I did, however, become increasingly concerned about Angie’s mother, because she began asking questions about the cost of our new car and all the work carried out on the house. She would tell Angie that she was surprised that a young unemployed man like me, with no job, could have found such an amount of money, not only to spend so much on our new home but also to have had enough funds to buy a smart two-year-old car which she knew had cost over £3,000.
Without thinking, I made another mistake a couple of weeks later. I bought Angie a £300 double pram for the kids, and gave her a further £200 for clothes for her and the children.
Her mother saw the bundle of notes in Angie’s handbag one day and, with some concern in her voice, said, ‘I don’t know how your Marty does it? He’s just spent a fortune on the house and now he gives you all this money. Where does he get it all from?’
‘I don’t know,’ Angie replied. ‘I never know where his money comes from. He’s always out working.’
More worrying, however, would be the fact that Davy Adams, who often called round to visit me, began cracking jokes when he visited our newly furnished home. I began to suspect that I had been foolish, even stupid, to spend so much money in one go. When he came to visit us, I watched to see if our new home, with all the redecorations, aroused any suspicions. Davy did make some jokes about our new furniture, at one point pretending to be concerned when he spilt some milk on the kitchen floor. He never asked any questions directly nor suggested how I was able to afford such luxuries, yet I felt increasingly awkward whenever he came round.
‘Have you been robbing banks?’ he joked on one occasion and that made me feel paranoid. I had always respected Davy’s intelligence. If anyone was going to put two and two together, I knew it would be Davy. And I knew what the consequences would be.
From time to time, other IRA members would call at the house and they all seemed highly impressed with our new home. Some made comments suggesting that I must be into drugs or had a secret supply of money. None suggested, however, that I might be working for the RUC, but I would always wonder if the thought crossed their minds.
Whenever they asked awkward questions, I would suggest that Angie and I had been saving for some years and had now decided to splash out.
But I wondered whether, behind my back, they were beginning to speculate as to the real source of all my money.
CHAPTER TEN
THROUGHOUT THE TWO YEARS that I worked with the intelligence wing of the IRA, I would learn many of the organisation’s intimate secrets, as well as discovering the detailed command structure responsible for finance, planning, intelligence, ordnance and the operations at street level where the bombings and shootings took place.
During the late 1980s and the 1990s, Sinn Fein, the political wing of the republican cause, worked hard to distance itself from the Provisional IRA, the military wing which was prepared to shoot and bomb their way to their ultimate goal of a United Ireland.
And no one worked harder at this than Gerry Adams, the President of Sinn Fein since 1983, a man who believed that Sinn Fein should become more involved in and committed to a wide range of political activity at community level. In the early 1980s, Sinn Fein decided that they should enter the political arena, putting up candidates in democratic elections, hoping to prove that they had a mandate from the Northern Ireland electorate. By 1983, Sinn Fein received 13 per cent of the vote throughout the north, and in the 1983 British parliamentary election, Gerry Adams was elected as Member of Parliament for West Belfast which he continued to represent until 1992.
Adams set out to secure the support of the West Belfast voters by pushing for housing campaigns, which in time culminated in the wholesale demolition of old houses and flats and the building of new homes. At the same time as initiating social, economic and cultural issues, Adams sought to open discussion and public debate about the achievement of peace through dialogue and a democratic settlement.
In 1986, Adams claimed that a military stalemate existed between the IRA and the British Army, which he maintained could only be resolved by a political settlement. So he launched a peace strategy, engaging in talks with church and reconciliation groups in Northern Ireland.
Throughout his years as a Member of Parliament, Gerry Adams tried to distance the political party from the bombs and the bullets of the IRA, which throughout those nine years continued to claim the lives of innocent people. He would claim that he had no links with the organisation.
But Adams was denying his past. In the early 1970s, the young Adams’ organisational skills were recognised by the then leadership of the Provisional IRA, and he was promoted to Quartermaster of the Ballymurphy Battalion, the man ultimately responsible for storing and issuing weapons, ammunition and bomb-making materials to active service units.
He would later be appointed Officer Commanding the Provisional IRA in Ballymurphy, the man primarily responsible for the IRA offensive in that area. In a ten month period, when Adams held the position of Officer Commanding the 2nd Battalion, a total of 52 people were murdered, including soldiers, police and civilians. As a result of those ‘successes’, Adams was promoted, becoming Commander of the IRA’s foremost operational command, the Provisional IRA Belfast Brigade, with three Battalions under his authority.
I witnessed at first hand the constant interplay between Sinn Fein and the IRA during the years when Gerry Adams claimed there was no link between the two organisations. Despite denying any link between the two organisations, Adams himself was not only President of Sinn Fein but was also a member of the seven-man Provisional IRA Army Council, the authority responsible for strategy and planning of both Sinn Fein policies and tactics, and all military operations.
Martin McGuinness would also later hold dual roles – as Chief Negotiator for Sinn Fein, as well as being one of the most influential members of the IRA Army Council. In 1974, he was found guilty of membership of the Provisional IRA before a Dublin court, and was given a six-month jail sentence. In court, he said he was the commanding officer of the ‘Derry Brigade of the IRA for two years. McGuinness would later return to jail, again for being an IRA member.
During my years inside the IRA, a number of senior provo intelligence officers confirmed to me that, during the late 1980s and early 1990s, McGuinness had been Head of the IRA Northern Command, one of the most senior positions throughout the entire IRA organisation.
More disgracefully and, I would suggest, more sickening, was the fact that McGuinness was widely known in the ‘Derry area of Northern Ireland to have been responsible for the loss of several people’s lives, as well as being the authority behind many savage punishment beatings.
Over recent years, it has been extraordinary to hear the Sinn Fein leadership declaring to British and American politicians, as well as the media, that they had no knowledge of the decisions taken by the IRA Army Council, while both Adams and McGuinness were Council members.
The IRA Army Council also decides when a ceasefire will commence and finish, when bombing campaigns will be conducted, and whether those campaigns should be aimed at targets in the Province or on the mainland. Adams and McGuinness would have been among those directly responsible for taking the decision to declare a ceasefire, as well as deciding when the ceasefire would end and the bombing recommence.
And that working relationship between the IRA and Sinn Fein would reach from the top to the very bottom of both organisations. To many working for either the IRA or Sinn Fein, the two organisations often seemed indistinguishable, because many people worked for both the military and political wings. To those inside both organisations, there is no doubt whatsoever that the military and political wings work closely together. And yet Sinn Fein continues to deny the relationship.
One example of how closely the two work together was revealed during the British Parliamentary or local Northern Ireland elections. During the years, I would become involved in helping the Sinn Fein cause, along with many other young men and women, many of whom were member
s of the IRA.
From their headquarters in Connolly House, Belfast, Sinn Fein organisers would try, with the assistance of the IRA, to do everything in their power to rig the elections. The plan would be to distribute false identification papers to IRA men and women and other republican sympathisers, and send them around to a number of polling stations so that they could cast votes in perhaps six to ten different places.
The problem would be identification. One way Sinn Fein circumvented this problem was by asking the IRA to steal a large quantity of brand-new medical cards, which the young IRA workers would then fill out with various false names and addresses, filling in dates and places of birth which would not arouse suspicion with the officers at the various polling stations.
On election day, fleets of taxis would be hired, which would then drive around the city dropping people off near various polling stations. They would then walk the short distance to the polling station, produce their medical cards as evidence of identification, date of birth and address and would be permitted to vote.
The taxis would then take their ‘voters’ off to another station and would continue this process for most of the day.
It was, of course, difficult to estimate how many illegal votes were cast in this way but there would certainly have been around a thousand or more, often enough to swing a local election. Even if the Sinn Fein candidate didn’t win, the large Sinn Fein turnout gave Gerry Adams and the organisation a certain mandate, claiming increasing support for the republican cause.
I would spend election days with Sinn Fein and IRA sympathisers, driving from polling station to polling station. Most of the young men and women volunteers considered the whole business great fun, particularly as their efforts would result in one of their own Sinn Fein candidates being voted into power to the chagrin and surprise of other law abiding candidates.
There were more sinister operations going on, however, which continue to have serious repercussions in Northern Ireland, and which could not only endanger many lives, but also provide the IRA with valuable information.
The IRA intelligence wing, with the approval of the IRA Army Council, decided on a major long-term campaign to infiltrate many organisations throughout the Province, including the Department of Health and Social Security, the major high street banks and building societies, British Telecom, the vehicle licensing centre in Coleraine, the Post Office, leading insurance companies, universities and travel agents.
I was led to understand that, by 1991, the republican sympathisers, including many Sinn Fein activists who had been recruited and, in some cases, trained to infiltrate the various organisations, had successfully penetrated these institutions and businesses and were now in place. They would remain as ‘sleepers’, waiting to be activated whenever their IRA masters needed their help in providing information.
Some sympathisers were encouraged to become computer experts so that they could find positions in organisations where access to computer files would provide the IRA with most of the information required to target members of the RUC, the security forces, prison staff and anyone the IRA decided they wanted to nail. It seems that the great majority of these men and women are still employed in the organisations, and are capable of handing over information which would put their targets at risk from attack. One phone call or late-night visit would be sufficient for the information to be ‘requested’ and provided, more often than not, within 24 hours the vital information would have been passed to the IRA’s intelligence wing.
One IRA man, a schoolteacher, has a part-time job and is employed and paid a monthly wage by the intelligence wing of the IRA Belfast Brigade, spending his spare time feeding information into a computer; details of thousands of men and women whom the IRA believe that it might want to target at some future date.
Every known detail is contained on computer floppy discs, which list an extensive range of Northern Irish citizens, including senior officers of the RUC and the Royal Irish Rangers, judges and lawyers, prison officers, Loyalist paramilitaries, building contractors and politicians of Unionist parties. The information includes their positions, ranks and precise occupations, their place of work and, more importantly, their private addresses and telephone numbers. The make, model and age of their cars, including the registration number and tax dates, are also often included on the disk.
But as well as gathering as much information as possible on potential targets, the IRA decided in the 1980s to change its entire command structure from the battalion-strength strategy, employing perhaps 40 people, to the far more secure and clandestine plan of working in separate cells of only eight people. This caused the security forces far greater problems, because infiltrating agents into so many cells proved almost impossible.
When cell commanders sometimes became suspicious that one of their members might be a British agent, arrangements would first be made to track down the spy and question him, and then the cell would be disbanded, its members fading away into the community until contacted some weeks or months later to carry out other IRA tasks.
The man whom they believed to be betraying the cause, however, would face a hell on earth. Several times, IRA investigators would target the wrong man and no matter how much he pleaded his innocence, his interrogators would beat a confession out of him. Whenever someone ‘confessed’, regardless of whether he was innocent or guilty, the sentence, would always be the same – one or two bullets in the back of the head. Some suspects would face up to seven weeks of horrific interrogation and torture before being executed.
Throughout my years inside the IRA, there was always a desperate shortage of good-quality, modern hand-guns. The IRA had ample supplies of AK-47s, hundreds of which had been supplied virtually free of charge by the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organisation) and Colonel Gaddafi of Libya.
A few of these were kept in ‘dumps’, in the roof spaces of safe houses dotted around Belfast and ‘Derry. The vast majority of AK-47s, however, had been buried in protective wrapping in dumps around Northern Ireland, particularly in South Armagh, the border county where the IRA had established a virtual no-go area for British troops and the RUC.
Whenever individual IRA cells needed more weapons and supplies of Semtex, arrangements would be made for the necessary equipment to be collected from IRA dumps in the Republic. A convoy would be formed – some cars would be bought or borrowed for the trip south, others would be hijacked. Usually, three cell members would call at houses where they knew there were reliable cars, the families would be held at gun-point and the cars would be taken. The families would not be released until the cars were returned later that day.
One such convoy of five cars was convened in Dundalk
in the autumn of 1990. Two of the cars were loaded with AK-47s and Semtex, which were being moved to safe arms dumps in and around Belfast. Two of the remaining cars led the convoy as ‘scouts’, and the fifth car brought up the rear, acting as ‘tail-end Charlie’.
The five cars, driving about a hundred yards apart, made their way through the back roads to a border crossing where they knew there was no RUC crossing or army checkpoint. The convoy then made its way to Belfast via Newry to Hillsborough, joining the M1 at Lisburn for the drive to Andersonstown in West Belfast.
Before leaving Belfast, the cell commander would brief the drivers, telling them that under no circumstances were they to risk being caught with the arms in their possession. ‘We can always get more arms and Semtex,’ he told them, ‘but we can’t afford to lose valuable members.’
The drivers, were also told that they should never use their indicators, whether turning off the road or overtaking. These were only to be used if it looked as though the Army or RUC were about to act or, of course, if they came across a road block. If the drivers carrying the equipment saw a light flashing on one of their leading scout cars, they were instructed to take the first available turning. If they were on the motorway, however, with no slip-road nearby, the drivers were to abandon their cars and walk back a few
yards to be picked up by the tail-end vehicle. The run in autumn 1990, only one of many, went without a hitch.
The excellent AK-47, though, was no good for the great majority of operations undertaken by active service units – they were bulky, difficult to conceal and useless at close quarters. Except for sniper work, hand-guns were preferred in nearly all circumstances. As a result, IRA activists became remarkably attached to their hand-guns, loath to loan them out to other cells.
The IRA organised sympathisers in Glasgow, Manchester and London to contact known villains and buy the guns on the black market. After the fall of the Soviet Union, hand-guns were also bought from gangsters in Moscow, mostly weapons stolen from the former Soviet bloc forces. There would, however, never be sufficient for the IRA’s purposes.
There was also a severe shortage of detonators, too. The IRA had access to as much Semtex bomb-making material as they could use. The problem was acquiring reliable detonators. On a number of occasions during my years with the IRA, a few active service bombing operations were postponed, and others cancelled, because there was no available detonators.
IRA bomb-makers were encouraged to construct home-made detonators, but these would often prove embarrassingly unreliable. Several times, IRA members risked carrying out a bombing only to find that the detonator was ineffective and the operation a waste of time.
As a result, orders were issued to the effect that detonators should be assembled by bomb-makers in batches of ten, so that three or four of them could be tested – exploded, in effect – hopefully ensuring that the home-made detonator would perform correctly when the bomb was laid. If two or three tests proved negative, then the whole batch would be scrapped and the bomb-maker would start again from scratch. The problem caused anger and frustration among the highest echelons of the IRA.
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