A Secret History of the IRA

by Ed Moloney

  Under Bruton’s leadership the Irish government moved closer to the British on the key issue of IRA decommissioning. Both governments believed that there had to be some progress on the issue, some signal that it would happen at least, before Sinn Fein could be safely let into talks. That alone was sufficient to set alarm bells ringing in the IRA. It all confirmed the worst fears of activists that once again the real aim of the British, the Irish, and their allies was to weaken and divide the movement, much as they had done in 1974 and 1975. Adams’s cease-fire strategy was supposed to create pressure on the British to quit Northern Ireland, not the weakening and emasculation of the IRA. The state of the cease-fire by the end of 1995 raised dark questions about the wisdom of the Adams leadership in going down this dangerous road. Far from showing any inclination to talk to the Provisionals, the British were as determined as ever to defeat them, or so it seemed.

  TO ADD TO the leadership’s problems, discontent at rank-and-file level became increasingly visible. When, for instance, it was revealed in November 1994 that Sinn Fein had secretly agreed to accept political training, in such basic skills as fund-raising and fighting elections, from the National Democratic Institute in Washington, a body it had once accused of being a CIA front when it gave the SDLP training in the mid-1980s, there was a revolt. At the party’s Ard Fheis in February 1995 the leadership could only watch in embarrassment as delegates overwhelmingly passed a motion condemning as “undemocratic” the notion that Sinn Fein should accept aid or training from the Americans.

  When the British prime minister, John Major, visited Derry in May 1995, local republicans rioted, venting their frustration at the British stalling tactics. The incident seriously embarrassed the Sinn Fein leadership. The occasion had been arranged so that Mitchel McLaughlin, whose non-IRA credentials were impeccable, could publicly shake hands with the British prime minister, thus signaling another stage in Sinn Fein’s journey out of isolation. Instead McLaughlin could only watch helplessly as the rioters got stuck into the RUC and Major’s travel plans were quickly changed. The handshake was abandoned.

  In the same month Sinn Fein accepted an invitation to attend a ceremony at Islandbridge in Dublin to commemorate Irish people who had died while serving in the British forces during the Second World War. Tom Hartley was sent along—colleagues later said he had to be dragged there—and pointedly remarked to the media that he was there because Gerry Adams could not accept the taoiseach’s invitation. The downward spiral in Hartley’s Sinn Fein career probably began at that moment. The incident deeply unsettled the Provo base. No Irish republican had ever honored Irishmen who had donned British uniforms.

  It was not all bad news for Sinn Fein. Adams was granted a fund-raising visa by Clinton, which allowed him to raise money for Sinn Fein—eventually millions of dollars—while the British slowly began troop withdrawals and then agreed to transfer selected IRA prisoners from British to Northern Ireland jails. Meanwhile the Boundary Commission redrew the West Belfast Westminster consituency in such a way that Adams was bound to regain the seat he had lost to the SDLP in 1992. The framework documents were also published by the British and Irish governments in early 1995, offering a power-sharing administration in Belfast and cross-Border bodies linking government reponsibilities in Belfast and Dublin. The idea was to enhance cooperation and even gradual integration in some economic and social matters between the two states. This was not British withdrawal, but at least it was some movement.

  Even so the balance sheet showed more red ink than black, and in the face of rank-and-file unease the leadership was forced to toughen its profile. At Eastertime in 1995 Adams made an thinly veiled threat to take his supporters onto the streets and warned the British they would soon be faced with “the sound of angry voices and stamping feet” unless there was progress.

  There were more ominous signs of discontent. Not long after Adams’s Easter address the IRA shot dead a notorious drug dealer, Micky Mooney, in Belfast. It used a new cover name, Direct Action Against Drugs (DAAD), to disguise its role, but this fooled few people, least of all the IRA rank and file, who gained some reassurance from this brief return to the use of firearms. DAAD was back in action in September 1995 when a second drug dealer was killed. Again this was the IRA leadership sending out the signal to its own people that it was not afraid to go back to the gun. Adams had personal experience of the unrest in the ranks a few days earlier when he was faced with a restless crowd that had marched to Belfast City Hall to commemorate the August 1971 internment operation, an annual high point of the republican calendar. When a voice from the crowd shouted, “Bring back the IRA!” Adams, in a memorable phrase, replied, “They haven’t gone away, you know!”11

  Sentiment within the IRA was running strongly against the cease-fire and the TUAS strategy by mid-1995. It was inevitable that opposition to the Adams policy would become more organized and structured and that moves would be made to return the IRA to war. As in every other period of republican turbulence, the twelve-person IRA Executive became the focus of unrest and the vehicle for rebellion. IRA Executives had historically regarded themselves as the conscience of the rank and file and believed they had a brief to ensure that the Army Council never stepped too far out of line with grassroots feeling. It would be no different this time.

  The IRA Executive of 1994–96 had a grievance with the Army Council and Adams so serious that the rift between them was particularly bitter. During the tortuous negotiations leading to the Downing Street Declaration and then to the cease-fire, the Executive had been excluded, on security grounds, from the information loop. Only the Army Council and the think tank knew what was going on, and the fact that the latter was a body that had no constitutional status at all served to deepen the resentment on the Executive. The Council refused to share information about the peace process with the Executive for fear of a leak to the British, and the memory that no such consideration had kept the chairman of the Army Council from hinting at the Eksund shipment deeply rankled. When the Army Council declared the August 1994 cease-fire, the Executive was treated just like the rest of the IRA, despite its elevated status. A few days beforehand two Executive members were briefed and told to inform the other ten. The lack of consultation and this offhand treatment served to further alienate the Executive.

  The 1995 Executive was a body that the Army Council could ill afford to ignore for long. Its members included key GHQ staff and members of both Southern and Northern Command. It met formally every six months or so, but informally its members were in more regular contact. In the absence of any sign that the British were contemplating negotiations about withdrawal, the number of Executive members ranged against the Adams strategy grew. By the summer of 1995 it stood at ten out of twelve, an overwhelming majority. The Executive’s complaint was straightforward. With the British barring Sinn Fein from talks and the Dublin government seemingly unable to influence them otherwise, the IRA was in trouble. The longer the sos lasted, the weaker the IRA would become, both politically and militarily, the Executive argued. If the sos did not end soon, its members complained, the game would be up.

  THREE MEN EMERGED as the sharpest critics of the Adams strategy. One was Micky McKevitt, the quartermaster general who, along with Slab Murphy, had masterminded the Libyan arms shipments. The second was the IRA’s director of engineering, Frank McGuinness, a young Dubliner whose department kept the organization supplied with explosives and improvised weaponry. The third was the Belfast commander, Brian Gillen, who headed the IRA’s largest brigade area. Between them they encompassed the bulk of Southern Command and the most politically important section of the organization in the North. Their internal political clout was enhanced by the fact that McKevitt’s partner, Bernadette Sands, was a sister of the dead hunger striker and Provisional icon Bobby Sands. They later married. As a group they presented a formidable opposition to Gerry Adams and his allies.

  The British ensured that the tide moved ever more strongly in the Executive’s direction
. Earlier in 1995 the Army Council had ordered a canvass of rank-and-file views, and Adjutant General Gerry Kelly was given the task of testing the waters. He toured Ireland talking to the activists, and his report to the Council made depressing reading for the peace party. Virtually every brigade area was unhappy and anxious, worried that its leaders had been tricked by the British and the Irish governments into adopting a strategy in which both advance and retreat seemed likely to weaken the IRA. Feelings against the strategy were particularly strong in Belfast, Tyrone, Derry, Monaghan, and South Armagh, and IRA leaders would have had to be deaf and blind not to have known that the level of discontent was sufficiently high that it was only a matter of time before the opposition took a more tangible and even dangerous form.

  Activists of this period paint a picture of an IRA that was in considerable turmoil. “A number of people at leadership level promised all sorts of things about going back to war,” recalled one. “The volunteers were led up the hill so many times only to be led down again that it was embarrassing. The state of the IRA was causing great concern, morale was at an all-time low, and there were very heated meetings where people would shout that they had been misled.”12

  The Executive met in August 1995 to consider a situation that was visibly deteriorating. The Army Council sent along McGuinness and McKenna to give a briefing. The message they brought was a depressing one: Sinn Fein’s efforts to get into talks were running into the sand, and the Army Council members did not see the cease-fire lasting much longer. In fact they went as far as giving the Executive an assurance that it would be called off soon. Reassured, the Executive eased the pressure.

  But the cease-fire survived, and the Army Council made no move to end it. Politically the autumn and winter of 1995 brought some softening of the British line on decommissioning, and this had the effect of forcing republicans to respond positively. At the end of November, on the eve of a historic visit to Northern Ireland by Bill Clinton, the British and Irish governments announced agreement on the so-called twin track approach to political negotiations. While preparatory talks involving the two governments and the political parties got under way, an international commission chaired by the former U.S. Senate Democratic majority leader, George Mitchell, would consider how best to address the problem of IRA decommissioning.

  Sinn Fein had endorsed this approach, first formulated by John Hume, earlier that month when Martin McGuinness formally presented it to the British. The party also agreed to make a submission to the Mitchell body, but the Army Council “soldiers” blocked an attempt to include an IRA figure in the delegation, as Adams and others had urged. After meeting the Mitchell commission, Martin McGuinness said his party had proposed that armed groups dispose of their own weapons in a process that could be overseen by an independent third party, a proposal that ultimately was adopted by the British and the Irish governments. The logjam was easing, but it was too little and too late.

  As 1995 drew to a close there were more ominous signs of IRA discontent, nearly all of them in Belfast, where Brian Gillen held sway. They came in the form of a burst of killings during December of alleged drug dealers, most of them small-time figures, by the IRA cover group DAAD. Starting on December 8 the IRA killed four times, and the killing continued into the New Year. A fifth drug dealer was shot dead in January 1996 in Lurgan, where the local IRA leader was also a critic of the Adams strategy. The DAAD killings were a barometer of rank-and-file unease and a measure of the current weakness of the peace camp in the IRA leadership.

  The dam eventually burst. In early January 1996 the Executive met, and eleven of its twelve members supported a resolution calling for an extraordinary General Army Convention, which they demanded should be held by the end of February or beginning of March. Already suspicious about the Army Council’s intentions, the Executive set out to force its hand. Knowing that a Convention would almost certainly vote to end the cease-fire—and might well also replace the Adams leadership—the Army Council met on January 31 and by a unanimous vote called off the cease-fire. After fifteen months of relative peace it seemed that the process itself, not merely the cease-fire, might be over.

  Preparations for the breakdown had actually begun two months earlier when, under the cover of the autumn’s dark evenings, South Armagh IRA members, directed by Slab Murphy, began preparing a huge truck bomb. Slab had correctly anticipated events. After the Army Council decision, the go-ahead for the bomb was given, and the device was smuggled over to England, where it was left in the underground car park of a six-story office building near Canary Wharf Tower in South London. At seven in the evening on February 9, it exploded, destroying the office building, killing two men, and, at a cost of around £100 million, devastating some of London’s most expensive commercial property.

  SHORTLY BEFORE the explosion Gerry Adams phoned the National Security Council at the White House to say that he was “hearing some very disturbing news” about the cease-fire and would call back later with more details. Before he could get back the bomb exploded. The Army Council had sanctioned Adams’s phone call at his request. The Sinn Fein leader had argued that otherwise he would lose all credibility with Clinton and his people. The episode was a piece of description that helped cast Adams in the role of the frustrated peacemaker, squeezed between his own hard-liners and an inflexible British government. It was a convenient cover story, but it was not too far from the truth.

  As far as official IRA policy was concerned, not only was the cease-fire over but so was the Adams strategy. The new military and political policy that replaced TUAS was straightforward, simple, and direct. The IRA would once more send huge blockbuster bombs to London and other English cities, having suspended this tactic in the midst of the Hume-Adams talks in 1993, and would not stop doing this until the British agreed to enter meaningful talks encompassing withdrawal. Only then would the IRA contemplate another cease-fire. It was back to the trenches, or so it seemed; back to comforting political certitudes. The “soldiers” on the Army Council were again in the ascendancy—at least for the time being.

  At its January meeting the Executive had called for an extraordinary Convention to take place by the beginning of March, but by Easter there was still no sign of one. The Army Council had asked Pat Doherty to convene the meeting, but despite his usually excellent contacts and knowledge of County Donegal, he reported back to the Council in May that he had been unable to locate a suitable venue. Amid suspicions that the delay had been contrived, the Executive complained directly to Chief of Staff Kevin McKenna, who relieved Doherty of the task and handed it over to Micky McKevitt. By that point the evenings were getting brighter, and the IRA was again under intense surveillance on both sides of the Border. For security reasons the Convention was postponed until the end of October, when darker evenings would give the IRA cover for its gathering.

  Doherty’s inability to find a meeting place for the Convention bought Adams and his allies a precious nine months during which events were to give them a fighting chance to survive the special IRA Convention. With the British starting to regret their earlier intransigence on decommissioning, elections were held to a new Northern Ireland Forum, from which negotiating teams for planned interparty talks were to be chosen. Sinn Fein scored its best-ever election result, winning over 116,000 votes, some 15.5 percent of the vote, and seventeen seats. Much of Sinn Fein’s success was ascribed to moderate nationalists’ switching from the SDLP to Sinn Fein so as to strengthen the Adams faction in what everyone instinctively knew was a struggle with hard-liners. It was encouraging evidence for the peace camp in Sinn Fein and their supporters in the Army Council that if the cease-fire was renewed, there could be even greater electoral dividends to be won.

  The huge bomb at Canary Wharf may have devastated one of London’s smartest new commercial districts, as well as demonstrating the threat still posed by the IRA, but it also had serious negative consequences for Sinn Fein, not least dismaying and weakening those establishment figures in Ireland, Bri
tain, and the United States who had heavily invested in Gerry Adams. Probing questions began to be asked about whether or not the Sinn Fein president had lied to the president of the United States about his peaceful intentions, for example, or if he had not, how much control he really did exercise over the IRA. And if he was a broken reed, as some in the three governments believed, then there was a strong argument against having any further dealings with him.

  THE IMPACT OF the Canary Wharf bombing disguised a troubling reality for the IRA, and this was that the manner of its execution was actually a sign of military weakness. The bomb had been made up and delivered by the IRA in South Armagh, and this was an eloquent demonstration that by the 1990s British intelligence had well and truly gotten on top of the IRA’s England department. Not only did MI5 and the RUC Special Branch have well-placed agents in Ireland and Britain feeding them information about the IRA’s plans, but the routine surveillance work carried out by the British police forces—the regular checking of boardinghouses, digs and so on that occasionally brought priceless snippets of intelligence—had improved enormously since the 1970s when the IRA first began its attacks in England. The intelligence agencies had also become more sophisticated. Fifteen or twenty years earlier the police would have moved to make arrests at the first sighting of an IRA suspect; by 1995 they had learned to sit back and observe suspects for perhaps as long as a year before striking, knowing that such in-depth surveillance could yield valuable intelligence and roll up scores of IRA activists. The consequence was that IRA operations in England had become much more difficult to organize, more complex and time-consuming, and also much more expensive, a big drawback for an organization that was always teetering on the edge of penury and debt. The IRA in South Armagh was the only section of the organization its leaders could be reasonably confident had not yet been penetrated by the British, and so responsibility for important operations in England was given to it.