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Hello and welcome to the Witness History Podcast from the BBC World Service with me Alex Lass.

And as part of a week of programs looking at the conflict in Northern Ireland,

today we go to the United States, a source of money and guns for the Republican cause,

to hear how an undercover FBI agent foiled a plot to supply weapons to the paramilitary group,

the IRA.

Our squad was the International Terrorism Squad,

and it had recently started up in about 1980.

We investigated a lot of Middle Easting groups, but we also had the IRA.

In 1981, John Winslow was the young FBI Special Agent in New York when he took on a new mission.

The way I got into it, we were in our office one day and somebody called out to me,

say, John, you want to do undercover in the IRA?

I said, sure.

Throughout the 1970s the provisional IRA had been waging a deadly campaign of shootings and bombings to force Northern Ireland out of the United Kingdom and create a United Republic in Ireland.

It was a conflict that costs thousands of lives and there was no end in sight.

To wage their campaign, the IRA needed weapons they secretly got crucial supplies

from the Libyan dictator Colonel Gaddafi who was not a fan of the British but from

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