IRA TECHNOLOGY

ANDY OPPENHEIMER

The man went up to his room, removed the bath panel, and hid an explosive device of his own creation after setting its pioneering timer to run down three weeks later. Then, at 2.45 a.m. on October 12, after those three weeks had elapsed, Patrick Magee’s bomb exploded with devastating effect. It was intended to assassinate the entire British Cabinet, who had gathered at the Grand Hotel for the Conservative Party’s annual conference.



Although Magee’s assassination attempt failed, the Grand Hotel explosion did claim five lives and produce many injuries. This is not surprising, given that the front of the hotel was completely blown out; in fact, pieces of the building were hurled by the gelignite explosion out into the sea. The most significant aspect of this attack, however, was the bomb itself, which was the first known device to use a video recorder as a long-delay timer. Had this bomb exploded during the day, and at the height of the 1984 Conservative conference, far more people would have been killed.



The Brighton incident is just one example of the Irish Republican Army’s pioneering ingenuity in the development of improvised explosive devices (IEDs). Between 1970 and 2005, the IRA detonated a staggering 19,000 IEDs in the United Kingdom. That’s one every 17 hours—which makes this effort the biggest terrorist bombing campaign in history, as well as one that featured unparalleled advancements in technology, tactics, and methods.



IRA INNOVATIONS, TARGETS, AND TACTICS



Many of the IRA’s IED-related innovations—including timing and power units (TPUs), long-delay timers, remote detonation (via command wire and radio-controlled devices), homemade detonators, lighttriggered initiation, and electronic triggers, to name but a few—came about as a result of the organization’s strategy and tactics. These included precise and careful targeting without intention to kill the maximum number of civilians, other than those deemed to be involved with the continued British rule of Northern Ireland.



The use of long-delay timers meant that the IRA could target locations and troops more accurately, prevent its own operatives from being blown up, and also prevent civilians from being killed at the height of the workday. Prior to the perfection of these timers, the IRA was on a learning curve for much of the 1970s, as many of its bomb deployments killed civilians and IRA operatives in addition to their intended targets. Moreover, throughout this period, whenever coded warnings failed or a device killed civilians who got in the way of an attack, the IRA was forced to change tactics, methods, and materials so that it didn’t lose support from its own community. At the same time, other inventions emerged to take out explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) squads and aid in direct assassination, most notably the mercury tilt switch, which was taken out of central heating systems and used to boobytrap under-vehicle IEDs so that they would detonate with even the slightest movement.



TECHNOLOGY TRANSFER: FOLLOWING THE TRAILS



Now that the Provisional IRA is no longer active, the primary concern for public safety and counter terror officials has shifted to determining when, how, and where IRA technologies, tactics, and methods were transferred during the organization’s 30-year campaign. Tracing which groups may have benefited from the IRA’s expertise either directly or indirectly (as is the case with many terrorist organizations today) is extremely difficult, and proof of direct acquisition is limited.



The process by which terrorists obtain knowledge and skills is relevant here. Traditionally, criminals and terrorists have been known to engage in deal making (i.e., “you do this for me, and I’ll help you”) when it suits them. Sometimes, the willingness to deal arises when groups view themselves as ideological “brothers in struggle.” Otherwise, materials, technology, and expertise get passed along by accident or by the very nature of information sharing and gathering, particularly these days, with the Internet and instant mass communications. Unlike current groups, the IRA did not have ready access to information via the Internet—including the passwordprotected jihadist Internet—and other open sources. Thus, it took the IRA generations of armed struggle to achieve its eventual level of expertise. Information was passed between operatives within the Irish Republican community, as well as through stolen manuals and help and expertise from abroad.



Of course, there is also accidental overlap of terrorist methods, such as when one group “discovers” a means of IED making that is actually a repeat of something previously used by another group. For instance, the IRA pioneered mobile phone IED initiation, but it ultimately decided against using this technique because it was deemed unreliable. In 2004, however, the terrorists who attacked the Madrid transit system found this method an excellent fit for their plans, and they used it to deliberately target and kill hundreds of civilians.



PREVIOUS DIRECT TRANSFER: ETA AND THE PLO



In the 1970s, the IRA established associations with several of the many terrorist groups operating in Europe and beyond. In doing so, the organization hoped to broaden its area of operations so that it could more readily target British bases and other interests outside the United Kingdom. For example, links were established with the Basque ETA separatist group in Spain, which had a similar nationalist-based aim, and both groups ultimately benefited from the association. Another group, the Breton Freedom Front, is said to have suggested to the IRA that they approach Libya’s Colonel Muammar Qadhafi, as he had stated his intention to assist groups that were conducting insurgencies against old imperial powers. 1 The result was several shipments to the IRA of arms and explosives from Libya.



Back in Spain, ETA targeted British vacationers using car bombs and similar IEDs, along with kidnappings and targeting of security personnel. The group had an on-off strategy similar to that of the IRA, and it too exhibited selectivity in its attacks, especially assassinations. There was also continued two-way traffic between ETA and the IRA; in fact, as late as 2002, ETA supplied the IRA with fresh stocks of plastic explosives (in this case, C-4) in return for bomb-making technology. 2 This enabled the IRA to hand over some of its out-of-date Semtex explosives as part of the decommissioning process required by the 1998 peace agreement without losing its bombing capabilities. In addition to ETA, the IRA also supported the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) for many years, with encouragement by the Soviet Union as part of that nation’s bid to undermine Western interests. For example, in August 1979, a bomb attack in Brussels that injured four members of a British military band and 12 others was carried out by the IRA in conjunction with the PLO, according to German intelligence reports to the British. As with ETA, the relationship between the IRA and the PLO involved two-way traffic; for instance, Israeli intelligence knew that the IRA was receiving arms from Al-Fatah in exchange for sharing bomb-making techniques with Black September (Al- Fatah’s armed wing) at a training camp near Beirut and at a Syrian-controlled camp in the Beqaa Valley. 4 The IRA also taught this group how to pack milk churns with homemade napalm; in fact, the British Army dismantled several IRA napalm milk churn bombs in the 1970s.



FOLLOWING BY EXAMPLE



The IRA’s ammonium nitrate car bombs, especially those used in its city of London attacks in the early 1990s, were meant to create maximum damage to property and the British economy. Al-Qaeda and associated groups also began using the same type of bomb, the so-called “nuclear weapon of guerrilla warfare,” around that time, following the IRA’s example— except that these groups wanted to kill as many, not as few, civilians as possible, and that is still their goal today. Therefore, these groups do not need elaborate timers to try to ensure that their IEDs go off with minimal casualties, unless they want to attain more precise targeting.



In addition, many bomb deployment practices used by the Taliban and other terrorists and insurgents are similar to IRA methods, although these groups acquired much of their information about these techniques via indirect, rather than direct, transfer. Nonetheless, some devices come straight out of the IRA textbook, such as electronically controlled pressuremat booby-trap devices, disguised IEDs, and command wire detonation. These methods were pioneered and regularly deployed by the IRA in rural and urban areas to ambush British troop convoys, without risk of the bomber or the bomb being seen. Booby traps were also set to lure bomb disposal operatives into danger.



The hallmarks of IRA bombing practices have also emerged in Iraq. For example, an attack that killed eight British soldiers in Basra in 2005 used technology developed from photographic flash units, which was employed by the IRA some 15 years earlier. According to British intelligence, this and other techniques had, in some instances, reached the Middle East through the IRA’s earlier cooperation with Palestinian groups, rather than through collusion with Iran. 6 For example, in 2002, Royal Engineers bomb disposal officer Paul Collinson, working with the Red Cross in the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank, reported that more than 200 Palestinian pipe bombs were “exact replicas of ones I found in Northern Ireland. The size of bomb, the way they put the nail in, the way of igniting it with a lightbulb filament, where they drilled the holes through, the use of a command wire and the means of initiating the bomb; these are all the same. They have all the hallmarks of originating from Ireland. When you put two and two together, then it seems that they could well have been trained by the IRA.” 7 Although there is no proof of direct links or weapons and expertise handover from the IRA to modern Islamic groups, or of any IRA intention to link with such groups, the IRA’s methods somehow eventually led to the death of troops and civilians in the Middle East.



DISSIDENT GROUPS: A RESURGENT THREAT



Today, the two main dissident Republican groups, the Real IRA and Continuity IRA, continue to present serious security risks. The recent killings committed by each group in Northern Ireland followed a series of attacks on police officers and attempts at bomb deployment. Unsubstantiated reports appeared in March 2008 that the Real IRA could have links with al- Qaeda, and that the two groups were sharing expertise. Also, when the Real IRA broke away from the Provisionals in 1997, it purloined weapons and explosives from that group. Indeed, the Real IRA’s bomb-making expertise was evident in the Omagh atrocity in August 1997, which killed 29 people, and it was more recently demonstrated in an intercepted car bomb found in Castlewellan, a village in Northern Ireland, in January 2009.



In March 2008, British intelligence service MI5 set up a dedicated team to monitor suspected al-Qaeda activists and supporters on both sides of the Irish border, after Irish police arrested three suspected Islamist terrorists in a flat in Tralee, County Kerry, where bomb-making materials were found. “Sleeper cells” in Northern Ireland with suspected links to other cells in Britain were said by security forces to “operate a very tight structure, just like the IRA.” Another cell believed to be operating in the Mid-Ulster area planted roots around Portadown, Lurgan, and Craigavon.



Also of interest are alleged links with al-Qaeda in Ulster of Kafeel Ahmed, the British terrorist who drove a car loaded with gas cylinders into the terminal at Glasgow Airport in June 2007 and died of burns as a result. Ahmed is believed to have arrived in Northern Ireland in 2001 and enrolled at Queen’s University Belfast to study aeronautical engineering, graduating in 2003 and staying on as a paid researcher.



It was reported in The Guardian newspaper in July 2003 that an expert bomb-maker who was once a member of the Provisional IRA in Newry, but switched his allegiance in 1999 to the Real IRA, had been sent to the Occupied Territories to sell his expertise to groups like Islamic Jihad. Both Northern Irish and Irish police said they have known of his activities for more than 10 years. Israeli intelligence indicated that he had linked up with rejectionist Palestinian groups in a sequence of contacts resembling “the ‘real IRA’s Colombia.’”



According to Reva Bhalla, Director of Analysis at Texas-based global intelligence company Stratfor, “The IRA of the 1970s utilized the same supply links for arms and drugs as al-Qaeda does in present day. But there is a huge gap between the time periods when both groups operated in North Africa and Latin America, which makes it nearly impossible that al-Qaeda and IRA interests overlapped in any meaningful sense.” But Bhalla does concede the possibility that “al-Qaeda and al-Qaeda–affiliated groups took tactical lessons from IRA training manuals that have been circulating since the 1970s.”



FARC: DIRECT TRANSFER



Of any terrorist group that is currently active, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) has been a prime beneficiary of IRA technology and training. Interestingly, ETA may have provided the link between the IRA and FARC, having been in touch with the Colombian underground since its 1966 conference in Havana, Cuba. Evidence indicates that the Provisional IRA was paid for its services to FARC in Colombia, and that the group ran a training program there ran between 1997 and the summer of 2001. 12 With no more than three to five Provisional IRA members operating in Colombia at any one time, in total, about 30 IRA members worked inside FARC-controlled areas as part of the training program. About $2 million was paid per training period, and there were between 10 and 14 such periods, which meant that FARC gave the Provisional IRA a total amount of more than $20 million.



In August 2001, three IRA members— Niall Connolly, Martin McCauley, and James Monaghan, the Provisional IRA’s chief mortar designer and later director of engineering—were arrested in Colombia in a demilitarized zone. The Colombians claimed IRA influence went even further—on to Iran and Cuba. In addition, the chief of the Colombian Army, General Jorge Mora, found that FARC had given the IRA drugs, money, and weapons in exchange for training, which included instruction in mortar design and manufacture, armor-piercing methods, and explosives manufacture.



The IRA-designed mortars were increasingly used throughout 2001, and in 2002, they were employed in several attacks with devastating effects. For example, 115 people were killed in a FARC attack on the rural town of Bellavista; this attack involved mortars identical to the IRA’s Mark 18 device. This apparatus consists of two gas cylinders welded together that carry a payload of homemade explosives. In addition, in May 2001, multiplelaunch mortars, also originally devised by the IRA, were used to attack the presidential palace in Bogotá during the inauguration of President Uribe, resulting in the deaths of 21 people.



Most FARC methods are also IRA methods; these include car bombs, trip-wire booby traps, booby-trapped mines, disguised bombs, and, most significantly, anti-jamming devices. Several technologies are also in service with various national armed forces today, such as fuel-air explosives (FAE). In fact, the CIA acquired designs for a fuel-air device from the three IRA operatives arrested in Colombia, who claimed that the IRA was developing a FAE device for FARC. These devices make a very big bang, so they would show up on satellite surveillance.



IS THERE CAUSE FOR CONCERN?



The decommissioning of IRA weapons was additionally spurred by the seismic change in U.S. attitudes toward terrorism following the 9/11 attacks, and the IRA has since all but disbanded. The dissident groups, however, do not accept the 1998 Good Friday Agreement and continue to resort to violence to achieve their aims. Although their campaign is seen as futile, officials are nonetheless greatly concerned with how far these groups will apply their fanaticism in forging links with other terrorists.



Many observers would opine that examining the IRA’s transfer of weapons and expertise elsewhere is tantamount to shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted. And what evidence exists, which in many instances is incomplete or unproven, illustrates how complex it is to track multifaceted and covert links and exchanges between groups. What is increasingly clear, however, is that the current jihadist network is expanding, the expertise is there, and patterns of attack are being replicated. It is therefore our challenge to ascertain fully how far and wide this expertise and these technologies have spread.