THE EXPLANATION THAT three alleged IRA members were in Colombia to discuss the peace process, or just on holiday, rather than training FARC rebels, was “insulting to our intelligence”, a top US diplomat said in 2001.
Richard Haass, who was the United States’ Special Envoy for Northern Ireland at the time, said the situation strained relations with the US and could have damaged the peace process in the North, newly released documents show.
The three men in question – Niall Connolly, James Monaghan, and Martin McCauley – were arrested on 11 August 2001 at Bogotá International Airport.
The men were travelling on false passports and Colombian authorities alleged they were training members of FARC (the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), the country’s main guerilla group.
The men became known as the Colombia Three. Their arrests happened at a crucial time in the peace process in Northern Ireland, just days after the IRA finally agreed on a method of destroying its weapons.
State records released this month detail conversations that took place between top Irish and US officials in the aftermath of the arrests.
State Papers – official documents from Government departments and the President’s Office – are generally released to the public 30 years after the fact. Documents related to the peace process in Northern Ireland are typically released after 20 years.
One newly released document notes that Haass was very critical of some of the excuses given as to why the three men were in Colombia.
A briefing document written for the Department of Foreign Affairs detailed a meeting between Haass and Seán Ó hUiginn, then-Irish Ambassador to the US, at the State Department in Washington DC on 7 September 2001.
The document notes that, at the time, the Irish and British governments were “obviously in stocktaking mode to work out a strategy in relation to developments in the peace process, including of course the Colombia dimension”.
“The benign explanation that the three might have been engaged in peace education was not sustainable.
Rather the choice was from the malign menu, for example, of some kind of weapons dealing, testing or training.
During the meeting Ó hUiginn reportedly told Haass that Irish officials “very much” appreciated the “restraint” shown by US officials in their “public reaction in such awkward circumstances”.
‘Not on vacation’
At the time the US was involved in peace process negotiations in both Northern Ireland and Colombia, and officials were deeply angered by the alleged training of FARC rebels by IRA members.
Haass said he and his colleagues were still “collecting information” to ascertain what had happened. He reportedly stated that US officials likely didn’t know anything more than their Irish counterparts at that point.
However he added that the three men “were not on vacation, they were not promoting a peace process”.
It was not only implausible to try to put across such explanations but insulting to our intelligence.
The document noted: “A far better course would be to admit that a mistake had been made and say that it would not happen again.
“It was far more likely that the detainees were involved in some kind of ‘transfer of know-how about bomb-making’.”
The Colombia Three have always denied wrongdoing, maintaining they were in the country to observe Colombia’s peace negotiations.
Haass is quoted as telling Ó hUiginn that if any US citizens were killed by FARC, US involvement in the peace process in Northern Ireland may need to be reevaluated.
He said the fact that the IRA “got involved in such a way in a country so important to US strategic interests was hardly imaginable”.
“The US had spent, and continues to spend, billions of dollars shoring up peace in Colombia and battling the drug trade,” he added.
Haass told Ó hUiginn that the US had “much more at stake in Colombia than Ireland”.
The memo notes:
Even so [the US] were determined, for the moment at least, not to let the event get in the way of the need for progress on other issues such as policing or decommissioning. This had been, in part, the motivation for their restrained reaction.
Ambassador Ó hUiginn said Irish officials also didn’t want the incident to derail negotiations in Northern Ireland.
“On the assumption that the happening in Colombia was an IRA initiative, the point had to be made to Sinn Féin that the damage to trust required a commensurate gesture to restore faith in the republican movement,” the memo notes.
‘Serious fence-mending required’
During the meeting Haass went on to speculate on the relationship between the three men and the IRA.
The document quotes him as saying: “It was highly unlikely that this was a rogue operation, such things did not happen in an organisation like the IRA.
The next question was who knew what and when. Answers had to be given.
“Further, regardless of what had happened, the message had to be clearly conveyed to Sinn Féin that, bad as things were now, it would be almost unsustainable if other comparable things were going on that were to come to light over the next while.”
Ó hUiginn agreed that “a freelance explanation was improbable” and “made the point to Irish Americans that in their contacts with Sinn Féin it was necessary to bring home to them that serious fence-mending was required”.
“[Gerry] Adams must surely understand if he were to have a place as a valid interlocutor, he could not have events of such magnitude contradicting his professed positions.
“If he wished to assert the priority of the political dimension, he must be able to say that the system that allowed these events to happen had been mended,” the document noted.
‘A thoroughly bad bunch’
During the conversation Haass is also quoted as saying that FARC rebels were a “thoroughly bad bunch”.
At the time, FARC was engaged in a decades-long conflict in Colombia. Founded in the mid-1960s, the guerrilla military group was anti-imperialist and originally aimed to overthrow the government.
The group financed its operations through the drug trade, kidnapping and extortion.
Throughout the conflict tens of thousands of people were killed at the hands of paramilitary groups, both left and right-wing, and government forces.
After failed attempts to restore peace in Colombia in the 1990s, 1998 to 2002 was one of the most violent periods in the conflict.
There were some parallels between the conflicts in Colombia and Northern Ireland, and the fact the IRA and FARC shared anti-imperialist ideologies.
The Colombia Three
The three Irishmen arrested in Bogotá were initially acquitted on charges of training FARC guerrillas, but convicted of travelling on false documents and sentenced to jail terms of between 26 and 44 months.
The men were released on bail pending a government appeal to a higher court, which in December 2004 convicted and sentenced them to 17-year prison terms.
However, it emerged that the three men had fled Colombia while on bail and returned to Ireland.
The Colombian authorities asked the then-Taoiseach Bertie Ahern to either extradite the men or have them serve their sentences in Ireland. There is no extradition treaty between Colombia and Ireland.
Connolly, Monaghan and McCauley voluntarily turned up at garda stations in Dublin to make themselves available for interview. None were charged with any offence.
As part of the 2016 peace deal aimed at ending the long-running conflict in Colombia, the three men were granted an amnesty by the Colombian government.
In 2000 Colombia’s Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP) pardoned the trio, providing they fully divulge the truth about their trip to the country in 2001.
However, the amnesty was revoked in December 2022.
In a statement released late last year, the JEP said the three men “failed in a serious manner to comply with their obligation to contribute to the full truth”.
President Juan Santos, who was the President of Colombia from 2010 to 2018, signed a peace agreement with FARC in November 2016.
However, the peace deal was narrowly rejected by the Colombian people in a referendum in October 2016 – 50.22% voted no and 49.78% yes.
Santos made some amendments to the agreement and, rather than putting the new deal to the people, he ratified it through Congress where his government had a majority.
More than 260,000 people were killed as a direct result of the armed conflict in Colombia over a 60-year period.
The reference number for these State Papers is 2023/53/29
Contains reporting from © AFP 2023
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