Talking to Terrorists: A Personal Journey from the IRA to Al Qaeda. Peter Taylor
in particular the right to wear their own clothes: in the longer term, Sinn Féin grew over the next thirty years to become the largest Nationalist party in Northern Ireland.
To his eternal regret, Brendan felt powerless to affect the course of the agonising second hunger strike. Michael Oatley had been replaced, and the ‘new’ IRA leadership apparently had little rapport with the person who took over from him (whom I cannot name for security reasons). Brendan believed that Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness ‘lacked experience at the time’ in dealing with the ‘Brits’. But even so, he thinks intervention would have made little difference. ‘It was a political strike, and Bobby Sands knew what he was doing. He went on that hunger strike to die. He set the agenda. It was a strike to politicise the people of Ireland. That’s what he set out to do, and that’s what happened.’
One of Brendan’s prize possessions is a ‘com’, a personal communication from Bobby Sands, written on toilet paper a few days before he died and smuggled out of the prison. As he read it to me, he found it difficult to hold back the tears. Sands wrote:
To you and yours. May I be permitted to say a last goodbye. If my passion is to mean anything may it mean peace and freedom for you and all of yours. And may I be permitted to say how much I appreciate all the efforts you’ve done on our behalf.
It was signed with Sands’ codename, ‘Marcella’, the name of his sister.
Michael Oatley was in Africa when Bobby Sands died. In April 1981 he had been posted to Salisbury (now Harare) in Zimbabwe, but before leaving he had made it clear to Brendan that he could be contacted at any time, although the back-channel relationship between the two remained purely informal. Throughout the 1980s, Oatley watched the conflict intensify and observed the rise of Sinn Féin. He returned to London in 1984 as MI6’s Controller Middle East, to which was added a year later Controller Counter-Terrorism. In 1988 he became Controller Europe, the largest of MI6’s Controllerates. Throughout this time he maintained an ongoing unofficial interest in the conflict in which he had invested so much. Brendan knew he was always there should his services be necessary, and sensed that at some stage the British would be back: ‘I knew it. It was simply a matter of waiting.’
The ten hunger strikers who died effectively achieved the political status for which they had so dramatically starved themselves to death. Almost a decade later, in 1990, I was allowed into the Maze to make a BBC documentary, Enemies Within. My producer Steve Hewlett and I were given unrestricted access to both IRA and Loyalist prisoners on the segregated wings of the ‘H Blocks’ (so called because of the configuration of the four wings in the shape of an ‘H’). It was an extraordinary experience. We were able to go onto the wings without any minders from either the prison service or the Northern Ireland Office, and my interviews were never monitored or recorded by the prison authorities. This remarkable access had taken me over a decade to negotiate. I finally got the green light after a meeting in London with the Northern Ireland Secretary, Peter Brooke. It was in the early evening, and he was wearing evening dress for a dinner he was due to attend. He said he trusted me not to abuse the privilege, and warned that if I did, I need never ask for any such facility again.
Steve and I spent several weeks inside the prison, getting to know and to gain the trust of the prisoners on both sides. We had had to clear the project with the Republican and Loyalist leaderships outside the prison, which wasn’t easy. The gaol was not the hell hole of Republican propaganda. It was more like a holiday camp, with the prisoners from both sides, now wearing their own clothes, effectively running their own wings. For the prison authorities it was easier that way, and they had little choice anyway. The prisoners on each wing had their own paramilitary command structure and hierarchy, unlike any other prison in the United Kingdom. Every lunchtime the inmates were locked in their cells for a couple of hours while the prison officers went off to have lunch, liquid or otherwise. Often we opted to be locked in with the prisoners, taking a rare opportunity to spend ‘quality time’ with ‘terrorists’.
Two encounters stand out for me. One was with a young IRA man from Derry, Eamonn MacDermott, whose father was a GP in the city. As I looked around his cell, I noticed the lines of literary classics on his bookshelves, from War and Peace to The Mayor of Casterbridge. ‘What’s an IRA man doing reading Tolstoy and Hardy?’ I asked. He looked me straight in the eye with an expression that, like his reply, I will never forget: ‘Because an IRA man is normal just like anyone else.’ When Eamonn was released he went on to become a journalist with the Derry Journal. In 2010 his conviction for the murder of a police officer was overturned.
Equally memorable, though in a different way, was my meeting with the Loyalist Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) prisoner Billy Giles, who was doing life for the sectarian murder of a Catholic workmate. He had shot him through the back of the head, and was full of remorse for what he had done. ‘It was quick and it was dirty and a guy lost his life,’ he told me, sitting on the bed in his cell. ‘I lost part of myself that I’ll never get back. I felt that somebody had reached down inside of me and ripped my insides out. You can’t stop it. It’s too late.’20 I met Billy again after his release. He looked fine, and seemed determined to make something of his life. But it was not to be. On 24 September 1998 he hanged himself, leaving a four-page suicide note. It concluded:
I was a victim too. Now hopefully I’ll be the last. Please don’t let any kid suffer the history I have. Please let the next generation live normal lives. Tell them of our mistakes and admit to them our regrets. Steer them towards a life that is ‘Troubles’ free. I’ve decided to bring this to an end now. I’m tired.21
Sadly, Billy Giles never lived to see the peace that he craved.
Most of the Maze has now been bulldozed to the ground, leaving a few buildings that are expected to become a centre for conflict resolution. But the memories will never be erased from the minds of those who were locked in there. Or from mine.
While filming in the Maze in the summer of 1990, I was aware from talking to the IRA leaders inside that a new political direction was gradually emerging. I was told that the armed struggle had gone as far as it could, and the time for politics and talks was not far distant. Brendan Duddy was ready, as was Michael Oatley with his ‘pipe’, which he admitted had ‘rusted up’ from lack of use during the Thatcher decade, at the end of which there seemed to be military stalemate.
At Christmas 1990, a few weeks after the transmission of Enemies Within, the IRA declared a Christmas ceasefire. It seemed that what I had picked up in the Maze was about to become real. Once again noises began to come down Oatley’s now rusty ‘pipe’, with the initiative coming from the Derry end. Word reached Oatley, now MI6’s Controller Europe, that Martin McGuinness might be interested in sounding out the ‘Brits’ after the Northern Ireland Secretary, Peter Brooke, had made this remarkable statement:
It is difficult to envisage a military defeat of the IRA. If, in fact, the terrorists were to decide that the moment had come when they wished to withdraw from their activities, then I think the government would need to be imaginative in those circumstances as to how that process should be managed . . . Let me remind you of the move towards independence in Cyprus. A British Minister stood up in the House of Commons and used the word ‘never’. Within two years there had been a retreat from that word.22
Brooke made other conciliatory noises too, no doubt intended for the IRA’s ears.
Oatley was due to retire in February 1991, and decided to visit Derry to say goodbye to Brendan after all they had gone through together. He was also aware that there might be revised thinking within the IRA leadership. ‘It seemed to be a pity just to walk away and leave it all as something one simply remembered,’ he told me. ‘It did seem that there might be a mood developing within the Provisional leadership where a political strategy, as an alternative to violence, might be something that they would consider pursuing.’ He got in touch with Brendan and a dinner was arranged, with Bernadette Mount acting as hostess and cook. The dinner over, there was a knock at the back door. Bernadette asked Brendan who it might be. ‘I forgot