For days, the prisoners were deprived of food, water and sleep and made to stand for long periods in stress positions, unable to see anything because of the hoods over their heads. They were also subjected to piercing, high-pitched noises. The British had learned these techniques by studying the experiences of soldiers who were held as prisoners of war by the Nazis or by the North Koreans and the Chinese during the Korean War. As it happened, Anthony Farrar-Hockley, who until the month before had served as commander of land forces in Northern Ireland, had himself once been tortured as a prisoner of war in North Korea. ‘The IRA call themselves soldiers and say they’re carrying out warfare, so they must be prepared to be frightened if they’re captured and interrogated,’ he remarked.
Initially, the techniques had been taught to British soldiers as a way to resist harsh interrogation and torture. But eventually these methods migrated from the portion of the curriculum that was concerned with defence into the portion that dealt with offence. They had been employed for nearly two decades against insurgents in British-controlled territories – in Palestine, Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus. But they had never been memorialised in any written manual, and were instead passed down from one generation of interrogators to the next, an oral tradition of human cruelty.
‘What’s your position?’ the interrogators asked McGuigan. ‘Who is on the Belfast Brigade staff?’ They wanted names – names like Gerry Adams and Brendan Hughes, the names of McGuigan’s commanding officers and his fellow volunteers. As one day bled into the next, with no sense of time, McGuigan’s psyche became warped by sleep deprivation and hunger and the relentless noise. He felt as if he was starting to lose his mind. When the interrogators asked him to spell his own name, he would garble the answer. When they instructed him to count to ten, he found that he couldn’t. For a long time, they had him chained to a cast-iron radiator, and the cuffs chafed his wrists until the skin was raw and tender. Many of the men began to suffer from hallucinations. At one point, convinced that he would never make it out alive, McGuigan bashed his head against the radiator until blood seeped down his face.
When the torture ended, after a week, some of the men were so broken that they could not remember their own names. Their eyes had a haunted, hollow look to them, which one of the men likened to ‘two pissholes in the snow’. Another detainee, who had gone into the interrogation with jet-black hair, came out of the experience with hair that was completely white. (He died not long after being released, of a heart attack, at forty-five.) When Francie McGuigan was finally returned to Crumlin Road jail, he saw his father, and the older man broke down and cried.
There is no record, at least in the public domain, of Frank Kitson’s views on ‘interrogation in depth’. But it seems unlikely that he was troubled by it. Rough tactics were a signature of the colonial campaigns in which he specialised. When his treatise on counterinsurgency was released, one review noted that ‘the four Geneva conventions of 1949, many parts of which are explicitly relevant, and which Britain has signed, are not mentioned’. A subsequent investigation by the British government found that some of the interrogation techniques used against the so-called Hooded Men constituted criminal assault. But in a controversial 1978 decision, the European Court of Human Rights held that the techniques, while ‘inhuman and degrading’, did not amount to torture. (In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, when the American administration of George W. Bush was fashioning its own ‘enhanced interrogation’ techniques, officials relied explicitly on this decision to justify the use of torture.)
But perhaps the most concrete application of Frank Kitson’s colonial philosophies in the context of the Troubles was the MRF. This was an elite unit so murky and clandestine that nobody seemed to agree even on the baseline matter of what precisely the acronym MRF stood for. It might have been Mobile Reconnaissance Force. Or Military Reconnaissance Force. Or Military Reaction Force. The MRF consisted of thirty or so special operators, both men and women, who were hand-picked from all across the British Army. They dressed in plain clothes, wearing bell-bottoms and denim jackets, and grew their hair long. Within the army, they were known as the ‘Bomb Squad’, because one of their responsibilities was reconnaissance, and they would stake out locations where they expected paramilitaries to plant a bomb. Soldiers of Irish origin were deliberately recruited, in order to blend in with the locals.
Members of the MRF drove around republican enclaves, conducting covert surveillance. But they also got out of their vehicles, in the heart of Indian country. They posed as road sweepers and dustmen. They huddled with the vagrants drinking methylated spirits by the side of the road. They also began to set up secret observation posts, creeping into shops and homes that had been damaged by rioting or fire. A single brick would be extracted from a walled-up façade, allowing an MRF member hiding inside to look out on the neighbourhood. One woman who worked for the MRF went door-to-door, selling cosmetics and gathering intelligence as she went. In December 1971, Kitson wrote a memo entitled ‘Future Developments in Belfast’, in which he explained that one critical means of bringing the fight to the IRA was ‘building up and developing the MRF’.
But the unit was doing more than gathering intelligence. It was assassinating people, too. Men in plain clothes would drive around in an unmarked Ford Cortina, with a Sterling sub-machine gun hidden under the seat. They had to keep the weapon out of sight, one MRF member would later explain, because they were camouflaged so effectively that if they passed an army outpost and were spotted with a gun, their own British colleagues ‘would open fire and we would be shot’. It was an MRF team that had burst out of the green van in West Belfast and attempted to murder Brendan Hughes. These hit squads deliberately carried particular makes of weapons that were used by the paramilitaries, so that when someone was murdered, the ballistics would suggest that it was the IRA or loyalist killers who were responsible, rather than the army.
‘We wanted to cause confusion,’ one MRF member recalled. If people believed the paramilitaries were responsible, it would erode their standing in the community and preserve the image of the army as a law-abiding neutral referee. This was particularly true in those instances where the MRF, seeking to assassinate a target, ended up inadvertently killing an unaffiliated civilian instead. One summer night in 1972, a twenty-four-year-old woman named Jean Smyth-Campbell was sitting in the passenger seat of a car at a bus terminal on the Glen Road when a bullet pierced the window and then her head. At the time, the police announced that ‘no security forces were involved’ in her death and implied that there might be some connection to ‘political bodies’ (a shorthand for paramilitary groups) in the area. Smyth-Campbell’s family came to believe that she had been shot by the IRA. It would be four decades before they learned that she was almost certainly killed by the MRF.
Frank Kitson was a maestro of press manipulation. In the aftermath of a spasm of violence, he would summon the local Guardian correspondent, a young writer named Simon Winchester, to visit him at army headquarters for a briefing. Kitson would proceed to spell out, with great certainty, the circumstances of the relevant incident, citing the army’s classified intelligence files on the victims. Winchester, feeling lucky to have the scoop, would then dutifully report that the dead man in question had been a quartermaster or an ordnance expert or a senior marksman for the Provos. Winchester liked Kitson, whom he thought of as ‘the little Brigadier’, and they became friends; the young correspondent would make social visits to Kitson’s family at their home on the army base and play cards with Kitson’s daughter. It was only later that Winchester came to realise how shoddy British intelligence on the Provos was at that stage, and to suspect that much of the information he had parroted was simply wrong. He eventually concluded, and acknowledged publicly, that he had been used by Kitson as a ‘mouthpiece’ for the army.
Kitson’s Strangelovean attributes made him an object of obsession for the IRA. The Provos studied Low Intensity Operations and featured Kitson in their p
ropaganda. In the fevered imaginations of the paramilitaries, he became an outsize antagonist, talked about but rarely seen, ‘Kits the Butcher of Belfast’. Already prone to wartime superstition, the Provos began to attribute any freak occurrence that they could not otherwise explain to the mind games of the shifty British strategist, as if he were some sort of poltergeist. There were plans to kidnap Kitson, though none of them ever came to fruition. The Provos were said to have a ‘death list’, with the names of priority targets for assassination; Frank Kitson was right at the top.
But the Provos were not the only ones to keep a death list. As the MRF conducted its surveillance and developed intelligence, the unit had its own catalogue of targets whom the operatives were authorised to shoot on sight. In the MRF’s secret briefing room in the heart of Palace Barracks, the walls were plastered with surveillance shots of the biggest ‘players’ among the Provos – their targets. According to an account by one former member of the MRF, the key figures on the wall included Brendan Hughes, Gerry Adams, and Dolours and Marian Price.
8
The Cracked Cup
A prison floated in Belfast Lough. The HMS Maidstone was a five-hundred-foot ship that had been used during the Second World War to service submarines for the Royal Navy. When the Troubles broke out, the vessel was hastily recommissioned as emergency accommodation for two thousand British troops arriving in Belfast, then recommissioned again, as HMP Maidstone – Her Majesty’s Prison. The ship slouched in the harbour, at a jetty, twenty feet from land. The prison quarters consisted of two bunkhouses beneath the deck: stuffy, overcrowded spaces in which prisoners were confined in three-tiered bunks. The light was dim, filtering through a few small portholes. The space was ‘not fit for pigs’, as one prisoner put it.
One day in March 1972, armed guards escorted a high-profile prisoner onto the Maidstone. It was Gerry Adams. After being on the run for months, Adams had been snatched by troops in a dawn raid on a West Belfast home, and now he was ushered roughly into the hold of the ship. He was greeted warmly by friends and relatives who were being held there, but he soon came to hate the place, which he thought of as a ‘brutal and oppressive sardine tin’. He may have been a hardened revolutionary, but Adams was not a man who was indifferent to nourishment. He liked a good meal, and the food on the ship was foul.
Adams was also in pain. When he was arrested, he had refused to acknowledge that he was in fact Gerry Adams. Instead he made up a pseudonym – Joe McGuigan – and insisted that was his name. He was taken to a police barracks and interrogated, and eventually one of the few RUC officers who knew him by sight came in, took one look at him, and said, ‘That’s Gerry Adams.’ Adams didn’t care. He continued to insist, stubbornly, that his captors had the wrong man. He had been ruminating, lately, about counter-interrogation techniques. ‘I had seized upon the device of refusing to admit I was Gerry Adams as a means of combating my interrogation,’ he later recalled. ‘By continuing to assert that I was Joe McGuigan, I reasoned that I would thwart the interrogation by bogging it down on this issue.’
The interrogators beat Adams, but he wouldn’t say a word. They tried good cop, bad cop – one of them going completely berserk, pulling out his gun and threatening to shoot Adams, only to be restrained by the other – but Adams didn’t break. It was only when he sensed that the interrogation was finally coming to an end that he acknowledged what everybody already knew: that he was Gerry Adams. By that time, his interrogators had been arguing with him for so long over the simple question of what his name was that Adams had managed to tell them nothing of any substance. ‘Of course, my strategy had been reduced to a charade by this time, but it had given me, I felt, a crutch to withstand their inquisition,’ he later observed. ‘To remain silent was the best policy. So even though they knew who I was, it was irrelevant. I couldn’t answer their questions, on the basis that I wasn’t who they said I was.’
When he was hauled onto the Maidstone, Adams saw the prison doctor and explained that, after all the beating, his ribs felt tender.
‘Is it sore?’ the doctor asked.
‘It’s sore when I breathe,’ Adams replied.
‘Stop breathing,’ the doctor said, without a flicker of a smile.
If the staff on board the Maidstone seemed bitter, and security was particularly tight, there was a reason. One frigid January evening a couple of months earlier, seven republican prisoners had stripped to their underwear, slathered their bodies in butter and black boot polish to insulate against the cold, sawed through an iron bar, squeezed through a porthole, dropped one by one into the icy water of the Musgrave Channel, and swum several hundred yards to the opposite shore. They had come up with the idea for the escape after watching a seal navigate the barbed-wire netting that had been placed in the water around the ship.
All seven men made it to the far shore and scrambled out of the water. They were soaking wet, dressed in their underwear and smeared with shoe polish. Looking as if they had just crawled out of the Black Lagoon, they proceeded to hijack a bus. Fortuitously, one of the escapees had been a bus driver before joining the IRA, and he piloted this unlikely getaway vehicle into central Belfast. When they stopped in a neighbourhood that was home to many republican sympathisers, local kids immediately set upon the bus, like a swarm of locusts, and started stripping it for parts. The prisoners hastened into the nearest pub, still mostly naked, and the patrons who stood around the bar looked up abruptly, shocked by this sudden, surreal intrusion. Then, without hesitation or, really, much need for explanation, the regulars started stripping off their own clothes and offering them to the fugitives. One of the patrons produced his car keys and tossed them to the men, saying, ‘Away youse go.’ By the time the army mobilised six hundred troops for a manhunt, the men had vanished. After slipping across the border, they held a triumphant press conference in Dublin, where the newspapers anointed them ‘the Magnificent Seven’.
Not long after Adams arrived on the Maidstone, British authorities elected to close the ship. The new prison that had been under construction for some time at the airfield outside Belfast was now complete. It was known as Long Kesh. One day, Adams was handcuffed to another prisoner, loaded into an army helicopter and flown to the new facility. Long Kesh was an eerie place. The paramilitaries who were confined there, adamant that they were not criminals but political prisoners, called it a concentration camp. And it looked like a concentration camp: on a windswept, desolate plain, a series of corrugated steel huts housed the prisoners, amid barbed-wire fences, floodlights and sentry towers.
Long Kesh came to occupy a vivid place in the Irish republican imagination. But Adams would not be staying long. One day in June 1972, a couple of months after his arrival, someone shouted, ‘Adams – release!’ At first he thought this must be a practical joke. Or, worse, a trap. But when he had gathered his belongings and stepped out of the prison, he saw Dolours and Marian Price waiting there for him, with a car to take him home. They drove him into Andersonstown, for a meeting with other members of the republican leadership on a matter of utmost delicacy.
While Adams was locked up, a secret back channel had been developing between the Provos and the British government. After some preliminary contacts, it seemed that an opportunity might exist to negotiate a possible ceasefire. One of Adams’s confederates in the IRA, a hard man named Ivor Bell, had insisted that a necessary precondition for any discussions with the British was the release from internment of Gerry Adams. He was still only twenty-three years old, but Adams had become such an instrumental figure in the IRA that there could be no peace talks without him. ‘No fucking ceasefire unless Gerry is released,’ Bell said.
On 26 June, the IRA initiated a ceasefire, and the British Army agreed to reciprocate. There had been an increase in the number of bombings and shootings just prior to the ceasefire; some suggested that this may have been a deliberate IRA strategy, in order to underline the contrast when the shooting stopped. But once the truce was called, IRA leaders commit
ted to honouring it, vowing, in an unintentionally comical flourish, that anyone who violated the ceasefire would be shot. The Provos announced that they had formulated a ‘peace plan’, which they would reveal ‘at the appropriate time’.
Many people in Northern Ireland objected on principle to any such dialogue, insisting that there should be no negotiation whatsoever with IRA terrorists. But that July, Adams and a small contingent of fellow IRA members boarded a British military plane, under conditions of great secrecy. Along with Adams, the group included Seán Mac Stíofáin, Ivor Bell, a gregarious, curly-haired young man named Martin McGuinness, who was the OC in Derry, and two other IRA leaders, Dáithí Ó Conaill and Seamus Twomey. They landed at an air force base in Oxfordshire, where two immense limousines stood waiting.
If this mode of conveyance seemed ostentatiously swanky, it was also grounds for suspicion. Adams was a former bartender. Ivor Bell had worked as a mechanic. McGuinness had trained as a butcher’s assistant. Hyper-attuned to any hint of British pomposity, the rebels would not allow themselves to be patronised or cowed. In advance of the trip, Bell had announced that, while they might be an official delegation to a peace summit, he, for one, would not be putting on a suit and tie. If history had taught him anything, Bell said, it was that the British liked nothing more than to make the Irish feel ill at ease. If their hosts were conspicuously formal, he would answer with extravagant informality. Let them feel uncomfortable for a change. Gerry Adams took a similar view on the wardrobe issue: he selected a pullover with a hole in it for the occasion.
The limousines ferried the group into London and deposited them at a grand old house in Chelsea, facing the Thames. As they walked inside, a little awed despite themselves, Adams noticed a blue plaque on the front wall that said the painter James McNeill Whistler had once lived there.
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