A Secret History of the IRA

by Ed Moloney

  The republican leadership had been sending conflicting and confusing signals about decommissioning for at least the previous five years. The Army Council chairman Martin McGuinness had, for example, suggested to the decommissioning inquiry headed by George Mitchell as far back as late 1996 that disarmament could be done voluntarily and by the paramilitary groups themselves. Two years later, Padraig Wilson, the OC of IRA prisoners in the Maze, gave an interview to the Financial Times expanding on this, saying that moves could be made by the IRA in parallel with the implementation of the Good Friday Agreement—as long as it was done voluntarily.7 At an IRA Convention held two months later, in December 1998, the Adams leadership succeeded in scrapping changes to the IRA’s constitution introduced by the dissidents at the 1996 Convention, including the vital amendment that took away the Army Council’s powers to negotiate on weapons. Adams and his allies argued for the wholesale elimination of the amended constitution, on the grounds that it had been contrived by people who had now left the IRA, and the effect of this, possibly unnoticed by the delegates, was to free the leadership’s hands on weapons.8 During the Good Friday Agreement talks, a senior Sinn Fein delegate had assured the British and Irish governments that decommissioning would happen,9 and much of the latter part of those talks was taken up by a dispute over how long it would take, with Sinn Fein holding out for five years and the unionists demanding immediate decommissioning. The two-year figure eventually agreed on was a compromise. As the Good Friday deal was gradually implemented, an independent arms body was set up, headed by a Canadian general. The IRA agreed to nominate members to this body and sent along Brian Keenan as its interlocutor.

  Taken together, all these moves indicated a willingness to eventually destroy weapons, but the Adams leadership had an internal constituency to address and reassure, and so a completely different message was relayed to it. In this regard the pledge from the IRA leadership never to decommission, given repeatedly to military activists and Sinn Fein members, played a vital role in selling the peace process as a whole, just as sending republicans to Colombia sent the same message. As long as the IRA held on to its weapons, the leadership’s claim that the process was merely tactical, and that armed struggle could and would be resumed if necessary, was invested with credibility. Going back on that pledge meant not only that the grassroots had been misled about the inviolability of IRA weapons but that they had been sold a bill of goods in regard to the entire peace process. Some figures like Gerry Adams had gone further, assuring colleagues in the IRA leadership in the summer of 1997 that decommissioning would not occur, because it would be the issue that would cause the unionists or the British to break the process and leave the IRA free to resume armed struggle in politically advantageous circumstances. To strengthen this perception, the IRA issued a series of statements, carefully and ambiguously worded to be sure, but which nonetheless ruled out decommissioning. Senior figures like Martin McGuinness, meanwhile, gave briefings to selected journalists to drive home this message.

  The Adams leadership had another reason not to decommission with any speed, and that was the leverage that possession of its still substantial arsenals gave the IRA during the negotiations and implementation of the Good Friday Agreement. Whoever had betrayed the Eksund in November 1987 lost the IRA some 150 tons of heavy weaponry and forced the organization to effectively abandon the planned “Tet offensive.” But another 150 tons of guns and explosives had already been successfully smuggled into Ireland by that point; 105 tons had come in on the Villa alone in October 1986. When the peace process was properly launched, Adams and his colleagues still had plenty of weaponry to negotiate away, especially large quantities of the powerful explosive Semtex, which the British were particularly eager to see put out of harm’s way. A traitor somewhere in the IRA’s upper reaches saw to it that the Libyan connection did not give the organization the military edge its leaders had once hoped for, but it strengthened Adams’s negotiating hand nevertheless during the peace process.

  In the months following the setting up of the Executive in the winter of 1999, one attempt after another to achieve decommissioning faltered, although each time the IRA edged appreciably closer to the point of no return. The issue was enfeebling the agreement, however. The Executive had to be suspended again and again, while David Trimble’s authority as Ulster unionist leader was steadily undermined. More critically, his support was leaching to the extreme and wilder anti-agreement sections of unionism, notably to the Reverend Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party, which wrested seats at Westminster away from Trimble’s party. The center ground upon which the agreement was built was crumbling. The two governments meanwhile could not decide whether Adams was trying to use the unionists to break the agreement, whether his private pleas that the IRA was just not ready to decommission were true, or whether he was just extracting as many concessions as he could before finally delivering. By the late summer of 2001, the matter was becoming critical. Once again the Good Friday Agreement was in suspension and needed but a nudge to send it over the precipice.

  So when the Colombia Three, as Sinn Fein dubbed them, were arrested, the pressure to decommission intensified, applied primarily by key figures in the United States. The discovery of the republican trio in one of America’s strategic backyards angered and embarrassed many of Gerry Adams’s American allies and influential friends, few of whom were impressed by the Provisionals’ efforts in Ireland to disown the men or to claim that the trio were eco-tourists. Once again there was a suspicion that they might have been hoodwinked by the Sinn Fein leader. Typical was Bill Flynn, chairman of the National Committee on American Foreign Policy, who had organized Adams’s first trip to New York in 1994 and taken huge risks fostering the peace process at a time when many others were deeply skeptical of Adams. Flynn, the chairman of Mutual of America, one of the world’s largest insurance corporations, issued a testily worded statement making clear his disapproval of what had happened. “The Colombia situation is the greatest puzzle that I have seen in the entire 10 or 15 years that I have been involved in the north of Ireland,” he said. “I don’t understand it. I disassociate myself from it. It frightens Americans of Irish heritage that there should be any connection.”10 The only way the IRA could salvage the situation was to decommission, he added.

  Pressure came from another direction, one which in the past had usually been a source of comfort and support to republicans when Bill Clinton was the tenant. But the White House now had a new occupant, and George W. Bush had none of Clinton’s sentimental attachment to the Irish peace process and no obligation to Irish-American voters. Bush quickly signaled a change of tack toward Ireland, and in a meaningful way. Clinton had kept the Irish peace process very close to him. Day-to-day management was handled by the National Security Council (NSC), based in the White House. The NSC’s top officials, people like Anthony Lake and Nancy Soderberg, would meet regularly with Adams and other Sinn Fein people, and Clinton often intervened personally, particularly at times of crisis like the Good Friday talks, when he repeatedly phoned the key party leaders to charm them or twist their arms. Clinton had also infuriated the British and the unionists by granting Adams a visitor’s visa in 1994 when the Sinn Fein leader was still a pariah.

  Bush swung back the pendulum. Responsibility for the peace process was returned to the State Department, where it had been before Clinton took office, and a signal sent out that Washington would henceforth be much more evenhanded in its dealings with the Northern Ireland parties. The unionists could no longer say that they were denied a hearing on Pennsylvania Avenue. Furthermore the Colombian episode had raised hackles in the White House, and hostility toward the IRA for meddling in matters that deeply concerned America’s foreign policymakers was palpable. The United States sought the extinction of FARC, suspecting it of fueling much of Colombia’s cocaine trade to America, and here was an outrageous example of the IRA’s seemingly giving FARC aid and assistance. The September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and P
entagon had meanwhile given a new, uncompromising edge to Bush’s war against foreign terrorism. The mood in the White House was such that few distinctions were being drawn between one terrorist grouping and another. If the IRA did not move on decommissioning, it risked angering this new president.

  Bush’s point man on Northern Ireland, Ambassador Richard Haass, was in Dublin when the news came in that Osama bin Laden’s deadlier version of human bombs had toppled the twin towers of the World Trade Center in a cascade of death and dust. By midafternoon, as the full scale of the Al Qaeda assault on the United States was becoming clear, Haass was being driven across the border to Belfast, where he was due to sit down with Gerry Adams to discuss the Colombian escapade. A former director of Foreign Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution and a prolific writer on American diplomacy, Haass had been drafted into the State Department by the Bush administration to give foreign policy a conservative, less interventionist bent. He had already signaled that, as far as Ireland was concerned, the laxity and tolerance toward the IRA of the Clinton days had ended. On that September 11 afternoon he was in no mood to mince his words. It was by all accounts a tough and direct encounter between the American diplomat and the Provisional leadership. It ended with Gerry Adams and his colleagues in no doubt about what the White House wanted to happen. The only way to dispel doubts about the IRA’s bona fides, doubts that had deepened because of Colombia, was to decommission. For the IRA, as for many others, it was time to choose sides.

  The move finally came six weeks later, on October 28, 2001, in a statement from the Army Council confirming that weapons had been put “beyond use.” If Adams had meant the decommissioning issue to bring down the peace process and to give the IRA the excuse to resume its war, as he had once told the IRA Executive, there was no sign of it in the statement. Quite the reverse. “This unprecedented move,” explained the IRA statement, “is to save the peace process and to persuade others of our genuine intentions.”11

  It was a historic moment, recognized and welcomed as such by George Bush, Tony Blair, and Bertie Ahern and lauded in scores of newspaper editorials around the world in the following days. The Washington Post called the act of decommissioning “a brave gesture,”12 while the New York Times suggested that now “an enduring peace may be possible.”13 The Irish Times described the IRA’s move as “far-reaching” and “profoundly symbolic,”14 while the Times of London said it was “the most decisive step in a lengthy journey” taken by the republicans.15

  Never before in the long and bloody history of Anglo-Irish conflict had an Irish insurgent group voluntarily given up its weapons for destruction, even self-destruction, at the behest of its opponents. When de Valera recognized the inevitability of defeat in the terrible Irish civil war and called a halt to the IRA’s campaign in May 1923, the organization was ordered to bury its arms, not to destroy them. Similarly when the 1956–62 Border Campaign ended, Ruairi O Bradaigh’s last order to the IRA units as chief of staff was to “dump arms.” The unspoken message was clear. The guns were being put away but only for the time being; the war against Britain would be resumed when the conditions improved. That was the significance of the Provisional IRA’s action on October 23, 2001. It said the opposite: not just that this campaign had been brought to an end but that the age-old conflict between Irish republicanism and Britain was over. The need for guns, in other words, had disappeared.

  After nineteen years of difficult, secret, and often dangerous diplomacy, Northern Ireland had finally arrived at a sort of peace. A new government, fairer than anything that had preceded it, was striving to make its roots grow, and Northern Ireland’s deeply divided population was struggling to come to terms with a new political order, one in which each side had been obliged to abandon some strongly held beliefs in return for a chance at building stability. The debate about who had won the peace – whether in particular Gerry Adams had led his supporters to a spectacular political and electoral triumph or whether the IRA’s war had been sold out – was only beginning. Although distrust and violence, albeit on a smaller scale, still stalked Northern Ireland, there could be little doubt that with its first act of decommissioning, the IRA had signaled the winding down of its long and bloody war against Britain.

  NINETEEN

  The Midas Touch

  It is one of the great unknowable unknowns of modern Irish history. If the arrests in Colombia and the devastation of the September 11 attacks in America had not come together to make any other course of action unthinkable, would the IRA have begun to decommission its weapons as early as it did, in October 2001, just a few weeks after the twin towers of the World Trade Center collapsed in clouds of dust and death? Or would it have waited for a more opportune moment, one that would perhaps have brought the greatest political or electoral windfall to the IRA’s political partners, Sinn Fein?

  That the IRA would have had to begin disarming at some point had been the sine qua non of the peace process since at least the autumn of 1994 and the immediate effect of the September 11 attacks was to bring a sudden end to some five years of quibbling and prevarication. But it hadn’t always been such a dominating or difficult issue. The surprising aspect of the early, pre-cease-fire years of the peace process was the extent to which disarming the IRA did not figure, or figured so slightly in the various debates and negotiations. And when the cease-fire did come in August 1994 it was clearly Gerry Adams’s hope and expectation, at least as expressed to this writer,1 that the British and Irish governments, if not the unionists, would recognize that the demand for decommissioning was so potentially destabilizing to his project that they would shelve it, at least to a point far off in the future when it could cause the least internal disquiet. But IRA actions in the weeks after the declaration of the 1994 cease-fire forced the question to the fore and transformed decommissioning into an unavoidable and, for some, a mandatory test of the IRA’s bona fides.

  Had the IRA kept to the letter and spirit of its cease-fire, it is possible that decommissioning could have been put off almost indefinitely, but the way the peace process strategy was constructed and sold to their IRA leadership colleagues by Adams and his allies determined otherwise. Unable and unwilling to spell out the huge ideological compromises waiting for the IRA and Sinn Fein down the road and obliged to clothe the process instead in hardline, republican garments, the ever-cautious Adams leadership had been forced to concede ground to Army Council colleagues, who insisted that the IRA be allowed to keep its war machinery in working order after the cessation began. The combined and particular effect of subsequent IRA activity undermined faith and trust in the cease-fire outside republican ranks and so the willingness of the IRA to put away its weapons for good became for many people a much more reliable and palpable index of its intentions than the IRA’s words or those of its political leaders, however seductive and enticing they might have sounded.

  While the British and Irish governments led by Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern did not ever, for their own reasons, regard decommissioning in quite this light, it was a vital test for unionists who would be asked, and were expected, to share power with the IRA’s political wing, Sinn Fein. It was clear, especially after the Good Friday Agreement had been negotiated and Sinn Fein had signaled that it would indeed take seats in government, that no unionist leader could or would agree to sit at the same cabinet table as Sinn Fein unless the most tangible expression of the threat of renewed violence, the IRA’s stocks of explosives and weapons, was being removed from the equation. But once decommissioning had been pushed to the top of the agenda and linked to Sinn Fein’s participation in the power-sharing Executive, the issue assumed the potential either to destroy or secure the peace process. From thereon the question of whether or not the IRA would decommission its weapons and, if so, when the process would be completed and how convincingly it would be done, dominated Northern Ireland and Anglo-Irish politics for over a decade, and in a way no other issue had.

  On the surface a debate raged over whether the
Adams leadership would or would not be destabilized—and the peace lost or strengthened—if the demand was pressed too hard. It was a sharply divisive debate, in the media, in government and, most damagingly, in Northern Ireland society where it helped widen sectarian faultlines. The Sinn Fein and IRA spinmachine fed furiously into this debate, skilfully recruiting many in the media and government to the view that for Adams and his allies, IRA decommissioning was a bridge too far. But the available evidence strongly suggests that all this was a canard, constructed for strategic reasons. The truth was that very soon after the Good Friday Agreement was ratified, the principal obstacle in the way of the Adams leadership undertaking decommissioning was removed with minimal internal dissent and from thereon the Army Council, which Adams utterly dominated, could have started to disarm whenever it wished. But instead of starting the process and shoring up the power-sharing agreement and their unionist partners in government, the Provo leadership decided to use decommissioning to their advantage. By employing delays in delivering disarmament and withholding transparency from the process—and justifying this on the grounds of internal opposition—the Adams leadership divided and destabilized mainstream unionism, rendered their SDLP rivals almost irrelevant, and polarized Northern Ireland politics to the advantage of the extremes. But most important of all, the way decommissioning was manipulated enormously assisted Sinn Fein’s bid to become the master of the Northern nationalist house and a new, rising electoral power in Southern politics.