MARGARET Thatcher ordered MI5 to investigate links between Moscow and the Provisional IRA in the early 1980s, amid fears the Soviets were supplying the organisation with weapons and financial aid, it’s been revealed.
Thatcher’s concerns of possible co-operation between Russia and the PIRA were roused by the Soviet leadership’s expression of support for the 1981 hunger strike of IRA prisoners, led by Bobby Sands in the Maze prison, which the Soviet Union’s state news agency, TASS, described as a “concentration camp”.
Shortly afterwards MI5 launched an investigation on the PM’s orders to find out if the Soviets were actively supporting the Provisionals’ campaign of terror attacks in Northern Ireland and on the British mainland.
It was known that a decade earlier the Soviet Union’s intelligence agency, the KGB, had supplied the Official IRA – the Marxist wing of the militant republican group – with a small amount of weaponry. But until now there had been no suggestion that the British government suspected Moscow of helping to arm the much larger and more deadly Provisional IRA.
However, the spy agency’s investigation, completed in January 1982, was able to allay Thatcher’s fears of an alliance between the Provisional IRA and Moscow.
On 8 January, Cabinet Secretary Robert Armstrong sent a memo to her Secretary for Foreign and Defence Affairs, Sir John Coles, informing No 10 that the Security Service had found “no evidence that the Soviet Union finances, arms or influences Irish extremist groups”.
The memo continued: “The conclusion [of the MI5 report] is that the main Soviet interest in the PIRA is one of propaganda.”
The MI5 report considered that the Provisional IRA leadership was reluctant to receive aid from Moscow, for fear of alienating their more conservative supporters at home and abroad, who were hostile to the Soviet Union and communism.
“The Provisionals welcome Soviet Press interest in their activities but are wary of closer dealings with the Soviet Union,” the memo informed Thatcher.