A Secret History of the IRA

by Ed Moloney

  Such ruthlessness paid off. The loyalist reaction was instant and widespread, fueled in no small way by the cultural and ethnic links many Protestants had with the part of Scotland the soldiers hailed from. Thousands of Protestants marched to the center of Belfast, where the Reverend Ian Paisley led them in an impromptu memorial service; angry Protestant workers in the shipyard laid down tools and joined them. Teenage loyalist bands calling themselves Tartan Gangs in tribute to the dead soldiers appeared on the streets, adding a violent and unpredictable element to the growing unionist unease. Within days the beleaguered Chichester-Clark resigned. The shipyard workers and other loyalists had demanded that IRA leaders be immediately interned, and the Ulster Unionist Party’s choice for their new leader was evidence that this measure was now on the agenda. Brian Faulkner, an ambitious member of both O’Neill’s and Chichester-Clark’s cabinets, had been minister of home affairs during the IRA’s 1956–62 campaign when the use of internment on both sides of the Border had helped end the IRA’s violence. Convinced that internment could and would work again, he promised his hard-line supporters that his would be a law-and-order administration.

  The prospect of internment also alarmed the IRA leadership, especially in Belfast, where the killing of the three Scottish soldiers and Faulkner’s elevation combined to produce leadership changes that would have profound and lasting effects on the course of the Troubles. In April, days after the killings, the Belfast commander Billy McKee and his adjutant, Proinsias MacAirt, or Frank Card, as the British insisted on calling him, fell foul of a new get-tough approach. They were stopped by a military patrol in West Belfast, and their car was searched both by the soldiers and by Scotland Yard detectives, who were on secondment to the military because of the RUC’s inability to operate in nationalist districts. One of the detectives triumphantly brought out an automatic pistol. McKee and MacAirt were arrested and charged. The IRA alleged that the men had been framed. Both men had participated in the secret talks about policing Ballymurphy, and the British knew exactly how important they were. They were also under constant surveillance. A powerful British army searchlight nightly illuminated the front of MacAirt’s house in the Lower Falls, where early brigade staff and other IRA meetings had been held. The pair knew how foolish it would be to drive around the city carrying arms. Their defense, however, was rejected and each was sentenced to five years in jail.

  McKee’s removal created gaps in the Belfast leadership’s battle order. The Second Battalion commander, Joe Cahill, took charge of the Belfast Brigade while Seamus Twomey replaced MacAirt as second in command and was made brigade adjutant. Cahill took McKee’s position on the Army Council, thereby preserving the precedent set at the September 1970 IRA Convention that the Belfast Brigade leadership would be heavily represented at leadership level. Twomey, a veteran of the 1940s’ IRA campaign, had been in charge of building up the Auxiliaries, but now he was set on a course for national prominence. Known as Thumper because of his habit of slamming the table with his fist when angered, Twomey would later leave an indelible imprint on the history of the Troubles.

  McKee’s departure opened opportunities for Gerry Adams. McKee disliked Adams and distrusted his motives for joining the Provisionals, believing that he was secretly sympathetic to the Goulding faction. The April 1970 riots in Ballymurphy had soured relations between them even further; Adams’s defiance had angered McKee, and it was clear that as long as McKee was in charge of Belfast, Adams’s chances of promotion would be slim. “He always thought of him as a Stick,” *recalled a contemporary.8

  Temperamentally the two were at opposite poles. McKee was first and foremost an operator and believed that the best way to lead was by example. When the Short Strand was under attack in June 1970, he immediately drove over from West Belfast to take his place beside the East Belfast IRA, crouching behind crumbling headstones to return the fire of loyalist snipers. The wounds he received that night left him with a permanent illness. Adams on the other hand led more from behind, earning a name not for his physical courage or operational valor but for his organizing abilities and tactical canniness.

  The British army had unwittingly cleared the way for Adams to rise through the ranks. Not only was McKee now out of the picture, but the elevation of Joe Cahill, a longtime IRA contemporary and friend of Gerry Adams Sr., meant that Adams had a friend at the top of the organization. As new Belfast commander, Cahill had the right to appoint his own commanders, and so in April 1971 he put Adams in charge of the Second Battalion. Adams had been Second Battalion adjutant when Cahill was battalion commander and according to one contemporary had managed to exercise “great influence” over his superior officer.9 Now Cahill’s old job was his, while Seamus Twomey became Cahill’s new deputy, the adjutant of Belfast Brigade. Twomey was another friend of the Adams family, and both he and Cahill looked to Adams as someone who knew the minds of young Volunteers who were now flocking to the IRA. Adams’s influence over Cahill and Twomey gave him a line right into the Army Council. Only fourteen months after the birth of the Provisional IRA, Gerry Adams’s voice would be heard, albeit indirectly, in its highest councils.

  The appointment of Faulkner and events on the streets combined to put the Belfast Brigade, and in particular the Second Battalion, in combative mode. It was clear that Faulkner would press the British to introduce internment, and since the IRA itself, from bitter experience, knew how effective a weapon it could be, it was important that the threat was met correctly. Adams realized that the great weakness of the British was their lack of hard intelligence on the burgeoning IRA. The no-go areas in Belfast limited the ability to mount searches, screenings, and various other surveillance and information-gathering exercises while the IRA itself had changed radically, expanding way beyond the small, well-known family networks of the 1940s and 1950s to include people who had no republican background and were unknown to the RUC’s intelligence wing, the Special Branch.

  Adams decided to force the pace, as a contemporary recalled:

  [I]n the Second Battalion, the leadership, which was making much of the running at that time, were aware that internment was on the way in so we took a strategic decision to force the British hand on the matter. We mounted a concerted bombing campaign against the barracks in the battalion area. Some of them we bombed two or three times. We could not afford to allow them to bring in internment when they were ready. Had it been introduced a year later the British would very probably have had their intelligence act together and would have hit us badly. We knew at the time that their intelligence was bad so it was to our advantage to force internment much sooner than they would have liked.10

  The official explanation given by the IRA for launching its bombing campaign in April 1971 was twofold—it would stretch the British army on the ground, and it would inflict economic damage, which the exchequer in London would have to pay for.11 But the truth was that the IRA wanted to force Britain into premature and hasty action. The number of bombing operations, mostly in Belfast, steadily rose: 37 in April, 47 in May, 50 in June, and 91 in July. The targets were not just military and police bases but increasingly included government and commercial premises.

  As the summer progressed, the pressure for internment and on Faulkner grew. In the early hours of the Twelfth of July, ten bombs exploded along the route in Belfast to be used by Orangemen later in the day. During the same week a brand-new printing plant built on the western edges of Belfast for the Irish edition of the popular British tabloid the Daily Mirror was destroyed in a daylight raid by a large IRA force. The bombing was a serious blow to Faulkner’s policy of attracting foreign investment to his ailing economy. By then the number of British troops on duty in Northern Ireland exceeded ten thousand, and the Tory home secretary, Reginald Maudling, declared that a state of “open war” now existed between the IRA and British forces. Faulkner calculated that if he did not get internment he was doomed, while the British still saw propping him up as preferable to dismantling unionist rule, a course they
feared would cause more Protestant unrest.

  On August 9, 1971, a day earlier than planned because of widespread rioting in Belfast, troops raided hundreds of homes in the hope of arresting and interning IRA leaders and activists. But the operation was every bit as disastrous and counterproductive for the British as Gerry Adams and his colleagues in the Second Battalion had hoped. As they had forecast, RUC Special Branch and British army intelligence on the IRA was either hopelessly out of date or inaccurate, and only a few handfuls of activists were rounded up in the initial swoop. Forced into premature action, the British army seized people who were in no significant way central to the IRA’s war effort. The IRA also had excellent intelligence and knew several days beforehand that the raid was about to happen. “Those capable of running an effective war machine escaped,” recalled one of Adams’s Second Battalion colleagues, “and went on to direct the war.”12 To rub salt in the British wounds, Joe Cahill held a press conference in the heart of Ballymurphy right under the noses of patrolling troops to declare that the IRA was intact. The press conference was organized by Gerry Adams, who had taken on the role of media adviser to the Belfast commander. It was evidence of Adams’s great media and PR skills, which he would put to good use throughout his career.

  Internment was a triumph for the IRA in political terms as well, not least because it had been introduced in such a completely one-sided way that its effect was to enormously increase nationalist alienation on both sides of the Border. Although loyalist violence was also growing, the operation was directed solely against republicans, and even then political activists who were in no way associated with the IRA, student civil rights leaders, for instance, were included in the swoop. In Dublin the prime minister, Jack Lynch, had been toying with the notion of introducing the measure in tandem with Faulkner but the one-sided nature of the Northern operation meant he had little choice but to abandon the idea. As sympathy for their cause in the Republic exploded, IRA fugitives could now find sanctuary across the Border, safe in the knowledge that the Gardai would not throw them behind bars. Internment also pushed the levels of violence to record heights. Sectarian rioting flared across the city, driving up to seven thousand Catholics and two thousand Protestants from their homes, while for several days fierce gun battles raged, in many cases pitting loyalists and British soldiers together against the IRA. Once again the IRA could boast that it had answered the call to defend Catholic areas.

  The figures spoke for themselves. In the whole seven months up to August 9, 34 people had been killed in conflict-related incidents, but in just three days following internment 22 people died violently. The death rate continued at a high level afterward; a further 118 were to die during the rest of the year, an average of nearly one a day. In Ballymurphy, British troops were involved in two days of savage gunfire and violence, which left a Catholic priest and 7 civilians dead, shot in circumstances that led to allegations the troops had killed with wanton abandon. There was little doubt that internment had exacerbated the violence.

  The consequent alienation and anger in the Nationalist community took two catastrophic forms. Scores of young men and women, eager to strike back, flocked to the IRA, while older and more moderate nationalists registered their disgust by resigning from public positions. At Stormont, the nationalist opposition party, a pro-reform coalition called the Social Democratic and Labour Party, or SDLP, had already withdrawn in protest against British security policy, but now its leaders announced plans to establish a rival parliament. Internment had united Northern Catholics against the state in a way nothing else had done since 1921. It also soiled Britain’s name abroad and brought protests from respected human rights activists and intellectuals. Special interrogation methods used against twelve of those arrested landed Britain in the European Court of Human Rights, accused by the Republic of Ireland’s government of breaching the human rights charter and found guilty, the first of many occasions in which events in Northern Ireland would see an embarrassed British government carpeted at the international tribunal.

  As the violence intensified and it became clear that internment had failed, unionists looked elsewhere for scapegoats and revived an old favorite—the IRA, they said, was still active because the Border with the Irish Republic was wide open. This simplistic conclusion flew in the face of the reality that most of the violence was taking place in Belfast, at least forty miles from the Irish Republic and rather too far for lightning cross-Border raids. Nonetheless in mid-October the British army obliged unionist anxieties and began to crater Border roads with explosives in an effort to make them unusable. In response, angry members of local farming communities who needed the road links to conduct day-to-day business promptly filled in the craters. The British army would arrive to stop them and there would be riots, often spread across fields.

  The effect of all this was to antagonize a broad swath of rural Catholics and to energize the IRA outside Belfast, in Counties Tyrone, Armagh, and Fermanagh in particular, where new units, battalions, and brigades of Provisionals were formed or expanded. Existing units that were still unsure of their allegiance after the 1969 split now decided to plump for the Provisionals. Internment enlarged the IRA into a six-county-wide army and transformed it into a force that could now seriously challenge British rule in Northern Ireland.

  Inasmuch as Gerry Adams’s Second Battalion had, by its bombing and his strategic foresight, helped to precipitate this disaster for British policy in Northern Ireland, the IRA had benefited from his strategic talents, and this enormously boosted his standing within the IRA. Cahill and Twomey became even more dependent upon his advice. Not the least of the effects of internment was that the IRA’s ranks were filled with new, angry, young recruits. The folklore of the IRA at this time is full of stories of young men and women rushing to join, some returning from as far away as North America and Britain. Numbers in the Second Battalion in particular soared, and soon its four companies were each able to field up to 100 volunteers. D Coy led the way with 120 members on active service at one point. By the end of 1971 the IRA in the whole of Belfast was more than 1,200 strong, a far cry from August 1969 when the entire organization was hard-pressed to mobilize more than 50.

  With its ranks bloated, the IRA went on the offensive. All units, not just those in Belfast, were encouraged to take part in a commercial bombing campaign against businesses and offices. IRA operations multiplied. The number of bombings rose to nearly 200 in September 1971, the first full month after internment. In its official history the IRA claimed that all but a tiny number of the violent incidents, shootings as well as bombings, logged by the British after August 9 were its responsibility: 999 in September, 864 in October, 694 in November, and 765 in December.13 One weekend in November saw no fewer than 100 IRA attacks, 60 of them carried out on the first day.14 The death toll also soared. Killings by the IRA climbed to 86 in 1971, more than four times the number in the preceding two years, while those ascribed to the British army rose by more than sixfold, to 45. Forty-four soldiers were killed in 1971, more than two-thirds of them after August 9, while IRA casualties rose threefold, to 23, all but 4 of whom died after internment. Civilians made up the largest category of violent deaths, as they would throughout the Troubles; 92 died in 1971, compared with 16 since 1969.15

  During all this time Gerry Adams led a highly furtive and clandestine existence. This was especially so after August 9, when British troops raided widely in West Belfast in the hope of catching those who had escaped the first swoops. Like other senior IRA figures, he moved from one safe house to another to sleep and eat—“billets,” in IRA language—and not always in the Second Battalion area. It was during this period that some IRA leaders realized that South Belfast, a mixed, mostly middle-class area with a large transient student population, was an ideal hiding ground, and they based themselves here. When it was necessary to talk to other members of his battalion staff or to pass on instructions, Adams used “call houses,” operational HQs in the houses of sympathizers in Wes
t Belfast, where it was considered safe to meet but not to stay overnight.

  Generally, as he related in his autobiography, he rarely ventured onto the streets during daylight hours. As a result Adams was something of a mystery figure to the British army. The Ballymurphy riots had made him a well-known IRA personality, but his precise rank and status in the organization remained a puzzle to the authorities. One former British intelligence officer recalled the poverty of intelligence on him. “We had a trace on Adams as Second Battalion staff, Lower Falls, St. James, the Rock, and Ballymurphy, but not much more than that. We had no trace of his involvement in any act of violence except what you would call B2 grade; in fact we didn’t have much intelligence on him at all. We certainly didn’t know where he was when he was ‘on the run.’”16

  The British army was not even very sure what Gerry Adams looked like. Only one photograph of him existed; it showed a bespectacled, clean-shaven figure wearing an IRA beret at the funeral of the Provisional icon Jimmy Steele, whose coffin he had helped to carry. Now that he wore a beard his appearance was an even greater mystery. Adams’s own story seems to bear this out. In his autobiography he writes that British soldiers kidnapped his pet dog, which they took with them on patrol around Ballymurphy, apparently in the hope that the animal would identify him. Had they been sure what he looked like, that would not have been necessary. His account of his life in this period is littered with stories of near-escapes, of being stopped, questioned, and let go by British patrols who failed to recognize that one of the most senior figures in the Belfast IRA had just slipped through their fingers.

  At rank-and-file level in the IRA it was a different story. Adams was beginning to acquire a celebrity status that he strengthened by placing a distance between himself and ordinary IRA Volunteers. He was never one to go for a drink with the lads or to hang around the many illegal drinking clubs that were sprouting up all over West Belfast. And he acquired a prestigious nickname to fit his image, as one IRA contemporary remembered: “Adams was talked about with great reverence. It was ‘The Big Lad says this and the Big Lad says that.’ Adams loved being called the Big Lad because it evoked images of Michael Collins, the Big Fella.”17