Brian Keenan: Mastermind of IRA terror campaigns once regarded as the 'biggest single threat to the British state'

The IRA career of Brian Keenan contains a paradoxical duality in that he first helped build up the organisation and then, decades later, helped shut it down. Few outside Irish republican circles will laud his role in the 1970s, when he roamed the world seeking guns for the IRA and masterminded a campaign which claimed many lives in both Northern Ireland and England.

Yet tributes have been paid to his part in the later peace process, when he played a key role in facilitating Sinn Fein's entry into politics and having the IRA abandon its weaponry. Specifically, he served as the IRA's link to the official decommissioning body which eventually put the guns and explosives beyond use. In other words, he spent years building up the killing machine which in later years he devoted himself to dismantling.

Keenan was a South Derry man who grew up in Belfast and moved in his teens to England, where his father had served in the RAF. He worked in Northamptonshire as a television repairman before returning to Belfast in the late 1960s. He became a shop steward in an electronics factory and, when the Troubles broke out, a member of the IRA. He was good with guns, becoming an important quartermaster.

Although he was never the fanatical Marxist which some commentaries claim, Keenan linked in very effectively with the international revolutionary underground of the day. In particular, from 1972 onwards he established a relationship with Libya which delivered many guns to the IRA. Over the next few years, he also ran a concerted campaign of violence in England which resulted in at least 16 deaths, most of them civilians. These included the Guildford and Woolwich pub bombings, which killed seven people and led to long-running legal sequels.

It was the combination of Keenan's Libyan and English exploits that led Jonathan Powell, formerly Tony Blair's chief-of-staff, to describe him in his recent autobiography as "at one stage the biggest single threat to the British state". Keenan's importance was further reflected in one writer's assessment that he was "regarded by his friends and enemies alike as possessing the best organisational brain in the IRA".

But Keenan was eventually caught, having left his fingerprints at bomb factories in Crouch End and Stoke Newington in north London. He was convicted in 1980 on 18 counts of planning terrorist acts including six killings, and was sentenced to 18 years in prison. He served a dozen years, emerging in 1993. Those killed by his unit included ordinary civilians who died in up to 50 bombing and shooting attacks on London railway stations, hotels, restaurants, pubs and other places designated by the IRA as "establishment targets".

Republicans are today not particularly proud of a phase in which they killed so many civilians, though they do point out admiringly that Keenan was away from home, either in prison or on the run, for 27 years.

From inside Leicester prison, Keenan supported the moves of Gerry Adams and others to build up the political aspect of republicanism. He wrote: "We must never forsake action but the final war to win will be the savage war of peace. To those of us who have struggled for years in a purely military capacity, it must be obvious that if we do not provide honest, recognisable political leadership on the ground, we will lose that war for peace."

On his release he made some apparently contradictory statements, leading to speculation that he was against the peace process. But as the process progressed he strongly supported the Adams line, and in doing so helped refute allegations that a sell-out of traditional republicanism was under way. His appointment as the man in charge of any discussions involving weapons decommissioning worried some, since at that time it was difficult to envisage such an iconic militant giving up the guns. But in the end he negotiated away the weapons, Gerry Adams remarking that "there wouldn't be a peace process if it wasn't for Brian Keenan".

Clearly Keenan had come a long way since the days when one of his men declared "As volunteers in the IRA we have fought to free our oppressed nation from its bondage to British imperialism." He and his colleagues had over the years lowered their sights from seeking victory to accepting compromise: he himself mutated from one of the most fearsome of the hawks to one of the most effective doves. Gerry Adams said of him yesterday: "Brian was a formidable republican leader over 40 years of activism – four decades of unstinting effort on behalf of republicanism."

When Sinn Fein went into government with loyalists last year Keenan was in the public gallery looking down on the spectacle. Jonathan Powell mused: "He had lived long enough to politicise the volunteers of the IRA over time, and gradually to transform physical force republicanism into a political movement."

David McKittrick

Brian Keenan, political activist: born Swatragh, Co Londonderry 1942; married (two sons, four daughters); died Belfast 21 May 2008.

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