The Yank: The True Story of a Former US Marine in the Irish Republican Army

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He believes some people in IRA leadership positions ensured the organisation's objectives could not be achieved.

Mr Crawley also reveals the inside story of how the huge cache of IRA weapons were seized after being transferred from a US vessel, the Valhalla, to the Marita Ann in the Atlantic Ocean after it was boarded by Irish authorities in 1984. Despite his misgivings about the Good Friday Agreement he is also clear that he does not support conflict. Technically Recon wasn’t Special Forces but special operations capable. The Marines preferred to keep Recon assets within the Marine Corps and did not want to share them with other branches of the service. Therefore, they wouldn’t officially join the Special Forces community in the US military command structure until 2006, when a contingent of mostly Recon Marines was renamed Marine Special Operations Command or MARSOC. MARSOC is now an integral part of the Joint Special Operations Command. Straightforward and unsentimental…Crawley provides enough context to understand the realities on the ground in the Ireland of the 1980s.” — Shelf Awareness I had been trained in the US Marines to recognise a wide variety of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and Warsaw Pact weapons, tanks, artillery and planes.

Lives lost

The Yank] reads like a movie script, full of mobsters, smuggling, sabotage, and murder....One thing it doesn’t have, though, is doubt." — The New York Daily News Crawley was born in Long Island, New York, in 1957, the son of a Co. Roscommon father and a Co. Kerry mother. Two years later the family moved to Chicago and, in 1972, John moved to the town of Castlerea, Co Roscommon, to live with an aunt. He notes in his book, with what I suspect is a degree of pride, that his great-uncle, Tom Crawley, shot dead RIC Sergeant James King, in Castlerea on 11 July 1921, and that the King incident saw the last shots being fired in the Irish war of independence. Partly out of curiosity and partly to keep Mike happy, I went to see a Marine recruiter. I told the recruiter that, although I thought the Marines were good, I wanted to go for Special Forces and the Marines had no such unit.

Its skipper was Mike Browne. Mike and Bob expertly steered their respective fishing boats on a heading into the wind without banging together while John made more than a dozen trips over eight hours. The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power. By now, the ceasefire had collapsed, so Crawley’s operation was live. Then in July 1996, an armed team of SO19 police raided his safe house, firing tear gas through the windows and blinding their IRA targets with ‘ambush lights’ mounted outside. He believes both IRA operations he was convicted for, a decade apart, were compromised by more than one informer.

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While in the states he was introduced to James 'Whitey' Bulger, who at the time was one of the most ruthless mobsters in Boston. Q: Your training in the United States Marines during the 1970s provided you with an expertise that often left you at loggerheads with the IRA leadership once you had joined to become a soldier for them. To what do you ascribe their counterproductive stubbornness in ignoring your professional advice? Weapons were often decades old. Telescopic sights were routinely out of alignment. Marksmanship was substandard. The former IRA man explains how at times he had to "walk on eggshells" when around Bulger, who once asked him how to make an under-car booby trap bomb.

That clinched it. I asked to see the guarantee I would be sent to Recon training after boot camp. A contract similar to what the army was willing to offer me. You see, here's the thing, they mightn't have got a guy onto the 'Army Council' who was actually an informer, but they got an informer so close to him that they were finding out everything that went on. On arrival in Ireland, Crawley brought with him, ‘Semper Fidelis’ (Always Faithful), the credo of the Marine Corps, which he adopted as a life motto. He had always been proud of, and faithful to the American Republic and, after becoming a member of the IRA, he remained equally faithful to the Irish Republic that had been declared on Easter Monday, 1916.

JC:I have a substantial outline of a novel I have been working on. It is also about the conflict between the IRA and the British, but I can be more forthcoming aboutcertain aspects of the war as it isin fiction form based on real events. I expect to be busy with marketing and publicity with THE YANK for a month or so after its release. I then hope to spend most of my time concentrating on finishing the novel. I would not have joined the IRA if I had have known that core members of the IRA leadership weren’t on the same mission I was on The next day, though, the IRA called its second ceasefire. Crawley was transferred to Portlaoise Prison and eventually released as part of the peace process. With the Provisionals stood down, Crawley ‘retired’ from the IRA. “People say I should be grateful for the Good Friday Agreement, but I’d be more appreciative if the IRA hadn’t been riddled with informers and we weren’t caught in the first place.” Being ‘grateful’ for the Good Friday Agreement, might mean him “being grateful to the people who set me up”. The crew from the Irish fishing trawler lined the gunwale of their boat. I didn’t recognise any of them.