A Secret History of the IRA

by Ed Moloney

  Another key reason for the fall in the Sinn Fein vote was the Anglo-Irish Agreement of November 1985. The agreement, signed by Margaret Thatcher and Garret FitzGerald, gave the Irish Republic a formal if only advisory say in Northern Ireland affairs, which Dublin’s diplomats skillfully used to smooth the rough edges of Britain’s security policy, thereby reducing the grievances that nourished Catholic support for the IRA. The product of two tortuous years of diplomacy, the Hillsborough agreement was regarded North of the Border as a triumph for the SDLP’s John Hume and the politics of persuasion. A vocal unionist reaction against the agreement, which saw a burst of loyalist street politics and a temporary withdrawal by unionist parties from constitutional politics, helped persuade nationalists that they had won some sort of victory. It injected new life into the SDLP and stabilized nationalist politics. The Irish political establishment’s nightmare scenario, Sinn Fein outpolling the SDLP, evaporated. From then on it was clear that, short of another hunger strike or a repeat of Bloody Sunday, Sinn Fein’s vote would never rise much above the 80,000–90,000 mark again. The Anglo-Irish agreement had created a stalemate in the competition between the two nationalist parties, and this was to make it easier for Adams to argue among his close advisers that only a radical departure could break the logjam.

  ELECTORAL SETBACKS raised questions about the direction Sinn Fein and the IRA could and should be taking, and that, in general, was of great assistance to the Reid-Adams project. But the IRA was still full of formidable men and women whose standing made them dangerous to have as opponents, who almost certainly would have stenuously resisted the infant peace process had they known of its existence. Fortunately for the Adams camp, some of the fiercest of these rivals were removed or otherwise fell at around the time that the peace process was beginning to develop its own sense of direction.

  The first to go was Kevin Mallon, who had become director of operations after Brian Keenan’s arrest in 1979. Mallon, who also sat on the Army Council and was on the same ideological wavelength as O Conaill and O Bradaigh, was a powerful figure in the IRA whose record went back to the Border Campaign, during which he was tried and acquitted on the capital charge of murdering an RUC man. The IRA in Tyrone was extremely loyal to him, and many of its members there would have sided with him in any political dispute with the Adams camp. It was Adams’s great fortune that Mallon self-destructed and that he did not have to confront him.

  Mallon’s downfall came over a number of botched kidnapping operations in the Republic that he had organized to help fill the IRA’s depleted coffers. One was the abduction of the racehorse Shergar, whose owner, the Aga Khan, refused to pay the ransom demanded by the IRA. As it was, Shergar was an uncontrollable, highly strung animal, and his kidnappers were forced to put him down. Worse was to follow in November 1983 when the IRA kidnapped the English-born supermarket executive Don Tidey in Dublin and demanded a seven-figure sum for his return. Three weeks later Tidey was rescued in a forest near Ballinamore, County Leitrim, but only after a fierce gun battle with the IRA in which an Irish army private and a Garda recruit were shot dead. The killings outraged opinion in the Republic, and for a while there was speculation that the government of Garret FitzGerald would actually proscribe Sinn Fein. In the following days, one senior republican after another emerged to express criticism of the kidnapping tactic, while Adams privately castigated “militarists” in the movement.53 Mallon was finished.

  The other upheaval in the Provisional IRA leadership was a much more serious affair for Adams, on a number of grounds: it was the first direct challenge to his political leadership of the Provisionals, it originated in his home base of West Belfast, and it was led by a figure whose regard in the IRA was beyond criticism. Ivor Bell had become chief of staff in the autumn of 1982, when Martin McGuinness stood aside to participate in the Assembly elections. Bell’s collaboration with Adams went back to the early 1970s, when both held staff positions in the Second Belfast Battalion and the Belfast Brigade. When the pair ended up in Long Kesh, they cooperated in the campaign against the Billy McKee leadership and together devised the plan to reorganize the IRA. The names Adams and Bell went inseparably together in the 1970s in the same way that those of Adams and McGuinness would twenty years later. Initially an enthusiastic supporter of electoral-ism—he had argued to run non-abstentionist candidates during the 1981 general election in the Republic—Bell developed reservations when he saw the negative impact on the IRA’s armed struggle, especially in Belfast, where IRA operations had been scaled down to facilitate Adams’s bid for the West Belfast seat and then for Morrison’s European contest.

  In 1983 and 1984 the Belfast IRA, once the cockpit of the organization, had accounted for only eleven of the IRA’s ninety-five victims. Bell’s fears that the campaign was being run down and that resources that should have gone to the IRA were being diverted to Sinn Fein were shared by senior figures on Northern Command, including his partner, Anne Boyle, and the operations officer, Sean McIlvenna, and in the Belfast Brigade by its commander, Eddie Carmichael, while two other senior Belfast figures, Anto Murray and Danny McCann, sympathized with the criticism. Bell’s tenure as chief of staff came to an abrupt end in September 1983, when the Belfast Brigade adjutant, Robert “Beano” Lean, became the latest in a series of embarrassing and damaging IRA supergrasses to agree to testify against former comrades, and the damage he could do to the IRA was enormous. Although Lean later retracted, his evidence led to the arrest and brief imprisonment of Bell and some twenty-seven other senior figures. Under IRA rules Bell lost all rank in the organization, and Kevin McKenna, a key figure in the Tyrone IRA, took his place as chief of staff. On his release Bell got back onto the council, but his power had been eroded. He was given the task of liaising with Libyan intelligence and also joined the IRA Executive, from where he began plotting against the Adams strategy.

  The Belfast Brigade meanwhile was intent on causing trouble for Sinn Fein. Angered by the amounts of money channeled to Sinn Fein from IRA coffers to finance election campaigns, the IRA leadership in the city carried out a number of killings and other actions intended to embarrass and damage Adams. Just before the June 1983 general election, the Belfast Brigade detonated a huge bomb outside Andersonstown RUC station, which devastated local homes right in the heart of the West Belfast constituency. The bombing angered many voters but, owing mostly to the fact that the opposition to Sinn Fein was split two ways, failed to deprive Adams of victory. In December 1983 the up-and-coming Ulster unionist politician Edgar Graham was shot dead outside the law department of Queen’s University, Belfast, where he taught. In April 1984 Mary Travers, the daughter of a leading Catholic magistrate, Tom Travers, was shot dead and her father seriously wounded when an IRA gunmen opened fire as they left Mass in an affluent area of South Belfast. Travers later claimed the gunman had also tried to shoot his wife in the head but that his weapon had misfired.54 The author was in the home of one of Adams’s closest advisers not long after the shooting happened when Adams phoned from Donegal, where he was on vacation. It was clear from their exchange that the Sinn Fein president was dismayed to hear what had happened and seemingly did not know that the operation was in the pipeline. An attack such as that on Travers should have been cleared at the highest political level and Adams, or at least those close to him, should have been told about it. Two months later, in the midst of Danny Morrison’s Euro campaign, the Belfast IRA shot dead a minor criminal, Jimmy Campbell, as he sat drinking in a social club off the Falls Road. The punishment was out of all proportion to Campbell’s transgressions—he was just a petty thief—but the killing had been done to embarrass Sinn Fein, and it led to protests and pickets outside one West Belfast polling station.

  It is not clear just when Bell and his colleagues began their attempt to overthrow Adams. The version put around by Adams’s allies afterward was that it started when Bell’s partner, Anne Boyle, was dismissed from Northern Command, allegedly for endangering the security of a Northern Comma
nd staff meeting, and that this led an angry Bell to set the plot in motion. Another says that the spark was the death in December 1984 of another Bell ally on Northern Command, Sean McIlvenna, a North Belfast IRA man who had been operating on the Border for some years. McIlvenna, thirty-three, was killed by a single bullet in the back when, by chance, the RUC came across him and other IRA men shortly after a land mine attack in County Armagh.55 The dissidents complained that while Adams and his Sinn Fein coterie were able to buy bulletproof jackets to shield them from loyalist attack, the IRA could not afford to give men like McIlvenna the same protection, and this is why the police bullet had felled him.56 Bell was convinced that a majority of IRA Volunteers were unhappy with the electoral strategy, and he had come close once before to successfully challenging it. A majority of the Council had indicated their sympathy for him when he was chief of staff, but he had been unseated just as he was about to move against Adams.

  Whatever the truth, when Bell began to canvass fellow members of the Executive in late 1984 and early 1985 to call for an extraordinary Army Convention in a bid to abandon or severely limit Sinn Fein’s electoral strategy, it did not take long for Adams to hear about it. He moved swiftly and resolutely against the dissidents. Bell, Boyle, Carmichael, McCann, and Murray were court-martialed and expelled from the IRA, although two, McCann and Murray, were later readmitted. Charged with treachery, Bell faced a possible death sentence, but Adams interceded, no doubt aware of the adverse publicity and speculation that would follow the discovery of his corpse in a South Armagh laneway, the customary dumping ground for such victims. Nevertheless the death threat continued to hang over Bell. He and Anne Boyle have lived quietly in West Belfast ever since; both have stubbornly refused to talk about the events of that time, least of all to journalists. The Ivor Bell rebellion was over, and in the space of a few months Adams had seen Kevin Mallon and Ivor Bell, two potentially serious obstacles to his leadership—and to the infant peace process—removed.

  By the end of 1985 the peace process was just over three years old, and already it was clear what the driving force behind it was. Sinn Fein’s success in the 1982 Assembly election had opened up intriguing possibilities. The results of that election and especially Adams’s own election to the West Belfast seat a year later meant that Sinn Fein was now a major political force on the island, confounding and dismaying its critics and enemies in both Ireland and Britain. The Sinn Fein achievement had alarmed supporters of the political status quo and had forced Britain and the Irish government to put together the Anglo-Irish agreement, the most ambitious attempt to stabilize Northern Ireland in ten years.

  Sinn Fein’s improved circumstances meant that when, in the aftermath of Sergeant Cochrane’s kidnapping, Father Alec Reid visited Gerry Adams, he found the Sinn Fein and IRA leader in a much more receptive frame of mind than ever before to discuss options to violence. On any prior occasion such discussions would have taken place in a vacuum. Now, after the electoral successes, there was something real to talk about.

  Success at the hustings fueled the peace process but so, paradoxically, did setbacks. Unwittingly, perhaps, the Sinn Fein and IRA grassroots had backed a strategy that almost precisely measured popular disenchantment with the IRA’s violence. In the days before Sinn Fein fought elections, the IRA could afford to disregard such considerations and take refuge in the thought that while the Irish people might not vote for republicanism, deep down they secretly supported it. Now there was no such fantasy in which to seek refuge.

  As 1986 dawned, much of the groundwork in the peace process had been done and Adams’s own internal problems had been eased with the departure of key rivals. But a peace process with only one participant was worthless. The next key questions were about the British and Irish governments and the extent to which they would be prepared to deal with Adams. The answer to those questions would determine the success or failure of the whole enterprise.

  EIGHT

  Dealing with the Brits

  The history of contacts between the IRA and the British government was, by 1986, a long but unhappy one. British ministers, including the then Northern Ireland secretary, William Whitelaw, had met a delegation of IRA leaders, including Gerry Adams and Martin McGuin ness, in London as far back as June 1972 during the first IRA cease-fire. In 1975 there were further contacts, although this time no British politicians were directly involved, and instead the talking was done between British officials and representatives of the Army Council. The talking in both cases ended in angry recrimination. In 1972 the cease-fire was abandoned within days of the contact amid IRA accusations of British bad faith, while in 1975 Adams and others alleged that the British had tricked the IRA into the cessation in order to buy time to devise the IRA’s defeat. Officially the Army Council was in 1986 so hostile to the notion of a cease-fire that it was committed never to talk to the British again, unless it was about their withdrawal from Ireland.

  All this meant that when Gerry Adams decided to open a dialogue with the British about the burgeoning peace process, he chose Father Reid to act as his go-between and representative. The Redemptorist acted as a sort of clerical cutoff, providing cover to all involved, both republican and British, and it was a task he performed with diligence and discretion when, finally, the moment came for Adams to move. Precisely when the pair made contact with the British government is not known, but the evidence strongly suggests that sometime in 1986, courtesy of Father Reid, a highly secret line of communication was opened between the Northern Ireland secretary, Tom King, and the Sinn Fein leader.

  In the intervening years both the British and the Sinn Fein leadership have, for reasons best known to themselves, gone to considerable lengths to persuade the outside world that the first contact between them did not take place until much later, in 1990, when British intelligence made contact with the IRA and commenced a dialogue with Martin McGuinness.1 But both parties have been extremely economical with the truth about the full extent of their dealings with each other.

  They each had very good reasons. Adams had not told his Army Council colleagues about his dialogue with Father Reid, much less the indirect contact opened up on his behalf with the British through the Redemptorist priest. Had they known just about the talks with Reid, Adams would have faced some hard questions from other IRA leaders. But knowledge that Adams was talking to the British government, especially one led by the woman most Republicans blamed for the 1981 hunger strike deaths, and was doing so without their sanction, would have set off alarm bells in the Army Council, possibly with serious consequences for Adams. The government of Margaret Thatcher had equally compelling reasons to keep a tight lid on the story. Mrs. Thatcher’s hatred and contempt for the IRA was renowned and although she had allowed MI6 officers to speak to the IRA during the hunger strikes, by 1986 there was another reason to keep her government’s contact with Adams, albeit filtered through Father Reid, a tightly guarded secret. Two years earlier, in October 1984, a 20-pound IRA bomb exploded in a bathroom of the Grand Hotel, in the south-eastern English coastal resort of Brighton, during the annual Conservative Party conference. The bomb exploded just before 3 a.m. and came very close to killing Thatcher and other members of her Cabinet. Five people were killed, including Sir Anthony Berry MP, while Thatcher’s hard-line Trade and Industry Secretary, Norman Tebbit, was badly injured in the blast. Mrs. Thatcher herself had a narrow escape; a bathroom she had been in a few minutes before the explosion was destroyed. In a statement the IRA said: “Today, we were unlucky, but remember, we only have to be lucky once— you will have to be lucky always.” In fact this statement was mostly bluster; the IRA never again attempted to kill Mrs. Thatcher, while senior figures, including Adams, were said by colleagues to be privately thankful that the effort had failed in its primary aim. Even so, the Thatcher government was taking an extraordinary political risk by opening up communication with Adams. Common sense suggests that someone in British officialdom with sufficient influence and knowledge of the backgrou
nd may have advised that the risk was worth taking.

  As can now be revealed for the first time, confirmation that Gerry Adams was in indirect conversations with the British government as early as 1986, or at least 1987, has been given in interviews with the author by two former British secretaries of state for Northern Ireland who conducted these dealings with the Sinn Fein leader. One was Tom King, who came to Belfast in September 1985, just before the Hillsborough agreement was signed, and the other was his successor, Peter Brooke, secretary of state between 1989 and 1992, a figure whose term of office is most identified with the emergence of the first public clues about the secret diplomacy that lay behind the peace process. Both men have since been elevated to the British House of Lords.

  A scion of the British establishment, Brooke came to Northern Ireland with what seemed like impeccable unionist credentials. His father had been a Tory home secretary in the early 1960s when the unionist and British Conservative parties were as one, and his family roots in Ireland went back 250 years to the heyday of the Anglo-Irish ascendancy. Although welcomed at first by unionists, he was viewed with some unease and doubt by the end of his term, since his sometimes less than forthright approach to the Provisionals unsettled them. Their alarm bells were triggered very early on in his ministerial term when he took a soft line on the defining question of how the British would respond to an IRA cease-fire. A charming and often amusing man, Brooke was well liked by the media and became extremely popular with nationalists, not least because unionists distrusted him.