A Secret History of the IRA

by Ed Moloney

  The Eksund’s ballast tanks had already been filled with water in preparation for scuttling. Cleary had crafted Semtex bombs that were just large enough to make holes in the vessel’s skin but not so large that the noise of the explosions would attract attention. French forensic experts later calculated that the Eksund would have sunk within seconds.

  The IRA man had chosen a hole known as Deep Hurd in which to scuttle the Eksund. The plan was to sink the vessel and then head in the dinghy for the Brittany coast, after which the crew would catch a ferry back to Ireland without the authorities’ ever knowing about the IRA’s audacious plan. That was when he discovered that a traitor had wrecked his plan.

  A cursory glance at the bomb mechanism told Cleary that the plan would have to be scrapped; the firing unit for the explosives had been sabotaged, its wiring damaged beyond repair. The device, known as a timing power unit (TPU), was simple to operate and safe enough for a child to use, but it was just as easy to put out of commission. Whoever had neutralized Cleary’s bombs would not have needed much training.

  Cleary never got as far as even connecting the device. Instead the realization of treachery forced a number of thoughts to flash through his head, as he later told IRA colleagues. The British must have known about their plans all along, and soon the media would know as well. But the question that brought a cold sweat to his brow concerned the identity of the traitor. There was certainly a collaborator on board, but was there another one, someone back in Ireland who had betrayed the Eksund and its precious cargo?

  Cleary knew that the TPU must have been tampered with after the Eksund had left Tripoli harbor and not before. The IRA man had made up the mechanism himself before sailing and had linked it to detonators fixed into slabs of Semtex not long after leaving the dock. The TPU had been in perfect working order. He had double-checked to make sure.

  There was no time to repair the timing unit. The spotter plane had again flown overhead, and in the distance the crew could see motor launches speeding toward them. The net was obviously closing. Cleary watched the scene with a sense of grim satisfaction; his instincts had been right.

  Within minutes the Eksund was surrounded and boarded by armed French customs men. Within hours a shocked and disbelieving public in Ireland and Britain would hear the news of the failure of this extraordinary smuggling venture. A few weeks later and the full scope of the IRA’s operations would be made public; everyone would know that the organization now had some 150 tons of explosives and modern weaponry, delivered earlier and safely stored away in secret dumps throughout Ireland. But the greatest secret of them all, that the Eksund had been betrayed, was to remain sealed.

  THE STORY OF the IRA’s long relationship with the Libyan regime of Colonel Qaddafi is one of the most extraordinary and colorful tales to come out of the Irish “Troubles,” and the history of their partnership is almost as old as the events that brought both into existence. Now for the first time the story of the links between the oil-rich Arab country and one of Western Europe’s bloodiest conflicts can be told in full.

  Both came into being in the summer of 1969. In Ireland the events that spawned the Provisional IRA began in August that year in the small streets that crouched beneath the towers of the Catholic Clonard Monastery in West Belfast, not far from where its future leader Gerry Adams had been born and raised some twenty years earlier.

  In Tripoli, a few weeks after those violent events but some 1,500 miles away, Muammar Qaddafi, a young Libyan army officer only a few years older than Adams, led a group of soldiers to power in a bloodless coup that ended centuries of colonial rule in this large North African country. Neither man knew it at the time, but fate and a shared hatred of the British were to throw them together within a few short years.

  By the summer of 1969 Northern Ireland had been simmering for months as Protestant resentment at a hugely successful civil rights campaign by Catholics, fueled by years of political and economic discrimination, threatened to spill onto the streets in violence. In August the cauldron boiled over, and the death and destruction began.

  It was not long before the trouble spread to Belfast, the scene for over a hundred years of often vicious and regular anti-Catholic violence. The IRA had always been there to protect its communities, but in 1969 the IRA, by this stage a small, select, and secret body that was a shadow of the army that had fought the British to a standstill in 1921, stood by almost powerless to stop the shootings and burning.

  By 1969 the IRA had come under the control of a group of orthodox pro-Moscow intellectuals and activists who had spent years patiently steering the organization away from the hallowed goal of driving the British out of Ireland in favor of a campaign to reform and modernize the Northern Ireland state.

  In a process that uncannily echoes modern developments, the IRA of that day was slowly putting away the gun in favor of political methods, just as Gerry Adams was to do many years later. The ambition of the IRA’s then leaders in Northern Ireland was to replace national struggle with class struggle; they had no time for Belfast’s narrow sectarianism, no sympathy for armed struggle, no need for guns.

  So when mobs of pro-British loyalists surged into the streets around Clonard, the local IRA had virtually no weapons with which to beat them off. An entire row of houses known as Bombay Street was burned to the ground, and a young boy was shot dead. When the IRA split acrimoniously later that year, the Belfast men who led the breakaway Provisional IRA swore they would never leave their streets defenseless again. For their icon they chose the phoenix, the mythical firebird rising in vengeance from the ashes of Bombay Street.

  Within a few years those Belfast founders of the Provisional IRA, soon to be dubbed the Provos, were to turn to that small group of Libyan army officers and their leader, Colonel Muammar Qaddafi, for supplies of the guns and explosives they needed not just to defend their own streets but to use against the British army and Royal Ulster Constabulary in a twenty-five-year campaign of violence.

  Libya had a history of colonial rule that surpassed Ireland’s. It had been first seized as far back as the earliest days of the Roman Empire, which had cultivated the country’s fertile coastal strip to feed Rome’s growing population, and had been occupied by outsiders more or less continuously ever since. In the twentieth century Libya was ruled first by the Turks and then by Mussolini’s Italy, whose grip on the country was maintained with brutal, bloody force. After the Second World War and Italy’s capitulation, the allies agreed to grant Libya independence, and it was ruled by the Idris family, which led one of the country’s largest and oldest tribal clans. But real power lay in the hands of the British, Americans, and French, who divided the country into spheres of influence and maintained large military bases to protect their political and economic interests in the region, especially vast oil fields that had been discovered deep in the southern desert. Oil wealth enriched the Idris family and the Western oil corporations, but little of the windfall made its way down to the ordinary population. Resentment at Libya’s festering poverty and the revolutionary gospel of Arab nationalism then sweeping North Africa and the Middle East inspired Qaddafi and his army colleagues to overthrow the Idris family and expel the Western powers.

  Qaddafi and the leaders of the Provisional IRA were natural allies. Both blamed colonialism for their country’s miserable histories, and both believed that their occupiers must be ejected from their countries, by force if necessary. One of the first acts of the Qaddafi government was to order the British, Americans, and French to close their bases and leave. It would not be long before the new Libyan leader turned to the IRA as a way of doing one of Libya’s former rulers, Britain, even more harm.

  In the wake of the split in the IRA, events in Ireland moved inexorably to conflict. In 1970 the Provisionals began organizing for war and within two years had launched a shooting and bombing offensive against the British army and the Northern Ireland state. As the conflict intensified, the need for modern weaponry grew.

  It wa
s, curiously, the Breton nationalist movement in France that was responsible for putting the Provisionals and the Libyans in touch with each other. In early 1972 a meeting was held between the Bretons and the Provisionals, one of a regular series of contacts with like-minded revolutionary groups opened up by the Sinn Fein president Ruairi O Bradaigh, who was particularly keen on finding common cause with some of Europe’s small and often exotic nationalist movements, such as those of the Basques, Corsicans, and Bretons. The contacts increased political cooperation and mutual understanding, but they also facilitated the mutual acquisition of weaponry and military expertise. During the 1972 meeting the Bretons suggested that it might be worth the IRA’s while to get in touch with Qaddafi’s government in Tripoli, a regime that had let it be known that it was ready and able to assist revolutionary movements willing to foment trouble for the old imperial powers that had once ruled the Arab Middle East. That duly happened, and in August of that year the contact was formalized when two members of the IRA’s ruling body, the seven-person Army Council, Joe Cahill and Quartermaster General Denis McInerney, flew out to Warsaw to meet agents from the Libyan Intelligence Service (LIS) in the offices of the Libyan trade mission to Poland. The IRA men knew they were plowing a fertile field as two months earlier Qaddafi, eager to cause trouble for Britain, had publicly thrown his weight behind the Provisional IRA.

  The Libyan leader had chosen his own state radio service to tell the world of the new alliance. “At present,” he said in an address broadcast in June of that year, “we support the revolutionaries of Ireland who oppose Britain and are motivated by Nationalism and religion. The Libyan Arab Republic has stood by the revolutionaries of Ireland, their aims and their support for the revolutionaries of Ireland.”2

  The Libyans agreed to supply money and weapons to the IRA, as long as a suitably secure smuggling route, or “line,” as the IRA called it, could be devised. The Libyans also offered to give the IRA semi-ambassadorial status in Tripoli. The IRA leadership readily agreed and set about selecting an envoy to send to the Libyan capital, where his task would be to liaise with Libyan intelligence and help set up the arms routes.

  The man chosen to represent the IRA was, at the time, not a member of the organization but a strong sympathizer. A schoolteacher from the Border town of Ballybay in County Monaghan, he had already spent a year teaching English to Libyans and was back in Ireland on vacation when he was approached by a member of the IRA’s Army Council.

  The Army Council member, a veteran activist from Coalisland, County Tyrone, won the teacher over and, using his background in teaching English language as a cover, this time supposedly tutoring the sons and daughters of the Libyan army officer cadre at the prestigious Tripoli College, the IRA’s newly recruited emissary flew out to the Libyan capital.

  The man, known to his Libyan handlers as Mister Eddie, found himself housed in a splendid Italianate villa in the middle of Tripoli’s embassy district. Ambassadors from other European countries would soon be aware that they had an intriguing new neighbor. The Libyans, it appeared, wanted the world to know all about Colonel Qaddafi’s new friends.

  Mister Eddie was put on a generous weekly wage and found that his villa had been sumptuously furnished. No luxury was spared; the crockery, stamped with King Idris’s crest, had come from the former royal palace. Every week he would meet with officers from the LIS to discuss the IRA’s needs and drink tea from an ornate china service.3

  What the IRA got out of its first fling with Colonel Qaddafi is a matter of dispute. What appears certain is that in the three years of that IRA-Libyan liaison over $3.5 million ($10 million in current prices) was funneled via City of London banks to the IRA’s coffers, an invaluable supplement to the IRA’s income at a time when its campaign was at its height and its most expensive.

  At least one shipment of guns and explosives was intercepted, but there are strong indications that perhaps three other shipments also got through to the IRA.4 One smuggling attempt was intercepted in March 1973 when the Irish navy captured the vessel Claudia not far from the County Wexford coast, packed with five tons of Russian-made rifles, pistols, ammunition, and explosives.

  On board was a man who from then onward personified the IRA-Libyan links: the IRA’s then chief of staff and overall military commander, a West Belfast veteran, Joe Cahill. With him was the IRA’s quartermaster general, Denis McInerney, the figure who had charge of the IRA’s weapons department.

  The first liaison between Libya and the Provisional IRA was, however, doomed and destined to break up in acrimony. The weak link in the relationship was to be Mister Eddie, who turned out to have more independence of mind than the IRA leadership would have liked.

  In 1974 he organized a conference designed to bring the Provisionals together with the largest loyalist paramilitary group in Northern Ireland, the Ulster Defence Association (UDA), ostensibly an enemy of the republican group. The UDA had helped organize a general strike of Protestants earlier that year, which brought down a political agreement that had established a government in Belfast in which nationalists and unionists shared power and a Council of Ireland was set up, which was aimed at bringing the two parts of Ireland closer together.

  According to those who knew him, Mister Eddie was intrigued by the loyalist leadership’s ideas for an independent Northern Ireland state and later became a close friend of the UDA supreme commander, Andy Tyrie. In the weeks after the general strike, Mister Eddie hit upon the idea of inviting delegations from the UDA and the IRA’s political wing, Sinn Fein, out to Tripoli along with businessmen from his native County Monaghan to discuss an economic aid package to facilitate the execution of UDA’s independence ideas.

  He also had new ideas about the IRA’s relationship with the Libyans and proposed that, instead of receiving cash and guns from Qaddafi, the IRA be given exclusive rights to handle trade between Ireland and Libya. In view of Libya’s insatiable appetite for beef and Ireland’s thriving cattle industry, it was an arrangement he believed would swell the IRA’s coffers.

  The problem was that Mister Eddie had arranged all this behind the backs of his IRA commanders in Ireland. When they learned of his plans, especially the invitation to the UDA leadership to visit Tripoli, they were furious.

  The conference went ahead in November 1974 and was promptly leaked to the media back in Ireland. The Sinn Fein delegation refused to attend, and the UDA returned home to Belfast, triumphant and claiming that they had driven a damaging wedge between the Qaddafi regime and the IRA. The Libyans, they said, had come to see that the Northern Ireland problem was not as simple as the IRA maintained, that there was a majority in favor of the union with Britain in Northern Ireland. As result, the UDA claimed, the Libyans had said they were rethinking their relationship with the Provos.

  The view that the UDA was responsible for terminating the IRA-Libya alliance has become widely accepted as the reason why Qaddafi ended his dealings with the IRA at that time. And there is no doubt that the relationship with Mister Eddie did end in dramatic fashion, when in May 1975 Libyan police picked him up from his luxurious villa and, with sirens wailing and lights flashing, drove him to the Tripoli airport, where they deposited him on a plane bound for Rome. The message to Tripoli’s diplomatic community was again clear.

  But the truth about what happened was more complicated, as one IRA source explained: “The Libyans were always doubtful about [Mister Eddie] and wanted assurances that they were dealing with real Provos, which was why Cahill was on the Claudia. After the [UDA] conference the Libyans were furious with him and suspected him of being a British agent and even of having compromised our operations. They actually offered to bury him in the desert, but the Provos said leave him alone, he’s harmless but just foolish.”5 Even so, Mister Eddie could not relax. The last words he heard from his Libyan handler as he headed for the airport were ominous: “Beware the Irish, Mister Eddie. Beware the Irish!”6

  Mister Eddie was eventually replaced as the IRA ambassador by a
more loyal and reliable figure, but the experience had soured the Libyans. The public statements of senior Libyan figures thereafter painted a confusing and erratic picture of their links with the IRA, sometimes disowning the IRA, sometimes supporting it.

  The truth was that the Libyans had put the relationship on the back burner, as the same IRA source explained: “The link with Libya that went back to Joe Cahill’s day… had never been broken, although there had been a period of quiet for a long time.”7 Libyan intelligence had been alarmed at Mister Eddie’s freelance antics, and the Qaddafi government had lost its trust in the IRA. They decided to keep the IRA at arm’s length.

  The event that revived the Libya-IRA axis was the death on hunger strike in 1981 of ten prisoners from the IRA and a related republican splinter group, the Irish National Liberation Army, in the Maze prison outside Belfast. The death fast marked the culmination of a protest against the withdrawal of special category or political status, which had been granted to IRA and other paramilitary prisoners in the 1970s. The prisoners’ leader and the first to die was Bobby Sands, who had been elected a British MP before his death.

  The 1981 hunger strikes received widespread international publicity and generated headlines around the world for much of the year. The Libyans watched with fascination and mounting interest. According to one senior IRA figure, “The Libyans saw the numbers coming out on the streets, the tens of thousands who came out for Bobby’s [Sands] funeral, for instance, and they thought the revolution was starting. They were also very impressed with the way the hunger strikers handled themselves. I think it had something to do with the martyrdom thing in Islam. Anyway that’s when the money flow restarted.”8

  The two IRA men responsible for reactivating the Libyan link were both former senior figures in the organization—Joe Cahill, who had been the contact on the Claudia, and Daithi O Conaill (David O’Connell), a twenty-six-year veteran and strategist whose republican credentials were impeccable. Both men had known the Libyans since the early 1970s and were trusted by them. In late 1981, following a renewal of contacts with Libyan intelligence, Qaddafi agreed to help the IRA once again. But there were to be no arms shipments, only modest amounts of money. Over the next three years or so they sent some $1.5 million to the IRA, a fraction of their contributions in the 1970s. Qaddafi was being cautious.