A Secret History of the IRA

by Ed Moloney

  While the moderate nationalist party, the SDLP, welcomed the arrival of the new British minister for Northern Ireland, the avuncular and genial gentleman farmer William Whitelaw, and showed an eagerness to re-enter political dialogue, the IRA greeted the fall of Stormont by stepping up its violence. With its ranks swollen by the anger at Bloody Sunday and other instances of state violence, the IRA carried out twelve hundred operations in May 1972, many of them in rural areas, and more the following month. While the IRA leadership hoped that this would drive the British to the negotiating table, the truth was that the fall of Stormont had opened up a fault line within nationalism that would never really close. Moderate nationalist opinion now sought a political deal and reform, while the IRA fought on for revolution and the elusive republic.

  From all the available evidence it seems that the subsequent truce was entered into halfheartedly by both the British and the IRA and in an atmosphere of intense mutual suspicion and distrust. After weeks of maneuvering, the cease-fire began on June 26, 1972, and ended just thirteen days later, on July 9, only two days after Whitelaw and an IRA delegation had met in London. It appears that neither side was all that sorry when it ended. A squalid sectarian dispute over the housing of Catholics in a loyalist-controlled part of West Belfast was allowed by the British to get so serious that it broke the cessation. If the British were secretly glad to see the truce end, so was the IRA in Belfast. Fears that the longer the cease-fire lasted, the more damage it would cause the IRA were very strong. The halt in hostilities had tempted hitherto unknown IRA members to break cover; they were mixing in public with known IRA men, and this was all very visible to the British. Something similar had happened during the 1921 truce. The IRA then had greeted the Treaty negotiations as a victory and celebrated accordingly, emerging in public to receive the adulation of their communities. Collins’s negotiating hand had been badly weakened as a result. Nevertheless the 1972 cease-fire gave something to both sides. The British got an opportunity to take a close look at the key Army Council and military leaders, while the IRA could now say to nationalists that at least it had tried to negotiate terms with the British, and if it had failed it was no fault of theirs.

  It was a measure of Adams’s status within the IRA even at that early point that part of the truce preconditions included a demand that he be released from Long Kesh to join the IRA leadership delegation and to assist Daithi O Conaill in making the detailed arrangements for the Whitelaw-IRA summit. According to one account the cease-fire would not have happened had Adams not been freed: “The leadership of the Belfast Brigade at this time was heavily made up of those who commanded the Second Battalion in the run-up to internment. When MacStiofain announced internally that we were going for a truce he was told by that element in the Belfast leadership that there would be no ceasefire in Belfast unless Gerry Adams was released from internment.”33

  It was men from Adams’s Second Battalion who fired the shots that ended the truce, a fusillade directed at troops stopping homeless Catholics from occupying houses in the Lenadoon housing estate. One of them recalled it vividly: “I remember quite clearly, Jim Bryson, Tommy Tolan, and another figure were told by Twomey to go up to Lenadoon with a Lewis gun— Big Louie—and two Armalites. They were told to wait for a signal from Twomey, who was negotiating with the Brits. When he raised his arm they were to open fire, and the cease-fire would be over. He couldn’t, because of the crowd that was confronting the Brits, but eventually Twomey got them back, and they opened up followed by the Andytown men.”34

  MacStiofain, ever eager to keep on good terms with the Northerners, had packed his London team with hard-liners from Belfast and Derry. Adams was joined by Seamus Twomey, Ivor Bell, now Belfast adjutant, and Martin McGuinness, the young leader of the Derry IRA who had risen through the ranks since internment. MacStiofain and O Conaill were the sole Southern IRA leaders on the delegation. Conspicuously absent was the Sinn Fein president, Ruairi O Bradaigh.

  Afterward only MacStiofain appeared positive about the encounter, a view with which Adams openly disagreed. Adams and the Belfast IRA men suspected that Britain was seeking to draw the IRA into a long cessation, as an associate recalled: “The reasoning of the Belfast leadership… was that the British wanted the truce to continue. One of the delegation saw previously unknown Volunteers sitting outside pubs drinking with known IRA people, and he was deeply concerned. [The IRA’s] guard was dropping, and he was determined to see the truce broken. As far as I recall, the Belfast delegation left the Whitelaw talks with the clear intention of breaking the truce.”35 Adams sided with the hawks, according to a contemporary. “Adams and Bell were very, very skeptical about the cease-fire, they warned us that things weren’t good, they didn’t trust the Brits and thought they were playing for time. They were fully in favor of breaking it. If Adams had been opposed, it wouldn’t have happened.”36 The truce duly broke down amid violence that claimed twenty lives over the next three days.

  The Belfast IRA had its own reasons for wanting to break the truce. There had been developments on the military front that gave the IRA in the city reason to believe that it could stretch the British further. The IRA, they calculated, was not yet at its strongest and, if things went well, could put more pressure on the British before returning to the negotiating table in a more powerful position. In both cases Adams’s contribution was crucial.

  The first was the decision by the Belfast Brigade to import quantities of the American-made Armalite rifle, a powerful semiautomatic weapon that came to symbolize the IRA of the 1970s. The Belfast Brigade first heard of the gun when a Falls Road seaman showed a member of Second Battalion staff a U.S. magazine article about the weapon, known as the AR-15, in the autumn of 1971. Weighing only seven pounds and fitted with a collapsible butt, the Armalite was easy to hide and could even be dumped in water. It fired a high-velocity .223 round, which tumbled through the air with the same deadly effect as a dum-dum bullet, and it was highly accurate. When brigade staff heard about the weapon, the decision was instantaneous: the Armalite could make the IRA better armed than the British army. The conclusion was simple, as one source familiar with the episode recalled: “If we could lay our hands on these guns [maybe] we’d win the war.”37

  Adams ordered his operations officer, Brendan Hughes, to travel to New York to arrange for the purchase and shipment of the guns. The Americans involved in gunrunning for the IRA had old-fashioned ideas about what the best weapons were, and GHQ in Dublin agreed with them. They were the weapons of their age. GHQ instructions were to acquire standard World War II U.S. infantry weapons, principally MI Carbines, Garand rifles, and the ubiquitous Thompson submachine gun. When Hughes arrived in New York looking for a completely different sort of weapon, he met enormous opposition from the locals. It strengthened a growing view at the top of the Belfast IRA that many in the Dublin leadership, especially in GHQ, were out of touch with the needs of those fighting the war in the North. Adams’s orders, however, were that the Armalites had to be acquired even if that meant bypassing GHQ. By the spring of 1972 the Belfast Brigade had organized its own supply route, and the Armalite began to appear in the city, where it was tested in combat by D Coy in gun battles with the British. The weapon was judged a huge success, and arrangements were made to import larger quantities. In May and June 1972, when preparations for the truce were in progress, two hundred AR-15s arrived in Belfast, smuggled aboard the transatlantic liner QE2 and then transported to Belfast from Southampton in England.38 There were enough Armalites to equip every active-service unit in the city. As Adams and Bell flew out on board the RAF plane to meet Whitelaw, they knew that back in Belfast the IRA was better able than ever to take on British troops.

  The second military advance was the development of the car bomb, another weapon synonymous with the IRA of that era. The car bomb was discovered entirely by accident, but its deployment by the Belfast IRA was not. The chain of events began in late December 1971 when the IRA’s quartermaster general, Jack Mc
Cabe, was fatally injured in an explosion caused when an experimental fertilizer-based homemade mix known as the “black stuff” exploded as he was blending it with a shovel in his garage on the northern outskirts of Dublin. GHQ warned that the mix was too dangerous to handle, but Belfast had already received a consignment, and someone had the idea of disposing of it by dumping it in a car with a fuse and a timer and leaving it somewhere in downtown Belfast. “It was a bomb in a car rather than a ‘car bomb,’” recalled a Belfast IRA source familiar with the episode. “A young Volunteer took it in [to the center of Belfast] and we could feel the rattle where we stood. Then we knew we were onto something, and it took off from there.”39 The car bomb enabled the IRA to increase significantly the amount of explosives it could deliver in each individual operation while exposing fewer operatives to arrest or premature death.

  The “black stuff” mix was perfected and made safer to handle within weeks of McCabe’s death, and this meant that the IRA now had unlimited supplies of homemade explosives. It no longer had to depend on gelignite, supplies of which were gradually being cut off by the British and Irish intelligence authorities. The car bomb was, however, a double-edged sword. The sheer size of the devices greatly increased the risk of civilian deaths in careless or bungled operations. The IRA bombs that killed seven people in Little Donegall Street, for example, were among the very first car bombs deployed, and no one could doubt that the episode was a public relations disaster for the Provisionals.

  The new explosives mix could be used outside the city as well. It was an ideal explosive to use in rural land mines, which were usually hidden in culverts, or drainpipes, which ran under country roads at regular intervals to draw off rainwater. The land mine came into its own during the early summer of 1972, making military and police patrols in Tyrone and Fermanagh hazardous and eventually rendering South Armagh a no-go area for motorized British units. The truth was that among Armalites, car bombs, and land mines, the IRA felt it was on a string of successes when the 1972 cease-fire was called. Seen in that perspective, the chances that IRA leaders would enter talks with Whitelaw in a mood of compromise were virtually nonexistent.

  WITHIN TWO WEEKS all had changed utterly. The IRA had forced the destruction of the Stormont parliament and fought the British to the negotiating table. Not since 1920 had the organization wielded such power or been so well placed to influence and shape events. But in a trice all that was to disappear. On Friday afternoon, July 21, the Belfast Brigade sent twenty of the new car bombs into the city and detonated them in just over an hour, killing 9 people and injuring 130, in one of the worst days of violence yet seen during the Troubles. At the height of the bombing the center of Belfast resembled a city under artillery fire; clouds of suffocating smoke enveloped buildings as one explosion followed another, almost drowning out the hysterical screams of panicked shoppers. Six people, two of them soldiers, were killed by a car bomb at a bus station, and three civilians, two women and a fourteen-year-old schoolboy, died when another device was detonated in North Belfast. Television pictures of firemen shoveling human remains into plastic bags compounded the horror.

  The deaths were not deliberate but the result of careless planning by the Belfast Brigade leadership. Brigade commanders made the fatal error of assuming that the British army and RUC could deal with so many bomb alarms all happening more or less at the same time in different parts of the city. Bloody Friday, as the day was called, was the unionist equivalent of Bloody Sunday, and it was an unmitigated disaster for the IRA. The IRA later tried to blame the British for deliberately ignoring telephoned warnings, but that cut little ice with anyone except its most loyal supporters. Most people accused the IRA of using sheer terror tactics. Bloody Friday had a speedy political impact. Moderate nationalists put even more distance between themselves and the IRA and intensified efforts to seek negotiations with the British and Faulkner’s unionists.

  It took years for the IRA to admit that Bloody Friday was its fault. “We put it down to the Brits allowing bombs to go off, but the real reason was it was too much for the Brits to cope with, the bombs went off too close together, the town was too small, people were being shepherded from one bomb to another,” conceded an IRA activist of the time.40 Bloody Friday had been planned by Twomey and his staff before the June 26 truce and was intended to pressure the British to come to the negotiating table.41 Adams was in jail at the time and played no role in its conception, but after the collapse of the truce he was back at the center of events, acting with Bell once again as adviser to Twomey.42 The plan was revived to demonstrate that the IRA was still in business, but it backfired badly; Adams did not initiate Bloody Friday, but he was involved in its organization. The British quickly realized that events had moved to their advantage. Ten days later, on July 31, in an operation code-named Motorman, hundreds of British troops invaded the no-go areas of Derry and Belfast, an action that would have been unthinkable before Bloody Friday. Within weeks military forts were constructed right on the IRA’s doorsteps, and the organization’s freedom of movement was severely curtailed. Now able to put the IRA under close surveillance in both cities and to screen thousands of civilians for IRA sympathies, British army intelligence on the IRA improved markedly. Within two years the British grip on areas like West Belfast was so tight that the Belfast Brigade was forced to move its operational headquarters to the southern outskirts of the city, to the affluent Malone area.

  Bloody Friday was the one great black mark against Adams’s strategic record in the early 1970s. The man himself was incandescent with rage after the botched bombings, according to IRA sources. “Most of the bombs that day came from the Third Batt area, from Ardoyne and the Markets, and some from the Second Batt; it was a BB [Belfast Brigade] operation though. Afterwards the word was that: ‘the Big Lad’s doing his nut, about the warnings not being phoned in or being bungled.’ There was an undercurrent of blame being put on the Third Batt leadership.”43 In his autobiography Adams played down the implications of Motorman, saying that it merely required the IRA to readjust its tactics. But the reality was that Bloody Friday and its aftermath marked a watershed in the IRA’s fortunes. From then on the organization would be on the defensive both politically and militarily.

  The first IRA casualty of Bloody Friday was the Belfast commander Seamus Twomey. Adams and Bell were convinced that Twomey was “too fiery” for the new circumstances, and they combined to persuade him to quit Belfast and to move to Dublin, where he would be better placed to look after the Northern IRA’s interests. In September, Twomey acquiesced. Adams replaced him and appointed Bell as his adjutant, and Hughes became his operations officer. In the view of some IRA members Adams was merely formalizing what already existed: “Twomey was commander in name only; Adams [always] really called the shots.”44

  Soon Adams would have an ally at the very top of the organization. In November 1972 Sean MacStiofain was arrested as part of the Dublin government’s accelerating crackdown on the IRA leadership. Sentenced to six months in jail on IRA membership charges brought on the basis of a radio interview he gave to the Irish broadcasting service, RTE, MacStiofain immediately embarked on that most traditional of IRA protests, a hunger strike, which ended fifty-seven days later, inconclusively and amid charges that the Provos’ chief of staff had cheated during the fast. Upon his arrest MacStiofain immediately lost his IRA rank, and thanks to the opprobrious circumstances of his fast’s conclusion, his republican career effectively ended. A tough and uncompromising leader, MacStiofain had overseen the birth and development of a formidable fighting machine, and for that Northern IRA leaders retained for him a degree of affection and respect that survived his ignominious departure. Joe Cahill took over as the Provisionals’ second chief of staff. Second Battalion veterans now occupied the two most important posts in the IRA, its national leadership and the command of Belfast, the cockpit of the IRA’s war against Britain.

  GERRY ADAMS was to be Belfast commander for the next ten months, during which
time his already established reputation as the IRA’s key strategic thinker was significantly enhanced. But he also earned a name for ruthlessness that would make many a potential rival pause for thought before considering any challenge to his authority.

  One event marked out Adams’s period in command as special in the eyes of other IRA members, and that was a strike against British military intelligence that was reminiscent of the triumphs organized by IRA leaders during the Tan War. It looked like an astonishing counterintelligence coup, but in reality what happened was more a chance affair, which owed much to the alertness of an observant junior IRA member. But the operation that followed persuaded many that the new Belfast commander had penetrated the core of British intelligence.

  The story of what became known as the affair of the Four Square Laundry began with an admission by a rank-and-file volunteer in the Second Battalion’s D Coy that he had been working as an informer for the military. The volunteer, Seamus Wright, from the Lower Falls Road area had come under suspicion because he was so often absent from Belfast, apparently spending much of his time in England. Under interrogation by Second Battalion staff, Wright admitted that all the time he had actually been in the company of a special military unit based at Palace barracks in Holywood, County Down, where IRA suspects were taken for routine interrogation before being interned. The unit was known by the initials MRF, which the IRA believed stood for Military Reconnaissance Force, a group subsequently alleged to have been involved in two drive-by shootings in the summer of 1972 that were blamed at the time on loyalist gangs. Wright admitted he had agreed to work for the MRF.