by Ed Moloney
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 bee
n 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.
PART ONE
The Dogs of War
British troops take cover from an IRA bomb attack in Belfast in the early 1970s. (Pacemaker Press, Belfast)
ONE
Roots
The Northern Ireland state created by the Anglo-Irish war of 1919– 21 and the subsequent settlement agreed by the British prime minister, Lloyd George, and Irish republican leaders was not much more than a quarter of a century old when, on October 6, 1948, Annie Adams gave birth to her first son and christened him Gerry after her husband. The centuries-old struggle for Irish independence had burst into violent guerrilla warfare between the IRA and the British just as the First World War ended, and although the rebellion was widespread and popular in a way unmatched in Irish history, it was only partially successful. When the two sides, exhausted by their bloody efforts, finally agreed to sit down and negotiate a settlement, the deal that emerged, the Treaty, as it would forever be known, eventually gave most of Ireland—twenty-six of its thirty-two counties—political freedom from Britain. But six counties, Northern Ireland, stayed British at the insistence of their large Protestant and unionist majority. By October 1948 Northern Ireland was enjoying peace, albeit an uneasy one. But trapped inside the state into which Gerry Adams was born was a significant Catholic and nationalist minority, a third of Northern Ireland’s one and a half million people, whose oppressive treatment at the hands of the unionists ensured that there would always be a role for the IRA and an audience for its seditious gospel.