Product Description

An epic portrayal of one of the twentieth century's longest wars—based on unprecedented access to all the players.

Filled with disclosures and based on the author's unprecedented access to the Irish Republican Army, this explosive book sparked controversy when it was first published in hardcover. Delving deeply into the inner workings, furtive plots, and deadly rivalries of the Irish Republican Army, Ed Moloney, who has covered the IRA since the late 1970s, delivers a riveting account of how one of the world's oldest and most ruthless terrorist groups was maneuvered into ending its thirty-year war with Britain. With revelations including the IRA's long and astonishing associations with Qaddafi's regime, Margaret Thatcher's secret diplomacy with Gerry Adams, the Catholic Church's clandestine negotiations with Republican leadership, and hitherto undisclosed activities of the American government under Bill Clinton, A Secret History rewrites, with dramatic results, the story of this intractable conflict. In particular, fascinating material on Adams's Machiavellian rise to power establishes the IRA leader as one of the most complex political figures of our time. Like Thomas Friedman in From Beirut to Jerusalem, Moloney brings a sharply intelligent reporter's eye to a tangled history often baffling to outsiders. #1 international bestseller; A Washington Post 2002 Rave. 8 pages of illustrations.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #215677 in Books
• Published on: 2003-11
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 640 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Most of this sure-to-be controversial narrative centers on the activities of Gerry Adams, who, over the course of his long IRA career, moved the organization away from the gun and toward a negotiated settlement with its British and Loyalist enemies. Moloney, an award-winning Irish journalist, begins with the crucial 1969 split between the Provisional IRA (PIRA), which championed armed struggle, and the socialist-leaning Official IRA. As a youth in Belfast, Adams joined the PIRA, and worked his way up through the ranks. As leader, he revamped the PIRA, starting in the 1980s, by altering its military structure while moving it into the political arena. Adams's strategy of utilizing both the bullet and the ballot, as Moloney repeatedly argues, led to inherent contradictions. Military operations, especially if they resulted in dead civilians, weakened Sinn Fein, the PIRA's political wing. In 1982, according to Moloney (years earlier than previously reported), Adams further eroded the militarists' influence by entering into secret peace negotiations with the Irish and British governments. Over the course of 16 years, Adams did the unthinkable and demilitarized Irish politics, but Moloney seems less than appreciative of Adams's achievements. His Adams is a Machiavellian figure who outmaneuvered and sold out the militarists within the PIRA. Some readers might conclude though Moloney never states it outright that Adams was the unnamed high-level IRA informer who, Moloney reports, tipped off the British to some IRA military operations. Whether Moloney is right or wrong about Adams, he's written an exhaustive and highly provocative account of the inner workings of the Provisionals. 16 pages of photos, 5 maps.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
An award-winning journalist and former Northern Editor of the Irish Times and Sunday Tribune, Moloney describes the delicate political maneuvering of Sinn Fein's Gerry Adams, which compelled the Provisional Irish Republican Army ultimately to accept what their constitution explicity forbade: a cease-fire in the fight to unify Ireland. Airing details of IRA political infighting for the first time, Moloney grants the lion's share of credit for the growing peace to Adams. Adams is the master insider, politician, and statesman who manipulated violence and the promise of peace in negotiations with England, Ireland, Ulster, and, to a lesser degree, America. By creating an internal bureaucracy that produced volumes of reports, more than the Army Council could digest, Adams kept control of the laborious negotiations. His greatest challenge, and success, was keeping the rank-and-file IRA in the dark about precisely what he was doing and how, working toward the cease-fire. The final push was the 9/11 attack, when the IRA dumped its weapons for fear of being lumped politically with al Qaeda by the Bush administration. Historians may ultimately apportion the credit differently, but Moloney does capture an important part of the process. For academic libraries and larger public collections.
Robert Moore, Bristol-Myers Squibb Medical Imaging, Billerica, MA
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Although to Americans this epic undertaking may appear ascoming out of the blue, in Northern Ireland its publication isanticipated with trepidation by some of its subjects. But although hisbook definitely unearths some buried information--including details onLibyan arms deals and clandestine diplomacy between the IRA andMargaret Thatcher, the Catholic Church, and even the Clintonadministration--the author's real focus is not so much the crimes ofwar as the foundations of peace. Concentrating primarily on the modernIRA and the events of the past 35 years, he treads carefully acrossdangerous ground, steadily building his thesis that Gerry Adams, theSinn Fein leader and IRA Army Council member, was the dominant forcein the Irish peace process from inception to conclusion. Moloney, aformer editor and reporter who in 1999 was named Irish Journalist ofthe Year, provides considerable historical background and demonstratesa clear understanding of the often-byzantine machinations of therevolutionary group. The endless names and minute level of detail,however, mean this is not the best work for those seeking anintroduction to the Troubles. Nor is the author a stylist; few of hispassages convey the maelstrom of shootings and bombings in humanterms. But in amassing and reinterpreting such a wealth ofinformation, he does a great service to those who struggle to learnthe facts so that they might figure out what it allmeant. Keir Graff
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

This book will stand the test of time.
With all the books that have been written on the Irish Troubles (Coogan, Bell, Holland, etc), its hard to believe that any new insights or perspectives could be possible, but 'A Secret History' is stunning in this regard. It absorbs all that has been written before and goes deeper, using inside sources in the Republican Movement to offer a view of the Peace Process that is enlightening, to say the least. Gerry Adams, in particular, emerges as a monumental contemporary Irish political figure - cunning, brilliant, ruthless, daring. The story of his engineering an end to the war in Northern Ireland has been told many times, but what is not generally known is that he did so by deliberatly misleading/betraying his own movement. Whether or not you think this is a good thing (it resulted in the Good Friday Accords) is for each individual reader to decide. But the author of this book, Ed Maloney, does a tremendous historical service by giving people a deeper and more informed version of events than anything published so far.

Honest survey of the shift from republican tradition
Perhaps overwhelming for the beginner, but for those informed about the evolution of the IRA and its movement away from the Green Book and the armalite to the British and Irish parliaments, Moloney offers corrective and sobering detail of the Adams and McGuinness-led coterie and their domination of the present Provos in both the IRA and Sinn Fein...Moloney has painstakingly assembled his evidence after long years spent bending the ear of many a hard man. As a native of Belfast and a skilled journalist, he writes without the verve of J. Bowyer Bell or the swagger of Tim Pat Coogan, but his own version of IRA history fills in details previously unreported by mainstream authors or known by the public crucial to a nuanced understanding of how the Provo IRA via SF came to be the acceptable face of republicanism today.

Behind the mask of violence
'The secret history of the IRA' is an engrossing and revelatory dissection of one of the most infamous terrorist forces in modern Western society and indeed, on the world stage. Never before has the Irish republican army and the republican movement been subjected to a complete autopsy, unearthing the truth behind the myth and unravelling the workings of a shadowy and clandestine organisation.
Unlike previous insights into the IRA, which have centred on purely an outsiders perception of Irish republicanism and the armed struggle, Moloney has successfully infiltrated into the heart of the movement. He has brought to the table an understanding of the IRA's raison d'etre and illustrated how painfully and precariously the mechanisms for achieving their goals have shifted, albeit at a glacial pace, from the smoking barrel of a gun to the electoral political process.
The first few pages set the tone, detailing Gerry Adams atavistic republican sentiments and how support for the armed struggle was passed from generation to generation like a family air loom. From this point on Moloney uses Adam's and in particular his revolutionary approach to the Irish question, as a historical and political barometer with which to measure the movement. He clearly identifies Adam's as a defining figure within Irish republicanism, which is nothing new for many political and social commentators. However, what is intriguing is how Maloney describes the events to which a fragile peace was eventually achieved, with Adam's acting as it's sole initiator. He details the duplicity and secrecy of Adam's strategy to instil change within the IRA and also how he influenced other nationalist political parties to join together to provide a united pan nationalist front. In addition, Moloney provides absorbing material on how two fundamentally different entities, the IRA and the British government, entered into dialogue and how their tempestuous relationship developed with Adams in the middle pulling the strings. There are numerous other interesting insights which weave throughout the book. Most notably, are the continuous, entrenched doctrinal divisions of the republican movement and the development and eventual success of the British intelligence to counter IRA military operations.
Moloney's tome is a detailed, informative account of Anglo -Irish modern history and Irish Republicanism. He brings a humanistic quality to the IRA, which is a seemingly difficult task to do for an organisation whose uncompromising violence is intrinsically inhumane. However, he succeeds were others may have failed as many of the unanswered questions about the IRA are not clouded in mystery and secrecy anymore.