Sean O'Callaghan - Role As An Informant

Role As An Informant

In 1976, aged 21, O'Callaghan resigned from the IRA, and moved to London, where he married a Scottish woman of Protestant Unionist descent. For several years afterward, he ran a moderately successful mobile cleaning business.

During the late 1970s, however, O'Callaghan was the target of overtures by his former IRA colleagues, who wished him to rejoin the organization. In response, O'Callaghan decided to become an informer. In his memoirs, he cited his reasons as disgust over the IRA's fatal bombing attack on the yacht of Lord Mountbatten, which also killed several children. After rejoining the IRA, O'Callaghan heard allegations that the bombing was planned in order to obtain money from the Soviet military intelligence service, or GRU.

In 1979, O'Callaghan and his wife moved to Tralee, where he arranged a clandestine meeting with a local officer of the Garda's Special Branch. Inside Tralee's Roman Catholic cemetery, O'Callaghan expressed his intention to subvert the IRA from within. He insisted that he would only speak directly to his contact and would not be blackmailed into providing information. O'Callaghan explained that he would freely give whatever information was asked for, however.

At first, O'Callaghan's role was largely confined to preventing the IRA from committing armed robbery of County Kerry post offices and banks. Then, during the 1981 hunger strikes in the Maze, O'Callaghan successfully sabotaged the efforts of Republicans in Kerry from staging hunger strikes of their own.

In 1984, O'Callaghan informed his Garda handler of an attempt to smuggle seven tons of AK-47 assault rifles from the United States. The shipment had been purchased from the Winter Hill Gang, an Irish-American crime family based in South Boston, Massachusetts. The actual planning of the shipment was carried out by Patrick Nee, a South Boston gangster and staunch IRA supporter. The security on the American end of the shipment was handled by Kevin Weeks and Whitey Bulger.

Overseen by Bulger and Nee, the guns were loaded aboard the Marita Ann, a fishing trawler from Gloucester, Massachusetts. However, O'Callaghan had already briefed his handlers on the shipment. As a result, the cargo was intercepted by a combined force of the Irish Navy and the Garda Síochána. The Valhalla's crew was arrested by U.S. Customs agents immediately after returning to Gloucester. One of the crewmembers, John MacIntyre, agreed to wear a wire on meeting Bulger, Weeks, and Nee. After learning of MacIntyre's deal from FBI agent John Connolly, Bulger murdered him and buried him in a South Boston basement. Nee subsequently served a long sentence in the U.S. Federal Prison system for his role in the shipment. In his 2006 memoir A Criminal and an Irishman, Nee compares O'Callaghan to Judas Iscariot.

O'Callaghan claimed to have been tasked in 1984 with placing 25lb of Frangex in the toilet of a theatre in London At the time Prince Charles and Princess Diana were due to attend a benefit concert featuring Duran Duran and Dire Straits among other performers. A warning was phoned in and royal correspondent, James Whitaker noted later that the early departure of the Royal couple had seemed seemed rude at the time. The theatre had been searched before the concert and a second search following the warning revealed no device.

O'Callaghan escaped to Ireland despite being hunted by the British police and in 1985 he was elected as a Sinn Féin councillor for Tralee Urban District Council, and unsuccessfully contested Kerry County Council. He was in regular contact with its leaders, Gerry Adams (now TD for Louth) and Martin McGuinness (now MP for Mid Ulster).