by Mark Urban
Two Republic of Ireland nationals were also in on the project: Martin Quigley lived in America; Peter Maguire in the Republic where he worked as a systems engineer for Aer Lingus. Quigley and Maguire provided the know-how in explosives and detonator design and the team designed a rocket which was to be fired from a six-foot tube and would be radio command-guided on to its target. They even test-launched a prototype.
But from 1982 onwards the FBI was aware of their plan and put the group under surveillance. They kept track of them for seven years. The operation only ended in the summer of 1989 when Johnson entered his garage to find FBI officers wiring his car for sound. By then, however, the authorities had accumulated a wealth of information on the conspirators: Martin Quigley was sentenced in 1990 for eight years; and Peter Maguire was indicted, but remains at large, believed to be in the Irish Republic.
In 1983 John Crawley, a former US Marine who had been living in Ireland and had become close to the Provisionals, was sent back to his native country to buy arms for them. The IRA may have hoped that an all-American boy would not arouse the suspicions of arms dealers in the way that an Irish person might. Crawley linked up with arms dealers and pro-IRA groups of expatriate Irish in Boston. He arranged for a shipment of weapons to be sent on a freighter called Valhalla.
Crawley’s shipment, estimated to have cost £1.5 million, included ninety rifles – mostly Armalites, sixty machine-guns, pistols, hand grenades and 71,000 rounds of ammunition. The FBI had become aware of the plan and notified SIS, and an elaborate combined operation evolved to thwart delivery of the consignment.
On 23 September 1984 Valhalla left America. It was tracked across the Atlantic by RAF Nimrod aircraft and, it was claimed afterwards, by a US spy satellite. On 28 September the arms were transferred on the high seas to Marita Ann, a trawler registered in the Republic. Martin Ferris, a senior Provisional – reputedly a former IRA Army Council member – was on board. The next day Republic of Ireland naval vessels intercepted the trawler and the men were arrested.
After the boat was seized, John McIntyre, a native of Boston, disappeared. His family said they believed he had been murdered by the IRA. They held the British authorities responsible, saying that a leak to newspapers that the shipment had been intercepted after an informer in the Boston Irish community had told the US authorities about the arms had led to his death. They believed that false information was given out to protect a high-level source within the IRA in Ireland.
As in so many cases involving intelligence operations against the Provisionals, it is impossible to ascertain the truth about these claims. Nevertheless, the leaking to newspapers of information which alluded in reasonably precise terms to the nature of an informer, as happened in this case, would be highly unusual under normal circumstances. It is quite plausible that it did constitute deliberate disinformation and that McIntyre may have died as a result.
14
Hunger Strikers and Supergrasses
The development of the protest at the Maze prison, following the abolition in 1976 of special category status for prisoners of terrorist groups, prompted the IRA to switch more of its resources from the armed struggle into the political work of Sinn Fein. Since the change in policy from treating imprisoned paramilitaries effectively as PoWs – allowing them to wear their own uniforms, for example – to dealing with them as ordinary criminals, the jail had become the focus for a battle of wills between the inmates and their guardians.
The prisoners’ first act of defiance was to refuse to wear regulation clothing, wrapping themselves in blankets instead. Prisoners’ claims that they were being beaten by officers when they went for showers ended up with them refusing to leave their cells. In April 1978 the ‘dirty protest’ began, with hundreds of republicans choosing to campaign for the return of political status and privileges by staying in their cells and covering the walls with their own excreta. The authorities did attempt occasional cleaning of the cells but did not have the resources to do so regularly. Perhaps also they underestimated the impact on public opinion which photos smuggled out of the prison would generate.
Although the Maze had been designed as one of Europe’s most modern prisons – less crowded and more comfortable than jails in Britain – conditions in the cells of prisoners on the dirty protest soon deteriorated. Maggots appeared, infesting the excreta and uneaten food. The willingness of the prisoners to subject themselves to confinement in these conditions soon caught the attention of the media and triggered an emotional upsurge in the nationalist community. The authorities’ attempts to ameliorate the situation only highlighted their impotence. Cells were washed down with high pressure hoses and disinfectant, but within days would return to their putrid squalor as inmates continued their protest.
The prisoners’ plight attracted media interest around the world, putting the British government on the defensive. The protest had successfully switched attention from the reason the men were in jail to questions about the sort of government that could allow them to exist in such conditions. The media campaign was spearheaded by Sinn Fein’s publicity director, Danny Morrison. A veteran activist, Morrison developed an acute ability to recognize what journalists coming to Ulster wanted, and to mobilize the resources required to provide it quickly while ensuring that the republican message was not forgotten.
Gerry Adams, the former Belfast Brigade commander and one of the architects of the new IRA, had in 1979 become its overall leader, replacing Martin McGuinness as the Chief of Staff of the IRA Army Council, the Special Branch believed. Nobody was more aware of the need for political mobilization if the Provisionals were to sustain their support to fight the ‘long war’. Increasingly Adams saw the value of using Sinn Fein, republicanism’s shop front, to achieve this goal. Advice centres were opened in nationalist heartlands, giving help which ranged from telling people what benefits they could claim to showing them how to find out if a son or daughter had been taken to Castlereagh. Adams, who held the title of Vice President of Sinn Fein as well as his IRA rank, backed this low-level activism because he wanted to use the electoral process to demonstrate popular support for republicanism. Adams knew success at the hustings would expose the claims of Westminster that only a tiny minority backed the IRA.
As time passed Adams, Morrison and Brendan Hughes – the IRA Officer Commanding the H-Block prisoners – became involved in a discussion about whether the protest for restoration of political status should become a hunger strike. There were ample precedents for such a move, the IRA having demonstrated its members’ willingness to starve themselves to death on several previous occasions. On 27 October 1980 seven prisoners, including Hughes himself, began their fast. They hoped that they would win a concession which would allow Sinn Fein to claim that political status had been restored, while at the same time they knew the strike would have enormous value in dramatizing the republican cause. On 18 December, following suggestions from a Northern Ireland Office civil servant who visited the Maze that compromise might be possible – for example on the clothing issue – they called off the strike.
However, the republican prisoners considered this promise breached and early in 1981 a wider attempt to end the dirty protest collapsed when the prison authorities prevented the prisoners from obtaining civilian clothes. A new hunger strike began, led by Bobby Sands, who had become the leader of the prisoners in the H-block. Others joined him a few days after each other so the authorities would be faced by a stream of prisoners nearing death.
Then the death in March 1981 of the MP for Fermanagh and south Tyrone prompted a by-election. Bobby Sands was entered as a candidate and the SDLP withdrew from the race, allowing the entire nationalist vote to swing behind the hunger striker. Sands won, giving a dramatic boost to the protest and to Adams’ plans to exploit the ballot box as well as the Armalite. On 5 May 1981 Sands died, his death leading to large-scale rioting. Some 100,000 people attended his funeral. Through his self-sacrifice, which appealed to the Irish people’s deep respect for m
artyrdom, Sands had won near universal acclaim among republicans.
One after another the IRA prisoners died and each time the republican enclaves erupted in violence. Lieutenant General Richard Lawson, the GOC, and Chief Constable Jack Hermon decided to bring in an extra Army battalion to help contain the public disturbances. The two men spent many hours discussing the situation, often late at night in the Chief Constable’s flat at police headquarters in Knock. Despite the scale of the street violence prompted by the deaths, the two men remained calm throughout the strike, according to a source party to their discussions. Mrs Thatcher, who frequently consulted them by phone, remained adamantly opposed to the idea of any concessions.
More funerals did not bring any change in Downing Street’s public position and, finally, on 3 October the hunger strike was called off, after the death of eleven prisoners – eight from the IRA and three from the INLA. The government then announced a deal: prisoners would be allowed to wear their own clothes and half of the remission lost as a result of joining the strike would be restored.
The most important practical effect of the strike was to strengthen the hand of those within the republican movement who favoured political campaigning. The strong instinct that the organization should abstain from elections – which had caused the original split with the Officials and which was still held by many in the Provisional IRA – had been compromised by Sands’ election. After Sands’ death Owen Carron, another prominent republican, held the Fermanagh and south Tyrone seat. The republicans had succeeded in showing that they could win elections and had done so largely because of the emotion generated by the hunger strikers’ sacrifice. Having a Sinn Fein MP opened a new dimension for republican propagandists. It brought home to the populace in Bromley or Barrow that the strength of feeling in Ulster led, in some places at least, to the people choosing a candidate who clearly endorsed IRA violence to be their representative.
In the years which followed the hunger strike, prisoners and prison officers evolved means of defusing crises through dialogue rather than confrontation. When BBC TV’s Inside Story was allowed to film inside the Maze in 1990 it became clear that prisoners there enjoyed privileges quite different to criminals in British jails. In one scene, evoking memories of the internment years when paramilitary groups held drill parades before the ‘criminalization’ of terrorist offences, a loyalist flute and drum band marched down the corridor on their H-Block to commemorate the battle of the Boyne. Prison officers confirmed that the men had 100 per cent control of their wings: the prison officers could only perform their duties with the co-operation of the inmates. Raymond McCartney, Officer Commanding the IRA prisoners in the Maze, and a veteran of the dirty protest, described it as a ‘political jail’.
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Just over a month after the hunger strikes ended a further drama began with the arrest of Christopher Black, a member of the Belfast Brigade, who had been mounting an illegal IRA roadblock in the Ardoyne. Black was taken to Castlereagh for questioning and, under pressure, he agreed to give information about the organization. Despite the use of cellular structures and Black’s comparatively lowly position, he was able to identify many people who he said had played a key role in acts of terrorism.
There had been previous attempts to use members of paramilitary groups in court but Chief Constable Hermon and the Army hierarchy at Lisburn agreed that there should be, as one senior Army officer describes it, ‘a very special effort made to persuade some CTs [converted terrorists] to turn Queen’s Evidence’, despite the mixed experience some years before with the ‘Freds’. The ‘very special effort’ involved trying to protect them from the kind of pressures which had led some of the Freds to return to the ghettos. Black was to become the most celebrated of the ‘supergrasses’, as these informers were known. Large sums of money were allocated to give the supergrasses – often accompanied by their wives and children – a new life away from IRA retribution.
Black told the police that he would testify against several people who he said were senior IRA members. These included Gerald Loughlin, who according to the RUC was commander of the Belfast Brigade’s 3rd Battalion, and Kevin Mulgrew, described as being in charge of one of Loughlin’s subordinate ASUs. A total of forty-one people were arrested on Black’s word, although three of them were not subsequently charged.
In August 1983, thirty-five of the thirty-eight people charged were found guilty in the Black case. During the trial Black had painted a picture of the IRA which was quite different to the idealized image projected in republican propaganda. He told of boredom, mistakes and service in an IRA unit nicknamed the ‘Sweeney’ which meted out punishments to wrongdoers on the estates. Although claiming that he had deliberately undermined attacks on the security forces, Black and his colleagues emerged as brutalized people who gave little thought to the purpose or consequences of their violence. It was a notable propaganda coup for the security forces.
Exploiting supergrasses offered tempting possibilities for the police. Few people would give evidence against paramilitaries, and the IRA’s growing forensic awareness meant that they often left few clues. Although by the early 1980s the Special Branch informer network was giving more information than ever before on the operations of paramilitary groups and the individuals responsible for particular crimes, many RUC officers were increasingly frustrated because the number of convictions was not keeping pace. Turning terrorists against one another appealed to many intelligence officers because of the climate of suspicion which it would generate. More and more operations would be stalled while internal investigations were carried out into individuals who had fallen under suspicion. Significantly, the supergrass system was also backed by those who felt that ambushing the IRA was counter-productive and that convicting a large number of its members might break the organization.
This early enthusiasm for the supergrass system was backed by evidence which seemed to indicate that a long prison sentence was a good deterrent: government figures showed that only about 15 per cent of those imprisoned for terrorist offences were reconvicted – a much lower rate than for many other crimes. In the republican estates someone who had served time was considered to have done his or her bit, with many no longer taking any active part in terrorism. Many police officers and soldiers who support the ambushing of terrorists, on the other hand, say they find it hard to accept that the number of people returning to terrorism is so low.
During the latter part of 1981 and 1982 more than 200 people were arrested on the evidence of supergrasses. The arrests offered the RUC the chance to cut right through the terrorist infrastructure in parts of Ulster. In effect, it was a more discriminating form of internment. Supergrasses were not confined to the Provisionals: there were also several in the INLA and the loyalist Ulster Volunteer Force, organizations with less discipline and more factionalism than the IRA.
Moving against the UVF allowed the RUC to show that they were not pursuing informers in a sectarian way. Some seventy loyalists were convicted on the words of Joseph Bennett, William Allen and James Crockard, the three UVF supergrasses. Most of these convictions were upheld, all except the fourteen loyalists imprisoned on the word of Bennett – a higher success rate than that gained against republican terrorists.
In January 1982 Kevin McGrady, a one-time IRA member who had been living in the Netherlands, voluntarily returned to Northern Ireland and put himself in police custody. McGrady had killed several people, and had seen his brother wrongly convicted of the murder of one of them. His guilt about these events mounted until, having become involved with a religious sect, he could bear it no longer and chose to return. McGrady was therefore unique among the supergrasses in that he was not in police custody at the time he made his decision to inform.
Given the seriousness of his crimes, the police would not agree to grant him immunity, although he was subsequently released after serving six years of a life sentence. However, in court McGrady’s testimony was patchy, several times confusing individuals who he
said had been involved in crimes.
In August 1982 Raymond Gilmour, his wife and two children, left their home on Londonderry’s Creggan estate, telling neighbours they were going on holiday. In fact they were taken into protective custody prior to a series of RUC swoops in which more than forty people were arrested. Gilmour, like Black, said he had evidence which could implicate senior Provisionals in terrorist crimes, including murder. Although Black became the more famous of the two, Gilmour’s testimony was arguably a greater threat to the IRA since its structure in Londonderry is smaller and more closely knit.
By late 1982 many members of the IRA were close to panic. Sinn Fein began to orchestrate a closing of ranks in the nationalist community. It referred to the supergrasses as ‘paid perjurers’ and sought ways to pressurize them into retracting their testimony. For some people the appearance of an angry crowd in the public gallery of a court was enough to give them second thoughts. In other cases family members were told that deals could be arranged protecting the safety of the informer if he would withdraw his evidence.
In August 1983 Clifford McKeown, a UVF member, changed his mind and retracted his evidence. This was followed in September by rowdy scenes at a preliminary hearing in Belfast, following which Sean Mallon – an alleged IRA man – withdrew his evidence against several men from Armagh. As he walked from the court some of those who had earlier screamed abuse at Mallon shook his hand saying, ‘We will not forget what you have done.’
Patrick Gilmour, the sixty-one-year-old father of Raymond, was taken from his home by hooded men in November. The IRA hoped that a threat to Patrick Gilmour’s life might force his son to retract his evidence. The problems faced by families of supergrasses were such that his father was believed to have co-operated with the ‘kidnap’ plan, hoping it would end their isolation in the community. But although the ploy failed to deter his son, all the people charged were eventually acquitted. The Derry Brigade took a heavier blow with the defection of another supergrass, Robert Quigley. Ten people were convicted on his evidence.
