Datum:
08.01.2001
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Zeitung:
The Times
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Titel:
A spy in the INLA
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A spy in the INLA
The INLA, one of Ireland's most ruthless terrorist groups, was
penetrated at the highest level by a German secret agent. Ian Cobain
and Allan Hall in Berlin investigate
Overhead, the steel-grey sky of an Irish summer promised
yet another day of soft rain. On the Muirhevnamore estate, in the
border town of Dundalk, no one paid any attention to the procession
of cars turning into a narrow cul-de-sac on the edge of the estate,
or to their occupants, men in their thirties and forties who clambered
out, strode up the driveway of a bungalow at the end of the street
and went through the front door.
In a backroom, these men dispensed with pleasantries and came
straight to their deadly business: fine-tuning the strategy of one
of the most violent and unpredictable terrorist organisations that
Europe has ever seen - the Irish National Liberation Army.
Atrocities for which the INLA is responsible include the murder
of Tory minister Airey Neave, killed by a car bomb as he drove out
of the House of Commons in 1979; the Droppin' Well disco bomb in
Belfast in the mid-1980s which left 11 off-duty soldiers, five women
and a teenage boy dead; the 1992 killing of Sergeant Michael Newman
in Derby; and the foiled attempt to bomb the Grand National three
years ago. The group included the chief-of-staff, Hugh "Cueball"
Torney, 40, so called because his weapon during his days in Long
Kesh had been a pool ball inside two socks; Gino Gallagher, 33,
the organisation's ruthless commander in County Tyrone; and Peter
Stewart, a veteran of many bloody INLA operations.
They also included a tall, quietly spoken man in his late thirties
who was an unusual figure to find among such committed and dangerous
Irish Republicans, not least because he was German.
The INLA's willingness to accept a German "volunteer"
into its ranks appears at first glance to be baffling, but is less
so when its history, politics and international connections are
considered.
Remarkable as it seems, this man was a senior and trusted comrade,
having apparently made contact with Torney and Stewart several years
earlier as a member of Revolutionary Cells, a left-wing German terror
gang which had been running arms-smuggling routes and safe havens
for the INLA for 20 years.
Had Cueball suspected the truth about his German friend, the man
would have been destined for the same fate that had befallen dozens
of traitors, both real and imagined, within the INLA's ranks. He
would have been bound, gagged, severely beaten, and tortured with
bolt-croppers before being shot in the face and his body dumped
in a country lane near the border.
This man, whose identity is known to The Times , was an
officer of the German intelligence service, the Bundesamt für
Verfassungsschutz (BfV), or Federal Office for the Protection
of the Constitution. The BfV, like MI5 in Britain, is responsible
for counter-espionage, secret anti-terrorist operations, and for
surveillance of right or left-wing organisations considered to be
a threat to the security of the state. It had scored a number of
successes over the years against the KGB and its East German allies,
and against neo-Nazis and groups such as the Baader-Meinhof gang
.
Few BfV enterprises had been quite so audacious, however, or potentially
fruitful, as its operation to infiltrate the highest echelons of
the INLA, one which appears to have been carried out in close co-operation
with MI5.
Details of that operation are laid bare in a series of classified
reports from the BfV, the German federal criminal investigation
department, the Bundeskriminalamt, and the federal prosecutor's
office, the Generalbundesanwalt.
Among them is the agent's own statement about his time as an INLA
volunteer, in which he explains the frustrations and dangers he
faced, identifies ten leading members of the INLA, and names the
INLA man who was eventually ordered to murder him.
The Dundalk meeting, he explains, was held in July 1994, at a
time when everyone in Ireland knew that the Provisional IRA was
about to declare a ceasefire. The INLA, however, was determined
to carry on the "armed struggle". It had no shortage of
willing volunteers, was anticipating an influx of disaffected Provos,
and held significant amounts of arms. Furthermore, the INLA was
not lacking in the technical expertise needed to make bombs - what
it lacked was high-quality explosives.
"The aim was to stop the further transportation of weapons
and explosives and to find out the routes used," the agent
wrote. "To this purpose leading INLA members were to be enticed,
under observation, to a procurement activity in BRD (Germany) and
to be arrested having been seen making purchases in the Czech Republic
and storing the goods in Schwäbisch Hall (a small town 40 miles
northeast of Stuttgart). "At the end of July 1994, a talk was
held at the house of one of the old bosses of INLA, Peter Stewart.
Stewart, INLA member Gary Adams and I were present at this meeting.
It took place in Dundalk.
"Two days later at Gary Adams's house there was a meeting
between the chief-of-staff of INLA, Hugh Torney; the area leader
responsible for Tyrone, Gino Gallagher; and myself. As much Semtex
as possible was to be bought in the Czech Republic, also detonators
would be needed. Short and long weapons were of no interest."
The German agent offered to find a safe house for storage of the
material, and was to be paid £50,000 plus $25,000, which was
to be collected the next day in Dublin. "The next day the man
who was supposed to hand over the dollars murdered another man outside
a pub in Dublin," he wrote. "So the dollars had to be
dispensed with." After leaving his meeting in Dundalk, the
agent returned to Germany on August 2, he wrote. The next day Torney
arrived in Stuttgart with a junior INLA member, Sean Green, 30.
Adams, meanwhile, remained in reserve in Amsterdam with two other
INLA terrorists.
At this stage the operation began to unravel. For reasons that
are unclear, the agent's superiors told him that no safe house would
be made available. "This was a critical situation for me as
the INLA chief-of-staff was already with me and I could not keep
my promise."
A week later the three men travelled to the Czech Republic where
they met a terrorist identified only as Murphy. In Pilsen they also
met a "representative" of Omnipol, the company that makes
Semtex. The manufacture of the plastic explosive had been halted
by the Czech Government in 1990, but was resumed the following year
after a system for tagging supplies received international approval.
The agent's report makes clear, however, that illicit supplies were
available for terrorists willing to pay.
With no safe house available, Murphy decided to transport the
Semtex back to Ireland himself, according to the agent's report.
It is unclear from the classified reports whether he succeeded in
reaching Ireland with his haul. The BfV believed that there was
a strong case against Torney and Green but, with no powers of arrest,
it decided to alert the German police.
A Stuttgart police report describes how the two men were arrested
at the city's railway station at 3.26pm on August 10. They were
carrying around £10,000 in various currencies - "money
left over from an explosives procurement activity" - and in
their rucksacks were single-use overalls, plastic gloves, bin bags
and sealing tape. "Objects such as these," the report's
author notes, "are not usually carried by a tourist."
As a result of Murphy's decision to transport the Semtex back
himself, however, no explosives were found, and the two men refused
to say anything during questioning. Senior officers decided that
the evidence of the BfV agent was insufficient to bring charges
and complained that they had no evidence that justified detaining
the two men.
"Both men were known as members of the INLA, but there was
no warrant for their arrest," the police report says. Torney
and Green were released the next day and escorted to a railway station
where they got a train to Paris.
The BfV officers involved in the operation were said to be furious.
One said: "You could see that the police regarded these two
as trouble, and just wanted them out of Stuttgart and out of the
country. They couldn't conceal their relief when the train pulled
out of the station."
The agent who had risked his life wrote in his account: "Although
the police authorities were handed a leading member of the INLA
on a plate, they failed dismally. Later I was warned that INLA member
Michael Weldon had been given the job of liquidating all those responsible
for betraying Torney and Green in Stuttgart."
The agent's report concludes by noting that two years later Torney
murdered Gino Gallagher in one of the many vicious feuds that have
repeatedly ripped the INLA apart over the last 26 years. Another
INLA member, Dessie McCleery, was killed during the same bloodletting,
and "Torney is looking for McCleery's German girlfriend, Steffi
Schulz, who is also to be killed".
In November 1994 the agent was invited to London to meet MI5 officers,
who asked him to take part in a similar operation, "but because
of my previous experience I turned them down ..." The agent
has since assumed a new identity and left Germany. The IRA did announce
a ceasefire, on August 31, but 18 months later it was abandoned
with the Docklands Bomb. Commanders of the INLA, however, were warned
by a Sinn Fein leader that death awaited them if they broke ranks
and continued hostilities.
Sean Green was jailed for five years in 1999 for his part in a
letter-bomb campaign that targeted, among others, Unionist leaders
David Trimble and Jeffrey Donaldson. He served just six weeks before
being freed under the early release programme. Gary Adams was jailed
for 12 months for intimidation.
Michael Weldon was last heard of in Amsterdam, where he was in
hiding with another INLA man named in the German agent's report,
Thomas "The Zombie" Savage. The Zombie was alleged to
carry out contract killings across Ireland for as little as £500
a time, before turning his hand to drug smuggling, and is wanted
for questioning about several murders on both sides of the border.
Peter Stewart died of cancer, and Torney is also dead, another victim
of internal INLA feuding. He was gunned down in September 1996 in
a drive-by shooting mounted in Lurgan by Gino Gallagher's friends.
Before he died, however, Torney was able to maim and kill several
people who would probably still be alive today had he been prosecuted
and jailed in Germany.
Among the victims of the INLA feud was Barbara McAlorum, 9, in
March 1996, who died as she played in front of her parents in their
living room when their North Belfast home was sprayed with bullets.
It was, INLA sources later conceded, a "mistaken" attack.
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