Mrs Margaret Thatcher's government knew weeks in advance of IRA plans in Gibraltar before three members of the group were killed there by the SAS in 1988, a book published today claims.
The Thatcher government always denied that the IRA trio had been killed in cold blood while trying to surrender.
But A Secret History Of The IRA, written by journalist Ed Moloney, suggests the operation was intended to give a "bloody nose" to the IRA, after an attempt on the life of Sir Geoffrey Howe when he was British Foreign Secretary.
The books says the IRA came within a whisker of assassinating Mr Howe - now Lord Howe - but were foiled by British intelligence.
The IRA planned to bomb a British military band in Gibraltar but would open its new campaign of violence by blowing up the foreign decretary during one of his regular visits to Brussels for meetings of NATO and European ministers.
Crucially, the organisation discovered a regular pattern to house movements in the city and a plan was devised to kill him by means of a remote controlled bomb placed in a car parked at the side of the street. When the minister's car passed, the bomb would be detonated in an operation that Mr Moloney claimed was approved by the IRA leadership.
He said the IRA team charged with carrying out the mission arrived, but Mr Howe's car, for the first time in months, failed to turn up.
The IRA concluded that British intelligence had discovered the plan and changed Mr Howe's itinerary. Moloney said the bomb was dismantled and left in a lock-up garage in Brussels where Belgian police found it in January 1988.
But Mr Moloney believes it "puzzling" that despite knowing of the plot, the British did not attempt to move against the IRA in Brussels.
Given what subsequently occurred in Gibraltar on March 6th, 1988, when the SAS gunned down three IRA members, Mr Moloney suggests Mrs Thatcher knew weeks in advance about the IRA's plans and wanted to give them "a bloody nose" in the streets of the colony.
Moloney said at a press launch for his book in London: "It raises the question, was Gibraltar therefore a set-up? The suspicion is that if British security forces wanted to strike a blow against the IRA, to do it in Brussels would have caused so many diplomatic and political problems that they may have opted to do it in Gibraltar instead".
The book, published by Penguin, also names Gerry Adams as the IRA's Belfast leader and charts his transformation from "hawk" to peacemaker.
Mr Adams categorically denies being a member of the IRA.
The author said: "There are elements of Mr Adams's character that some people will find distasteful - his ruthlessness for example - but it was probably that ruthlessness which enabled him to push forward the peace agenda".
PA