A Secret History of the IRA

by Ed Moloney

  The capture of the Eksund changed everything. The more astute among the IRA leaders fully realized the consequences. “We were gung ho before at the prospects, but now it was the war of the twilight,” recalled the source. “It was over, and it led directly to a stalemate situation which then fed into the peace process.”5 The IRA’s grassroots were jubilant over the organization’s newfound strength, but even this was illusory. The IRA had lots of weapons, but it was by no means certain that they were the best that could be had. The value of the AK-47s, for example, had been exaggerated. “The Volunteers thought they could fire round corners,” remembered the same source. The heavy Soviet machine guns, the “Dushkies,” were pretty much useless. “They took three men to carry and only fired eighty rounds to a belt; they fired too slow,” recalled a rural IRA activist.6 The SAM-7s were virtually obsolete. They dated back to the 1960s, and the batteries in the firing mechanisms were dead and useless. Without Libyan assistance, and that was cut off when the Eksund was lost, they could not be replaced, and so the SAM-7s stayed in their dumps while the IRA’s spin doctors did their best to exaggerate their threat. The IRA had scores of Webley revolvers, but their ammunition was of too low a caliber for its needs, while many of the millions of rounds of ammunition shipped from North Africa had been rendered unusable by old age. Qaddafi had been generous to the IRA, but his gifts had come mostly from the back shelves of his arms stores.

  The IRA had plenty of Semtex, but that, really, was all. In the coming years the inventive resources of the IRA’s engineering department would be stretched to the limit as improvised weapons were developed one after the other. Homemade rocket launchers, grenades, coffee jar bombs, booby trap car bombs, and mortars poured out of the IRA’s factories hidden deep in the Republic, each device designed to utilize the explosive power of Semtex. At the time all this was seen as evidence of the IRA’s ingenuity, skill, and strength, even though in fact it was a symptom of the weakness caused by the loss of the Eksund.

  The IRA leadership was forced to make do with what was available, but the big military breakthrough was now as elusive as ever. The plan put together by the director of operations, Tom “Slab” Murphy, and approved by Chief of Staff Kevin McKenna before the capture of the Eksund, envisaged a three-pronged offensive that would start in Northern Ireland and then spread to continental Europe, where British army contingents in West Germany would be targeted, and to England, where the targets would be military, political, and economic. Following the Eksund’s loss, IRA structures in the Republic were disrupted for weeks by the huge twenty-six-county-wide search for the earlier shipments, but nonetheless the go-ahead was given to begin the campaign in Europe.

  A probing attack had been made in early 1987, when a 300-pound car bomb exploded outside the officers’ mess of the British army’s West German headquarters at Rheindahlen, injuring thirty-one people. It looked like a reasonably successful operation, but, in fact, the IRA had had a miraculous escape. The only reason people were not killed was that the ASU had been unable to position the car bomb close to the mess, because the car park was full of vehicles. Unknown to the IRA, most of the vehicles blocking their way were owned by West German military officers who had been invited to spend a social evening with their British counterparts. Had the car bomb exploded as it was supposed to, many of these officers could have been killed and the beginning of the IRA’s European campaign would have become a diplomatic and military disaster.

  The campaign proper began on as bad a note for the IRA when on Sunday, March 6, 1988, two seasoned IRA activists, thirty-one-year-old Mairead Farrell and thirty-year-old Danny McCann, and a young, twenty-three-year-old bomb maker, Sean Savage, were gunned down by the SAS as they made their way out of Gibraltar, Britain’s quaint cosmopolitan colony perched on the southern tip of Spain. The trio, who were all from West Belfast, were unarmed when shot, and this helped transform their subsequent inquest into a virtual trial of Margaret Thatcher’s tough approach to the Northern Ireland problem. A celebrated Thames Television documentary, Death on the Rock, produced eyewitness evidence that supported the allegation that the three had been shot down in cold blood while trying to surrender, a contradiction of the version of events put about by the Thatcher government, which implied that the SAS believed they might have been about to detonate a bomb or reach for weapons when killed. An inquest jury cleared the SAS, but the controversy lingered on.

  The IRA’s plan was to place a large Semtex car bomb in the center of the colony and detonate it just as a British military band assembled for a weekly changing-of-the-guard ceremony outside the governor’s official residence. Usually some fifty soldiers took part in the parade, and the target was doubly tempting, offering the IRA substantial casualties in one of the few remaining British colonies. If it worked, the attack would be a military triumph full of political symbolism. The three were on a final scouting mission when they were killed, and had left an empty car in a parking lot near the band’s assembly point, presumably to reserve a spot for the real car bomb two days later. On the trio’s way back to the border with Spain, the SAS struck.

  At the inquest, held amid considerable publicity in Gibraltar itself, it became clear that substantial British intelligence resources had been deployed to forestall the attack, and it seemed there was little that the authorities did not know about the IRA’s plans. Apart from the SAS soldiers, teams of MI5 “watchers” had been assigned to follow the ASU in Gibraltar. The Garda Special Branch had watched the team leave Dublin airport for Malaga, but while the Gardai did not inform the British, the IRA later learned, Interpol in Vienna was told. Interpol in turn contacted Spain, and via the Spanish police the British were told the team was on its way. IRA intelligence later established that the Spanish had sought assurances from the British that if they tailed the three and kept MI5 and the Gibraltar police informed of their movements, they would not be killed. The British reneged on the deal.7

  The Gibraltar operation was a disaster for the IRA, although it probably did win the subsequent public relations battle with Thatcher’s government. The true extent of the calamity for the IRA was, however, never acknowledged by the organization and was kept hidden from the rank and file. The story of Gibraltar is the story of an operation that should never have been allowed to happen.

  In the weeks leading up to the operation, warning signals were clearly visible to IRA GHQ and senior Army Council personnel—red flags in military parlance—which indicated that the British had access to the IRA’s plans in Europe. They were ignored.

  ALONG WITH the Gibraltar bombing, the IRA was planning another European spectacular to open its Continental campaign. The IRA had learned that the British foreign secretary, Sir Geoffrey Howe, traveled regularly to Brussels for meetings of NATO and European Community ministers, and, crucially, there was a regular pattern to his movements in the city. He was driven to his destination by the same route each time. A plan was devised to assassinate him by means of a remote-controlled bomb placed in a car parked at the side of the street. When Howe’s car passed, the bomb would be detonated and one of Mrs. Thatcher’s most senior ministers blown to pieces.8 The operation was approved by the IRA leadership, and the bomb put in place. The IRA team charged with carrying out the mission arrived, but Howe’s car, for the first time in months, failed to turn up. The IRA concluded that British intelligence had discovered the plan and changed Howe’s itinerary. The bomb was dismantled and left in a lockup garage in Brussels where, in January 1988, Belgian police found it.

  There was, however, one puzzling aspect to the affair. The British clearly knew all about the IRA plot, but they did not tip off the Belgian authorities, who could easily have arrested the ASU. That would have been something of a coup for all concerned. The reason the British and Belgians let matters lie was that the Gibraltar and Brussels operations overlapped. The IRA chiefs who had planned the Gibraltar attack and two members of the Gibraltar ASU were also involved in putting together the attempt on Sir Geoffrey Howe’
s life. Had the authorities moved against the IRA in Brussels, thereby indicating that there had been a leak or treachery, GHQ would have been obliged to abandon the Gibraltar operation and Mrs. Thatcher would have been denied the chance to give the IRA a bloody nose in the streets of her colony.

  Even so, the evidence suggests that the British knew weeks in advance about the IRA’s plans for Gibraltar and that the IRA should have suspected this. The original intention had been to bomb the Rock in December 1987, but the operation had to be abandoned when suddenly and for no obvious reason the changing-of-the-guard ceremony outside the governor’s residence was cancelled. But early in the New Year the IRA returned to Gibraltar and found that the parade had been resumed. The intelligence on the operation was resubmitted, and the bombing was once again authorized by the IRA leadership. No effort had been made to discover why the parade had been halted at a crucial point during the execution of the first plan or if this might have indicated that the British knew something about the IRA’s intentions. Nor did anyone in the IRA hierarchy link that with the failed attempt on Sir Geoffrey Howe’s life.

  The Army Council ordered an internal inquiry into what had happened at Gibraltar and blamed loose talk by members of the ASU, three of whom were dead and could not answer back. The investigation claimed there had been a leak in West Belfast and one in County Louth, just across the Border. There was other independent evidence to indicate carelessness on the part of some of the team which suggested there was validity in the complaint. Just after the killings a West Belfast republican told the author that Danny McCann had been seen drinking in a Lower Falls social club a week before, and nearly everyone who knew him could tell he was going on an operation. “He had dyed his hair,” the source explained.9 McCann had been allowed back into the IRA not long before and forgiven for his rebellious liaison with Ivor Bell. The IRA inquest did not, however, consider the possibility that there had been a leak or a traitor at a higher level. Given the occurrence of the Gibraltar debacle within months of the loss of the Eksund and after the Loughgall massacre, that possibility should have been considered.

  THE CELLULAR REORGANIZATION of the IRA prompted by Adams and his colleagues in Long Kesh in the mid-1970s had been motivated by the alleged looseness of the old company and battalion structure. But the changes had failed to stem security breaches or agent infiltration and recruitment on the part of the British. In fact there has always been a strong school of thought in the Provisionals that held that the centralized control systems introduced in the mid-1970s may have facilitated rather than hindered such penetration. Not least it meant that one well-placed agent in the new IRA could do more damage than a dozen informers distributed around the old company and battalion system. In the months after the betrayal of the Eksund, more and more evidence surfaced suggesting that the IRA had been infiltrated in this way, at a high level and in different sections. So serious was the problem that it effectively hobbled the revised “Tet offensive.”

  The autumn and winter of 1989 provided the evidence. In October a mass breakout of remand prisoners from Crumlin Road jail in Belfast was frustrated by the British. At least thirty IRA men had planned to escape by using smuggled Semtex to blast their way out of the central block. The Belfast Brigade had organized backup. A bomb would blow a hole in a perimeter wall while up to a dozen cars had been positioned around the prison to whisk the escapers to freedom. But on the appointed day the British were waiting in large numbers and clearly knew everything there was to know. A smuggled “comm” from remand prisoners to a colleague on the outside a few months later made the prisoners’ suspicions clear. The secret communication, apparently intercepted by the authorities, was quoted in Jack Holland’s Hope against History and read, “Our conclusion is the BB [Belfast Brigade] may well be compromised.”10 It was one of several bad operations highlighted by the prisoners.

  There were other telltale signs of serious penetration by the British. The original plan for the post-Eksund offensive had called for the establishment of flying columns along the Border and in Belfast and Derry. The columns, which would be brought together for specific operations and then dispersed until needed again, were to be the cutting edge of the first assaults, but in the wake of the Loughgall and the Eksund setbacks, GHQ and Slab Murphy drastically scaled down the plan. Eventually a single, experimental flying column was put together under the command of Michael “Pete” Ryan from East Tyrone, composed of around twenty of the IRA’s most experienced and trusted operators from throughout the North who were specially drafted in.

  The column’s first and, as it turned out, only operation was devised by Northern Command, two of whose staff vetted the details. The plan was shared with the column members just before it was put into action. The aim was to destroy a large British army checkpoint at Derryard, near Roslea on the Fermanagh-Monaghan Border, and kill perhaps a dozen soldiers. While some members of the column sealed off approach roads to prevent civilians from stumbling onto the scene, a truck carrying eleven IRA men was to drive into the checkpoint and attack the base with two heavy machine guns, half a dozen automatic rifles, grenades, and a flamethrower, one of a consignment that the Libyans had added, unasked, to the IRA’s shopping list. Under the cover of all this fire the column would then place close to the soldiers’ living quarters a 400-pound van bomb, which would cause carnage when detonated. The operation went according to plan, and two soldiers, members of the King’s Own Scottish Borderers, were killed in the initial phase. Suddenly the column itself came under attack. Heavy gunfire was directed at its members from fields about fifty yards away, while a British army Wessex helicopter appeared from nowhere over a nearby hill. The column fled, leaving behind the primed van bomb.

  To the outside world the Roslea attack looked like a success. Unionists protested angrily and called for a tough security response, while the media pondered the significance of this sudden intensification of IRA violence. But the truth was that the flying column’s first outing had been betrayed, and its members were lucky to have survived. “It was a disaster,” said a source familiar with the operation.”11 The van bomb failed to explode, and an internal investigation concluded that the detonating mechanism had been sabotaged, a sign that a traitor had been at his or her work. A limited number of people had known about the operation, and although no one was pointing fingers, at least openly, the failure at Derryard illustrated for many IRA activists the dangers of sharing operational details with Northern Command or indeed with anyone outside their tight, trusted circle.

  That was the end of the flying column idea. “The fear of a high-level informer made people afraid to go on column operations,” recalled another IRA source.12 Not only had an informer sabotaged the original “Tet offensive,” but the revised campaign had been undermined apparently in a similar fashion. The loss of the Eksund had dealt a devastating blow to the IRA’s ambitions, and now the campaign patched together in the wake of that disaster was falling to pieces. Slowly but surely the IRA’s military options were being closed off.

  A MONTH LATER one of Gerry Adams’s closest advisers and confidants, Danny Morrison, was arrested in a house in Andersonstown, West Belfast. Inside police found the disheveled, exhausted, but extremely relieved figure of Sandy Lynch, a Special Branch agent who had infiltrated the IRA in North Belfast. Financed by the RUC, Lynch had purchased a car, started taxiing, and offered his services to the IRA, who had gratefully accepted. It was one of the oldest tricks in the intelligence book, yet it always seemed to work. Eventually Lynch came under suspicion, and he was lured to the Andersonstown house, where he was interrogated and quickly confessed. Those questioning Lynch were members of the IRA’s security department, a specialist counterintelligence unit established as part of the Cage 11 reorganization plan.

  The arrest of Danny Morrison proved to be a serious blow to the Adams leadership. A skilled and affable propagandist, Morrison had revamped Republican News back in the mid-1970s and overseen the “fusion” of the Belfast paper and An
Phoblacht in Dublin. Regarded as a figure who could always be relied upon to loyally echo the Adams line, Morrison rose through the ranks. A member of GHQ staff, he was the IRA’s and Sinn Fein’s director of publicity and by 1989 had sat on the Army Council for the best part of a decade.

  Morrison found himself in the Andersonstown house because of the activities of another informer, Joe Fenton, or rather because of the Belfast brigade’s decision in February 1989 to kill Fenton before he could be thoroughly interrogated and the extent of his treachery—and his dealings with key brigade staff—discovered. The decision had angered senior figures in the IRA, who realized that a golden opportunity to uncover a network of spies had been lost. There were angry accusations of a cover-up and favoritism toward the relatives of key West Belfast figures. To quell the unease, the Army Council ordered that in the future one of its number would have to check whether a suspected informer had been properly and fully questioned before any action could be taken. The British security forces had nicknamed Morrison “The Lord Chief Justice” after he took on this role, and they clearly relished the prospect of catching him red-handed. On January 7, 1990, their opportunity came. Almost as soon as Morrison turned up at the house, soldiers and RUC officers swooped. He was arrested and subsequently convicted and sentenced to eight years.

  The significance of the swoop was that it suggested that the IRA department whose job it was to track down and kill informers had itself been penetrated by the British. The RUC Special Branch and British military intelligence had long identified the IRA’s security department as a prime target for infiltration and for very good reasons. The security department had an intimate and unrivaled knowledge of the organization’s affairs. Its job was to investigate every botched, failed, or aborted operation to see whether or not the IRA had been compromised. It was work that meant that the security department would be aware of the identities and detailed role of IRA members throughout the organization. The department also had the job of vetting recruits. It was the Achilles’ heel of the reorganized IRA. An agent placed inside the security department could provide priceless information. There already had been strong suggestions that this had happened. In July 1988, Markets IRA man Brendan “Ruby” Davison was shot dead by the UVF at his home. An irritated RUC later let it be known to the media that the loyalists had killed a key double agent. The RUC would have been grossly negligent had it not made considerable efforts to replace Davison, and Morrison’s arrest suggested that it may well have succeeded. The Sandy Lynch affair added to a general sense of paranoia in the IRA, inhibiting its ability to intensify the revised “Tet offensive” to the levels hoped for by the Army Council.