North Korean arms links to Ireland
Sunday World piece on Xmas day following up North Korean links to Ireland;
A piece I wrote for Sunday Mirror in October 2009 about North Korean links to Irish politicians. Reposted after the death of Kim.
FORMER Official IRA members have revealed the group’s links to Communist North Korea, where members received military training in the late 80s.
Official IRA volunteers have admitted making trips to the totalitarian regime during the same period that the Workers Party, their political wing, had seven elected TDs in the Dail, including current Labour Party leader Eamon Gilmore and former leader Pat Rabbitte.
North Korean agents also supplied the group with a shipment of weapons, which are believed to still to be in the hands of people loyal to the organisation.
Official IRA men have detailed how they traveled to the Far East where they were trained in assassination techniques, the use of heavy machine guns and intelligence gathering by the North Korean army.
Over a dozen Official IRA men, nicknamed Stickies, received training in early 1987 with two others having traveled to the country the previous year. The group included men from Belfast and Dublin.
Two younger operatives traveled to North Korea initially and trained alongside specialist units of the Korean People’s Army. The following spring a dozen more members traveled to Pyongyang for several weeks of intensive weapons, combat and intelligence instruction.
The group traveled via USSR, according to IRA sources, and were assisted by the KGB with elaborate measures were taken to conceal their real destination from western intelligence agencies.
Each man was forced to write a series of postcards and letters while in Moscow which they dated over the coming weeks; a Moscow-based IRA member sent these greetings on during their stay in North Korea.
During the same period the book claims the Official IRA were involved in bank robberies and other illegal fundraising schemes, which helped pay for the Workers Party.
The Workers Party was represented in the European parliament by Dublin MEP Proinsias De Rossa, who now holds the same position for the Labour party.
However, the Official IRA men say they were not training to fight the British but defend members from the Provos and other paramilitary killers.
Some volunteers believed it was “just an exercise in keeping them happy” while others claimed they were informed the training was to establish an elite “assassination squad”.
While in North Korea the Irishmen mixed with soldiers from African countries who were also being trained by the secretive North Korean army.
The revelation is contained in a new book “The Lost Revolution – the story of the Official IRA and the Workers Party”.
Historian Brian Hanley, one of the authors of The Lost Revolution, explained the men were committed to socialist ideas and believed that they needed to be trained so they could protect the Workers Party from republican rivals.
“The training in North Korea was actually part of a plan to stand down the Official IRA and finally allow their movement to give up the gun,” he stated.
The book also reveals the Official IRA continued to receive weapons supplies long after their 1972 ceasefire; the Russian secret service, the KGB, and other international groups supplied the Officials with guns into the late 1980s.
Among those who supplied arms were the Middle Eastern guerrilla group the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
Unlike other Northern Irish paramilitary groups the Official IRA have not decommissioned any of their weapons including two dozen hand-guns which were delivered by North Korean agents in the late 80s.
