by Ed Moloney
Elaborate planning went into the bombs that would be placed in London. Although Chief of Staff Sean MacStiofain was told about the plan and approved it, GHQ’s involvement from Dublin was kept to a minimum, not least because the clannish Belfast IRA did not fully trust their Southern colleagues. The date of March 8 was chosen deliberately, for it was the day on which a British government-organized poll to decide whether the Border should be retained was to be held. With the result a foregone conclusion, thanks to Northern Ireland’s built-in Protestant majority, it was the IRA’s way of showing contempt for the idea that unionist consent should ever be a precondition of Irish unity.
The choice of bombing team was to prove controversial. Among the six IRA members who went to London were two young sisters, nineteen-year-old Marion Price and her twenty-two-year-old sister, Dolours, from a staunchly republican family in West Belfast. They had been among the first to volunteer for the mission. The Price sisters had been brought up in a family atmosphere in which sacrifice to the republican ideal had been sanctified. An aunt had been cruelly maimed in the cause, losing her sight and both hands in a bombing that had gone wrong in the 1956–62 campaign. MacStiofain objected, saying that they were too young and that both couldn’t go, because they were sisters. He relented only when one of them became visibly upset.55 The operations organizers in Belfast, by contrast, had expressed no such qualms, and they were sent on the mission.
The bombings duly went ahead. Car bombs were driven over on the Dublin–Liverpool ferry and taken down to London, where at 9:00 A.M. they were parked beside their targets. March 8, 1973, was not an abnormal day by the standards of the time in Northern Ireland. That morning a twenty-one-year-old British soldier was shot dead by an IRA sniper as he guarded a polling station in West Belfast; a thirty-one-year-old soldier shot earlier in the week in South Armagh died in hospital of his wounds; and the body of a forty-five-year-old married Catholic man was found in a Protestant district of North Belfast, shot in the head, apparently by loyalist gunmen. Six bombs exploded in Belfast that day and five in Derry, but it was the blasts in London that captured the world headlines. One car bomb detonated outside the Old Bailey courthouse and another exploded in Whitehall, at the epicenter of the British government. One man died of a heart attack and 180 people were injured. The IRA had bombed targets in England before, during the Forties Campaign, but never on this scale in London. Now, as a result of the efforts of the Belfast Brigade, the IRA’s war had come to Britain, and the extent of the subsequent media coverage taught the IRA a lesson its members would never forget: one bomb in London was worth a dozen in Belfast.
The bombing team had, however, made a simple error that caused its downfall. The group had fitted false British license plates to the cars ferrying the bombs before they arrived in Liverpool but had made them up randomly. What they had failed to realize was that British plates were year coded, and the age of the cars did not match the code on the plates. An alert police patrol noticed that a car parked outside Scotland Yard, the headquarters of the London metropolitan police, had the wrong plates and raised the alarm. The second car bomb, parked in the West End, was discovered in the same way, and both devices were defused several hours before they were due to go off. The police headed straight for Heathrow Airport, where they found the bombing team queuing for the flight to Belfast. The plan had been that the bombers would all be safely back in West Belfast by the time the car bombs detonated, but it had all gone badly wrong.
It looked as if a simple oversight at the planning stage had landed the London bombers in jail, but there is evidence to suggest that the operation had been compromised somewhere in Ireland. The Belfast Brigade’s original plan had been to take ten bombs over to London, but that was scaled down to six, one for each member of the team. Two days before the bombs were set, a decision was made to reduce the number to four, after British customs officers had taken a close interest in one of the car bombs as it was driven off the Dublin–Liverpool ferry. A message was sent to the Belfast Brigade to leave the fifth and sixth car bombs in Ireland, just in case the customs interest was more sinister.56
It later became clear that the British knew all about this change of plan. At the bombing team’s trial, depositions from the prosecution side revealed that British police had sent out a bomb alert warning of four devices—not the six or ten in the IRA’s original plans—and had sealed ports and airports at 6:00 A.M. on the day of the bombings, long before the bombs had even been put in place. The intelligence was very specific and suggested the existence of an agent somewhere at the top of the organization. In addition, the police had distributed photographs of the Price sisters with instructions to stop them—it was clear that the police in Britain knew not only that a bombing was planned but who was involved. The evidence appeared to point to a serious leak somewhere in the Belfast Brigade, but attempts to hold an internal investigation into the affair were resisted.
THE NET HAD CLOSED over the London bombers, and in a wider sense it was also closing in on the Provisionals. On the political front the fracture within nationalism brought about by the fall of Stormont deepened. Whitelaw cajoled the SDLP into talks and won the party’s support with a promise that any deal negotiated would need to embrace “the Irish dimension” and that other nationalist concerns would have to be addressed. In March 1973 Whitelaw published a white paper that recommended a power-sharing form of government that would give the SDLP a guaranteed say in running Northern Ireland. There would also be a Council of Ireland to give meaning to the Irish dimension.
The principle of consent—the doctrine that Northern Ireland would stay British as long as a majority wanted—was reaffirmed, but there were other, balancing concessions for Catholics. Oaths of allegiance to the British crown, which were obligatory for civil servants, teachers, and local councillors and which Catholics considered discriminatory, were abolished. Most nationalists found Whitelaw’s proposals to their liking, and gradually the middle classes dropped their post-internment boycott of the state and returned to public life. There were other positive developments to encourage the Catholic middle class. In mid-1973 the first loyalist paramilitaries were interned, thus answering a long-standing nationalist complaint that the implementation of internment had been biased and one-sided.
The Provisionals meantime sought refuge in ideological purity and as a consequence became more isolated. In January 1973 Sinn Fein announced that it would boycott local council elections planned for later in the year. These went ahead, and the SDLP managed to establish itself as the North’s largest nationalist party. In June an SDLP councillor became mayor of Derry, once the capital city of unionist discrimination. When elections were held to Whitelaw’s power-sharing Assembly, the IRA urged nationalists either to boycott the poll or to spoil their votes. Another Stormont parliament would hinder the achievement of “a just and lasting peace,” it said.57 Most nationalists ignored the IRA and voted. The SDLP got a mandate, 22 percent of the votes and one-fifth of the seats. When the results came in, the SDLP leader in Derry, John Hume, declared, “The IRA have now heard the voice of the people and it is time they listened.”58
Operation Motorman had meanwhile tightened the British army’s grip on the previously unchallenged no-go areas of republican Belfast and curtailed the IRA’s freedom of movement. The numbers of IRA suspects arrested and either interned or charged with criminal offenses increased steadily, according to official claims: one hundred by November 1972, a thousand by the following April. In June 1973 the Northern Ireland Office claimed that 500 IRA members had been convicted and sentenced since Motorman, eight of whom had been given life sentences, the rest an average of four years in jail apiece. Slowly the number interned fell—it stood at 450 in early 1973 but at 330 in June—as the British relied increasingly on the courts to put their adversaries out of action.
By this time Adams had found a safe billet in the University area in neutral South Belfast where he lived with Colette, by now expecting their first son, Gearo
id. Like some sort of revolutionary commuter, Adams traveled daily from the safety of his middle-class hideout into the war zone of West Belfast to direct IRA operations. The fact that the IRA’s senior figure in Belfast was now unable to live among his own people was eloquent testimony to the extent to which events had put the IRA on the defensive.
On July 18, another signal that the IRA’s fortunes were slipping came when the Northern Ireland Constitution Bill, a product of Whitelaw’s political negotiations, became law and enshrined once again in section 1, part 1, the principle of consent, that Northern Ireland would remain part of Northern Ireland unless and until a majority of people voted otherwise in a poll. The passage of the bill symbolized the gravity of the political reverses suffered by the IRA since the suspension of the Stormont parliament in March 1972. The British move to strip unionism of power had succeeded in dividing nationalism and diluting opposition to the state, while the IRA’s stubborn support for violence alienated more and more Catholics.
The largest section of nationalism, represented by the SDLP, which was supported by the Catholic middle classes and church hierarchy, welcomed British direct rule and quickly entered into talks with the British and eventually the unionists about a deal that at its core would, inevitably, recognize the constitutional integrity of Northern Ireland. It was a decisive break with the Provisionals. The Catholic middle-class boycott of the institutions of Northern Ireland, which had begun in sympathy with and protest against the internment of IRA men in August 1971, slowly evaporated, and soon constitutional nationalist politicians and Catholic clerics would be condemning IRA violence with the gusto and vehemence they had once reserved for British excesses.
PART TWO
Taking On the Old Guard
Gerry Adams speaks to jubilant supporters after his election as Westminster MP for West Belfast in June 1983. (Derek Speirs/Report, Dublin)
FOUR
Cage 11
At around the same time on July 18, 1973, that Queen Elizabeth signed Whitelaw’s Constitution Bill into law, a British army patrol was briefed to carry out one of the most important arrest operations of the Troubles so far: the capture of most of the Belfast Brigade’s key staff. Early the following morning Adams, his operations officer, Brendan Hughes, and another staff officer, Tom Cahill, arrived at the appointed call house in the Iveagh district of the Falls Road, and this was the signal for the soldiers to swoop. Adams, Cahill, and Hughes were dragged off to Springfield Road RUC barracks, where another senior brigade officer, Owen Coogan, joined them not long afterward.
Adams was stripped and for several hours was badly beaten by his interrogators. Eventually the beatings ended, and Adams and his comrades were trussed up and then photographed, almost as if they were prize trophies, before being flown by helicopter to Long Kesh internment camp. When Adams was welcomed once again by IRA comrades into the huts and cages of Long Kesh, it was two days short of the first anniversary of Bloody Friday.
The IRA was never quite sure how the British army knew about the brigade staff meeting in Iveagh, but it was clear that a well-placed informer had been at work. The loss of the Brigade staff made this a disastrous day for the IRA, but worse was to come. Only hours after the capture of Adams, Hughes, Cahill, and Coogan, the entire Third Battalion staff was arrested at a house in Ardoyne in North Belfast. That day the Belfast IRA saw at least sixteen of its most skilled and experienced leaders incarcerated by the British.
It was not until two years later that the identity of the informer responsible for these losses was established with any certainty, and by then the damage he had done elsewhere to the Provisional IRA’s personnel, resources, and structures was irreparable. The informer’s activities were to have major long-term significance for the IRA, but they were also eloquent testimony to the IRA’s failure in Belfast to sustain the brief counterintelligence successes enjoyed under Adams’s command. The Four Square Laundry operation of late 1972 had been a flash in the pan.
The name of the informer was eventually pieced together in the Long Kesh prison camp, where IRA inmates worked out that their brigade quartermaster in Belfast, Eamon Molloy, was the one figure who had featured in each of their sad stories. A message was smuggled out to trusted colleagues suggesting that he should be closely questioned, and Molloy was tricked into admitting his secret role. Under interrogation he confessed that he had been working for the British since early 1972 and had betrayed dozens of IRA members and revealed the whereabouts of enormous amounts of arms and equipment. After a court-martial in the summer of 1975, Molloy was killed, felled by a bullet to the back of the head, and, like Seamus Wright, Kevin McKee, and Jean McConville, his body was buried in a secret grave, by now the Belfast IRA’s established way of dealing with its embarrassing secrets.
Molloy’s remains were recovered by the IRA, placed in a coffin and left in a graveyard near the Irish Border in May 1999, a year after the Good Friday Agreement was signed. The scandal of the “disappeared,” which surfaced as the peace process gathered pace, had forced the IRA to end years of lying and admit that it had abducted, killed and hidden nine people, mostly in the early and mid-1970s, and all but one from Belfast. To that list have been added five other names who were “disappeared” by the IRA in later years. Some sources have hinted that there is yet another category of such victims, people who could be said to have been “double-disappeared,” i.e. their secret executions and burials have never been acknowledged by the IRA. There may be two or even three such victims, the first of whom was executed and “disappeared” after his alleged misuse of IRA procedure, weapons and personnel led to a serious clash with the rival Official IRA and the death of one Official IRA member. Another of the possible “double-disappeared” was an alleged undercover MI5 agent killed by the IRA in County Kerry. The remains of only five of the fourteen people that the IRA admit to having “disappeared” have been recovered despite claims from the IRA to have provided details of the location of their bodies to the authorities.
That Molloy was able to inflict such damage was due in large measure to the refusal of his immediate superior to believe that one of his own men could be a traitor. It was a weakness in IRA commanders that the British learned to exploit well. Brian Keenan, the IRA’s quartermaster general at this time and Molloy’s commander, has entered IRA mythology as one of its
hardest men, a skilled and ruthless commander who was as determined a revolutionary as existed anywhere in the IRA—but like many military-minded men he had a weak spot in his vanity, and Molloy’s handlers in British intelligence exploited this flaw with consummate skill.
The problem for the British was simple but not straightforward. Molloy had been picked up by the military and had quickly broken during interrogation at Castlereagh RUC station in East Belfast, which was fast becoming the major holding center for IRA suspects, and had agreed to work for military intelligence. But if he was to be of any value to the authorities, he had somehow to be put back into circulation, back into the IRA’s higher circles in Belfast—and fast. The difficulty was that too many of Molloy’s senior IRA colleagues knew he had been arrested, and since the fate of most IRA men who fell into the hands of the authorities was usually immediate consignment to an internment cage, Molloy’s reappearance in West Belfast would automatically attract suspicion. A way had to be found to explain away his safe return from Castlereagh. Molloy’s handlers devised an audacious cover story that worked only because Brian Keenan fell for it, although it required nerves of steel on Molloy’s part when he explained it to the IRA’s quartermaster general. The story concocted by British intelligence was extraordinary: Molloy would tell his IRA colleagues that during a break in questioning one of his interrogators had carelessly left the key to his cell in the lock on the outside of the door. He had spotted this, he said, slipped a sheet of paper taken from the detectives’ carelessly discarded notepad under the door, and using the policemen’s similarly abandoned pen then worked the key free, and fortuitously, it fell onto the pap
er. He slid this back, unlocked the cell door, and calmly crept out of the station unnoticed by any of his jailers. It was a measure of the hold that his captors had over him that Molloy was prepared to return to the IRA with such a fanciful tale. But incredibly it worked. “Keenan gave him a clean bill,” recalled a colleague.1
At the time of Molloy’s arrest and “escape,” Brian Keenan was already one of the IRA’s most important leaders and a key ally of Gerry Adams. Throughout his long IRA career, even during fourteen long years spent later in the high-security sections of various British jails, Keenan, whose IRA nickname was “the Dog,” would stay loyal to Adams and was always there to give support to whatever new direction Adams was advocating. At one point in the peace process he appeared to back dissidents who were plotting Adams’s downfall, but this, it later appeared, was a ruse devised to infiltrate and undermine the Sinn Fein president’s enemies. This hard-line image was a huge asset to Adams. When it came to selling a strategy that filled the republican grassroots with doubt and uncertainty, Keenan’s support helped to win over skeptics. Had he seriously opposed Adams, the outcome of the peace process might have been very different.
Born in Swatragh in rural South Derry in July 1940, Keenan had been in the republican movement since his early twenties. He came from a much more eclectic background than most other Northern republicans of his time and was certainly more politically aware than the scores of recruits flooding into the organization after 1969. The son of a junior member of the British Royal Air Force, Keenan left home when he was just sixteen and emigrated to England, where he worked for a while as a television repairman. Accounts of his early life conflict. One version says that when he went to England he joined the Communist Party and embraced left-wing politics, while another says that he got the name for holding Marxist views only because he was a Goulding supporter when he joined the IRA in the early 1960s.