‘They were always Gerry’s squad,’ Hughes said.
When Mackers asked about the disappearance of Jean McConville, Hughes told him that Gerry Adams had known about and approved the operation. In Hughes’s view, the murder had been justified.
‘She was an informer,’ he said.
22
Touts
Everyone is recruitable. In The Informer, an Irish novel published in 1925, the author Liam O’Flaherty tells the story of Gypo Nolan, a police informer. Gypo identifies a Dublin republican who is wanted for murder. The man is subsequently killed by the police. From the moment Gypo delivers the information to the authorities, he is acutely aware that he has become an ‘outcast’ in his close-knit city. He feels paranoid and doomed, terrified of exposure: ‘the customary sound of a human footstep had, by some evil miracle, become menacing’. The tout occupies an outsize place in the Irish imagination, as a folk devil – a paragon of treachery. Gerry Adams once remarked that informants are ‘reviled in all aspects of society in this island’. But the truth is that the English have employed spies and cultivated double agents in Ireland for hundreds of years. Frank Kitson’s insights, back at the onset of the Troubles, eventually blossomed from the rudimentary ‘counter-gangs’ of the MRF into an extraordinarily broad and sophisticated effort, by British military and intelligence and by the Royal Ulster Constabulary, to penetrate paramilitary circles.
Trevor Campbell was a burly and imposing Belfast cop who worked for the Special Branch of the RUC. After two years in Derry (which was always and only ‘Londonderry’ to Campbell), he was transferred to Belfast in 1975 and spent the next twenty-seven years embroiled in the conflict. Campbell’s speciality was the handling of informants.
‘In the beginning, there were no real rules. No law. It was catch as catch can,’ he recalled. The authorities were not systematic about who they targeted or how they managed their informants. But, gradually, the science on the ground improved. The biggest challenge of running touts in Northern Ireland was the petri-dish dimensions of the place. You couldn’t meet a Belfast source in Belfast; the city was just too small. So you would have him travel to the suburbs or to the country. But these were often quite parochial individuals, who had grown up in one pocket of the city and never ventured beyond it. Too many buses and trains and they were liable to get lost. Campbell would take informants out of town for a meeting in a beachside village and they would stand there in awe, as if a single bus transfer had deposited them at the end of the earth. Campbell liked to meet his contacts in the countryside, but not too far into the countryside. In some rural areas, like South Armagh, the locals knew every car. The presence of a single unfamiliar vehicle was enough to put the neighbours on alert.
The challenge of finding a safe location in which to meet was often secondary to the challenge of communicating the need for a meeting in the first place. During the early years of the Troubles, many homes in Northern Ireland did not have their own telephones. If they did have a phone, it was generally a shared line, upon which prying neighbours could eavesdrop – not a great solution for communicating with a clandestine informant. In theory, the tout could use a pay phone. But virtually all the pay phones in wartime Belfast had been destroyed by vandals, and in the event that the tout was lucky enough to find one that functioned, some nosy acquaintance was liable to happen by, spot him in the phone box, and demand to know who he’d been talking to.
So Campbell devised creative ways to notify his informants when he needed to meet. Initially, he employed crude tricks from the playbook of Cold War espionage, like a chalk mark on a brick wall. But he soon developed other, more innovative techniques. Sometimes Campbell would launch a sudden, clamorous raid on a Belfast house – not the house of his source, but the residence of some unsuspecting civilian who had the misfortune of living across the street. This could be tough for the innocent family whose home was raided, Campbell allowed. But it was an unmistakable way to deliver a message: We need to meet.
Belfast is not Berlin – it’s not even East Berlin – and playing these types of spy games in such a small, provincial city could give rise to surreal situations. Once, Campbell was interviewing a hardened IRA man at Castlereagh, the fortress-like East Belfast interrogation centre, which was notorious as a site of rough questioning and torture. The man had been arrested on other occasions, and Campbell had endeavoured, without success, to recruit him. Now, the police could legally hold him for three days before they had to either charge him or let him go, and for three days Campbell sat face to face with him in a stale, windowless interrogation room and talked. In such encounters, some IRA prisoners would maintain a stony silence, staring daggers at Campbell and never uttering a word. Others would talk and talk, working him, trying to elicit information: Where did he grow up? What rugby club did he support? Did he have a family? Where did they live? Campbell wanted to build a rapport with his interrogation subjects, but he knew that any stray detail he let slip might amount to a death sentence. So he endeavoured to keep the banter flowing without offering up any hard details about himself. On this occasion, the IRA man was a talker. But he was just as disciplined as Campbell was: he wouldn’t reveal anything that Campbell could work with, and he certainly wasn’t going to allow himself to be recruited. He was just shooting the shit, with a casual, jocular menace that Campbell could not help but respect. Waiting out the clock. After three days, time was up, and Campbell had no choice but to let him go.
Campbell had not spent any time with his wife in seventy-two hours, and she was grumbling that he never took a night off. So, when the man was released, Campbell went home to clean up and take his wife on a date. They drove to a nice fish restaurant down the coast. It was a bustling spot, popular with tourists, and Campbell and his wife sat at a table with a view of the water and ordered their meals. They had just finished their first course when Campbell glanced up and saw someone standing at the bar. He had his back to Campbell, but there was a large mirror behind the bar, and now, in the reflection above the spirits bottles, the two of them locked eyes. It was the man Campbell had been questioning for the past three days.
‘We may not be staying for the main course,’ Campbell announced to his wife, without taking his eyes off the man. He was generally careful about watching the road when he was driving, and he did not think that they had been followed to the restaurant. Instead, this appeared to be a wild coincidence. But it felt like a dangerous one. Without elaborating to his wife about the delicacy of this predicament, Campbell excused himself, walked over to the bar, and greeted the IRA man with the kind of gruff nonchalance he would normally reserve for someone whom he saw every day.
The man returned the greeting. Then he said, casually, ‘Is that your wife?’
‘It’s somebody’s wife,’ Campbell replied.
‘Knowing you, it’s probably somebody else’s wife,’ the man said with a smirk.
Campbell acknowledged the joke with a thin smile. Then, selecting his words with care, he said, ‘Are you going to sit at this bar all night? Or are you going to go to the phone and call someone?’
After a carefully attenuated pause, the man murmured, ‘Go back to the good woman. Enjoy your meal. Then fuck off out of here.’
‘Who was that?’ Campbell’s wife asked when he rejoined her.
‘Guy I know, workwise,’ Campbell replied, and left it at that.
Campbell lived by a principle: Everyone is recruitable. Sometimes you just need to find the right button. You could haul the same person in fifteen times and he would not break; then, the sixteenth time, something would happen. Circumstances change. The man suddenly found himself at odds with his crew. Or he was in a spot and needed money. Informants from the ethnic ghettos that bred Belfast paramilitaries were often unemployed, scraping by on public benefits. If you timed your overture right, you could offer a bailout at the moment when they most desperately needed it.
If there was someone you really wanted to target and his circumstances didn�
�t change, you might just change those circumstances for him. ‘You’d arrange for him to lose his job,’ Campbell recalled. ‘Or lose his house.’ For a man or woman with a family to feed, nothing sharpens the mind like the prospect of homelessness. If the potential recruit relied on a car to get to work, Campbell could arrange for the car to have a problem that would necessitate expensive repairs. ‘When you know he’s down-and-out, that’s when you bring him in,’ Campbell would say.
Money might have been an effective hook with which to ensnare an informant, but it could be dangerous as well. Some informants were what are known as ‘five-pound touts’: little fish, local people who could furnish occasional low-level tips for a minimal gratuity. But when you had someone who was more fully compromised – someone who was delivering valuable intelligence and acting as an agent of the British state – it could be difficult to pay such a person in a manner that would not blow his cover. Most of these people lived in run-down enclaves where nobody had ever had much money. How do you pay someone in that environment hundreds or even thousands of pounds and expect it to go unnoticed? You might concoct a story about a windfall. A banner day at the races. But that works exactly once. What do you say about the next payment?
The best informants worked for the authorities for years, often decades. It was hazardous to pursue such a double existence, in a land where the punishment for touting was a bullet in the head and a lifetime of shame for one’s family. It was also lonely. Campbell’s informants often came to rely on him emotionally. He may have been exploiting their preparedness to risk death. He may have blackmailed them into cooperating with him in the first place, or blackmailed them into staying an informant when they wanted to quit. But he was also, quite often, the only person who knew their secret. As such, he became doctor, social worker and priest. The tout’s problems became his problems: repairs to the house, Christmas presents for the kids.
Conventional wisdom had it that every handler wants a highly placed source. But Campbell found that the best informants often were ‘access agents’ – not the intelligence target himself, but the man standing right beside him. Recruit the man who drives Gerry Adams’s car and you may get more valuable intelligence than you would if you recruited Adams himself. (Roy McShane, who served as Adams’s personal chauffeur during the 1990s, was outed as a British informant in 2008.)
The IRA was hardly oblivious to the dangers of British penetration. When Brendan Hughes and his men first interrogated Seamus Wright and Kevin McKee back in the 1970s, they learned about the ‘Freds’ and the Kitsonian scheme to subvert the republican movement from within. Later that decade, the Provos established a dedicated internal security unit, which could vet new recruits and interrogate suspected touts. This cadre of inquisitors would become known as the Nutting Squad – because when a traitor confessed, they would ‘nut’ him, or put a bullet in his head.
For decades, the most fearsome spy hunter on the Nutting Squad was reputed to be Alfredo ‘Freddie’ Scappaticci. A barrel-chested bricklayer with a handlebar moustache, Scappaticci had grown up in South Belfast, in a family of Italian immigrants. His father owned a popular ice cream van, which bore the family name, and people called Freddie ‘the Wop’ or, more often, simply ‘Scap’. He joined the republican movement at the beginning of the Troubles and was interned at Long Kesh.
Members of the Nutting Squad would interrogate any IRA member who was suspected of possible cooperation with the British. Methods seldom varied. The questioning would last for hours, and often days, with threats, beatings and torture until a confession was proffered. The signs of the group’s handiwork would suddenly materialise in stretches of wasteland at the edge of town or alongside rutted lanes in the country: corpses, their limbs bound, their flesh singed and battered from torture, their eyes ghoulishly blotted out with scraps of masking tape. ‘Every army attracts psychopaths,’ Brendan Hughes liked to say.
Trevor Campbell was all too aware of what awaited those who were summoned by the Nutting Squad. Once, a Provo quarter-master named Frank Hegarty supplied his handlers in British intelligence with the location of a cache of weapons that the IRA had obtained from Libya. Hegarty fled to England, where he went into hiding at an MI5 safe house. He might have survived, had he stayed away for good. But he got homesick and telephoned his mother back in Derry. She told him that Martin McGuinness had been coming round to see her and that he had offered his personal assurance that if Hegarty came back to Derry and explained everything to the IRA, his life would be spared. When Hegarty returned, he was questioned by the Nutting Squad, and his body turned up by the side of a road along the border. (In 2011, McGuinness insisted that he had played ‘no role whatsoever’ in the execution. But in 1988, two years after Hegarty was killed, McGuinness had pointed out in an interview that republican activists knew the repercussions for ‘going over to the other side’. Asked to clarify what those repercussions might be, McGuinness said, ‘Death, certainly.’) When Trevor Campbell was working with his own informants, he would tell them: ‘Whatever happens, never confess. If you confess, you’re dead.’
During his Boston College oral history with Anthony McIntyre, Brendan Hughes declared with conviction that Jean McConville had been executed because she was a tout. According to Hughes, McConville had been discovered to have a ‘transmitter’ in her house – a radio, presumably supplied by the British. McConville, Hughes said, ‘had her own kids gathering information for her, watching the movements of IRA volunteers around Divis Flats’.
Hughes told Mackers that McConville first came to the attention of the Provos when a local foot soldier encountered one of her children and the boy mentioned that his ‘mammy’ had something in the house. ‘I sent a unit, a squad, over to the house to check it out,’ Hughes recalled. There, Hughes said, they discovered the radio. The IRA arrested McConville, Hughes continued, taking her away for interrogation. According to Hughes, she confessed that she had been passing information to the British Army using the radio to communicate. Hughes cautioned Mackers that he himself had not been ‘on the scene at the time’, so his recollections were based on second-hand information from his subordinates. But he said that after the confession, his men confiscated the transmitter and let Jean McConville return to her children, with a warning.
Several weeks later, Hughes said, a second transmitter was discovered in the McConville flat. ‘I warned her the first time,’ he recalled, but now, ‘I knew she was being executed.’ Even if one were to accept Hughes’s account that McConville was an informer, it is difficult to conceive of a scenario in which she could have furnished anything but low-level titbits. That didn’t matter to Hughes and his comrades. However minor the practical impact of the alleged betrayal might have been, to the IRA, a tout was a tout, and the penalty was death.
Hughes insisted that he personally did not know that McConville was going to be secretly buried, ‘or “disappeared”, as they call them now’. He had always identified as a left-wing freedom fighter, yet here was a tactic that seemed synonymous with tyranny. In Mackers’s view, ‘the disappearance of people is a calling card of the war criminal, whether it’s in Chile or Kampuchea’. Even in the chaos of 1972, the Provos did not kill and disappear someone lightly, Hughes insisted. As barbaric as it might seem in retrospect to bury a mother of ten in an unmarked grave, the decision to do so was the product of an earnest debate.
As Hughes related the story, one local IRA leader in particular, Ivor Bell, had argued that McConville should not be buried. Bell was a hard-liner, a veteran of the 1950s campaign who had accompanied Gerry Adams to the unsuccessful peace talks in London in the summer of 1972. Less than six months after the London summit, Hughes said, Bell and the Provisional leadership in Belfast argued about what to do with Jean McConville. ‘If you are going to kill her, put her on the fucking street,’ Hughes recalled Bell saying. ‘What’s the sense of killing her and burying her if no one knows what she was killed for?’ Better to send a lesson to other locals who might consider beco
ming touts in the future. If you didn’t leave the body out, Bell suggested, then the murder would be ‘pure revenge’.
But Bell was overruled, Hughes said – by Gerry Adams.
‘Adams rejected this logic?’ Mackers asked.
‘He rejected it,’ Hughes said.
‘And ordered her to be disappeared?’
‘To be buried,’ Hughes said. There may have been concern, Hughes hypothesised, that because McConville was a woman, and a widowed mother, her murder could damage the reputation of the IRA. Yet the Provos had identified her as an informer, and that necessitated the ultimate sanction. So a decision was made to kill McConville in secret and have her simply disappear. In the hierarchical IRA, Hughes suggested, there was no ambiguity about who it was that ultimately authorised this decision. ‘There was only one man who gave the order for that woman to be executed,’ Hughes told Mackers. ‘That fucking man is now the head of Sinn Féin.’
The Nutting Squad did not yet exist in 1972. So, Hughes said, for the sensitive job of transporting Jean McConville across the border, Adams had turned to the secret squad run by Wee Pat McClure. It was the Unknowns who were responsible for escorting McConville to her execution, and one member of the group in particular: Dolours Price.
As it happened, Price was one of Mackers’s closest friends. They had found each other in the aftermath of the Good Friday Agreement and discovered that they both nurtured a deep sense of disaffection. She was living in Dublin, where the family had moved in the mid-1990s. She liked the city, though she hoped that her sons would not lose their Belfast accents. Her marriage to Stephen Rea, which had grown strained in recent years, eventually ended in 2003. Price continued to live in the large family home in Malahide, a prosperous suburb on the coast north of Dublin. There, she surrounded herself with memorabilia from her days of notoriety: framed press clippings, faded photos and patriotic banners lined the walls. Her relationship with food had never returned to normal. She would invite a guest for tea and lay out a fresh coffee cake, then watch the guest eat but decline to have a slice herself. ‘I don’t particularly enjoy food,’ she would say.
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