However, a solution was found by interfering with weaponry to render it harmless. Bomb-making materials can be made harmless. Minute transmitters can also be planted to allow them to be tracked. The identity of an informer who has pinpointed the bomb can thus be protected because the IRA knows that it has dud ordnance from time to time. This type of operation left the IRA profoundly unsure whether its bomb-making materials had been neutralized or whether it was simply a bomb that didn’t work, although the Provisionals knew that on occasion its explosive devices were being tampered with and said so publicly in 1988 when a device failed to go off in Londonderry.
The Jas Young case had alerted the IRA to the dangers of jarking. In 1985, things went wrong again, when an IRA man noticed something unusual about his gun. It was examined by Provo technical experts who realized what they had found. The weapons had been stored by Gerard and Catherine Mahon, a couple in their twenties living on Belfast’s Twinbrook estate. The Provisionals launched a counter-intelligence operation.
The couple were followed to meetings with Special Branch handlers. They were subsequently abducted and interrogated, during which it was established that they had agreed to work for the SB the previous year in return for being let off prosecution for unpaid fines. They had allowed SB technical experts to go into their house and jark the weapons stored there. The SB had given them a ‘panic button’ to press if they felt they were in danger of being caught, but they had been unable to use it.
In the middle of one September night in 1985 a taxi stopped on the Turf Lodge estate. The Mahons and their executioners got out. Mrs Mahon was forced to watch as her husband was shot in the face and back of the head. She was then cut down with a burst of machine-gun fire. The Special Branch had been paying them £20 a week.
13Beyond Ireland
During the 1970s the IRA developed contacts abroad to provide it with arms and money, although at this stage it was not using these contacts to help attack targets on the continent. Early shipments of weapons from America – where there was a strong Irish Catholic community with links with the IRA – had been followed by deals with Libya and with Palestinian guerrillas. The IRA gained a bewildering variety of weapons from these and other deals with arms merchants: weapons recovered by the security forces included Venezuelan army surplus self-loading rifles, 0.357 magnum revolvers bought over the counter in American gun shops and Chinese-made assault rifles. In addition to standard sniping weapons, the IRA also acquired RPG-7 anti-tank rocket launchers and heavy machine-guns.
Attempts to thwart these shipments had met with limited success. In 1973 five tons of arms from Libya on board the freighter Claudia had been intercepted and in 1977 a consignment from the Middle East was seized in Antwerp. This included seven RPG-7 launchers and thirty-six rockets. Both of these operations had involved collaboration between various intelligence services. In spite of such examples, many more shipments were still slipping through customs, as the variety and quantity of weapons turning up on the streets in Northern Ireland showed.
In the United States and many other parts of the world Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service attempted to intercept these shipments. But the IRA had well understood the difficulties facing SIS. As each country protected its sovereignty jealously, the ability of MI6 to act on any information received was limited. The IRA had only to spread its activities across several frontiers to multiply the number of intelligence bureaucracies searching for them, decreasing the likelihood of any co-ordinated effort to detect its operations.
These weaknesses could also be exploited by attacks on British targets overseas. Sinn Fein had become aware that another bomb in Northern Ireland was less likely to make headlines than one in London. The IRA had consequently committed ASUs to various campaigns in Britain, and, during the early and mid 1970s the organization pulled off a series of bloody attacks on pubs and other targets in England: in Birmingham in 1973, and at Guildford and Woolwich in 1974. The British police were ill-prepared to meet the threats of these outrages and, under political pressure to find the culprits, moved against the Irish community in Britain. The result was a number of false convictions. In 1990 the ‘Guildford Four’ were freed after serving sixteen years for bombings which they did not commit. Then, less than a year later, six men who had been convicted of the IRA’s bloodiest murder of the mid 1970s, the Birmingham pub bombings, were also freed. In both the Guildford and Birmingham cases convictions were secured on the basis of confessions which the prisoners later claimed were beaten out of them.
Chris Mullin, an investigative journalist and later MP who championed the Birmingham Six, claimed in 1990 to have uncovered evidence that the police knew for years who the real culprits were. One man was even alleged to have gone on to take part in subsequent bombing campaigns in England.
After this early wave of violence in Britain both the IRA and the police refined their methods. The Metropolitan Police Special Branch had a supervisory role in co-ordinating the activities of smaller SB detachments around the country. Increased contact with the RUC SB, directly and via the Security Service, allowed the Metropolitan Police SB to act more effectively in monitoring individuals as they moved between Ireland and Britain, where greater efforts were also made to establish informer networks in Irish communities. As the SB and MI5
