Controversy erupts over Fla. claim

By Jack Holland

The decommissioning crisis that has shaken the Northern Irish peace process deepened with further revelations linked to the alleged role of the IRA leadership in the Florida gun-running operation of July 1999.

This week, GQ magazine quoted Richard Scruggs, a federal prosecutor in Florida who indicted three men and a woman with smuggling arms for the IRA, as saying that he came under direct pressure from the then Attorney General Janet Reno not to go public on IRA involvement as it would endanger the Good Friday agreement. He told the magazine that he took "surreal phone calls" from Washington when it was learned that he had given an interview to Ulster Television about the case.

"Everyone went [crazy]," he was reported as saying. He told UTV that the operation to smuggle 46 handguns and 600 rounds of ammunition was sanctioned by the IRA leadership. He told an Irish reporter: "There’s absolutely no doubt whatsoever that this was a sanctioned operation from the Provisional Irish Republican Army."

He refused to withdraw his remarks even after being told that President Clinton himself was warning of the consequences they might have to the peace process.

Stories quoting Scruggs also appeared in the London Sunday Times, the Observer, and the Fort Lauderdale New Times.

Anthony Smyth, Conor Claxton and Martin Mullan were convicted, along with Siobhan Browne, who was allegedly Smyth’s lover. At the time, the IRA acknowledged that Smyth, Claxton and Mullan were IRA members but denied the arms running operation was sanctioned.

In 1999, the case hit the headlines in Northern Ireland at the worst possible time, when Unionists were refusing to enter government with Sinn Fein until the IRA decommissioned its weapons dumps. Unionists said it proved that the organization was not seriously committed to the peace process.

The most recent revelations came just a month after the IRA was believed to have carried out the largest robbery in Irish history. On June 8, a day after the British general election, an IRA active service unit made off with more than $6 million worth of cigarettes from a Belfast dockside. Reliable sources claim that the massive operation, involving between 20 and 30 people, must have been sanctioned at the highest levels.

The Unionist leader, David Trimble, resigned three weeks later as first minister in the power-sharing government over the IRA’s refusal to decommission. The group has also been linked to the murder of a drug dealer in Dublin 10 days ago.