Say Nothing

by Patrick Radden Keefe

  In trying to explain how the police had managed to be so far ahead of the bombers, British authorities would later make it sound as though they had simply been brilliantly lucky. But it was also suggested in the press that the police in London may have had prior notice that an attack was coming, and that it would involve more than one bomb. The Price sisters, for their part, would always believe that the operation had been betrayed by an informant. Hugh Feeney shared their suspicion, declaring later, ‘We were set up.’

  They were right: decades after the bombing mission, a retired Special Branch officer would reveal that he had been tipped off fourteen hours before the bombs were set to blow, and that his source had been a senior member of the Provisionals. The officer knew in advance that there would be four bombs rather than six. He also knew that the bombing team would include a young Provo named Gerry Kelly and ‘two sisters named Price’.

  Even so, as police fanned across central London in search of the other three bombs, the city looked like one big car park, completely clogged with stationary vehicles. They searched frantically for anything suspicious, but, having no clue as to the rough locations, they were unable to locate any of the other cars. The bombs could literally be anywhere. Just before 2 p.m., the warning call was received at The Times, spelling out the locations and descriptions of the cars. But even then, there was a miscommunication within the police department, which caused a delay in getting officers to the scenes of the three remaining bombs. Martin Huckerby, the Times reporter, beat the police to the Cortina outside the Old Bailey by more than twenty minutes, and additional precious minutes ticked by before the bomb squad arrived and the officers began running into surrounding buildings to evacuate people.

  Inside the Old Bailey itself, several criminal trials were under way: a drug conspiracy case was wrapping up in one courtroom, a judge was addressing the jury for a murder trial in another. Someone burst into the courtrooms and told everyone to get out – a bomb was about to go off right outside the building. A pub called the George, which stood opposite the courthouse, was full of patrons nursing afternoon pints when somebody ran in and shouted that there was a bomb in the street. Some of the customers simply moved deeper into the pub, crowding the back bar. But others looked out at the serene, sunny afternoon and, thinking this could only be a hoax, decided to stay put. London had not experienced any serious bombings since the Blitz, three decades earlier. It was as if people could not imagine the idea. Some gawkers pressed their faces against the windows to watch the bomb squad work. The technicians were trying to defuse the bomb, but without success, and the timer in the front seat kept ticking. As three o’clock approached, the police were still struggling to clear the area when a school bus rolled up, not fifty yards from the Cortina. Inside the bus were forty-nine schoolchildren, on a field trip to visit St Paul’s Cathedral. As the hand on the timer ticked towards three, the children began to disembark.

  Most of the bombing team were on a bus to Heathrow when the BBC put out a report about the first bomb being discovered and defused. The bombers did not hear the bulletin, so they arrived at the airport unaware that they were now the subject of a manhunt. As far as they knew, the mission was proceeding as planned and they were about to return unnoticed to Ireland. They arrived at Terminal 1, headed to Gate 4, and presented their tickets for the British European Airways flight to Dublin, which was due to depart at 11:20. Several of the bombers had actually filed onto the plane and taken their seats when officials entered and instructed everyone to get off.

  Dolours, Marian and Hugh Feeney were scheduled to take an Aer Lingus flight at 12:30. By the time they arrived at Heathrow, the rest of the team was supposed to be in the air. But when they entered the terminal, Special Branch officers were waiting. ‘Are you flying to Dublin?’ one of the officers asked. ‘Would you mind coming with me?’

  They were taken into custody and ushered into a holding area for questioning. But because the plan had been predicated on the idea that the team would be out of the country before any of the bombs were discovered, none of the volunteers had concocted any sort of cover story that was remotely convincing. Some claimed they had come to London in search of work. Others said they had been staying on the Belgrave Road and had got drunk at a local pub (which, at any rate, had elements of the truth). They all offered false names – Dolours stuck with her pseudonym Una Devlin – and denied that they knew one another. Asked about the bombs, they responded with sullen silence. (What the authorities did not know then but would learn later was that one member of the group – an eleventh bomber – was missing. He had slipped away before the others were arrested at the airport, and gone to ground in London. He has never been identified or captured.)

  ‘I don’t intend to tell you anything,’ Marian Price said when she was questioned by a senior police officer. ‘You’ve no right to keep me here.’ She continued to stonewall, refusing to say a thing. It was already after 2 p.m., and the detectives knew they were running out of time. They pressed Marian about where the other bombs were, but she would not say. She wore a locket around her neck, and she kept putting it in her mouth and chewing on it anxiously. It suddenly occurred to the chief inspector who was interviewing her that the locket might contain some kind of poison, like a cyanide pill. He snatched it from her, only to see that it was a crucifix. His frustration growing, the inspector called her ‘an evil little maniac’ and said she would not be seeing the sunshine again for some time.

  But Marian Price said nothing. There was something robotic, almost trance-like, about her demeanour, and that of her fellow bombers. The detectives began to wonder if they had undergone some instruction in how to resist interrogation. They would fix their eyes on an object and just stare at it, as if hypnotised, refusing to say a thing. Then, just before 3 p.m., Marian raised her wrist and looked pointedly at her watch.

  In a quiet fury, the chief inspector said, ‘Am I intended to gather that the timing on the other bombs has just expired?’

  Marian Price just smiled.

  In Whitehall, people were ambling back from lunchtime in the pleasant weather when the police finally discovered the Hillman Hunter parked in front of the army recruiting centre. The officers stormed into the surrounding buildings, clearing everybody out. With five minutes to go before detonation, an explosives expert from the Royal Army Ordnance Corps broke a window and climbed into the car, then attempted to disarm the device. But there wasn’t time now, and he scrambled out. Using a hook attached to a long line, he snagged the detonating cord connecting the timer to the explosives, then took cover around the corner of a building and started to pull. The resistance was significant, so he asked a sergeant who was with him for help. The two of them had just started pulling on the cord again when the timer’s hand reached its terminus.

  The Hillman split apart, ripped open by a sheet of flame that rose forty feet in the air. There was a dull thud, and a reverberation so strong that it lifted people in the surrounding area clean off the pavement. Windows shattered in the offices and shops for a quarter of a mile around. The blast blew the helmets off the policemen’s heads and sent tiny missiles of glass and metal whizzing in every direction.

  A sooty mushroom cloud rose above the street, and acrid smoke billowed among the buildings. A gas main ruptured, spewing more smoke and starting a blaze as firemen arrived and began dragging hoses through the carnage. People staggered about, dazed, their skin lacerated by glass. Dozens of cars were hollowed out and twisted up like crumpled paper.

  The clap of the blast echoed throughout central London. On Dean Stanley Street, authorities had just managed to find and dismantle the third bomb, in the Vauxhall Viva, in front of the British Forces Broadcasting Service building. But by the time police had identified the car at the Old Bailey, it was too late. An officer ran towards the school bus and shouted at the children who had just got off, telling them to run for their lives. They did, screaming and shouting, hurrying around a corner for cover.

  One of the Londo
n bombs explodes, Whitehall, 8 March 1973 (G/M/Camera Press/Redux)

  A police photographer was taking pictures of the car when suddenly he was hurled across the street. The blast was enormous. The façade of the George pub was torn away, exposing the lounge as if it were a room in a doll’s house. A police officer was evacuating jurors from the Old Bailey when the blast threw him twenty feet. Another policeman was riding by on his bicycle when he was hurled against a wall, the force of the blast ripping away his uniform. Martin Huckerby, the Times journalist, was cut on his face and hands and taken to St Bartholomew’s Hospital. People with blood running down their faces staggered through the smoke, trying to escape or to help others. But the whole vicinity of the explosion was consumed in a dense cloud of hot dust, making it difficult to see. The schoolchildren had managed to make it to safety, but injured victims lay sprawled on the pavement. Everywhere there was a thick carpet of broken glass, swishing around people’s feet, like sand at the beach.

  This sort of scene might have become commonplace in Northern Ireland, but it felt deeply jarring in London. To those witnesses who were old enough to remember, it was reminiscent of the Blitz. Between the two bombs that detonated, nearly 250 people were injured, and ambulances rushed in to deal with casualties. As luck would have it, there was not only a rail strike that week but also a strike of non-medical workers at nearby hospitals. Even so, when they saw the bloodied patients being carried into emergency wards, the striking workers abandoned their picket lines and ran inside to help. Frederick Milton, a fifty-eight-year-old caretaker who worked at Hillgate House, right next to the Old Bailey, was covered in blood by the blast, but he resisted the call from medics to go to hospital, insisting on helping other injured survivors. Milton collapsed a few hours later from a heart attack and died in the hospital.

  An autopsy later revealed that his heart attack had actually started prior to the explosion, so the medical evidence did not support a charge of murder. Dolours Price would blame the casualties from the blast on British authorities, for moving too slowly after the telephone warnings to locate and defuse the bombs and to alert civilians. Other members of the bombing team took the same view. This was clearly a convenient excuse, and as a moral matter it was conspicuously disingenuous. But as a factual matter, Price was not altogether wrong. The police themselves admitted, in the aftermath of the attack, that ‘human error’ in their control room had garbled the message about the Old Bailey bomb, significantly delaying their response.

  A British prosecutor would later speculate that the intention of the IRA mission was to kill people, and that it was no coincidence that the warning call had been made only after the gang had been arrested at the airport. He suggested that the warning was nothing but a selfish, last-minute bid to mitigate the severity of the punishment, once the IRA knew that their comrades had been captured. But however callous and incompetent the bombers were, it seems unlikely that their objective, when they journeyed to London, was mass slaughter. ‘If the intention was to kill people in London, it was quite easy to kill people in London, to kill civilians,’ Brendan Hughes said later. As with Bloody Friday, the London mission was envisaged as a symbolic, and ideally bloodless, attack. But powerful explosives leave no margin for serendipity, and the plan unravelled, with devastating results. Hughes was not particularly focused on the human toll of the bombs. What he regretted more acutely was not ‘burying’ the bombers in England – letting them hide out in place, in or around London, to filter back home in ones and twos once the hysteria subsided. Instead, the IRA had tried to get them out as quickly as possible, a mistake that would have momentous consequences.

  From Heathrow, the members of the bombing team were transported to a nearby police station. Their clothing was stripped from their bodies so that it could be forensically tested for residue of explosives. Dolours Price was photographed naked. When they were offered prison uniforms, some of the team accepted them. But the Price sisters and several others refused. This was a republican principle: they thought of themselves not as criminals but as captured soldiers from a legitimate army – as political prisoners. Given this distinction, they would not accept the prison scrubs of the ordinary criminal. Dolours and Marian draped rough prison blankets over their bodies. Hugh Feeney refused even a blanket and stood in his cell, brazenly naked. The prisoners were all separated, but at one point Dolours and Marian crossed paths briefly in an interview room, and Dolours hissed at her sister, ‘Don’t say a word.’

  12

  The Belfast Ten

  Thomas Valliday was a prisoner at Long Kesh, where he held a job as an orderly. This required him to ride around in the rubbish lorry, picking up refuse from different corners of the prison camp and loading it into the truck. Life inside any prison tends to boil down to the deadening repetition of a daily routine, and Valliday’s job was no exception: you made your rounds, you picked up the rubbish, you threw it in the lorry. Sometimes, in addition to the standard rubbish, Valliday would find an old mattress that had been discarded because it was soiled or damaged. The prisoners would leave them, alongside the rubbish, outside the barbed-wire ‘cages’ surrounding the half-cylinder Nissen huts where they lived. One Saturday morning in December 1973, the truck stopped outside a cage where a rolled-up mattress had been left. When Valliday went to pick up the mattress, it was considerably heavier than usual. But he got his arms around it and heaved it up onto the bed of the truck. If Valliday evinced no sign of suspicion that what appeared to be just a mattress might weigh as much as a small man, it was because he knew that nestled inside, wrapped up like a sausage in a bun, was Brendan Hughes.

  Hughes had informed the police, upon his capture, that he intended to escape from prison, and he was being entirely sincere. Within thirty-six hours of arriving at Long Kesh the previous summer, he had begun to scheme with comrades about how best to get out. Gerry Adams felt that, given the importance of operations to the current phase of the struggle, and the instrumental role that Hughes played in spearheading such operations, it should be Hughes who escaped first, before even Adams. But only two people had ever managed to break out of Long Kesh, which was ringed with barbed wire and surrounded by troops, and neither of them had ‘broken out’, per se. The first was Dolours Price’s childhood friend Francie McGuigan, the former ‘Hooded Man’ who had been tortured at the secret army facility. One day in February 1972, McGuigan donned a set of borrowed black robes and, mingling with a visiting delegation of priests, walked right out of the front door. Eighteen months later, another man, John Francis Green, managed to escape using exactly the same ruse. (Green’s brother, who actually was a priest, came for a visit, and the two of them switched clothes.)

  It seemed prudent to assume that any further holy men seeking to depart Long Kesh might be subjected to a heightened degree of scrutiny, so if Hughes was going to escape, he would have to find another method. Somebody came up with the idea of leaving the camp by hitching a ride on the underside of one of the refuse lorries. As a stratagem, this was reminiscent of Homer’s Odyssey, in which Odysseus and his men escape the cave of the Cyclops by clinging to the bellies of his sheep. The prisoners constructed a special harness for Hughes to wear so that he could attach himself to the chassis of the lorry. He rehearsed on one of the bunk beds in the cages, gripping the underside of the top bunk. But Hughes was still weak from the beating he had taken during his interrogation, and it was not certain that he would have the strength to cling to the lorry until it had cleared the outer fence. So eventually they abandoned that plan. This may have been disappointing for Hughes at the time, but it would turn out to be a stroke of exceptionally good luck: when another prisoner, Mark Graham, tried to escape using a similar method some months later, the lorry went over a ramp and snapped his spine, leaving him paralysed for life.

  In late October, the Provos had engineered perhaps their most audacious escape to date. The IRA leader Seamus Twomey was being held at Mountjoy Prison, in Dublin, when a hijacked helicopter suddenly appea
red in the sky and touched down in the prison yard just long enough for Twomey and a couple of his associates to hop aboard. This sort of precedent emboldened Hughes and his fellow prisoners, but it also meant that security was tight. The Provos knew that the refuse lorry made its rounds twice a day before leaving the facility to go to the dump. They had heard that, before the lorry was permitted to leave the grounds, guards would stab each rubbish bag with a spear, to make sure nobody was hidden inside. But the IRA had cultivated its own intelligence network inside the prison, and these informants suggested that lately the guards had not been bothering with the spears.

  On the day in question, Hughes climbed into the centre of an old mattress while others helped to roll it round him. With the assistance of Thomas Valliday, he ended up on the back of the lorry, which proceeded to rumble around the camp, stopping periodically so that rubbish could be dumped on top of Hughes. All he had to do was wait. But the cheap prison mattress was filled with sawdust, and it was everywhere: fibrous, itchy, smothering. Hughes had brought an orange that he could suck for fluid and blood sugar, and he kept it jammed in his mouth, but the sawdust was getting in his nose, making it hard to breathe. The lorry trundled around the camp, in no particular hurry. Then it stopped, and Hughes heard Valliday whispering to him. They could not leave the prison yet, Valliday said. The lorry was going to stay to collect more rubbish. He advised Hughes to get out and sneak back to his cage. There would be a head count at 4 p.m. If Hughes was missing, the guards would lock down the facility and raise the alarm.

  He stayed put. Valliday had disappeared, but Hughes was well hidden, and the lorry had to leave at some point. Inside the mattress, he couldn’t see what was going on around him, but now he heard the unmistakable accents of British soldiers. The lorry had ended up in the British Army compound, where the soldiers lived. Rather than take him through the gates to freedom, it had conveyed him directly into the most dangerous part of the camp. The sawdust had crept into his eyes, irritating them so much that he couldn’t open one of them. Hughes lay quietly, hoping nobody would discover him.