis Faul, Letter to the Guardian, [undated], June 1973.

  39 ‘Long Kesh Camp staff reply to allegations’, Irish News, 25 June 1973.

  40 Irish Times, 12 June 1973.

  41 Irish News, 5 June 1973.

  42 Irish Times, 5 June 1973.

  43 Interview with Anthony McIntyre, former IRA internee, 22 July 2009.

  44 http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/sutton

  45 Correspondence from Dr Peter Hughes, Archivist, Sisters of
Nazareth, Hammersmith, London, 9 May 2009.

  46 Sunday Mirror, 7 October 2001.

  47 Frances Reilly, Suffer the Little Children.

  48 Interview with former Sinn Fein activist, April 2009.

  49 Redacted copy of inquest documents in death of Patrick Crawford, Public Records Office of Northern Ireland, released 1 July 2009.

  50 Telephone interview, 15 July 2009.

  51 Hansard, 11 January 2005, column 197.

  52 Telephone interview, 16 July 2009.

  * Ballymurphy IRA leader shot dead in disputed circumstances, 22 September 1973.