Johnny Adair given weapons by shadowy Ulster Resistance group, new book reveals

Johnny Adair was given high-quality arms by the Ulster Resistance, a group once led by Ian Paisley, just weeks after the loyalist terrorist had become a powerful Ulster Freedom Fighters figure, a new book alleges.Written by academic Aaron Edwards, Enemies Within traces Adair’s journey from neo-Nazi skinhead to leader of the most vicious group of loyalist killers during the Troubles.Meanwhile, the book highlights a 1993 warning to Garda commissioner Patrick Culligan from RUC chief constable Hugh Annesley that Adair-led “attacks in the South were more of a question of when, not if”.Based on years of research and multiple interviews with Adair, who now lives in exile in Scotland, the book,“Enemies Within” recounts how Adair drove in 1990 to a farm near Loughgall, Co Armagh, to meet the Ulster Resistance group.READ MOREMade up of a loose network of farmers, businesspeople and members of the Ulster Defence Regiment, a locally recruited British army regiment, Ulster Resistance had smuggled “vast quantities” of weaponry from Lebanon, the book alleges.Describing them as “pillars of the community”, Edwards says Ulster Resistance knew how to plan, but “what they didn’t know was how to kill people, and that’s where Adair came in”.Johnny Adair now lives in exile in Scotland Following two seizures by the security forces of loyalist weaponry, Ulster Resistance were suspicious about the number of informers within the ranks of the paramilitaries.Partially convinced by Adair’s rhetoric that he would “take the fight to the IRA”, Ulster Resistance agreed to a test run, sending VZ58 assault rifles, RPG-7 rocket launchers and grenades and other equipment to Belfast, hidden in a truck carrying a new kitchen.The first victim of a newly armed Ulster Defence Association (UDA) C Company came in January 1991 when 44-year-old Seán Rafferty was shot at his home in Rosapenna Court, north Belfast. He was chosen solely because he was a Catholic.Founded in 1986 by Ian Paisley, Ulster Resistance was never party to the talks that led to the Belfast Agreement or the decommissioning of weaponry that it led to years later.There have been only rare mentions of it in public. Nothing is known about what happened to its alleged armoury. Adair’s growing importance led the IRA to try to kill him. They hatched a plan to drive a stolen JCB carrying a huge bomb in its bucket into the front of a shebeen used by loyalist paramilitaries, including Adair.However, the plan – which was based on intelligence leaked to the IRA from within the UDA – was eventually blocked by the IRA army council, which feared the consequences of killing large number of loyalist leaders.Meanwhile, Adair claims that a senior police officer offered him £50,000 cash held in a suitcase to stop his campaign of killing in 1992.Adair had been arrested after the killing of 26-year-old mother of two Philomena Hanna behind the counter in a chemist shop on Lanark Way in west Belfast by one of Adair’s gunmen, Stephen McKeag, who died of a drug overdose in 2000.“The next thing, this guy came in. I didn’t know him from Adam, dressed with a lovely suit on,” Adair told Edwards. He refused the money, in £1,000 bundles, “because money was never my God”.For months afterwards, Adair gathered intelligence driving throughout republican districts of west Belfast wearing Celtic attire “because the taigs were as alert as f**k looking for loyalist death squads”.Such was the fear created by Adair, the book claims, that it led Seán “Spike” Murray, a senior republican, to call senior UDA figure Tommy Potts in the UDA’s Shankill Road headquarters “offering a deal”.Claiming to have been stopped “3,000 times” by the British army and the RUC at checkpoints in nationalist areas, Adair told one RUC officer at the time that he loved “a wee bit of ethnic cleansing, sure, we’re all on the same side”.[ The dangerous world of Johnny AdairOpens in new window ]Adair claims that an undercover British soldier tried to kill him outside his home in March 1993 after Adair had confronted him with a friend, Donald Hodgen, who was shot three times.The soldier from the British army’s 14th Intelligence Company fired four shots, a later RUC investigation found, where the soldier claimed that he fired only because he felt his life was in danger.Meanwhile, an attempt by his own to kill him in 2002 during the height of the feud was foiled when two gunmen were knocked off their motorcycle by an RUC van, just as Adair had left his Boundary Way home to take his daughter to primary school.The RUC insisted the gunmen had been tackled because they been seen acting suspiciously, but later it was alleged that the intelligence came from a listening bug in a UDA commander’s home.The book outlines how Adair changed the culture of his support into “a group of hardened assassins”, even though most members of the UDA were involved only in running clubs or extorting money.Not everyone was expected to be involved in violence, but they were required to “help out” as drivers, couriers, or to offer safe houses, and they had to attend a monthly meeting where they were briefed about actions.“The whole feel of the organisation changed by the week, and you felt a part of something important. Being a UDA man wasn’t something to be ashamed of any more, now it had meaning,” said one then-member.The danger posed by Adair to the attempt to bring about a political deal led to the RUC targeting known loyalist terrorists, including Adair, in the run-up to December 1993, so that they felt “watched and followed – and unnerved”.In June 1993, shortly after an attack on the home of Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams’s west Belfast home, senior security chiefs met in Stormont and accepted that all past efforts to curb Adair had failed.Returning from the meeting, RUC deputy chief constable Blair Wallace decided to put Ronnie Flanagan, then in charge of the RUC in Belfast, at the helm of a dedicated team to bring Adair to trial.“They were working like crazy on a peace process and they knew if they didn’t get Adair – because Adair was never going to stop – that for any chance for this accord to work they had to get him off the streets,” says former RUC officer Alan Cormack.Using newly passed legislation that had created a charge of directing terrorism, RUC officers were brought together and told “from the highest level” they had “to get Johnny Adair off the streets”.Northern Ireland secretary of state Patrick Mayhew kept closely in touch with the investigation, especially after it emerged that Adair’s group had got supplies of a powerful commercial explosive, X1.Briefing prime minister John Major, Mayhew said the recent upsurge in loyalist attacks had “unsettled Catholic communities”, warning that the security forces now faced “a difficult situation on two fronts”.The Mayhew warning was quickly copied, national archives files in London now reveal, to all of London’s top security and intelligence chiefs, including the heads of MI5 and MI6.The head of the UK’s joint intelligence committee Pauline Neville-Jones had already warned Major that loyalist terrorists’ success was “a symptom of the increasing alienation of the Protestant community frightened about its future”.In late 2004, shortly before Adair was released belatedly under the terms of the Belfast Agreement, senior loyalist paramilitary leaders sought protection from the Northern Ireland office once he was back in the community, the book reveals.