A Secret History of the IRA

by Ed Moloney

  Whether the Adams leadership really needed to resort to such dissembling, or did so in the knowledge that the intelligence feedback to the British and Irish would strengthen the view that Adams’s freedom of movement was indeed limited, or even that this was another example of Adams indulging his own legendary caution, the reality was clear. In various ways and for various reasons, the Adams leadership was altogether much stronger by 1999 than at any time since the failed putsch carried out by Michael McKevitt and his allies in 1996–97, and arguably more in control of the republican movement than at any other point in the peace process.

  To begin with, the malcontents on the Army Executive who had led the revolt against the Adams leadership had been soundly defeated. The 1997 Convention had put them in a minority and when the McKevitt rebels left weeks later so did they, and the new IRA Executive that took over was much more to the leadership’s liking. There was little likelihood of trouble from this traditional source of internal unrest. In addition, the Army Council was, by a very comfortable margin, solidly in the Adams camp. The former chief of staff, Kevin McKenna, who had never liked the peace process, had departed, replaced by Tom “Slab” Murphy of the South Armagh IRA. “Slab” was a much less self-confident figure than his predecessor, as was evident by his demeanour during the 1994 Army Council meeting that declared the first cease-fire. Committed beforehand to voting against the cessation, he elected to sit on the fence when Joe Cahill suddenly switched sides to back Adams and give him victory. McKenna, by contrast, stuck to his guns and voted against, the only Army Council member to do so. A year after his appointment as chief of staff, Slab sued the Sunday Times for libel and lost badly after a less than spectacular performance in the witness box which did neither his image nor his authority on the Army Council much good. Aside from Adams and McGuinness, there were two other Sinn Fein stalwarts on the Council, Pat Doherty and Martin Ferris, the Kerry-based activist who had been jailed for his part in an arms-smuggling venture (betrayed by the spy Sean O’Callaghan). Both men were strong supporters of Gerry Adams. The remaining Council members were also on Adams’s side: Brian Keenan and Brian Gillen, the latter the former Belfast commander who had come over to Adams’s side during the 1997 Convention and had been elevated to the Army Council as a reward. On a bad day Adams could count on a six-to-one majority in his favor; on a good day all the Army Council members would vote for his proposals.

  But the most significant improvement in Adams’s fortunes was that the changes in the IRA’s constitution pushed through at the 1996 Convention, notably the restrictions placed on the IRA leadership’s ability to decommission weaponry, were reversed at a Convention held in early 1999, the second since the eclipse of the McKevitt dissidents in 1997. The first, in 1998, had approved IRA members of Sinn Fein taking seats in the new power-sharing Assembly, a move that completed the ending of abstentionism begun in 1986. At the 1999 meeting, the Army Council had restored to it total control over the IRA’s “equipment and other resources” in between Conventions. The McKevitt constitutional changes had taken away control of IRA weaponry, specifically if they were to be decommissioned, and given it to the Convention, which became the only body with such authority. But this power had been handed back to an Army Council now fully under the control of Adams and his peace process allies and unthreatened by dissidents. There was only one caveat, and a minor one at that. The Army Council’s authority to dispose of IRA weapons was linked to Sinn Fein’s entry into the yet-to-be established power-sharing Executive.28 That restriction probably suited the Adams leadership since it buttressed the republican insistence that devolution must precede IRA disarming, an essential condition if the strategy of destabilizing Trimble and the SDLP was to succeed. The important point was that the leadership now had the authority to begin decommissioning whenever it wished and didn’t need to call a special Convention to win approval.

  None of this deterred the Sinn Fein leadership from pretending otherwise. In 2000 the SDLP was told, for example, that decommissioning was unlikely because Sinn Fein “no longer” had much influence with the IRA, even though this was more than a year after the 1999 Convention.29 The Irish government accepted, seemingly without hesitation, the claim from Sinn Fein that “Adams did not have the votes” at a Convention to move on arms, a belief that cannot have been grounded in anything remotely resembling accurate intelligence.30 The Irish government flip-flopped alarmingly during these years, a sign that its understanding and analysis of the Provos was less than perfect. In February 1999, for instance, Irish prime minister Bertie Ahern gave an interview to the Sunday Times in which he said that Sinn Fein would not get into government until and unless a start was made on decommissioning. Yet only four months later he performed a U-turn, saying decommissioning could begin only after Sinn Fein ministers were seated around the cabinet table. When another decommissioning deadline was missed, this time at the end of January 2000, the Irish government’s explanation was that Gerry Adams had tried to sell the idea “on a tour of IRA units around the country” but had given up, presumably because of the bad reaction.31 The truth, of course, was that the heavy lifting on decommissioning, such as it was, had already been done.

  That the Irish government believed that before Gerry Adams or his colleagues could take risky and important decisions they needed to consult with and win the approval of the IRA rank and file seemed sensible—or at least it would have been if one was talking about any other organization, even one like Fianna Fail, but not the Provisional IRA. The whole point about the Adams peace strategy, the characteristic that made it really special, was that the entire expedition had been undertaken without the say-so or knowledge of the IRA’s rank and file and that if they had been given a real veto over the process it probably would never have got off the ground. The priority of the Adams leadership was never to seek and win the consent of the grassroots for what it wanted to do, but to side-step, identify, undermine or subvert opposition and then manoeuvre the IRA or Sinn Fein into the desired place.

  Two key events that took place before IRA decommissioning was an issue stand out as examples of how, eventually, the question of IRA guns would be dealt with. The 1986 Ard Fheis, which approved dropping abstentionism in the Dail, gave the leadership the result it wanted not because Adams or any of his colleagues toured the rank and file and won them over by argument but as a result of a piece of political trickery that Tammany Hall would have been proud of. Fictitious Sinn Fein cumainn were invented and registered with head office and when the Ard Fheis came around, dozens of delegates, invariably IRA men loyal to the military leadership, were sent to vote to drop abstentionism on behalf of a non-existent membership. That’s how the leadership won the debate. Had they not done that, the proposal would probably have been comfortably defeated. In the run-up to the 1994 cease-fire, then Northern Commander Martin McGuinness publicly assured the republican grassroots that there would have to be an Army Convention before any cessation proposal was approved and the effect was to calm the ranks. But there never was a Convention because the Adams leadership knew they would probably lose the vote if there had been one. The first rule of IRA politics, as was very evident to the Adams camp in 1996, is never to call a Convention unless you know you can win it, preferably because your people are in charge of organizing it. No Convention was called before the 1994 cessation and, instead, the decision was left in the hands of the much more easily managed and manipulated Army Council. And it was the same story with decommissioning, once Adams had won the 1999 Convention.

  Sleight of hand was, as always, employed by the leadership to ensure that the decommissioning issue was handled in the way it wished, notwithstanding opposition at grassroots IRA levels. One long-time and now former republican activist described how this process worked: “There is widespread consultation, but it’s not that simple. Command or Departmental OCs call meetings and there is the opportunity to put your case but then the leadership goes ahead and does what it wants. When asked, the leadership says, ‘W
e have consulted’ but the grassroots never find out what the overall result was because they only know about what took place at their own meeting. And if you say to them [the leadership] ‘We were against this or that’ the answer is that ‘well you don’t know how others we consulted felt’. The logic is that the leadership does what it wishes.”32

  Irish government policy on decommissioning may have become what it was, due—at least in part—to the fact that policy-makers relied in large measure on the Sinn Fein leadership for their insight into IRA affairs, a dependence that had its origin in the Adams—Father Reid—Martin Mansergh chain established in the late 1980s. According to one senior Irish political source, policy formulation by the Dublin government in regard to the peace process, which was largely in the hands of the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA), happened with little or no reference to the Garda Special Branch or the Department of Justice during these years. The Irish Special Branch had agents inside the IRA who gave accounts of internal matters that could have assisted policy-making, but their information was ignored. “They [DFA] had been co-opted by the Provos,” asserted the source. “They ended up having a sort of Stockholm Syndrome relationship with them in which the rule was ‘Gerry’s problems are our problems’.” It wasn’t until 2005 that Garda intelligence was fed regularly into the process and by then it was far too late to influence the decommissioning process.33

  The 1999 Convention imposed two other restrictions on IRA involvement in the institutions of the Good Friday Agreement. One prevented ranking IRA members from taking seats in the new Assembly, and as a result Gerry Kelly, an Assembly member for North Belfast, coud not be reappointed as adjutant-general. Another said that no IRA member could hold office in the new Executive, a restriction that possibly puts Adams’s own reluctance to take government office in a new light. This also had implications for Martin McGuinness, slated to be minister of education, when in December 1999 the deal brokered by George Mitchell paved the way for the Executive to be established. As Dean Godson noted, the Irish government became aware that Martin McGuinness “stopped going to IRA meetings” when he was appointed to the Executive, although it is not clear if Dublin fully understood why. Godson was told this was happening “so as to keep a clear division between ministers and ‘the movement’,” whereas it was in fact a condition that had been imposed by the 1999 Convention.34 These limits to the leadership’s freedom of movement were pretty mild and fell way short of the sort of hobbling measures that an unhappy and assertive IRA grassroots would have demanded, the sort of grassroots that the Sinn Fein leadership would afterwards maintain prevented greater or faster movement towards IRA disarming. The Adams leadership could be well satisfied at the outcome of the 1999 IRA Convention. It had restored the Army Council’s tactical flexibility and had encountered no real, organized opposition, while the Irish and British governments continued to believe, or acted as if they believed, that the opposite was the case.

  MEANWHILE the destabilizing impact on unionism of the IRA’s dodging and weaving around the decommissioning issue was becoming more evident as well as threatening to the Ulster Unionist leader, David Trimble. He had significantly moderated his decommissioning stance since the Good Friday Agreement was signed and had dropped the demand that it be a precondition for Sinn Fein’s presence in government. Instead he accepted that it could happen after devolution was underway, although the deadline for this kept being extended further and further into the future. As this happened, unionist unrest intensified. Even when the IRA agreed to its first act of decommissioning in October 2001, Trimble won no relief from internal criticism. The IRA had moved, after all, not out of consideration for unionists’ susceptibilities but in self-interest, lest by not decommissioning the White House would place it in the same camp as Al Qaeda. Furthermore, Trimble had lost some of his Assembly members to anti-GFA unionist dissidents and was only re-elected as first minister when members of the Alliance Party and the Women’s Coalition temporarily redesignated themselves as unionists, a device that Trimble’s critics roundly condemned as shabby and demeaning. In some telling ways the first act of IRA decommissioning actually weakened Trimble.

  Even though the IRA had begun decommissioning, it soon became clear that another difficulty had emerged. The IICD, which oversaw and verified the process, gave no details at all about what had happened. A 144-word statement outlining the first decommissioning act of October 2001 said merely that the IICD’s members had witnessed “an event” in which “arms, ammunition and explosives” were put beyond use. How much weaponry was decommissioned or precisely what type was not revealed and neither was the method of decommissioning. The IICD would not even say where the event had taken place, whether it was North or South of the Border or even in Ireland. The IICD’s statement after the second act of IRA decommissioning in April 2002 was even shorter, at 112 words, and again no details at all were given about what had happened.

  The IICD was led by three members: Tauno Nieminen, a Finnish Brigadier-General, Andrew Sens, a former US diplomat and John de Chastelain, a retired General in the Canadian Army, who was the IICD’s chairman. Ironically, in view of subsequent events, de Chastelain’s appointment had been resisted by Sinn Fein since both his parents had links to British intelligence, his father as an MI6 officer in the Balkans during the Second World War, and his mother who was on the staff of Churchill’s legendary US-based spymaster, Sir William Stephenson. De Chastelain had sat on the Mitchell International Body, whose report in 1996 had established the need to avoid the appearance of surrender or defeat as a central principle in any disarming process. In line with that thinking, de Chastelain and his colleagues agreed an arrangement with Brian Keenan in which no detail pertaining to the decommissioning process would be made public.

  “It became clear to us,” the IICD chairman explained, “in our continuing discussions with the IRA representative that they would only agree to decommission on that basis.” De Chastelain went to the two governments with that proposal and Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern agreed. “Now the IRA representative didn’t tell us this but I think they also had to do a selling job to their own rank and file about how things would be done,” he recalled, “… they didn’t want to be humiliated.”35 The confidentiality deal was negotiated, de Chastelain believes, by either late 1999 or early 2000, by which time the Army Council had recovered its authority over IRA weapons. Significantly de Chastelain now admits he knew nothing about the 1999 IRA Convention. Out of a wish not to be compromised, the IICD had eschewed links to the British or Irish intelligence network and therefore had no way of knowing about it.

  The IRA’s confidentiality agreement with the IICD meant that no evidence that decommissioning had even happened could be made public and it was this that allowed the leadership to tell rank-and-file volunteers that de Chastelain had been conned. But it also unsettled an already uneasy unionist community, many of whose members assumed that the real purpose of the secrecy was to hide the fact that no weapons or a very insignificant number of them had been destroyed. One consequence was that an already weakened faith and trust in the IRA’s bona fides, Tony Blair’s veracity and David Trimble’s political leadership, slipped away at an accelerating rate. By October 2000 the slim majority of Protestants, 51 percent, who had voted in favor of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, had become a slightly larger majority, 53 percent, who would now vote against given a second chance.36 Just under three years later, according to a Joseph Rowntree Trust/Queen’s University Belfast poll, Protestant support had fallen to around a third. Trimble faced growing opposition from within his own party; at increasingly agitated meetings of his party’s supreme decision-making body, the Ulster Unionist Council, he was doing well if he won the support of more than 55 percent of delegates. In September 2000 disaster struck when in a by-election for the Westminster constituency of South Antrim, the Reverend William McCrea, a Free Presbyterian minister shipped in from far-off south Derry to fight the election and one of the wilder fundamentalists i
n Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party, took what had been the Ulster Unionist’s safest seat in Northern Ireland, beating David Burnside, who was himself something of a hard-liner and critic of Trimble. Grassroots unionist sentiment was moving away from the moderate center ground and that process would quicken in the next few years.

  Any hope that the start of decommissioning would signal a change of direction by the IRA was dashed on the night of Sunday, March 17, 2002, St. Patrick’s Day. Three intruders burst into a Special Branch office located deep in the Belfast headquarters of the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), the renamed Royal Ulster Constabulary, at Castlereagh in the east of city, overpowered the duty officer and made off with scores of files containing the code-names of double agents, the names of their handlers and details of the Special Branch’s complete battle order, including names and phone numbers. It was a devastating strike against British intelligence, and because the raiders appeared to have intimate knowledge of the Castlereagh base the authorities at first discounted IRA responsibility and assumed that the raid had to be an inside job, possibly carried out by disgruntled intelligence officers. The PSNI Chief Constable, Sir Ronnie Flanagan, said he would be “most surprised” if paramilitaries or civilians were responsible.37 A week later, however, the PSNI had changed its mind and began raiding and arresting leading republicans in Belfast and Derry. The Castlereagh raid was an IRA operation, the police had concluded, carried out with the assistance of a civilian accomplice working at the base, which was under reconstruction at the time and consequently not guarded with the customary level of vigilance.