by Ed Moloney
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 eru
pted 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 inflata
ble 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