The Scotsman
July 1988
It was just before eleven o’clock in the morning on July 20 1982 when a group of Horse Guards riding through Hyde Park in central London were torn apart by a blizzard of six-inch nails hurled from a car bomb which had been planted on their route. Four soldiers and seven of their horses were killed.
When police scientists gathered together the charred fragments of the bomb, they found the remains of a sophisticated type of electronic switch, an unusual element which had been used to detonate the device by radio signal. The switch was a potentially vital clue and police set out to trace its history in search of the bombers.
The search led detectives from London to Paris and there to a witness who admitted knowing the switch’s history and who finally disclosed the name of the man who had bought it. It had never surfaced publicly but in the small world of counter-terrorism, the name was loaded with notoriety – Patrick Ryan, the Provisional IRA’s bomber priest.
The story of Father Patrick Ryan, aged 58, who is now being held by police in Brussells, reads like a piece of pulp fiction. He is a Catholic missionary who seduces a shy English spinster and embroils her in the world of international terrorism, a Church fund-raiser who launders a fortune in IRA funds through a network of secret bank accounts, an amiable bar-fly who forges the links between the IRA’s Chief of Staff and the Libyan leader Colonel Ghadaffi, and, finally, the target of what is probably the longest-running manhunt in Europe.
For the last 15 years, Ryan has been the master fixer behind the Provisional IRA, bumping around Europe in an old camper van, supplying the funds, the arms and the explosives which have kept the IRA alive. The Hyde Park bomb is only one incident on a long list of murderous attacks in which he has been involved. Yet the mere fact that he has been captured is no guarantee that he will be brought to trial.
Ryan’s story begins in County Tipperary where he was born in a small farming town on June 26 1930. He went to the local school and then joined an order of Catholic missionaries who ordained him as a priest in 1954. He spent the next eleven years in Africa and then in the United States before becoming the assistant curate of a small church in east London.
Up to this point he had shown no great interest in politics beyond a basic resentment of the British role in Ireland. Now, as the civil rights movement gathered speed in Belfast, Ryan’s behaviour in London for the first time showed signs of a new course.
One of his jobs was to collect money for missionary work in Africa but, despite his hard work, his superiors noticed that he was sending less and less. They challenged him and he declared quite openly that he was sending the cash to a better cause – the Republican movement in Ireland. He defied their request to stop and then gave them further cause for alarm by wooing a timid young woman named Catherine, a regular church-goer who lived with her parents and worked with mentally handicapped children. Catherine fell deeply in love with the charming priest and his chatty ways.
By 1972, Ryan’s church superiors were so worried that they suspended him from normal duties and then gave him six months leave of absence. He became more outspoken than ever and caused a minor scandal on a trip to Rome in the summer of 1973 when he told Italian priests that he hoped the IRA bombed the centre of London.
This was not mere talk. During his leave of absence, he had gone to Dublin where he had cemented his links with the Republican movement, offering them the priceless asset of his clean record and his respectable front. The IRA put him to work on what was then their worst problem – their chaotic supply lines. They had no shortage of men on the ground in Belfast but they were unable to maintain the steady flow of money and arms which were needed to keep them busy.
So it was that after scandalising his colleagues in Rome, Patrick Ryan discreetly boarded a flight to Libya and, still wearing his priest’s robes, made contact with Libyan military intelligence in Tripoli.
During the autumn of 1973, his break with his old life became complete. As he shuttled back and forth between Dublin and Geneva, opening bank accounts and transferring funds from his new friends in Libya, the Catholic Church formally suspended him. Weeks later, he transferred several thousand pounds from Geneva through Frankfurt to Dublin – the beginning of a flood of money which he was to direct into the IRA Army Council’s coffers.
Early in 1974 he set up a base in Le Havre, staying in a tourist hotel and working around the clock to set up the IRA’s new supply lines. There were bank accounts in different names all over Europe, particularly in Luxemburg and Switzerland. There were couriers in Brussels and Paris, stewards on the cross-Channel ferries, lorry drivers who rode the routes between Dublin and the continent. And there was one fatal flaw.
Unknown to the errant priest, his behaviour had caught the eye of a quick-witted Canadian tourist who was staying in the next room to him in his Le Havre hotel. The Canadian could hear him tuning in to a short-wave radio every morning as if he was trying to pick up a signal, and he noticed him down in the docks, asking about cargo vessels travelling to Ireland. The hotel told the Canadian that this man was Patrick Ryan, a seaman. The Canadian wondered how a humble sailor could afford the string of international phone calls which Ryan made.
After several days, Ryan checked out to go on one of his numerous trips round Europe. The Canadian slipped into his room and seized the contents of Ryan’s waste paper basket. The next day he was on a ferry to Southampton.
Hampshire Special Branch did not know quite what to make of this excitable tourist clutching a handful of waste paper. But when they examined the paper, they found phone numbers of known IRA contacts in Dublin and Europe and, mysteriously, of a council flat in east London – Catherine.
From this moment, Father Ryan was never alone again. The London Anti Terrorist Branch embarked on an operation which was eventually to embrace the police Special Branch, the Security Service, MI5, the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, and the intelligence agencies of most of the countries of Western Europe, an extraordinary transnational manhunt.
At the beginning it was focussed on Le Havre where French police agreed to keep an eye on Ryan and to report his movements to Scotland Yard. British undercover teams, supplied through MI6, took up station in Le Havre and watched as Ryan built his empire.
They were there in January 1975 when Joe Cahill, an IRA veteran, and Eamonn Docherty, then the IRA’s assistant chief of staff, travelled to Le Havre to meet their priest. They followed the three men as they journeyed to Paris to meet a notorious arms dealer, known as Max.
The surveillance teams watched as Eamonn Docherty came back again and again to Le Havre, often travelling on to Switzerland to check the latest banking arrangements. They watched, too, early in 1976, when the IRA’s chief of staff himself, Seamus Twomey, came with Docherty to meet Ryan for the most important mission of all – the striking of an alliance with Colonel Ghadaffi.
The three men travelled to Libya together and spent a week there arranging the details of their mutual aid before flying back to Paris for a further week of discussion among themselves. The teams watched also as Ryan’s romance continued with the shy English spinster, Catherine.
Ryan had begun to exploit the innocence of the besotted woman. He needed an English driving licence in a false name, so he spun her a story about how he could not get one in his own name while he was living in France. She got it for him and smuggled it through Customs in her girdle. She carried bundles of cash back to London for him and sent them to a bank in Ireland. He said the money was for the dream home where they would eventually live together. It was really for Maurice Prendergast, then the IRA’s director of finance.
By 1976, Ryan had become a pivotal figure in the IRA. In less than two years, he had pumped nearly one million pounds into IRA bank accounts, most of it from Libya. He had supplied pistols and bullets concealed in the doors of lorries. He had smuggled nitroglycerine in loads of lemons from Italy. Crucially, he had discovered a device called a Memopark.
A Memopark is a gadget for motorists: you park your car, turn the dial on your memopark so that it rings in your pocket when the time on your meter has expired. The IRA discovered they could attach a metal arm to the top of a Memopark so that when it rotated, instead of ringing a bell, it completed an electrical circuit – the perfect bomb timer.
Ryan found a novelty shop in Zurich which sold the gadgets and in May 1975, he bought out their entire stock of 400 Memoparks. Over the next 18 months, those Memoparks were traced at the scene of 185 different explosions in Northern Ireland. They were also found in a bomb factory in London.
The operation against Ryan had been striving to find evidence which would justify his arrest. In the summer of 1976, as Catherine arranged to meet Ryan in Zurich, the British persuaded the Swiss authorities to mount a joint surveillance in an effort to find evidence to justify making an arrest. The couple were followed for a week. As Catherine flew back into London on July 25 she was arrested under the Prevention of Terrorism Act. In the Pradier Square in Geneva, Ryan was picked up on the pretext of a minor motoring offence.
After days of questioning, Scotland Yard accepted that the tearful Catherine was merely an innocent dupe. In Switzerland, Ryan denied everything until he was confronted with his diary – a painstaking record of his movements. Then he admitted that he was the European Quartermaster of the IRA and threatened that unless he was released the IRA would attack Swiss Embassies in Dublin and London. His threat was taken seriously.
Scotland Yard, however, were playing a losing game. They had no evidence that Ryan had committed an offence on Swiss soil. The only evidence they had was of IRA activities which would be deemed political by the Swiss courts and, therefore, outside the terms of the extradition treaty between the two countries. After ten days in custody, Ryan was released and, despite frenzied diplomatic efforts, he was able to move a small fortune in IRA funds out of Swiss bank accounts before the police could freeze them.
Since then, Ryan has been working on the run. He has been arrested and released all over Europe – France in December 1976, Italy in February 1977, Luxembourg in March 1977. He was kept under surveillance in Spain for months. While police in Britain have accumulated evidence of his continued involvement in supplying funds and arms for the IRA, they have never been able to beat the extradition laws to get him back to London for trial. Nor have other European forces been able to prosecute him for offences in their jurisdiction. It remains to be seen whether Brussels will mark a break-through.
