Talking to Terrorists: A Personal Journey from the IRA to Al Qaeda. Peter Taylor
become ‘collateral damage’ in the alleged ‘shoot to kill’ policy.
We finally came to a halt, and I was told I could come out from under the blanket. I was ushered inside a derelict, isolated ‘IRA safe cottage’. The room was bare, with only an old sofa and a peat fire smouldering in the corner. I was met by three or four IRA men wearing balaclavas and armed with AK-47s. One of them said, ‘I know you, but you don’t know me. We met in the Maze.’ I’ve often wondered who he was, but I never found out. It was probably best that I didn’t. In one corner of the room was an ancient Alba tape recorder, the kind that you would once have found in Woolworths. After some technical problems with the machine, not surprising given its age, I was played a brief section from each of the three interrogations. Chillingly, each began with the sound of a spoon striking a saucepan, which was the signal to start ‘conferring’. The voices of the men making the confessions sounded disembodied and stressed, and I suspected they had been elicited under some form of torture. I asked if I could take the tapes away with me. The answer was no, but I was assured that I would get them in due course. I was then driven back across the border, again under the blanket, this time thinking that I’d come so close to getting the tapes, but failed to return with them. Had all this been for nothing?
Some time later it turned out that my hazardous journey had not been in vain, when the redacted tapes and the IRA’s redacted transcripts of them were duly handed over to me after another trip to Dublin. At last I had the material for the documentary. And were Starrs, Burns and Dignam really informers? I suspected that they probably were. Ironically, it was later speculated that the leader of the IRA team that interrogated them was probably the British double agent, codenamed ‘Steak Knife’, who was the alleged head of the IRA’s Internal Security Unit, better known as the ‘nutting squad’.
When ‘Robert’ returned to Brendan’s house from the Bogside with Martin McGuinness and Gerry Kelly, they adjourned to the room where Brendan usually held his business meetings. ‘Robert’ began by outlining the government’s position, and trying to reassure McGuinness and Kelly that there would be no repetition of what happened during the truce in 1975, when the ‘new’ Provisional leadership under Adams and McGuinness believed the Brits had tricked them. On the Republican side, McGuinness did most of the talking while Kelly took notes. Sinn Féin’s account of the meeting, based on Kelly’s notes and the Republicans’ joint recollection of what was said, is remarkable. When I later read it, I was astonished at one particular paragraph that purported to record what ‘Robert’ told the Republican delegation (the emphasis is mine):
Any settlement not involving all of the people North and South won’t work. A North/South settlement that won’t frighten unionists. The final solution is union. It’s going to happen anyway . . . The historical train – Europe – determines that. We are committed to Europe. Unionists will have to change. This island will be as one.31
Even allowing for a degree of accentuating the positive on the part of McGuinness and Kelly, I could not believe that ‘Robert’ had actually said this. But Brendan, who was present, assured me that he had. He went on to tell me that ‘Robert’ had also emphasised that the British government would never abandon the Unionists, nor would it become an advocate for a united Ireland. I later asked Sir Patrick Mayhew about the meeting, and what ‘Robert’ had allegedly said. Sir Patrick had had no knowledge of it until many months later: ‘If it was true, it would have been dangerously and damagingly outside the remit. It may have been an expression of this man’s personal views. It was certainly not an expression of the views of the British government or fulfilment of anything he’d been authorised to do or say.’32
Sir Patrick and the Prime Minister, John Major, were kept in the dark about the meeting until news of it burst onto front-page headlines in the Observer eight months later, on 28 November 1993, when Belfast journalist Eamonn Mallie ran his scoop that the British had met the IRA. Presumably the story was leaked by Sinn Féin. This explains why on 1 November 1993, less than a month before Mallie’s scoop, Major had been able to tell the House of Commons in all honesty, ‘To sit down and talk with Mr Adams and the Provisional IRA . . . would turn my stomach.’33 His remarks followed the IRA’s bombing of Frizell’s fish shop on Belfast’s Loyalist Shankill Road a week earlier that killed ten people and injured fifty-seven. The news of ‘Robert’s’ unauthorised meeting caused Sir Patrick Mayhew acute embarrassment. But, fearing being fed to the lions when he faced the House of Commons, he was astonished to find that he got what amounted to a hero’s welcome. It was as if Honourable Members on both sides of the House were applauding a government that was prepared to take great risks for peace.
However, senior mandarins in London who were monitoring and guiding ‘Robert’s’ dealings with Brendan subsequently took a very different view. One of them told me that ‘Robert’ had ‘severely damaged’ government policy by having the face-to-face meeting. ‘Our whole strategy was to be straight with them [the Provisionals] and build up trust. We were “banging on” about no face-to-face meeting before an IRA ceasefire, and they couldn’t understand that because they’d already had one. It just made things more difficult.’34
Whether or not history would have been different had ‘Robert’ not broken all the rules and gone to the meeting, we will never know. Brendan had built up trust with the IRA not just in the two years or so since ‘Robert’ took over from Michael Oatley, but over almost two decades since he first nervously faced the IRA’s Army Council at the country house outside Dublin. Had the meeting in Derry not gone ahead, that trust would have been destroyed, with the result that the conflict may have gone on even longer, although it was destined to end at some stage, once both sides had tacitly agreed on what was possible. But it would still be almost another eighteen months until the IRA finally declared its historic ceasefire on 31 August 1994.
And what of Brendan? He remained in the loop until almost the end of 1993, when the ‘conflict is over’ message was revealed to the world, to the fury of McGuinness and the acute embarrassment of Sir Patrick Mayhew. Shortly afterwards, four very senior IRA men paid Brendan a visit at his home. I asked him who they were. ‘Think of four senior Republicans,’ he said, ‘and you won’t be wrong.’ I assumed that two of them would have been McGuinness and Adams. In an upstairs room, they grilled him ‘very intensively’ for four hours about the message, which they suspected him of having sent. He finally convinced them that he had not. His life was probably on the line, as there were suspicions that he might have been an MI5 agent. His wife Margo remembers seeing him afterwards. ‘He was very upset after that for a long time,’ she told me. ‘I still don’t know what happened.’ I asked Brendan if he was an MI5 agent. ‘I’m glad you asked me that,’ he said. ‘I am Brendan Duddy. Northern Irish. My own person in my own right. I didn’t have to be MI5 or MI6, and I never was.’ Did they ever try to recruit you? ‘Never.’ Did they ask you to join them? ‘No. Not my job. Nor did they ever ask me a question that would have put someone in gaol for the rest of their lives.’
After his interrogation by the IRA, Brendan’s role was over. McGuinness told me that the government had ‘abused the Contact to destruction’. By this time Brendan had had enough anyway. His role was finished, his self-appointed duty complete. I asked him why he had done it over all those years. Tears welled up in his eyes. ‘When you ask questions like that, I choke. I get emotional. I find it hard to answer.’ He paused as he tried to compose himself. ‘I had no choice.’ Then he broke down.
And ‘Robert’? Far from receiving the decoration Brendan thought was his due, he was, in Brendan’s words, ‘court-martialled’ for disobeying orders.
At what turned out to be their final meeting, ‘Robert’ told Brendan, ‘This is the last time you will see me.’ In what must have been an emotional farewell, he presented Brendan with a book: The Laurel and the Ivy, Robert Kee’s biography of the legendary nineteenth-century Irish constitutional nationalist Charles Stewart Parnell, who almost succeeded in bringing Home Rule to Ireland. The book is one of Brendan’s most