A Secret History of the IRA

by Ed Moloney

  The eighth person around the Army Council table was the quartermaster general, Michael “Micky” McKevitt, another South Armagh figure, who until 1984 had been quartermaster of Northern Command. The Libyan arms deal was the spur for his elevation. The QMG at the time the deal was negotiated, Kevin Hannaway, Gerry Adams’s cousin, had never recovered from the interrogation methods used on him by soldiers and policemen during the 1971 internment operation. Hannaway was judged too ill to handle such an ambitious enterprise and was quietly moved sideways and then eventually he was retired. Responsibility for getting the Libyan armaments safely to Ireland was given instead to McKevitt and Slab Murphy. McKevitt sat in on the Army Council’s deliberations and, like Gerry Kelly, could have a say but not a vote. His real influence was felt on the IRA Executive, of which he was a leading member. Like Murphy and the other South Armagh member of the Council, the Northern adjutant, McKevitt, had spent his entire republican career in the IRA and had never been in Sinn Fein, although as the peace process moved forward he was to play an increasingly political role.

  The IRA’s military commander at the time of the 1994 cease-fire was the Tyrone man Kevin McKenna. Appointed chief of staff after the fall of Ivor Bell, McKenna became the longest-serving of all the IRA’s chiefs of staff, and his period at the top of the IRA encompassed the crucial transition from war to peace. Born on the family farm near Aughnacloy on the Tyrone-Monaghan Border in 1945, McKenna had been in the IRA briefly before the Troubles erupted in 1969 but had emigrated to Canada and missed key moments, such as the split between the Officials and the Provisionals. The introduction of internment in 1971 brought him back to Ireland and to the IRA, as it did scores of other young Northerners made angry at the turn of events and eager to help strike back. McKenna quickly made his mark and was soon a leading figure in the Tyrone organization, as a contemporary recalled:

  His rise in the IRA was accounted for by the fact that back in those days there would have been three types of IRA men, the bulk were eighteen-to nineteen-year-olds, some in their fifties and sixties who were veterans of the ’56–’62 campaign and a small number like Kevin in their mid-twenties who were the right age to take the lead. He had come back from Canada with a bit of money, enough to buy a car. He was mobile, the right age, single and willing to work, and away he went.6

  McKenna helped form an IRA unit around the Eglish-Aughnacloy area of Tyrone and afterward rose through the Tyrone Brigade. Kevin Mallon, the first OC of Tyrone, was succeeded by another figure known for his operational daring, Brendan Hughes, who was no relation to the Belfast figure of the same name. At the end of 1972, after Hughes’s departure, McKenna became commander of Tyrone but within eighteen months had been arrested and interned. Released in early 1975, he again assumed command of Tyrone, this time running the brigade from the distance of Monaghan, where he has lived ever since. The Northern commander immediately prior to Slab Murphy, McKenna was eventually elevated to the Army Council, and there was little doubt that, whatever his military skills, he was also put there to placate a Tyrone IRA made uneasy by Adams’s routing of Kevin Mallon in the wake of the disastrous Tidey kidnapping.

  “McKenna would have been seen as keeping Tyrone out of politicking and troublemaking,” said one IRA veteran. “He’d be there to keep Tyrone happy, so they could say that their man was chief of staff. He would also empathize with the South Armagh men; he knew the price of cows and was happy wearing wellies.”7

  The chief of staff was liked by his men even if his political analysis, like that of the other “soldiers” on the Army Council, was less than sophisticated, as the same IRA source recalled:

  He is a very pleasant man to talk to, thoughtful, hospitable, and affable. He wasn’t a superior type nor stern, more an avuncular figure. While Twomey would be full of rage and almost physical retribution if you failed to carry out a mission, McKenna was more tolerant and understanding. If a unit was operating well, he would make sure it was well equipped. The fighting men had time for him; he was always there for them.

  He had no well-defined politics as far as I could remember, and he was confused about the movement’s support for socialism. I remember at the time of the 1972 cease-fire him saying to me that he wanted the Brits out but he was not sure whether we needed socialism. I then saw him at a Sinn Fein Ard Fheis in the mid-seventies wandering around. A Portuguese army colonel had just spoken, and McKenna was in a daze saying this really is a revolutionary party. He was lost in terms of economics. He knew how to buy and sell cattle and would have made a good small businessman, but the macro stuff left him trailing.8

  The Army Council was never an entirely united body, and personality clashes often soured its meetings. The squabbling between McGuinness and McKenna, a product of deep personal rivalry, was particularly serious. McKenna, who managed to be a most secretive and publicity-shy commander, resented constant media reports that McGuinness was the real chief of staff, and he suspected that the Derry man had done little to discourage them. There was a widespread suspicion that McGuinness desperately wanted his old job back and in particular to be chief of staff when the Libyan-resourced “Tet offensive” began. Before the Libyan weapons arrived, he launched a torrent of criticism at McKenna’s handling of the IRA’s campaign and, but for the support of Slab Murphy, the chief of staff might have succumbed. “Everything was thrown at him except a vote of no confidence,” recalled one source.9 Adams, by contrast, generally stayed above their conflict and refused to take sides, waiting to see who emerged victorious.

  After the Libyan weaponry started to arrive, the rows between the two men worsened. As Northern commander, McGuinness and his staff had the final say on which units were to receive the new weaponry. But when it was discovered that arms were being sent to areas with inactive or small IRA units, such as Lurgan in County Armagh, or where training in the new equipment had yet to be given while other well-trained areas were ignored, McKenna angrily intervened. The problem was that the weapons were being lost by inexperienced units almost as quickly as they arrived, and the drain on the Libyan stores became so great that by the early 1990s McKenna gave an order to cease replacing lost weapons and issued instructions that existing stocks in Northern Command be moved around internally, with a consequent risk that guns and equipment would be bugged by the British. There were accusations that McGuinness was either attempting to curry favor with the rank and file or was just incompetent; relations between the pair became icy.

  McGuinness and McKenna clashed again when more precious Libyan weapons were lost. This time the trouble broke out after Gardai discovered two plastic tanks full of automatic rifles, Semtex explosives, and ammunition hastily buried in the beach at Five Fingers Strand near Malin Head in north Donegal in January 1988. The weapons had been moved to Donegal on the basis of assurances from McGuinness’s right-hand man, an activist from the Inishowen peninsula, that the appropriate dumps had been located and readied. The assurance was bogus, and the arms had to be quickly buried on the nearest available beach as soon as they arrived. The van carrying the load was stopped by alert Gardai, who realized that the driver and passenger had republican records. The van was empty but there were traces of sand inside. On a hunch, a search of beaches near the driver’s home on Malin Head was ordered, and the weapons were duly uncovered. The Inishowen activist was sacked from the IRA at McKenna’s insistence, the episode being recorded as another black eye for McGuinness.

  The biggest row between the pair, however, was over the activities of a well-placed IRA informer in the Derry Brigade, Frank Hegarty, who was attached to the quartermaster’s department. Hegarty had been seconded to work with Northern Command staff to help move part of the first Libyan shipment to dumps in the west of Ireland. The consignment, some eighty AK-47s that had come to Ireland as part of the Kula’s cargo in August 1985, was being moved by stages when in January 1986 the Gardai swooped. Two transitional dumps, one in Roscommon and one in Sligo, were raided and the weapons seized. The next day Hegarty disappe
ared from Derry, and it soon became clear not only that he had given the dumps away but that he had been working for MI5, the British Security Service, which had spirited him away, and that he was being kept in a safe house somewhere in the north of England.

  Hegarty’s forced flight was a disaster for the intelligence community. An IRA member from the 1970s, Hegarty was Northern Command QM in 1982, when it was discovered that he was having an affair with the wife of a soldier in the Ulster Defence Regiment. His case went as high as the then chief of staff, Ivor Bell, who dismissed him from the IRA. Not long afterward Hegarty was approached by an arm of British military intelligence called the Force Research Unit who persuaded him to return to the IRA and work as a double agent. Inexplicably, Hegarty was allowed back into the IRA in Derry and made his way once again into the QM’s department with a brief from British intelligence to rise as far as he could, even as high as QMG. His handlers assured him that his IRA bosses would be removed one by one to smooth his way. British intelligence’s ambitious plans for Hegarty were, however, frustrated by the Special Branch in the Republic’s police, who insisted on moving in on the IRA dumps in Roscommon and Sligo as soon as the weapons arrived. Eager to strike a damaging propaganda blow against the IRA, the Gardai vetoed a British plan to bug and follow the weapons, and they moved to seize them. Fortunately for the IRA, Hegarty had been given a false story about where the weapons had come from; he was told that they had originated in Europe, and this, together with the fact that some Belgian FN rifles had been mixed in with the AK-47s, satisfied British intelligence. Nevertheless, the British had lost a potentially priceless agent as well as an opportunity to track the progress of the weapons.

  The British had, though, come perilously close to discovering the Libyan link. Since most of the remaining Libyan shipments were still being awaited, including the Eksund’s 120 tons, the episode gave the IRA leadership a bad fright, and a high-level investigation was ordered. The first question to be resolved was how Hegarty had been allowed back into the IRA. Since McGuinness was Northern commander, it stood to reason that he must have known of Hegarty’s return, but he denied this and argued that the real informer had to be someone other than Hegarty.

  During Hegarty’s period in hiding in England he was in regular contact by phone with his family in Derry. A month after his sudden disappearance Hegarty just as unexpectedly returned to Ireland, and so began one of the most controversial chapters in McGuinness’s republican career. Hegarty’s family would later insist that he had agreed to come back only after they passed on to him an assurance from McGuinness that he would not be touched. McGuinness has always denied this, but sources familiar with Hegarty’s subsequent interrogation at the hands of the IRA say that the informer repeated the claim while in the organization’s custody.

  Hegarty also told his questioners that McGuinness had known and approved of his return to the IRA’s ranks, an admission that sparked a blazing row between the Northern commander and the chief of staff. Behind the row lay an unanswered question: why had McGuinness advanced Hegarty’s second career in the IRA’s quartermaster’s department when there had been so much doubt about his loyalty that he had previously been thrown out of the organization? In May 1986, just four months after the Gardai seized the Roscommon and Sligo arms dumps, Hegarty’s body was found on the outskirts of Castlederg near the Tyrone–Donegal Border. His eyes had been taped over, his hands tied behind his back, and a bullet wound to the back of his head indicated that he had received the punishment customary for those judged guilty of informing. The rivalry between McGuinness and McKenna would simmer on for years to come, but Hegarty’s death effectively marked the end of the Derry man’s ambitions to take over the chief of staff’s job.

  THE QUARREL between McKenna and McGuinness was an important feature of the IRA leadership in those days, but it paled into insignificance compared with the much deeper division in the IRA leadership. That was the one that separated the Army Council into the complex political operators of the Adams and Doherty variety and the simple “soldiers,” like Slab Murphy, McKenna, and the Northern adjutant, all figures who never had and never would have any dealings with Sinn Fein. An understanding of how this affected the way the IRA Army Council did its business during the years of the peace process is vital to understanding how the Provisionals were brought to a cease-fire.

  Contemptuous of politics, the “soldiers” paid little heed to the unfolding peace process until the cease-fire was almost upon them, and for a simple reason. They, along with much of the republican grassroots, proved to be exceptionally receptive to a steady diet of assurances from their political colleagues that Gerry Adams was only playing “word games,”10 as the phrase had it, with John Hume and the British, Irish, and American governments and that what was said to them by the Sinn Fein leader was not meant to represent the reality of the Provisionals’ politics. The strategy was disarmingly simple. The name of the game, they were told, was to forge a pan-nationalist alliance with the SDLP and Dublin that would put the British under pressure. This would supplement the IRA’s military campaign, and the combined pressure would force the British to move. But securing that nationalist alliance required two things. First the IRA’s military strategy had to be tailored so that it would not offend the rest of nationalist Ireland. That meant the IRA had to concentrate on hitting targets in England and military targets in the North while avoiding civilian casualties of any sort in Ireland. Meanwhile on the political front it was necessary to create the impression that republicans wanted to abandon military methods in favor of politics. The line given to the “soldiers” went something like this: to build that nationalist alliance, it would sometimes be necessary to say or do things that neither the IRA nor Sinn Fein really meant, including that a cease-fire might be possible, otherwise Dublin and the SDLP might balk at the relationship. Lies would have to be told, but the Army Council and the republican base could be sure that they were being told the truth, that the struggle was still what it had always been about, that is, securing British withdrawal. “All the time,” recalled one senior source, “Adams and Co. were telling people that the IRA didn’t mean it but that they had to say the sort of things they were saying. They kept assuring our people to ignore the public statements, that nothing short of British withdrawal would be acceptable.”11

  DISSEMBLING had become part of the republican political arsenal long before the peace process assumed such an important part in Provisional politics. It began not long after the 1986 victory on abstentionism. “After the 1986 convention everything was sold as a tactic,” recalled one veteran IRA commander. “The use of language became a tactic, words didn’t matter, they were a means to an end.”12 The roots of all this actually reach back much farther, to 1982, when Sinn Fein first contested elections.

  One of the difficulties presented by the electoral strategy was that it exposed Sinn Fein’s relationship with the IRA to a harsh and potentially dangerous spotlight. One election candidate after another would be quizzed by journalists about their association with the IRA, and each would have to deny it, even those like Adams and McGuinness whose role representing the IRA in talks with the British, for example, was well known and publicly recorded. Otherwise they could face charges of IRA membership, an offense that could mean up to five years in jail. To get around the problem, IRA members involved in Sinn Fein politics had been given a dispensation to deny their links. The rank and file knew what the truth was but accepted the need to deceive. It began at this level and the practice grew. Not meaning what was said increasingly became a defining and acceptable feature of republican political culture. It was to occupy a central place in the peace process strategy.

  As Sinn Fein leaders moved rhetorically closer to accepting the ideas and principles of constitutional nationalism, their edgy, nervous supporters were constantly reassured. “They would keep on saying that these were tactical talks that meant nothing,” recalled the same source. “They would say don’t worry, what is being said
is not meant, we have to say these things in order to talk to these people.”13 This message would be transmitted to rank-and-file Sinn Fein supporters and IRA activists alike and be repeated all the way up the ladder to the very top. Many, especially those who were fighting the IRA’s war, believed what they were told because they wanted to. The alternative opened up an appalling vista. Others believed because they had always believed. At the same time, the Irish, British, and American governments would be assured that Sinn Fein and the IRA were genuine and sincere but needed to manage carefully their difficult constituency. In this way the Sinn Fein leadership moved the peace process forward, entrusted by their supporters to take it to the next stage, while the governments waited patiently for results, secure in the knowledge that the farther the Provisionals traveled on this journey, the more difficult it would be to go back. Even so, it was often difficult to tell who was being lied to.

  Occasionally, when their guard dropped, leadership figures would admit to the tactic. In September 1995, a year or so after the first cease-fire, the author had a lengthy session with one of Gerry Adams’s closest advisers, a figure who not long before had been released from prison. At the time, Adams was under enormous pressure from the Army Council’s “soldiers” to break the cease-fire, but he had a problem. Bill Clinton was coming to Belfast in a few weeks and he had just visited the White House to reassure the administration that, despite the difficulties, his commitment to peace was absolute. A detailed note of the conversation records the following: “[H]e admitted/claimed that they were lying to their new friends in the U.S. [i.e. Clinton] and elsewhere and that they could go back to war even though there would be, he admitted, a high price to pay… At one stage he said, ‘Your problem is that you mind too much about the lies’—he defended the tactic utterly, even though I said it only gets you into a wilderness of mirrors.”14