Book Probes Adams' Early IRA Career

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by SHAWN POGATCHNIK Associated Press Writer

September 29, 2002, 12:51 PM EDT

DUBLIN, Ireland -- Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams became a senior Irish Republican Army commander in 1971 and was responsible for "many horrendous acts," an Irish newspaper commented Sunday as it published extracts of a long-awaited study of the modern IRA.

The Sunday Tribune published a key 32-page chapter from "A Secret History of the IRA," written by Ed Moloney, an internationally known reporter for the paper.

The entire 600-page book -- billed as the most definitive effort yet to shed light on the underground organization and its charismatic figurehead -- was being released Monday in the United States and Europe.

Adams declined to comment Sunday. His spokesman, Richard McAuley, said no one from Sinn Fein had been given an advance copy of the book, making it impossible to comment on specific allegations.

Sunday's extracts focused heavily on the early IRA career of Adams, who in recent years has won praise for achieving the IRA cease-fire of 1997 and his movement's acceptance of the landmark Good Friday peace accord of 1998.

"As leader of Sinn Fein, he has denied consistently that he was once a member of the IRA. Nobody has believed him and there has been a realization that there are understandable tactical reasons for this deception. But it does not mean that everyone should acquiesce with this lie," The Sunday Tribune said in an accompanying editorial.

"Adams was responsible for many horrendous acts, even if he chooses for his own reasons to continue to deny them," the newspaper added.

McAuley said Sinn Fein had no immediate plans to sue. He said reporters had long felt comfortable printing what he called "fanciful exaggerations and lies" about Adams because he was jailed without trial as an IRA suspect in the 1970s.

In Sunday's extracts, Moloney said Adams in April 1971 became commander of the self-styled "second battalion" of the Belfast IRA, which was estimated to have about 400 members and mounted hundreds of gun and bomb attacks that year in the Northern Ireland capital.

The account said Adams evaded arrest for more than a year -- partly because British intelligence officers didn't know what he looked like, partly because Adams kept moving from house to house -- but was finally caught on March 14, 1972, and brutally interrogated. In the end, Moloney wrote, Adams dropped his insistence that he was named "Joe McGuigan."

Adams, Moloney wrote, "was beaten badly and subjected to mental terror; his captors pretended they were about to kill him, and an attempt was made to inject him with what he was told was a truth drug."

Moloney, who has covered Northern Ireland affairs since 1978, said Adams became the Belfast IRA's overall commander in September 1972 and lived secretly in south Belfast, the most religiously mixed and peaceful side of the capital.

"Like some sort of revolutionary commuter, Adams traveled daily from the safety of his middle-class hideout into the war zone of west Belfast to direct IRA operations," Moloney wrote.

Sunday's extracts repeated much background contained in earlier books about Sinn Fein and the IRA, notably Tim Pat Coogan's "The IRA"; "The Provisional IRA" by Patrick Bishop and Eamonn Mallie; and "Sinn Fein and the IRA" by Brendan O'Brien.

But Sunday's extracts made several new allegations detailing Adams' suspected role in the IRA's most important tactical moves -- and embarrassing chapters.

Moloney said Adams directed the Belfast IRA's operations officer, Brendan Hughes, to go to New York City in early 1972 to smuggle hundreds of U.S.-made Armalite rifles to Belfast. The author also credited Adams with a role in deciding to begin hitting London with car bombs in March 1973.

But Moloney absolved Adams of any direct responsibility for the worst atrocity carried out by the Belfast IRA -- the so-called "Bloody Friday" attack on Belfast involving 20 car bombs. The blasts killed nine people and wounded 130 on July 21, 1972.

"Adams was in jail at the time and played no role in its conception," Moloney wrote, adding that Adams "was incandescent with rage" when he heard that the IRA had provided inadequate telephoned warnings that overwhelmed the British security forces' ability to respond.

The IRA in July issued an unprecedented apology for killing civilians on Bloody Friday and in other attacks during its 27-year campaign to abolish Northern Ireland as British territory.

Moloney said Adams in 1972 established two four-person IRA units that "received their instructions only from him." These two units, known as "the unknowns," rooted out and executed spies within the IRA and its Catholic support base.

The book accuses Adams and his Belfast deputies of ordering the execution of a Belfast mother of 10, Jean McConville, after she was twice caught using a radio transmitter to tell British spies about the movements of IRA members in west Belfast's Divis Flats complex.

Adams in 1999 appealed to the IRA to identify the unmarked graves of McConville and those of more than a dozen other missing IRA victims. Months of digging at a remote beach in the Republic of Ireland failed to find any of McConville's remains. Copyright © 2002, The Associated Press

-- Anonymous, September 30, 2002


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