by Peter Taylor
The meeting with McGuinness, in the presence of the Contact, lasted several hours. Gerry Adams was supportive of the initiative but not able to attend. ‘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. He was certainly very well informed and had a sophisticated view of what was going on in British political life. 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.’ Oatley outlined to McGuinness his view of the IRA’s position. ‘It hadn’t really achieved anything for many years in terms of advancing its objectives and, although it had killed a lot of people and continued to give the Government and security forces a hard time, nothing tangible had been achieved.’ He then spelt out how he saw HMG’s position. ‘Clearly the Government was willing to go on for ever, if necessary, with a policy of containment but if the IRA wished to pursue a political course, given a considerable change in political circumstances with the development of the European Union, there might be things the British Government could do to help.’
Oatley concluded that McGuinness was prepared to consider these possibilities in ‘a hypothetical and very positive way’. He then returned to London, wrote a report and went to see the new Permanent Under Secretary at the Northern Ireland Office, John Chilcot, who was to become one of the ‘Brit’ architects of the peace process. Oatley told Chilcot that the Provisionals had shown some interest in pursuing a political course, ‘though perhaps not very quickly’, and that that was something that could be ‘encouraged or discouraged’ according to whatever policy HMG adopted. Oatley had told McGuinness that he had recently retired and could play no further part, but that if the leadership wished to pursue some sort of dialogue, another senior official might be made available to conduct it. Oatley had no authority to make this suggestion and had sought none for attending the meeting. McGuinness said that should the British wish to appoint a successor to Oatley, the Republican Movement was ‘morally and tactically obliged not to reject their offer’.12
Oatley then retired to watch from the wings, having set in train through the Contact the sequence of events that four years later was to lead to the IRA cease-fire and, ultimately, eight years later, to the Good Friday Agreement. The ‘long peace’, like the ‘long war’, took a long time. A successor was appointed, a former MI6 officer who was brought out of retirement and seconded to MI5 to carry on where Oatley had left off. He met the Contact and showed him a letter of authentication from Peter Brooke. Oatley also confirmed his status to the Contact. This person, who was anonymously referred to as the ‘British Government Representative’ (BGR), was to play a critical and highly controversial role in the years that followed, although initially that role largely consisted of briefings on upcoming speeches and political moves.
No sooner had Oatley left MI6, whose top job had narrowly eluded him, than the IRA sent a more familiar message to the British Government. This time it was directed at its very heart. On 7 February 1991, at the height of the Gulf War, the IRA fired three deadly Mark 10 mortar bombs at Downing Street. It was barely a month after the meeting between Oatley and McGuinness. They had been used to devastating effect in Northern Ireland, most notably in the attack on Newry RUC station in 1985 in which nine police officers had been killed, but had never been used in England before. They were fired from a white Transit van parked opposite Horse Guards Parade, near the Ministry of Defence. One landed in the back garden of Number Ten, almost wiping out the Prime Minister and members of his Cabinet. Two more had landed in St James’s Park, just beyond the garden wall. Each bomb weighed around 140 lbs, was over four feet long and carried a payload of 40 lbs of Semtex high explosive. At the time, John Major was presiding over a meeting of the Overseas and Defence Committee, discussing the Gulf War. ‘Suddenly there was this tremendous explosion and then an after-shock and then what seemed like a second explosion,’ he said. ‘Then all the windows came in. At that stage, Tom King, who was sitting directly opposite me, said, “It’s a mortar!” He clearly recognized it from his time in both the army and Northern Ireland. And everybody ducked under the table. I thought for a second that it might have been a present from Saddam Hussein but it quickly became apparent it was the IRA.’ As the members of the Cabinet Committee emerged from under the table, the Prime Minister announced they had better continue the meeting somewhere else at which point they all went off to the underground bunker beneath Downing Street known as the Cobra Room.13
Despite Oatley’s discussion with McGuinness only a few weeks before, the IRA’s audacious and near-fatal attack did not cause Major, Brooke, Chilcot or Oatley any great surprise since they fully expected the IRA to carry on with, and even intensify, its campaign whilst putting out peace feelers, on the grounds that when and if talks with the British began, the IRA would be doing so from a position of strength. They also knew that McGuinness and Adams had to carry their comrades with them in the enterprise and the best way of doing so was to carry on hitting the ‘Brits’ and making them count the human and financial cost. Talking and killing were not mutually exclusive.
A year later, on 17 January 1992, the East Tyrone IRA detonated a huge landmine at Teebane crossroads just outside Cookstown. The target was a minibus taking home Protestant workmen who had been working on an army base at Lisanelly, Omagh. Eight workmen were killed. The 500 lbs of home-made explosives left a crater more than six metres wide and one metre deep.14 It was the IRA’s biggest attack on Protestant workers since the Kingsmills massacre in 1976. That same evening, Peter Brooke appeared on Ireland’s most popular television chat show, the Late Show with Gay Byrne, and, having talked about the horror of Teebane, was inveigled into singing ‘My Darling Clementine’ in front of the studio audience. Unionists were appalled at the Secretary of State’s apparent insensitivity and demanded his resignation. Brooke, realizing the error of judgment, apologized and offered his resignation to the Prime Minister. John Major refused.15
Nearly three weeks later, on 5 February 1992, the loyalist UFF took their revenge by walking into Sean Graham’s bookmaker’s shop on Belfast’s Lower Ormeau Road and gunning down five Catholics, including a sixteen-year-old boy and a pensioner. The UFF concluded its statement claiming responsibility with the words ‘Remember Teebane’. By the end of 1992, for the first time in the history of the conflict, the loyalist paramilitaries had claimed as many victims in one year as the IRA. Both organizations had killed thirty-four people. Three of the loyalists’ victims were members of Sinn Fein, as the UFF and the UVF increasingly targeted known republicans.
The day after the killings at Sean Graham’s betting shop, Albert Reynolds, the Irish Finance Minister, succeeded Charles Haughey as leader of Fianna Fail and was ratified as Taoiseach by the Irish parliament. John Major was delighted. As Chancellor of the Exchequer he had worked with Reynolds within the European Union and liked him a lot. Both were deal-makers and there was a natural chemistry between them. Major recorded that relationships between London and Dublin immediately improved. ‘He was easy to get on with, naturally cheery and loquacious, and as keen as I was to see real progress in Northern Ireland … his commitment was a plus. So was his love of a deal, born of making a fortune selling pet-food and owning dance-halls.’16 Both Prime Ministers were convinced that, given time and persuasion, a deal was there to be done. The tit-for-tat carnage at Teebane and Sean Graham’s simply brought the urgency home. Time was not on the province’s side.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Secret Talks
1992–1993
John Major knew that if he was to make any progress on Ireland he would have to win the next General Election since he was very much regarded as the caretaker Prime Minister whom fate had thrust into Margaret Thatcher’s shoes. He was also conscious that his Premiership had to be put to the nation which would bestow on him, or not, t
he authority to continue. Major called the election for 9 April 1992. The omens did not look good. At the start of the campaign, one of the Downing Street officials asked the Prime Minister’s wife, Norma Major, if she had ordered a removal van.1 He was being realistic not facetious, but there was no need for packing: Major remained in Downing Street with a majority of twenty-one seats, defying most predictions. The Labour pretender, Neil Kinnock, had run a highly professional, super-smooth campaign, orchestrated to the last sound-bite, carefully staged rally and soft-focus-image TV party political broadcast. In contrast, John Major took to his ‘soap box’, fending off eggs and other unsolicited missiles, to bring his message to the people. The soap box won. Ireland was never an issue in the campaign, nor had it ever been in any British General Election in living memory. There was good news for Major in Northern Ireland, too, with the SDLP vote up 2.4 per cent and the Sinn Fein vote down 1.4 per cent. But best news of all in the province for the Government was that Gerry Adams lost his West Belfast seat to the SDLP candidate, Dr Joe Hendron, not least because Protestants on the Shankill Road, part of the West Belfast parliamentary constituency, cast their votes strategically for Hendron to ensure Adams’s defeat. It was not often that loyalists voted for the SDLP.
The day after the election, as the Tories were still rubbing their eyes in partial disbelief and celebrating Major’s victory, the Government was given a reminder of what lay ahead when the IRA rocked the City of London with a huge explosion at the Baltic Exchange. Three people were killed in the blast, including a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl, Danielle Carter. The IRA’s warning was inadequate. The bomb caused £800 million worth of damage, eclipsing the £600 million that had been the total cost of the damage in Northern Ireland since the outbreak of the ‘Troubles’ in 1969. The IRA had welcomed Major to Downing Street with mortars and were now serving him notice on the day after his victory that, although Ireland had not been an election issue, it had not gone away.
Major did not need reminding. With the giant sweep-up operation in the City under way and insurance companies holding their heads in their hands, Major reshaped his Cabinet and summoned his old friend Sir Patrick Mayhew to Downing Street. Mayhew, who had been Attorney-General since 1987, was at home when he got the call and did not know whether he was being summoned for a job or the sack. ‘It was a lovely sunny day,’ he told me, ‘so I picked a camellia that was in flower, stuck it in my buttonhole and up I went.’ Before the Prime Minister could say anything, Mayhew congratulated him on his ‘terrific achievement’ of winning the election on his own and said he just wanted to get that out of the way first. Major then offered him the job of Northern Ireland Secretary. ‘I’m afraid I didn’t say any of the solemn things that people are supposed to say on these occasions,’ he said, ‘I simply said, “Whoopee!”’
The Baltic Exchange bomb reinforced what the Prime Minister and his officials knew already from the mortar attack on Downing Street: however good intelligence on the IRA might be in the province, it was sadly lacking in London. Major ordered the Home Secretary, Kenneth Clarke, to carry out an urgent review and make recommendations to improve the structure of intelligence-gathering on the mainland. The review was conducted by Ian Burns who had been transferred from the Northern Ireland Office to the Home Office’s Police Department. Ever since its origins in 1883 (to combat Irish terrorism), the Metropolitan Police’s Special Branch (then known as the Irish Special Branch) had been responsible for countering the IRA. Clearly by the early nineties, with mortar bombs raining down on Downing Street, there was a feeling in high places that Special Branch was not up to the job. MI5, which was gradually emerging from the shadows under its new Director-General, Stella Rimington, was waiting in the wings to take over. Reports of a fierce turf war between the Met’s Special Branch and MI5 were probably not exaggerated. The Security Service won and in May 1992 the Home Secretary announced that MI5 would take over as the lead agency in the battle against the IRA. There was dismay in Scotland Yard at what some Special Branch officers saw as a snub but a working relationship was established, bonded in the face of the common enemy.
One of MI5’s first acts in its new over-arching role was to visit every police force in the country to carry out an intelligence audit on every IRA suspect on their books. The result was 1,000 names which were then categorized and computerized. It then set about recruiting agents in Great Britain with connections going back to Belfast where most operations started. In Northern Ireland, one in every twenty people approached by MI5 officers with a view to becoming an agent signed up. Recruiting on the mainland was unlikely to prove any easier with an even tighter network of IRA activists.
In Downing Street, policy towards the IRA did not change. The message to the Republican Movement remained the same. Stop the killing and HMG will be prepared to listen. Sir Patrick Mayhew carried on where Peter Brooke had left off and sent the IRA another public message on 16 December 1992 in a keynote speech at Coleraine on ‘Culture and Identity’. It did not need decoding.
Unity cannot be brought nearer, let alone achieved, by dealing out death and destruction. 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 …2
The words could almost have been taken from Merlyn Rees’s speaking notes in the run-up to the 1975 IRA cease-fire and the secret talks that followed.
Just over two months later, on 22 February 1993, the IRA made what John Major and Sir Patrick Mayhew considered an astonishing response that added an extra dimension to what Major had thought was possible. The Prime Minister had no doubt it came from the Provisional IRA’s Army Council (PAC), routed through Martin McGuinness. Major believed that both McGuinness and Adams were members of the PAC. ‘That a settlement could be delivered without them did not seem to me to be credible,’ he told me. ‘If there was to be an agreement, it had to involve Adams and McGuinness, so great was their authority within their own Movement.’
The response came in the form of a message that MI5 told Major and Mayhew had been sent by Martin McGuinness. The ‘message’ was transmitted by the Contact to the MI5 officer known as the British Government Representative (BGR), who then transmitted it to his superiors. They then passed it on to Number Ten and the NIO. Major received it late in the afternoon of a ‘pretty miserable, dreary, dark day’ as dusk was falling. He was working on his own in the Cabinet room when his Private Secretary came in with the ‘message’. It was written down as follows.
The conflict is over but we need your advice on how to bring it to an end. We wish to have an unannounced cease-fire in order to hold dialogue leading to peace. We cannot announce such a move as it will lead to confusion for the Volunteers because the Press will interpret it as surrender. We cannot meet the Secretary of State’s public renunciation of violence [as read into his Coleraine speech], but it would be given privately as long as we were sure we were not being tricked.3
Major and Mayhew both took advice from the Security Service and were assured that the message was genuine. Major knew he had to take it very seriously. If it was merely a publicity stunt, then the worst that could happen would be egg on the Prime Ministerial face. But if it was real, then there was the possibility of a genuine breakthrough leading to round-table talks and an acceptable settlement to the interminable dispute. Sir Patrick Mayhew was equally up-beat.
I certainly didn’t regard it as a ‘white flag’. I was very pleased that it had come and I certainly wasn’t expecting it. I wanted to regard it as a recognition that, contrary to the IRA’s belief over many years, the British Government was not going to
be shoved away from the principle of consent and democracy by violent attacks, whether in Northern Ireland or in the City of London. If it was that, then I wanted to sustain that conversion to politics and abandonment of violence.
When the wording of the ‘message’ subsequently became public, McGuinness was enraged and denied he had ever said any such thing, let alone in a message. Given its provocative wording about needing ‘advice [from the ‘Brits’] on how to bring it to an end’, McGuinness could do little else. Whatever the interpretation put on it by Mayhew, its wording would suggest surrender and that was the last thing on McGuinness’s mind. The intelligence services had put the IRA under great pressure but had certainly not won a military victory. As the IRA rightly pronounced, it was ‘undefeated’. The flip side was that it had not won. There was almost certainly a degree of confusion over the ‘message’. It may have been that the Contact or, more likely, the BGR was interpreting too liberally McGuinness’s general sentiments in the hope of giving the peace process a much-needed impetus at a critical time.
Behind the scenes, events moved quickly.4 The British responded promptly to the ‘message’ they had received, assuring McGuinness in a document forwarded by the BGR, via the Contact, that ‘all those involved share a responsibility to work to end the conflict’; that there was need for ‘a healing process’; that it was essential that ‘both sides have a clear and realistic understanding of what it is possible to achieve’, and that there was ‘no blueprint’ but a search for ‘an agreed accommodation, not an imposed settlement, arrived at through an inclusive process in which the parties are free agents’. Critically, the Government emphasized that there was no question of accepting any prior objective of ‘ending partition’. It accepted, however, that ‘the eventual outcome of such a process could be a united Ireland but only on the basis of the consent of the people of Northern Ireland’.5 In the light of what was to happen a few days later, one sentence in HMG’s submission was of paramount importance. It stressed that ‘any dialogue could only follow a halt to violent activity’, which it accepted ‘in the first instance would have to be unannounced’.6 The document was dated 19 March 1993. When the BGR handed it over to the Contact, he also passed on an oral message recognizing the difficulties involved for both sides and warning ‘that all acts of violence hereafter could only enhance those difficulties and risks, quite conceivably to the point when the process would be destroyed’.7
