A Secret History of the IRA

by Ed Moloney

  The MRF ran plainclothes military patrols in republican areas of the city, but it also had built up an agent-running capacity and had set aside a special section of Palace barracks to house informers where debriefings were conducted and operations planned. A favorite tactic was to drive these agents through nationalist districts in military vehicles to identify and photograph other IRA activists through the slits in armor plating. Wright named another D Coy volunteer as a fellow MRF agent. The IRA arrested Kevin McKee, and his questioning added significantly to the IRA’s knowledge of MRF operations.

  McKee revealed that the MRF had constructed an intricate undercover intelligence network that included a massage parlor, ostensibly run by English prostitutes, an ice cream business, and the Four Square Laundry, which operated in West Belfast. The Four Square operation was simplicity itself: a van would tour housing estates offering cut-price laundry sevices so as to acquire clothing to be analyzed for traces of explosives and gunpowder and so to identify IRA houses. Within the roof space of the large van used to collect and return laundry lay two British operatives who would photograph suspects on the streets. By the standards of later British intelligence operations against the IRA, it was an amateurish operation but also an indication of how little the British knew about the IRA in those early days.

  After McKee’s interrogation, the Belfast Brigade—Adams, in other words—took over the operation from Second Batt, and plans were made to ambush the various MRF teams. During the midmorning of October 2, 1972, gunmen ambushed the Four Square Laundry van as it made its rounds in Twinbrook, a sprawling housing estate on the edge of West Belfast. The driver was shot dead and the roof compartment sprayed with automatic fire. At the same time in North Belfast gunmen from the Third Battalion shot up the massage parlor. The third premises identified as an MRF front, city center offices, turned out to be vacant when the IRA arrived. At the end of the day the IRA claimed to have killed five undercover British soldiers, but the British would admit to only one dead, the van driver killed in Twinbrook. Despite this uncertainty the IRA regarded the day’s work as a major victory over British intelligence, and Adams compared the operation—and implicitly himself—to the counterintelligence exploits of Michael Collins, whose famous “squad” had wiped out the bulk of Britain’s secret agents in Dublin in one violent day, the first Bloody Sunday, fifty-two years earlier: “It was a devastating blow, on a par with Michael Collins’ actions against British Intelligence in November 1920…,” Adams later wrote.45

  A devastating blow it certainly was, but the incident was no less serious for the IRA. Although badly hit by the Belfast Brigade, the episode had demonstrated that the MRF had clearly managed to infiltrate the IRA’s crack Second Battalion, and that this had only been discovered by chance. It was also apparent that, thanks to Wright and McKee, British intelligence now knew the names of all D Coy’s members and many of the Second Battalion’s secrets. The chances of there being other Second Battalion agents on the MRF’s payroll, recruited as a result of intelligence passed on by the pair, had to have been high. More than anything else the penetration demonstrated that the IRA had no systematic counterintelligence capability. After all, Wright and McKee had been caught by luck, not by any IRA system. While the task of pursuing traitors was part of the Coy intelligence officer’s job, it was only one part of a substantial job description—more time and energy went into identifying targets than into uncovering agents. The Four Square Laundry affair exposed major deficiencies in the way the IRA conducted its business and it raised embarrassing questions. Not least it exposed the damaging consequences that would result if the intelligence officer himself or herself had been turned by the British. Without a foolproof counterintelligence capacity, the IRA had no protection against that level of penetration. The Four Square Laundry operation was loudly praised, and Adams basked in the adulation, but the hard questions were just not asked. Instead, the accidental discovery of the MRF’s penetration and the weaknesses in IRA command and control which it had exposed were literally covered up.

  The IRA sentenced the MRF agents Wright and McKee to death after courts-martial, but in an unprecedented twist the Belfast Brigade ordered that they be buried in secret after execution and their treachery kept hidden.46 This was contrary to one of the central principles of the IRA’s informer-hunting practice, which was that those found guilty of working for the British must be exposed publicly in order to discourage others from imitating them. In practice that meant that the bodies of dead informers must be left literally by the roadside and a public explanation given for the killing. The thinking behind this was that anyone tempted to follow suit would be persuaded to think again. That in this case, contrary to IRA rules, Wright and McKee were put in secret graves suggests another motive.

  The justification for “disappearing” the men that was put forward at the highest levels of the Belfast Brigade—at the level of Adams, Bell, and Hughes—was disarming. Since Wright and McKee were both members of influential republican families, it was agreed, the IRA would be sparing their relatives considerable embarrassment if they were just quietly buried and news of their fate kept hidden.47 Wright was related to the Hickey family, and a sister-in-law, Eileen Hickey, went on to become a senior figure in the Belfast Brigade and the commander of IRA prisoners at Armagh women’s prison. McKee was a nephew of Billy McKee, Adams’s old adversary. Secret executions and burial would spare their familes embarrassment, although anguish at their unexplained disappearance would surely outweigh that. But the secret manner of their deaths served another purpose; the extent of British intelligence penetration of Adams’s IRA units, particularly in his own Second Batt and D Coy, went to the grave with them and the luster of the Four Square Laundry operation left untarnished. The pair were ferried secretly down to South Armagh, where they were held for six weeks before the orders to kill them arrived. By that time their jailers had built up such a strong rapport with them that the South Armagh IRA requested that others do the deed. IRA men from Belfast, in fact from Adams’s old IRA unit in Ballymurphy, were sent down to carry out the killings.48 The execution and burial of the two agents was kept a secret until March 1999 when the IRA, under pressure from relatives and the demands of the peace process, finally admitted part of the story of what had happened. Despite intensive efforts their graves have never been located. Seamus Wright and Kevin McKee carried to their secret graves the untold story of how British intelligence bested Gerry Adams. Their fate ensured that the story would never see the light of day.

  THE CLANDESTINE BURIALS of Wright and McKee set a precedent that was repeated at least seven more times in subsequent years. The Belfast Brigade, under Adams’s leadership, had set a grisly precedent. From there on, if the IRA had an informer on its hands whose existence would embarrass the organization or its supporters, it would think little of disposing of the problem under the clay that covered a secret grave. The third secret interment during Adams’s reign as Belfast commander fell into that category, although the circumstances of the disappearance of Jean McConville were to leave a much more lasting and damaging stain.

  The death and disappearance of Jean McConville was made possible by another important military innovation pioneered by Gerry Adams. With an eye on the special “squad” that Michael Collins had constructed in 1920 to subvert British intelligence operations in Dublin, Adams did the same thing in the Belfast of the early 1970s when he got Twomey’s go-ahead to set up two secret cells in the city to carry out special operations on behalf of the Belfast Brigade. These cells reported directly to Adams and received their instructions only from him, a chain of command that was formalized when Adams replaced Twomey as Belfast commander. They became known in IRA folklore as “the unknowns.” One unit was located in West Belfast and led by the brigade staff intelligence officer, a figure from the Turf Lodge area. The other was in the Third Battalion area in North Belfast and commanded by a renowned IRA leader, who was later shot dead at his home by loyalists. The cells were very small
at the start, consisting of only three members each, later expanded to four. The idea was that “the unknowns” would be self-sustaining and independent of the rest of the Belfast IRA; they carried out their own intelligence work and acted on it themselves, although from time to time they borrowed personnel from other units for larger operations, especially D Coy in the Lower Falls.

  Jean McConville was a thirty-seven-year-old East Belfast Protestant who had married a West Belfast Catholic and converted to Catholicism after their wedding. In 1972 she had been living for two years in the Divis Flats complex in the Lower Falls area with her ten children. Her husband, Arthur, a former soldier in the British army who had quit in 1964 to become a builder, had died a year before. Now widowed and poverty-stricken, Jean McConville was struggling to raise her family. In December 1972, suddenly and without any reason, she disappeared from the face of the earth. One widely accepted and repeatedly given explanation for her disappearance was that she had angered the IRA by comforting a seriously wounded British soldier who had been shot by a sniper outside her front door. In revenge, the story continues, the IRA abducted her and took her to a house in the Beechmount district of West Belfast, where she died during interrogation, allegedly suffocating when her questioners placed a plastic bag over her head in a bid to make her talk. Rather than admit what they had done, the IRA then decided to bury her quietly and afterward spread stories that she had deserted her children and run away to England with a British soldier.

  The truth was much more complicated, as it tends in such stories to be, although there is no doubt the IRA lied about what happened to Jean McConville—and continued to lie for many years thereafter. The real story behind McConville’s death, the sad and squalid truth of her killing pieced together from sources in the IRA active at this time, is that she died because she was a small and not very important cog in the British army’s intelligence-gathering machine who had the misfortune to cross paths with two ruthless men. One was the British officer who ran her as an agent; the other was the senior IRA figure in Belfast who decided that her secret death would suit his purposes.

  THE BACKGROUND to the tragedy of Jean McConville was set in Divis Flats, then a large sprawling complex of apartments and tower blocks whose stairways and corridors provided a perfect stage for snipers and bomb throwers. In the early 1970s the IRA operated virtually openly in Divis. “Everyone knew who the IRA in Divis Flats were; they walked around with guns and so on,” remembered one of their number.49 For the British army it soon became a priority to place a reliable spotter in the flats who could warn them of IRA activity and planned ambushes. Jean McConville agreed to be one of those spotters, but by all accounts she was not very good at her job and showed a too obvious interest in the IRA’s affairs. It was not long before the local unit tired of her unending questions and began to suspect her. Her apartment was raided, and sure enough the IRA found a radio transmitter that she had been using to communicate with the British army. “It was taken off her, and she was warned never to do that again; she was a woman and the mother of a large family, and so we let her off,” explained one IRA member familiar with the events.50 But it was just that, a warning. Next time, she was told, there would be no warning.

  Inexplicably McConville went back to spying on the IRA, this time with fateful consequences. Although by this stage the British army must have been aware that the IRA knew all about her activities and that she was now in terrible danger, her handlers carried on regardless and supplied her with a second transmitter. Her spying recommenced, and it did not take long before the IRA worked out that she was back in business, once more betraying IRA volunteers and operations. The Belfast Brigade decided that this time she had to die, but its senior members disagreed violently about what to do with her body. The question bitterly divided the Belfast Brigade staff. Some argued that her body should be dumped in the street so that her fate would act as a deterrent to other would-be informers in accordance with IRA custom and practice. But one figure disagreed, arguing that the publicity attached to her death, the fact that she was a widowed mother of ten, would work strongly against the IRA, and he urged that she be buried in secret and effectively disappeared.51

  The job of “disappearing” Jean McConville was given to “the unknowns” in a move that guaranteed that the story of what had really happened to her would be confined to the smallest number of IRA activists. According to one well-informed source, the order to “disappear” McConville was given to the Turf Lodge-based commander of one of the “unknown” units by a senior member of the Belfast Brigade. Whether, as alleged by one well-informed source, or not the order was given by Adams himself, it is inconceivable that such an order would have been issued without his knowledge. Her court-martial had been held—although McConville was not present to defend herself—she had been found guilty and sentence pronounced. The task of the “unknown” was to fetch her and carry out the sentence.52 McConville was taken down to a beach near Carlingford just across the County Down–County Louth Border, where she was shot in the back of the head and her body buried in the sand.

  Jean McConville’s death and disappearance came back to haunt Sinn Fein during the height of the peace process in the mid-1990s. A campaign to discover her fate was launched by her children, all of whom had been dispersed to foster homes after her abduction, and their efforts won the support of President Bill Clinton and the Irish government, two of Adams’s strongest allies in his new foray into constitutional politics. Adams met the chief campaigners, McConville’s daughter Helen McKendry and her husband, Seamus, but initially denied all knowledge of events. Only after Clinton’s intervention did he and the IRA admit that she had been “disappeared” by the organization. Even then strenuous efforts were made to distance Adams from the affair. Sinn Fein spin doctors suggested that he had been in Dublin at the time of the killing, implying that he had played no part in the decision to kill and secretly bury Jean McConville. Adams himself, according to her son-in-law Seamus McKendry, tried to claim that he could not have been involved, since he had been interned at the time: “He told Helen and I [sic]: ‘Thank God I was in prison when she disappeared.’ ”53 In fact Adams was very much at large at the time of Jean McConville’s disappearance and must have known all about the circumstances at the time. He was not arrested and imprisoned until July 1973, more than six months after her abduction and execution.

  Public disquiet over the IRA’s treatment of the “disappeared,” especially Jean McConville, forced the Irish and British governments to set up a cross-Border commission to coordinate the search for missing remains. The IRA’s Army Council appointed its director of intelligence, Bobby Storey, a close ally of Gerry Adams, to revisit each case and to question the IRA members involved in an effort to discover where bodies had been hidden, while the police on both sides of the Border dug up bogs, beaches and basements. In the case of Jean McConville, extensive searches and excavation of beaches in the Carlingford area by Irish police in 1999 and the following year failed to find anything. But in August 2003 her remains were discovered, apparently by chance, by members of the public walking on a nearby beach that had not been searched. A postmortem examination revealed she had been shot once in the back of the head. While many in Sinn Fein were relieved to see this grisly and embarrassing case apparently closed, for others the killing and disappearance of Jean McConville had become an enduring metaphor for the Adams stewardship of the Belfast IRA. It also seems likely that McConville’s “disappearance” will haunt the Provos and Adams for some time. In July 2006, Police Ombudsman Nuala O’Loan said that an investigation by her office, launched at the request of the McConville family, had failed to find evidence Jean McConville had been an informer, a claim that forced the IRA to publicly repeat its assertion that the dead woman had been executed for spying on behalf of the British army. With the McConville case thus re-opened and an unwelcome spotlight directed at himself, Gerry Adams felt obliged to express concern at the IRA’s past behavior, although managing to av
oid mentioning the word “disappeared” or his own possible knowledge of events: “Whatever about the circumstances surrounding Jean McConville’s killing, the burial of her remains was a great injustice to the family.” He also urged the Irish government to “act speedily” so that more excavations to find others who had been “disappeared” by the IRA could take place.

  THE IRA’S FORTUNES had waxed and waned in the two years since the Ballymurphy riots ended in December 1970. By the end of 1972 the political and military balance was swinging in the British favor and the IRA was very much on the defensive. Not least of the factors now working against the IRA was that the British military’s intelligence was improving all the time, thanks to the recruitment of a growing number of informers. Since the IRA was increasingly restricted on its home patch, the idea grew among Belfast activists that it should try to break out of the straitjacket, to take the war directly to the enemy. The idea came not from Adams himself but from others in Belfast Brigade, although in IRA mythology it is credited as his and recorded as yet another example of his military and strategic skill.

  “Towards the end of 1972 we started working on the plans,” recalled a well-placed IRA source.

  The first priority was to recruit unknown Volunteers with no records. It was Adams who went to the three battalions to get them; he told them that the operation was a very big one, that it could be a hanging offense, as it was treason. There were rooms full of Volunteers, and when he said that and that anyone who didn’t want to go should leave, he was nearly knocked down in the rush. The result was that the team ended up with red lights, people like Gerry Kelly who was on the run for murder and others who had been interned.54