Members of the Official IRA manning a barricade, the Bogside, Derry, April 1972. Getty Images.
In the early 1970s, as paramilitary and state violence escalated in Northern Ireland, British and American diplomats feared that the Soviet Union might take advantage of the crisis. Anglo-Soviet relations were decidedly frosty and the prospect of a Soviet embassy in Dublin created the alarming possibility of KGB agents using it as a back door into Britain.
