A Secret History of the IRA

by Ed Moloney

  At one level the governments behaved as if Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness were telling the truth when they claimed they had never had any links to the IRA, or in McGuinness’s case that he had severed them in 1972, and that the IRA leadership was separate from them and took decisions by itself, heeding the advice of Adams and McGuinness only when it suited. Given their access to intelligence briefings, both premiers certainly knew otherwise, particularly that Adams and McGuinness were not just senior members of the Army Council but that they were the IRA’s senior strategists and that no decisions would ever be made without their knowledge and approval. A former colleague of the two leaders, John Kelly, a founding member of the Provisional IRA and a scion of one of Belfast’s best-known republican families, put it well when asked whether figures like Gerry Adams would be aware of IRA operations: “I go back to what the Bible said, that not a sparrow falls from the sky but that the man above does not know about it and Gerry Adams in terms of the republican movement is the man above. He is God, so he knows and would want to know and would be disappointed if he didn’t know everything that happens within the republican movement and nothing will be hidden from him.”11 For reasons that defy understanding, both governments acted as if they believed otherwise.

  A bizarre example of how this sort of fantasy infected government thinking occurred after the Colombia arrests and was described in detail by Dean Godson: “When the three [IRA members] were arrested, however, there was a level of disbelief in the highest reaches of Government: [John] Reid [Northern Ireland Secretary], for one, told Sir Ronnie Flanagan [RUC Chief Constable] that he believed that the three men may have been in Colombia without the knowledge of Adams and McGuinness. Furthermore, Jonathan Powell [Blair’s Chief of Staff] told Trimble on 29 August 2001 that he thought that Adams and McGuinness had lost an internal battle inside the movement.”12 Just before the Colombia arrests, during the July 2001 Shropshire conference, Tony Blair approved a package of concessions dealing with policing and demilitarization for Adams to present to his colleagues, even though intelligence officials had told him that the IRA was active in the central American country.13 Blair would have known that Adams was aware of what was happening in Colombia and the only explanation for his behaviour in Shropshire is that he believed Adams was an unwilling participant and that he needed to be strengthened to withstand his hard men. In fact the British prime minister continued indulging Adams in this way for years afterwards, even though intelligence officers had told him that at one meeting senior republicans had half-jokingly suggested sending a list of especially extravagant demands to Downing Street to show that Tony Blair would concede virtually anything that was asked of him to ensure the survival of the Adams leadership.14 And an intriguing clue as to how the IRA leadership really regarded Blair emerged from a pile of IRA documents seized by police investigating a spy ring based at the British government complex at Stormont in the autumn of 2002. One document referred to the British prime minister by his IRA code-name: “The Naive Idiot”.15

  In fact the expedition to Colombia had been authorized by the Army Council, upon which both Adams and McGuinness sat. In overall charge was their fellow Army Council member Brian Keenan, who also played a part in setting up the affair, traveling to and from Colombia and exploiting family links in New York to put the arrangement together.16 According to Irish Justice Minister Michael McDowell, if the deal had not been intercepted the IRA would have been paid as much as $35 million by the Colombian FARC guerrillas for training in explosives and mortar production.17 FARC could well afford such generous payments. A left-wing liberation guerilla group with ties to Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro’s Cuba, FARC held unchallenged sway over much of Colombia’s eastern region where the bulk of the country’s coca and poppy crop is grown, harvested and turned into drugs that are destined for the US market. One estimate put the region’s drug trade turnover in 2001—of which FARC held a majority share—at $300 million.

  If evidence given at a 2002 hearing of the US Congressional House International Relations Committee is correct, then the IRA team in Colombia was of such a calibre that the suggestion that it was a freelance or unauthorized operation appears so far-fetched it approaches fantasy. As for Sinn Fein’s claims that those arrested in Bogotá were interested in ecotourism or had come to study the Colombian peace process, Committee chairman Rep. Henry Hyde dismissed these as “an insult to our intelligence.”18

  The team, all of whom traveled on false identities, consisted of some of the organization’s most experienced and senior explosives engineers, whose republican curricula vitae had also included trusted, senior roles in Sinn Fein. The head of the training team, according to testimony provided by the chairman of the Colombian armed forces general staff, General Fernando Tapias, was Niall Connolly, who doubled as Sinn Fein’s representative in Havana, Cuba, and had lived there since 1996. He had also worked as a volunteer for the Irish Foreign Service for ten years before that and was named by General Tapias as the man who was first introduced to FARC by the Basque paramilitary group, ETA, around the time he moved to Cuba. He traveled under the alias David Bracken, a Dublin boy who was accidentally killed in 1965. Tapias claimed that Connolly, whose brother Frank, a Dublin journalist, had also allegedly traveled to Colombia on false identity papers, was “well known for his expertise in firearms and explosives.”19 The second key figure was James Monaghan, who had joined the Provisionals’ engineering department way back in 1970, rapidly becoming one of the IRA’s foremost bomb-making experts, and was, at the time of his arrest, the IRA’s director of engineering, in charge of the department that produced all the IRA’s home-made explosive mixes, detonating devices, mortars and other improvized weaponry.20 Monaghan’s post meant that he automatically sat on the IRA’s GHQ, near the very pinnacle of the organization, only a bracket or two on the organizational chart away from Adams and McGuinness. He had also served with the two men on Sinn Fein’s ruling executive, the Ard Comhairle. The deputy director of the engineering department, Martin McAuley, from County Armagh, was the third member of the team arrested. McAuley had been wounded near Portadown, County Armagh, by a crack police squad in 1982, in one of a series of so-called “shoot-to-kill” incidents that caused a bruising scandal for the RUC when they were investigated by Greater Manchester police chief John Stalker. McAuley had also been Sinn Fein’s director of elections in Upper Bann. Two other suspected IRA figures, “Kevin Noel Creemley” and “Margaret Steindoughtery”, were arrested at the same time as the three men but were let go for lack of evidence. Tapias said that a further two IRA members had been traced visiting the FARC area four months before, “John Francis Johnson” and “James Edward Walker”. The training team’s principal task, Tapias told the committee, was to show FARC how to manufacture and use mortars capable of traveling 3,000 meters.

  There were claims and reports subsequently that among a total of some twelve to fifteen IRA operatives, tracked as having entered and left Colombia during this period, was Padraig Wilson, a recently released former commander of IRA prisoners at the Maze jail.21 Wilson was a close ally and supporter of Gerry Adams and had been used by the leadership as a conduit to announce IRA concessions on decommissioning in 1988 via a newspaper interview. The overall director of the Colombian adventure, Brian Keenan, was another Adams loyalist who had backed his strategy at critical points, not least during the McKevitt-inspired revolt in 1996 when Keenan pretended to sympathize with the rebels to gather vital intelligence for the Adams camp. At the time of the Colombia arrests, Keenan was the IRA’s contact man with the IICD, a mark of the trust the Adams leadership had placed in him. The second key figure in the IRA’s Colombian team was Gerry Adams’s cousin Davy Adams, and if all these claims are true then it would be stretching credibility to suggest that both Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness had been left out of the loop in an operation of such critical importance to the IRA. The idea also that all this could or would be organized behind their backs and that characters like
Keenan and Wilson, not to mention Adams’s own cousin, would abandon years of loyalty to Adams to undermine him was a notion whose absurdity was matched only by the naivety of those in government ready to believe it was possible. Nonetheless, as government ministers and officials reached out to excuse the Sinn Fein leadership and as Adams denied all knowledge of Connolly’s role as Sinn Fein’s “Man in Havana”, the party’s public relations machine whirred into action to separate the Adams leadership from Colombia by hinting to the media that Keenan had embarked on a solo run in South America, just as a few years earlier the same spin doctors had characterized Wilson’s 1998 remarks on decommissioning as his own. A few gullible journalists had fallen for the latter piece of fiction but the best brains in the British government swallowed the former.

  At another level entirely, both governments cheerfully acknowledged that Adams and McGuinness did in fact have sway over the IRA leadership and had authorized various IRA operations. But this was viewed in a very different light, one that characterized their actions as a necessary and legitimate part of the working out of the peace process. The line of thinking went something like this: Adams and McGuinness would never be able to take the IRA’s hard men with them if they knew where the peace process was really heading; so to keep the hard men happy and on board, Adams et al. would have to give them their head and approve operations like robberies, gun-running and the like; but at some point down the road matters would be so far advanced that the peace process would be irreversible and at that point the hard men could be brought to heel. Until that happened the best policy was to turn a Nelson’s eye to all but the most outrageous IRA operations and give Adams and McGuinness the benefit of the doubt.

  In one exceptionally egregious example of this type of thinking, an official speaking on behalf of the late Northern Ireland Secretary Mo Mowlam had characterized the killing of a Belfast punishment shooting victim by the IRA in August 1999 as “internal housekeeping”.22 But the Irish authorities could be every bit as economical with the truth, as one brazen armed robbery in Dublin, also in 1999, demonstrated. On January 5, 1999, an armoured car carrying some £600,000 was travelling through Dalkey in south Dublin when its path was blocked by a large transit van. It was then rammed by a flat-bed lorry onto whose superstructure had been welded two heavy girders that stuck out like a medieval battering ram. The impact of the girders smashed open one of the armored car’s rear doors. Masked men armed with AK-47 automatic rifles jumped out of the van and swarmed around the car, making off with a dozen bags of cash. These they threw into the boot of a waiting Ford Granada getaway car but the vehicle’s engine stalled and wouldn’t start up again. The impact of the bags of cash had triggered a safety valve in the boot designed to stop the flow of petrol to the engine, thus reducing the chances of a fire in the event of a rear-end collision. The only mistake made by the robbers, in an otherwise meticulously planned and executed operation, was their choice of escape car. Forced to abandon the money, the gang made their getaway in another car which they hijacked after firing shots at the driver, who was cut around the head and shoulders by flying glass from his shattered windscreen. The gang had switched off the safety catches on their weapons, indicating they probably would have engaged the Irish police if necessary.

  Immediately afterwards there was intense speculation about the identity of those responsible. The robbery was too well planned and the robbers too heavily armed for it to have been the work of one of Dublin’s many criminal gangs and the finger of suspicion at once pointed to a republican paramilitary group of some stripe. For the same reasons, common sense suggested that the well-armed and resourced Provisionals, rather than the smaller and more amateurish dissident groups, had been behind the raid, but in the following days the Dublin newspapers and media performed alarming contortions in an attempt to put dissidents in the frame. Since the stories were written mostly by the media’s security correspondents, a group of reporters whose dependence upon the Garda press office for their bread and butter had been a legendary if less than distinguished feature of Irish journalism for many years, it was difficult not to conclude that their stories reflected what the Irish political and security establishment wanted to see reported—although by this stage in the peace process the media rarely needed such encouragement.

  Immediately after the robbery, reporters cited Irish police sources as unequivocally blaming either the Real or Continuity IRA, but as the days passed and it became clearer that the expertise of the raid was beyond these groups, the coverage changed in a bizarre way. The reports began to concede that there were differences of opinion within the Gardai about who had planned the robbery and edged close to suggesting the Provos might have had some hand in it—but they stopped significantly short of actually saying so. Instead, reporters wrote that the robbers “had learned their trade with the Provisional IRA,” that they might have acquired weapons from the Provos and might also have attracted figures to their ranks “who must have been among the Provisional IRA’s most able and dangerous…”23 This was as close as the Dublin media, circa 1999, could come to saying that one of the most audacious robberies in the city’s recent history had been perpetrated by a group whose leaders were dealing with the government and its leaders on a daily basis to supposedly deliver peace to the island. The same report, which had coyly hinted at some mysterious Provisional IRA association with the raid, ended, inexplicably, by returning to safer ground: “Dalkey undermines the case that the dissidents are finished. Here was an expertly planned raid executed by terrorists who were quite prepared to kill anyone who got in their way. According to some Gardai, the raid has shown not only that these ‘dissidents’ are undeterred by the shame of Omagh and the so-called ‘draconian’ anti-terrorist laws and threats from the Provisionals, but that they appear to be determined to continue and even escalate their activities.”24 The same sort of doublespeak came from government ministers in the days after the robbery. There was an 800-pound gorilla sitting in the middle of the room but no one in the Irish State, police, press or politicians, wanted to admit it.

  In fact the robbery was a Provisional IRA operation which had been authorized by the Army Council and planned by the IRA’s finance department. It was remarkably similar to a bungled robbery in Limerick three years before which had gone badly wrong when a Garda Special Branch detective was shot and killed by IRA members who had also switched off their AK-47 safety catches.25 Had Irish police arrived on the scene at Dalkey any sooner than they did, then there might well have been fatalities that day as well. Within weeks Irish government officials were admitting privately that the Garda/media spin was incorrect and that the Provisionals had indeed been responsible. But publicly no Irish government minister or official would ever blame the Provos for what had been a barefaced and flagrant breach of their cease-fire.26 The effect of incidents like this—and there were many of them—was to tempt the IRA into more and more contumelious activity. Since the first cease-fire was called in 1994 this was the third brazen armed robbery carried out by the Provos. The first two had caused fatalities but neither had deterred the IRA from proceeding with the Dalkey robbery, and that was compelling evidence both of the contempt the IRA had for the Irish and British governments and its leaders’ confidence that neither administration would respond in anything like a punitive way. Given the timidity of the reaction to events like Dalkey, the IRA could hardly be blamed for pushing the envelope to its limit. The nature of government response also helped create an ideal set of circumstances for the Adams leadership in which no matter what the outcome of IRA activity, they, the leadership, would always come out ahead: if the IRA did something and neither London nor Dublin responded, then, to the great satisfaction of the IRA rank and file, their weakness would be evident for all to see, while the IRA would be able to pocket the proceeds of their operations. But if they reacted badly, which eventually they would have to, Adams and his allies would then be able to use this as a lever to push the IRA into making concessions necessary to ke
ep the peace process alive.

  The degree of unease within the Provisionals’ grassroots during the years between the departure of the Real IRA rebels and the first act of decommissioning is by definition impossible to measure accurately. Certainly the Adams leadership continued to behave as before, disguising and misrepresenting their moves to their grassroots as they had done since the peace process began. The way decommissioning was presented internally was a classic example of this. While the world hailed the decommissioning act of October 21, 2001 as a breakthrough and a brave initiative by the IRA leadership, the Provos’ rank and file were assured that it was a meaningless piece of theatre. The arms dump that had been decommissioned, the IRA told its volunteers, had already been discovered by the security forces and was under surveillance by them. The IRA had given up no arms that had not already been lost or compromised. A similar approach was taken to the next two acts of decommissioning, in April 2002 and October 2003. In one instance, the IRA told its members that the engineering department had been busy manufacturing bogus armaments, such as electronic fuses, and had fooled the head of the IICD, General John de Chastelain, into accepting faux weaponry. In another manifestly false claim, the grassroots were told that a senior member of the IICD had been caught by the IRA with another woman and was being blackmailed to lie to the world about the decommissioning process. Far-fetched though all this may sound now, it was actually believed at IRA grassroots level by enough people to matter, as one former IRA prisoner, Michael Benson, found out. Writing on The Blanket website he recalled: “One honest and sincere young man for whom I have the greatest respect and who unlike so many recent Republican converts actually found himself in Long Kesh told me that the Republican Movement had NEVER [writer’s emphasis] decommissioned anything and that de Chastelain had been conned. Conning there may well have been but I don’t think it was the Canadian General who was conned. And no doubt if there is another act of decommissioning that the foot soldiers will be again told some outlandish story.”27