Historian, Thomas Mahon, With the aid of a former FBI code breaker, Jim Gillogly, has spent the past few years breaking the IRA's secret communications code, used to pass messages back and forth between Ireland and America from the 1920s until th e1960s, the results are explosive.From discussions about mundane matters to considerations of deals with the USSR and China, the IRA letters delve into just about every matter concievable for a terrorist organisation. Some of the ideas are harebrained or cracked but some like the proposal to source gas for use in Ireland are dangerous and unnerving.With the eye of a historian and the tools of a professional code breaker, Thomas and Jim have together created a wonderful and engrossing read.

Tom Mahon is originally from Dublin, though his grandfather was Tom Crofts from Cork, a well know IRA and Fianna Fail personality of the time. Tom graduated from UCD as a medical doctor in 1983, becoming a Fellow of Royal College of Radiologists in 1988 and in 1993 a member of the American Board of Radiology. He is a consultant radiologist in Hawaii, where he lives with his wife and 10 year old son Tommy. He has been researching the IRA for a number of years at archives throughout Ireland. He started working on these documents in the autumn of 2004 before making contact with Jim early in 2005. One of the foremost crytologists in the USA, Jim Gillogly has had a long history with both computers and cryptology. He has worked at RAND, gained a PhD from Carnegie Mellon University and cracked some of the world's most mysterious codes.