A Secret History of the IRA

by Ed Moloney

  The speech crafted for Drumm went further and contained a hint of what was to come, although few of those present at Wolfe Tone’s graveside that day would have realized the full significance of his remarks. “We find,” he went on, “that a successful war of liberation cannot be fought exclusively on the backs of the oppressed in the Six Counties, nor around the physical presence of the British Army. Hatred and resentment of the army cannot sustain the war…”23

  Heavily coded though these remarks were, the import was clear. The first message was that if republican activists wanted to sustain the war effort, they would have to expand their support base in the North by becoming politically active. Adams had already described how he saw this being done, in a series of articles written in Long Kesh and published weekly in Republican News under the Brownie pen name. Dropping abstentionism, recognizing the partitionist parliaments, and running for office, at least in the North, was still forbidden territory, but Adams nevertheless put the idea onto the Provisionals’ agenda, albeit in a more subtle way. He called his approach “active abstentionism,” a philosophy that in theory involved republicans’ building alternative governmental structures and becoming relevant to the needs of ordinary people.

  Borrowed from his days as a Goulding republican, “active abstentionism” was just another way of encouraging political activity in an organization in which “politics” was still a dirty word. The plans to construct alternative structures never really got off the ground, but the idea that republicans should “do things for the people” took root and later found more tangible expression when Sinn Fein started to fight elections and in an approach that was christened the “Armalite and ballot box” strategy. The really significant feature of the move was the way Adams sold it to his colleagues, largely on the basis that increasing political support would enable the IRA to intensify and sustain its war effort. It would not be the last time that he justified political activity in military terms even if, in the end, the effect was to undermine the IRA’s war effort.

  The same military argument was used to justify another major theme in the Drumm speech, the idea that the republican movement should try to build political support in the South. Increasing political support south of the Border, Adams argued, would translate into more safe houses for the IRA to use, more money, and more recruits. The argument was uncritically accepted internally, even though it flew in the face of the reality of the Ireland of the mid-1970s. The truth was that by that point in the Troubles, the conflict in the North was something most Southerners wanted nothing to do with, and no amount of political work by Sinn Fein was likely to change that. Nevertheless the Adams dictum became IRA policy, and with hindsight it seemed a highly significant move. Its effect was to introduce a contradiction into Provisional politics that played a major role in the evolution of the peace process. Political ambition south of the Border and armed struggle in the North were mutually exclusive. One or the other could prosper but not both. The contradiction was sharper in the South but it also restricted Sinn Fein’s room for growth in the North, even though the IRA’s campaign had created a sizable support base. Adams had set the republican movement on a journey that would eventually reach a crossroads, where it would have to choose between politics and the gun.

  When it came to putting flesh on the theory of “active abstentionism,” Adams and Bell turned to the Libyan regime of Colonel Muammar Qaddafi for inspiration. Qaddafi had outlined a system of people’s committees or popular congresses to help govern Libya. Organized in a pyramidal fashion, the people’s committees oversaw different aspects of government and elected delegates to a general people’s congress, Qaddafi’s version of the Libyan parliament. This system, Qaddafi wrote, is “the only means to achieve popular democracy.”24 Adams and Bell copied the idea and suggested that people’s committees be established separately from British government structures in republican areas of the North. Adams extolled the idea in a Brownie article: “We need an alternative to the British administration in our country. Especially now in the 6 Counties and when the Republican movement has control and administration to some degree in all the Nationalist areas. So why not cement this into local government structures. In Belfast alone could not the three or four big Nationalist areas be organised into community councils?”25

  The concept of people’s committees made a brief appearance after Adams’s release from jail, but by mid-1979 talk of building alternative government structures had virtually disappeared. The reason given was the arrest of the group of Sinn Fein activists charged with bringing them into existence, but the idea had proven to be simply impractical. One bit that did survive, however, was the Civil Administration, or Administrative IRA, which was created to police the areas within which the IRA had influence. With the Troubles now nearly a decade old, law and order had broken down in many nationalist districts and established value systems had been upturned. Crime, vandalism, and joyriding were endemic, and there was a demand for a policing system. Rather than see the RUC back in their areas, the IRA began to dispense its own system of rough justice and to mete out punishment shootings, beatings, and expulsions.

  While it appears that some of Adams’s associates, Bell in particular, were motivated by an admiration for Qaddafi, the Long Kesh dissidents were also trying to ingratiate themselves with the Libyan leader in the knowledge that he had the wherewithal to arm and finance the IRA beyond its wildest dreams. This consideration was evident in two other structural changes advocated by Adams and Bell.

  One was the Revolutionary Council, which came into being in 1976–77 and took its name from a central part of the Libyan system of government. In Libya the Revolutionary Council was the executive branch of government that sat atop the people’s committees. It consisted of Qaddafi, a general people’s committee chosen from the People’s Congress, and the ministers of the principal government departments. The IRA’s version was a sort of mini-Convention, a sounding board of IRA opinion representative enough of the grassroots, yet small enough to be able to meet safely. The regular IRA General Army Convention could draw as many as a hundred delegates, and the risks attached to convening such a large gathering were considered too great in the mid-1970s. The last Convention had met in September 1970, and much had changed in between. Adams and Bell saw the Revolutionary Council as a way of bringing the IRA leadership into touch with the rank and file, among whom their influence ran strongly.

  A mini-Convention held in late 1976 agreed to set up the Revolutionary Council and determined its makeup. It would consist of the seven-man Army Council, the GHQ staff, and the commander, adjutant, and quartermaster of the Belfast, Derry, Mid-Ulster, East Tyrone, South Derry, and South Armagh Brigades. Allowing for overlapping at Army Council and GHQ level, the Revolutionary Council had perhaps thirty to thirty-five members.

  Bell had intended the Revolutionary Council to effectively replace the Army Council as the IRA’s primary decision-making body. As a radical— some would say a Marxist, others an anarchist—Bell distrusted the middle-aged conservatives who dominated the Army Council, and he wanted to sideline them by subjecting them to IRA democracy. Adams, however, used the Revolutionary Council in a very different way, to control and bend the Army Council to his way of thinking but not to replace it. In his hands the Revolutionary Council became an instrument for taking over the leadership of the IRA, but the Army Council, a smaller body and thus easier to manipulate, remained, under his direction, the supreme decision-making body. The Revolutionary Council was phased out when Adams’s control of the Army Council was complete, although it was revived, to perform a similar function, during the peace process many years later. “It was at this stage that a gap started to open up between Adams and Bell,” observed a contemporary.26 While Bell wanted to broaden and radicalize the IRA, Adams sought merely to curb and then control the Army Council.

  Qaddafi had outlined his political philosophy, a compromise between communism and capitalism that he termed “the third way,” in a three-volume publ
ication called the “Green Book,” so called because green is the color of Islam. Again in imitation of their putative arms supplier, Adams and Bell proposed that the IRA should have its own “Green Book,” which all IRA recruits would be obliged to read and digest before being admitted as full-fledged Volunteers. Thereafter such IRA members would be described as having been “Green-Booked.”

  A cross between a political manifesto and a training manual, the hundred-page “Green Book” set out the IRA’s fundamental beliefs and political and military strategies. It also included a copy of the most up-to-date IRA constitution, often an extremely sensitive and revealing guide to the organization’s political disposition and intentions, which IRA leaders strove to keep secret. The result was that the Green Book’s circulation was unnecessarily restricted, bestowing upon it, in the public mind, a sense of mystery and importance beyond its merit. The IRA, it said, was the lawful inheritor of the First Dail and was the legal government of Ireland. The Dail in Dublin and any parliament at Stormont were thus bogus and illegal, the “puppet governments of a foreign power and willing tools of an occupying force,” according to the text.27 The IRA’s long-term aim was to create a democratic socialist republic, and Volunteers had the moral right to kill to achieve it, not least because they were acting on behalf of the true Irish government. IRA strategy would be based on a number of tactics, the Green Book said, including a war of attrition against “enemy personnel,” a bombing campaign to deter inward investment, opposition to all attempts to create internal political stability, and a propaganda campaign in Ireland and abroad aimed at broadening support for the war effort.28

  To most rank-and-file IRA members, however, being “Green-Booked” really meant they had gone through training in the anti-interrogation techniques outlined in the manual. The RUC’s holding centers at Castlereagh, Gough barracks, and Strand Road were having a devastating impact on the IRA, and there was an urgent need to instruct Volunteers in ways of resisting police questioning, as one member recollected: “Men were breaking in the police stations. We’d hear of people handing over twenty-five to thirty names at a time. In the first twelve to eighteen months of Castlereagh we suffered great damage.”29 The lectures in the “Green Book” on anti-interrogation methods, which basically boiled down to tutoring IRA members—seasoned activists as well as novices—in how to remain silent during questioning, came into effect around late 1978 and early 1979. From then on the only defense that an IRA member could make to a proven accusation of informing was that he or she had not been “Green-Booked.”30

  The Army Council chose a brutal way of demonstrating to Volunteers the importance it attached to the “Green Book” and its admonition to stay silent during interrogation. In July 1979 Michael Kearney, a twenty-year-old IRA Volunteer from Lenadoon, was found dead near Newtownbutler in County Fermanagh with a bullet wound to the head. In a statement the IRA said he had been killed “for breaches of general army orders in that he imparted information of vital importance to the British war machine.”31 Later the organization’s spin doctors suggested Kearney had betrayed a major bombing operation in East Belfast aimed at destroying oil depots and industrial plants. But within the IRA the strong belief was that Kearney had been killed only because he had broken during RUC interrogation and that his death was meant as a warning to others. A few years before, when such examples of weakness had been commonplace, the worst that most IRA members could expect was to be boycotted and isolated by colleagues in jail. Kearney’s death was intended as a signal that this leniency had gone and that others should take the “Green Book” with deadly seriousness.32 In September 2003, the IRA finally admitted that Kearney had not been an informer, thereby implicitly conceding that he had been killed only because he had violated the Green Book’s admonition to stay silent during police questioning.

  British informers were high on the dissidents’ target list. In their reorganization scheme, Adams and Bell suggested the creation of a specialist counterintelligence unit, known as the security department, which was initially charged with debriefing IRA members who had been in police custody with the aim of discovering whether they had talked to their interrogators or been turned by them; initially confined to Belfast, the security department was eventually extended to Northern Command and, over the years, its powers to probe IRA affairs were expanded. The security department was also responsible for arresting, interrogating, and ultimately arranging the deaths of informers, a great number of whom would end their days hooded and trussed at lonely roadsides in places like South Armagh. After 1977 the number of deaths of alleged informers rose steeply; one estimate suggests that as many as 70 percent of all informers caught by the IRA during the entire Troubles were killed after that date.

  The security department proved to be a double-edged weapon, however. Infiltrating the new department became a priority for the RUC and British intelligence for one very simple reason. The security department’s members knew many of the IRA’s most intimate secrets, including the identity of key gunmen and bombers, and a double agent placed within their ranks could cause havoc. The years since the department was set up have been characterized by persistent suggestions that this is just what happened.

  The idea for the internal security department came in part from the special “unknown” cells set up by Adams in 1972. Part of the task of “the unknowns” had been to lure alleged informers to their deaths and to engage in counterintelligence work. “The unknowns” were also the inspiration for another part of the reorganization plan, and that was the refashioning of the IRA into secret cells and the dismantling of the old company and battalion structures. Modeled on the British army, the IRA’s old system of companies and battalions were based in well-defined geographical areas, and this made it relatively simple for the British to work out which units were responsible for what operations. The structure also made easier the task the RUC Special Branch and other intelligence agencies faced in mapping and identifying the IRA’s battle order so that when the interrogation centers swung into action the organization quickly buckled.

  Adams was asked by the Army Council to design the reorganization plan, a draft copy of which was found by the Gardai when they arrested Chief of Staff Seamus Twomey in Dublin in December 1977. The kernel of Adams’s scheme was the creation of secret, four-man active-service units (ASUs), which would specialize in activities such as sniping, bombings, assassinations, and intelligence work. They would have a roving commission and could operate anywhere in the IRA’s war zone so that the British would find it more difficult to identify which ASU had been active where.

  The restructuring of the IRA, its new political-military strategy, the “Green Book,” the internal security unit, and the course of anti-interrogation lectures for recruits and veterans were all parts of a strategy designed to facilitate the conduct of the “long war.” The theory was that between them the changes would enable the ASUs to ward off penetration by British intelligence and resist RUC efforts to force confessions out of the activists, thus enabling the IRA to survive and fight for years to come. At the same time the IRA’s new political activism would, again in theory, expand the support base and provide a steady supply of new recruits, safe houses, and so on.

  On top of all this Adams proposed another major innovation, the idea that the IRA should have “permanent leadership” at all levels. The argument put forward in favor of this innovation was that the IRA lacked consistency at the commander level and was too easily disrupted by arrests and harassment. Since the start of the IRA campaign, Adams and his allies argued, there had been too many chiefs of staff, too many changes in Army Council and GHQ personnel, and, lower down too high a turnover at the brigade staff level. Each time a top commander was arrested and jailed, valuable talent was lost, and precious experience and knowledge would disappear and have to be replaced in a lengthy and often difficult process.

  Adams’s proposal was backed by a powerful group of activists, including Danny Morrison, Brian Keenan, Martin McGu
inness, and Adams’s cousin Kevin Hannaway. They got their way, and while the change was not always implemented, where it was enforced it did not come cost free. In an important way the concept of “permanent leadership” made the IRA more vulnerable to British penetration; a commander turned by the RUC or MI5 could be in place for a very long time. There was another unforeseen consequence. In practice the only way “permanent leadership” could work was for commanders to become operationally inactive so as to avoid any risk of arrest. That was a significant break with Provisional IRA tradition and practice, in which leaders had often led by example, fighting alongside Volunteers. One outcome was the development of a self-perpetuating elite at top- and middle-level ranks whose composition was often the result as much of loyalty to the political strategy of the Army Council, and ultimately to Gerry Adams, as of battle skills. The concept, the fact that leaders put away their guns, also paved the way for hitherto secretive senior figures to emerge as public personalities, an essential prerequisite for a successful electoral strategy.

  Much of the Adams-Bell blueprint was beginning to be implemented before Adams’s release from Long Kesh. With Adams, Bell, and Hughes in jail, the task of selling the restructuring plans both to the Army Council and to the middle leadership fell in part to Martin McGuinness, the Derry IRA leader who had spent much of the cease-fire period in Portlaoise prison after a conviction for IRA membership. But it was mostly Brian Keenan who toured the country preaching the Cage 11 gospel to IRA members. “More than anyone else,” remembers one former IRA man, “Keenan was a roving ambassador for Adams.”33