By all appearances—in the ten years since immigrating to Philadelphia in 1959—Vinent Conlon had settled into life as an average Irish-American dad: a handsome, successful carpenter raising five children on a leafy street in the city. But this unassuming cover masked one of the IRA’s most enterprising, quietly ambitious operatives in America, a battle-hardened veteran who had taken control of a secret society of Irish rebels and reorganized it in service of the IRA’s cause.
And now, to his immense frustration, the people who were in charge of the army back home were squandering this opportunity—and, it seemed, every other one that fate had handed them.
Although Conlon remained a devoted IRA man, the army’s impotence had grown maddening. He had once maintained close friendships with elder IRA leaders, but by 1969 he could no longer ignore the fact that those at the top of the organization seemed content to let the IRA and its American satellite brigade simply limp along, ineffectual and increasingly irrelevant.
One of those old hands, Cathal Goulding, was the official who had first directed Conlon’s work with Clan-na-Gael in America, and across the 1960s the two had remained close. Goulding visited Philadelphia regularly; Conlon had even sided with him when the IRA went through a fraught reorganization in the early 1950s.
Back then, Goulding was the leader of the movement’s more militant faction. But in the run-up to 1969, the friends found themselves on different ends of a stark divide. Under Goulding, the IRA had grown less militant and less ambitious, more interested in Marxist politics than armed resistance.
This unassuming cover masked one of the IRA’s most enterprising, quietly ambitious operatives in America, a battle-hardened veteran who had taken control of a secret society of Irish rebels and reorganized it in service of the IRA’s cause.