Tantalizing Tales from the I.R.A.

A double defector tells of gunrunning from the U.S.

Just from living in Boston, one acquires a natural interest in the Irish Republican Army," says Reporter Andrew Blake of the Boston Globe. Blake's interest sharpened during a year of reporting for the London Sunday Times in Northern Ireland. And after some machine guns stolen from an armory in Danvers, Mass., turned up in Ulster last year, Blake set out to find out how the I.R.A. runs guns from the U.S. Several sources steered him toward a man who might talk -- Peter McMullen, 32, a Belfast-born Catholic who had first deserted from an elite British paratroop battalion to join the Provisional I.R.A., then quit the terrorists. Blake found McMullen hiding out in San Francisco and persuaded him to sit through 18 hours of interviews stretching over four days. The result: a six-part Globe series that, if McMullen is to be believed, last week gave the first inside report on all manner of I.R.A. activities, from alleged plans to assassinate Prince Philip to skulduggery in the U.S.

McMullen, a burly man who is wanted by the British for terrorist bombing, first came to the U.S. in 1972 on a false passport. He worked as a doorman-bouncer at Wednesday's, an uptown Manhattan bar with a heavily Irish-American clientele. He bought guns with money embezzled by a barman -- as much as $3,000 a week, he claimed. Mostly, McMullen said, he just strolled into gun shops, cash in hand, and bought whatever weapons he wanted, but on occasion the approaches got a bit dicey. Said he: "One night I'm standing at the door of this busy nightclub, and up comes a guy with this great bloody carpet over his shoulder. He says he's got something to show me. So I tell him to get the hell out of the doorway and meet me in the basement. He unrolls the carpet and there's four Winchester rifles" plus submachine guns and handguns. McMullen angrily told the supplier to bring the guns next time to his apartment in Jackson Heights, Queens. But he nonetheless bought the guns -- with $2,500 that he said was supplied by the Irish Northern Aid Committee, an organization that raises funds ostensibly to support the families of Irishmen held by the British.

The guns that McMullen purchased were smuggled to Dublin in household and office furniture, he said. Labor union contacts made the arrangements, McMullen explained, and other sympathizers ensured smooth passage through U.S. and Irish customs. From Dublin it was easy to spirit the weapons into Ulster in cars often driven by women with children on busy Sunday afternoons.

McMullen's tales of I.R.A. activities in the United Kingdom, to which he returned in 1973, are filled with incidents ranging from absurd to chilling. Five years ago, the I.R.A. was plagued by corruption and laxity, McMullen said. Once in 1974 he could not assemble a squad to bomb a British barracks in Northern Ireland because "Sean had to go to Mass and Seamus had to visit his mother and Kevin had to milk the cows. It sounded like one of those Irish jokes."

New leadership, under Gerry Adams, has regrouped the I.R.A. into smaller cells and tightened screening against informers. It has negotiated alliances with the Palestine Liberation Organization, which supplies arms, money and training, and the Libyan government of Muammar Gaddafi, which, McMullen says, provides loans, arms and transportation.

The new leaders and new connections give the I.R.A. enough muscle to risk a long planned series of hits against members of the British royal family. The assassination of Lord Mountbatten last month, says McMullen, was only the first. Future targets include Prince Philip, Princess Margaret and Princess Anne. McMullen predicts bombings of both Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle, among other royal residences.

McMullen says he disliked the I.R.A.'s random terrorism and as early as 1974 tried to "resign." He was soon arrested in Dublin on gun-possession charges and spent 2% years in Portlaoise prison; he suspects the I.R.A. set him up. After getting out of jail in 1977, he returned to New York on his own, but was pressed back into I.R.A. service. He says he was ordered to kidnap Dan Flanagan, who owns the chain of Blarney Stone bars in Manhattan, and hold him for ransom. He told the I.R.A. that he had agreed only to gather intelligence on Flanagan. Then McMullen heard that the I.R.A. planned to send a squad from Belfast to kill him, and he went into hiding.

How much of McMullen's story can be believed? Although Blake says he checked whatever he could, TIME sources found some parts of McMullen's story credible, other portions improbable. New York City police can see no reason why the I.R.A. would want to kidnap Flanagan, an unpolitical type; any ransom it might collect would hardly be worth the danger of provoking a police crackdown. David Blundy, a London Sunday Times writer who interviewed McMullen extensively before Blake did, says McMullen's accounts of two bombings in Ireland checked out in every detail, but that his stories of his U.S. adventures were a little dubious. U.S. authorities say that whatever may have been the case in 1972, the I.R.A. in the U.S. now limits itself to fund raising.

Skeptics think McMullen has at the least exaggerated portions of his tale to help peddle an eventual book. But it is indisputable that the British want him extradited for the bombing of a barracks near Liverpool. A San Francisco federal magistrate turned down the request on the ground that the bombing was a "political" act. U.S. authorities are now trying to deport him, and McMullen presumably will surface in San Francisco on Sept. 28 for a hearing.

Whatever happens, McMullen has violated the I.R.A.'s code of silence. Says a Midwestern source heavily involved in fund raising for the I.R.A.: "McMullen was already sentenced to death in Ireland, but now they're going to get him here, wherever he is."

McMullen himself claims to know -- in fact, to have brought into the U.S. last year, under a false passport -- the I.R.A. hit man who has now been as signed to kill him. He describes the putative assassin as fortyish and bland-looking, the kind of lad who would lure his victim to a bar, buy him a drink, then splinter his skull and walk out.

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