One burden of command, in any armed conflict, is that the senior officer is obliged to make choices that may get subordinates killed. Hughes was traumatised by the orders he had given to send young volunteers – and innocent civilians – to their deaths. He replayed these events on a loop in his head. On Bloody Friday, he told Mackers, he had been the man on the ground. But it was Adams who was calling the shots. ‘Gerry was the man who made the decisions,’ he said.
By denying that he had ever played a role in the conflict, Adams was, in effect, absolving himself of any moral responsibility for catastrophes like Bloody Friday – and, in the process, disowning his one-time subordinates, like Brendan Hughes. ‘I’m disgusted with the whole thing,’ Hughes said. ‘It means that people like myself … have to carry the responsibility of all those deaths.’ If all that carnage had at least succeeded in forcing the British out of Ireland, then Hughes might be able to justify, to himself, the actions he had taken. But he felt robbed of any such rationale for absolution. ‘As everything has turned out,’ he said, ‘not one death was worth it.’
Even as Hughes contended with these demons, he was struck by the fact that Adams appeared to be completely free of any such painful introspection. He seemed, instead, to glide along from one photo opportunity to the next, like a man who was not in any way shackled by his own past. It maddened Hughes. Of course he was in the IRA! ‘Everybody knows it,’ he told Mackers. ‘The British know it. The people on the street know it. The dogs know it on the street. And he’s standing there denying it.’
Hughes may have seemed to possess credentials, as a veteran of the armed struggle, that would render him unimpeachable in republican circles. But when he refused to endorse the peace process and drifted apart from Adams, Sinn Féin, with its fetish for conformity, proceeded to shun him. It humiliated Hughes to be living on public benefits and to see others – people ‘who never fired a shot’, people who were ‘never actually involved in the revolution but hung on to the aprons of dead volunteers’ – establishing themselves as power brokers in post-war Belfast. He grumbled that Adams and his cohort seemed to be enjoying a lavish lifestyle that was at odds with their ostensible politics as revolutionary socialists. He called them ‘the Armani suit brigade’.
Hughes worried, also, that the armed struggle was now being sanitised and reified, turned into a bumper sticker. The republican movement had always venerated its martyrs, but it seemed to Hughes as though some of those martyrs, who were still alive and struggling from the after-effects of their contributions, were now being cast aside, upstaged by their own portraits in graffiti. ‘Painting murals on walls to commemorate blanket men after they have died a slow and lonely death from alcohol abuse is no use to anyone,’ he would say. ‘I would hate for young people now to have this romanticised version of the events of that time.’ He added, ‘The truth is so very far removed from that and I suppose I’m living proof.’
It had not taken long for word to reach Adams of his old comrade’s disloyalty. In 2000, the two men met, and Adams challenged Hughes about why he had chosen to go public with his criticism, questioning him about some of the people he had been associating with and saying, as Hughes remembered it, ‘that I had got myself into bad company and I should get myself out of it’. Hughes felt that this overture was an effort to censor him. It only intensified his resentment. At one point, Hughes discovered a listening device in his flat: a small black microphone. There was a time when such a device would almost certainly have been planted by the British military. But now he was convinced that it had been installed there by the IRA.
This sense of disillusionment was a theme in other interviews that Mackers conducted. One of his subjects was Ricky O’Rawe, a compact man in his late forties who had shared a prison cell with Hughes and been a close friend of Bobby Sands’s. During the 1981 hunger strike, O’Rawe had served as the lead spokesman for the strikers. When Mackers first approached O’Rawe and told him about the Belfast Project, O’Rawe was reluctant to participate. As it happened, he had been nursing a dark secret for two decades, and he worried that if he spoke about his experiences in the IRA, the secret might slip out. But eventually Mackers persuaded O’Rawe to talk, and he started coming over to his house in the evenings with his recorder. The initial interviews were anodyne. O’Rawe spoke about his family history, how his father had been an IRA man in the 1940s, how he had grown up singing rebel songs and joined the Provos himself when he was still a teenager. O’Rawe talked about how he was interned on the Maidstone, alongside Gerry Adams, and about how he once conducted a ‘freelance’ robbery to score some money for booze. His IRA masters punished him by shooting him in the legs – a penalty that he felt, on balance, was entirely justified. Mackers and O’Rawe were doing an interview when the news broke that two planes had crashed into the World Trade Center, in New York. Both men were horrified. If either of them saw any affinity between the Irish tradition of political violence and the mass murder of Al Qaeda, they did not dwell on it.
‘I’m not going to talk about the hunger strike,’ O’Rawe told Mackers on a number of occasions. And for the first eight interviews, he didn’t. But on the night of their final interview, the subject came up and O’Rawe found himself sharing the one story he had promised himself he would hold back.
In the summer of 1981, after Bobby Sands and three other hunger strikers had died, O’Rawe was helping to lead the negotiations from inside the prison. According to O’Rawe, the prisoners received a secret offer from Margaret Thatcher that would have granted almost all their demands. It wasn’t a complete capitulation, but it guaranteed that they would be able to wear their own clothes – one of their chief requirements – as well as other key concessions. O’Rawe and another negotiator smuggled a message to the Provo leadership outside the prison, indicating that they were inclined to accept the British offer and call an end to the strike. But word came back from the outside – specifically, from Gerry Adams – that what Thatcher was proposing was not enough, so the strikers should hold out.
Six more men died before the strike concluded. The public narrative had always maintained that it was the prisoners themselves who insisted on persevering with the strike, and O’Rawe had never spoken out to question this version of history, deferring to what he came to think of as the ‘carefully scripted myths’ that had solidified around these dramatic events. But privately, he felt enormous guilt for not standing up at the time and being more forceful. He wondered why Adams and those around him would have sustained the strike rather than take an offer that the men on the inside had been prepared to accept.
Over years of private rumination, O’Rawe began to develop an awful theory. When Bobby Sands ran for his parliamentary seat, the spectacle of a peaceful protester seeking public office engendered popular support for republicanism on a scale that the IRA had never achieved through violence. After Sands died, on 5 May 1981, as many as a hundred thousand people took to the streets. O’Rawe wasn’t privy to the discussions of the Army Council, which made the decision; but he came to believe that Adams had deliberately perpetuated the hunger strike in order to capitalise on the broad-based sympathy and support that it produced. In terms of republican policy, the hunger strike was the moment that ‘split the atom’, O’Rawe concluded. For the first time, Adams saw the potential for change through electoral politics. In prolonging the strike, he recognised an unprecedented opportunity to dramatically expand the support base for the republican movement. It only cost six lives.
Once O’Rawe started telling Mackers the story, he found that he could not stop. He began to cry, choking up at first, then bawling uncontrollably like a child. For twenty years, he had been walking around with the weight of those six dead strikers on his conscience, and after two decades of silence he felt purged, emotionally, to be talking about it. ‘I don’t give a fuck any more, this is coming out,’ he told Mackers. ‘Guys died here for fucking nothing!’
But when he reflected on the notion that Adams might have cynically determined that a steady supply of martyrs was indispensable in launching Sinn Féin as a viable political party, O’Rawe was forced to concede a jarring possibility: were it not for that decision, the war might never have ended. As Ed Moloney subsequently wrote, ‘The hunger strike made Sinn Féin’s successful excursion into electoral politics possible: the subsequent tension between the IRA’s armed struggle and Sinn Féin’s politics produced the peace process and ultimately the end of the conflict. Had the offer of July 1981 not been undermined, it is possible, even probable, that none of this would have happened. There will be those who will say that the end justified the means, that the achievement of peace was a pearl whose price was worth paying.’ To O’Rawe it seemed that anyone capable of playing such a long and calculating game and dispatching six men to an unnecessary death must be a genius of political strategy – but also a sociopath.
Brendan Hughes nurtured his own survivor’s guilt when it came to the hunger strikes, and he dwelt on it in his interviews with Mackers. Hughes often thought about the initial, abortive strike, which he had called off after the young striker Sean McKenna slipped into a coma. Playing a similar game of if/then counterfactuals, Hughes would consider what might have happened had he just allowed McKenna to die. Could the second strike have been prevented altogether? Could that have saved the lives of ten men? He ran the arithmetic in his head. It could be overwhelming. At one point, long after the strike, Hughes bumped into McKenna in Dundalk. McKenna had brain damage, and his eyesight had been permanently affected by the strike. ‘Fuck you, Dark,’ McKenna said to Hughes. ‘You should have let me die.’
There were times when Hughes thought about killing himself. Like McKenna, he bore physical scars from the strike. Eventually, his eyesight would start to go. He took to wearing an eye patch, which gave him the piratical appearance of an outlaw in winter. He would sit in his flat and stare for hours out of the window, chain-smoking, gazing at the jagged lines of the city, the schoolyards and church steeples, and, in the distance, the shipyards, where a century earlier the Titanic had been built. It seemed to Carrie Twomey, Mackers’s wife, that Hughes was stuck there. ‘I always got the sense that he lived a large part of his life in that windowsill,’ she recalled. ‘He couldn’t commit to either jump out and end it all or jump back in and start really living.’
‘I have a clear image now of the prison hospital,’ Hughes told Mackers at one point. ‘I can still smell the – there is a smell when you die, there’s a death smell – and it hung over the hospital the whole period during the hunger strike. And I still have recurring thoughts of that. I can even smell it sometimes, that stale death smell. And for years, I mean, I couldn’t have spoke like this a few years ago. I couldn’t. I wasn’t able to do it. I put it out of my head.’
Hughes recalled Dr Ross, the kind physician who had tended to him during his hunger strike and brought him fresh water collected from a mountain spring. Bobby Sands had never trusted Ross. He called him a ‘mind manipulator’. But the doctor’s kindness had meant a lot to Hughes. Later, he learned that after watching all ten men die in the hunger strike, Dr Ross had taken his own life, with a shotgun, in 1986.
Hughes acknowledged to Mackers that there was a level of candour he could adopt in these conversations because he knew that the interviews would be sealed until his death. He told Mackers that Gerry Adams had authorised the bombing mission to London in 1973, the mission that ended up putting Dolours Price and her fellow bombers behind bars. ‘I mean, there’s things that you can say and things you can’t say,’ he reflected. ‘I’m not going to stand up on a platform and say I was involved in the shooting of a soldier or involved in the planning of operations in England. But I’m certainly not going to stand up and deny it. And to hear people who I would have died for, and almost did on a few occasions, stand up and deny the part in history that he has played – the part in the war that he has played, the part in the war that he directed – and deny it is totally disgusting and a disgrace to all the people who have died.’
Hughes remembered Pat McClure, ‘Wee Pat’, and his clandestine squad, the Unknowns, in which Dolours Price had served. McClure ended up disappearing during the 1980s. He had dropped out of active service at some point and gone to work driving a black taxi. Someone asked him if he would go back, to fight the long war. But McClure said no. He was done. Hughes heard that he emigrated to Canada and died there. If it was McClure who had day-to-day command of the Unknowns, Mackers asked, who had ultimate authority for the unit? Who was giving the orders?
‘They were always Gerry’s squad,’ Hughes said.
When Mackers asked about the disappearance of Jean McConville, Hughes told him that Gerry Adams had known about and approved the operation. In Hughes’s view, the murder had been justified.
‘She was an informer,’ he said.
22
Everyone is recruitable. In The Informer, an Irish novel published in 1925, the author Liam O’Flaherty tells the story of Gypo Nolan, a police informer. Gypo identifies a Dublin republican who is wanted for murder. The man is subsequently killed by the police. From the moment Gypo delivers the information to the authorities, he is acutely aware that he has become an ‘outcast’ in his close-knit city. He feels paranoid and doomed, terrified of exposure: ‘the customary sound of a human footstep had, by some evil miracle, become menacing’. The tout occupies an outsize place in the Irish imagination, as a folk devil – a paragon of treachery. Gerry Adams once remarked that informants are ‘reviled in all aspects of society in this island’. But the truth is that the English have employed spies and cultivated double agents in Ireland for hundreds of years. Frank Kitson’s insights, back at the onset of the Troubles, eventually blossomed from the rudimentary ‘counter-gangs’ of the MRF into an extraordinarily broad and sophisticated effort, by British military and intelligence and by the Royal Ulster Constabulary, to penetrate paramilitary circles.
Trevor Campbell was a burly and imposing Belfast cop who worked for the Special Branch of the RUC. After two years in Derry (which was always and only ‘Londonderry’ to Campbell), he was transferred to Belfast in 1975 and spent the next twenty-seven years embroiled in the conflict. Campbell’s speciality was the handling of informants.
‘In the beginning, there were no real rules. No law. It was catch as catch can,’ he recalled. The authorities were not systematic about who they targeted or how they managed their informants. But, gradually, the science on the ground improved. The biggest challenge of running touts in Northern Ireland was the petri-dish dimensions of the place. You couldn’t meet a Belfast source in Belfast; the city was just too small. So you would have him travel to the suburbs or to the country. But these were often quite parochial individuals, who had grown up in one pocket of the city and never ventured beyond it. Too many buses and trains and they were liable to get lost. Campbell would take informants out of town for a meeting in a beachside village and they would stand there in awe, as if a single bus transfer had deposited them at the end of the earth. Campbell liked to meet his contacts in the countryside, but not too far into the countryside. In some rural areas, like South Armagh, the locals knew every car. The presence of a single unfamiliar vehicle was enough to put the neighbours on alert.
The challenge of finding a safe location in which to meet was often secondary to the challenge of communicating the need for a meeting in the first place. During the early years of the Troubles, many homes in Northern Ireland did not have their own telephones. If they did have a phone, it was generally a shared line, upon which prying neighbours could eavesdrop – not a great solution for communicating with a clandestine informant. In theory, the tout could use a pay phone. But virtually all the pay phones in wartime Belfast had been destroyed by vandals, and in the event that the tout was lucky enough to find one that functioned, some nosy acquaintance was liable to happen by, spot him in the phone box, and demand to know who he’d been talking to.
So Campbell devised creative ways to notify his informants when he needed to meet. Initially, he employed crude tricks from the playbook of Cold War espionage, like a chalk mark on a brick wall. But he soon developed other, more innovative techniques. Sometimes Campbell would launch a sudden, clamorous raid on a Belfast house – not the house of his source, but the residence of some unsuspecting civilian who had the misfortune of living across the street. This could be tough for the innocent family whose home was raided, Campbell allowed. But it was an unmistakable way to deliver a message: We need to meet.
Belfast is not Berlin – it’s not even East Berlin – and playing these types of spy games in such a small, provincial city could give rise to surreal situations. Once, Campbell was interviewing a hardened IRA man at Castlereagh, the fortress-like East Belfast interrogation centre, which was notorious as a site of rough questioning and torture. The man had been arrested on other occasions, and Campbell had endeavoured, without success, to recruit him. Now, the police could legally hold him for three days before they had to either charge him or let him go, and for three days Campbell sat face to face with him in a stale, windowless interrogation room and talked. In such encounters, some IRA prisoners would maintain a stony silence, staring daggers at Campbell and never uttering a word. Others would talk and talk, working him, trying to elicit information: Where did he grow up? What rugby club did he support? Did he have a family? Where did they live? Campbell wanted to build a rapport with his interrogation subjects, but he knew that any stray detail he let slip might amount to a death sentence. So he endeavoured to keep the banter flowing without offering up any hard details about himself. On this occasion, the IRA man was a talker. But he was just as disciplined as Campbell was: he wouldn’t reveal anything that Campbell could work with, and he certainly wasn’t going to allow himself to be recruited. He was just shooting the shit, with a casual, jocular menace that Campbell could not help but respect. Waiting out the clock. After three days, time was up, and Campbell had no choice but to let him go.
Campbell had not spent any time with his wife in seventy-two hours, and she was grumbling that he never took a night off. So, when the man was released, Campbell went home to clean up and take his wife on a date. They drove to a nice fish restaurant down the coast. It was a bustling spot, popular with tourists, and Campbell and his wife sat at a table with a view of the water and ordered their meals. They had just finished their first course when Campbell glanced up and saw someone standing at the bar. He had his back to Campbell, but there was a large mirror behind the bar, and now, in the reflection above the spirits bottles, the two of them locked eyes. It was the man Campbell had been questioning for the past three days.
‘We may not be staying for the main course,’ Campbell announced to his wife, without taking his eyes off the man. He was generally careful about watching the road when he was driving, and he did not think that they had been followed to the restaurant. Instead, this appeared to be a wild coincidence. But it felt like a dangerous one. Without elaborating to his wife about the delicacy of this predicament, Campbell excused himself, walked over to the bar, and greeted the IRA man with the kind of gruff nonchalance he would normally reserve for someone whom he saw every day.
The man returned the greeting. Then he said, casually, ‘Is that your wife?’
‘It’s somebody’s wife,’ Campbell replied.
‘Knowing you, it’s probably somebody else’s wife,’ the man said with a smirk.
Campbell acknowledged the joke with a thin smile. Then, selecting his words with care, he said, ‘Are you going to sit at this bar all night? Or are you going to go to the phone and call someone?’
After a carefully attenuated pause, the man murmured, ‘Go back to the good woman. Enjoy your meal. Then fuck off out of here.’
‘Who was that?’ Campbell’s wife asked when he rejoined her.
‘Guy I know, workwise,’ Campbell replied, and left it at that.
Campbell lived by a principle: Everyone is recruitable. Sometimes you just need to find the right button. You could haul the same person in fifteen times and he would not break; then, the sixteenth time, something would happen. Circumstances change. The man suddenly found himself at odds with his crew. Or he was in a spot and needed money. Informants from the ethnic ghettos that bred Belfast paramilitaries were often unemployed, scraping by on public benefits. If you timed your overture right, you could offer a bailout at the moment when they most desperately needed it.
If there was someone you really wanted to target and his circumstances didn’t change, you might just change those circumstances for him. ‘You’d arrange for him to lose his job,’ Campbell recalled. ‘Or lose his house.’ For a man or woman with a family to feed, nothing sharpens the mind like the prospect of homelessness. If the potential recruit relied on a car to get to work, Campbell could arrange for the car to have a problem that would necessitate expensive repairs. ‘When you know he’s down-and-out, that’s when you bring him in,’ Campbell would say.
Money might have been an effective hook with which to ensnare an informant, but it could be dangerous as well. Some informants were what are known as ‘five-pound touts’: little fish, local people who could furnish occasional low-level tips for a minimal gratuity. But when you had someone who was more fully compromised – someone who was delivering valuable intelligence and acting as an agent of the British state – it could be difficult to pay such a person in a manner that would not blow his cover. Most of these people lived in run-down enclaves where nobody had ever had much money. How do you pay someone in that environment hundreds or even thousands of pounds and expect it to go unnoticed? You might concoct a story about a windfall. A banner day at the races. But that works exactly once. What do you say about the next payment?
The best informants worked for the authorities for years, often decades. It was hazardous to pursue such a double existence, in a land where the punishment for touting was a bullet in the head and a lifetime of shame for one’s family. It was also lonely. Campbell’s informants often came to rely on him emotionally. He may have been exploiting their preparedness to risk death. He may have blackmailed them into cooperating with him in the first place, or blackmailed them into staying an informant when they wanted to quit. But he was also, quite often, the only person who knew their secret. As such, he became doctor, social worker and priest. The tout’s problems became his problems: repairs to the house, Christmas presents for the kids.
Conventional wisdom had it that every handler wants a highly placed source. But Campbell found that the best informants often were ‘access agents’ – not the intelligence target himself, but the man standing right beside him. Recruit the man who drives Gerry Adams’s car and you may get more valuable intelligence than you would if you recruited Adams himself. (Roy McShane, who served as Adams’s personal chauffeur during the 1990s, was outed as a British informant in 2008.)
The IRA was hardly oblivious to the dangers of British penetration. When Brendan Hughes and his men first interrogated Seamus Wright and Kevin McKee back in the 1970s, they learned about the ‘Freds’ and the Kitsonian scheme to subvert the republican movement from within. Later that decade, the Provos established a dedicated internal security unit, which could vet new recruits and interrogate suspected touts. This cadre of inquisitors would become known as the Nutting Squad – because when a traitor confessed, they would ‘nut’ him, or put a bullet in his head.
For decades, the most fearsome spy hunter on the Nutting Squad was reputed to be Alfredo ‘Freddie’ Scappaticci. A barrel-chested bricklayer with a handlebar moustache, Scappaticci had grown up in South Belfast, in a family of Italian immigrants. His father owned a popular ice cream van, which bore the family name, and people called Freddie ‘the Wop’ or, more often, simply ‘Scap’. He joined the republican movement at the beginning of the Troubles and was interned at Long Kesh.
Members of the Nutting Squad would interrogate any IRA member who was suspected of possible cooperation with the British. Methods seldom varied. The questioning would last for hours, and often days, with threats, beatings and torture until a confession was proffered. The signs of the group’s handiwork would suddenly materialise in stretches of wasteland at the edge of town or alongside rutted lanes in the country: corpses, their limbs bound, their flesh singed and battered from torture, their eyes ghoulishly blotted out with scraps of masking tape. ‘Every army attracts psychopaths,’ Brendan Hughes liked to say.
Trevor Campbell was all too aware of what awaited those who were summoned by the Nutting Squad. Once, a Provo quarter-master named Frank Hegarty supplied his handlers in British intelligence with the location of a cache of weapons that the IRA had obtained from Libya. Hegarty fled to England, where he went into hiding at an MI5 safe house. He might have survived, had he stayed away for good. But he got homesick and telephoned his mother back in Derry. She told him that Martin McGuinness had been coming round to see her and that he had offered his personal assurance that if Hegarty came back to Derry and explained everything to the IRA, his life would be spared. When Hegarty returned, he was questioned by the Nutting Squad, and his body turned up by the side of a road along the border. (In 2011, McGuinness insisted that he had played ‘no role whatsoever’ in the execution. But in 1988, two years after Hegarty was killed, McGuinness had pointed out in an interview that republican activists knew the repercussions for ‘going over to the other side’. Asked to clarify what those repercussions might be, McGuinness said, ‘Death, certainly.’) When Trevor Campbell was working with his own informants, he would tell them: ‘Whatever happens, never confess. If you confess, you’re dead.’
During his Boston College oral history with Anthony McIntyre, Brendan Hughes declared with conviction that Jean McConville had been executed because she was a tout. According to Hughes, McConville had been discovered to have a ‘transmitter’ in her house – a radio, presumably supplied by the British. McConville, Hughes said, ‘had her own kids gathering information for her, watching the movements of IRA volunteers around Divis Flats’.
Hughes told Mackers that McConville first came to the attention of the Provos when a local foot soldier encountered one of her children and the boy mentioned that his ‘mammy’ had something in the house. ‘I sent a unit, a squad, over to the house to check it out,’ Hughes recalled. There, Hughes said, they discovered the radio. The IRA arrested McConville, Hughes continued, taking her away for interrogation. According to Hughes, she confessed that she had been passing information to the British Army using the radio to communicate. Hughes cautioned Mackers that he himself had not been ‘on the scene at the time’, so his recollections were based on second-hand information from his subordinates. But he said that after the confession, his men confiscated the transmitter and let Jean McConville return to her children, with a warning.
Several weeks later, Hughes said, a second transmitter was discovered in the McConville flat. ‘I warned her the first time,’ he recalled, but now, ‘I knew she was being executed.’ Even if one were to accept Hughes’s account that McConville was an informer, it is difficult to conceive of a scenario in which she could have furnished anything but low-level titbits. That didn’t matter to Hughes and his comrades. However minor the practical impact of the alleged betrayal might have been, to the IRA, a tout was a tout, and the penalty was death.
Hughes insisted that he personally did not know that McConville was going to be secretly buried, ‘or “disappeared”, as they call them now’. He had always identified as a left-wing freedom fighter, yet here was a tactic that seemed synonymous with tyranny. In Mackers’s view, ‘the disappearance of people is a calling card of the war criminal, whether it’s in Chile or Kampuchea’. Even in the chaos of 1972, the Provos did not kill and disappear someone lightly, Hughes insisted. As barbaric as it might seem in retrospect to bury a mother of ten in an unmarked grave, the decision to do so was the product of an earnest debate.