A Secret History of the IRA

by Ed Moloney

  By March 2003 talk of another deal-saving agreement was in the air and, with speculation rife that it could include both a resolution of the IRA decommissioning impasse and an indication that the IRA’s war would be over for good, the parties and the two governments reassembled at Hillsborough Castle for talks that stretched into April and overlapped with the beginning of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. Blair and President Bush met at Hillsborough Castle just as American troops entered Baghdad. Blair hoped to talk Bush into giving the United Nations a greater role in reconstructing a post-Saddam Iraq. He also wanted the American leader to join him in giving the Irish parties a pep talk. According to one well-informed Irish political source, Sinn Fein had hinted that this summit would be the occasion to announce an IRA acceptance of the demands being made of it, something that might help cast Bush, already being castigated as a warmonger, in the role of peacemaker, or at least peace helper.41 But as Irish officials arrived at Hillsborough, their glum faces signaled yet another disappointment and Bush, Condoleezza Rice and other White House luminaries had to settle for a tour of Hillsborough Castle and its Royal Throne Room instead of playing a supporting role in ending the Irish Troubles. As Sinn Fein leaders mixed and socialized with Bush and his entourage inside the Castle, outside a few party activists joined an anti-war rally. But the anti-war protesters were in no mood to indulge the spectacle of Provos riding two horses on this occasion and by all accounts gave them a dusty reception.

  The talking stretched on for weeks and finally ended in early May 2003 in stalemate and a postponement of the Assembly elections. But before the blinds came down the IRA did just enough to ensure that the process would resume after the Orange marching season had ended and to preserve Sinn Fein hopes that the Assembly election might yet take place. The governments, through Tony Blair, were pressing the IRA to answer a number of questions: would the IRA end its activities, complete decommissioning and signal that the conflict would be over for keeps if the Good Friday Agreement was fully implemented? The IRA refused to give an explicit answer and instead Gerry Adams delivered a speech which replied “yes” to each question, albeit without stipulating a timeline. At this point events took a Kafkaesque turn. Rather than demand straight answers and honest dealing from the IRA, the governments instead asked if Adams had spoken with the IRA’s authority and eventually the IRA agreed that he had. By participating in this style of diplomacy, the British and the Irish not only signaled their unwillingness to confront either Adams or the IRA but they also gave implicit credibility and legitimacy to one of the peace process’s hoariest canards—that Adams had no direct ties to the IRA. Although he had been on the Army Council since the late 1970s, was a former chief of staff and adjutant-general and had been the IRA’s leading political—and before that military—strategist for twenty-five years, Adams himself continued to insist that he had never even been a member, so much so that many in the media had long since abandoned attempts to probe the matter. By asking whether or not Adams’s views reflected those of the IRA, Blair and Ahern gave credence to the idea that the Sinn Fein leader might not have any association with the IRA. If the way the IRA’s peace process strategy was constructed under Adams’s guiding hand is a reliable guide, then in much the same way that he talked to himself in the bathroom mirror each morning, Gerry Adams had probably helped to compose, and most certainly had approved, all three statements: the IRA’s first statement which declined to specifically answer Tony Blair’s questions, his own speech which did and finally the IRA’s confirmation that Adams’s affirmative answers reflected its own views. Asking if Gerry Adams spoke for the IRA was like asking George Bush if he spoke for the White House. In such ways did grown men manage the ending of one of Europe’s longest post-war conflicts.

  It all started up again in October 2003 but in ominous circumstances for David Trimble when three of his MPs, Jeffrey Donaldson, Martin Smyth and David Burnside, who had won back the South Antrim seat in the 2001 election, resigned the party whip. They demanded “acts of completion” before the Good Friday institutions could be restored and this added significantly to the likelihood that another failure would end Trimble’s leadership. Senior Sinn Fein figures like Martin McGuinness warned, “We have no intention whatsoever of going near the IRA” unless an Assembly election date was offered and this appeared to have the desired effect.42 Irish premier Bertie Ahern threw his weight behind the demand, even though a good result for Sinn Fein would likely strengthen the Provos’ challenge to his own Fianna Fail party. Bush’s ambassador to the peace process, state department official Richard Haass, also backed elections, and by the end of the first week in October, Blair’s spin doctors were telling the media that an election date, November 13, 2003, had been penciled in. With an election all but confirmed, the only leverage on the IRA to do something significant had effectively been removed.

  Once again speculation revolved around a deal that would involve a third and major act of IRA decommissioning, this time done in a credible and persuasive fashion, despite the confidentiality deal struck between Brian Keenan on behalf of the IRA and General de Chastelain for the decommissioning body. A statement from the IRA declaring an end to its activities and the conflict would be published and a commitment given by Sinn Fein to sign up to the new policing arrangements. Unofficially the election date was being described as a racing certainty. If the deal was anything like this, observers predicted, the Good Friday Agreement, the peace process and Trimble’s leadership of unionism would all be assured.

  The full story and explanation of the extraordinary events that unfolded on the day the deal was unveiled, October 21, 2003, have still to be fully established. Nor is it known whether what happened was the result of incompetence or deliberate neglect, especially on the part of the governments. What can be said with certainty is that the day was a debacle for David Trimble and led directly to his political downfall—but it was a triumph for Sinn Fein, thanks to IRA obduracy. Despite all the speculation about a breakthrough deal, the sequence of events was characterized by sloppy preparation and the absence of required detail. There was no statement ending its war by the IRA, merely a variation on the bathroom mirror diplomacy of the previous May, and no promise that the IRA would start winding down. Gerry Adams issued a statement saying merely that full implementation of the GFA would “provide full and final closure of the conflict” and while the IRA announced that Adams’s statement “accurately reflects our position,” the reality was that his statement was conditional, aspirational and lacking in necessary detail. Arguably the Adams–IRA statements of May 2003 were actually more compelling. Nor was there any commitment by Sinn Fein to sign up to the new policing dispensation.

  What brought the edifice tumbling down was the inadequacy of the decommissioning event. Although everyone had assumed that the chairman of the IICD, General de Chastelain, had persuaded the IRA to relax its insistence on secrecy, it seems nobody, least of all David Trimble, had bothered to check whether this had happened. In fact the IRA had not budged at all and this failure was compounded by what was widely agreed to have been a dreadfully unpersuasive public performance by de Chastelain. At a press conference to announce the third decommissioning event, a weary and distracted de Chastelain, who had spent several sleep-deprived days in the field with Keenan and the IRA, could give no more details about what had happened than on the two earlier occasions. Even though a large amount of IRA weaponry had apparently been decommissioned, much bigger than on the two previous times, it was hinted, de Chastelain struggled to find the right words to get this message across and a colleague, the American member of the IICD, Andrew Sens, had to intervene in an effort to compensate. But it was too late. The fact that no details were provided, no inventory of destroyed weapons supplied, no description of how the arms had been put beyond use and no timetable for future decommissioning published meant that an event advertised as hugely significant was no more credible or compelling to unionists than the earlier decommissioning acts. The culprit wa
s the confidentiality agreement which de Chastelain had agreed with the IRA, and without which, the General insists to this day, decommissioning would not have been possible.43 All the non-IRA participants had failed to establish whether the confidentiality deal could be, or had been eased while Provo leaders sent out misleading signals. Martin McGuinness said that while there could be no independent witnesses to the decommissioning act the credibility problems associated with the two earlier decommissioning acts would be addressed. The third one, he told the media, “would prove more convincing for unionists.”44 That turned out to be an empty promise.

  On the appointed day the IRA refused to budge from the confidentiality agreement and by so doing predetermined the day’s outcome. Neither the British nor the Irish had tried to ensure that it would do otherwise; in fact the effect of their conceding the Assembly election date to Sinn Fein some time beforehand was to virtually guarantee that outcome. Having himself failed to compensate for the governments’ shortcomings and with next to nothing to show for the day’s work, Trimble halted the day’s sequenced announcements, which were to have culminated in his agreement to restore the Assembly and Executive. By so doing he saved his leadership, at least for the time being. Sinn Fein had pocketed its election date, however—the announcement that an Assembly election would be held some five weeks later, on November 26, was the first act in the day’s sequenced events, announced at 7 a.m., long before de Chastelain’s disastrous performance in front of the media. As Sinn Fein prepared to go to the hustings it could argue to nationalist voters that the IRA had decommissioned more of its arsenal and indicated an intention to end the conflict, yet David Trimble and his unionist allies were still not satisfied and would not share power with republicans. If nationalists wanted to register their feelings about this they knew exactly how to mark their ballot papers on November 26.

  No one was or could be surprised at the result of the Assembly election. Sinn Fein comprehensively hammered the SDLP, winning 58 percent of the nationalist vote, compared to the 44.5 percent it had secured in 1998. Its tally of seats in the 108-member Assembly rose from eighteen to twenty-four while the SDLP’s fell from twenty-four to eighteen. The fortunes of the two parties had been reversed exactly and as the largest nationalist party in the parliament, Sinn Fein’s likely nominee, former IRA chief of staff, Northern Commander and Army Council chairman, Martin McGuinness, would now become deputy first minister of Northern Ireland if the power-sharing Executive was ever restored. On the unionist side, Paisley’s DUP triumphed, more by mopping up fringe loyalist support than by making a huge inroad into Trimble’s Ulster Unionists. With thirty seats in the Assembly for the DUP, it would be Ian Paisley, not David Trimble, who would become first minister in a new government. By any stretch of the imagination it was an extraordinary result. As for Sinn Fein, the party’s leaders and strategists surveying the landscape afterwards could be forgiven for believing that everything they touched turned to political gold. The Midas touch had been with them for the better part of two decades. The only question was—would it last?

  TWENTY

  The Last Kalashnikov

  Belfast is one of those Victorian cities that looks its best in winter, during the dark, gloomy and wet months of the year; in summertime it is a city to vacate, if one can. This has something to do, perhaps, with the predominance of red brick in the city’s buildings and the unsettling effect of bright sunshine reflected from rows of russet-stained houses. Overcast skies, rain streaming down the roof tiles and days when dusk begins to fall not long after lunchtime seem to suit the architecture of Belfast much better. December 2004 was a particularly dark month. Weather records show that there were less than fifty-one hours of sunshine during the entire month and Monday, December 20, was a typical day. The sun shone for just over two hours, peering fitfully through gaps in clouds that from time to time deposited a light drizzle over the city. That night, temperatures dropped below freezing, to 30 degrees Fahrenheit, a cold night for Belfast.

  The dark winter months were also the season the IRA preferred. The cover of darkness allowed them greater rein and it was no accident that Army Conventions were invariably held at this time of the year or that it was in these months that the IRA had brought its Libyan weapons to Ireland. But those days had gone, or so it seemed, and the city had reason to be cheerful. Christmas was just a few days away and once again it promised to be a peaceful holiday. It had been ten years since the IRA had called its first cease-fire and while a political settlement was still beyond reach there was a growing conviction that the bad old days of bombs and bullets would never return. People were getting used to the idea that they could travel without being held up at security force roadblocks or contemplate a night’s drinking or a meal in one of the city’s many new restaurants without the fear that it might end in a hail of machine-gun bullets. Traders in the city centre were looking forward to a bumper holiday season. Peace and currency-related price differentials that favored the shopper were tempting thousands of newly affluent Southerners to abandon their fear of the North in favour of bargain-hunting, and there were predictions that this year’s holiday business in Belfast would rise by as much as five percent. On the evening of December 20, as office workers streamed home, their journey was cheered by Christmas lights and decorations strung around the city hall and the festive, expectant melodia of carols piped into the frosty evening air.

  At 11 o’clock that night, as the city centre emptied and began slipping into slumber, the phone rang in the control room of the Police Service of Northern Ireland in the Knock district of East Belfast and soon, nothing would ever be the same again. At the other end of the phone was a twenty-four-year-old bank official called Chris Ward, a Catholic from Poleglass, a rambling estate of public sector housing built in the 1980s to accommodate the overflow from West Belfast. Ward was a beneficiary of Northern Ireland’s reformed work practices and held down a good, pensionable job with the Northern Bank, one of four local clearing banks that had the right to print their own distinctive notes. There were more Catholics working in the banking sector in 2004 than ever before in Northern Ireland’s history. Long a preserve of the Protestant lower middle classes, fair employment laws that came into force in the late 1970s, and which were beefed up after the IRA cease-fires, obliged the banks to appoint their workforces on the basis of merit rather than background or nepotism. Ward’s work was in the underground vault of the Northern Bank’s Belfast cash center in Donegal Square, adjacent to city hall, which distributed notes to the bank’s ninety-five branches and to hundreds of ATMs scattered around the country. It was Christmastime and there were an awful lot of notes in the vault that day.

  Ward’s phone call to the PSNI was to tell the police that a great number of those notes had just been stolen in an audacious, meticulously planned robbery carried out with military-style efficiency by an armed and determined gang. The night before, as he and his family watched television, armed men had tricked their way into his home and Ward had been abducted and his family held hostage, guarded in the house by armed men. He was driven to Loughinisland, near Downpatrick, County Down, to the home of Kevin McMullan, a colleague and supervisor at the cash center. Earlier, men posing as PSNI officers had called at the McMullan home and, pretending to have bad news for Kevin’s wife Karen, gained entry to the house. There had been a bad car crash in County Tyrone involving her sister, they claimed, but this was a lie. The men produced handguns, tied up Kevin, blindfolded Karen and took her away. That night the gang forced the two bank officials to an upstairs bedroom and coached them in the parts they would play in what the following day would be the world’s largest robbery of cash from a bank. Members of the gang were very forensically aware; they wore surgical gloves, overalls and had masks over their faces. Even their hair had been cut short so as to reduce the chance that discarded strands might provide vital DNA evidence to the police. The gang also questioned the men about procedures at the bank, but it was more a case of double-checking what the
y already knew. Both the bank and the PSNI would say later that the gang was very well informed about security at the cash centre. With their families held as hostage Ward and McMullan had little option but to cooperate.

  The next morning the two men arrived at work as usual, armed with mobile phones supplied by the gang to communicate with them. In the afternoon, Ward took £1 million from the vault, placed it in a holdall and, following the gang’s instructions, left the building. Outside he passed the bag over to a man waiting at a nearby bus shelter. This was the gang’s way of testing if the police had been alerted. At the close of business the rest of the staff went home but Ward and McMullan stayed on. Eventually a white transit van pulled up in an alleyway beside the bank where Ward and McMullan were waiting with trolleys piled high with what appeared to be rubbish, shredded documents and so on. But underneath the covering of garbage lay green cardboard boxes stuffed with banknotes which the two bank officials had removed from the vault. These they rolled through a gate and into the alley where the van was loaded. A passer-by would assume that the van was carting away bank rubbish and be completely unaware that an audacious robbery was taking place. The van drove off and forty minutes later it returned, suggesting that the gang had an operational headquarters not far away. Ward and McMullan were waiting with more trolleys piled high with rubbish-covered boxes of cash. The gang could have returned for a third run but decided against it—perhaps this would have been tempting fate. The vault had not been emptied entirely but as the scale of the raid emerged that became an academic point. By the time Northern Bank’s management had finished their sums the following morning it was clear that the gang had netted a huge haul: £26.5 million in all; £16.5 million in new Northern banknotes and £10 million in old notes and various currencies.1