New York Times journalist Watkins writes with exactitude and compassion, digging deeply in archives to capture a high-stakes tale that played out internationally during the early 1970s, when the Northern Irish sectarian war against British domination (the Troubles) was at its brutal extreme. While the Provisional IRA received a new generation of recruits due to outrage following Unionist excesses like the \u201cBloody Sunday\u201d massacre, weapons were in short supply. With a sprawling cast, Watkins focuses on the \u201cPhiladelphia Five,\u201d a group of ordinary-seeming blue-collar Irish Americans with covert ties to the Republican cause, eventually \u201ccharged with trafficking hundreds of rifles to the IRA.\u201d But for years, their complicated multistate network maintained \u201cplausible deniability\u201d via involvement with NORAID, a charity outwardly devoted to aiding beleaguered Catholic communities: \u201cIt was a fragile arrangement, having a public-facing organization as the front for a decidedly illegal transcontinental gun-smuggling operation.\u201d Watkins ably captures the quirky personalities and gritty working-class backdrop of the American side, but she alternates it with the chilling narrative of how one smuggled rifle armed a young woman in Belfast in 1973, on an IRA mission ending with her own shooting and imprisonment. As Watkins notes, while the Troubles would endure for another 25 years, the brazen actions of the Philadelphia Five predictably provoked an unwelcome diplomatic firestorm: \u201cOfficials in Belfast and London had been making the case, nearly since the Troubles had started, that the majority of the IRA\u2019s arsenal came from American hands.\u201d And despite their cocky Irish patriotism, \u201cAs the boys in Belfast were fighting the British Army, the boys in NORAID were barreling toward their own confrontation, with the US Department of Justice.\u201d<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
New York Times journalist Watkins writes with exactitude and compassion, digging deeply in archives to capture a high-stakes tale that played out internationally during the early 1970s, when the Northern Irish sectarian war against British domination (the Troubles) was at its brutal extreme. While the Provisional IRA received a new generation of recruits due to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":2246,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2244","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2244"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2244"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2244\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2246"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2244"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2244"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2244"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}