A Secret History of the IRA

by Ed Moloney

  AT THE START of their dialogue Tom King had responded diligently to the Reid-Adams pipeline, but other diplomacy was under way as well, albeit more tentative. Sometime in early 1987, and separately from the more considered response to Adams’s letter, King authorized a statement to be delivered to the Sinn Fein leader saying that there was no strategic or economic interest in staying in Northern Ireland as far as Britain was concerned, nothing “that would override the democratic will of the people of Northern Ireland.”13 According to King this was in response to an overture from the SDLP leader, John Hume, rather than the Reid-Adams pipeline, and King’s memory is that it happened in early 1987. “It was before Loughgall [the SAS ambush that killed eight IRA members] because after Loughgall things slowed down, and we were annoyed by this,” he recalled.14

  Tentative peace talks may have been opened with Gerry Adams, but the latter’s colleagues in the IRA continued with their armed struggle regardless. Unaware of the secret diplomacy, certainly ignorant of the correspondence between Tom King and Adams, the Army Council authorized the launch of the much delayed and reduced “Tet offensive.” It was this decision, later on in 1987, that brought the dialogue between King and Reid-Adams to its first crisis.

  At the end of August 1987, three Irish people—two men and a woman, all with Dublin addresses—were arrested in the grounds of King’s estate near Bridgeport, Wiltshire, and later charged with conspiracy to murder the Northern Ireland secretary. Paramilitary-style equipment, notes of King’s car registration numbers, and a large cash sum were found in their campsite nearby. The three were initially convicted but later cleared on appeal. Nevertheless, King was convinced that all the while he was sending messages to and receiving them from Gerry Adams, the IRA had been plotting to kill him, and he was furious. A few months later, in March 1988, the attentuated “Tet offensive” was launched with an attempt to bomb the Mediterranean colony of Gibraltar, and that was followed by a wave of violence culminating that September in an effort to kill the head of the Northern Ireland civil service, Ken Bloomfield, in a bomb attack on his home outside Belfast.

  The alleged IRA surveillance of his home caused an incandescent King to cut the cord to Alec Reid. “He told Adams to get stuffed,” recalled one informed source. “He took Bridgeport as a very personal affront, and I also suspect that he was getting a lot of support from Mrs. Thatcher for cutting off the talks.”15 In autumn 1988 the Thatcher government responded to the IRA upsurge with a tough package of security measures, which included a ban on radio and TV interviews with members of Sinn Fein, a change in the law that eroded the suspect’s right to silence during police interviews, and a mandatory oath of nonviolence for all candidates in local elections in Northern Ireland. What brought matters to this point was the stark difference between the desire for peace of which Reid and Adams talked and the reality of the IRA’s violence, a difference the British might have better understood had they realized just how secret the Reid-Adams diplomacy was.

  From then on and for years ahead, there were two distinct British views of Adams’s and the Provos’ motives, as one participant with a ringside seat remembered:

  At the start Tom King saw this as something that had to be pursued, that it was an historical chance. He saw it as the IRA going through their dying throes, and they were looking for a way out. It was only after what happened at Bridgeport that he concluded they were spoofing. The Foreign Office was very positive all the way through. I can’t remember a time when they were negative. In the Northern Ireland Office it depended very much on who was there, but the prevalent view was that they were doing something new but for the same purpose. The difficulty was that it was so hard to take Reid seriously; he was so passionate about things [but] with no evidence of change.16

  The letter from Adams to King that produced the remarkable British reply was undated—as is the secret reply itself—but public comments by the Sinn Fein leader suggest that the ideas contained in the British correspondence were circulating inside Adams’s head toward the end of 1986 and the beginning of 1987. In a December 1986 interview with the Irish Times, for example, he stated, “I say the British still have an interest in this country. If they don’t, let them say it. What they should be saying, quite simply, is that they have no interest in Ireland and they’re going to leave. That would have the effect very quickly of bringing everyone—and people might say that includes us—to their senses and starting to work something out.”17 That point was dealt with in the secret British answer.

  Three months later there was more of the same. In a speech to the Oxford Union, Adams called “for the establishment of an all-Ireland constitutional conference consisting of elected representatives of the Irish people that would draw up a new constitution for an independent Ireland and organise a new system of government open to all significant organisations of political opinion in Ireland.”18 The British reply also dealt with that matter. With hindsight it is difficult not to conclude that these comments were an intriguing public glimpse of a still very secret diplomacy.

  One unresolved question concerns the identity of the British civil servants who were dealing directly with Father Alec Reid, those who very probably drafted the secret answer to the Adams letter. The conduit between Tom King and those who were talking to Alec Reid was Ian Burns, then the deputy under secretary of state at the Northern Ireland Office, who retired in the early 1990s.19 According to informed sources, Burns was a consistently optimistic influence on NIO thinking during this period, and to some of his colleagues this suggests he was privy to much of Adams’s thinking. There is also evidence that he was the conduit to King for highly confidential information coming from a second source in or near to the Pro visionals, this time in Derry. The contact civil servant in that case was Mark Elliott, a Foreign Office official seconded to the NIO who was in charge of the British side of the joint Irish-British secretariat, which had been set up as part of the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement. Elliott made regular monthly trips to Derry, and his subsequent reports were considered so sensitive that for security reasons he wrote them out by hand and delivered them directly to Burns.20

  Elliott’s role had its roots in the bureaucratic structure erected by the British when the outbreak of violence in August 1969 and the deployment of British troops forced a more direct involvement by London in the day-today running of Northern Ireland’s affairs. To keep an eye on the increasingly volatile situation, the British sent over a senior civil servant to be its official representative, a sort of ambassadorial figure, to liaise with the unionist government. Over the years the office became the regional headquarters of British intelligence, and it was eventually located in a secluded villa called Laneside, in the pleasant seaside town of Hollywood, east of Belfast. It was from Laneside that British officials like Michael Oatley of MI6 made discreet contact with the IRA in 1974 and 1975 on the eve of the cease-fire, and it was there that secret meetings with IRA leaders were held. Laneside was the nerve center of British policy in Northern Ireland.

  Eventually Laneside was closed down. Some of the office’s functions were transferred to the Political Affairs Bureau (PAB) at the Northern Ireland Office, and the interest of Whitehall was signified by the presence of a Foreign Office official at its head. In later years the job was given to Mark Elliott. The intelligence section of Laneside went its own way and was later housed in a new office block in the Stormont complex along with MI5.

  Neither Tom King nor Peter Brooke can say, will say, or can remember who on their staff dealt with Father Alec Reid. “I don’t know who was dealing with Reid,” said King bluntly; “probably the political relations side.”21 But the evidence is that the Political Affairs Bureau in the NIO was kept firmly in the dark about the secret communications with Gerry Adams, as one former British official explained: “I never had the slightest wind of it, no hint of it all. I can’t believe that the way the office was organized it could have been possible. No one would have thought of doing it that way, because it would have got o
ut almost immediately,” he said.22 This official, like other of his former colleagues interviewed by the author, is convinced that the intelligence services must have handled the contacts.

  We were very much part of the ordinary office, and it’s conceivable that one person could have been up to it, but I just find it impossible to believe that. I think it was done through other channels. And frankly I suspect if you were doing something like that, you would have left it to someone who perhaps had some training and background. They are the sort of people who are trained to do that sort of thing, and they are probably better placed for that sort of endeavor. What you also have to remember is that when this started (a) it was not stated government policy, and (b) it easily could have gone very, very pear-shaped, and I would have thought whichever minister or ministers [were] involved would have wanted some cover.23

  Some aspects of the diplomacy suggest that it embraced a strong “need to know” element of the sort that usually indicates an intelligence role rather than the conventional duties of a mainstream government department. Both King and Brooke denied all knowledge of the secret British reply to Gerry Adams and said they had never read the document until shown a copy by the author. Had they known about it at the time, the political risk to them would have been enormous. The document was explosive, its content an absolute contradiction of stated British policy toward the IRA in the mid- to late 1980s, which was to shun and isolate both it and Sinn Fein. Had the document or any of its contents leaked, the sitting secretary of state, either King or Brooke, would have been forced to resign.

  The piece of evidence that suggests that both King and Brooke may have been kept in the dark about the secret reply to Adams is that one of them, Peter Brooke, had no knowledge at all of Adams’s original letter to Tom King until this writer told him. He had not been told about it during his initial briefing as NI secretary from civil servants, and Tom King had not disclosed it to him either, even though, according to Brooke, King had briefed him on the Reid-Adams conduit. It seemed that someone, somewhere in the NIO or possibly in the intelligence apparatus had decided it would be better if Brooke remained ignorant about the correspondence. When the author told Brooke about the King letter during lunch in Westminster, he was astonished and frankly incredulous. It was the first he had heard of the letter.24 But the existence of the Adams correspondence is undisputed by King himself, even if he disavows all knowledge of the reply. The British politicians, it appears, were only partly aware of the full picture.

  There is another clue that strongly suggests intelligence involvement. It also comes from Peter Brooke’s memory of events. Previous accounts of the peace process have told how in late 1990 a senior MI5 officer called John Deverill met Brooke with a proposal to initiate secret talks with the IRA leadership and that when Brooke gave the go-ahead, back-channel negotiations began.

  In an interview with the author in June 2000, Brooke explained that what really happened was that Deverill came to see him not to get authority to start talks with the IRA but to inform him that a different intelligence officer would be taking over day-to-day handling of what appeared to be an already ongoing operation.

  What was put to me in relation to political cover—and I was being told because of a change in personnel—was that a channel existed, represented by an individual in Derry, there was a vehicle or conduit under which British intelligence services acting on behalf of the British government was in a position to say things to him by which Sinn Fein could test if they wished what we meant by some action by us. The circumstances suggest that the dialogue with the IRA had been going on for some time.25

  If British intelligence was conducting covert conversations with the IRA behind the backs of British ministers, then, equally, it could have been sending secret letters to Gerry Adams, and figures like Peter Brooke and Tom King would have known nothing about them. Although this is necessarily conjecture, there is no doubt that there was a British letter to Adams and that it laid the foundations for the Good Friday Agreement. Someone in the British administration wrote it.

  By the time the secret Reid-Adams pipeline to the British was opened, the Redemptorists and British intelligence were not exactly strangers to each other. During the 1980 hunger strike a Redemptorist priest, Father Brendan Meagher from the congregation’s Dundalk House, had acted as a messenger between Michael Oatley of MI6 and leading Provisionals, Gerry Adams, Martin McGuinness, and other IRA figures in Belfast, as well as the leader of the hunger-striking prisoners, Brendan Hughes. According to one account, members of the Provisional leadership who wanted a settlement to the protest26 had initiated the contact, and some republicans believe that had Father Alec Reid been fit and healthy, he would have performed the role played by Meagher. Code-named Angel, Meagher met Oatley, code-named Mountain Climber, at Belfast airport to receive a copy of last-minute British proposals to settle the prison dispute.27 Meagher took the document to the prison and then to a house on the Falls Road to show to Adams, McGuinness, and Danny Morrison.

  Five years later, in 1986 and 1987, another Redemptorist priest, this time Father Alec Reid, would shuttle between Gerry Adams and the British government. But this time his mission was much more historic than settling a hunger strike. This time it was about ending the IRA’s ancient war with Britain.

  NINE

  “Stepping Stones”

  Few twentieth-century Irish politicians have aroused such powerful passions as Charles Haughey and none whose political legacy has been so fiercely argued over, even during their lifetime. If Ireland had a Richard Nixon figure, then it was Haughey. Once banished into the political wilderness, tarnished with allegations of gunrunning, Haughey made an extraordinary comeback, rising to become leader of Ireland’s largest political party, Fianna Fail, and on three occasions Irish prime minister, or taoiseach. Like Nixon’s, his years in office were dogged by scandal and controversy until finally he was driven out of office and hounded by disclosures and allegations of corruption and venality. But just as the passage of time and reflection caused Nixon’s period to be reassessed, so Haughey’s role in the Northern Ireland peace process, a story never before fully told until now, may well place his own stewardship in a different light.

  Charles Haughey had never met Gerry Adams, but the men were not entirely strangers either. They first started talking to each other, albeit indirectly, during the 1981 hunger strikes when Haughey was taoiseach and trying to negotiate a settlement of the prison protest with the British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher. The go-between was an old friend and confidant, Padraig O hAnnrachain (O’Hanrahan), whose Fianna Fail credentials were impeccable. A County Clare man, O hAnnrachain had been recruited by de Valera in the 1950s and became the great man’s private secretary. In the days of Lemass and Lynch, he headed the Government Information Service, and was responsible for ensuring that the taoiseach got the best media coverage possible. Discreet and affable, O hAnnrachain, who died in 1988, was trusted by Haughey to handle the secret phone calls to and from Gerry Adams during the turbulent spring and summer of 1981. Had Adams wished, he could have destroyed Haughey with a judicious leak about their dialogue, but the contact was never revealed and trust between the men grew.

  Five years later Haughey was no longer ensconced in Government Buildings in Dublin, but he was still the leader of Fianna Fail, despite the best efforts of rivals to unseat him. In August 1986, a few months before he was once again elected taoiseach, Father Alec Reid came to see him at Kinsealy, the splendid Georgian estate owned by the Haughey family on the northern outskirts of Dublin. It was the start of a dialogue that would culminate just nine months later in an extraordinary offer of an IRA cease-fire from Gerry Adams and later in the creation of a strategy that enabled the republican leader to coax, direct, and otherwise persuade his followers to take a path that would lead to the ending of the Provisionals’ long war against the Northern Ireland state.

  BY THE TIME the Provisional IRA Army Council ordered the second cease-fire of the peace
process, in July 1997, a decade or so after Father Reid’s journey to Kinsealy, it seemed, as one erstwhile loyal fan put it, that “the pathological anti-Haugheyites” had won the argument about Haughey’s place in Irish life.1 The former Fianna Fail taoiseach had been mired in one of the worst corruption scandals ever to hit Irish politics, and it seemed that it would be this rather than the achievements of office that would shape history’s judgment of him.

  It was the Provisional IRA that was indirectly responsible for Haughey’s plight. Back in October 1981 the IRA was strapped for cash, and so the Army Council authorized the kidnapping of Ben Dunne, one of Ireland’s wealthiest and most flamboyant supermarket tycoons. It was a risky operation, for it was sure to attract the anger of the Irish political establishment, but despite that the IRA went ahead. The task was given to the IRA in South Armagh, and it went about the kidnapping with typical flair and careful planning. Just north of the Border at Jonesboro the IRA staged a fake car accident, and when Dunne stopped to give aid, armed men pulled him from his car. He was held for a week and then released into the hands of a local journalist. Both Gardai and the Dunne family denied reports that some £300,000 was paid to the IRA for Dunne’s life, but the suspicion persisted.

  Whatever the truth, the experience scarred Dunne and in no small measure contributed to a serious cocaine habit, which finally surfaced eleven years later in a bizarre incident at the Grand Cypress hotel in Orlando, Florida, when the supermarket boss threatened to jump from the seventeenth floor. Other members of his family were appalled and angered, in particular his sister Margaret Heffernan, who ordered an investigation into the financial affairs of their supermarket chain, Dunnes Stores. The probe re vealed secret payments to Charles Haughey and led directly to the government of the day setting up a tribunal to inquire into the former taoiseach’s past financial dealings.