by Peter Taylor
The GOC at the time, Lieutentant-General Sir Frank King, agreed with the Secretary of State. ‘Certainly if you get a very large section of the population which is bent on a particular course, then it is a difficult thing to stop them,’ he told me shortly after the strike was over. ‘You can’t go round shooting people because they want to do a certain thing.’8 The last thing the army wanted to do was to face a ‘war’ on two fronts, with the IRA on one side and the loyalist paramilitaries on the other.
On 28 May, three days after Wilson’s broadcast, Brian Faulkner and the Executive resigned and Direct Rule was re-introduced. Sunningdale and power-sharing were almost a quarter of a century ahead of their time. The humiliating collapse of the political solution that the ‘Brits’ had hoped would finally bring peace played straight into the hands of the Provisionals, who cited it as proof that the only solution was not an internal settlement but a British withdrawal. With the strike over and the political initiative in ruins, the IRA’s strategy was to carry on bombing and shooting and keep up the pressure. The problem for the IRA was that the ‘Brits’ intended to keep up the pressure too.
Chapter Fourteen
Changing the Course of History
May 1973–November 1974
In May 1973, Frank Steele, the MI6 officer who had played such a critical role in facilitating the Cheyne Walk meeting between Whitelaw and the IRA leadership, left Northern Ireland, certain in the knowledge that there was a long haul ahead. ‘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.’ His replacement was another MI6 officer, Michael Oatley, whose influence on events at critical moments over the following two decades was to prove crucial, although he had no idea of what lay in store when he moved into Frank Steele’s quarters at Laneside, the house along the shores of Belfast Lough. Laneside was more than just a roof over the head for the ‘Brits’ who lived there. It was also the sounding board for the murderous politics of the province. Here Oatley worked alongside James Allan, a senior Foreign Office diplomat who had been sent to Northern Ireland as Whitelaw’s Political Adviser. Oatley posed as his Deputy. At Laneside, Allan hosted many secret meetings with the province’s politicians and representatives of the paramilitary organizations on both sides in an attempt to bring the warring factions together. His ear was finely tuned to any change in entrenched positions that might make peace possible. Much of the groundwork that led to the Sunningdale Agreement of 9 December 1973 was done in Laneside’s secluded rooms, well away from the public gaze. So sensitive were the secret negotiations that the ‘Brits’ heaved sighs of relief at the beginning of every meeting when all the heads were counted and none was found to be missing. There was genuine fear that some of those present might be targets for gunmen who felt that the politicians were going too far. Allan was well respected as a man of integrity, and even some of the toughest loyalist paramilitaries came to like and trust him. Oatley’s public position as Allan’s Deputy gave him convenient cover for his real mission, which was to develop covert contacts with, and channels of influence to, the IRA.
Oatley used Laneside as a base for forays into the most troubled areas of the province, and his official position as a passport to anyone at the grassroots level who was prepared to accept the possibility of at least some measure of good faith in British Government intentions. Under Allan’s management, Laneside continued as the venue for informal soundings with legitimate politicians of all shades and eventually for the secret inter-party talks conducted by Frank Cooper which led to Sunningdale.
Oatley had much in common with Steele: he was unorthodox, charming and willing to try anything, and, like Steele, he admitted he was starting from scratch. ‘I knew absolutely nothing about Northern Ireland,’ he told me, ‘and I was, in that sense, typical of most of the people who went to help the Secretary of State to deal with this new problem.’ Oatley had never expected to go to the province any more than Steele had. He was stuck in London at the time at the end of a home tour, and had been promised ‘some exciting posting’ by the Secret Intelligence Service’s Personnel Department which, in the end, failed to materialize. Oatley was anxious to get back into the field and, with friends in the military in Northern Ireland, he thought that the province might be the kind of ‘exciting posting’ he was looking for. Although it was not exactly the foreign field in which he and his colleagues had long been accustomed to serve, it was unlike any other part of the United Kingdom and a theatre in which he thought he might be able to exercise his particular talents. He also knew that with Frank Steele leaving, a post was coming free. ‘Obviously it was the most urgent problem facing the British Government at that stage and 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,’ he said. And so Michael Oatley packed his bags and went off to Northern Ireland for what was to be an eventful two-year stint.
When he arrived he found ‘an engaging group of amateurs led by a marvellously charismatic figure, “Willie” Whitelaw, trying to grapple with a maze of problems which they didn’t understand at all.’ Such was the nature of Direct Rule in its infancy. Whitelaw’s team would sit around discussing the myriad problems that arose on an almost daily basis, agree a Ministerial statement on a particular issue and then have to withdraw it when they realized it was inoperable. In the end, there were occasions when the team thought it better to say nothing rather than be caught on a hook from which the new administration found it difficult to escape. In a light-hearted moment one of them devised a Direct Rule crest and shield, prominently featuring three hooks. It would no doubt accompany the motto Frank Steele had suggested, ‘It seemed like a good idea at the time.’
When Oatley first arrived and established his political bearings, he was surprised that no one in the team, civil or military, was giving much thought to understanding the nature and motivation of the IRA leadership and its followers. Not surprisingly, the IRA’s continuing campaign had hardened attitudes and the natural inclination of the security forces, especially the army, was to identify their enemy in stark terms. Oatley suspected the analysis was not quite as straightforward as they would have it appear. His wide-ranging brief from MI6 gave him the opportunity to test it. Of all the members of Whitelaw’s entourage Oatley was the one most free of specific responsibilities. His instructions were to make himself useful in whatever way he thought best. At an early stage he decided to apply his energies to filling in the picture of what lay behind the IRA campaign and to seeing whether something could be done to influence it.
Oatley soon became very conscious of loss of life, particularly of the number of young British soldiers who were being killed in a situation of virtual stalemate. One weekend he picked up the Sunday Times colour supplement with photographs of all those killed. By the end of 1973, there were 211 of them, in addition to 39 members of the UDR and 44 policemen. Oatley knew that although the IRA, both Provisional and Official, was responsible for just about every one of those deaths, loyalist violence was casting its own increasingly bloody shadow over the statistics. In the same period, the UDA and the UVF and their related organizations had killed 240 people, the vast majority innocent Catholics and most them killed in the period 1972–3.1
Nevertheless he calculated that if the Provisional IRA could be persuaded to stop killing (the Official IRA remained on cease-fire), the loyalist paramilitaries might be persuaded to do the same on the basis that their violence was a reaction to IRA violence. He reasoned that the key to reducing the death toll must lie in the minds of republican leaders. Oatley knew what he had to do. ‘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.’ The question was how to do it. While his co
lleagues battled to contain the situation, Oatley was free to explore. ‘I was trying to understand what was going on in the grass roots areas where the violence was actually taking place,’ he said. Frank Steele had done the same, and had left him some exceptional guides as well as a range of contacts in both communities and a reputation for using the Secretary of State’s authority to bring solutions to immediate practical problems. There might be an argument between the local community and a Battalion commander over the intensity of military patrolling, or the failure of housing officers to attend to repairs, or the need to support a youth centre which might keep young people away from violence. Both men found that people in areas of social deprivation on either side of the sectarian divide had been equally badly served during the years of devolved government. When Oatley first arrived in the province, he believed, like most of his colleagues and contemporaries, that the IRA was the cause of the problem and not the symptom of it. The longer he spent in republican areas, the more he realized the reality was far more complex than that and was surprised at what he found.
The quality of the young people joining the IRA was very impressive and you could go to a street in the Creggan and find that everybody’s favourite son had joined the IRA. However much their mothers might disapprove of what they were doing or be frightened by it, that was what happened. From this I came to deduce that if so many young people were going to do this, then there must be social and political reasons more complex than I had understood propelling them in that direction. I thought that the quality of the leadership of the organization was probably quite interesting and would be worth studying.
Six months into his tour, how to get through to the IRA leadership became one of Oatley’s main preoccupations. The problem was that he could only study it from afar. The revelation of Whitelaw’s meeting with the IRA at Cheyne Walk had caused the Secretary of State great embarrassment, and that, added to the IRA’s carnage of ‘Bloody Friday’, had resulted in a ban on any Government representatives talking to or approaching the IRA. Oatley was well aware of the injunction from his political masters but realized that, unless some way could be found of prevailing upon the leadership of the Republican Movement, the violence could continue indefinitely, however successful the security forces and the intelligence services might be at containing the IRA. Oatley was fortunate, however, in that the Permanent Under Secretary at the Northern Ireland Office, Frank Cooper, came to the province at roughly the same time as Oatley and was a man of formidable strength and independence of mind. He too arrived in ignorance and, apart from the violence with which he was now familiar, was astonished at the social conditions he found.
Cooper had been brought up in and around Manchester during the depression of the 1930s and thought that, nearly forty years later, Belfast did not seem much different. Although Cooper might have disagreed with Oatley’s analysis of the IRA itself, he was at least as willing to take risks in the hope of developing a solution.
I didn’t think the IRA could absolutely be beaten because there had to be a political settlement of one kind or another at the end of whatever period it took to achieve it. In the meanwhile, I thought it could be contained. My own view is that if you’re dealing with a terrorist organization, at some remove you always ought to have a dialogue going because the basic problem about terrorism is that it’s very difficult to snuff out. You’ve got, in the end, to find some way of stopping terrorism. We can’t go around shooting everybody we think is a terrorist, which is certainly one possible way of doing it. Nobody in this country would have stood for that. We are, after all, a parliamentary democracy, and we did behave throughout as such, which is a very, very important point. But if a political situation made it possible, one should never discount the need to have a dialogue, although one should be extremely careful and extremely clear about what you were trying to do if you did.
Cooper himself had never been overly optimistic that Sunningdale and its political linkages would work. He thought the arrangements were ‘very, very clever indeed but too clever by three-quarters’ and admitted that he had not realized just how fractured a society Northern Ireland was. Cooper recognized that Sunningdale, with its carefully balanced give-and-take, was simply too sophisticated a solution for the divided citizenry and politicians of the province to take. As with most other British politicians, he realized that political progress could not be made if the majority of Protestant opinion was deeply opposed to it. The UWC strike could not have brought the point home in a clearer and more dramatic way.
Fortunately for both Cooper and Oatley, the new Northern Ireland Secretary, Merlyn Rees, was also flexible and imaginative in his political approach to the problem. He once rationalized the Labour Government’s lack of decisive action in countering the strike as if it were a calculated, strategic political act, which it was not. Certainly, with the UWC strike over, Rees and Cooper believed that they could start again with a clean slate. Again, both realized that for the violence to stop, the republicans and loyalists responsible for it would have to be brought into the political process. Controversially, with that in mind, Rees legalized Sinn Fein and the UVF. (The UDA had never been proscribed.) The order was passed at Westminster without debate on 14 May 1974, four days after the arrest of Brendan Hughes in Myrtlefield Park and a fortnight before the collapse of the power-sharing Executive.2
But, at this stage, legalization did nothing to blunt either side’s campaign. Three days later, on Friday 17 May 1974, the UVF exploded three car bombs without warning in the centre of Dublin and one car bomb in Monaghan. The Dublin bombs killed twenty-six civilians and injured 140, most of them going home in the Friday afternoon rush hour and looking forward to the weekend. Twenty of those killed were women and two of them were baby girls aged five months and seventeen months, one of whom was decapitated. The Monaghan bomb killed a further seven civilians and injured twenty more. The final death toll of thirty-three was the biggest loss of life in a single day in the whole of the conflict.3 It was the UVF’s own ‘Bloody Friday’.
To the triumvirate of Oatley, Cooper and Rees, the horror of the Dublin and Monaghan bombs and the shock of the successful UWC strike made a political solution even more imperative, however difficult it might be to achieve it. The IRA had also been causing mayhem in 1974, notably in England where it could operate with much greater freedom than in Belfast, where it was being increasingly hemmed in by the activities of Special Branch and the ‘Det’. On 4 February 1974, an IRA bomb exploded on a coach travelling along the M62 in Yorkshire carrying military personnel from Manchester to Catterick army camp near the Scottish border. The 50-lb bomb, concealed in the boot, killed nine soldiers, one woman and two children, aged five and two. The attack also had other implications for the ‘Brits’ because Judith Ward, the person convicted and sentenced to thirty years for planting the bomb, was later proved to have been the victim of a miscarriage of justice. She had always maintained her innocence and the IRA denied she had ever been one of its members. The Court of Appeal finally quashed her conviction in 1992 on the grounds that it had been unsafe. In delivering its verdict, the Court criticized the forensic scientists involved in the case analysis.4
Having legalized Sinn Fein and the UVF, Rees’s strategy was to hold elections for a Constitutional Convention after a decent interval had elapsed in which the bitterness and memory of the strike had subsided, and to encourage all the parties, including those that represented the paramilitaries on both sides, to participate. The Convention, under an eminent chairman, would then work out its own home-grown solution to the problem, free from ‘Brit’ interference. On paper it looked fine and if it took place in a climate free from violence and one in which there was also the prospect of an end to internment, then there was a glimmer of hope that it might stand some chance of success. Rees hinted that, given ‘a genuine and sustained cessation of violence’, anything might follow. This phrase was to become a mantra which, as Rees said, ‘could have been emblazoned in neon lights over Stormont
Castle’.5
Getting the IRA to declare a cease-fire was a critical part of the process. As Oatley knew from his predecessor, cease-fires of any duration and meaning had to be carefully negotiated and could not be done in a vacuum. That is why Frank Steele and Philip Woodfield had held their secret meeting with Gerry Adams and David O’Connell as a prelude to the IRA’s 1972 cease-fire and the talks at Cheyne Walk. The problem for Oatley and for Cooper, too, was that there was still a strict injunction in place about talking to the IRA, although both the Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, and the Northern Ireland Secretary, Merlyn Rees, had done so when they were in opposition. Now, however, the political situation was precarious because Wilson was leading a minority Government after the February General Election had left him without an overall working majority. Labour won 301 seats, the Conservatives 296 and the Liberals 14. The Liberals, therefore, held the balance of power. Wilson was gambling on going to the country again as soon as the situation seemed favourable and the last thing he wanted was a potentially damaging political storm over the Government’s secret contacts with the IRA. As Billy McKee had anticipated, bombs in England had concentrated the mainland mind in a way that bombs in Belfast had not. Oatley and Cooper knew the tightrope they were walking as Oatley began to put out feelers to the IRA. At first, Rees was not in the ‘loop’ and probably involved only on a ‘need-to-know’ basis, although he knew Michael Oatley and his general brief.
Oatley developed first two and later three secret channels to the IRA leadership. One was through an English businessman based in Northern Ireland who, Oatley says, approached him to sound out the possibility of a conversation, however vague, with David O’Connell, the most politically inclined member of the IRA’s Army Council. As a result, Oatley ‘made various noises’ but they did not get very far. The second involved a former Commander of the Provisional IRA’s Belfast Brigade. However, it was felt that these two channels were merely a convenient cover for the third, and by far the most important contact. This was a person in Derry who had a line to Ruairi O’Bradaigh, the President of Sinn Fein. (I will simply refer to him as the Contact as his true identity has been one of the most carefully guarded secrets of the current Troubles.) O’Connell and O’Bradaigh were the Republican Movement’s foremost political thinkers. The Contact had originally met Frank Steele whilst Steele was taking the political temperature in Derry and, although he himself was not a member of the IRA, he appeared to have a good understanding and appreciation of its thinking, which was not surprising in such a small and tightly knit community. In fact, he was the person who had mediated between the army and the IRA to ensure that ‘Operation Motorman’ did not become a second ‘Bloody Sunday’ and had personally encouraged the IRA’s removal of its weapons from the ‘no-go’ areas in Derry before ‘Motorman’ got under way. Steele suggested that Oatley should maintain the link with him. Over the years, the Contact made superhuman efforts with Oatley and others, often at great personal cost and danger to himself, to develop initiatives to end the conflict. He was trusted by both the British and the IRA leadership and few in the history of the past thirty years have fought harder, more devotedly or with more imagination to bring peace to the province.
