Good guys, of course, need bad guys, and the McMahon family, which was just one generation away from Ireland, considered members of the Irish Republican Army to be in the latter group. They were not only lawbreakers, McMahon's dad would say, but were the worst kind: cold-blooded killers. And that's the way McMahon saw it even as he began a career as a federal probation officer in the late '70s. FBI good, IRA bad. Simple.
And dead wrong, he now says.
A strange thing has happened to McMahon during the past dozen years: He's come full circle, his illusions crushed by his close relationships with both the FBI and the IRA.
He says he found out he was mistaken after seeing the FBI's corruption firsthand as a federal officer -- including its use, and protection of, murderous informants. He also saw the stone wall of silence that sometimes allows the Bureau to cover up wrongdoing. McMahon, who'd once been a rising star in the probation office, was fired by the federal government in 1990 for giving seemingly benign information about a closed case to a book author. You don't mess with the stone wall.
"I was definitely disillusioned," he says.
When he was fired, he'd already begun studying Irish history and then took something of a pilgrimage to the land of his forefathers in 1989, where he saw, as he puts it, the "terrible beauty" of Northern Ireland. He visited with IRA prisoner Sean Lynch in Belfast, and the experience opened his eyes to the complexity of the Troubles.
"I saw the atrocities that were being committed against the Irish Catholics in Northern Ireland," says McMahon, now a Fort Lauderdale private investigator. "I saw the siege mentality that the people growing up there were living under."
Does he condone the IRA's use of violence?
"I'm in favor of a united Ireland," he says. "Did George Washington and the American Revolutionary people have to use violence? When you're dealing with the British, they aren't giving up their possessions without a struggle. Do I advocate violence? No. That would be a crime to advocate violence, but I understand it."
And it is from this rather unique perch that McMahon sees the FBI's current Irish gunrunning case in Fort Lauderdale. The case of four co-conspirators buying more than 90 guns in the U.S. and trying to ship them to Ireland has made headlines throughout the world and threatened the ongoing peace talks in Belfast. Last week the case intensified when U.S. prosecutors topped off the gunrunning case with charges of terrorism and conspiracy to "murder and maim" people in Northern Ireland.
McMahon again has sided with Irish prisoners. He accepted a court appointment to investigate the case on behalf of Siobhan Browne, a 34-year-old, Republic of Ireland-born former stockbroker charged with illegally mailing guns, terrorism, and conspiracy.
Browne would seem as unlikely a terrorist as McMahon is an antigovernment agent crusader. While she holds both American and British citizenship, she's never even set foot in Belfast, McMahon says. In her 20 years in America, at least a decade of them in South Florida, she's led a relatively untroubled life, free of criminal charges. Early last year she quit her job and moved into a condo in Weston with her boyfriend, Anthony Smyth, himself a long-time South Florida resident who hails from Northern Ireland and also has no previous criminal record.
Browne's FBI-alleged role in the caper is simple: In a reckless spree, she and Smyth bought more than 90 guns between them in their own names, and some of them wound up, via the U.S. mail, in Ireland. She was also known to associate with Conor Claxton, a 26-year-old, Northern Ireland-born intrigue artist who is accused of mailing to Dublin some of the guns Browne and Smyth bought.
When Claxton was arrested just before dawn on July 26, 1999, in his Deerfield Beach motel room, it broke the case wide open, according to FBI reports. In the room agents found a how-to kit on becoming an IRA operative. There was a book entitled The Modern Identity Changer, another publication called Pro Sniper, and a pamphlet on "covert communication techniques of the underground."
Claxton allegedly told FBI agent Mark Hastbacka that he was an IRA member working for a "higher-up." According to the FBI, Claxton said the guns were to be used against police in Britain and Northern Ireland, along with Protestant paramilitary forces. Why? "Claxton's rationalization for sending the weapons back to associates he would not name in Ireland was that the Protestants were not negotiating a peace agreement in good faith," Hastbacka wrote in his report.
McMahon defends Browne's role in the plot by saying, quite correctly, that the government hasn't produced any evidence that physically ties Browne to the actual mailing of weapons. Her purchase of the weapons was legal. But the evidence, taken as a whole, makes it clear that Browne was intimately involved in something, and it involved Claxton and the illegal sending of guns to Ireland.
Beyond that, answers have been hard to come by on both sides of the Atlantic. After the U.S. arrests, several suspects were apprehended in Ireland, but most of those suspects have either been cleared or at least released from jail. The four arrested here remain in prison without bond. While the arrests have obviously strained the peace process, they haven't stopped it. The baffling case, in its grandest sense, hinges on the boasts of a 26-year-old with loose lips, who put his trust in two untrained, easily caught amateurs. While it is dangerous to make any assumption about the IRA's world of secret allegiances and concealed motives, it has been often remarked both here and abroad what a clownish operation it was. "If the IRA had nobody better than Conor Claxton to carry out their clandestine missions, then they should just fold up their tents," McMahon declares.
But the U.S. government, led by federal prosecutor and former high-ranking Justice Department official Richard Scruggs, was more than willing to make broad assumptions about the case, most of them based on Claxton's interview -- which wasn't tape-recorded. In a hearing shortly after the arrests in July, Scruggs sweepingly declared that this was the work of the IRA and was meant to destabilize the ongoing peace process. Scruggs' words -- which were uttered during his successful attempt to keep Browne and the others held in jail without bond -- were reported as gospel by newspapers around the world. And the inflammatory news about the IRA's importation of guns made certain that the peace process was indeed threatened.
Shortly thereafter the IRA's leadership denied that it "sanctioned" any gunrunning. But it wouldn't deny that an unauthorized faction of the IRA may have been responsible for it. This omission seemed to support what many believed: that some IRA renegades were off on their own, which is nothing new. Splinter groups of the main Provisional IRA (PIRA) have formed new alliances dedicated to destroying the peace talks. Paramilitary factions from the Protestant, British-loyal Ulster Unionist side are also bent on destroying the peace process.
But Scruggs has remained publicly convinced that the PIRA is behind it. Scruggs intensified his prosecution last week with the filing of charges of terrorism and conspiracy to commit murder, which could put the alleged conspirators in prison for life. While the government clearly has an obligation to enforce gun-exportation laws in the U.S., taking the extra step into the realm of terrorism allegations, McMahon argues, shows that Scruggs is playing politics. The FBI's terrorism task force helped investigate this case. FBI Director Louis Freeh has said the goal is to respond to "acts of terrorism against the United States and its citizens wherever they occur." Freeh said nothing about protecting British soldiers and police and Protestant guerrillas in Northern Ireland. The IRA isn't even listed as a designated foreign terrorist organization by the Department of State. So why is Scruggs going out of his way to heap terrorism charges on people who clearly had no criminal intent against Americans?
Scruggs didn't respond to New Times' requests to answer that question. McMahon, however, believes he knows the answers. The deepest reason, he says, is that the U.S. has always backed its strong ally, Great Britain, in Ireland and always will. If it were the other way around, he notes, the U.S. would consider IRA members to be freedom fighters.
Another reason for the U.S. zealotry, according to McMahon, is that the FBI is hungry to justify the infusion of tax dollars it's received to fight terrorism, an annual budget that has grown from $78.5 million in 1993 to $301.2 million in 1999.
McMahon also finds answers in a look at Scruggs' background. Scruggs formerly worked as a special assistant to Janet Reno in Washington, D.C. It was Scruggs who wrote the official report in 1993 that definitively stated that no incendiary device was used by the FBI during the Waco siege. The report, of course, has since been proved wrong. McMahon's point: Scruggs has missed key facts before, and he's doing it again in the Irish case. Contends McMahon: "It was obvious from day one that he was politicizing this case without having the facts."
And politics, McMahon surmises, is exactly what the case will ultimately boil down to. He is certain that Scruggs will introduce British and Protestant witnesses at trial -- which is still months away -- to describe atrocities committed by the IRA to move the jury to convict. McMahon says he also plans to find experts who can describe atrocities -- ones committed by the British and Irish Protestants.
The situation sets up an interesting scenario should the peace process still be on track at the time of trial: While there is talk of peace in Belfast, a war of words will be waged in Fort Lauderdale.
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