Each day, the excavators turned over more soil, but there was no sign of Jean McConville. At one point, there was a momentary flurry of excitement when the investigators unearthed a set of bones. But it turned out to be the skeleton of a dog. Nerves frayed. Sympathetic locals turned up at the dig site with warm meals for the family. Someone donated a mammoth carton of cigarettes.
‘Where are we going to bury her?’ Michael asked his siblings one day.
‘West Belfast,’ Helen responded. ‘They were the ones that killed her. They were the ones that robbed us of a mother.’ Helen wanted to bury Jean at Milltown Cemetery, among the republican tombs, with a headstone that read, JEAN MCCONVILLE. KIDNAPPED AND MURDERED BY THE IRA.
Her siblings might have shared her anger, but they were wary of antagonising the Provos. ‘We’re not discussing the IRA and what they done. Everybody knows it,’ Jim said. ‘We all live in republican areas and we don’t want no hassle from them.’ He continued, ‘Them boys who done it, they’ll suffer for the rest of their lives. It is time to say forgive.’
‘I don’t know about youse, but I’ll never forgive,’ Billy snapped. ‘I don’t forgive them bastards for what they done.’
It was painful for Michael McConville to see his siblings quarrel, and to join the quarrels himself. ‘I’d hoped we’d come together a bit over this,’ he said. ‘But it’s tearing us even further apart.’
Inside the IRA, the disappeared, as they came to be known, were regarded as a political liability – and as a source of shame. In 1995, Bill Clinton had made a point of pressuring Gerry Adams and Sinn Féin on the issue. ‘There are families that have still not had the chance to grieve in peace, to visit the graves of their loved ones, to reunite after years of separation,’ Clinton said. ‘It is time to allow families to be whole again.’ In 1998, a longtime IRA man named Bobby Storey, who was a close confidant of Gerry Adams’s, began knocking on the doors of former Provos, enquiring about their memories of what had happened to Jean McConville. He sought out Ivor Bell, who had argued that McConville should be murdered and left out in the street. He also approached Dolours Price, who was startled to think that Adams might send anybody to ask her what had become of Jean McConville. She advised Storey that if he wanted to find out the truth, perhaps he should ‘go and see Gerry’.
As it happened, Adams was meeting during this period with the McConville children. He had initially visited Helen and her husband, Seamus, in 1995, arriving at their house accompanied by bodyguards, ‘like he was a celebrity’, Helen thought. Like the McConvilles, Adams had grown up in a family of ten children, and he expressed his condolences. But Helen noticed that he would not meet her eye. During a meeting with Michael McConville, Adams said, ‘For what it’s worth, I apologise for what the republican movement did to your mother.’ Adams excelled at this type of dissimulation. He would assume no personal responsibility himself. After all, he had never been in the IRA. ‘These killings happened twenty-five years ago, when the war here was at its height,’ Adams told one newspaper. ‘During war, horrible things are done.’
At one of his initial meetings with the McConvilles, Adams made it clear that he had what was, in effect, an alibi. ‘Thank God I was in prison when she disappeared,’ he said. This was not true. He had been released from Long Kesh in June 1972, in order to fly to London for the peace talks. Jean was abducted in December, and Adams was not locked up again until the following July. (‘That shouldn’t be taken out of context,’ Adams said later. ‘I got confused about the dates.’)
To Brendan Hughes, it was appalling that Adams would go to Jean McConville’s children and pledge to get to the bottom of what had happened to their mother, as though it were some great mystery to him. ‘He went to this family’s house and promised an investigation into the woman’s disappearance,’ Hughes told Mackers in one of his Boston College sessions. ‘The man that gave the fucking order for that woman to be executed! Now tell me the morality in that.’ Only a ‘Machiavellian monster’ could do such a thing, Hughes concluded.
It was beginning to appear that the search for the bodies would take longer than expected. ‘The IRA were able to deliver a body on Friday in a coffin,’ Helen’s husband, Seamus, said after the discovery of Eamon Molloy. ‘They should get down here and do the same for us.’ But while a few of the graves had been easy to locate, others were proving more elusive. The graves were unmarked precisely so that they would blend in with the surroundings. People had grown old, memories had faded. Also, the topography had changed. Someone might recall a particular location with reference to a barn, but the barn had been torn down decades earlier. What had been a row of delicate saplings in the 1970s might be a grove of sturdy trees today. ‘The IRA leadership approached this issue in good faith,’ the Provos declared in a statement, sounding a bit defensive. Their efforts had been hampered, they said, by the passage of time.
The McConvilles found some solace in other families whose loved ones had disappeared. Several of the families would convene at a ‘cross-community’ trauma centre called Wave, which became a source of support for the relatives of the disappeared. Some had been through indescribable anguish. After Kevin McKee disappeared, his mother, Maria, went slightly mad. Some nights, she would rouse her other children from bed and bundle them into their coats, insisting that they head out into the city on fruitless searches. She would accost neighbours, pounding on their front doors, shouting, ‘Where’s my son? What have you done with Kevin?’ Other nights, she would prepare a plate of food and tell her children, ‘Put that in the hot press to keep it warm for Kevin,’ as if he had just stepped out to run an errand.
After a gun was discovered on a police raid of the McKee house, Maria ended up being arrested and spending several months at Armagh jail, where she happened to overlap with the Price sisters. She allowed Dolours Price to do her hair, unaware that this was the woman who had driven her son across the border to be shot. When Eamon Molloy’s body was recovered, Maria McKee attended the funeral and experienced the blissful delusion that she was burying her own son. But they still had not found Kevin when she died. Maria’s extended family kept the memory of him alive by naming children Kevin. Sons. Cousins. Nephews. Whenever a baby boy was born, it seemed, they’d call him Kevin.
The Irish landscape is dominated by peat bogs, and the anaerobic and acidic conditions in the densely packed earth mean that the past in Ireland is occasionally subject to macabre resurrection. Peat cutters sometimes churn up ancient mandibles, clavicles, or entire cadavers that have been preserved for millennia. The bodies, which in some cases date back to before the Bronze Age, often show signs of ritual sacrifice and violent death. These victims, cast out of their communities and buried, have surfaced vividly intact, from their hair to their leathery skin. At the height of the Troubles, during the 1970s, Seamus Heaney became fixated on ‘bog people’ after encountering a book, published in 1969, about the preserved bodies of men and women found in bogs in Jutland, who appeared to be the victims of ritual sacrifice. The photographs of these gnarled bodies, naked, some with their throats cut, reminded Heaney of certain ‘barbarous rites’, past and present, in Ireland. Heaney wrote a series of poems about such figures, including ‘Bog Queen’, in which he assumes the voice of a woman, long buried, who is disinterred, ‘barbered/and stripped/by a turfcutter’s spade’.
Heaney grew up harvesting peat as a boy on his family’s farm. He once described the bogs of Ireland as ‘a landscape that remembered everything that had happened in and to it’. Reviled though the practice of disappearing people might be, it was not new in Ireland. In fact, the old IRA disappeared people during the War of Independence, back in the 1920s. Nobody knows precisely how many people were secretly buried, but the bodies still crop up occasionally, bones dyed such a deep brown by peat that they look like tree roots rather than anything human.
At the beach on the Cooley Peninsula, the machines excavated for fifty days, digging a crater that grew to the size of an Olympic swimming pool.
The McConvilles kept assembling by the shore each day, holding out hope that the earth might yield up some clue: a button, a bone, a slipper, the nappy pin their mother always wore. Some nights, the children would sit in the warmth of a car, staring out over the darkening Irish Sea, as the waves beat against the shore. But eventually the search was called off. It appeared that, in supplying the coordinates of the grave, the IRA had been mistaken. ‘They made a laughing stock of us’ when Jean was kidnapped, Agnes said, her mascara dissolving in tears. ‘They’re making another laughing stock of us now.’
The siblings parted ways, left the beach, and returned to their respective homes. But everywhere there were reminders of their mother. They may not have known who ordered Jean’s murder or who carried it out, but they still remembered the young neighbours who had barged into their flat that December night and ushered her out of the door. The members of the abduction team had grown up, married, had families of their own. This was a cruel twist: some of the children could no longer remember what their mother had looked like, apart from the one surviving photo of her, but they still recognised the faces of the people who took her away. Once, Helen took her children to McDonald’s and found herself staring at one of the women who she knew had taken her mother. The woman was there with her own family. She shouted at Helen to leave her alone.
On another occasion, Michael climbed into the back of a black taxi on the Falls Road, only to look up and see that the driver was one of Jean’s abductors. The car pulled away from the kerb and the two men rode in silence. Michael didn’t say a word. What could he say? Instead he sat, unspeaking, until they reached his destination, then he handed the man the money for his fare.
24
An Entanglement of Lies
The thieves were dressed in suits, as if they had come on official business. There were three of them, in a car, purring up to the gates of the Castlereagh complex just after ten o’clock on a Sunday night. It was St Patrick’s Day 2002, and East Belfast was quiet. Only twenty or so people were on duty throughout the entire heavily fortified police compound. Trevor Campbell wasn’t there that night. After decades of interrogating and turning paramilitaries, he was preparing to retire. In fact, four months earlier, in accordance with the Good Friday Agreement, the Royal Ulster Constabulary itself had ceased to exist; rechristened as the more neutral-sounding Police Service of Northern Ireland, it had a new mission to be more inclusive in its hiring and less closely associated with the Protestant community.
Even so, Castlereagh still had the look of a forward operating base in a war zone, encircled by high walls topped with barbed wire. It was said to be one of the most secure buildings in all of Europe. At the gate, the thieves casually flashed their credentials – what appeared to be army identification badges – and a guard waved them into the complex. In addition to the police, Castlereagh housed members of the British Army, along with certain faceless, nameless individuals who worked for the intelligence community. It was a busy facility, not some local precinct house where a guard might be expected to know every face, and besides, even the boldest criminal would not be so foolish as to break into a heavily guarded installation that was crawling with armed soldiers and police. Bad things happened to people who got locked up at Castlereagh. It was a place paramilitaries fantasised about breaking out of – not into. At the front desk, the men produced their identification a second time, and an inattentive night-duty guard waved them into the building.
The thieves moved through a series of corridors with a purpose that suggested this expedition had been carefully planned. They were headed to one room in particular, an office. As it happened, the room that the office normally occupied was being renovated, so the whole operation had been temporarily relocated to a different space elsewhere in the facility. But the men knew this in advance. They proceeded deep inside the building to the temporary location of what was known as 2/20 – the secret, round-the-clock nerve centre of the security forces’ spy network in Belfast, where hundreds of informants all across the city could call into a special hotline and make contact with their handlers in the police force, the army and MI5.
A solitary Special Branch constable was in the room that night, manning the phones. He had no reason to suspect that anyone would knock on the door with bad intentions, so he opened it, and a fist connected, powerfully, with his jaw. The constable went down. Moving quickly and saying little, the men taped his mouth shut, tugged a hood over his head, and trussed him to an office chair. Then they placed a pair of headphones blaring music from a Walkman over his ears. With a set of keys that was lying, unhidden, on the desk, the men began to unlock drawers and filing cabinets, pulling out documents. Periodically, one of them would return to the bound police constable, check his pulse, and make sure he was breathing properly. But eventually, they stopped checking. With the blindfold and headphones, the constable had no way of knowing whether they were still in the room. Eventually, he started trying to wriggle out of his binding, and nobody intervened to stop him. By the time he got the blindfold off, the thieves were long gone and the shelves were empty. The men had made off with a precious trove of highly classified information – notebooks and files containing details and code names of informants working inside the IRA and other paramilitary groups. Nobody noticed them leaving the building. They left behind only one clue – a lapel badge that one of the men had been wearing. In what was either one stray element of a convincing disguise or a smug joke on the part of the thieves, the badge said: SAVE THE RUC.
This was a brazen heist: three men had walked, unmasked and unarmed, into the inner sanctum of anti-terrorist operations in Belfast and escaped with a bonanza of sensitive intelligence. The police immediately flew into a panic, contacting informants to let them know they could be compromised and ultimately relocating more than three hundred people. Suspicion turned to the IRA. One security source told the BBC that the break-in was a wilful violation of the peace process – indeed, that it constituted ‘an act of war’. The IRA responded that, on the contrary, this was an inside job by the authorities. Most observers ultimately concluded that the break-in had indeed been carried out by the Provos. But the thieves appeared to have had help from within the building. A man who worked as a cook at Castlereagh was sought for questioning; it turned out he was an associate of Denis Donaldson, an ex-IRA leader who now worked at Stormont as a Sinn Féin official. One press report speculated that the break-in may have been carried out with the aim of uncovering ‘the identity of one informer in particular’, an individual who had achieved ‘mythological status as one of the highest-ranking informers working for the police within the Provisionals’. According to the article, the code name of this supposed spy was ‘Steak Knife’.
There had been rumours for years about an informant operating at the very highest echelons of the republican movement. At some point, a code name had leaked out: sometimes it was written ‘Stakeknife’, other times ‘Steak Knife’ or ‘Stake Knife’. But the visual implication was always the same: a lethal stiletto, a dagger in the heart of the IRA. In one 1999 account, Stakeknife was described as ‘the crown jewel’ of British intelligence in Ulster.
Dolours Price had heard the rumours. ‘You know this Stakeknife character they talk about? The informer of all informers,’ she said to a visitor at her Dublin home in March 2003. ‘He’s meant to be high, high up in the republican hierarchy. I certainly have not figured out who it is.’ In her moments of anger, Price admitted, she sometimes joked that it could be Gerry Adams himself. ‘But I don’t think he’s Stakeknife,’ she said.
The very idea of Stakeknife was so unnerving to republicans that it was tempting to wonder whether the British had not simply concocted the rumour with the explicit aim of demoralising them. During the Cold War, the CIA official James Jesus Angleton became convinced that his agency was being undermined by a Russian mole. He paralysed the agency for years, trying to find this double agent, but it is generally accepted now that he was chasing shadows. Mole hunting ca
n become a self-destructive madness, a paranoid condition elegantly captured by Angleton himself, who described the counter-intelligence business as a ‘wilderness of mirrors’.
For years, the Nutting Squad had been interrogating and killing suspected informants. Between 1980 and 1994, no fewer than forty people were executed by the IRA on suspicion of being touts, their bodies dumped unceremoniously. Of the people who were murdered, many had indeed been cooperating in some fashion with the authorities. But not all of them. As the IRA would subsequently acknowledge, some of the Nutting Squad’s victims had never been informers at all. And for all the corpses deposited in country lanes along the border, the IRA never could seem to eliminate the problem. Arms dumps kept getting discovered. Missions kept getting foiled. No matter how many people were killed, there always seemed to be at least one more traitor lurking in the ranks.
When Brendan Hughes got out of prison, an IRA associate named Joe Fenton offered him a flat. Fenton worked as an estate agent on the Falls Road. He also secretly worked for the British, providing ‘safe houses’ to the IRA that had in fact been wired for sound. Fenton used to tell his IRA friends that he had connections who could procure brand-new, presumably stolen colour televisions. The TVs were bugged as well. Eventually Fenton’s betrayal was discovered. He was questioned and confessed. Before he could be executed, he broke away and made a run for it, but the Nutting Squad shot him in the back, then in the face, and left him in an alley on the outskirts of Belfast.
Hughes found that he was increasingly uneasy. ‘I discovered something here that was murky, was high-level,’ he told Mackers. ‘I didn’t trust Belfast.’ There seemed to be spies everywhere. He spoke to Gerry Adams about it, but Adams told him not to worry, that he was being paranoid. Hughes was right to worry. James Jesus Angleton may have conjured infiltrators where there weren’t any, but the IRA was, in actual fact, hopelessly penetrated by double agents. In a subsequent submission to a tribunal in Dublin, one handler who worked in British military intelligence estimated that by the end of the Troubles, as many as one in four IRA members worked, in some capacity, for the authorities. At the most senior levels of the IRA, he suggested, that figure might be closer to one in two. Of course, that is the kind of story that could be fabricated as a psychological operation to undermine the republican leadership, and Adams and other Sinn Féin officials would discount any such statistics that emanated from the British as inherently unreliable.
Say Nothing Page 29