Читать книгу Talking to Terrorists: A Personal Journey from the IRA to Al Qaeda - Peter Taylor - Страница 8

Chapter One

Talking to the IRA

There are moments that stick in the memory forever. At the time you may sense their significance, but it’s only long afterwards that their real importance sinks in. Standing by a public telephone in a new shopping mall in the centre of Derry in 1998 was one of those moments.

I’d made sure that I had enough coins in case the conversation was long, but I suspected I wouldn’t be needing them. I remember the empty feeling in the pit of my stomach. The reason for my apprehension was that I thought that, after months of trying, I’d finally identified the shadowy figure, known only as ‘the Mountain Climber’,^b who for almost a quarter of a century had been the key link between Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, and the IRA. I was about to ring him to see if he would meet me. His name was Brendan Duddy.

I put the coins in the slot, and remember hearing them go ‘clunk’ one after the other. I held my breath as I heard the ringing tone. Then someone at the other end picked up the phone. I suspected it would be in an office, and tried to sound as composed as I could. I asked if I could speak to Mr Brendan Duddy. ‘Can I say who’s calling?’ replied the person on the other end of the line. I thought it best to be open and say who I was. There was a pause, and I was asked to hold. The wait seemed endless, as lunchtime shoppers filed past me. Then another voice came on the line. ‘Brendan Duddy speaking.’ I took a deep breath and told him who I was, again trying to sound composed and calm. I expected to hear a ‘click’, marking the end of the conversation, but I didn’t. ‘I’ve been waiting to hear from you,’ he said. I could scarcely believe what I was hearing. To my surprise, he was familiar with my work in Northern Ireland over the years. I asked if I could come and see him to have a chat. He said that would be fine. When? ‘Today?’ I asked. He suggested I go to Rafters, one of the restaurants he owned, and someone would come and get me.

I put down the receiver, let out a huge sigh of relief that must have been audible to the shoppers, and went off for a cup of tea to collect my thoughts. I had to work out what I was going to say, and how I was going to present myself, to a man whose identity and top-secret work were known to no one apart from the handful of IRA men and spooks with whom he had dealt over so many years. The identity of ‘the Link’, as Brendan became known, was one of Northern Ireland’s most closely guarded secrets.

I drove to Rafters, a modern, barn-like steakhouse on the edge of the city, sat down at a table and ordered some food, although I wasn’t hungry. I had too much on my mind. My meal arrived, and so did a young man who introduced himself as one of Brendan’s sons and asked me to follow him downstairs. That was the first time I set eyes on Brendan Duddy. He was discussing finance with a banker from Dublin. He stood up, greeted me with a warm smile and a handshake, and introduced me to the banker, his wife Margo and others sitting at his table as if he had known me for years.

His financial business done, Brendan suggested we go to his home, where we could talk in private. In the hallway we were met by Tara, a Great Dane of Baskervillian dimensions. We adjourned to Brendan’s ‘wee room’ at the back of the house, with a peat fire smouldering in one corner. Margo brought us cups of tea and biscuits – as I was to learn she had done on many occasions for IRA leaders and assorted spooks. Then Brendan began to talk, a facility he has in abundance. I stressed that anything he said would be off the record, and that I would never repeat or publish any of it unless he gave me the green light to do so.

His story was extraordinary – the stuff of fiction. But as I was to discover, this was fact, not fantasy. He said that the seeds of peace had been planted in the very room in which we were sitting. They had been ripped up and then replanted on numerous occasions down the years before they finally grew into what became known as the peace process. He told me how IRA leaders had been smuggled across the border for secret meetings with the British at the height of the IRA’s campaign; how his family had learned never to ask questions about what was going on in their home, and never to utter the names of some of the most wanted IRA men who had taken tea with the British under the Duddy family roof; and of how he’d known Martin McGuinness for around thirty years. As the night wore on, Brendan produced a bottle of Irish whiskey and started to pour. I don’t normally drink whiskey, but under the circumstances it seemed both impolite and impolitic to refuse. As the alcohol hit home, I struggled to keep my mind clear: I did not want to miss anything. I seldom use a tape recorder – I usually take notes – but in these exceptional circumstances I feared that the presence of a notebook and poised pen might inhibit the conversation.

At about 4 a.m. I must have been visibly flagging, unlike Brendan. I thought it was time to go, but after several whiskeys I did not want to drive back to my hotel. Brendan said his son would take me, and I could pick up my car later that day. He also said that I should meet his family and, crucially, his close friend and accomplice in the Link, Bernadette Mount, so I could get the full picture. I woke up in my hotel room, not surprisingly, with a headache, scarcely believing what I had heard the night before, and started to make notes of my recollections. Brendan rang and asked if I’d like to have dinner at Bernadette’s house that evening.

We ate roast lamb. Bernadette is not only a very good cook, but a remarkable woman. She later told me of how she had given bed and breakfast to IRA leaders like Billy McKee and Seamus Twomey, and their less notorious counterparts in the IRA’s political wing, Sinn Féin, like its President Rory O’Brady.¹ Brendan’s wife Margo and one of their sons were also at the dinner. It was a bitterly cold evening as we talked round the fire. I asked if there was ever any chance of my telling their astonishing story, knowing that the answer would almost certainly be no. The time was not right. The peace process was at an uncertain stage, and it would have been far too dangerous for Brendan to have broken cover at that time. But they said they would think about it, if the time ever came. Ten years later, it did.

Brendan Duddy was born on 10 June 1936 and raised in the city of Derry, on the very edge of the United Kingdom, on the border with County Donegal in the Irish Republic. In the late 1960s it was an impoverished and neglected place, as if its distance from Westminster relegated it to an inferior status. The majority of its inhabitants were Catholic, and considered themselves to be Irish, not British. Discrimination against Catholics was institutionalised in the political, economic and social fabric of the city, and the electoral boundaries were rigged in a way that guaranteed a Protestant majority on the council. Fourteen thousand Catholic voters elected eight councillors, while 9,000 Protestant voters elected twelve.² This reflected the gerry-mandering of Northern Ireland itself.^c The province is made up of roughly a million Protestant Unionists, who wish to remain part of the United Kingdom, and half a million Catholics, most of them Nationalists and Republicans who wish to be part of a united Ireland. Nationalists favour bringing this about by peaceful means, while Republicans believe that violence is justified to achieve the goal.

In Derry, broadly speaking, Protestants got the best jobs and the best houses. These glaring inequalities, largely ignored by Westminster, and about which the majority of citizens in the rest of the United Kingdom remained unaware and indifferent, were the dry tinder that led to the explosion of the civil rights movement in 1968 and the subsequent re-emergence of the IRA. Brendan was simply one of the thousands of Catholic victims of the system. ‘I had no work in Derry. There was no work,’ he told me.³ To fill the emptiness of the days he used to go running in the beautiful countryside outside the city with a friend, Bobby Daly, who was a bin man. ‘I was hoping that some day I might get a job as his assistant.’ That was Brendan’s dream.

London called him, as it had so many young Irish men and women in the past. ‘It was the feeling of being boxed in in Derry. No work. No home. No house. England was a different world.’ It was an alien environment for Brendan, but at least there were jobs there. He finally found work at the Bush factory in Ealing, ‘putting the little knobs on brown Bakelite television sets’. He’d been expecting a replication of the discrimination he’d left Derry to escape, and that the English would look down on him because he was Irish. When it came to overtime, he assumed there wouldn’t be any for him. But he was wrong. The way he was treated in England conditioned forever the way he thought of his fellow citizens on the other side of the Irish Sea. ‘I met a group of people who were honest, easy to get on with and fair to me.’ This, combined with the experience of learning the Irish language at the feet of the IRA veteran Sean Keenan, equipped Brendan to understand and interpret both sides of the conflict, and made him a valuable intermediary in the secret dialogue between the British government – via its spooks and diplomats based at the Northern Ireland Office residence at Laneside outside Belfast – and the IRA’s ruling Army Council.^d

Like many Derry men and women who leave the city, the urge to come home proved irresistible to Brendan. He returned, and opened a fish-and-chip shop in William Street, on the edge of the Bogside area where the majority of Catholics live. ‘I loved every second of it. I was the best, and still am. I understand potatoes. I understand fish.’ In London he had been earning £11 a week, and now he was making £10 or £12 a night. But the shop was more than just a chippie. It was a salon for the emerging leaders of the civil rights movement, who would discuss politics way into the night. Brendan never put the chairs on the tables. The teenaged Martin McGuinness was a regular visitor, not to take part in the greasy political salon but to deliver the sustenance for it through the back door, in the form of beefburgers from James Doherty’s butcher’s shop down the street. ‘He was an innocent, handsome young boy,’ Brendan remembers. ‘He’d come in with the box of burgers, put them on the counter and chat up the girls, and I’d say, “Come on, Martin, there’s work to do here.”’ Did he have any interest in politics? ‘Absolutely none.’

The chip shop endured turbulent times in the late sixties and early seventies, with regular riots on its doorstep as the increasingly radicalised Nationalist youth of the Bogside fought pitched battles with their hated enemies the police (the RUC) and the British Army. It was ironic that the army was seen as the enemy only a few months after British soldiers had intervened in August 1969 to defend Catholics from Loyalist mobs in Derry, Belfast and elsewhere. British soldiers were initially welcomed as saviours, but the honeymoon was soon over. The army referred to the opposition as the ‘Derry Young Hooligans’ (DYH). Margo and Bernadette both served in the chip shop, and regarded the street battles as entertainment. ‘We used to sit upstairs and watch,’ Margo remembers. ‘The riots were fierce, but you didn’t feel in any danger. It was good fun.’

But on 30 January 1972, the fun ended. The day became known as ‘Bloody Sunday’.^e Everyone knew there was trouble coming. The army had made its own controversial assessment. Three weeks previously, Major General Robert Ford, the Commander Land Forces (CLF), who had visited Derry on 7 January, wrote a secret memorandum to his boss, Lieutenant General Sir Harry Tuzo, the General Officer Commanding Northern Ireland (GOC). He didn’t mince his words: ‘I am coming to the conclusion that the minimum force necessary to achieve a restoration of law and order is to shoot selected ringleaders amongst the DYH after clear warnings have been issued.’⁴

The ‘enemy’ was ready too. By this time, both wings of the IRA – the Officials and the Provisionals^f – had grown in strength, their ranks swelled by anger at the British policy of internment (the arrest and detention without trial of hundreds of Catholic Nationalists, and far fewer Loyalists) and allegations of torture being used by the army to extract information from detainees. Martin McGuinness had now risen to become second-in-command of the Provisionals’ Derry Brigade. His former lack of interest in politics had been transformed by internment and what he saw on the streets of his city, where British soldiers were now seen by Catholics as the aggressors and no longer their saviours. Brendan had grown increasingly concerned at the potential consequences of a showdown between the army and the IRA. And so had his old friend, the police officer in charge of Derry, Chief Superintendent Frank Lagan, who was one of the few Catholics in the almost exclusively Protestant RUC at the time.

As tension in the city mounted in advance of a huge anti-internment march that was being planned for Sunday, 30 January, Lagan came to see Brendan to seek his help. ‘He said, “I’m terrified. The IRA must not be there. There must be not a gun in that area.” I said that was a tall order.’ Lagan waved his hand, smiled and said, ‘You can do it.’ Brendan did his best. He talked to both wings of the IRA, and got assurances that guns would not be in the Bogside that Sunday. He reported back to Lagan that, as requested, there would be no guns. But there were guns – in the hands of soldiers of the First Battalion of the Parachute Regiment. And they used them. The army said the para-troopers came under fire from the IRA as they deployed into the Bogside to arrest rioters, the ‘Derry Young Hooligans’, who had been stoning soldiers stationed at the entrance to the area. The paras returned fire at what they claimed were gunmen and bombers. As a result thirteen civil rights marchers were shot dead. In his epic report into the shootings almost forty years later, Lord Saville concluded that all the dead were unarmed and innocent.^g His definitive findings ran to 5,000 pages, took twelve years to produce and cost £195 million. I was relieved when I first read his summary, which confirmed much of what I had concluded in 1992 in my own investigation into the events of Bloody Sunday on its twentieth anniversary, and about which I had given evidence to Lord Saville’s tribunal sitting in the Guildhall in Derry. A senior member of the Official IRA in the city told me that some weapons had been left in the Bogside for ‘defensive’ purposes.⁵ I had concluded that there was at least one Official IRA gun in the Bogside, and that a single shot was fired at paratroopers. I had wrongly deduced that the Official IRA had fired first. Lord Saville’s report stated that the first shots were fired by the paras, and the Official IRA’s shot was in response.

The day after Bloody Sunday, Frank Lagan came to Brendan’s house again. Brendan was furious, having arranged, as he thought, the removal of all IRA weapons from the Bogside. Lagan was shattered, and had no explanation of what had happened or why. ‘This is an absolute disaster,’ Brendan told him. ‘We are going to have a war on our hands.’ That is precisely what happened.

Bloody Sunday was my introduction to the conflict in Ireland. I was then a twenty-nine-year-old journalist, most of whose previous TV experience was limited to reporting for Thames Television’s Today programme, presented by the legendary Eamonn Andrews. I covered local government, social issues and lighter subjects too – from the ‘pumpkin nobblers’ sabotaging a village’s ‘biggest pumpkin’ competition to a man building a flying saucer in the Berkshire woods, with his coalshed acting as Mission Control. I hardly felt equipped to cover what I found when I arrived in Derry late that Sunday evening after the shooting was over. By then I was working for Thames’s This Week programme – ITV’s Panorama. We’d been planning to cover the march that day with three film crews – one with the army, one with the marchers and one just floating, since it was clear that there was going to be trouble. But our plans were stymied by the militant television technicians’ union, the ACTT, which demanded danger money on such a scale that the company refused to pay. The plan therefore was called off.

I remember shivering in my London flat that cold Sunday afternoon, sitting on the night-storage heater to keep warm, when I heard the news that there had been shootings and deaths in Derry. My programme editor, John Edwards, and I spoke on the phone, and along with a phalanx of other journalists I caught the next plane to Belfast. I confess I had to look at a map to find out where Derry was, such was my ignorance of Ireland. Like most of my fellow citizens, and many journalists too, I was equally ignorant of the roots and history of the conflict. I arrived in Derry just before midnight and checked into a B&B. As I undressed to go to bed I glanced at the window, wondering if an IRA sniper had me in his sights. I smile when I think of it now.

The following morning I went down into the Bogside. I found a scene I will never forget. There was not a soul around. I could almost touch the silence. Fresh blood was still on the ground. Nervously, I started knocking on doors to try to talk to people. Being a journalist from a country whose soldiers had just killed thirteen of their neighbours, I expected a hostile reception, but I was surprised to find the opposite. People asked me in, and gave me tea, biscuits and buns. They were eager to talk, wanting the world to know what had happened. I met some members of the IRA’s Derry Brigade. They were not what I’d expected. They weren’t hooded or threatening. Many of them were the sons or fathers of the families I had been speaking to. They were part of the community, and now after Bloody Sunday they were seen more than ever as its defenders. I also interviewed the Provisionals’ Commanding Officer, who was adamant that they had removed all their guns from the Bogside. He was a nervous man with no great natural authority, and first had to make a phone call to the IRA high command in Dublin to check that he could do the interview. It was the first time I had talked to an active ‘terrorist’. I remember being acutely embarrassed before filming began when my producer insisted on combing my hair.

I watched a torchlit procession wind its way through the Bogside and up to the church on the Creggan estate on the hill above, where thirteen bodies were lying in their coffins. I was standing next to the Nationalist politician John Hume, who in 1998 would jointly win the Nobel Peace Prize with his Unionist counterpart David Trimble. John pointed out one of the mourners, and said he was someone I should talk to. It was Martin McGuinness. Shortly afterwards I met McGuinness in the disused gasworks in the Bogside which was a sort of IRA gang hut. It was a bizarre experience to meet a senior member of the IRA in such unlikely surroundings, within sight and range of British Army rifles stationed high on the city walls above the Bogside. The army had made a decision not to go into the areas dominated by both wings of the IRA. The twenty-two-year-old McGuinness was charming, articulate and impressive, and seemed terribly young. Even then his eyes, into which I was to look on and off over the next thirty years, had the capacity to harden at a moment’s notice, and seemed capable of taking you out at ten paces. He talked passionately about the ‘armed struggle’ and why he was engaged in it. To my surprise, at the end of our conversation he said he’d much rather be washing the car and mowing the lawn on Sundays than doing what he was doing. I believed him, although I thought that I shouldn’t. I never imagined that one day one of Britain’s most wanted ‘terrorists’ would become Northern Ireland’s Deputy First Minister.^h

* * *

The events of 30 January 1972 made Brendan Duddy determined to do all he could to help bring peace to his city and the province. ‘That feeling was as strong as it could be. It was not that I could fail. It was that I was going to do it. I think it came from years of running over the hills. You had to get there.’ After Bloody Sunday, the violence escalated as young men and women queued up to join the IRA. Retribution for the killings that day was swift and savage. The IRA, in which the Provisionals now made the military running, thinking they were close to achieving their goal of driving the British out of the North, declared that they were ready to call a ceasefire and talk peace. The British decided they had nothing to lose, and secretly took up the Provisionals’ offer, arranging to meet the IRA leadership – which included Martin McGuinness and Gerry Adams (belying Adams’ insistence that he was never a member of the IRA) – in the unlikely setting of fashionable Cheyne Walk in London’s Chelsea. The meeting, held on 7 July 1972, got nowhere. The IRA said they wanted the British out of the North on or before 1 January 1975. The Northern Ireland Secretary, William Whitelaw, later said that meeting and talking to the IRA was the greatest mistake of his political career. Brendan wasn’t surprised at the failure of the talks, as he felt the IRA leadership were living in cloud cuckoo land. ‘It was a disaster. “Brits out” politically couldn’t happen. I just said, “They’re crazy!” Nobody had taken the time to think what would happen to a million Protestant Unionists if the Brits left. It was their lack of understanding of politics.’ He was to spend the next twenty years trying to educate the IRA in political realities.

Two days after the fiasco of Cheyne Walk the ceasefire was over, and it was back to the ‘war’ with an even greater savage intensity. On Friday, 21 July, the IRA exploded twenty-two bombs across Belfast, killing eleven people and injuring 130. The disturbing scenes of the carnage, with charred body parts being shovelled into black plastic bags, could not be shown in their entirety on television. The IRA claimed that warnings had been given but not properly heeded. There were warnings, but they were hopelessly inadequate. I had been looking for an IRA contact the previous evening and was told he was at a meeting in a school in the Nationalist Andersonstown area of predominantly Catholic West Belfast. I went along, and stumbled upon what seemed to be a high-level gathering of the IRA’s Belfast Brigade sitting around a table and, I subsequently imagined, possibly finalising the plans for what became known as ‘Bloody Friday’. What happened shocked me, and shattered Brendan. ‘It wouldn’t add one centimetre to Irish freedom,’ he said. ‘When I was looking at that black bag, that was somebody’s mother, father or brother.’

By the summer of 1972, the British had decided that the army would have to enter the ‘no go’ areas not just in Derry but in Belfast and other places in the province that the IRA had made its fiefdom, and from which its units could operate with impunity. The government feared that moving into uncharted territory dominated by the IRA was potentially a recipe for disaster on a scale that would dwarf Bloody Sunday. Once again, Chief Superintendent Frank Lagan pressed Brendan into service. He told him the army was coming in with tanks and 5,000 men. ‘All the heavy stuff,’ he said. ‘We need the IRA’s guns removed.’ Brendan was understandably sceptical, given what had happened on Bloody Sunday, but Lagan convinced him that this was different. He went to Dublin to see Seamus Twomey, the IRA’s Belfast commander and member of the Army Council, and convinced him that his men would face overwhelming force, and the loss of life would potentially be great. He explained that the British had no objection to the IRA removing its weapons – presumably across the nearby border into the Irish Republic, where they would hang on to them. Twomey said he would do what he could. Shortly afterwards Brendan received a ‘mysterious’ visitor who told him that the weapons were ready for removal. When I asked him how this was brought about he was cagey, admitting that he had faced a desperate moral dilemma, given that some of the weapons had probably been used to kill people and might well be used to do so again. ‘I had two choices,’ he said. ‘Either do it or not do it.’ He decided to do it. All he would say was that the process wasn’t interfered with by either the army or the police.

On 31 July 1972, ten days after Bloody Friday, 12,000 soldiers with bulldozers and tanks moved into the so-called ‘no go’ areas across the province and re-established control. It was called Operation Motorman, the biggest British military operation since Suez.⁶ The IRA offered no resistance. For the moment, Brendan’s work was done.

A year later, Brendan’s life was to change forever. Although it was known to only a tiny handful of people, in October 1971 Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) had stationed one of its officers in the province alongside the diplomats living at Laneside. The IRA’s increasingly violent campaign clearly indicated the need for improved intelligence-gathering on those who were killing British soldiers and policemen, and bombing the hearts out of its cities, with Derry in the front line. The first MI6 officer to be posted there was Frank Steele, a former Foreign Office diplomat who had served in the Middle East and Africa, and now found himself seconded to Northern Ireland, about which, as he told me, he knew virtually nothing. It was Steele who had organised the abortive meeting between William Whitelaw and the leadership of the Provisional IRA at Cheyne Walk in July 1972. He was a remarkable man. I interviewed him not long before he died of cancer in November 1997. Knowing that he had only a few months to live, he sat in a wheelchair and talked, wishing to place on the public record what he had done and what he had tried to achieve. He told me how depressed he was after Cheyne Walk, and how he left the province in May 1973 with a heavy heart. ‘I don’t think either community had suffered enough to make peace an absolute imperative,’ he said wearily, ‘and so we settled down to twenty-five years of waste and murder.’⁷

Steele was succeeded by his fellow MI6 officer Michael Oatley, who was very different in temperament and style, but equally accomplished. At Laneside he found a message from Steele suggesting that he might find it useful to look up a businessman in Derry called Brendan Duddy. Oatley made enquiries, and found that one of the contacts he had met through Steele, a prosperous local businessman, knew Brendan. A meeting was arranged at the businessman’s house. That was where Brendan first met Michael Oatley, and where a relationship that was to last for almost twenty years began. At the time Brendan was not aware that Oatley was an MI6 officer. He thought he was simply a British diplomat who had come to Derry to find out more about Northern Ireland. Brendan was impressed by Oatley, who he said had the appearance and polished manners of a film star: ‘He could listen for approximately five hours, drinking tea without once going to the toilet. The perfect spy man.’ Brendan learned a lot from Oatley, and Oatley learned a lot from Brendan. They both came to need each other. Oatley carried on where Frank Steele left off in working towards the long-term aim of finding a way of getting the IRA to end its campaign. Brendan became the key to that end as they walked the tightrope together between the British government and the IRA’s Army Council.

Oatley admitted that he was inexperienced when he first set foot in the province. ‘I knew nothing about Northern Ireland,’ he told me. ‘In that sense I was typical of most of the people who went to help the Secretary of State with this new problem.’ But he was clear about what he had to do. ‘I thought that it was a situation in which intelligence would not be a matter of simply reporting on situations, but trying to influence them. If I was going to spend two years or longer in Northern Ireland, I ought perhaps to try to concentrate on seeing whether my particular skills and background could enable me to find a way to influence the leadership of the IRA, or to make some kind of contact through which they could be influenced.’⁸ Brendan was to become that contact. He was perfectly placed. He had established his credibility with the IRA on two critical occasions, in the days leading up to Bloody Sunday and Operation Motorman. He had met senior members of the Army Council like Seamus Twomey and, perhaps most importantly, he knew Martin McGuinness well from the days when he used to deliver burgers to his chippie in William Street. He also knew Rory O’Brady, the President of Sinn Féin, whom he’d met during his earlier negotiations over the removal of weapons. Brendan was Oatley’s means to a very distant end, although at the time Oatley probably had little idea just how distant that end was likely to be. He knew that at some stage he, and ultimately the British government, would have to talk to the ‘terrorists’ if they were to bring an end to the conflict. It could be seen as a win-win situation. If talking to the IRA led to a lasting peace, that would be a win. If, on the other hand, it led to a series of ceasefires and splits that weakened the IRA through internal divisions, that would be a win too. But he was under no illusions that difficult and dangerous political terrain lay ahead.

I asked Brendan what he thought Michael Oatley’s game plan was at the time. ‘I don’t think he had one. My job was to teach Michael, and Michael’s job was to teach the Prime Minister or whoever he could get access to. The idea was to share this information.’ And that meant talking to the IRA? ‘Absolutely. That was the point. I was not an IRA man, not a Sinn Féin man. At the end of the day my job was to get these people talking.’ I asked if he felt that Oatley was using him for his own purposes and the purpose of the British government. He was frank. ‘Yes. Absolutely. And I was perfectly happy with it.’ He was happy because he and Oatley shared a common view of the way forward. There had to be engagement with the IRA. ‘I was saying all the time, “You’ve got to talk to them. This has got to stop, and the way to stop it is to talk to them.”’ But for Oatley there was a problem. After the fiasco of Cheyne Walk, and subsequent political embarrassment when news of the meeting with the IRA leadership was leaked, a strict prohibition was placed on any further contact with the ‘terrorists’. Oatley was well aware of this, and used metaphors and analogies when he talked to Brendan. ‘It’s very cold at the moment,’ he would say. ‘Put on your woolly [long] Johns.’ This was his way of warning Brendan that the government wasn’t interested in any political initiatives.

By 1974 the weather was positively arctic following the IRA’s bloody campaign in England. On 4 February a coach carrying military personnel along the M62 from Manchester to Catterick army camp in North Yorkshire was bombed. The fifty-pound bomb concealed in the boot of the coach killed nine soldiers, one woman and two children aged five and two.⁹ By the autumn the IRA had intensified its mainland campaign. On 5 October it struck at two pubs in Guildford – the Horse and Groom and the Seven Stars – which it claimed were ‘military targets’, as they were used by off-duty soldiers from nearby camps. Four soldiers, two of them women, were killed. A civilian also died and fifty-four people were injured. A month later, on 7 November, there was a further bomb attack on the King’s Arms pub in Woolwich, killing a soldier and fatally wounding a part-time barman. Two weeks later, on 21 November, came the most shocking IRA attack of all, when two pubs in Birmingham were bombed – the Mulberry Bush and the Tavern in the Town. A warning was given, but only minutes before the explosions. Twenty-one people died and 182 were injured.

In such a climate it seemed unthinkable that any representative of the British government should put out feelers to the IRA, let alone meet them. Oatley knew full well what the IRA was up to. ‘One of the things that I’d come to understand at a fairly early stage was that the continuation of a violent campaign was not inconsistent with the IRA’s willingness to consider political options.’¹⁰ But he and Brendan agreed how tightly those political options were circumscribed, and accurately reflected the British government’s position in terms of negotiating any settlement to the conflict. Brendan spelled out two unshakeable principles. ‘The British made it clear that they were not going to speak as violence continued – and Michael and I made it clear too.’ The second principle was that the British weren’t going to ‘get on their boats in Belfast’, sail away and abandon the Unionists. These principles remained the cornerstones of the British government’s position right through to the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 that was designed to settle and end the conflict. It was the first of them – no talks while violence continued – that, as we will later see, almost derailed the process.

Oatley faced a conundrum. He had been forbidden to have any contact with the IRA, but he knew that as the security situation spiralled from bad to worse, both in the province and on the mainland, something had to be done, and done urgently. He devised a way of communicating with the IRA without ever talking to them directly, by inventing a metaphorical bamboo ‘pipe’. The ‘pipe’ was held by Oatley at one end and Rory O’Brady at the other, with Brendan in the middle conveying and interpreting the messages that were passed down it from the British to the IRA, and vice-versa. ‘What we were in fact able to do was to blow gently down the “pipe”, and the person at the other end would be able to feel the draught and blow back,’ Oatley said. ‘This seemed to me not much more than a slight bending of the Secretary of State’s rules.’ Oatley went to his boss, Frank Cooper, the senior British civil servant in Belfast, and got clearance from him to use the arrangement. ‘It’s quite a nice pipe,’ he assured him, ‘so can we perhaps put a bit of material down it to see if we can develop a relationship?’ Cooper, as flexible and inventive as Oatley, agreed, and as a result of messages sent down Oatley’s pipe, the groundwork was laid for an IRA ceasefire and talks.

The IRA declared a ceasefire over Christmas 1974, expecting the ‘Brits’ to reciprocate at once with dialogue. But there was no movement, and the IRA leadership became increasingly frustrated. Brendan was made abundantly aware of their anger, and their suspicion that the perfidious ‘Brits’ were at it again. He became worried that the credibility and the trust he had so carefully built up over the previous two years was about to evaporate. On Christmas Eve he rang Oatley in the middle of the night, as Oatley says was his wont, and warned him that things seemed about to fall apart. He wanted to know what the IRA wanted to know: what were the British prepared to discuss, and crucially, was a British withdrawal on the agenda? The phrase Oatley used on behalf of the British was ‘structures of disengagement from Ireland’. To him, this meant the disengagement of the security forces and their withdrawal from Catholic areas in response to a cessation of violence. So when Brendan asked the $64,000 question of whether ‘withdrawal’ was on the agenda, the answer wasn’t yes and it wasn’t no. Oatley’s basic message to Brendan, and therefore to the IRA, was that once violence stopped, anything could be discussed. He admitted to me that he was being intentionally ambiguous. ‘I think that was the nature of our dialogue, and I think that the ambiguity was recognised by both sides, so that each could make of it what it wanted. Ambiguous phrases were very much the currency we were involved in.’¹¹ As Oatley knew, there was a world of difference between discussing withdrawal and actually carrying it out. But his message was enough to lead the IRA to believe that the phrase ‘structures of disengagement’ meant the beginning of the road to their goal, the ending of British rule in Northern Ireland. By this time Brendan knew that Oatley was working for MI6, although the IRA was still under the impression that he was just a political adviser seconded from the Foreign Office. Oatley had had to tell Brendan of his real affiliation, as Brendan had to know about what Oatley described as ‘certain procedures’.

The following day, Brendan climbed into his battered Datsun and began the long journey south through the snow to see Rory O’Brady at his home in Roscommon in the seemingly endless flatlands of central Ireland. But first he had to get petrol. It was Christmas Day, and the petrol stations were shut. He was forced to call on a local garage owner whom he knew, and who obliged by filling up his car. ‘He said, “I’m taking no money,” and he didn’t know what I was doing. People sensed that something that might alter their lives was happening.’

Brendan arrived at O’Brady’s house just as the family were sitting down to Christmas dinner, and tapped on the window. Brendan Duddy was the last person Rory O’Brady expected to see staring through his window on Christmas Day, but he invited him in, put an extra plate on the table and told him to tuck in. The dinner seemed to last forever as O’Brady went on about the weather, with Brendan bursting to give him Oatley’s message. The plates put away, the two adjourned to a room where they could sit alone and talk. Brendan told O’Brady he had had a message from Michael Oatley, and produced a piece of paper with notes of the telephone conversation he had had the previous evening. The note was not detailed, in case it was intercepted by the police on either side of the border. Brendan said that everything the IRA wanted to talk about was on the table. That included withdrawal – although there was no indication that the British ever intended to carry it out. O’Brady explained that he couldn’t make a decision himself on a face-to-face meeting with the ‘Brits’, but would have to consult and get permission. ‘Consulting’ meant talking to the IRA’s Army Council. ‘I thought the best thing was to confront them with the primary source, the intermediary himself,’ O’Brady told me. The Army Council wanted to see the whites of Brendan’s eyes.

On New Year’s Eve 1974 Brendan made the journey with O’Brady to the IRA’s inner sanctum. Brendan says he didn’t look out of the car window, and kept his eyes on the floor, as he didn’t want to know where it was or the route they were taking to get there. These were his rules for staying alive. ‘I didn’t want to know the road signs, and I didn’t want to ask.’ They finally arrived at a big country house outside Dublin belonging to a businessman who had presumably allowed it to be used in the name of the cause. ‘It was the most enormous house I’d ever seen,’ Brendan said, ‘almost a castle.’ He was shown into a huge drawing room where the IRA leadership was waiting. It seemed an unlikely setting for a meeting with the most wanted men in Ireland. ‘They were sitting round this big table, just like a board of directors. Everyone was very polite.’ O’Brady waited in the wings, as it wasn’t normal for the President of Sinn Féin to be there as a member of the Army Council, although he could be present ex officio, in his political capacity. Seamus Twomey was in the chair, alongside his fellow Belfast Republican Billy McKee. McKee told me of his surprise when Brendan walked in. ‘We were just finishing up an Army Council meeting. He looked bloody scared when he came into that room. I’d never seen Brendan Duddy before, and I was amazed, because it isn’t on the books to bring anybody to an Army Council meeting. There was nobody at these meetings except Army Council men.’ Nevertheless, they soon got down to business, as O’Brady remembers. ‘They didn’t give him an easy time. They questioned him very closely. It was a very serious matter.’ I asked him if they suspected that Brendan might be a British spy. ‘The question didn’t arise. They were aware that he was the person who had been conveying these messages for a number of years, and that this channel was totally reliable.’

Brendan explained that he had been talking to Michael Oatley, whom he described as ‘a servant of the British government’ (technically, Oatley was referred to by the government as ‘the British government representative’). The IRA was more interested in the message than the man, and Brendan duly conveyed the ambiguous communication, although I suspect the ambiguities were not dwelt on. At this stage both parties wanted to get on with the business of dialogue. Brendan insisted that he make all the security arrangements for the meeting, which he said would take place at his house in Derry. This was the point at which he enlisted the services of his friend Bernadette Mount, to drive some of the IRA leaders across the border. Bernadette is a most unlikely IRA courier, which is why Brendan chose her. Attractive, quick-witted, feisty and brave, she’s the last person to arouse suspicion at army checkpoints on either side of the border. ‘She was very cheerful and in no way anxious or fearful,’ says O’Brady. ‘She just rose to the occasion, and that was appreciated highly by all of us and still is.’

There were some hairy moments as they approached army checkpoints: ‘It was nerve-racking,’ says Bernadette. ‘I’d write my car registration on the front of the dashboard, as I’m hopeless at numbers.’ She hid O’Brady’s notes and papers by stuffing them under her jumper. Bernadette not only ferried the IRA leaders to Derry, she put them up in her house as well. She remembers the sheer ordinariness of it all, and showed me some photographs she’d taken at the time. Seamus Twomey was singing Irish songs – ‘He was a nice singer.’ Billy McKee helped clear out the grate, insisting it was man’s work – ‘Billy lit the fire every day.’ And Rory O’Brady was wandering around in his paisley pyjamas, which Bernadette found very amusing – ‘I told him I’d send the photo to Ian Paisley, and he thought it was funny.’ She was clearly a great fan of Michael Oatley: ‘He was tall, thin and perfectly dressed. Everything about him was just like James Bond. He was so relaxed he made you feel that everything was fine. He was very nice.’ Brendan’s family were also mesmerised by the British visitor who was to become so much a part of their lives. Brendan’s wife Margo felt ashamed to give him tea in a mug, and on one of her trips to London she went into Selfridges, where there was a sale on, and bought a Royal Albert china tea-set called ‘Old County Roses’. The set still stands in her kitchen cupboard.

The first encounter between the British and the IRA since the abortive meeting in Cheyne Walk took place at Brendan’s house on 7 January 1975. The participants were Billy McKee and Joe McCallion, a senior IRA man from Derry who along with Martin McGuinness had been convicted in Dublin of IRA membership in 1973, and Michael Oatley in his capacity as the ‘British government representative’. This was a preliminary meeting about meetings, in which both sides set out their bona fides. Further encounters followed in Brendan’s tiny ‘wee room’ over the next few weeks, with Oatley joined by James Allan, the diplomat who operated from Laneside and was Political Adviser to the Secretary of State. So the talks could be held in absolute privacy, Brendan had sent his family off for two weeks to a three-star hotel in Torremolinos, with £100 to spend. Torremolinos in January was freezing. Meanwhile the secret talks back home in Derry were warmed on those cold winter days and nights by the peat fire in the corner, which Oatley became accustomed to tending, just as Billy McKee did in Bernadette’s house. Brendan stood in his ‘wee room’ and told me about its significance:

It’s a simple room in a simple family house. This is where it all happened. Hard as it is to believe, there was always a rush for this little chair here. There’s a notion that big things happened in the Oval Office in Washington or the Grand Hall in the Kremlin, but it doesn’t happen that way. It happens less formally and more simply. And when you get a situation where eventually somebody is dying for a cup of tea and says, ‘I’ll make a cup of tea,’ and you have to ask somebody who you are not very happy about, ‘Would you like tea?’ it breaks it down. And then, of course, what happens is somebody says, ‘When you’re there, would you get a bucket of coal?’

Brendan normally absented himself from sensitive and secret negotiations once he believed his job as facilitator had been done.

Republicans always took careful minutes of meetings, and those held in Brendan’s house in the mid-1970s were no exception. I tried for a long time to get access to them, and finally succeeded in 1996. It involved a long drive across the border into a remote corner of the Irish Republic. I arrived at the seaside location to which I’d been directed, and waited. At last a car arrived, and I was told to get in. Once I was in the front passenger seat, I was told to look down, and not to make any mental note of the route we were taking. It was the same routine Brendan had followed when he went to meet the Army Council. I was told that the reason I was kept waiting at the rendezvous was so my minders-to-be could make sure I hadn’t been followed. We finally arrived at a large detached house in the country. I was made welcome, and shown into a bedroom. On the table was a red file which contained the minutes of the historic meetings. I was allowed to dictate them into my tape recorder, as annotating them by hand would have taken more time than I was to be afforded. I felt a slight tingling sensation as I read the minutes, seeing the record of history, albeit from one side. I was kept going by endless cups of tea and fruit cake brought in by the woman of the house. The minutes recorded what was said at the meetings in Brendan’s ‘wee room’ at the beginning of 1975, after which the IRA declared a ceasefire or ‘cessation of hostilities’. At the time this was, and continued to be for the next twenty years, the British prerequisite for any private face-to-face talks with the IRA. They stated that the British agreed the following on the basis of ‘a genuine and sustained cessation of violence and hostilities’:

• [In that event] the army would gradually be reduced to peacetime levels and withdrawn to barracks.

• Discussion will continue between [government] officials and representatives of Provisional Sinn Féin and will include the aim of securing a permanent peace.

• Once violence has come to a complete end, the rate of release will be speeded up with a view to releasing all detainees [from internment].

This was not a million miles from what was discussed and agreed at the secret talks almost two decades later that finally led to the Good Friday Agreement and the ‘permanent peace’ that was the aspiration inherent in those minutes from 1975. I scoured them for any sign of a reference to ‘structures of disengagement’ and British withdrawal from Ireland. I finally came across one dated 2 April 1975. It read: ‘The British government cannot say they’re leaving Ireland because the reaction would prevent that happening. The tendency is towards eventual British disengagement but it would stop if the Republican Movement [the composite name for the IRA] goes back to war.’

I was surprised that a British official would say such a thing quite so baldly. I asked Brendan if he was also surprised. He said he wasn’t. ‘I’m not an apologist for the IRA, [but] basically they don’t tell lies about things like that.’ Billy McKee was adamant that withdrawal was discussed. ‘[The word] “withdrawal” was used during the whole negotiations with Oatley and others. They said that was what they wanted, and they needed the IRA to help them so there wouldn’t be a bloodbath. I can tell you that if they hadn’t mentioned withdrawal there’d have been no ceasefire and no truce at the time.’¹²

The 1975 cessation lasted for almost a year, but became increasingly meaningless as Loyalist paramilitaries, suspecting a British sellout to the IRA, stepped up their campaign of sectarian slaughter, killing 120 Catholics, most of them innocent civilians. The IRA retaliated, sometimes under so-called flags of convenience,ⁱ while stepping up its attacks on London until the unit responsible was besieged in Balcombe Street before surrendering on 12 December.

By the beginning of 1976, the cessation was over. It had marked a turning point in the history of the IRA. Its former Belfast commander, Brendan Hughes, who was in prison at the time of the truce, told me it was the nadir for Republicans: ‘In the 1975 period there was a great deal of disillusionment among a lot of people in the gaol. When the ceasefire was on, the whole machine slipped into sectarianism and a lot of us were very, very unhappy with the situation.’¹³

The leadership that had taken the IRA into the truce was discredited. There was no ‘permanent peace’, but the IRA had largely stood down its units, rendering most of its volunteers inactive. Frustration at the lack of political progress grew, as did impatience with IRA orders to refrain from attacks. The result was disillusionment and dissension in the ranks. This was the point at which the IRA’s new leadership emerged to challenge O’Brady, Twomey and McKee and the others who supported and advised them.

Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness were untainted by the truce. Adams was in the Long Kesh prison camp,^j and McGuinness had been released from gaol in the Irish Republic on 13 December 1974, having served nine months of a twelve-month sentence for IRA membership – his second such sentence. After McGuinness emerged he was not involved in the preliminaries to the secret dialogue with the British, or the subsequent negotiations that led to the truce. The new leadership believed that the IRA had been duped by the ‘Brits’, and vowed that it would never happen again. Brendan looks back on the period, and the failure of the negotiations and the truce, with sadness. ‘The leadership of McKee and O’Brady did everything in their power within their Republican remit to get a track going similar to the track twenty years on. The difficulty was that when the young men came along, Adams and McGuinness, they simply saw the O’Bradys of this world as being past it. They said, “We’re running this campaign.”’ And they did. Ironically, twenty years later, on 31 August 1994, the ‘new’ IRA leadership, which had remained in place over all those years, did the same as the old leadership, declaring ‘a complete cessation of military operations’,¹⁴ and finally set Northern Ireland on the road to peace.

* * *

Although the ‘old’ leadership had been discredited, Brendan thought that Rory O’Brady, Billy McKee, Seamus Twomey and others had done all they could through Michael Oatley to try to establish a permanent peace. He didn’t think it was their fault that it had all fallen apart by the beginning of 1976. The bloodshed that had marked the months of the truce continued unabated through the rest of the 1970s, with a further three hundred deaths,¹⁵ including the assassinations of Christopher Ewart-Biggs, the UK Ambassador to the Republic of Ireland, and Lord Louis Mountbatten, the last British Viceroy of India.^k

By 1980 a new crisis had arisen that was to have momentous consequences for the future course of the conflict and the long and bloody road to peace. IRA prisoners in the Maze were still refusing to wear prison uniform, claiming that it criminalised them and their ‘struggle’. They insisted that they were not criminals but prisoners of war, and as such demanded that they should be allowed to wear their own clothes, a demand that the new Conservative government under Margaret Thatcher steadfastly refused. In 1972 a previous Conservative government, confronted with Billy McKee’s thirty-day hunger strike in Crumlin Road prison, granted ‘Special Category Status’, under which prisoners were allowed to wear their own clothes and were given other privileges. This was taken by the IRA to be the political status they demanded. In 1976 the Labour government rescinded these concessions and insisted that prisoners wore prison uniform. The protest began when prisoners rejected uniforms and wrapped their naked bodies in the blankets provided for the beds in their cells. The government was unmoved. In 1978 the prisoners escalated the blanket protest by smearing their excreta on the cell walls in the so-called ‘dirty’ or ‘no wash’ protest. Again the government stood firm. In 1980, with no sign of movement from Mrs Thatcher’s new administration, IRA prisoners took the step of last resort and embarked on a hunger strike, the weapon of ultimate protest, to put pressure on the British. Their use of the tactic went as far back as 1920, when Terence MacSwiney, the Sinn Féin Lord Mayor of Cork, arrested on charges of sedition during the Irish War of Independence, died in Brixton Prison after seventy-four days on hunger strike.

Brendan was deeply depressed. Throughout the period he had remained in touch with his ‘old’ IRA contacts and with Michael Oatley, who had kept his ‘bamboo pipe’ in good working order. Oatley had made it clear to Brendan that he was always available as a point of contact, wherever he happened to be in the world. He believed he had the confidence of the new IRA leadership: ‘I think that people on the IRA side thought I had come out of it as a reasonably reliable person with whom they could deal, and I for my part had been quite clearly convinced that people on the other side were able to keep secrets.’¹⁶

As the crisis over the hunger strike escalated, Billy McKee came to see Brendan at his home. ‘He was really upset about hunger strikes due to his own experiences in gaol,’ Brendan remembers. ‘He said, “You’ve got to do something about this. I prefer a man to die on the front line rather than die in prison.”’ Brendan had feared the worst during the lead-up to the hunger strike, before Mrs Thatcher came to power. Labour’s tough, Yorkshire-born Northern Ireland Secretary, Roy Mason, had a visceral loathing for the IRA. He once described squeezing them like a tube of toothpaste: ‘We are squeezing them out of their safe havens. We are squeezing them away from their money supplies. We are squeezing them out of society and into prison.’¹⁷ ‘We had that awful man Roy Mason here,’ Brendan recalls. ‘We had the sides getting further and further apart. The IRA didn’t want to know. They didn’t want to be involved in anything. I saw the hunger strike as a possibility for reopening negotiations. That’s how I read it.’

Brendan picked up the phone to Michael Oatley, as usual in the middle of the night, told him what McKee had said, and stressed the urgency of trying to break the impasse. Christmas 1980 was approaching, and some of the seven original hunger strikers appeared to be near death.^l ‘We spent two or three hours discussing it in veiled language,’ Oatley told me. ‘It seemed that one might be able to develop a formula, with no doubt some ambiguities in it, which would be a gesture by the British government to the demands of the hunger strikers.’¹⁸

Oatley went to see the Permanent Under Secretary at the Northern Ireland Office, Sir Kenneth Stowe, to attempt to work out a solution that would bend the prison rules and provide a face-saving formula for both parties. While talking to Stowe – a pragmatic civil service mandarin, not a dogmatic ideologue – Oatley kept in touch with Brendan over the phone to make sure that the ‘escape hatch’ being devised would be acceptable to the IRA. A formula was agreed, with the question of what constituted the prisoners’ ‘own clothes’ being left imprecise, or as Oatley described it to me, ‘fairly open-ended and in some ways ambiguous’.¹⁹ Stowe got in touch with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, whose Private Secretary he had previously been. She signed off the deal, no doubt reluctantly. All this, of course, was done in the utmost secrecy. Oatley was then driven at top speed along the M4 to Heathrow, from where he would take a plane to Belfast’s Aldergrove airport to deliver the compromise formula to the IRA via another intermediary, Father Brendan Meagher, a priest from Dundalk in the Irish Republic.

Brendan had driven from Derry, and was waiting at Aldergrove with Father Meagher. When Oatley arrived he handed the envelope containing the formula to Brendan, who gave it to Father Meagher, who conveyed it to the Provisional leadership waiting in Belfast, who relayed its contents to the hunger strikers in the Maze. The strike was called off at the eleventh hour, and no one died. But that was only the beginning of the tragic story. When families and relatives subsequently arrived at the prison carrying their loved ones’ clothes, the prison authorities would not let them put them on. There was a total breakdown in communications. Brendan was desperate, as he knew what the consequences would be. ‘It fell apart because the language of the prison governor and prison warders was quite different from the language of the Republican prisoners.’ The prisoners thought they were getting political status, but they weren’t. The prison authorities did not share Oatley’s and Stowe’s flexibility, and apparently the government was not minded to force the issue, as it depended on the cooperation and goodwill of the prison administration and officers to run the gaol.

Brendan was thrown into even deeper despair when he heard that there was to be a second hunger strike, as he knew that this time there would be no compromise, and it would be to the death. He had no illusions about Mrs Thatcher’s determination: ‘The British government had moved away from thinking of any form of agreement in Northern Ireland. They thought they were on the winning trail. They felt, “The IRA is beaten, and we’re going to hammer this.”’ Perhaps the government thought it was going to finish rolling up Roy Mason’s tube of toothpaste.

Brendan was right. Matters were now out of his hands. The epic second hunger strike began on 1 March 1981, led by the IRA’s new Officer Commanding (OC) in the Maze, Bobby Sands. Nine of his comrades subsequently joined the protest, which became the second great watershed that transformed the conflict, Bloody Sunday being the first. From the outset it was clear that if the British did not give in to the prisoners’ five demands, Sands was prepared to die.^m As the days went by and Sands grew weaker, media interest in his condition and the reasons for his determination to give his life for the cause he believed in became huge. The hunger strike became an international story, with camera crews flying into Belfast from all over the world. It became an even bigger story when in a by-election held on 9 April, forty days into his hunger strike, Sands was elected as Member of Parliament for the Fermanagh-South Tyrone constituency. This was a momentous political event, as it appeared to give the lie to the long-established government spin that the IRA were a bunch of murdering terrorists with no popular support. Sands died on 5 May, the sixty-sixth day of his hunger strike. Around 100,000 mourners came to his funeral, which became a global media event. The implications for the future evolution of the conflict, and the inexorable rise of the IRA’s political wing, Sinn Féin, were immense.

In the weeks and months that followed, nine other hunger strikers followed Bobby Sands to their graves.ⁿ Mrs Thatcher, known not without reason as ‘the Iron Lady’, accused the IRA of playing their ‘last card’. But her adversaries were just as determined as she was. History shows that in the medium term IRA prisoners gradually won their demands, 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 to tell you,’ he said, ‘that’s Martin.’ Bernadette expressed some concern. ‘We don’t have enough dinner for him,’ she said. ‘We’ve eaten it all.’ Brendan told her not to worry: ‘He’s not here for the dinner.’ The visit was no accident – Brendan had carefully planned it. Oatley and McGuinness settled down to talk, as Oatley remembers: ‘I’d never met McGuinness before, and I was considerably impressed by his intelligence and firmness of manner. I thought him very serious and responsible, and I didn’t see him as someone who actually enjoyed getting people killed. I found him a good interlocutor. It was rather like talking to a middle-ranking army officer in one of the tougher regiments, like the Paras or the SAS.’²³

Brendan watched the two of them – traditional enemies on opposite sides of the dinner table. Oatley had no brief to do what he was doing or say what he was saying, while McGuinness had a strictly limited brief from the IRA – to listen, and that was all. Brendan couldn’t believe what he was seeing and hearing. ‘It was like a couple wanting to get together to enter a courtship. Dignified. Friendly.’ As well as business, there was small talk about McGuinness’s passion for fishing: he had only ever crossed the Irish Sea once, for a two-week fishing trip to Scotland. It was all part of breaking the ice. Then Oatley confronted McGuinness with the harsh reality that although the IRA had killed a lot of people, and continued to give the government a hard time, it had achieved nothing tangible. ‘Clearly the government was willing to go on forever, if necessary, with a policy of containment, but if the IRA wished to pursue a political course, there might be things the British government could do to help.’ In other words, there was a military stalemate, with neither side capable of winning and neither side prepared to give in. The alternative was politics. Brendan recalled: ‘I’d never seen Martin interested in politics in my life. He held his own with Michael, and put forward his points of view. Michael very firmly told him, “You’ll not beat the Brits, you’ll not drive them out of here, and really and truly, would it not be better to find a better way?”’ Brendan was profoundly impressed by McGuinness, who had clearly travelled a long way since delivering beefburgers to his chip shop: ‘I’d known him for twenty-five years, and this was someone I’ve never seen before. I’m watching McGuinness emerging.’

This landmark meeting set the scene for what was to happen over the following decade and beyond. The British were going to have to talk to the ‘terrorists’ once again, but this time with the IRA recognising what the realistic limitations of such talks were: a complete cessation of violence, no sell-out of the Protestant majority, and no breaking of the Union. Most other things would be up for discussion.

Oatley returned to London, and briefed the Permanent Under Secretary at the Northern Ireland Office, John Chilcot, who was destined to become one of the architects of the subsequent peace process. McGuinness said that if the British wished to appoint a successor to Oatley when he retired, the Republican movement was ‘morally and tactically obliged not to reject their offer’.²⁴ A week after the Derry dinner, Michael Oatley retired and departed the scene. On 7 February 1991, with Oatley scarcely gone, the IRA staged a mortar attack on Downing Street and came perilously close to wiping out the British Cabinet, now chaired by the new Conservative Prime Minister, John Major, who a few months before had emerged to seize the crown after the coup that toppled Mrs Thatcher. As with most insurgent organisations, fighting went hand in hand with talking, the aim being to pile on the pressure in the hope of entering negotiations from a position of strength. Neither Major nor Chilcot was surprised.

Brendan was in London on his way back from a trip abroad on the day Downing Street was mortared, and although he too wasn’t surprised by it, he was ‘pretty fed up with the divergence of, on the one hand, trying to talk peace and, on the other, trying to bomb London’. Oatley had called Brendan while he was out of the country and told him that there was someone who would take his place, and that he’d like to introduce him. But he never did. By now matters were out of his hands. The new Director General of the Security Service, MI5, Stella Rimington, took the view that if it was advisable to renew the contact with Brendan, the officer who did so should be from MI5, not MI6. The anomaly of the involvement of Britain’s foreign intelligence service in a domestic conflict had probably only arisen because Michael Oatley had established his relationship with Brendan back in 1973, when MI6 ran intelligence operations in the province. Rimington had support for the new initiative to resuscitate Brendan’s role from John Major and his Northern Ireland Secretary, Peter Brooke, and John Deverell,^o MI5’s Director and Coordinator of Intelligence (DCI) in Northern Ireland.²⁵ Now the back channel had mainstream political support.

On his return to Derry, Brendan received a phone call from a man who said he was interested in bringing employment to the city and thought that Brendan, as President of the Chamber of Trade, might be able to help. He talked of creating a hundred jobs. Brendan said he was too busy. The caller said it would only take half an hour, but Brendan still said no. The man rang back repeatedly, and eventually Brendan gave in and said he would see him: ‘My purpose was to get him in, be polite and get him out again.’ When the visitor arrived, ‘He was very nice, very soft, very gentle.’ He said he represented a company called Euro Assets. Brendan was beginning to switch off when the man suddenly reached into an inside pocket, pulled out a letter and handed it to him. ‘I looked at it, and it was from Peter Brooke, the Secretary of State.’ The letter praised Brendan for all his efforts over the years, and expressed the hope that he would continue them, now working with the bearer of the letter, who became known as ‘Robert’. ‘Robert’ was a former MI6 officer who had been seconded to MI5 and tasked by Stella Rimington to carry on where Michael Oatley had left off. ‘I knew that John Major and Peter Brooke wouldn’t be sending over someone to talk to me unless it was the beginning of the beginning. I knew. People talk about the wonderful work that Tony Blair has done. Wonderful, everybody knows that. But John Major is the guy who really took the courage in his hand and did this – and after the IRA tried to kill him.’

And the IRA kept on sending John Major the military message with increased ferocity. The day after his unexpected general election victory on 9 April 1992, the City of London was rocked by a huge explosion at the Baltic Exchange. Three people were killed in the blast, which caused £800 million worth of damage, eclipsing at one stroke the £600 million that had been the total cost of the damage in Northern Ireland since the outbreak of the Troubles in 1969.²⁶ As the daunting sweep-up operation began, Major reshuffled his Cabinet and gave the job of Northern Ireland Secretary to his old friend Sir Patrick Mayhew, who had been Attorney General since 1987. Mayhew thought he was being summoned to Downing Street to be given the sack, and decided to put a brave face on it, picking a fresh camellia and sticking it in his buttonhole to make the blow more fragrant. He was astonished but delighted when he was offered the job. ‘I didn’t say any of the solemn things that people are supposed to say on these occasions,’ he told me. ‘I simply said, “Whoopee!”’²⁷

Mayhew carried on where Peter Brooke had left off, sending barely coded messages to the IRA in speeches, advance knowledge of which was fed to the IRA via Brendan. The key speech was made on 16 December 1992 at Coleraine:

It is not sensible to believe that any British government will yield to an agenda for Ireland prosecuted by violent means . . . provided it is advocated constitutionally, there can be no proper reason for excluding any political objective from discussion. Certainly not the objective of a united Ireland through broad agreement freely and fairly agreed . . . in the event of a genuine and established cessation of violence, the whole range of responses that we have had to make to that violence could, and would, inevitably be looked at afresh.²⁸

The IRA’s apparent response to this message came just over two months later, on 22 February 1993. John Major was working at his desk on, as he told me, a ‘pretty miserable, dreary, dark day’, when his Private Secretary came in with a piece of paper on which was written a message. The Prime Minister was told it came from the IRA. It read:

The conflict is over but we need your advice on how to bring it to an end. We wish to have an unannounced ceasefire in order to hold dialogue leading to peace. We cannot announce such a move as it will lead to confusion for the Volunteers as the Press will interpret it as surrender.²⁹

Major checked with MI5, who assured him that the message was genuine, and had been sent by Martin McGuinness. When it became public later that year, McGuinness was incandescent, since it gave the impression that the IRA was surrendering. Brendan, who had been working with ‘Robert’ for almost two years, building confidence as he had with Michael Oatley, is adamant that McGuinness did not in fact send the message, and that its publication, which was never intended, ‘practically wrecked the peace process’. He knows exactly what the provenance of the message was, and says it definitely wasn’t McGuinness who sent it, and it definitely wasn’t him. Any message to the British government had to be conveyed through ‘Robert’.

I finally managed to see the original draft of the note, which had been scribbled in pencil on a piece of paper when Brendan met ‘Robert’ in a hotel room in London. It was ‘Robert’ who wrote it, and then sent it, presumably neatly typed or rewritten in ink, via MI5 to John Major. ‘Robert’ may also have added a gloss to give the government added encouragement. He then gave the original historic piece of paper to Brendan. The words on it reflected what Brendan believed the IRA’s broad position to be – with the exception of the unfortunate phrase ‘we need your advice on how to bring it to an end’, which may have been ‘Robert’s’ own amendment, ‘pour encourager’.

Despite the embarrassment and confusion the message subsequently caused, it had the desired effect. The government took almost a month to consider it, and finally responded in a communication via ‘Robert’ dated 19 March 1993. It said the government was prepared to engage in dialogue, but only within the limits it had already made clear: that an end to the partition of Ireland would not be on the agenda, and the principle of the consent of the majority was taken as read. Crucially, given what was about to happen, the government emphasised that any such dialogue could only take place following ‘a halt to violent activity’.³⁰

The following day, 20 March, the IRA exploded two bombs planted in waste bins in Warrington city centre, near Liverpool. It was a Saturday, and the town was packed with shoppers. Warnings were given, but they proved inadequate. Two young boys died in the blast. One of them, Jonathan Ball, was only three years old. The other, Tim Parry, was twelve. Brendan was horrified. ‘A disaster. A total disaster. Warrington actually spurred me on. This is crazy. This has to end. Warrington practically stopped the process. I just said to Martin, “This is absolutely not on,” and he said, “Yes, you’re right.”’

The reason Warrington almost brought the peace process to an end was that following the government’s response the previous day, arrangements were already in place for a meeting between ‘Robert’ and his boss, John Deverell, and Martin McGuinness and another senior Provisional, the former IRA gun-runner and Maze escapee Gerry Kelly. Both sides were keen for things to move as quickly as possible, and the meeting had been scheduled to take place at Brendan’s house in Derry the following Monday, 22 March. The government had made it clear in its response of 19 March that dialogue could only take place following ‘a halt to violent activity’. With two young boys dead in Warrington and the nation outraged by the IRA’s murderous activity, going ahead with any such meeting was utterly unthinkable. ‘Robert’ knew it, and John Deverell knew it. But Brendan was convinced that the meeting had to take place, despite Warrington. McGuinness and Kelly were all geared up, and to cancel it risked destroying the whole process. Inevitably, the IRA would accuse the British of bad faith, and McGuinness’s judgement in going along with the relationship with ‘Robert’ and Brendan, and perhaps even his leadership, would be called into question. McGuinness knew he was walking a tightrope.

‘Robert’ let Brendan know, probably by coded fax, that he couldn’t come to the meeting. But Brendan was desperate: ‘We’ve a situation where two senior Republicans are prepared to meet you – and there can be progress. If you don’t come, I’m finished.’ ‘Robert’ said that under the circumstances he couldn’t come, but he would make a call and then ring Brendan back. Ten minutes later, the phone rang. ‘Robert’ said he still couldn’t make it. Brendan laid the situation on the line: ‘I’m totally serious about this. These people [McGuinness and Kelly] are in Derry at the moment, and I’ve organised it.’ ‘Robert’ said he would call back in half an hour. ‘He rang back in four minutes and said, “I’ll come.”’ But he would be coming on his own, without John Deverell. ‘Robert’ was breaking the government’s cardinal rule, that it would only talk directly to the IRA once it had declared an end to violence. ‘That’s why I admire the guy so much,’ said Brendan. ‘The world is full of everybody who does the right thing, and then occasionally there’s people who cross the line. If he hadn’t done what he did, we’d still be hearing the bombs going off today – and there’d be no Good Friday Agreement. “Robert” is the kind of guy who in other days you would pin medals on.’ The government didn’t find out about the meeting until many months later, and was horrified that its emissary had broken its vital precondition.

True to his word, ‘Robert’ arrived in Derry for the crucial meeting. McGuinness and Kelly were waiting at McGuinness’s mother’s house in the Bogside. When they heard that ‘Robert’ was alone, and Deverell hadn’t turned up, they were furious, scenting British double dealing. The spectre of Michael Collins was probably in their minds.^p A message was conveyed to Brendan that the Republican delegation wouldn’t come until Deverell arrived, and that they would wait until the following day. ‘Robert’, who was waiting at Brendan’s house, said he would go and explain the situation to McGuinness and Kelly. Brendan was worried at the prospect of his going into the Bogside on his own: ‘Robert’ had told him two years earlier that if he was captured the IRA would kill him, but that they would torture him first to get him to reveal the names of MI5’s agents within the IRA, which were stored in his head. It was therefore decided that a former Catholic priest, Denis Bradley, who played a peripheral role in the Link, would accompany him to Mrs McGuinness’s house. ‘Robert’ must have been persuasive, as they returned with McGuinness and Kelly.

Northern Ireland is a dangerous place, and not just for ‘spooks’. It can be dangerous for journalists too. In 1993, around the time ‘Robert’ was meeting Martin McGuinness and Gerry Kelly at Brendan’s house, I was in the province researching a documentary called Dead or Alive for my series States of Terror, which was transmitted in autumn that year. I had no idea about the secret contacts between MI5 and the IRA that were taking place in the shadows of Derry.

Ironically, given that ‘Robert’ from MI5 was in Derry on a very different mission, Dead or Alive investigated the ways in which MI5 and the RUC’s Special Branch recruited and ran informers from within the ranks of the IRA, and how the IRA hunted them down and ‘executed’ them. As part of the evidence for the documentary, I needed to get my hands on taped interviews that I’d heard the IRA had recorded with three alleged informers before they put bullets in the back of their heads and left their naked bodies in black bin liners in remote country lanes in South Armagh.

The bodies were found on 2 July 1992, and were those of three Republicans from Portadown in County Armagh: Aidan Starrs (twenty-nine), John Dignam (thirty-two) and Gregory Burns (thirty-three). I wanted to find out who these men were, what had happened, and whether they really were informers or ‘touts’. The tapes of their ‘confessions’ would obviously be vital evidence for the documentary I was making.

Getting access to the tapes was a long process that involved clandestine meetings with masked IRA men in council houses in Belfast and Dublin. These meetings invariably began with my being picked up in a pub and then being taken to the rendezvous, whose location I was told to forget. The IRA finally gave the go-ahead for me to hear the tapes. However, the plan wasn’t for me to listen in the comfort and relative safety of a council house, but at some remote location in the wilds of South Armagh, where the tapes were apparently being held.

I met my escorts in a pub on the Irish side of the border, and was driven to another meeting point, where I was directed to get into another car. It was late at night, and very dark. I was told to get in the back and to cover myself with a blanket that was lying there. I was then driven across the border and, I assumed, through a maze of narrow country lanes. I remember lying under the blanket nervously wondering what would happen if the SAS was aware that they had two IRA men in their sights, and whether I was about to 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 treasured possessions. Inside ‘Robert’ had written a Latin inscription from Virgil’s Aeneid which translated means, ‘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.