Peter Taylor - Provos: The IRA & Sinn Fein

Never before has an outsider had such access to record the remarkable history of the provisional IRA and Sinn Fein, the Provos, from their dramatic beginnings to the critical juncture they have reached today on the brink of becoming part of the cabinet in the new government of Northern Ireland. It is an astonishing story.

Thirty years ago, the Irish Republican Army was a fading historical memory. It had dumped its guns and embraced extreme left-wing politics. The result was that when sectarian violence erupted in 1969 and nationalist areas came under loyalist attack, only a handful of IRA veterans were on hand to defend them. Taunting graffiti read IRA I ran away. The consequences were momentous. The IRA split and the Provisional IRA was born to become the most formidable organisation of its kind in the Western world. For more than a quarter of a century the Provisionals have fought a bloody campaign, in which over 3,000 lives have been lost, to force the British government to disengage from Northern Ireland and re-unify Ireland.

Today their leaders, once branded as terrorists, have been feted at the White House and become regular visitors to Downing Street. Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness are now Westminister Members of Parliament, steering the Provos to acceptance of the historic Good Friday peace Agreement which they believe will be the stepping stone to the United Ireland they and their followers have fought and died for. In a series of remarkable, first-hand interviews with the Provisionals who fought on the military and political fronts and the British who countered them, Provos tells the extraordinary story of the evolution of the Provisional IRA and Sinn Fein over 30 bloody years, from gunmen and bombers to potential statesmen. With IRA and loyalist ceasefires and the Good Friday Agreement in place, are we now about to see the final resolution of one of the worlds most ancient conflicts?

To Susan, Ben, Sam
Emmeline and Bob

In 1981, following the slow and agonizing deaths of ten men during the IRA hunger strike at the Maze prison in Belfast, recruits flocked to the Provos, determined to strike back at the government of the British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, whom they accused of murdering their comrades. Now more than ever, the IRA needed not only guns to arm the hundreds of new Volunteers but also heavy weaponry to upgrade its capability and take on the British army. It was to America that the IRAs General Headquarters Staff (GHQ) the people who run the IRAs war turned for help. Across the Atlantic, the IRAs arms-buying network was overhauled and streamlined. A senior IRA figure came over from Ireland and told veteran arms supplier, George Harrison, that he was being stood down. Harrison had been diligent in his job. Throughout the seventies, he had shipped over 2,500 weapons and a million rounds of ammunition to Ireland. The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) believe that this figure is a conservative estimate.

Harrison was telephoned and told, to his dismay, that Skinny Legs would be taking over. Skinny Legs was Gabriel Megahey, a Belfast republican who had joined the IRA after the upheavals of August 1969 and had later gone to England and taken a job in Southampton. He was now being sent to America to put George Harrison out of business. I met Megahey in New York, where he is currently fighting deportation, and asked him what his role had been. The Federal Government would deem me to have been the Officer Commanding (OC) of America and Canada. I asked him if this was true but he would not elaborate. Thats what they have on record.

My job at that time was to do something to save the hunger strikers. We had men dying and I felt it was a moral duty to do something about it. Specifically, I knew Brendan Hughes very well. [Hughes was on hunger strike for fifty-three days.] Id been a good friend of his for many years and it hurt me deeply that Brendan was lying on a death bed.

What Megahey did not know was that the FBI knew he was coming. In the wake of the IRAs assassination of Lord Mountbatten and the killing of eighteen British soldiers at Warrenpoint on the same day in 1979, the FBI had reorganized to combat the growing threat from the IRAs arms procurement operations in America. The British were delighted that at long last the United States Government, now under President Reagan, had grasped the fact that much of the blood being spilled on Irish soil was the result of American arms and money. In May 1980, an FBI PIRA Squad (Provisional IRA) was set up in New York under Agent Lou Stephens, a veteran of anti-IRA operations in the seventies. At its height, Lou Stephens PIRA Squad was running around half a dozen wire taps on key IRA suspects. One of them was on George Harrisons phone.

At first the FBI did not know who Skinny Legs was. It was only some time later, whilst carrying out surveillance on another IRA suspects house on a hot summers day that they saw the suspect talking to a man on the veranda in shorts, who had very thin legs. Stephens and his unit put two and two together, got in touch with their British counterparts, and found that Gabriel Megahey emerged from the files. Megahey was placed under FBI surveillance. To Stephens and his team, he became known as Panicky because he was clearly so surveillance conscious. Another suspect, Gerry McGeough, then appeared in the frame. McGeough came from County Tyrone, had joined the Provisional IRA in 1975, been active during the hunger strike and then gone on the run following an alleged murder attempt on an off-duty part-time soldier who was working as a postman. It was decided that McGeoughs considerable talents as an IRA Volunteer would best be used in America so he was sent over to join Megaheys arms procurement operation. The hunger strike had the effect of re-awakening an Irish American giant, he told me. An Anglophobic one.

Irish America fulfilled certain functions. They supplied guns, weapons, war material and financial and moral support. It was obvious to me personally that if we were going to prosecute a war, we would have to have the right weaponry with which to do it and I saw my role as helping to get that in place.

McGeough started work in Florida, travelling the state with a young American woman whose driving licence was used to buy dozens of sophisticated assault rifles from gun shops and arms dealers. Buying weapons across the counter in America posed no problem as all citizens have the constitutional right to bear arms and McGeough had the ready cash to pay for them. They were smuggled on board a Greyhound bus and driven to the North-Eastern seaboard for shipment to Ireland by IRA sympathizers who worked in the docks and elsewhere. I asked McGeough what sort of quantities he was assembling. He said the last consignment consisted of somewhere in the region of maybe forty or fifty weapons, thats Armalite AR 15 assault rifles, Heckler and Koch HK 91s. McGeough ensured that the arsenal reached New York docks. Impressed by McGeoughs cool efficiency, Megahey asked him to supervise the most important arms procurement operation ever undertaken by the IRA in America. Word had come from a senior IRA figure at GHQ, who today is believed to be one of the most uncompromising members of the IRAs ruling Army Council, that the men on the ground, in particular in operational areas like South Armagh, needed missiles to shoot down British army helicopters and deny the enemy their dominance of the skies. Megahey needed to be told no more.

We felt that if we could nullify the helicopter, we would be well on the way to winning the war. A surface to air missile (SAM) or a Red-Eye missile will zero in on the heat of the helicopter motor and bring it down and you dont need too much knowledge to know how to use it. Gerry McGeoughs role was to acquire the missiles, do the negotiations and basically to oversee with me the whole operation in America.