A Secret History of the IRA

by Ed Moloney

  Much has been written about Keenan’s links to radical Middle Eastern and former Soviet satellite countries in Eastern Europe—he is said to have had extensive links with East German intelligence, for example— but little has ever been substantiated in the way of definite links to such regimes. He has often been portrayed as the sole, uncompromising Marxist revolutionary in the IRA leadership, but this portrait suffers from one major flaw. It was the Goulding group, the Official IRA, which obtained political, financial, and other assistance from the Soviet Union and its allies, not the Provisionals. The Officials received cash, guns, and other aid both from East Berlin and from Moscow, but no evidence has ever been produced to indicate that the Provisionals enjoyed such generosity, which presumably would have been the case had Keenan been as close to these governments as has been suggested. Occasionally Keenan revealed his politics publicly. In an article written in the February 1988 edition of the IRA prison journal Iris Bheag, Keenan, writing under the penname Pow-Wow, revealed that he got his real political inspiration from the neocolonial struggles of South and Central America rather than from the dull orthodoxy of Eastern Europe.

  At thirty years of age Keenan was considerably older than most other IRA recruits when he switched to the Provisionals, but he quickly rose through the ranks. By 1971 he had become Belfast quartermaster and two years later was made quartermaster general, succeeding the rebel Catholic priest Father Patrick Ryan, who had been promoted when Denis McInerney was captured on board the Claudia as it made its way from Libya packed with Colonel Qaddafi’s weapons. Keenan’s elevation was another piece of evidence that Northerners were not as excluded from the IRA’s upper reaches in those early days as the Adams camp would subsequently claim. His appointment as QMG also gave Adams another important ally at leadership level, one who was also in charge of a crucially important IRA department.

  Keenan’s impact was felt very quickly. While his predecessors in the QM’s department had mostly turned toward conservative Irish-America, the Clann na Gael, and other support organizations for supplies of arms and cash, Keenan was not afraid to seek assistance from revolutionaries elsewhere, even those in strange foreign lands. He was one of the first to realize that the strongly anti-British regime of Libya’s Colonel Muammar Qaddafi could be a rich and regular source of weaponry. By 1972 Keenan was importing RPG-7 rocket launchers and missiles from Libya to add to the IRA’s already fearsome arsenal of Armalite rifles, car bombs, land mines, and endless supplies of homemade explosives.

  Keenan had overseen and approved Eamon Molloy’s rise through the quartermaster’s department, from deputy QM to brigade QM, and in 1972, after his arrest and apparently remarkable escape from Castlereagh police station, cleared him of all suspicion of treachery, apparently unwilling to believe that someone he had mentored could turn against him. The British double agent was now free to wreak havoc on such a scale that within two years his activities played a major role in forcing the IRA to call a cease-fire.

  Molloy’s treachery led to important arrests. In February 1974 Ivor Bell, Adams’s successor as Belfast commander, was arrested in Andersonstown on the basis of information that was subsequently shown to have come from Molloy. Bell soon escaped by swapping places with a prison visitor on April 15 but was recaptured less than a fortnight later, hiding out in a flat in the affluent Malone Road section of South Belfast. In December 1973 Brendan Hughes also managed to escape from Long Kesh, hidden in an old mattress, and returned to active service as Bell’s adjutant. When Bell was captured, Hughes took over the Belfast command and moved into the IRA’s operational headquarters in Myrtlefield Park, also in the Malone area, where he posed as a toy salesman. He lasted until May 10, a fortnight or so after Bell’s second arrest. The IRA later learned from Molloy that the British had placed Hughes and the Myrtlefield Park house under constant surveillance and could have moved against him at any moment—but did not.

  This aspect of Molloy’s spying activities convinced Adams, Hughes, and Bell that the British were using his information to shape and mold the composition of the Belfast Brigade staff to their liking. This was done, they suspected, to boost elements in favor of a cease-fire, by releasing more pragmatic figures from internment while simultaneously rounding up the IRA’s so-called Young Turks, those identified as hard-line associates of Adams, Bell, and Hughes. That way the brigade staff would be composed of figures more amenable to a peace settlement. The evidence for that, they later claimed, was the cease-fire of December 1974, a disastrous cessation that helped seriously debilitate the IRA. That cease-fire opened a fault line between the Belfast IRA and the national leadership, the basis for which was the conviction in the Adams camp that the new Belfast Brigade leaders and the national leadership of the IRA had been the victims of a British intelligence sting.

  The British, however, may have had other reasons to put the youthful militants behind bars. In late 1973 the unionist leader, Brian Faulkner, had agreed to share power with the moderate nationalist SDLP and the middle-of-the-road Alliance Party and also to establish a cross-Border Council of Ireland to foster cooperation between the two parts of Ireland.

  The Provisionals opposed the deal, known as Sunningdale, after the English civil-service college where the parties hammered out the deal, seeing it as something that had the potential to sideline and defeat the IRA— but it was also bitterly opposed by hard-line unionists who saw the deal as a plot to destroy Northern Ireland. There was widespread agreement within the republican movement that the IRA had better move to kill off Sunningdale before Sunningdale killed it, as a key strategist of the time recalled: “Our objective was to ensure that the Sunningdale Agreement would not succeed. [Daithi] O Conaill was pushing us to blow up [the] Stormont [parliament] with a massive bomb and the Belfast leadership was trying to devise a method of getting a bomb onto a ship and blow it up in order to block the main channel in Belfast harbour. We wanted to make our presence felt as a force without which there could be no solution that was not to our liking.”2 But before these plans could be put into place, the British, very possibly armed with intelligence from Molloy, moved against the Belfast Brigade. Just four days before loyalists began a general strike aimed at killing off Sunningdale, the Myrtlefield Park headquarters were raided and troops arrested the brigade commander, Brendan Hughes.

  The timing of Hughes’s arrest convinced the Adams camp that the British were manipulating the IRA leadership in Belfast and elsewhere. The Young Turks later discovered that secret contacts with the British were being opened behind their backs, contacts that eventually formed part of the negotiations for the 1974 cease-fire. Hughes learned that Jimmy Drumm, a veteran from the 1950s and a member of the IRA Executive, was talking indirectly to the Northern Ireland Office; Drumm was arrested by the Belfast Brigade and questioned, but he denied the story. Nevertheless Hughes complained directly to the Army Council. A week later he was arrested.3 Among the Adams dissidents the view hardened that Hughes had been kept under surveillance but removed only when he started to threaten the British plans for the new cease-fire.

  The conspiracy theorists found evidence from elsewhere to support their suspicions. From inside Crumlin Road prison—then a peeling, overcrowded Victorian hulk used to hold paramilitary remand prisoners—it emerged that the MRF, the British undercover group, had re-formed and was once again dabbling in black operations in a bid to destabilize the organization. The IRA staff in the jail uncovered what they were convinced was evidence of a plot to poison senior IRA figures who were in the jail awaiting trial, as well as plans to sow suspicion and distrust within the ranks. The story began when a young remand prisoner confessed that he had taken part in a number of MRF-type operations carried out on behalf of British intelligence. “They were involved in dirty tricks, MRF sort of stuff designed to get a sectarian war going or to discredit the IRA,” recalled a source familiar with the episode. “They planted a bomb in Corporation Street in a Protestant bar that killed two children and that was wrongly blamed on th
e IRA. A woman was raped and shot, garages robbed, and so on, all of which was blamed on the IRA.”4 The remand prisoner, eighteen-year-old Vincent Heatherington from Andersonstown, claimed that British intelligence had trained and armed him and then given him, along with other double agents, a free hand to carry out shootings, bombings, and robberies that would be blamed on the IRA.

  Heatherington named his alleged co-conspirators to the IRA leadership in Crumlin Road, many of whom were interned or imprisoned in Long Kesh. His claims were believed, and a reign of terror began in the jails. Those named by the young prisoner were tortured into making confessions to even the most far-fetched wrongdoings against the IRA. “They created paranoia in the ranks…,” admitted one of those involved in the affair.5 It was of course a classic sting operation, as the IRA staff in Crumlin Road and Long Kesh eventually realized. The aim was to set the IRA prisoners at each other’s throats, and the ploy worked.

  The British operation did more than that. Outside the jail it divided the IRA leadership in Belfast between those who took Heatherington’s allegations seriously and those who were either deeply skeptical or who believed that torturing people into confessions was fundamentally counterproductive. This division coincided with the fault line that had long existed in the Belfast leadership and that was now, as the 1974 cease-fire approached, asserting itself with a vengeance. The split was between those associated with Adams, Bell, and Hughes, who had all fallen for the British sting, and Billy McKee, at this point commander of IRA prisoners in Long Kesh, who had tried but failed to stop the torture and mistreatment of the IRA inmates named by Heatherington. The effect of the British operation was to discredit the Young Turks and strengthen the traditionalists who proposed and supported the coming cease-fire. When, in September 1974, McKee finally came to the end of his sentence on the 1971 arms charge and was released, he was not interned, as happened to many released IRA prisoners, but allowed to return to the IRA, where he slipped easily and unopposed back into command of the Belfast Brigade.

  Eamon Molloy’s activities were meanwhile having a devastating impact on the IRA’s ability to sustain its war effort in Belfast. The loss of hard-to-smuggle weaponry in particular enervated the organization, and the ceasefire came as something of a relief, as one former IRA officer recalled:

  The cease fire was a godsend. We had no weapons. In the Second Battalion of the Belfast Brigade there were three weapons. In fact the situation was so bad that at the start of 1975 while we were still waiting on [a] shipment [from the Irish-American gun-running ring] to come in we went to a member of the Sticks [Officials] and we told him that we felt there was going to be a repeat of the 1969 pogroms but on a larger scale. We asked him for weapons which he refused to part with. We told him that it would be on his conscience if such a situation developed. He then agreed to sell us twenty weapons without the knowledge of his leadership.6

  The cease-fire arrived hesitatingly. Secret contacts with the IRA leadership were opened up by a group of liberal Protestant clerics, and there were other indirect conversations between the Army Council and the British government, mostly though its Secret Service, MI6, which produced a shortlived truce over the Christmas holiday of 1974 and early new year of 1975. The cease-fire was renewed in early February 1975, and there were reasons to believe that this time it would not be like 1972, and that the British wanted to hold serious talks. Although the IRA was not able to raise its violence to the levels of 1972, when nearly five hundred people had died, 1974 was nevertheless a bad enough year. Killings had risen by nearly 20 percent compared with 1973, and the notion that, in the bleak winter of 1974–75, in the wake of the collapse of Sunningdale and with no other viable options available, a frustrated British government might seriously contemplate talking to the IRA about withdrawal was not that far-fetched.

  IF THE IRA LEADERS agreed to the 1974–75 cease-fire with high expectations that it would end with a British commitment to withdraw, they were to be sadly disappointed, although it was easy to see why at the time the Army Council might have entertained such thoughts. The collapse of the Sunningdale agreement sent British policymakers into despair. The power-sharing deal had offered something to everyone, yet it had been decisively rejected both by the Protestant working class—and less ostensibly by much of the unionist middle class as well—and by the supporters of the Provos. In a way the collapse of the Sunningdale experiment seemed to symbolize to the outside world the addiction of the parties in Northern Ireland to their ancient quarrel and spoke to an almost inherited inability on the part of the belligerents to entertain reasonable solutions. With IRA and loyalist violence continuing apace and no political settlement in sight, the British might, it seemed, be inclined to contemplate even the most extreme solution. So it was when, at Christmastime 1974, Sinn Fein’s president Ruairi O Bradaigh received an extraordinary message from an intermediary in Derry that the British wanted to talk about ways of disengaging from Northern Ireland, the Army Council did not hesitate in recommending that the advance be followed up.

  As things turned out, the cease-fire was to be just another punctuation mark in a long story, a pause during which the British regrouped their forces and improved their intelligence in preparation for an assault on the IRA that very nearly brought its total defeat. But the cease-fire was to have other unexpected consequences, the most significant of which was that it paved the way for Gerry Adams and his allies to take control of the IRA.

  Adams and a small group of like-minded activists grouped around him in jail led the opposition to the cease-fire, and the manner in which they did so created one of the most abiding myths of his career—that he rescued the IRA from the near defeat precipitated by the cessation. The Adams camp would argue that the Army Council of 1974 foolishly led the IRA into a carefully laid trap, the objective of which was to tempt the IRA into lengthy and inconsequential talks designed to buy the British enough time to construct the method of the organization’s downfall. From the confines of their cages in Long Kesh, Adams and his supporters not only put forward the political arguments against the cease-fire and those who had advocated it, but, the myth continued, they designed the practical changes and political-military strategies needed to drag the IRA back from the edge of the abyss.

  A crucial part of their case was that the blame for the cease-fire disaster lay with an Army Council that was dominated by Southerners who had no feeling for those fighting the war in the North. But the facts suggested a massaging of the truth. Of the seven Army Council members who sanctioned the 1974–75 cease-fire, no fewer than five came from the North. These included the chief of staff, Seamus Twomey, who had been Belfast commander when Adams was his number two, while another key Council member, Joe Cahill, was a family friend and an ex-Belfast commander who had been particularly close to Adams. There were three other Northerners on the Council: J. B. O’Hagan from Lurgan, Kevin Mallon from Coalisland, County Tyrone, and Seamus Loughran, from West Belfast. The anti-Northern accusation was a potent, if unfair, charge which greatly appealed to the prejudices of those who made up the bulk of the fighting units north of the Border, while serving to undermine the position of Army Council members Daithi O Conaill and Ruairi O Bradaigh, two of the three major IRA figures who stood between Adams and his supporters and their bid to win absolute control of the organization. The third member was Billy McKee, who rejoined the Council upon his release from Long Kesh late in 1974 and who was a figure with whom Adams had repeatedly clashed ever since the Ballymurphy riots of 1970. That McKee was a fellow Northerner and a West Belfast veteran was later forgotten as Adams and his allies portrayed the struggle for the IRA’s soul as a battle between compromising, armchair generals pontificating from the safety of the South and those who actually had to take on the British in the mean streets of Belfast and Derry.

  Adams exploited the divisions within the IRA to his own advantage, but so too did the Army Council in its efforts to commence talks with the British. In the run-up to the cease-fire the Army Council
held discussions with a group of liberal Protestant clerics in the County Clare village of Feakle, and one of the clergymen vividly recalled the IRA leaders playing the Adams card: “O Conaill told me at the time that we would have one bite at the cherry, no more. He said, ‘That’s because behind every one of us on the Army Council there’s a young man with a gun in his hand who still has to make his name for Ireland and write his name in the history books. And when they take over there will be no more cease-fires.’”7

  The 1974–75 cease-fire had three major negative consequences for the IRA, each of which would be critiqued by Adams during his subsequent bid to capture the organization. The first was the debilitating effect on the organization caused by both the sheer length of the cessation and the failure or refusal of the British to put flesh on the bones of the secret offer to talk about “structures of disengagement” from the North, as O Bradaigh had been promised by the Derry intermediary.8

  Talks took place between the two sides, but nothing concrete ever seemed to emerge. There were three levels of contact. At the lowest level, incident centers were set up that linked Sinn Fein and British government monitors in Belfast, where there were seven such offices, and in Derry, Armagh, Newry, Enniskillen, and Dungannon. These were supposed to monitor the truce to ensure there was no 1972-style breakdown. Sinn Fein figures and British officials, communicating mostly via telex machines, would try to make certain that small problems did not become big ones. The enterprise was given an appropriate code name, after the mock-Gothic pile, Stormont Castle, which housed the British administration in East Belfast. Operation Ramparts conjured up a picture of British spies crouched over keyboards at the top of spiral stone staircases as they waited for the latest message of complaint from their IRA counterparts.