Provisional Irish Republican Army arms importation
[9] According to Brendan Hughes, a key figure in the Belfast Brigade, the IRA smuggled small arms from the United States by sea on Queen Elizabeth 2 from New York via Southampton,[5] through Irish members of her crew, until the network was largely shut down by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in the early 1980s after almost a decade of effort.
"[14] U.S. House Speaker Tip O'Neill told Northern Ireland Secretary of State Roy Mason in mid-October 1977 that "[t]he flow of guns and money had been greatly reduced.
[16]On March 1, 1981, Claire Sterling wrote for The New York Times Magazine: The I.R.A has come a long way since its early days of dependance upon the United States.
However, in a secret meeting at a hotel on Manhattan's East Side in August, FBI agents agreed to a deal with De Meo's lawyer that his sentence would be reduced to five years if he can surrender the IRA's primary gunrunner.
[18] In 1981, Meo notified the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force about Harrison's attempt to smuggle a large cache of arms into Ireland from his home in New York.
[19] Subsequently, in June, Harrison, Michael Flannery and three other Irish gunrunners were arrested by the FBI as part of a sting operation but acquitted at their trial in 1982.
Their acquittal was widely attributed to the unconventional efforts of Harrison's personal attorney, Frank Durkan; the men did not deny their activities but claimed that they believed the operation had been sanctioned by the Central Intelligence Agency.
All too often weapons, sometime purchased over the counter in gun shops, would make their way to Ireland in twos and threes, only to be intercepted or captured by the authorities, who would then be able to trace them back and arrest and charge the sympathizers responsible.
[23]Megahey was arrested by the FBI in 1982 after a successful sting operation, where he was trying to purchase surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) for the IRA, and sentenced to seven years in prison.
Subsequently, Irish authorities discovered that the arms ship was a vessel named Marita Ann, allegedly after a tip-off from Sean O'Callaghan, the Garda Síochána informer within the IRA.
[9] Three Irish Naval Service ships confronted the vessel off the coast of County Kerry, and prevented its escape by firing warning shots.
Andrew J. Wilson in his book Irish America and the Ulster Conflict 1968-1995 wrote that: The most effective measures taken by US law enforcement agencies, however, were against IRA gunrunning .
[25]In August 1969, some 150 Irish Canadians in Toronto announced that they intended to send money which could be used to buy guns, if necessary, to the Catholic women and children of the Bogside in Derry.
[30] In February 1982, three Canadian republicans and Edward "Ted" Howell (a close ally of Gerry Adams) and Dessie Ellis from Dublin were arrested for trying to enter the U.S. illegally from Canada and "with a cache of money and a shopping list" of weapons for the IRA.
[31] In 1993, Irish security forces uncovered an IRA bomb factory at Kilcock, County Kildare, discovering that parts of the detonating cord came from Canada.
[33] Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi supplied a crucial number of arms to the IRA, as part of a strategy at this time of opposing United States interests in the Middle East by sponsoring paramilitary activity against it and its allies in Western Europe.
In early 1973, the Irish Government received intelligence that the vessel Claudia was carrying a consignment of weapons, and placed the ship under surveillance on 27 March.
[36] Ed Moloney reports that the early Libyan arms shipments provided the IRA with its first RPG-7 rocket-propelled grenade launchers, and that Gaddafi also gave three to five million US dollars at this time to the organisation to finance its activities.
Contact with Libya was opened again in the aftermath of the 1981 Irish Hunger Strike, which was said to have impressed Gaddafi, just as the FBI successfully disrupted the IRA gunrunning operation in America that same year.
[46][47][48] On 1 November 1987, during transit to Ireland, one-third of the total Libyan arms consignment being carried aboard the MV Eksund was intercepted by the French Customs coast guard while the ship was in the Bay of Biscay,[49] along with five crew members, among them Gabriel Cleary.
The vessel was found to contain 120 tonnes of weapons, including HMGs, 36 RPGs, 1000 detonators, 20 SAMs, Semtex, 82mm mortars,[50] 106mm cannons and 1,000,000 rounds of ammunition.
[59] At one stage, the PLO offered weapons and training to the IRA, but it declined on the grounds that it was impossible to smuggle arms out of the Levant region in general and Palestine specifically without alerting Israeli intelligence.
[65] Former MI6 agent Tony Divall said that around August 1987, a Swiss arms dealer based in Zurich was trying to charter a 350-ton Panamanian vessel on behalf of the IRA.
The last British soldier killed in Northern Ireland during The Troubles, Stephen Restorick, was shot dead by a sniper in South Armagh in February 1997.
"[71] Earlier, in August 1986 Gardaí had intercepted an arms consignment in the Central Sorting Office in Dublin that included a Barret M82 and ammunition, posted from Chicago.
It needed a new source of weapons, since the Libyan pipeline had been closed and smuggling from the United States became far more difficult due to its transatlantic gunrunning network in the country being disrupted by American authorities in the early 1980s.
[86]However, despite the conclusion of the IICD agreeing with the figures provided by the British security forces, unnamed sources in MI5 and the PSNI have reported to the press that not all IRA arms were destroyed during the process, a claim which so far remains unsubstantiated.
In its latest report, dated April 2006, the IMC points out that it has no reason to disbelieve the IRA or information to suspect that the group has not fully decommissioned.
The relevant points are that the amount of un-surrendered material was not significant in comparison to what was decommissioned and that these reports do not cast doubt on the declared intention of the IRA leadership to eschew terrorism and to follow the political path.
