3 Early Days in Pearse Street

If he is apprehended there is no way in which he can help you as he will not know these locations.

No.3. Our messanger is quiet prepared [for] the risk of being apprehended when he collects the money. Are you prepared to risk apprehending him? The decision is yours.

You will have received this letter by the end of November. On Saturday the 8th December we would like you to reply to us, once again through the Personal Column in the Irish Times. If you agree to pay the money you will simply state ‘Tom Smith has read your proposals and will agree to your conditions’. You will then recieve a letter early in January giving you details of how the money is to be paid.

However should this notice not appear as requested we will assume that you are not prepared to meet our demands and we shall then prepare to carry out our plans in due course.

Trusting this will not be necessary.

Yours sincerely.

As they said, the ball was back in our court. We were beginning to get some sort of a psychological profile on the gang, or at least on ‘Unsigned’, and it seemed to us that this was an intelligent, thoughtful, strategic person. Spelling mistakes apart – and these could have been down to his flaws as a typist – he came across as highly literate and probably well educated. But beyond that, we didn’t have much to go on. The Garda Document Section

checked for fingerprints, indentations in the paper, the kind of envelopes used, the typing paper, the typewriters they were using and the kind of typeface on the page. Our fingerprint experts turned up various fingerprints, but none of them were identifiable in any way. They noted the typing errors in the text, which indicated that the letters were not typed by a professional secretary.

I went back down to D’Olier Street and booked another ad, to appear as instructed in the newspaper on 8 December. ‘Tom Smith has read your proposals and will agree to your conditions.’ Underneath the message we added the reference number.

Things started to pick up pace now. Ten days later, on 18 December, Agriculture received another letter from the gang. This time it had a Dublin postmark. And in it they were demanding that the money be paid in the following quantities and denominations: £2 million in German deutschmarks; £2 million in Swiss francs; £1 million in Irish pounds. All the money ‘should be packed into one leather case’. They also asked that a diplomatic passport be issued and that a car, a white Mini 1000 with customised accessories, be used for the handover of the cash. And all of this was to be arranged by early January. Again, they asked that another ad be placed in The Irish Times, on 22 December: ‘Tom Smith has read your message and has agreed to your proposals.’

But we couldn’t continue with this carry-on. We had to make some sort of move. We had to try and put a bit of pressure back on them. So the top brass in the Gardaí and Agriculture came up with a different formula of words

for the ad, to try to rattle them and flush them out from the cover of their secret letters. This time ‘Tom Smith’ wouldn’t fully be playing ball with them. The wording in the ad on 22 December would read: ‘TOM SMITH has read your message but encounters difficulty – discussion is necessary.’ I went back down to D’Olier Street, gave them the wording, and it was duly published that Saturday.

Earlier that month, Jack Lynch had stepped down as Taoiseach and leader of Fianna Fáil. Charlie Haughey took over in both capacities and reshuffled the Cabinet. Ray MacSharry was appointed the new Minister for Agriculture. As I recall, neither Gibbons nor MacSharry became directly involved in the operational process around this case.

The different wording in the ad had the desired effect. The next day, a male caller rang the Department of Agriculture and asked for the Minister’s private secretary. But it was a Sunday; there was no one around bar a few telephonists and skeleton staff. So the caller left a

message: ‘Tom Smith, 300/79, will telephone at 3 p.m. Monday afternoon: very important.’ The caller was told that Monday was Christmas Eve and nobody would be working that day. He became very agitated and warned the switchboard operator to make sure that there would be somebody there on Monday to take the call. The Minister’s private secretary at the time was a man called Cassidy. He was immediately contacted at home; it was decided that he and two colleagues would be in the office when the call came and that the call would be recorded.

At 2.55 p.m. on Christmas Eve the switchboard operator in Agriculture saw an incoming call on the board. She heard three distinct pips, which indicated an international or UK call. She answered; a female voice with broken English spoke and asked the operator to hold for a call. The female then put the caller through to the operator. A male voice spoke and asked to be put through to the Minister’s private secretary. The conversation went as follows.

Male (M): Do you know anything about a notice in the Irish Times? Cassidy (C): I can’t hear you. M: Repeat above. What is the difficulty, please? C: Who’s speaking? M: Sorry, go ahead. C: Are you the writer of the letters? M: Yes. C: I’ll tell you why I’m asking you. You see we had three of them and two of them were in a different format to the third. Did you write all three?