_ From: "Stasi" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Sun, 19 Aug 2001 11:51:08 +0100 To: "Peoples War" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: [Peoples War] Ire/Col: Rumbled In The Jungle - Sunday Times August 19 2001 FOCUS The arrest of three Sinn Fein sympathisers in Colombia has revealed frightening new developments for the fight against global terrorism. Tony Allen-Mills reports from Bogota � Rumbled in the jungle ============== How it unfolded | Spot the difference | Killing in company The fuselage emblem on aircraft that are flown by Satena, Colombia's domestic airline, is a flying stork. But three passengers on board flight 9665 to Bogota last week looked more like sitting ducks. Unbeknown to Niall Connolly, an Irish republican sympathiser, and his two like-minded companions, Colombian intelligence agents had spotted the trio the moment they drove down a dirt road to the modest airport terminal at San Vicente del Caguan, the southern rural stronghold of the left-wing guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known as Farc. In a country of predominantly short, dark, wiry men, the thickset, pale-faced travellers were instantly recognisable as extranjeros - foreigners. Few tourists these days visit the mountains, jungle and unkempt savanna that are controlled by one of the world's most violent guerrilla armies. Among Farc's most profitable criminal activities is the kidnapping of foreigners for ransom. Long before the Satena Dornier twin-prop touched down at Bogota's Eldorado international airport, General Reinaldo Castellanos, commander of the Colombian army's 13th Brigade, was studying a report from DAS, the national intelligence service known by its Spanish initials. The foreign suspects who had disappeared into a guerrilla area five weeks earlier were on their way out. Castellanos ordered a team of special forces to the airport. Even on a quiet day the Eldorado terminal swarms with heavily armed men and women from the army, air force, civilian police and the airport's own security unit. Connolly, who lives in Cuba, would have noticed little out of the ordinary as he emerged from the domestic arrivals hall with James Monaghan, the IRA's head of engineering, and Martin McCauley, a reputed specialist in booby traps. The three men, who were travelling under false names, carried only hand baggage. They turned right past a desk where passengers check in guns before boarding flights and walked into the international departures hall, but they never made it to the check-in desk there. In a smoothly executed interception that few passengers noticed, the three men were steered by soldiers to waiting military vans. Within 20 minutes they were languishing in separate cells at the 13th Brigade's military police barracks close to Bogota's centre. During an initial round of questioning, one man said he was a tourist, the other two said they were journalists. But there was no guidebook in their luggage, nor a single notebook or camera. Within 24 hours their fingerprints and photographs had been sent to British intelligence. Monaghan and McCauley were identified immediately; it took a little longer to produce Connolly's name. A routine Colombian intelligence coup was about to become an IRA fiasco. ONE week after the Bogota Three joined a long list of suspected IRA terrorists, the arrests of Connolly and his comrades are still stirring an international political storm. Allegations that a team of IRA bomb experts with well documented Sinn Fein links has been collaborating with Colombian terrorists have exploded like one of Monaghan's mortars in the Northern Ireland peace process. The case may ultimately inflict permanent damage on Sinn Fein's carefully honed image in America. Congressional aides from both Republican and Democratic parties were last week said to have been stunned at the alleged connection between notorious Colombian terrorists and an Irish political group that is supposed to be committed to peace. Senators and congressmen who have been following peace negotiations in both Northern Ireland and Colombia - where America has invested heavily in an anticocaine offensive - were said by one official to be "extremely angry . . . they regard themselves as having been let down by Sinn Fein". In a strongly worded editorial in the influential Washington Post last week, the newspaper wrote that it was "increasingly clear who's to blame" for the stalling peace process. "Mr Adams used to have friends in Washington, but the band is dwindling now," it continued. Such comments are likely to put in jeopardy the hundreds of thousands of pounds that Sinn Fein is believed to gain each year in fundraising from pro-republican sympathisers in America. The Bush administration is examining the evidence closely to decide whether Sinn Fein's link with Farc is sufficient for the group to be added to a list of banned organisations prohibited from seeking financial support in the United States. Closer to home, the fracas is also providing valuable fodder for the IRA's critics in Northern Ireland. "They say they are committed to peace, but all the time they are engaged in exporting terrorism around the world," said Sir Reg Empey, a prominent Ulster Unionist and minister in the Northern Ireland assembly. Particularly significant was the evidence which suggested that the IRA was doing business with a guerrilla group whose main income stream comes from the supply and traffic of cocaine. General Fernando Tapias, chief of the Colombian armed forces, last week called Farc "the principal producers and exporters of cocaine in the world". If a link between the two organisations can be proved it will cause immense damage to the Provisional IRA's credibility and its oft-stated public opposition to the drugs trade. Such links, however, will depend on hard evidence which is proving more elusive than first seemed the case. Although the three men being held in Bogota could face up to 20 years in Colombia's notoriously violent jails if found guilty of colluding with terrorists, it seems increasingly likely that they will face charges only on a lesser account of entering the country on false passports. Yesterday Carlos Hernan, the state-appointed lawyer representing McCauley and Monaghan, said he expected his clients to be deported this week, as usually happens when foreigners are discovered using fake papers. He insisted there was "not even circumstantial evidence" to show that his clients had assisted in the training of Farc guerrillas, as the Colombian military had alleged. Hernan claimed that 17 new forensic tests of the men's skin residues and clothing contradicted the military's initial report that traces of explosives and cocaine had been found, fuelling speculation that these early reports had been exaggerated by the Colombian military to bolster its reputation with American drug-enforcement agencies. "There is no serious evidence of a major crime," said Hernan, a claim reflected in the increasingly lenient handling of the prisoners. After four days in isolation the three men were allowed to speak to each other on Thursday and were yesterday exercising outdoors together. Yet if they were not involved in some form of guerrilla training, what were the men doing in the depths of the disease-ridden Colombian jungle? How had they ended up travelling to one of the most remote and hostile territories in the world and where did the intelligence come from that led to their eventual capture? IT all began almost by accident. In mid-June, two weeks before Monaghan and McCauley left Belfast for Bogota, Spanish intelligence warned the Colombians that Farc guerrillas had been attempting to recruit help from Eta, the Basque separatist group. Eta's bombmaking skills have proved brutally effective in a series of attacks against Spanish political targets in recent years. To the disgust of the Spanish, the "naive" Colombian military made little attempt to disguise the source of its tip last week. "They have gone a long way to letting Farc know that it has been infiltrated," one security source in Madrid complained. On the lookout for arriving Basques, DAS intelligence instead picked up a trio of suspect European visitors. The agency quickly established that two of the men had arrived on June 30 from Belfast via Paris. They were travelling on British passports under the names Edward Joseph Campbell (later confirmed as Monaghan) and John Joseph Kelly (McCauley). They checked into a Bogota hotel, where they were joined the next day by David Bracken (Connolly), who had flown in via Madrid and Caracas, and was travelling on an Irish passport. There, it is believed, the trio made contact with Farc, reportedly using a codeword provided either by Eta or possibly by sources in Cuba. Why were they not detained sooner? "We couldn't arrest them when they arrived because they hadn't done anything wrong," said Captain Jos� Espejo, a Colombian army spokesman. But the Colombians were sufficiently suspicious of the men's journey into Farc-controlled territory to contact the British embassy - which also represents Irish diplomatic interests - asking for help in establishing any political affiliations or outstanding warrants. According to military sources, the British had no record of Campbell or Kelly, but found two David Brackens. The first was a one-year-old boy who had died in 1965, the other was a man in Northern Ireland who had never applied for a passport. "We think Bracken used the trick in Frederick Forsyth's novel Day of the Jackal," said Espejo. "He got his passport by stealing the identity of a dead child." DAS suspicions were now firmly aroused but the trail had gone cold. Two years ago, as part of an attempt to encourage peace talks, the Colombian army withdrew from a 42,000sq km swathe of rugged hinterland, leaving it in the control of Farc and Manuel Marulanda, the group's 69-year-old Marxist leader known as Tirofijo or Sureshot. Despite military claims that it continues to monitor guerrilla activity, Farc operates with impunity in an area the size of Switzerland. Barred from entering the Farc zone, the Colombian military had no choice but to wait for the mysterious foreigners to re-emerge. Five weeks passed before they were seen again and there are two radically different accounts of how they spent their time in between. THE first account was summed up last week by Raul Reyes, a Farc commander, who plonked his AK-47 down on a table in the Farc-controlled village of Los Pozos and said that his Irish visitors had been doing "nothing except exchanging information". Publicly confirming for the first time that Farc had invited IRA representatives to Colombia, Reyes, a plump, bearded figure, denied that the men had trained guerrillas or been paid for their work in either dollars or drugs. "Of what's been said, the truths are few, the infamies many," he said. "The rest is inventions, nothing more." Reyes's denials were echoed by Hernan, who said his clients had come to Colombia to discuss their experiences of working with former political prisoners in Dublin. Between the three of them, the group have a wealth of experience in the field. Monaghan, who is in his early fifties, lives in Dublin. Following an early role in Sinn Fein's national executive, he had been working for Tar Isteach, an organisation helping to resettle IRA prisoners released early under the Good Friday agreement. He is believed to have tendered his resignation in June. McCauley, 38, was a Sinn Fein election worker in 1998, although the party last week denied that he was still a member. Having attracted the attention of unionist factions, he was forced to move from Northern Ireland to Co Kildare, where he is believed to have lived ever since. However, if the group was indeed in Colombia to share ideology rather than technical expertise, why bother with false passports? Hernan says his clients had resorted to subterfuge because they had criminal records in Britain and did not want to be refused entry to Colombia. They were right to be concerned. Two of the group have a track record of terrorist activity. Monaghan was arrested on explosives charges in the 1970s and escaped from the special criminal court in Dublin following a double bomb blast. Having somehow smuggled in explosives, he blew a hole in his cell with such precision that it took down a section of wall without hurting him or damaging the getaway car. He was later caught when a newspaper van blocked the escape route. McCauley, in turn, has received a suspended sentence for the possession of weapons. In 1982 he was shot by an RUC undercover unit while inspecting the contents of an IRA weapons dump concealed in a haystack. He subsequently won an undisclosed five-figure sum for the injuries he sustained. Much less is known about the third member of the group - Connolly - but a picture is beginning to emerge of a principled but wayward young man who exchanged a comfortable upbringing for an itinerant, bohemian lifestyle. Raised as one of 13 children in the upmarket Blackrock area of Dublin, Connolly was educated at the primarily Protestant Newpark comprehensive school, where he is remembered as "a lovely, ordinary young guy". He trained as a carpenter, but high unemployment took him to London in the early 1980s, where he was soon swept up in the Irish nationalism that attracted many of his generation. Around 1987 Connolly began to travel more widely, first to Europe, then to America, before ending up in El Salvador where he made contact with the Irish volunteer agency APSO. He left the organisation in September 1993 and is believed to have married and produced two children in Cuba. Fluent in Spanish, Connolly is subsequently believed to have established himself as Sinn Fein's unofficial "ambassador" in Havana. Security sources in Belfast believe that he was the intermediary in fixing up Gerry Adams's scheduled visit to Cuba next month. Sinn Fein denies any such association, despite a statement from the Cuban authorities on Friday that Connolly had been resident in the country for five years and was known to them as the party's legal representative in the region. Whatever Connolly's long-term role in the area or that of his travelling companions, the key question remains: had they really travelled deep into the Colombian jungle simply to talk politics? FOR military and intelligence services in both Britain and Colombia, there is a more worrying possibility. Monaghan and McCauley are described in security circles as highly skilled weapons experts capable of advising Farc on the manufacture and deployment of home-made arms; the open spaces of the Colombian hinterland would also enable the IRA to test and modify its weapons without fear of attracting the attention of the security forces. According to Colombian military sources, the British embassy in Bogota first pointed out similarities between Farc and IRA weaponry two years ago. General Jorge Mora, the Colombian army commander, paid a five-day visit to Britain last year that included a stop in Northern Ireland. Military sources claimed to have detected an IRA influence in a new Farc mortar that uses two sawn-off gas cylinders, one inside the other, to deliver a lethal blast. Colonel Paulino Coronado, an army spokesman, said Farc filled a 20lb canister with an explosive mix that sometimes included heavy nails, and placed it on top of a detonating device inside a 100lb cylinder. The device leans on bipod feet but was "not accurate", he said: "Instead of destroying rural police stations, they usually destroy all the civilian homes around them." As a member of the IRA's general headquarters staff as well as the group's director of engineering, Monaghan is said by Northern Ireland security sources to be a mortar expert who may have been able to help Farc to improve its accuracy. "He helped to develop the whole range of improvised devices that the IRA has excelled in for the past decade, ranging from shoulder-launched rockets to the barrack-buster mortar," the source said. The Colombians also claim that Farc is working on a small missile, made with oxygen cylinders stolen from hospitals, which explodes in a shower of burning vapour. The army has encountered landmines of undetectable plastic bottles stuffed with explosives as well. Coronado said last week he believed the IRA team was exchanging its expertise for money rather than narcotics. "The guerrillas have more money than they can spend from narcotics trafficking and criminal activities," he said. No money or drugs were found in the three men's luggage, and other sources suggested that the real benefit to the IRA was the chance to develop weapons to replace the arms that are due to be handed over under any decommissioning agreement. "They see the building up of home-made explosives as a means of reassuring the grassroots that the IRA remains a potent force," a Northern Ireland security source said. WHATEVER the exact nature of the IRA's pact with Farc, the hint of a warped technology merger with so doubtful a Colombian terror group spells further trouble for Gerry Adams, both at home and abroad. With American sentiment turning against him and the possibility of his financial lifeline in the United States being severed, the discovery of the three republican sympathisers in Colombia is a huge embarrassment for his party as it continues to broker for concessions in the peace process. Connolly and his compa�eros may end up with just a caution - their fate is likely to be decided by Wednesday - but the implications of the IRA's bungled debut on a Latin American stage awash in civilian blood are only just beginning to sink in. Additional reporting: Nick Rufford in London, Liam Clarke in Belfast, John Lee in Dublin, Tim Brown in Madrid and Kirk Semple in Los Pozos "A revolution is not a bed of roses. A revolution is a struggle to the death between the future and the past." Fidel Castro "The Marxist-Leninist doctrine on class struggle and the dictatorship of the proletariat affirms the role of violence in revolution, makes a distinction between unjust, counter-revolutionary violence and just, revolutionary violence, between the violence of the exploiting classes, and that of the masses." General Vo Nguyen Giap "Without a Peoples Army the people have nothing" Mao Tse-Tung _________________________________________________ KOMINFORM P.O. 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