Voices from the Grave: Two Men's War in Ireland

by Ed Moloney

  After we brought the Armalites in we had two call houses, one in 9 Gibson Street and one directly facing it. One day we were all called over to get something to eat; Mrs Maguire had made us something … and … three or four of us went over and Twomey arrived at the house to find the weapons and no sign of us … he could have court-martialled me, but he didn’t. He shouted at me, for leaving the weapons unattended, which was an offence … he could have done me that time but he didn’t. Me and Twomey had a funny relationship.

  [Eventually] there was a takeover [of the IRA leadership], directed, controlled, manipulated and achieved by Gerry Adams. He was the person who removed the old Army Council. Now at that time I agreed [with all this] … I saw them as conservative, as right-wing and as people who were not going anywhere. So I was in agreement. I didn’t oppose what Adams was doing. I was part of it – I was one of the tools used by Gerry to remove that Army Council … [But later] I started to get concerns at the way Seamus Twomey was treated and at that stage my concerns were more humanitarian … When I got out of prison in 1986, he had been thrown on the scrap heap. I remember going in and out of Parnell Square in Dublin, Sinn Fein headquarters, and Twomey would be sitting there, down and out; he would sit in a chair in Parnell Square all day. Joe Cahill was downstairs counting his money and Twomey didn’t have enough for a pint. He had a small flat in Dublin which was really run down. This is a man who had spent his whole life in the IRA. And then he took bad, and I would visit him in hospital … he died a sad, lonely man. I remember bringing his coffin back to Belfast and when we got to his house after driving the whole way from Dublin there was nobody there, only his wife. It was so sad, so sad. And even … when he lay in hospital, he got very few visitors.

  While the military setbacks the IRA would suffer would not really be evident for some time, the political isolation caused by ‘Bloody Friday’ would quickly become apparent. By the end of 1972, the British had outlined the parameters of any future settlement, limits that would never change in the years that followed. Executive power would have to be shared between Unionists and Nationalists and a mechanism created to accommodate the cross-border relationship with Dublin, something to give expression to the so-called Irish dimension. On the security front, the British made the first moves to ‘criminalise’ the IRA’s armed struggle and to make it easier to obtain convictions in court. A government commission recommended the creation of no-jury trials, with the power to accept confession evidence, to deal with terrorist-type offences. The noose was tightening around the IRA. Meanwhile the violence that year would be the worst of the entire Troubles: 496 deaths, nearly three people killed every two days. The IRA was responsible for almost half of the deaths and for most of the 151 soldiers and policemen who perished. But Northern Ireland would never see as violent a year again.

  In later years, not long after the formal beginning of the peace process, 1972 would be remembered for a more notorious reason. This was the year in which the IRA began ‘disappearing’ people it had killed. By the standards of Chile, Argentina or Peru, the IRA’s use of this practice was mild, but many would argue that it is not the scale of the practice that matters as much as the fact that it happens at all. The IRA has admitted killing nine people and burying them in secret graves between 1972 and 1978, a tiny number compared to the hundreds disappeared by General Pinochet or the Argentinian junta. Most of those killed in Ireland were allegedly spies or informers working for the British. The IRA regards itself as an army at war, and during wartime spies are shot dead when they are caught – so it believes such killings are permissible. But letting the world know what had happened was usually seen by the IRA as a vital part of the process, generally by leaving the body in a public place along with a press release explaining the reasons for the killing. Spies and informers were dealt with in this way as a warning to others and to discourage anyone tempted to follow their example, an especially important factor for the IRA since most informers would be recruited either from within its own ranks or from the community within which it operated. So killing and then secretly burying the victim runs counter to the IRA’s stated traditions, values and interests and the practice has left the organisation, or at least those who ordered such disappearances, open to the charge that it was done only to avoid embarrassment or shame. That the only other known example of the IRA disappearing people was the cause of huge controversy at the time confirms the point. In April 1922, after the Treaty but before the civil war, the IRA in West Cork allegedly disappeared three local Protestants who had been accused of spying for the British. The killings brought accusations of sectarian bigotry in their wake and both sides in the Treaty debate, those for and those against, united to condemn the deaths and to distance themselves from the perpetrators. A measure of the scale of the controversy is that those far-off events in County Cork continue to reverberate to this day in often bitter exchanges between rival historians about what really happened.

  Disappearing people is also a war or human rights crime. In April 2009 the former president of Peru, Alberto Fujimori, was convicted of a number of human rights violations, among which was the ‘enforced disappearance’ of nine students and a university professor by virtue of the fact that he had effective command of those who actually committed the crimes, a secret military squad.27 The seventy-year-old faces a lengthy jail term for disappearing around the same number of victims that the IRA has admitted treating in the same way. In Northern Ireland, the issue assumed huge significance during the peace-process negotiations. Relatives of the disappeared had been campaigning for the truth and the recovery of their relatives’ remains for years and the issue had become a festering sore that needed resolution if the wider settlement was to take root. So in the wake of the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, the British and Irish governments established an Independent Commission to co-ordinate the search for those still missing. In March 1999, the IRA finally admitted that it had deliberately dis appeared those people who had gone missing and furnished a list of the victims to the new commission.

  The IRA began disappearing people in the summer and autumn of 1972, not long after Gerry Adams was released from Long Kesh internment camp and around the time that he became the Belfast Brigade Commander. The IRA has procedures for dealing with alleged informers. The accused would face a court martial and, however imperfect the process, the procedure and verdict would have to be ratified by GHQ and eventually by the Army Council, which would also confirm the sentence, normally death in such cases. However, the manner of execution, whether the victim would be acknowledged or their death covered up, was often a matter to be determined locally and by the circumstances of the case. This latter feature of the process is what made the Belfast Brigade’s behaviour during this time so controversial. Brendan Hughes was a witness and participant in some of the events that led to these disappearances and in his interviews with Boston College, he confirmed that a special unit called ‘the Unknowns’, several of whose members were active in the bombing campaign in Britain, took some of these victims to their deaths, and that the unit was established by and, ultimately, was responsible to Gerry Adams.

  Another startling assertion made by Hughes is that the IRA has been lying about just how many people were disappeared over the years. One of the names omitted from the list of victims handed over to the authorities, according to Hughes’s interviews, is the very first person killed in this way by the IRA. An IRA member like most of the disappeared, the first victim’s ‘crime’ was not treachery but the attempted murder of an IRA colleague for reasons of love or lust. The IRA man at the centre of the story was a senior figure called Joe Linskey, the Belfast Brigade’s Intelligence Officer (I/O) at the time he vanished. Joe Linskey, who spelled his name ‘Lynsky’ for IRA purposes so as to confuse the police and army, was court-martialled and then, Hughes believed, shot dead and buried in a secret grave after it was discovered that he tried to kill a fellow IRA member so that he could have the man’s wife to himself. Linskey had been conductin
g a lengthy affair with the woman and apparently decided that only her husband’s death could ensure the survival of the liaison. One warm evening in June 1972, the cuckolded husband answered a knock at his door and was shot in the doorway as he held a child in his arms; and, probably because of that, the shot was poorly aimed and not fatal.

  Although badly wounded, he managed to make his way down to the Lower Falls where he told Brendan Hughes that he thought his attacker had been a member of the Official IRA whom he knew. That sparked a feud between the Provisionals and the Officials in the Lower Falls area, in the course of which Desmond Mackin, a member of a family closely linked to the Officials, was shot dead. Only later did Provisional IRA leaders discover that Joe Linskey had attempted to use his position in the IRA to remove a rival for his lover’s affection. Hughes said he cannot give first-hand confirmation that Linskey was killed and disappeared but he knew that he had been taken away by ‘the Unknowns’ – as was at least one other of the disappeared – and he believes that he was shot dead and secretly buried. The betrayed IRA husband was wounded and Mackin killed on the night of 18–19 June 1972. Gerry Adams had just been released from Long Kesh as part of the ceasefire deal when all this happened. On 20 June, he and Daithi O Connail met the British on the Derry–Donegal border to arrange the terms of the ceasefire and, by the time Linskey was dealt with – arrested by the IRA and condemned to die – Adams had been restored to his place on the staff of the Belfast Brigade.

  Joe Linskey was one of the founder members of the Provisional IRA in Belfast, a personal friend and associate of Gerry Adams and was in his late thirties or early forties when all this happened. In his younger days, he had been a Cistercian monk – his nickname, predictably, was ‘the mad monk’ – but he left the order around the mid-1950s and became involved in Republican politics well before the events of 1969. According to those who knew him, Linskey’s IRA hero and role model was Michael Collins, from whose many exploits he derived his interest in intelligence. When he joined the Provisionals he ensured, like Collins and Brendan Hughes’s father, that the British would not know what he looked like by destroying all photographs of himself.

  Members of Joe Linskey’s family have been trying for the best part of thirty-five years to find out what happened to him, but without success. As they told the author last summer, they have made repeated efforts to persuade senior Republicans, including Gerry Adams, to tell them what happened but each time hit a brick wall of silence. His mother and only brother went to their graves not knowing what had become of him, or whether he was alive or dead, while others in the family worried that their uncle had been killed for informing or had been hiding in fear the IRA would catch up with him, an offence that would cast a shadow over the entire family. In the last four years, with the peace process firmly embedded, family members intensified their inquiries but again with no result. As one of them put it: ‘It was perhaps understandable that no one would tell us when the war was on, but now that there is peace, his family should be told the truth.’28 Whether the IRA leadership – or what remains of it – now comes clean about Joe Linskey’s fate and reveals what happened to him, whether he was killed or not and if so where his body might be found, remains to be seen. In the meantime Brendan Hughes’s testimony is, for the moment, the only clue as to what happened to Joe Linskey.

  That night [18–19 June 1972] I was at the corner of Varna Gap when a Volunteer came and told me that —— had been shot. He was a Volunteer from the Kashmir Road area and he had made his way after being shot to a drinking club called the Rapid Metal Club on Osman Street, directly facing the Raglan Street School where the famous ambush had taken place. I went and saw him and he’d a bullet wound … the bullet was still lodged in his stomach so we arranged to get —— away. He was taken across the border which was the normal practice where there were no questions asked. —— told me that it was the Sticks shot him. So, I then went and mobilised the Volunteers in D Company and we went into the Cracked Cup (an Official IRA drinking club). I fired a couple of shots into the air to get their attention and arrested eight or nine Officials. Hatchet [Eamon Kerr, a well-known OIRA gunman] was one of them, —— who was the brother of Jim Sullivan, the O/C of the Officials, —— and I can’t remember the other names. They were the three most prominent ones in the area. A man died that night as well because of this incident … a man called Dessie Mackin resisted … [and] he was shot. He was actually shot by ——. He bled to death; it was an accidental death, if it can be called that. We brought them to a house in Gibson Street and held them in the house and threatened to execute them unless the person who shot —— was handed over. We held them for most of the night until the next morning. They denied shooting ——, but the Officials organised a picket outside the house. Fifty or sixty women came around – everybody in the area knew we had them in that house; so to cut a long story short we were forced to release them, otherwise the attention that it was bringing could have brought the Brits in. As it turned out later that day we found out that it wasn’t the Official IRA who shot ——. It was one of our Volunteers – a man called Joe Linskey. And Joe Linskey was having an affair with ——’ s wife. He was a strange fella. I believe he was at one time a Christian Brother, but he was a Volunteer in the IRA and he was the man that shot ——. That’s the way it happened but what I have since learned [is that] he was taken away, Joe Linskey was taken away by the IRA for interrogation and has never been seen again. I believe he was executed and buried. I believe he was the first to be disappeared by the IRA. I can’t confirm it, [but] I believe it … I know he was taken away by ‘the Unknowns’ – [as] they were called at that time. Wee Pat McClure‡ ran the squad … anyone that needed to be taken away, it was Pat’s squad that normally did it. Its members were ——, ——, ——, ——; they were the main ones in this squad. There were obviously other ones, at times, who drifted in and out … They were always Gerry’s squad … I had no control over this squad, as O/C of the Second Battalion even. Gerry had control over it …

  Q. Did they not sort of double up as a type of Irish Republican Brotherhood, a group within a group which was loyal to Gerry Adams in that sense?

  A. I think that’s probably the best description of them …

  Q. Were they not his own personal squad, something like Michael Collins had, a personal squad?

  A. By and large, that’s what it was, that’s exactly what it was … that’s what they were … a flying column type thing … they could move into any area [and] they finished up as the nucleus of the team the first time London was bombed. But because of the situation … at the time, the Brigade, the Battalion, Company structures, if they were coming into an area to do a particular operation, there was always a tie-in with the local Company. Pat McClure was an ex-British soldier, a very good organiser and very capable of leading a squad like that. He died in Canada, Pat did … I never got talking to Pat before he left and it was a surprise to me [that he left] because I always saw Pat as a very dedicated IRA man. I don’t know the personal circumstances that made him leave … whether he got disillusioned or whatever … Pat would have been in his thirties when I knew him in the 1971, 1972 period; he would have been one of the older ones. When I say older ones, he’d have been older than most of us. As I say … plenty of military experience behind him. I think he’d served in the Middle East.

  Q. Why did Gerry Adams need a particular personal team? A squad? A personal squad?

  A. I think it was for effectiveness, right, and I think that it was a naive attempt possibly to introduce the cell system into the IRA.

  * * *

  No single event in the annals of the IRA during 1972 more firmly established the Belfast Brigade’s name for military daring, or the mastery that its Commander, Gerry Adams, seemed to exercise over the dark world of counter-intelligence, than the so-called Four Square Laundry operation. It was a strike against British Military Intelligence that evoked comparisons with Michael Collins whose famous ‘squad’ had wip
ed out the bulk of Britain’s secret agents in Dublin in one violent day, the first ‘Bloody Sunday’, nearly fifty-two years earlier. Adams, whose ‘Unknowns’ were very possibly an attempt to replicate Collins’s squad, was not shy in making the comparison in his autobiography Before the Dawn: ‘It was a devastating blow, on a par with Michael Collins’s action against British Intelligence in November 1920,’ he wrote.29

  In 1972, the British Army dominated the security offensive against the IRA and that included the intelligence war. In those days the level of distrust and hostility between the Army and the RUC, including the Special Branch, was quite intense. The British Army’s own analysis of its three-and-a-half-decade-long campaign in Northern Ireland reflected this frosty relationship, describing the RUC of those days as ‘secretive and mistrustful of outsiders’30 and the Special Branch ‘as mediocre and … hugely overworked’.31 Reluctant to share responsibility with the RUC for gathering intelligence on the IRA, the Army created its own network which operated at a number of levels, from the foot patrols that daily crisscrossed the Catholic working-class districts of Belfast hoovering up street-level information through to specialist units whose main task was to penetrate the IRA and to recruit and run double agents. In 1972, the foremost of these outfits was an organisation known as the Military Reaction Force (MRF), which was partly an undercover unit that spied on and attempted to disrupt the IRA and partly a pseudo-gang cum dirty-tricks operation, not beyond making assassination attempts on IRA suspects, of the sort that Brendan Hughes had survived. A parliamentary written question put by the Labour MP Chris Mullin to the Junior Defence Minister in March 1994 drew out this official, if somewhat understated,description of the MRF: ‘The Military Reaction Force was a small military unit which, during the period 1971 to 1973, was responsible for carrying out essential surveillance tasks in Northern Ireland in those circumstances where soldiers in uniform and with Army vehicles would be too easily recognised.’32