I live in Latin America. As such, I am intimately aware of US dirty tricks over the last half century. I know people who were victims of CIA dirty tricks... None of this comes as a surprise to me...

It was just another St Patrick's weekend in Washington. The Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern presented shamrock to President George Bush, the Northern Ireland political parties continued to bicker over who is responsible for the latest impasse, and green beer was drunk by the gallon.

This weekend, however, a new cloud hangs over the legacy of the Troubles and the alleged role played in a number of deaths by both American and British security agencies.

The claim - if true - threatens a new political storm over how and why FBI officials and MI5 operatives conspired to supply deadly bomb-making equipment to the Provisional IRA in the early 1990s, mechanisms the paramilitary organisation later shared with Palestinian fighters.

Today in Iraq the same technology is being used by insurgents to kill and maim British and American soldiers.

Six months ago, when The Independent on Sunday first broke the story, the Secretary of State for Defence, John Reid, was forced into a humiliating retraction.

For weeks his officials had claimed that bombs which killed eight British soldiers in separate attacks in Basra had been supplied to foreign fighters by Iran's Revolutionary Guard.

Our story showed that the technology, far from being new, had in fact first been used in Newry, Co Down, in 1992 to murder a policewoman and maim her male colleague.

Kevin Fulton, a former soldier who infiltrated the IRA on behalf of the security services, made an astonishing claim: that he had flown to New York, met FBI and MI5 agents and was given money to buy an infra-red device to be used to set off IRA bombs.

The security services - already successful in preventing radio-signal bombs - believed that by supplying the equipment they could then introduce counter-measures.

"They knew the IRA was looking at the technology. By supplying the equipment, they thought they could stay one step ahead of the IRA," Mr Fulton told the IoS yesterday.

Following our article in October, an investigative journalist from the American magazine Atlantic delved deeper. And in an article to be published next week, Matthew Teague claims FBI sources have confirmed Mr Fulton's trip to the United States.

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