People's War

They have some new stuff but not much.
MiG-29s (grade A ones, not hand-me-downs) with helmet-mounted sights and AA-11 Archers. T-72 tanks. SA-10 surface-to-air missiles. SS-21 short-range and SS-23 medium-range ballistic missiles.
Those are magic bullets though, only a few. Mostly it is MiG-21s / -23s, T-55s & older SAMs. East Germany is damn well armed but it isn't the Soviet Union.

Five – Informants


In the middle of 1994, the IRA came very close to declaring a ceasefire. Its armed opposition to the British Government was almost brought to a temporary cessation due to the ongoing political dialogue between Northern Irish politicians and London. There had been a change in leadership in London where Heseltine replaced Major yet still the likelihood of an end to the shootings and bombing was widely believed to be on the cards. It never came about though. There was foreign interference which made sure that the terrorism would continue and, with that, a British military response. Throughout ‘94 and into ‘95, the IRA carried on waging war against military and economic targets despite the best efforts of diplomats and politicians to finally bring it all to a conclusion.

Devastating bombs had hit the City of London – the financial district – in 1992 and ‘93 with the IRA then mortaring Heathrow Airport three times over five days early in ‘94. Those attacks were economically damaging to Britain, more than any of the violence which took place across in Ulster. The Army Council had agreed to that strategy of making ‘spectacular’ attacks on mainland Britain at the urging of one of the independent entities which made up the whole organisation. The IRA was never fully united at any level with significant power in the hands of leading figures from regional areas who had seats on the Army Council. The East Tyrone Brigade was one of the most lethal and active forces within the IRA and was responsible for a great deal of the violence within Ulster. There was too the South Armagh Brigade which, while active within Ulster, had plentiful experience in striking within mainland Britain too. Both of them were rather independent-minded, more so than other IRA component parts with leaders who weren’t willing at all to go along with the peace process that the politicians were pushing for. In June ‘94, each of those two brigades received separate foreign shipments of arms. Those came not from America nor Libya, from where many previous shipments had been sent, but instead from the East Germans. There was a lot to be doled out, all free of charge. None of the weaponry was traceable direct to the DDR itself and all of it was in fact stolen from overseas where former Soviet Army stocks down in the Ukraine had been raided by arms dealers. There were a few complaints that some of what was sent wasn’t up to the best of standards yet it was all free. The rifles worked, the explosives would do. Infused with those stockpiles, the dissents who were opposed to the notion of a ceasefire with the British felt confident enough to defy those seeking a temporary end to the armed campaign: they were flush with weapons which would bring support towards them so that others wouldn’t dare challenge them. Open criticism was made of the progress of talks with London – nit-picking to be honest – and a push was made for the fight to continue. Outvoted, those who had been seeking a ceasefire were forced to accept that it wasn’t going to happen at that time. As to the political leadership, they got wind of some of what was going on behind the scenes yet didn’t grasp the full picture. Moreover, there was no understanding that East Germany had sent those weapons nor what was desired by those in East Berlin to be seen done with all of it.

Across the middle of Ulster, through August and September there were multiple shootings and explosions. The security forces, Loyalists and commercial targets came under attack. The clatter of AKs and explosions of both bombs & RPG rounds made it all seem like a real war zone. The British Army fought back and there was an increasing role for the SAS there too where they took the fight right back to volunteers with the East Tyrone Brigade. Intelligence operations caught wind of the scale of the weapons stockpile that the IRA had to make use of though were unsure of its origins. What they did know was that a lot had come in and a lot was being used up. It was quite the summer of violence and at once destroyed the process of ongoing dialogue between those seeking peace. In early October, when the British Government was in the midst of making a (limited) military deployment to the Gulf to support the American-led Operation Desert Knight, London faced a bombing campaign directed against it. Two huge blasts rocked the capital on subsequent Sunday evenings. The headquarters of the Met. Police at New Scotland Yard was targeted first by a truck bomb on Broadway. Half a dozen lives were lost including that of one of the team of bombers who was shot by armed officers making his escape. Seconds after he was gunned down, the bomb went off. Major damage was done and Met. Police operations were severely disrupted in the aftermath. The next target was a financial one where the South Armagh Brigade used a near identical truck bomb to blast a target to the east. It was Canary Wharf which they struck, detonating a bomb next to the building where a light rail train station ran above ground. Only one death occurred but the damage done was just as severe as it was over at New Scotland Yard. The Canary Wharf project was not the success for the developers of it that they had foreseen yet there was economic growth there picking up. The extensive damage caused by the IRA bombing at once set all of that back. Hitting out there in the London Docklands had been a less-preferable target for the IRA that the City of London. The ‘ring of steel’ which the UK security forces had put around there following the Baltic Exchange & Bishopsgate bombings of previous years made striking there too risky though. Canary Wharf was chosen for its high-profile image where more damage could be done visually rather than with more effective as it would be back over in the City.

November and December saw other bombs strike across the mainland. London was targeted with smaller blasts than those October ones and the IRA moved outside of the capital as well. Over in Ulster, before the year was out there was a continuation of the violence through the central portions of that province but also down in Armagh as well. There were comments made that the situation in Ulster was starting to look like guerrilla warfare with remarks made that it was ‘Britain’s Tet’. That was overblown hyperbole. IRA gunmen had the conflict taken right back towards them as Heseltine and his Cabinet responded strongly. Troops flooded Ulster with emergency deployments made – stretching the British Army – and there also was an expansion of intelligence operations. The latter paid off where a bomb attempt to strike at the West End, hitting theatre-land right before Christmas, was thwarted and there was also the raiding of a safe-house in South London where a trio of terrorists were caught when asleep. They had a further bomb ready, one to be used before ‘94 was out against Victoria Coach Station. Back over in Ulster, the SAS engaged a team of gunmen travelling in a van to strike against a fortified police station at Cookstown. All five inside the vehicle lost their lives during an ambush and that struck quite the blow against East Tyrone Brigade operations as much as what happened in London to South Armagh Brigade operatives. Police announcements and comments from government ministers claimed that diligent police work was behind the successes had before the year was out against IRA operations. That wasn’t the case. Instead, it was the work of informants within the IRA who provided the security forces with information. Tip-offs came and counteraction was taken. Those who passed on what they knew did so for a variety of reasons. There was dissatisfaction with the wave of extreme violence from those who felt that an opportunity for peace had been lost earlier in the year. A revulsion to it all was in others. Internal feuds and power-plays were also at work. British agents also had blackmailed another informant.

Three of those informants died during January 1995 with a fourth coming damn close to suddenly losing his life. The killings took place in both Ulster and on the mainland. The IRA kidnapped those informants and set about torturing them during ‘debriefings’ before murder occurred. Police officers rescued the fourth but couldn’t save the other three. Further informants, including ones not involved in the recent British operations, found themselves suddenly swept up and taken away for their own safety. That blew the cover of many of them meaning that they were useless in the future and their lives would forever be in danger. It saved them from being snatched from their homes and dying horribly though. The IRA did have their names on-hand. In one of the most significant and damaging security breaches that British operations in Ulster had ever suffered, the identities (and activities too) of almost all of their undercover agents – working for the police, the military and MI-5 – were revealed to the IRA. A list was provided to them and it was extensive. MI-5 became aware late on that the identities of informants had been revealed yet coordinated the response, on prime ministerial instruction, to take away from danger all of those at risk. Counter-arguments were made that that might not be the best idea but Downing Street overruled hesitation: the idea of leaving those people to die rubbed Heseltine the wrong way once he fully understood the scale of the leak. Of course, he, like so many others, wanted to know who had leaked that information. Collating the various names from several sources, bypassing security, was something that would have taken a lot to do. The hunt was on for the perpetrators. It would take a few months but the ultimate outcome of the investigation would be the revelation that the HVA was behind it all. That was East Germany’s foreign intelligence arm, part of the Stasi. They had operatives in the UK who spied on Britain and were working with the IRA.

East German–IRA cooperation went back a good few years. The Soviets had never worked with the IRA – they did have contact with the smaller INLA though – but the East Germans had started to during 1991. There was no ideological connection between the two. IRA volunteers, the men and women who made up its ranks, knew nothing of the cooperation with the East Germans. It was leadership figures and key mid-ranking people in intelligence & logistics roles who were involved on the Irish end know knew the truth about where weapons stocks (smaller ones before the big ‘94 transfers) came from. From out of East Berlin, there weren’t any declarations of real support for the IRA. Comments were made in official statements about them and other terrorist organisations – ETA in Spain and various Middle Eastern entities – where there was a fight against ‘Imperialists and capitalists’, but it was never regarded as a big deal. In the background it was though. Honecker, his wife, Mielke and Schwanitz all approved of it all. Britain had been one of the foremost post-’89 opponents of the DDR and it was judged to be worth it in a strategic sense for there to be a distraction for the UK at home. There was too the emotional connection with regard to the IRA and many in the United States who had a romantic idea of Irish terrorism. British crackdowns caused problems in trans-Atlantic relations, which benefited East Germany in seeing opponents at each other’s throats. It also cost the DDR very little for it wasn’t like they brought those weapons they passed onwards.


What was sent to the IRA was miniscule in terms of what East Germany managed to extract from the former Eastern Bloc and the once component parts of the Soviet Union. There was a marked increase starting mid-1994 when governmental cooperation began in earnest yet before then, Stasi agents were working with illegal arms smugglers to commit wholescale thefts. Security at arms depots was in many places non-existent. Paper-work was fudged where inspections on stockpiles were made. On a few occasions, the missing stocks were noticed and inquiries were made. There were no East German fingerprints over the operations though, at least not at source. Belarus, Bulgaria and Russia all had leaders come ‘94 who were willing to work with the DDR to make things more official. Costs did go up though not to a level where it was unaffordable. Moreover, what military equipment was sent to East Germany was of better quality and in larger shipments than beforehand. There was additionally a level of legitimacy to that too. Western sanctions upon East Germany weren’t levelled by nations showing a friendly face to the Margot Honecker regime. They did what they wanted, what was in their interest to do, and the West could go do one!

East Germany didn’t gain new tank fleets nor large numbers of combat aircraft during the two separate stages of its Nineties armaments transfers. The shipments made either undercover or openly weren’t about that. Smuggling like that was impossible and so too was paying for it all either. The DDR would have liked to have improved it military in such a way but that wasn’t practical. What was mainly brought was ammunition and supporting equipment for systems in-place. The entire East German Armed Forces was composed of Soviet or Eastern Bloc produced equipment. The DDR had a small organic arms production set-up but nowhere near what was necessary to maintain the required force level that was deemed necessary to deter any future military action by the West. Missiles and rockets were brought into the country to provide stockpiles for existing launch platforms. High-tech sensors, aircraft engines, spare parts for tank fire-control systems… that was what East Germany got their hands upon. That said, East Germany did make the purchase come late ‘94 of a dozen Moldovan MiG-29 fighters (not the monkey-models, but the very best versions) and also twenty more OTR-21 short-range ballistic missile launchers. They already had such weapons in-service and paid for more of them to reinforce their fleets. Yet, Russia refused to see further sales of the longer-range OTR-23 ballistic missile of which the DDR only had a few but wanted more of: the range of them caused too much concern in Moscow. Even when there were official transfers, there was still some good old fashioned illegal smuggling though and that included a lot of what went to the IRA and various terror groups down in the Middle East. It was with that that a lot of those involved personally enriched themselves beyond what went on the state balance sheets. Chernomyrdin in Moscow, Belarus’ new dictator and the Bulgarian leadership that was infiltrated by the powerful mafia in that Balkan nation wanted to get rich. Several East Germans too found themselves making sure that their own Swiss bank accounts were bulging. Weapons were moved on to various external customers after the East Germans got their hands upon them where wars down in Africa would be fought with stolen weaponry that the Stasi had had its hand involved in seeing moved about.

Due to the East German links with both Libya and Iraq where there were exchanges of missile technology and also help from the each where all three were involved in various sanction busting, attention was shone on all of that through late ‘94 and into ‘95. Britain, France, Israel and the United States all had their intelligence services active. The two Arab countries were of most concern though the more East German involvement uncovered led to greater attention being paid to the DDR in what it was up to. There were informants who provided information in addition to what spies and communications intercepts could detect. The Israelis paid more attention to East German activity where they looked at the missile programmes of that country’s allies and saw danger. A team of Kazakh & Ukrainian missile engineers – skilled men who had lost their livelihoods when the Soviet Union fell – had been contracted by the DDR to work on a joint missile programme with the Libyans hosting the effort, Iraqi cash paying for a lot of it and the East Germans providing many of the components. That was interrupted by the Gaddafi-Saddam spat but then continued in ‘95.

Mossad got a man down into the depths of the Libyan Desert to have a look up close at what had been seen from afar through observation and what an informant had told Israel in secret. The missile programme was far more advanced than thought. Libya and Iraq would have regional strike capabilities, while the East Germans would get themselves a Europe-wide weapon themselves at the end of it all. The discovery was important in many ways down the line.

   Somewhat off topic but I did read back, about this period of time that many IRA informants were obtained by judicious use of terror.  The target would be contacted by some council officer or someone like that, possibly with regard to some compensation for some issue and would meet up and often receive some money.  Shortly afterward he would receive a visit by someone from the security services with pictures of the meeting and information that the guy was actually also a security operative.  So they would either work as an informant or their 'colleagues' in the IRA would be informed of the contact.  Since this would very likely mean their torture and death this successfully turned many into informants. Great to use the savagely and paranoia of such a terrorist group against them.

And this time there are three of them working together.

Thank you.
They inherited plentiful Soviet-era missile - so many Scuds and a few newer types - but are thinking long-term with the joint Arab programme. Western governments are now aware though and will want to react.




Nasty, but sounds very plausible. No laws broken and a whole bunch of rotten people get stuck in the sticky stuff.
What's not to like!?


Neither Iraq nor Libya will settle for a missile just with a big bang. They'll be desiring more.
East Germany's WMD programme is in an upcoming update. They'll have the tech and the knowledge, but will need the materials. How the West deals with that, along with everything else, will be the casus belli. 

Why do i have the feeling that the East German operation will backfire seriously.

How will this affect the Hong Kong and Macau handover by the end of the decade?