The Soviet Union plotted to arm the Irish Republican Army in the early years of the Northern Ireland conflict, according to the published memoirs of Russian President Boris Yeltsin.
Britain's Sunday Times newspaper, which is serializing Yeltsin's book, said the KGB arranged a secret arms shipment to the IRA between 1969 and 1972 in an operation overseen by Yuri Andropov, who was later to become Soviet leader.Yeltsin's "The View from the Kremlin" quotes from KGB files about a plan for the IRA to pick up bundles of weapons dropped from a Soviet ship at a spot in the sea just north of the island of Ireland, the newspaper said.
The deal was set up using an Irish communist middleman in three years of painstaking negotiations between Soviet intelligence and the IRA, which in 1969 began its violent campaign against British rule in Northern Ireland.
The files are unclear about whether the plan actually went ahead, but Yeltsin said he believed it probably did, according to the Sunday Times account of the memoirs.
It said the arms negotiations were documented in eight memos from Andropov that show the Kremlin was worried about supplying weapons which might be traced back to the Soviet Union.
One memo dated Oct. 21, 1970 speaks of a draft plan to deliver 100 German assault rifles, nine machine guns and 20 pistols in a sea drop to be codenamed operation Splash.