A Secret History of the IRA

by Ed Moloney

  Possibly because of the initial confusion about who was responsible, the impact of the Castlereagh raid was somewhat less explosive than it could have been, but angry unionists were nonetheless soon taking aim at the Provo leadership. Republicans in turn fiercely denied any IRA hand in the raid and accused malicious security force elements of staging it to discredit Sinn Fein and the peace process. This was yet another example of a long and concerted effort by the republican leadership to blame allegedly reactionary elements in the intelligence world, whom they dubbed “securocrats”, for IRA operations or other incidents that caused problems for the peace process.

  As it turned out, the police investigation into the Castlereagh break-in was a slow-burning fuse. As raids and searches continued, the authorities uncovered more and more evidence that the IRA’s intelligence department was running an extensive spy ring at British government offices in the Stormont complex in east Belfast. According to one security source with intimate knowledge of the affair, the IRA had as many as five spies inserted into the lower levels of the civil service, or recruited by them, who were funneling sensitive documents to the IRA and Sinn Fein.38 Amongst these were papers listing the names and addresses of some 1,600 prison officers, and around 600 soldiers, policemen, politicians and civil servants. But the more significant material included position papers prepared by the British government for peace process talks, documents and correspondence from other parties to the Northern Ireland Office, and transcripts of phone conversations, including those between British premier Tony Blair and the US President George W. Bush. Some of the material was of value only to the IRA, but the bulk of it was potentially of enormous help to Sinn Fein’s leaders as they constructed their negotiating positions for talks with the British and other parties.

  On October 4, 2002, a large force of PSNI officers raided Sinn Fein’s offices at the Stormont parliament and took away computer disks. Two days later, the head of administration for Sinn Fein at the Assembly, Denis Donaldson, and his son-in-law Ciaran Kearney, appeared in court charged with possessing documents likely to be of use to terrorists, and later a Stormont messenger was also charged. A bag full of British papers had been discovered at Donaldson’s home and the involvement of Donaldson, an IRA veteran and apparently loyal disciple of the Adams leadership from the Short Strand area of Belfast, would later reverberate massively within the republican movement.

  Within a week the peace process was in the middle of a full-blown crisis. Faced with unionist threats to quit the power-sharing Executive, the British suspended the Good Friday Agreement institutions and direct rule was reinstituted. Once again IRA activity had collapsed the house of cards and raised dark questions in unionist minds about the wisdom of David Trimble’s seemingly interminable and unsatisfactory political liaison with the Provos.

  Faced with widespread criticism, and doubtless encouraged by the question marks still in the public’s mind about the Castlereagh raid, the Sinn Fein leadership once again played the “securocrat” card. Party leaders alleged that the spy ring, quickly dubbed “Stormontgate” by the local media, was an invention of hostile intelligence officers who had contrived the affair to rescue David Trimble from hard-liners in his party who were moving against his leadership. The claim that “Stormontgate” had been staged to “Save Dave,” combined with TV footage of a PSNI raid on Sinn Fein offices that was clearly over the top, helped the Provos retrieve some ground, at least within the nationalist constituency. For instance, Martin Mansergh, who had spent years as the Irish government’s contact man with the Provos in the early days of the peace process and was by now an Irish senator, questioned the timing of the raid, which he said was reminiscent of what might happen in Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe.

  The security authorities in Northern Ireland had been aware of the spy ring for months but had been slow to act. If the testimony of one former senior intelligence officer involved in the affair is correct, then far from staging the operation to rescue Trimble at the expense of the Provos, British intelligence strove to minimize the damage that would accrue to them once it all became public. Former Chief Superintendent Bill Lowry, head of the PSNI Special Branch in Belfast who headed the operation, code-named “Torsion,” later said: “I felt during the whole operation that I was running, constant pressure from the security services [MI5], that it would be better if we didn’t take skulls, if we just took papers. It would leave Sinn Fein/Provisional IRA a chance of denying they were involved in it.”39 Lowry quit the PSNI weeks after “Stormontgate” was exposed and after a row with MI5 over his alleged contacts with media. This would not be the last time that republican claims of “securocrat” influence would be seriously questioned.

  The other reason why the authorities stayed their hand was the hope that they would be able to ensnare the mastermind behind both the spy ring and the earlier raid on the Castlereagh Special Branch office. Both operations had been run by the IRA’s director of intelligence, Bobby Storey, a West Belfast IRA veteran who by this time had become something of a republican legend. An active gunman and bomber in the 1970s who had reputedly inspired Mairead Farrell, later killed by the SAS in Gibraltar, to join the IRA, he was jailed in the 1970s and again in 1981 for eighteen years after an ambush on British soldiers during the hunger strikes. Two years later he helped lead a spectacular IRA break-out from the Maze prison, the old Long Kesh, in which thirty-eight prisoners escaped. Around half were recaptured shortly afterwards, including Storey, who had tried to hide under water in a nearby river by breathing through a reed. Back in the H Blocks, he headed IRA security inside the jail, a job that entailed, inter alia, policing republican prisoners for dissent against the Adams leadership. After his release around the time of the first cease-fire, Storey—at 6’4” he was known as “Big Bobby” in IRA circles—rose in the ranks and was soon deeply involved in the organization’s intelligence work. Immediately after his release, Storey was appointed Northern Command intelligence officer and in that capacity he was to play an enormously significant role in saving Adams’s IRA skin. He helped organize and mastermind the bombing of Thiepval barracks, the British army’s headquarters in Northern Ireland, on the eve of the 1996 IRA Convention, and by so doing strengthened Adams’s hand with delegates as he faced criticism orchestrated and led by Michael McKevitt.

  It is Storey’s close relationship with and uncritical support for Gerry Adams that adds a fascinating twist to the destabilizing events of 2002. Just as in the case of the Colombian adventure, it is inconceivable that operations on the scale of the Castlereagh raid and “Stormontgate” would have been unauthorized or unknown to members of the IRA’s Army Council, which included both Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness. Nor is it likely or at all credible that someone like Storey, ever the loyal soldier, would undertake such missions knowing that they would or could undermine Adams. The logic of all this strongly suggests that Adams, as well as McGuinness, both knew and approved of operations like Castlereagh and the spy ring before they happened and that when Bobby Storey planned and crafted them, he knew it was with their support and endorsement, as IRA leaders.

  The next obvious question is why did Gerry Adams and his allies in the leadership give the go-ahead to such activities? One part of the answer is a variant on the old response, “because they could,” in this case “because they could get away with them.” As Bill Lowry’s experience demonstrated, and the response of British and Irish ministers to previous incidents showed, there was huge reluctance on the part of officialdom to confront the republican leadership over such matters. In the cause of Adams’s careful and hopefully successful management of his hard men, all things, or virtually all things, were permissible.

  Nonetheless, this course of action was not without huge risk for Adams and his allies. By this stage of the Troubles security force penetration of the IRA was extensive. The PSNI Special Branch, British military intelligence and MI5 had so many agents placed at different levels of the IRA that at the time of the first cease-fire in 1994 e
ight out of every ten IRA operations were known to the intelligence agencies, according to one very authoritative assessment.40 So when the Army Council authorized activity, whether it be an ambitious scheme like Stormontgate or a local shooting or abduction, the chances that it would come to light, notwithstanding the Nelson’s eye of British intelligence and the indulgence of the British and Irish governments, were statistically very high indeed.

  One possible explanation for this risk-taking was that the political fallout from such operations made it worthwhile. Within unionism, the impact was always to strengthen hardliners like Ian Paisley’s DUP and undermine more accommodating figures like David Trimble. Destabilizing unionism was, by itself, a worthwhile prize for many nationalists. Not only that but against a background of rising unionist protest over sharing power with a Sinn Fein that was linked to a still very active and armed IRA, Trimble was obliged to toughen his language, if not his policy, on IRA decommissioning, and to deny Sinn Fein a place in government or restrict the workings of institutions like the cross-Border bodies until the matter was settled. All this had an equal if opposite effect upon nationalist opinion, which needed little encouragement to conclude that decommissioning was just an excuse invented or inflated by unionists to deny Sinn Fein, and the Catholics who supported it, the mandated right to participate in government.

  To begin with, many Catholics had difficulty seeing David Trimble in anything resembling a friendly light or in accepting that he may have moderated his views over the years. His history and background had been one of association with the more hard-line, inflexible elements of unionism. He had, for instance, made political alliances with Paisley in the very recent past, most notoriously over the issue of the annual Drumcree Orange march, in Portadown, County Armagh, where each year local Orange lodges would attempt to march through a small Catholic area despite the intense opposition of its residents. For a number of years in the late 1990s the Drumcree march became an annual arm-wrestling match between unionism and nationalism and on one occasion, when the Orangemen won, Trimble danced a victory jig with Paisley through central Portadown and earned the undying hatred of many Catholics. In the 1970s he had joined the Vanguard party which had been founded by Bill Craig, the unrelenting unionist home affairs minister who had banned some of the early civil rights marches. In 1974 Trimble had sided with the loyalists opposed to the Sunningdale power-sharing deal and wrote the rule book for the Ulster Workers’ Council whose general strike had combined with loyalist paramilitary muscle to bring down the deal. The image of Trimble as a liberal proponent of power-sharing with republicans was difficult for nationalists to swallow and so the Trimble who toughened his rhetoric on IRA decommissioning and stopped Sinn Fein from sitting at the cabinet table looked not much different from the ungenerous, inflexible Trimble of old.

  Nationalists also saw Gerry Adams’s stewardship of the Provisionals in much the same sympathetic light as Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern, and agreed that he would have to manage his activists carefully and delicately if he and his peace project were to survive. In particular they sympathized with him on the question of IRA decommissioning and regarded unionist demands for it as tantamount to seeking a humiliating surrender. As the battle over IRA decommissioning lengthened and became more bitter, another effect was to make the SDLP largely irrelevant and reduce it to quasi-spectator status. The political impact of all this was to drive more and more nationalists into Sinn Fein’s camp and out of the SDLP’s, while increasing numbers of unionists deserted David Trimble for the DUP.

  The election results during the years between the resumption of the IRA cease-fire in 1997 up to the “Stormontgate” affair show a decisive swing within nationalist politics to Sinn Fein. In the 1997 Westminster general election the SDLP was still the dominant bloc, winning three seats to Sinn Fein’s two and 60 percent of the nationalist vote. Four years later the situation had reversed. Sinn Fein outpolled the SDLP at the 2001 Westminster election by 51 percent to 49 percent and won four seats to the SDLP’s three. It was a very similar, if not quite so dramatic, story on the unionist side. In 1997 Trimble’s Ulster Unionists secured 71 percent of the Protestant vote to the DUP’s 29 percent and held ten seats to the DUP’s two. By 2001, however, the share of the UUP vote had fallen to 54 percent, while Trimble’s party now held just six seats to the DUP’s five.

  The battle over decommissioning and controversies surrounding IRA activity had benefited the extremes to the disadvantage of the center ground in Northern Ireland politics. The message for Sinn Fein from all this was that more of the same might help the Provos deliver the coup de grâce to the SDLP and hand the party complete dominion over nationalist politics. Or, put another way, conceding transparent decommissioning to Trimble might resolve the political impasse and take the heat out of politics but very possibly at the cost of re-energizing the center ground of nationalist politics and reviving the SDLP. In a very significant sense this was history repeating itself, a history whose lessons Sinn Fein had digested well. In 1981, the fact that the hunger strikes were still ongoing when Owen Carron stood in a by-election to replace Bobby Sands as MP for Fermanagh–South Tyrone meant that nationalists had a reason, almost an obligation, to turn out to vote for him. Had the hunger strikes been resolved before polling day, as they nearly were, Catholic voters would have stayed home in droves and Carron would never have won. Twenty years later, the decommissioning dispute would play a very similar motivating role on Sinn Fein’s behalf throughout nationalist communities in Northern Ireland. Like prolonging the hunger strike, Sinn Fein had everything to gain from drawing out the decommissioning dispute.

  In the South the peace process, for somewhat different reasons, had also brought electoral benefits for Sinn Fein. The party had won its first Dail seat in the 1997 general election when Caoimhghin O Caolain won a seat in the Cavan–Monaghan constituency. In the 2002 election Sinn Fein’s tally rose to five seats and the party fared well enough elsewhere to suggest it might triple its tally of seats at the next outing. One of those to win a seat was Martin Ferris, in Kerry North, and his victory meant that three of the seven members of the IRA’s Army Council had been elected to parliaments in Ireland and Britain; if Pat Doherty had not left the Council in the interim, it would have been four. The peace process was enormously popular in the Irish Republic and the charismatic Sinn Fein leader, Gerry Adams, especially so. Sinn Fein was also a new fresh face at a time when scandals about political corruption in other parties, especially Fianna Fail, abounded; the fact that the Provisionals’ leaders had just emerged from armed struggle suggested they were still guided by principle and unlikely to be subverted by brown envelopes stuffed with cash, at least for a while.

  There was also a good deal of pan-nationalist sympathy with Sinn Fein over the decommissioning battle with David Trimble and it was surely no coincidence that the IRA’s second decommissioning event took place just weeks before the May 2002 Irish election, underlining the IRA’s perceived fealty to the peace process even in the face of Trimble’s unreasonableness. Indeed, some observers believe that but for the Colombia arrests and the September 11 attacks, this would have been the date for the first act of decommissioning. Adams and his allies were also aided by Trimble’s own personal failings, not least an inability to resist intemperate language. He had won no friends in the South, for instance, when in March 2002 he called the Irish Republic “a pathetic, sectarian, mono-ethnic, mono-cultural State.” Not surprisingly there was an indignant reaction in the Republic and Sinn Fein reaped the benefit. The message from the South, at least, was that denying transparency in the decommissioning process and continuing IRA activity while maintaining a rhetorical commitment to peace wasn’t doing the party any harm.

  If, as many people believed, the goal of the Adams strategy was first to become the dominant nationalist party in the North and a significant political force in the South, and second to subsequently occupy seats around cabinet tables on both sides of the Border at the same time, then it was
on the way to being realized.

  ACCORDING to the rules of the Good Friday Agreement, the next Assembly election, and therefore Sinn Fein’s chance to deliver a knockout blow to the SDLP, was scheduled to take place in May 2003. Otherwise there wouldn’t be a proper opportunity until at least 2005, when the next local council and Westminster elections would take place, and that was too far off for comfort. The problem facing Sinn Fein’s strategists was that in the post-Stormontgate atmosphere there was no guarantee that there would still be an Assembly around in May 2003 to which elections would be held. The task facing them was to do just enough in terms of movement towards satisfying Trimble’s demands to keep him in the game and to get a date confirmed for the Assembly election while not doing so much that the fire under the decommissioning pot might be quenched.

  And so the weary waltz recommenced, kick-started by an obliging Tony Blair who came to Belfast within days of the Assembly’s suspension. He brought a message of comfort and reassurance to Trimble in the form of a warning to the IRA that it could no longer be “half in, half out” of the process and that “a fork in the road had been reached” in relation to continued paramilitary activity. It was time for “acts of completion,” he declared. A few days later the Sinn Fein charm offensive began with a speech from Gerry Adams in which he talked of seeing a future “without the IRA” and admitted that IRA actions had strengthened unionist inflexibility. Blair had also announced an end to endless “inch by inch” negotiations—but in fact the two speeches were the signal for another yearlong bout of precisely that sort of diplomacy.