Talking to Terrorists: A Personal Journey from the IRA to Al Qaeda. Peter Taylor
‘Perhaps one day it will be good to remember these things, through all their vicissitudes and endless ups and downs.’35 Brendan never saw ‘Robert’ again. He believes he became a ‘non-person’ because he had broken the rules.
I knew that somehow I had to find ‘Robert’ to try to get his side of the story. Did he really say what the Sinn Féin minutes recorded? Did he really send the infamous ‘conflict is over’ message with the killer words ‘we need your advice on how to bring it to an end’? There were many other things I wanted to ask him. But what was his real name – and where was he? Brendan did not know, and even if he had, he would have kept the confidence. It seemed an impossible challenge. Luckily I was working with a remarkable young researcher called Julia Hannis, for whom the word ‘impossible’ does not exist. We decided that the starting point had to be the Latin inscription in the book ‘Robert’ gave Brendan, and it was that which led me to him in the end. I can’t reveal the remarkable piece of detective work by which Julia found ‘Robert’, as it might lead others to do so. He lived some distance from London. I took a train, hired a car, and approached the house with my heart thumping. I knocked on the door several times. No reply. Tried again. Still no reply. The house seemed empty. I had a copy of my book Provos with me that I wanted to leave as a calling card. I had also written him a letter describing everything I had done with Brendan. I left them with a neighbour who told me the owner of the house was away on holiday, and would be back in a couple of weeks. I returned to London with an empty feeling inside. I knew I had to try again.
Two weeks elapsed, and then I retraced my journey. As I approached the house the weather was appalling, with rain sheeting down. I saw someone outside whom I took to be ‘Robert’, and explained who I was. To my astonishment he replied, ‘I’m afraid you’ve got the wrong man.’ I said politely that I was sure I hadn’t, and that I had come all the way from London to see him. He insisted that I was wrong, and that Brendan’s name meant nothing to him. I asked if he’d got the book and the letter I’d left with his neighbour. He said he had, and that he would let me have them back. He went inside, leaving me standing on his doorstep in the pouring rain. By now I felt like a drowned rat. He emerged with the book and said goodbye. I drove away crestfallen. We couldn’t have got it wrong – or could we? It was only on the long journey back to London that I realised that perhaps we hadn’t. If he really had not been the man I was looking for, surely he would at the very least have asked me in, out of politeness and curiosity, to dry off and have a cup of tea. He seemed that kind of man. But he didn’t.
In 2008, when I was making a documentary about Brendan for BBC2 called The Secret Peacemaker, I decided I had nothing to lose by writing to the man I still assumed was ‘Robert’ to ask if he would see me. I concluded by saying, ‘I suspect your answer will be no, and you may not even feel disposed to answer this letter. Dum spiro, spero . . . [While I breathe, I hope].’ But astonishingly he did reply, in a letter dated 6 March 2008, three weeks before the programme went out, although I didn’t receive it until long afterwards – it had, I assumed, been vetted by MI5 first. He wrote: ‘You guessed correctly in the final paragraph of your recent letter. I would not welcome a further meeting (though thank you for the good-natured way in which you proposed it).’ It was signed with his real name. The writing matched the signature in the book he had given Brendan as a farewell souvenir. It was a small consolation, but at least I knew we had got the right man. I recalled the translation of the Latin inscription that ‘Robert’ had written in the book: ‘One day it will be good to remember these things . . .’
The abiding memory of, and the wider lesson I learned from, my association with Brendan over the years and my investigation into the covert mechanisms behind the Northern Ireland peace process, is that apparently intractable conflicts can be resolved. The crucial prerequisites are that the ‘terrorists’ agree to end violence, and the warring parties are prepared to engage in a dialogue that may lead to some form of compromise. Northern Ireland offers a possible template for the resolution of other conflicts, which would inevitably involve states ‘talking to terrorists’. In the occupied territories, Hamas (the acronym for the Islamic Resistance Movement) would have to recognise Israel and declare an end to violence, while in Afghanistan the Taliban would have to engage in dialogue, end their insurgency and undertake to deny Al Qaeda access to its former training base in Afghanistan.
But what about Al Qaeda? After thirty years covering Northern Ireland, I’ve spent the decade since 9/11 investigating and reporting a very different form of ‘terrorism’. Al Qaeda is the subject of the rest of this book. What is it? Where did it come from? How did it evolve and change? How has the West responded to it, to what extent has torture been used to elicit intelligence, and what is the threat that it currently poses? Those are some of the questions I will endeavour to answer in the second and more recent part of my journey from the IRA to Al Qaeda.
Chapter Two
From the IRA to Al Qaeda
As I watched the Northern Ireland peace process move towards its close in the late 1990s, I never suspected that events unfolding thousands of miles away would determine what I was to do for the next decade. Little did I think that Al Qaeda would come to dominate my working life as the IRA had done for the previous three decades, and that I would be faced with the task of trying to understand and analyse a terrorist organisation that was very different from the IRA.
As the name Osama Bin Laden began to emerge in the mid-1990s, I was about to embark on a television trilogy for the BBC, Provos, Loyalists and Brits, which examined the histories of the three parties to the conflict, and was starting to write the three accompanying books. Al Qaeda was barely on my radar. I didn’t know at the time that the IRA was about to put itself out of business just as Al Qaeda was beginning to make its bloody and indiscriminate mark. I was aware of Al Qaeda’s existence, and had heard of Bin Laden from newspaper reports and mentions on radio and television, but I never took either seriously enough to think that I should start focusing my attention on them. I was too busy concentrating on whether the efforts and hopes of Brendan and Michael Oatley would finally bear fruit.
On the eve of Good Friday, 10 April 1998, I stood in the freezing rain outside Government Buildings at Stormont, where negotiations between Sinn Féin and Northern Ireland’s other political parties were balanced on a knife-edge. I remember watching through the distant windows as the silhouetted outlines of Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness paced back and forth, deliberating whether enough was on offer to enable them and their Sinn Féin and IRA comrades to do a deal. I noted in my diary that I didn’t sleep for thirty-six hours, not wishing to miss the dénouement of the events I had covered for the previous twenty-five years. I tried to catch some sleep in the middle of the night, lying on the floor of the press tent, and being awakened by the booming voice of the Reverend Ian Paisley, obviously far more wide awake than I was, who swept in and declared that as far as he was concerned, the talks were doomed, and he was not going to be party to any agreement with Republicans and the IRA.
The historic Good Friday Agreement (or Belfast Agreement) was signed after long and tortuous labours through the night between Tony Blair, the Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern, and Northern Ireland’s political parties. It was a remarkable achievement. Essentially, the compromise was that the IRA and Sinn Féin recognised partition as the political status quo, and agreed to share power with Unionists in a devolved assembly and government at Stormont. This did not mean that in the longer term they had to abandon their historic aspiration to achieve a united Ireland; the difference was that now they agreed to pursue it via political, not violent, means.
Two fundamental principles underpinned the Agreement: first, that any change in the constitutional status of Northern Ireland could only be implemented following a vote in favour by the majority of its citizens; second, that all parties were committed to use ‘exclusively peaceful and democratic means’.1 These cardinal principles were a vindication of all that Brendan Duddy and Michael Oatley had impressed upon the IRA over so many years. The IRA, despite great reluctance in many quarters, finally came to accept them.q In return, Unionists agreed to share power with the Nationalist Social