Decoding the IRA

by Tom Mahon

  Whether the letter contributed to it or not, by April Keogh had been certified as insane and was transferred to Dundrum Criminal Lunatic Asylum. Maud Gonne alleged he was ‘the sixth victim driven mad in Maryboro’ Jail within the last twelve months’. Shortly after his arrival in Dundrum, George Gilmore entered the asylum in a hijacked Clery’s department store van and rescued him.

  The IRA managed to get him to New York, where Connie Neenan wrote, ‘he has cost us a lot of money’, and by ‘writing home too often [and] giving his address’, his presence was detected by the US emigration authorities, who charged him with entering the country ‘without [a] passport and being insane’. Given the large community of ex-IRA men in New York – ‘there is too much company in New York for him’ – Neenan felt that it would be best to send him to Chicago, where an IRA man, Johnny Connors, could get him a job.112 There he settled for a while and in 1933 Neenan wrote to Twomey: ‘[I] have no news of Keogh, other than he is alive, working, and possibly giving the wife a run for her money.’113

  Keogh, his wife Helen and their son and daughter moved in the 1930s to Florida.114 Around 1940 he returned to Galway where he was employed as a workman. In 1945 at the age of forty-three he went to a chemist shop and purchased a bottle of the aptly named ‘Kilcro’ – for poisoning crows. A little later his body was found in a field with the empty bottle beside him. At the inquest the coroner stated that it contained suffcient strychnine to poison sixty people.115 The jury returned a verdict of accidental death.

  CHAPTER 6

  The IRA in Britain

  Do your utmost to carry out sabotage during [the general] strike. Destroy transport petrol supplies. Slash windows to start looting … derail trains, destroy junctions and signal cabins … Blacklegs may be ambushed.

  IRA chief of staff to an officer in Britain

  Things are bad [here in London]. The police [are] very active. Have destroyed most of my stuff and dumped the rest. If I am pinched nothing will be found on me.

  Senior IRA officer in Britain to the chief of staff, Moss Twomey

  The IRA’s units and personnel in Britain were an important arm of the organisation. Weapons and explosives were smuggled across to Ireland, while men on the run from Ireland were given refuge. In the event of renewed conflict with Britain, these units were expected to carry out sabotage and arson attacks. Additionally, the IRA’s senior officer, the OC. Britain, worked for Soviet military intelligence and assisted Soviet spies in London.

  This chapter discusses IRA activities and organisation in Britain, including much information which hasn’t been publicly disclosed before. The organisation’s relationship with Soviet intelligence in London is covered in greater detail in Chapter 8.

  Background

  In the nineteenth century the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) built an underground support network for radical Irish nationalism that stretched from America to Britain. This was later to form the template for much of the IRA’s network. In Britain the IRB established itself among sections of the Irish community throughout the country, where its activities included smuggling weapons to Ireland. The IRB was a secretive revolutionary organisation, whose members were commonly known as Fenians and were blamed for a series of bombings in England. These attacks and the resulting police crackdown helped bring about the marginalisation and decline of the organisation. By 1914 there were just 117 members in England and 250 in Scotland.1

  In 1919 with the outbreak of the Anglo-Irish War, IRA units began to spring up in Britain – these were usually started on local initiative but quickly came under the control of the reorganised IRB and Michael Collins in Dublin. In the words of Art O’Brien, Collins’ right hand man in London, ‘In so far as London was concerned, IRB and IRA were interchangeable terms.’ At its peak there were up to 1,000 men enrolled in the IRA in Britain, though, as in Ireland, only a fraction would have actually reported for ‘active duty’. During the Anglo-Irish War the IRA volunteers in Britain were relatively active when compared with many of their comrades in Ireland. The British IRA largely committed acts of arson and sabotage rather than attacks on police officers or soldiers; on one night in November 1920 over a hundred men from Liverpool burned nineteen buildings along the docks. Other actions followed intermittently, and in April 1921 there was a mysterious spate of window-smashing throughout the country. Thousands of windows were broken at night, before the attacks abruptly stopped. Though the culprits were never found, many suspected the IRA of being responsible.2

  When the IRA split in 1922 (as a result of disagreement over the Anglo-Irish Treaty) the organisation in England largely disintegrated, never to fully recover. In September 1922 during the ensuing Civil War, P. A. Murray was appointed officer commanding (OC.) Britain, and sent to London to reorganise the IRA. Murray was a well-respected operative, whom Seán MacBride referred to as ‘a competent Cork man, a pleasant person to work with, silent and effcient’.3 He found ‘the difficulty in England was great but the men were fine’ and that ‘sources of supply and new contacts and lines had to be built up from zero’.4 The chief of staff, Liam Lynch, told Murray to lead a bombing campaign, by blowing up buildings and bridges. This, however, was well beyond the resources of the IRA there, and nothing came of it.5 Instead Murray saw his role as one of supporting and supplying the IRA back in Ireland. In London he made contact with Soviet agents and this may have laid the basis for the later IRA–Soviet agreement.6 A year after his arrival (and with the ending of the Civil War) Murray returned to Dublin and was appointed IRA adjutant general.7

  In November 1924 the IRA’s adjutant general inspected the units in England and Scotland and reported that none of the units were ‘in a healthy condition’ and that there was ‘great dissatisfaction’ among the men.8

  The key IRA agent in the country was the OC. Britain. The very title ‘OC. Britain’ speaks to the pretensions of the IRA, and the Soviets found it amusing to think that there was an IRA officer commanding Britain (though in fairness, the IRA did include a full stop between ‘OC’ and ‘Britain’).9 Virtually all significant IRA operations and activities in England were carried out by the OC, either acting alone or with a small group of associates. He smuggled over arms and explosives as well as military manuals, obtained false British passports, oversaw the IRA units in England, assisted escaped prisoners and men on the run from Ireland and gathered technical and military intelligence material for Soviet intelligence. He also forwarded money and despatches to Dublin, which arrived in Britain by way of transatlantic liners from New York. IRA leaders, including Moss Twomey, visited London regularly and met with him, while Seán MacBride came across from Paris. There was also an IRA intelligence system in Britain, though how well it functioned is difficult to say.

  The true identity of the OC. Britain in 1926 isn’t clear; the only clue I have is that he signed documents with initials, ending in ‘M’. By September 1926 ‘M’ was replaced by George. George signed his correspondence as ‘HS’. However, in several instances (sometimes in cipher) he was also referred to as George, so this was most likely his real first name. There’s evidence that he was George Power from Cork. Power had served in the North Cork brigade along with Moss Twomey during the Anglo-Irish War. In April 1926 Power was in London and Twomey wrote to ‘M’: ‘George Power is in London. He would like to meet you and he may be returning soon. His address is: 6 Lanark Villas, Maida Vale. Call if you can spare time. I enclose a note for him.’10

  The decline in the fortunes of the IRA in Britain, following its peak during the Anglo-Irish War, occurred as a result of several factors, including: the post-Treaty split and the outbreak of the Civil War in Ireland, the disbanding of the IRB in 1924 by the IRA, the general disillusionment following defeat in the Civil War and the subsequent lack of a coherent strategy. IRA members in Britain were also subjected to intense police scrutiny and officers regularly visited their workplaces, which presented a strong incentive to disassociate from the organisation. In March 1923 the police mounted a
massive operation and arrested 110 suspected IRA members and sympathisers, who were then deported and interned in the Free State. Though the regulation under which this was carried out was later found invalid by the courts (allowing the deportees to return), the action significantly weakened the IRA and many of the deportees shied away from the movement.11

  The IRA organisation in Britain

  Aside from the OC. Britain and his assistants in London, the IRA in England was organised into three companies, each of which covered a specific region or area. Number 1 Area comprised London and the home counties, Number 2 Area Manchester, Salford and parts of Yorkshire and Number 3 Area Liverpool and the surrounding region. Additionally, there were small groups of IRA volunteers scattered in a handful of other cities. These units were under the command of the OC. Britain, though in practice he exercised little direct control and showed little interest.12 There was also an IRA battalion in Scotland which reported directly to headquarters in Dublin.

  The three English companies and the Scottish battalion were based in cities – London, Manchester, Liverpool and Glasgow – with major Irish immigrant communities, and which were also centres where the IRB had been strongest in the nineteenth century. While few of the older generation of IRB activists were likely to have remained, there is some indication that a degree of continuity was preserved by a tradition of membership running in families. This link with the past was perhaps strongest in Glasgow. However, there was a high turnover in membership, as many IRA volunteers were transient unskilled or semi-skilled workers, while new immigrants were continually arriving from Ireland.

  Aside from petrol for arson, the primary weapon of the IRA in Britain was the revolver – the mainstay of urban guerrilla warfare. And the number of revolvers and volunteers in each centre gives an overview of the IRA’s distribution and strength. In March 1926 the IRA reported that in London there were twenty-five ‘reliable men’, thirty-five revolvers with about 500 rounds of ammunition and no grenades or mines. Liverpool had fifteen to twenty ‘good men’ (plus some recent IRA immigrants who hadn’t formally attached themselves to the company) and thirty revolvers. There were ten to fifteen revolvers in Newcastle, but the number of men there was unknown. There were four men, with five revolvers in Swansea. A small number of IRA volunteers worked at the port of Southampton, where they were able to assist with despatches sent from America, but they were reported to be unarmed, and at Portsmouth there were nine men and four revolvers. There were men with weapons in a few other cities, but they had lost touch with the IRA headquarters.13

  A report prepared by Seán Russell for the Army Council in 1926 noted that ‘for the past few years nobody appeared to have a clear conception of the reasons and objective for maintaining’ the IRA in Britain. Russell summed up the situation: ‘Without a clear idea and objective, there as elsewhere, it is impossible to rouse interest and get men to work wholeheartedly.’ He went on to suggest that the justifications for having the units were primarily twofold: that they would be able to carry out operations in response to British attacks including ‘economic warfare’ against Ireland (‘the Republic’) or that they would gather intelligence, supply munitions to the IRA in Ireland and maintain communications with ‘foreign countries’. Russell felt that they could ‘act as an internal menace to the British Government and try to appear more [a] formidable force than they really are’. The skills needed by these volunteers were ‘a good knowledge of engineering, explosives or chemistry and some proficiency in the use of short arms and grenades’.14

  At the time, the IRA in Britain had only 189 members, and between 1926 and 1927 only ninety-three IRA members emigrating from Ireland requested to be transferred to one of the British companies. The membership was composed of a mixture of ‘old timers’ and recent IRA immigrants from Ireland; and particularly in Liverpool there was friction between both these groups, which had a serious adverse effect. However, there was a greater degree of support for the IRA among the Irish community in Britain than these figures suggest. Both Sinn Féin and Cumann na mBan had clubs in England, and social functions organised by these and other republican groups were on occasion able to attract large attendances.15

  During the period 1924 to 1926, the IRA headquarters made an effort to reorganise the units, which cost a ‘great deal of money’.16 Officers who were sent over from Ireland worked with the men and appointed new officers locally. However, Twomey and his colleagues remained consistently dissatisfied, and there is no evidence that any of the British detachments were regarded as capable of effective action. The most that seems to have been expected was that they could have carried out some smuggling and low-level operations such as sabotage.

  Seán Russell stated that the IRA in Britain was not worth the ‘energy expended and labour involved in maintaining it’. One of the problems was that the IRA was originally conceived in Ireland as the legitimate army of the Irish Republic – with units and a command structure meant to parallel that of the British army – rather than as a secret revolutionary force. This relatively open form of organisation was ill-suited to the situation in Britain, where the members were a tiny minority within a hostile country and pursed by an effective police force. Therefore Russell recommended that ‘a smaller force, highly organised and distributed in small groups, in as many cities and large towns as possible would be more effective. That these groups work in secret is essential, and an oath of secrecy might be administered to them. They should avoid as far as possible public connection with Republican civilian organisations and prominent Republicans.’ Since many of the IRA’s operatives were already known to the police, Russell suggested that the new organisation should be largely composed of volunteers who had emigrated after the Civil War. These recommendations presaged the successful cell structure eventually adopted by the Provisional IRA in the late 1970s.17 In April 1927, however, Moss Twomey reiterated that the ‘efforts to organise’ the IRA in Britain had made ‘little progress’.18

  In the spring of 1926 the IRA in London carried out an attack that did little to enhance its reputation. In March the Conservative prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, attended a St Patrick’s evening banquet. As ‘M’ (who was OC. Britain at the time) reported, ‘St. Patrick’s night operations carried out, but not as successful as desired owing to defective stuff. Two tickets for [the] Hotel Cecil were secured and there four bombs were ignited, but three failed and the other simply spluttered and was ineffective … The bombs were hopeless and pitiable, considering the risk and expense incurred. One of the two men who went to the Hotel Cecil is detained.’19 The ‘bombs’ were actually smoke bombs, making this episode little more than an elaborate schoolboy prank. The arrested volunteer, Hugh Daly, ‘acting under official orders … carried out his instructions to the letter and it was only defective material that rendered ineffective his cool daring. He ignited two “bombs” and throwing one of them quite near, to cover his retreat, he landed the other on the table in front of the prime minister. Had the “bombs” exploded as anticipated this plan would have upset the whole proceedings and in the ensuing confusion Daly would certainly have escaped. However … owing to faulty mixing of the contents of the “bombs” the asphyxiating gas producing material was untouched and thus rendered abortive the whole operation.’ The unfortunate Daly was seized by a Fr Evans and handed over to police.20

  After his arrest, the police promptly released him ‘with a view to the discovery of any colleagues, but [Daly] was rearrested as [he] was about to enter his lodgings’. Notwithstanding the £42 the IRA spent on his defence, he was sentenced to a year in prison.21 The chief of staff agreed with ‘M’ that it was a rather expensive failure, though ‘if things went as they were planned it would be worth it’ and added: ‘I hope you will not overlook anything that might be done for him [Daly].’22 With actions of this calibre it’s no wonder that morale amongst the IRA in London was poor!

  The next planned attack was of far greater significance, an attempt to cause civil unrest under the c
over of the 1926 general strike – the largest industrial dispute ever in British history. The strike grew out of a dispute involving the coal miners. In 1925, with falling prices for coal, the mine owners proposed to cut the miners’ wages and increase their work hours. Not surprisingly, the miners resisted and threatened to strike.

  Members of the British cabinet and the establishment were concerned that a strike could lead to civil disorder and provide a cover for communist agitation.23 The Irish Times went so far as to say that the strike posed as grave a threat to Britain as did the outbreak of the First World War.24 This was also a thought that crossed Moss Twomey’s mind, and one that he found appealing.

  In late April 1926 Twomey asked ‘M’: ‘Do you think there will be a coal strike [sic]? If there is keep an eye on the possibilities arising out of it.’25 With Stanley Baldwin ostensibly trying to negotiate a settlement, ‘M’ replied: ‘I have it on good authority that both sides are anxious to avoid a strike, especially the miners. If there are any developments I will let you know.’26

  However, negotiations broke down, and when the miners refused to accept the employers’ terms they were locked out. The Trades Union Congress (TUC) reacted swiftly and called a general strike on 3 May – which was initially heeded by up to three million workers throughout Britain. Crowds took to the streets and though largely peaceful there was widespread disruption of basic services and transportation.27