by James Adams
Then Bryan was there with his water and honeyed words. At first she had been suspicious, frightened that he would make her betray her comrades and the strike. But he never tried to talk her into eating, never reproached her for the killings or the bombings. Instead he listened and he talked. Oh, how he talked in those first few days. There seemed no logic in any of it to her. He told her of days spent fishing in Yorkshire, walks along the coast, a cottage he had in Robin Hood’s Bay. He talked of comradeship. How much he valued friends, how lucky he felt to have parents he loved and who loved him.
It was all a lie, of course. He never fished, had seen a postcard of Robin Hood’s Bay but never visited it, his parents were dead. And he never mentioned the wife and two children because that would have ruined the image he was creating, an image carefully designed to fit the psychological profile put together by the shrinks back at Lisburn.
Captain Bryan Dickens had been in Military Intelligence for ten years, five of them spent in Northern Ireland. He was part of the new breed of intelligence officers brought in after the disasters of the early seventies when the Army seemed to think it was still fighting in the jungle in Malaya. Belfast was not somewhere where you could simply shoot people you didn’t like after torturing others to find them.
He had joined the Devon and Dorsets as a simple infantryman but found the routine boring and asked for a transfer. The Intelligence Corps was actually second choice (he wanted the Army Air Corps but failed the eye exam) but he found he had an aptitude for the duplicity and secrecy that is meat and drink to the better spies. He had to suffer the barbs of former colleagues who refer to the Corps as the “green slime”, a reference to the bright green of their berets and the generally low opinion soldiers have of those who work in intelligence.
It wasn’t that Dickens was dishonest, or even that he thought lying an acceptable pastime, rather that he was clear about his loyalties and equally clear that if wars were to be won they needed people like him who used their minds not their muscle so that when the shooting started the bullets hit the right target. The Corps motto of Manui Dat Cognitio Vires (Knowledge gives Force to the Arm) summed it up well.
His looks, too, were a help, or at least they were when he first went into intelligence. He had a round face with the rosy cheeks of a farmer, which made him look friendly, and the blue eyes which vanished in the crinkles when he smiled were topped with bushy black eyebrows and straight black hair brushed off his forehead in the style of some thirties matinee idol. His wife told him he was good-looking but he wasn’t vain enough to give it much thought. The important thing was that people warmed to him and trusted him. Trust was a commodity of real value when you dealt in lies.
The Rita Cloghan file had been passed to him along with those of the other two women the day the hunger strike began. The file, in its customary buff folder with the purple diagonal stripe across the top right-hand corner marking its “Secret” status, told a familiar story of terrorism and capture, interrogation and jail. But what made Rita different from the others was the psychiatric report at the back which suggested that there might be an opportunity. It had all seemed very glib to Dickens, their talk of a father figure and substitution and dependency. But intelligence was attractive because it was a game of the mind, a pitting of wills, a delicate balance between the hunter and the hunted.
He had read the file but it was not until he began prising out her story in that filthy and depressing cell that he really began to understand her. It had taken three days of him talking and her listening before she began to reveal herself.
“I joined the Movement in ‘78,” she began. Her voice was low and husky, the vocal chords dry and contracted after months of talking in whispers to avoid being overheard by the screws and the microphones that all the prisoners were certain were everywhere. Dickens was surprised that he found her voice, if not her emaciated body, sexy.
“Looking back, it’s hard to remember just why I did it. I’d heard stories from other women about brothers killed, houses searched and the brutality of the Prods or the Brits, but they were just stories to me, things that had happened to other people. I grew up in Greencastle, just north of the city.”
Dickens knew all of this, of course, but he nodded encouragingly as if it was all news to him.
“By what I saw of other kids’ parents, we were quite well off. Not rich, just comfortable. Dad was one of the few Catholics to get a job at Harland and Wolff but even there he worked in the drawing office and so didn’t get such a hard time from the Prods on the shop floor. He drew up the electrics for those big container ships that Wolffs used to build. He loved drawing, reading. He was such a gentle man.”
“You were close to your father then?” he asked.
She grimaced with what he thought was a shallow attempt at a smile that recalled happier times. “I was an only child and they always say that daughters are closer to their fathers. Well, it was certainly true in my case. Mam was happy at home, happy if Dad was happy. But he was different. We used to go down to Loughshore Park and picnic on the edge of Belfast Lough: ham sandwiches, crisps and a bottle of pop. He would walk on the edge of the water and tell me about the revolution that would come one day.” Seeing the question in Dickens’s eyes, she gave a low laugh. “No. No. You think I’m the heir to an IRA legacy. Not at all. He thought the Boys were just a bunch of pansies, that they didn’t understand the inevitability of political revolution. He was a true Marxist, born out of the Depression and hardened on the sacrifices of the war.
“Our little house was filled with books — Marx, Engels, Bakunin — he must have been the best-read draughtsman in Belfast. Before the war he had been certain that revolution was inevitable but it never happened. He became a dreamer, always hoping for the call to arms which never came. It must have been very lonely for him. Mam didn’t understand. I was his audience, someone he could explain everything to.”
In fact the assessment Dickens had seen in Peter Cloghan’s file, which had been gathered from interviews with his manager at Harland and Wolff and with family friends, had produced a different picture of a man who drank too much, who lived in the past and had no prospects for the future. The books that Rita saw as a sign of sophistication in fact marked both the development of his political thought and the disintegration of his political hopes. By the time baby Rita was old enough to understand, all he had left was the lit flame of revolution which he was determined to pass on to his daughter.
“I never bought into all that Communist stuff. It seemed so irrelevant to me, to my life in Belfast. God, I was just a kid and he wanted me to carry his torch. I may not have cared about what he said but it mattered that he was saying it to me. We would spend hours with him talking to me or we might just read together.
“I suppose I was just lonely and he was a good friend. I…I…” She stumbled and Dickens reached out.
“So what happened?” he prompted.
“I was thirteen. He was walking from Wolffs to catch the bus. I was at home and we had agreed to go down to the lough for a walk that evening. Then a policeman came to the door and I heard my Mam crying. A brick had fallen on him from a building site. So stupid. Such a waste.
“I felt so alone. I had depended on him for so much — friendship, love, somebody to turn to. I had nowhere to go and nobody to tell me what was happening to my life.”
She turned her face to the chipped grey wall of the cell, but Dickens had seen the tears forming and running off the bridge of her nose on to the wool blanket. He reached into his pocket and drew out a pristine folded white square of handkerchief, shook it out of its folds and then gently dabbed away the tears. It was a brief moment of intimacy that established a bond between them: she was grateful for the sympathy and he satisfied that she had given enough of herself to cry in front of him.
“So what happened then?”
“Oh, I lost it for a while. Started running with a fast crowd. Hanging around the city centre; going to discos and pubs. We all thoug
ht it was great fun, boosting cars, drinking too much, some drugs. Our favourite pastime would be to get stoned on beer and dope and then con our way into the Europe Hotel and vomit. You scored five for the toilet and ten for any public room. It was pathetic really; our way of sticking one to the rich businessmen and the Brits who stayed there.
“I pretty much dropped out of school. Went out with a few boys and that came to nothing too. By the end of the seventies, Belfast was a dump and the counties a hopeless place to make a life. But I had nowhere to go and no job I wanted to do.
“The Movement then was doing pretty well. They were doing fine in the elections, they were opening advice centres across town, helping people with their social security and housing, stuff like that. Sure there was terrorism, too, but it didn’t seem too bad, you know? More like they were a popular social service. It was the Brits and the Prods who were hopeless, doing nothing for the community, beating up women and children.
“Anyway, I didn’t become a card-carrying fanatic or anything like that. I’d read the old guys, the people my father was brought up on, but I’d also read Marighella and I even remember him giving me a copy of Gaddafi’s Green Book — no wonder the Boys couldn’t stand him.
“But back then the Movement was a refuge for people like me. They wanted locals and their security was hopeless. They wanted numbers and weren’t fussed about the quality. There was still the legacy of the early seventies when IRA stood for I Ran Away because there were so few of them and they were so badly armed. So they wanted bodies on the ground and there was no trouble about joining. Friends who’d signed up said it was great, like being part of an elite, separate somehow but one of a group. So I volunteered.”
Dickens remembered it differently. In the early days the IRA had relied on Second and even First World War weapons which had been buried under floorboards or hidden in hedgerows. They were just a bunch of enthusiastic amateurs — but then so were the British. Northern Ireland had been a cushy posting for second-rate officers who hunted, shot and fished and played the part of landed gentry, which is what the locals seemed to expect. When the Troubles began, the army had no idea how to respond, while all the police understood was beating up Catholics, something they had been doing for generations. Then reinforcements had arrived, some fresh from the ruthlessness of the Malaya campaign. But their tactics were not right for an urban environment and nor were they right for Britain, and losses had been high on both sides. However, there had been a steep learning curve and by the time Rita joined the ranks, the IRA was beginning to look like a reasonably professional terrorist organization.
Of course, Rita was an ideal recruit: no family connections to the Republican cause and no record.
“Did they send you to that training camp south of Sligo? The Ox Mountains?”
A momentary hesitation showed Dickens that he had surprised her with his knowledge. But he wanted to make himself part of her story and not just a bystander. He wanted to draw her closer to him.
“Sure. We drove there one night. It was a small camp with tents and shacks and for two weeks me and one other woman and eight blokes learned about guns and explosives. It was all pretty basic stuff: field stripping an Armalite, planting a culvert bomb, firing a command wire, that kind of thing.
“All that was easy enough and I quite enjoyed it. But God it was a beautiful place: the hills, the dawn swims in Lough Easky, the rain, the mist. We’d sit for hours around a fire in the evening talking about the Movement, about politics, about anything really. We all had views. We were all part of something and that brought us together. I knew more about politics than anyone there and I think they were amazed that anyone, let alone a woman, could know more than they did.
The instructors told us tales of The Big Fellow, of Pearse, Connolly and the others. We learned about the brutality of the Brits, Bloody Sunday and the rest. But what made it for me was the belonging, feeling a part of something. In a strange way I thought I’d found a home.”
Dickens broke off the confession. It had been a good beginning. She had spoken for the first time and clearly wanted to say more. But the essence of the agent runner-spy relationship was subtlety and care. He had read once that the Apache, perhaps the greatest hunters in the world, hunted through the soles of their feet and through their noses. Their feet were so sensitive they could pick up the slightest vibration and their noses could smell their quarry. They would stalk their prey for hours, moving back a little, advancing a little on their nervous target. Recruiting an agent was a bit like that. You needed all the skills of a hunter and a delicate touch to avoid scaring the skittish prey. So now he wanted to give her time to rest, to think about him and to allow her subconscious to mull over what she had said.
The next day, he returned in the afternoon when he thought her morale would be at a low ebb and she would be grateful for some attention and some company. He took up the conversation where they had left off.
“So, after you’d done your training, they must have wanted to get you bloodied. An operation tends to cement the ties that bind,” he added helpfully.
“Ah. Well. That is where it all went badly wrong.”
She was still lying down — there were no pillows as the prison regime had banned them after an inmate had used the down to start a fire. But he felt a small thrill of satisfaction as he saw that she had used some of her water to wash the worst of the grime from her face. He noted absently that under all that mess there might be an attractive woman.
“We were briefed one night by the Commander of the Belfast Brigade. It was a grand title but he was not much older than me and his nerves were shot to pieces. He smoked so much that every sentence ended with a cough. You could practically see the nicotine dripping from his yellow fingers.
“Anyway, there were four of us. Three men and me and I was to do the snipe. The target was the Ladybrook RUC station and we would shoot from the cemetery at the junction of Suffolk Road and Stewartstown Road. There was nothing smart about it. I would just hit the first RUC man out of the station with a couple of rounds from the Armalite and then we’d all run like hell.”
They had got into position, creeping along the edge of the wall, bodies doubled over, fear and inexperience causing them to mutter curses as one or other of them stumbled in the darkness. From where she was hidden, it was an easy open shot to the door of the police station and she hunkered down, blackened face peering over the edge of the wall, rifle questing ahead.
The shout when it came had broken the night with such force that she had literally felt her skin jump. It had been a British ambush.
“God, I was terrified. I heard the shout. For a second I didn’t know what to do. I heard one of the guys curse, another started crying and messed himself with the fear. Then I stood up. I meant to leave the gun but I was just in a panic and clung on to it. As I came above the wall and the soldiers could see me, they started firing. I saw the flashes and wanted to shout at them I give up, I surrender, anything to make it stop. Then this huge fist hit me in the chest and I was literally lifted up and punched over the wall and into the street. I must have blacked out for a few seconds. When I came round it was suddenly bright as day, brighter even. The cops had turned on a searchlight and I was pinned down. I heard more shouting from the station. The cops wanted me to move towards them and I tried to stand up. But I’d taken another bullet in the leg and couldn’t walk so I had to shuffle the fifty yards on my bum. There was no pain really. I just remember feeling so humiliated at having to do this ridiculous shuffle across the road.
“Then there were these guns pointing at my head, men shouting orders I couldn’t understand. The pain started and I remember hearing this screaming and thinking God, what a noise and then realizing that it was me.
“A soldier gave me some morphine but I think he was as frightened as me because the needle broke off in my arm. One of the Pigs came and I was dumped in the back. Some of the soldiers were really angry, shouting at me, spitting in my face, stuff like tha
t. But then this young Brit came and squatted on all fours over me on the floor of the Pigs. He was shouting at the others, telling them I was wounded, protecting me with his body. I was lying there looking up into his face and thinking that this was the oddest position I had ever been in. Then I passed out.”
“How badly were you injured?” Dickens asked.
“It could have been worse, much worse. One bullet went straight through but took a fair bit with it. They had to take out one kidney and I’ve got a few feet less intestine. The other bullet they took out of my thigh and the bone seems to have knitted back together although I’ll always walk with a slight roll. People say I walk like a sailor just home from a long sea voyage.”
Dickens had laughed gently at the image. The conversation was easier now; a gentle seduction, the candlelight replaced by the harsh fluorescence of the single ceiling light and the bouquet of a fine burgundy replaced by the stench of faeces and stale sweat.
Over the next week he called in every day, at first in the afternoons and then twice a day and then three times, so that he was the last person she saw at night and the first she saw in the morning. Through it all she became weaker, her body collapsing in on itself like a balloon with a leak. All the time he worked away, listening to her talk of herself and her hopes. He told her what he thought she might like to hear about the persona he had created. At the same time, he worked on her loyalty.
The IRA had made it easy for him. Although they had welcomed her as an increase in their numbers, women were still seen as a sub species. When the men began their hunger strike, the women were not allowed to join at first. When the men had begun the blanket protest and refused to wash, the IRA high command refused to let the women take part. It was three months before Mairead could get the reason: the men thought the women would be embarrassed when they got their periods. Of course, the women were as strong as the men — stronger in some cases — and their protests carried more weight.
