The Sinn Féin President has dismissed the claims made about him in a newly-published book about the IRA, and confirmed he is taking legal advice about a possible libel case.
A Secret History of the IRA by journalist Ed Moloney claimed Mr Gerry Adams was instrumental in setting up an IRA unit called The Unknowns to "disappear" and murder suspected informers.
Mr Adams said yesterday: "I find some of the claims outrageous and think some people will be deeply upset by a mixture of innuendo, recycled claims, nodding and winking." He repeated his familiar denial: "I have not been and am not a member of the IRA".
The book also claimed Mr Adams was involved in secret contacts with the Mrs Thatcher's government in 1986, just two years after the IRA nearly killed her and her cabinet in the Brighton bombing.
Referring to suggestions that, as a senior Provisional IRA figure in Belfast, Mr Adams must have known of the abduction and murder of Mrs Jean McConville, a mother of 10, in 1972, he said these claims were "offensive and outrageous".
Moloney asserts that Mr Adams was a senior republican tactician and played a key role in weaning the IRA off its campaign and turning the movement towards politics.
Speaking at a press conference in London yesterday he said Mr Adams deserves credit for the peace process "more than any other individual".
He brands Mr Adams as a republican hawk who clearly believed the IRA could win its "war". This changed with time, he claims, and by as early as the mid-1970s Mr Adams was minded more towards constitutionalism.
"To begin with, he was 22 years old and the war was raging in Belfast and the place was full of anger. I think he genuinely believed at that time they could win the war.
"He began to realise they were in for a long war and I think his mind turned to the political process," Moloney said.
"I think he should have won the Nobel Peace Prize for what he did. He stands there with people like Michael Collins as a very significant figure. He is a man of strategic genius." The book also alleges that the IRA had advanced plans to murder the then British Foreign Secretary, Sir Geoffrey Howe, in Brussels in the late 1980s.