Brian “The Dog” Keenan was once described by a Government official as “the single biggest threat to the British state” but even a decade before his death his powers were greatly diminished.

The Provisional IRA leader and international arms dealer told a rally in 1996 that activists should not be confused about the course of the peace process: the only thing that would be decommissioned was the British state, he said to approving cheers.

That speech was made at a time when the Provisionals were insisting that they would never get rid of even an ounce of their Semtex – a condition of making peace and getting into government.

One of Keenan’s last public appearances was a year ago when he sat in the public gallery of the Stormont Parliament, accompanied by other members of the IRA’s Army Council and just a few feet away from Tony Blair, to watch Gerry Adams, his mentor, going through the formalities of power-sharing with Ian Paisley, the Nemesis of the Provos.

By then the Provisional IRA had declared its war over, had decommissioned and its political wing was administering British rule in a part of Ireland.

To talk of a life’s work left in ruins is an understatement.

Born in Swatragh in rural south County Londonderry in 1940, Keenan joined the republican movement in his early twenties. His father was in the Royal Air Force and Keenan had left home at 16 to go to England to find work as a television repair-man.

He was always portrayed as an uncompromising revolutionary Marxist, a man with extensive contacts in the Middle East and former Iron Curtain countries, although his decision to switch camps and defect from the Official IRA, led by the communist Cathal Goulding, to the Provisionals puts much of this into question.

In a 1988 IRA prison journal, writing under the pen-name Pow-Wow, he said that his political inspiration derived from neo-colonial struggles of South and Central America.

By 1971 he was Belfast quartermaster, rising two years later to quartermaster general, in charge of the Provisionals’ arsenal. He was the first to realise that Colonel Gadaffi of Libya would be an enthusiastic donor of weaponry to the anti-British cause. He travelled to Tripoli and negotiated with the Libyan dictator the supply of weapons and finance.

He was a loyal supporter – described once as “a roving ambassador” - of Adams, touring Ireland to convince members of the need for the 1977 reorganisation of the IRA into tight cell-like structures – active service units – to resist the debilitating effect of informers.

By 1977 Keenan was the IRA’s director of operations, responsible for the conduct of its operations in Britain and Europe, having masterminded the detonation of a 200lb landmine under the car of Sir Christopher Ewart-Biggs, the British Ambassador to Ireland, six months earlier. The ambassador and a civil servant, Judith Cook, were killed instantly.

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