by Ed Moloney
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 r
est 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 m
ost 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?