A Secret History of the IRA

by Ed Moloney

  JIM GIBNEY had been a close friend and ally of Gerry Adams since they first met in the Long Kesh internment camp in the mid-1970s, and after his release he had become a key member of the small group of mostly Belfast republicans who acted as Adams’s advisers. Like others in the group, Gibney, who hailed from the small Catholic enclave of Short Strand in East Belfast, often floated controversial ideas on behalf of Adams to see how the IRA and Sinn Fein rank and file would react. It was a ploy that kept Adams himself comfortably distant from controversy.

  It fell to Gibney in the summer of 1992 to make public the real agenda of the Reid-Adams diplomacy in a move that once again served to highlight both the Army Council’s ignorance of what was happening behind the scenes and the extent of potential division at the top and, by extension, the remainder of the IRA over the real peace process. The logic of the Reid-Adams enterprise, the logic of “stepping stones” and the hidden logic of “Towards a Lasting Peace,” was that British withdrawal as republicans normally envisaged it had been recognized as unrealistic and unrealizable by Adams. If there was going to be political settlement at the end of the peace process, it would necessarily be based on the existing constitutional status quo, albeit with sufficient concessions to Irish nationalism to enable the Sinn Fein leadership to present the settlement as a “transitional” stage to Irish unity—although most IRA activists were still ignorant of all this. Michael Collins had presented the 1921 Treaty in the same way. There were no surprise stops on the journey undertaken by Adams.

  Gibney gave the annual Bodenstown address at the grave of Wolfe Tone in June 1992 and sparked an unprecedented flurry of cease-fire speculation in the media. The fuss was caused by one sentence in his address. “We know and accept,” he said, “that the British government’s departure must be preceded by a sustained period of peace and will arise out of negotiations involving the different shades of Irish Nationalism and Unionism.”8 The crucial phrase was “will arise out of negotiations,” a formulation suggesting that an IRA cease-fire would precede a British commitment to leave Ireland, a reversal of the sequence that was Army Council policy. Gibney’s version set the stage for a transitional settlement and it was totally consistent with the Reid-Adams diplomacy. It was also the outcome of accepting, in practice, the principle of consent. These concepts were, however, both foreign and heretical to the assembled republican faithful at Tone’s graveside.

  Normally Bodenstown speeches were cleared beforehand by the Army Council to ensure that they conformed to IRA policy, but Gibney’s had not been. There was another row, this time between Adams and McKenna, and Gibney ended up carrying the blame. Adams said his speech had been drafted at the last minute, written partially during Gibney’s journey to Bodenstown, with the result that the crucial sentence had been clumsily worded. But journalists had received a neatly typed advance copy of the speech faxed to their offices before the speech. Adams also gave a sympathetic response to Gibney’s remarks, as the Irish Times reported: “The Sinn Fein president, Mr Gerry Adams, said that Mr Gibney’s speech did not signal a shift in policy but ‘an elaboration of themes democratically agreed by the party over the past number of years.’ He also said that… the points about British withdrawal and the need for negotiations should not be dismissed.”9 The affair hardly looked like a mishap. A very important cat had been let out of the bag, and the governments in London and Dublin took due notice.

  TO IMAGINE that Gerry Adams constructed the peace process with all its complexities and subtle strategies by himself or at most in concert with Father Reid would be to bestow upon him talents and powers that not even his closest and most admiring friends would claim for him. Adams had gathered around him over the years a small group of trusted confidants and advisers who had helped him navigate his way first to the top of the IRA and then to the leadership of Sinn Fein. Born in the confines of Cage 11, the Adams “think tank” would perform a similar task with the peace process.

  The role and influence of the think tank had contributed in no small measure to the row between McKenna and Adams. Within the group of “soldiers” on the Army Council, resentment at the growing power of the group had been festering away, and Gibney’s Bodenstown speech was another example of this.

  Not surprisingly, Adams had placed like-minded people into the think tank, people who were not only reliable but talented and inevitably, given the demands of the task, more likely either to have been ex-IRA or in some cases never in the IRA. The most important figure in the think tank, aside from Adams himself, was a man virtually unknown outside the closed world of republicanism. A former Second Belfast Battalion commander like Adams himself, Ted Howell was a reclusive figure who for many years used a pseudonym in public, the legacy, it was said, of years spent on the European continent liaising with foreign groups on behalf of the IRA leadership, during which he had managed to avoid the attentions of various intelligence agencies, not least of the British Secret Service, MI6. Adams made a reference to Howell, using his nom de guerre, in the acknowledgments to his book A Pathway to Peace, published in 1988. “This essay could not have been written without the co-operation and encouragement of the ‘Kitchen Cabinet,’ ” he wrote. “I thank them. Thanks also to… Eamonn ‘Ted’ McCrory for access to [his] material….”10 “Kitchen Cabinet” was Adams’s term for the think tank.

  Ted Howell, alias Eamonn McCrory, was arguably one of the most influential figures in the Provisional movement. While he was chairman of the think tank in the years leading up to the 1994 cease-fire, hardly a document was submitted to the British and Irish governments or to the SDLP by the republican movement that was not either written or vetted by him, or whose contents he had not influenced. By the time of the 1998 negotiations that led to the Good Friday Agreement, he was indispensable to the Sinn Fein leadership, as one story told about the talks illustrated. “During the 1998 talks Adams came into the room,” recalled one source, “and somebody asked him, ‘What’s going on?’ His reply was ‘I don’t know but Ted Howell does, and he’s the only one who does.’”11 Howell had another brief that was every bit as important. He was the link between Adams and the Provisional support groups in North America, initially Noraid and Clann na Gael, but later he would set up communication channels with the figures in corporate Irish-America, Congress, and the White House who would smooth Adams’s passage to the corridors of power in Washington.

  There were six or seven other members of the think tank in the years prior to the 1994 cessation. Jim Gibney, whose republican nickname was “God’s little helper,” God being Gerry Adams, was a personable and friendly character who spent a great deal of time briefing the press, whose company he evidently enjoyed. He had been on the think tank since the late 1970s, as had Tom Hartley, another former press officer for Sinn Fein, who went to some trouble to cultivate the view that he had no IRA history at all. A grumpy and often imperious disposition disguised a sincere if somewhat insecure personality, but it was those negative qualities that made him less than popular with many republican activists and therefore vulnerable. Like other members of the think tank, Hartley would often float controversial ideas on behalf of Adams. If they went down well, Adams would eventually adopt them; if not, Hartley would carry the can. Once a rising star in the Sinn Fein firmament, Hartley was made a sacrificial lamb in 1995 to deflect criticism from the leadership when the peace strategy ran into difficulties. While other, less talented figures went on to become Assembly members in the new power-sharing arrangement, Hartley has languished in Belfast City Council.

  Aidan McAteer was Adams’s personal assistant and a son of a former chief of staff, Hugh McAteer, and nephew of the former Nationalist Party leader Eddie McAteer. Once on the staff of Belfast Brigade, McAteer had left under a cloud in the 1970s not long after his arrest, but he was brought back by Adams despite reservations at some levels of the IRA. Danny Morrison had been a founder member of the think tank, but after his arrest and imprisonment in 1990 his influence dwindled. Even so it appears he was
still in the loop. He would receive regular prison visits from Father Alec Reid during his incarceration, and it was Morrison who gave the first hint of the coming cease-fire during a pre-release break from jail in the summer of 1994. Gerry Kelly, the adjutant general, was another member, and in the period leading up to 1994 so was Martin McGuinness.

  By far the most unpopular and controversial member of the think tank, as far the Army Council “soldiers” were concerned, was Mitchel McLaughlin, not least because he had joined the republican movement in 1966, yet had never been in the IRA. Once famously dubbed “the draft dodger” by an unkind unionist during a debate in the post-1998 Northern Ireland Assembly, McLaughlin was a refrigeration engineer by trade who had spent much of the early part of the Troubles working in the Middle East. McLaughlin’s principal role in the late 1980s and early 1990s was to take the IRA to task for botched and bungled operations, and he later became the acceptable public face of republicanism, the first to shake hands with British ministers, for example. His lack of any association with the IRA was made an asset.

  When Adams revived the Revolutionary Council, McLaughlin was brought along to expose IRA commanders to criticism, and this drove the activists wild, especially when, on occasion, he repeated the censure publicly. IRA activists could take reprimands from one of their own but not from someone who had never fired a shot in anger. At one stage the Army Council, on the insistence of Kevin McKenna, ordered McLaughlin to be gagged, saying that he would have to clear all his public statements with the IRA. There were even calls from figures on Northern Command for his expulsion from the movement. At another point senior figures recommended McLaughlin’s exclusion from important decision making, but Adams ignored them. His continued presence at Revolutionary Council meetings led some figures to stay away and contributed to its eventual demise.

  THE THINK TANK acted in an advisory capacity to the Army Council, mostly on political matters but occasionally on military strategy as well. During the preparation of the blueprint for the “Tet offensive,” for instance, it strongly advised against plans to launch rocket attacks on British embassies in Europe, on the grounds that this would almost certainly alienate potentially friendly or neutral governments. It was during the peace process, however, that the think tank came into its own.

  The sheer volume of work involved in administering the process meant that the Army Council was forced to look outside its ranks for assistance. The Council was particularly ill-suited to the task. It met only once a month, and most of its meetings were spent discussing detailed IRA matters, while nearly all its members had other jobs either in the IRA structures or in Sinn Fein. The peace process required specialized skills and the undivided and virtually full-time attention of a secretariat. Since the Army Council could not do it, the task was taken on by the think tank.

  During the years after Reynolds’s elevation to taoiseach through to the first and second IRA cease-fires and beyond, nearly every position paper presented by the IRA in its own name or through Sinn Fein to the British and Irish governments and to the SDLP was meticulously prepared by the think tank. The process was exhaustive. If a document came into the IRA from, say, the Dublin government, the think tank, or more often a subcommittee of the group headed by Howell or Gibney, would typically draft several papers in response. One would be an analysis of the Dublin paper, another a draft reply, and a third an attempt to anticipate what Dublin’s response to that might be. The Army Council would have to give an opinion on the draft response, which would go back in skeleton or outline form to the think tank, which would prepare a final draft. That would then have to go back to the Army Council for final approval before being sent on to Dublin. The same process would be repeated for communications with the British, the SDLP, and anyone else involved in the process, sometimes all at the same time. This complicated bureaucracy helps explain the at times laboriously slow pace of the peace process, an aspect of the negotiations that often perplexed and frustrated the two governments.

  The role played by the think tank gave Adams an important edge over other members of the Army Council. The body was, to begin with, his creation, and he alone decided who would sit on it. By definition it was loyal to him before anyone else. It also generated a huge amount of paperwork for the Army Council to read on top of the usual workload that greeted its members at their monthly meeting, and that too worked in Adams’s favor. While Adams, McGuinness, and Kelly would already be familiar with the material, having generated or helped to generate much of it, the rest of the Army Council, especially the “soldiers,” would come to it new.

  Some of the paperwork could be mind-boggling in its complexity. It would not be unusual for analytical documents to be written in three different typefaces—bold, roman, and italics. To read the document required constant reference to a key that explained, for example, that bold type represented the republican position, italics the Dublin or British government position, and a normal Roman typeface what republicans might end up negotiating. Since Army Council members were not allowed, at least in the early years of the process, to hold on to the documentation—whereas think tank members could have regular access—it was hardly surprising if much of it went unread or was only partially digested. The volume of paperwork became so great that the Army Council gave Adams and McGuinness, and occasionally Kelly, the authority to approve think tank final drafts without their going back to the Council. Some of the most important communications from the IRA went to the taoiseach in Dublin or to the British, unread by the IRA leadership. The think tank effectively developed into a shadow republican leadership; some came to believe that in the end it was more powerful than the Army Council.

  THE THINK TANK also played a crucial role in one of the most intriguing and puzzling episodes of the peace process, the nearly three years of secret dialogue between the Army Council and the British government in the period 1990–93. A conduit that had come into existence, almost casually, just after the 1972 cease-fire facilitated the talks. The inspiration came from the Derry businessman Brendan Duddy, who has since gone on to become something of a player on the international peace circuit. After the 1972 cease-fire collapsed, he approached Ruairi O Bradaigh with a suggestion. SDLP figures such as John Hume and Paddy Devlin had helped mediate the truce terms, but the effect of that was that the republicans had lost control of the direction of events. The IRA, Duddy had said, should use another way of communicating with the British in the future.

  A source familiar with the episode described what happened next:

  Later he came back and said, “If you ever want a way of communicating with the British, then I can do it for you.” The opportunity came when the Anglo-Irish aristocrats the Earl and Countess of Donoughmore (who lived part of the year in Ireland) were kidnapped in Dublin in June 1974 in an attempt to force the transfer of the 1973 London bombing team, including the Price sisters, from Brixton jail back to the North. The prison dispute was settled, and so O Bradaigh contacted the conduit, who passed the message on to the British that the Donoughmores would be released. Another opportunity arose when a British officer wandered into Donegal. He was captured by the IRA and then released, and again the pipeline was utilized. Later the conduit was involved in the 1975 cease-fire passing messages to and from us and the Brits.12

  Over the years the conduit expanded to include two other figures, only one of whom, Denis Bradley, a former Derry priest turned community worker, has ever publicly admitted his role. The third figure, who played the more prominent role in the 1990–93 dialogue, was another Derry businessman, one involved in the energy industry. Contact between the British and the Army Council had been intermittent over the years and from the IRA’s point of view largely unsatisfactory.

  According to well-informed republican sources, efforts to resume contact between the IRA and the British, as distinct from the Adams-Reid pipeline, began in the late 1980s when Michael Oatley of MI6 attempted to make contact with Martin McGuinness. The trigger for the contact was the captur
e of the Eksund and British intelligence’s realization that many more tons of weaponry had been successfully smuggled into Ireland. The contact was made at around the time when the IRA began moving the Libyan weaponry northwards in preparation for the “Tet offensive,” and the Army Council concluded that Oatley was on a fishing expedition to tease out the IRA’s intentions. It responded warily to his advances, and nothing came of the approach.13

  More substantive, if desultory and largely one-sided, contact with the Army Council was reopened on the initiative of the British in early 1990. From the pace and content of the messages between them, it seemed the British were keen to test the IRA’s mind. Thanks to the secret dialogue facilitated by Father Reid, which stretched way back to Tom King’s day, they had been given an insight into the sort of settlement that might be acceptable to Gerry Adams. But what they could not know for certain was whether Adams was speaking for the Army Council, or what the Council’s bottom line in negotiations might be. When these talks became public in 1993, the news caused a sensation. While most attention was directed at a clumsy attempt by the then Northern Ireland secretary, Sir Patrick Mayhew, to minimize the contacts, especially a British offer to hold talks in the event of an undeclared IRA cessation, a much more significant chapter was largely overlooked. Details of this emerged in two documents published when Sinn Fein released a partial account of the dialogue in late 1993. Seen against the now revealed but then secret Adams-Reid diplomacy, they take on greater significance.