It was barely a year since the ULA had emerged from the shadows to take some kind of shape. For the first year they’d operated, it was thought by the British that they were a PIRA Special Action Group, a Provo hit squad, a theory broken when a captured PIRA member had indignantly denied complicity in what had turned out to be a ULA assassination. The authors of the report then examined suspected ULA operations, pointing to operational patterns. These, Ryan saw, were quite real. For one thing, they involved more people, on average, than PIRA ops.
That’s interesting . . . Ryan walked out of the room, heading down the corridor to the kiosk, where he bought a pack of cigarettes. In under a minute he was back to his office, fumbling with the cipher lock on the door.
More people per operation. Ryan lit one of the low-tar smokes. That was a violation of ordinary security procedures. The more people involved in an operation, the greater the risk of its being blown. What did this mean? Ryan examined three separate operations, looking for his own patterns.
It was clear after ten minutes of examination. The ULA was more of a military organization than PIRA. Instead of the small, independent groups typical of urban terrorists, the ULA organized itself more on classic military lines. The PIRA often depended on a single “cowboy” assassin, less often on the special action groups. There were many cases Ryan knew of, where the one “designated bitter” — a term popular in CIA the previous year — had his own special gun, and lay in wait like a deer hunter, often for days, to kill a specific target. But the ULA was different. For one thing they didn’t generally go for individual targets. They relied, it seemed, on a reconnaissance team and an assault team that worked in close cooperation — the operative word here was “seemed,” Ryan read, since this, again, was something inferred from scanty evidence. When they did something, they usually got away cleanly. Planning and resources.
Classic military lines. That implied a great deal of confidence by the ULA in its people — and in its security. Jack started making notes. The actual facts in the report were thin — he counted six — but the analysis was interesting. The ULA showed a very high degree of professionalism in its planning and execution of operations, more so than the PIRA, which was itself proficient enough. Instead of a small number of really sharp operatives, it appeared that weapons expertise was uniform throughout the small organization. The uniformity of expertise was interesting.
Military training? Ryan wrote down. How good? Where done? What source? He looked at the next report. It was dated some months after “Genesis” and showed a greater degree of institutional interest. CIA had begun to take a closer look at the ULA, starting seven months previously. Right after I left here, Jack noted. Coincidence.
This one Concentrated on Kevin O’Donnell, the suspected leader of the ULA. The first thing Ryan saw was a photograph taken from a British intelligence-gathering team. The man was fairly tall, but otherwise ordinary. The photo was dated years before, and the next thing Jack read was that the man had reportedly had plastic surgery to change his face. Jack studied the photo anyway. He’d been at a funeral for a PIRA member killed by the Ulster Defense Regiment. The face was solemn enough, with a hardness around the eyes. He wondered how much he could draw from a single photo of a man at a funeral for a comrade, and set the picture aside to read the biography of the man.
A working-class background. His father had been a truck driver. His mother had died when he was nine. Catholic schools, of course. A copy of his college transcript showed him to be bright enough. O’Donnell had graduated from university with honors, and his degree was in political science. He’d taken every course on Marxism that the institution had offered, and been involved on the fringes of civil-rights groups in the late sixties and early seventies. This had earned him attention from the RUC and British intelligence agencies. Then, after graduating, he’d dropped out of sight for a year, reappearing in 1972 after the Bloody Sunday fiasco when British Army paratroopers had gotten out of control and fired into a crowd of demonstrators, killing fourteen people, none of whom had been proven to have a gun.
“There’s a coincidence,” Ryan whispered to himself. The paratroopers still claimed that they’d been fired upon from someone in the crowd and merely returned fire to defend themselves. An official government report done by the British backed this up — of course, what else could they say? Ryan shrugged. It might even have been true. The biggest mistake the English had ever made was to send troops into Northern Ireland. What they’d needed were good cops to reestablish law and order, not an army of occupation. But with the RUC out of control then, and supplemented by the B-Special thugs, there hadn’t been a real alternative. So soldiers had been sent in, to a situation for which they were unsuited by training . . . and vulnerable to provocation.
Ryan’s antennae twitched at that.
Political-science major, heavy course-load in Marxism. O’Donnell had dropped out of sight, then reappeared about a year later immediately after the Bloody Sunday disaster, and soon thereafter was identified by an informer as the PIRA’s chief of internal security. He didn’t get that job on the basis of college classwork. He’d had to work to earn that. Terrorism, like any other profession, has its apprenticeship. Somehow this Kevin Joseph O’Donnell had earned his spurs. How did you do that? Were you one of the guys who stage-managed the provocations? If so, where did you learn how, and does that missing year have anything to do with it? Were you trained in urban insurgency tactics . . . in the Crimea maybe . . .?
Too much of a coincidence, Jack told himself. The idea of Soviet training for the hard-core members of the PIRA and INLA had been bandied about so much that it had lost credibility. Besides, it didn’t have to be something that dramatic. They might just have figured out the proper tactics for themselves, or read them in books. There were plenty of books on the subject of how to be an urban guerrilla. Jack had read several of them.
He flipped forward in time to O’Donnell’s second disappearance. Here the information from British sources was fairly complete for once. O’Donnell had been remarkably effective as chief of internal security. Nearly half the people he’d killed really had been informers of one sort or another, not a bad percentage in this sort of business. He found a couple of new pages at the end of the report, and read the information that David Ashley had gathered a few months before in Dublin . . . He got a little carried away . . . O’Donnell had used his position to eliminate Proves whose politics didn’t quite agree with his. It had been discovered, and he’d vanished for a second time. Again the data was speculative, but it tracked with what Murray had told him in London. O’Donnell had gone somewhere.
Surely he’d convinced someone to provide his nascent organization with financing, training, and support. His nascent organization, Ryan thought. Where had it come from? There was a lapse of two years before O’Donnell’s disappearance from Ulster and the first positively identified operation of the ULA. Two complete years. The Brit intel data suggested plastic surgery. Where? Who paid for it? He didn’t do that in some jerkwater third-world country, Ryan told himself. He wondered if Cathy could ask her colleagues at Hopkins about the availability of good face-cutters. Two years to change his face, get financial backing, recruit his troops, establish a base of operations, and begin to make his impact . . . Not bad, Ryan thought with grudging admiration. All that in two years.
Another year before the name of the outfit surfaces . . .
Ryan turned when he heard someone working the lock on his office door. It was Marty Cantor.
“I thought you stopped smoking.” He pointed at the cigarette.
Ryan crushed it out. “So does my wife. Have you seen all this stuff?”
“Yeah.” Cantor nodded. “The boss had me run through it over the weekend. What do you think?”
“I think this O’Donnell character is one formidable son of a bitch. He’s got his outfit organized and trained like a real army. It’s small enough that he knows every one of them. His ideological background tells me he’s a careful recruiter. He has an unusually high degree of trust in his troops. He’s a political animal, but he knows how to think and plan like a soldier. Who trained him?”
“Nobody knows,” Cantor replied. “I think you can overestimate that factor, though.”