Word: british
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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McMullen, a burly man who is wanted by the British for terrorist bombing, first came to the U.S. in 1972 on a false passport. He worked as a doorman-bouncer at Wednesday's, an uptown Manhattan bar with a heavily Irish-American clientele. He bought guns with money embezzled by a barman - as much as $3,000 a week, he claimed. Mostly, McMullen said, he just strolled into gun shops, cash in hand, and bought whatever weapons he wanted, but on occasion the approaches got a bit dicey. Said he: "One night I'm standing at the door...
...tales of I.R.A. activities in the United Kingdom, to which he returned in 1973, are filled with incidents ranging from absurd to chilling. Five years ago, the I.R.A. was plagued by corruption and laxity, McMullen said. Once in 1974 he could not assemble a squad to bomb a British barracks in Northern Ireland because "Sean had to go to Mass and Seamus had to visit his mother and Kevin had to milk the cows. It sounded like one of those Irish jokes...
...leaders and new connections give the I.R.A. enough muscle to risk a long planned series of hits against members of the British royal family. The assassination of Lord Mountbatten last month, says McMullen, was only the first. Future targets include Prince Philip, Princess Margaret and Princess Anne. McMullen predicts bombings of both Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle, among other royal residences...
Skeptics think McMullen has at the least exaggerated portions of his tale to help peddle an eventual book. But it is indisputable that the British want him extradited for the bombing of a barracks near Liverpool. A San Francisco federal magistrate turned down the request on the ground that the bombing was a "political" act. U.S. authorities are now trying to deport him, and McMullen presumably will surface in San Francisco on Sept. 28 for a hearing...
European rebuttals to Kissinger's alarm bell demonstrated how strategic worries continue to look different from each side of the Atlantic. "We never thought you [the U.S.] reached to the sky," countered British Political Economist Andrew Shonfield. "And the fact that you now recognize that you don't, and that you also look back nostalgically to the moment you thought that you did, impresses you perhaps more than it impresses us." Added British Strategic Expert Laurence Martin: "I would prefer to say not that deterrence has collapsed, but that certain illusions which were perhaps justified in the days...