The Eksund And The IRA's War-Making Capacity

Bleakley and Brandon Sullivan ✍examine whether the loss of the arms ship Eksund in 1987 really doomed the IRA to a stalemate . . .

Fate

1 November 1987.

Somewhere above the Hurd Deep, off the coast of Brittany, France.

The former grain hauler Eksund. Fifty years old and showing her age. Onboard: 150 tonnes of arms destined for the Irish Republican Army, courtesy of the ever-generous Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. A weight of weaponry equal to all the IRA had received from Libya in four earlier shipments of the preceding two years.

When French customs officials boarded the stricken vessel they discovered that the IRA men had tried to scuttle the ship and its deadly cargo. For them, secrecy was paramount. The British government couldn’t be allowed to discover that that IRA now had a large arsenal of modern military hardware.

According to journalist Ed Moloney in his seminal work A Secret History of the IRA the paramilitary group were planning to launch a massive offensive inspired by the Viet Cong’s famous “Tet Offensive” of 1968. In strict military terms Tet was a failure yet is credited with shifting US public opinion towards demanding a withdrawal from Vietnam.

In Moloney’s telling, the success of this offensive relied on the Eksund and its precious cargo arriving in Ireland undetected. The arms aboard the Eksund and the element of surprise were supposedly the two the key ingredients if the IRA hoped to pull off a startling escalation of a conflict that had by then settled into something resembling routine.

Moloney’s central hypothesis is that the dominant personalities within the IRA, conniving with the British, scuppered the Eksund venture to avert an escalation of the conflict many IRA members hoped for, thus saving the Peace Process and setting the stage for the 1998 Good Friday Agreement.

Is this possible?

Variants of this account have been circulated by different authors. Were the IRA prepared for a large-scale military offensive that would have totally changed the dynamic of the conflict? Could the arms carried by the Eksund really have made that a reality? What capabilities could this weaponry have offered to the IRA, in any case?

Revolutionary Toolkit

Firstly it’s important to ask, what was the Eksund actually carrying on that fateful journey in late 1987?

The answer isn’t as straightforward as it seems. Virtually every source gives a different inventory. Media illiteracy on the subject further muddles the picture e.g. claiming one-hundred and twenty missile launchers were seized when they really meant their ammunition. However after combing through various books and newspaper articles here’s a preliminary list:

x 1,000 AK-47 type rifles.
x 10 7.62mm general-purpose machine guns
x 10 12.7mm DshK heavy machine guns
x 1,000,0000 rounds of 7.62mm and 12.7mm ammuntion
x 430 Soviet-type grenades
x 10 RPG-7 rocket launchers
x 120 RPG-7 warheads
x 2,000 electric detonators
x 4,700 fuses
9 K32 Strela-2 surface-to-air missile launchers
9 K32 Strela-2 missiles
2 tonnes of Semtex plastic explosive.
x 12 82mm infantry mortars
x 106mm M40 recoilless rifles
LPO-50 flamethrowers
Submachine guns

An impressive catalogue. These were the arms that the IRA’s offensive supposedly hinged on. They can broadly be separated into two categories we’ll label Quantities and Capabilities.

Quantities

There’s an old saying in the military world: Quantity has a Quality of its Own.

However in the case of the IRA circa 1987, this arguably had ceased to be the case. Four Libyan deliveries in 1985-1986 had left the IRA with upwards of 1,300 AK-47 type rifles, forty 7.62mm general-purpose machine guns, twenty-six DShK heavy machine guns, and five tons of Semtex, amongst a swathe of other munitions. The only weapons systems not previously delivered to Ireland in some number that were aboard the Eksund were the 82 mm mortars and 106 mm recoilless rifles.

Were formations of IRA members sitting in camps in Donegal and Monaghan, trained in small-unit tactics and large-scale offensive action, waiting with bated breathe for the extra 1,000 AK-47s on the Eksund? Did the IRA’s fortunes really rest on having fifty general-purpose machine guns rather than forty, or thirty-six DShK heavy machine guns rather twenty-six? Before the Libyan donations the IRA had perhaps two heavy machine guns and a handful of general-purpose machine guns.

The IRA by the time of the Eksund’s loss had vastly more guns than they ever had before or indeed would ever need for the tempo of their campaign. Dumping more AK-47s into the organisation would not have transformed the IRA into an army capable of carrying out large-scale, synchronised operations, as former IRA Volunteer John Crawley in his book The Yank explained:

It’s a crude mechanistic view of war to believe that equipment alone is the answer. Training would have to reach a hitherto unimagined level, not just in terms of weapons and tactics but also advanced operational planning. We’d have to change our organisational culture.

Crawley knew what he was talking about. A former member of the US Marines most elite unit, Force Recon, in his compelling memoir The Yank he recounts that he personally drew up the list of types of weapons in 1984 that the IRA would later receive from Libya.

Frankly, there’s no evidence that the IRA was undertaking this sort of far-reaching transformation at the time of the Eksund’s seizure. A handful of Volunteers were sent to Libya for training on specific weapons but that’s a far cry from what would have been needed. The challenges in retraining and building a new knowledge base in an armed formation were exemplified in 2023 by the Ukraine’s failure to form new army units capable of acting in concert to breach layered Russian defenses.

Having seven ton of Semtex rather than five tons, along with the detonators and fuses, would have no doubt been a boost to the IRA’s engineering department. But it’s a stretch to hypothesise that those extra two tons of plastic explosive were the war winning special sauce the IRA needed.

Flamethrowers: The IRA received ten Soviet-made LPO-50 flamethrowers from Libya. One was seized in Belfast in 1988, another in Derry in 1989. The first outing of the IRA’s flamethrowers was in a famous assault on a border base near Rosslea in Fermanagh in December 1989. That attack was probably the one occasion where Libyan weapons were used near as envisioned by IRA men like John Crawley. It was also the flamethrower’s last outing and they were relegated to arms dumps through the IRA’s final 1997 ceasefire (one was found by Gardaí in County Meath in 1994).

RPGs. Again, the IRA would certainly have appreciated an extra dozen RPG-7 launchers but that surely wouldn’t have enabled the group to prosecute a very different sort of armed campaign then they had up to then. The 430 hand grenades likewise would have been helpful but the IRA improvised and continued to develop their own line of homemade grenades, culminating in the coffee jar bomb.

Soviet-made Strela-2 surface-to-air missiles. Popularly known as “SAM-7.”These were the great hope for republicans in the 1980s and in theory could have been a game changer in border areas, where the British Army was almost totally dependent on helicopters to resupply outlying outposts. However, in actual fact the Strela-2 turned out to be a damp squib for the IRA. It wasn’t until July 1991 that the IRA actually tried taking down a helicopter. In what was either a technical or training issue the missile failed to lock on and landed harmlessly on the ground. The attempt was not repeated; the IRA tried to pass it off as an RPG-7 attack. Gardaí found a Strela-2 thermal battery and grip stock in the same County Meath bunker as the flamethrower in 1994.

It’s been suggested that the capture of the Eksund alerted the British Army that the IRA was in possession of heat-seeking missiles and led to the installation of countermeasures on helicopters. This should be weighed against the famous leaked British intelligence document Northern Ireland: Future Terrorist Trends raising the possibility as far back as 1978. Indeed, a British pilot interviewed in 1979 in the wake of the leak said counter-measures had been available for “six or seven years”. Even if the IRA had the element of surprise, and successfully used a Strela-2 missile to shoot down a helicopter, surely there was no reason the British military couldn’t add flare dispensers to their helicopters at short notice.

Point is, all of these portions of the Eksund cargo simply added to the quantity of weapons the IRA had already received from Libya and were unlikely to represent a game changer.

According to Moloney, the earlier Libyan shipments were placed in dumps to be held in reserve, and it was the Eksund delivery that was to fuel the “Tet offensive.” However if the IRA was truly prepared for a large ground incursion it seems plausible that organisation would have been able to improvise and use the large stocks of Libyan arms already in Ireland.

The surprise factor of losing the Eksund is also perhaps overstated. The IRA already had a close shave when informant-driven intel saw Gardaí uncover a large hide of Libyan weapons in 1986. In January 1988 a huge dump of Libyan arms were found hastily buried on a Donegal beach.

The IRA’s so-called “Tet Offensive” was unlikely to materialise, at least in the spectacular fashion popularly imagined. The reasons were multi-faceted and would probably justify a few articles in their own right. What did emerge in the summer of 1988 was still politically impactful but not at the level of, say, IRA units across Northern Ireland overrunning British bases. The Eksund arms should be examined in that context.

In part II we’ll examine the Capabilities lost aboard the Eksund and whether they really could have changed the course of history . . .

⏩Bleakley is an IT consultant currently living in the south of Ireland. Covid-19 boredom spurred an interest in the nitty gritty of Irish history.

⏩Brandon Sullivan is a middle-aged West Belfast émigré. He juggles fatherhood & marriage with working in a policy environment and writing for TPQ about the conflict, films, books, and politics.