A new book on the IRA is a blend of serious analysis and Le Carré thriller, writes Frank Millar, London Editor.
Mr Gerry Adams plotted peace behind the backs of the Provisional Army Council and should have shared the Nobel Prize with Mr John Hume and Mr David Trimble.
This is one of the central assertions of a dramatic new book out today which seeks to trigger a major re-evaluation by republicans and unionists of the origins of the Northern Ireland peace process, the background to the IRA's 1994 ceasefire and the nature and direction of the Belfast Agreement.
A Secret History of the IRA by Ed Moloney, a former Irish journalist of the year, directly challenges assumptions about Mr Adams's problems in managing the republican movement to the path of peace, casting him instead as its ruthless and unquestioned controller. And it heavily implies - though it must be said without conclusive proof - that a series of botched or "betrayed" IRA operations significantly helped Mr Adams's secret diplomacy with the Thatcher government, allegedly begun as early as 1986.
Betrayal is a recurrent theme in this book, which spectacularly combines Mr Moloney's celebrated talent as expert reporter and serious analyst with some of the ingredients of a Le Carré thriller.
From the Prologue: "There was only one thought in Gabriel Cleary's mind, and it chilled him. As he checked the firing unit linked to the 12 explosive charges beneath the Eksund's waterline, the signs of sabotage were unmistakable. With a growing sense of horror the IRA's director of engineering realised that the most ambitious gunrunning plot ever in the IRA's long war with Britain had been betrayed."
The Eksund was carrying the fifth, and biggest, consignment of Libyan weaponry with which the Provisionals planned a major escalation of violence, finally forcing the British to reconsider their options in respect of Northern Ireland.
Modelled on the Tet offensive launched by the Vietcong in January 1986 (credited with beginning the end of American involvement in that part of south-east Asia), Moloney quotes an IRA volunteer privy to the plan "to take and hold areas in Armagh, Tyrone and Fermanagh and to force the British either to use maximum force or to hold off."
Border posts were earmarked for IRA units to hold. SAM-7s were to be used against British helicopters, ideally cutting off south Armagh and leaving it under Provo control.
But the Provisionals had been robbed of the priceless asset of surprise. The British soon knew what weapons had been brought in and were able quickly to put countermeasures in place.
According to Mr Moloney, the effect was to condemn the IRA to "military stalemate" with the British. The earlier successful Libyan shipments certainly made the IRA a more deadly enemy, dangerous enough eventually to persuade the British that talking to the IRA might be productive.
However: "The chance of securing a decisive military advantage over the British - the aim and purpose of the 'Tet offensive' - had been lost forever." It was in such an atmosphere, claims Mr Moloney, that the idea that politics might be an acceptable, even unavoidable, alternative to armed struggle took hold.
"When Gabriel Cleary inspected the sabotaged firing unit on the bridge of the Eksund and realised that its precious cargo was doomed, he was not to know that the spy who had betrayed his mission had also boosted another secret operation then under way, an operation that not even the Army Council knew about but which the world would soon know as the Irish peace process."
There are plenty such "smoking guns" in this version of the IRA's long war. However, the author does not identify the alleged "spy" in the IRA ranks, nor does he purport here to show that Mr Adams has "sold out" on his republican ideals. As he himself acknowledges, the debate about who "won" the peace is still raging.
It certainly isn't difficult to see why Mr Adams might have been excited by a London communication indicating the British government's willingness "to withdraw from the central area of historical, political, religious and cultural conflict and from the central forum of political debate" and confine itself to the role of "facilitator" in an ongoing convention or conference between the representatives of both traditions.
Against that - as most unionists were painfully aware - London had been effectively neutral since the early 1970s, when the Heath government affirmed it had no desire to impede the relalisation of Irish unity.
Mr Seamus Mallon once famously described the Good Friday accord as "Sunningdale for slow learners". This was widely taken as a withering commentary on the reluctant state of unionism. However, in coming to accept John Hume's dictum - that it was the unionists, and not the British, who needed persuading - he might equally have meant that the Shinners were the slowest learners of all.
A Secret History of the IRA by Ed Moloney is published today by Penguin/Allen Lane