Arms from Africa fuel paramilitary terror in Northern Ireland


29 October 1991
The Independent - London
David McKittrick reports on three Ulster loyalists convicted in Paris of plotting to trade missile secrets for guns.


A French court gave three Northern Ireland loyalists suspended sentences yesterday for their part in a plot to give South Africa British missile secrets in exchange for money or guns. The three, who were members of the paramilitary Ulster Resistance organisation, were arrested in Paris in 1989 with a South African diplomat and an arms dealer. A piece of missile manufactured by the Belfast company Shorts was recovered at the time.

Noel Little, 41, of Markethill, Co Armagh, who was described in court as the main instigator, was given a three-year suspended sentence and fined 50,000 French francs (#5,175). Samuel Quinn, 43, a Territorial Army missile instructor from Co Down, was given a two-year sentence with a Fr30,000 (#3,100) fine while James King, 52, also of Co Down, received a one-year sentence with a Fr20,000 (#2,070) fine. The arms dealer, American Douglas Bernhart, 43, was given a three-year suspended sentence and a Fr100,000 (#10,350) fine. All four were banned from re-entering France for three years, though Quinn said he hoped to remain in Paris. The South African diplomat involved claimed diplomatic immunity and did not face trial.

The three loyalists will presumably face RUC questioning if they return to Northern Ireland. The four men were convicted of arms trafficking and associating with criminals involved in terrorist activities. They were accused of having stolen missile parts and documents. They were also accused of having furnished weapons and ammunition to South Africa, despite an embargo on arms sales. A number of South African diplomats were expelled from Britain and France after it emerged that their country had been trying to obtain British missile secrets and had supplied money and guns to loyalist extremists.

The 1980s will go down in Irish history books as the time when rival paramilitary groups were armed, for very different reasons, by two countries at either end of the African continent.

Earlier this year, a French judge heard the case against five men involved in transporting huge arms shipments from Libya to the IRA. Yesterday, she disposed of the case of three loyalists involved in an even more ambitious scheme, in which South Africa was prepared to give loyalists large amounts of guns and money in exchange for multi-million pound British missile secrets.

The South African escapade reads, in part, like a Frederick Forsyth thriller and, in part, like a Feydeau farce. It involves Paris and Lebanon, Portadown and Pretoria, and features extraordinary bungles by the loyalists and the security forces. The story can be traced to 1985, when three different loyalist groups - Ulster Resistance, the Ulster Defence Association and the Ulster Volunteer Force - came into contact with an Ulsterman who had moved to South Africa and become involved in the arms industry there.

At a meeting in the east Belfast home of a senior paramilitary leader, he offered to supply guns, though he said he was only interested in orders worth a quarter of a million pounds or more. Alternatively, he would accept missile parts or plans. The loyalists sent a UDA man to South Africa, where he was shown a warehouse full of weaponry. But the UDA man was, in fact, a British army undercover agent. So British military intelligence, presumably, knew of the South African connection right from the start. 

The loyalist groups were interested in an arms deal but were short of money. After some unsuccessful attempts to obtain material from Shorts missile factory in east Belfast, they helped to stage a bank robbery in Portadown, Co Armagh, in June 1987, which raised more than #300,000.

A fair amount of this appears to have gone into the pockets of some paramilitary leaders, but #150,000 was used to buy a consignment of weapons. This consisted of 200 Czech assault rifles together with Browning pistols, RPG-7 rockets and hand grenades. This is well below the black-market value of such weapons, and the assumption is that the South Africans let the loyalists have the guns at a cut-price rate in the hope of receiving missile technology. The transaction was set up through Douglas Bernhart, an American arms dealer who worked for the South African arms industry. He put the loyalists in touch with Joseph Fawzi, a Lebanese arms dealer, who had the weaponry shipped into Northern Ireland in crates marked as containing ceramic tiles.

The consignment arrived in December 1987, and the following month was split three ways among the loyalist groups. The UDA's share - apart from its RPG-7s - was seized almost immediately at a Royal Ulster Constabulary roadblock. It has never been clear whether this was a routine roadcheck which, not surprisingly, took an interest in the spectacle of two heavily-laden identical hired car s one of which contained Davy Payne, one of the UDA's best-known figures; or whether the security forces knew of Payne's journey and were waiting for him.

But the unanswered question is how the security forces, who presumably were aware of the whole enterprise through their UDA agent, missed the other two-thirds of the shipment. Parts of it have been recovered, but much remains at large and has been used in killings by the loyalists, including the attack on a republican funeral by Michael Stone in 1989, in which three people were killed.

By this stage, the South African connection was thoroughly blown: Payne, for example, had Noel Little's telephone number written on his hand when he was arrested. Nonetheless, the South Africans were undeterred, and a technical officer at their embassy in France arranged for three Protestants to be trained in firing an RPG-7. At one stage they offered #1m for a complete missile system or a complete blueprint, and said they would pay several million pounds for the newest and most advanced missile, Starstreak.

According to Bernhart, the South Africans handed over #50,000 as down payment on a missile. There were several thefts of missile parts from Shorts and another from the Territorial Army missile battery where one of the accused, Samuel Quinn, worked as an instructor. But the parts taken appear to have been inoperative. Some were models.

When the loyalists went to Paris in April 1989 the whole thing had become a fiasco. They were tracked all the way first by the British security forces and then by the French, who had surreptitiously photographed Little on a previous trip to Paris when he met Bernhart, the Ulsterman who made the original contact, and South African diplomats. On this occasion the South Africans hoped the loyalists had brought valuable missile material; as it turned out, Little and the others were hoping to palm off dummy material of little or no practical use to them. French police moved in and broke up the meeting. At first it looked as though the loyalists would be charged with transporting weapons, but they faced lesser charges since what they had was not in working condition and could not be classed as a weapon. They have spent little time in prison, having been bailed on condition that they did not leave France.

In the meantime, the French and the British have expelled a number of South African diplomats, and security at Shorts and Territorial Army bases in Northern Ireland has been considerably tightened. The British Government regarded the whole episode as both alarming and embarrassing, and shows no sign of wishing to take the matter further.

But most of the weapons supplied by the South Africans - like those given to the IRA by Libya - remain secreted by terrorist groups in Northern Ireland.


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