Brendan Hughes may have been dead by the time it was revealed that he had direct knowledge of the McConville disappearance. But Dolours Price was still alive. When the Sunday Life article was published, in 2010, the McConvilles were shocked that Price would speak so freely about her involvement in an operation that had been a closely guarded secret for so many years. Ravenous for more information, Michael sent a message, through intermediaries, that he would like a meeting with Price. But he never heard back from her. Helen greeted the story with an angry challenge to the authorities. ‘Arrest the pair of them, Adams and Price,’ she said. ‘It’s disgusting that the people involved in my mother’s murder are still walking the streets.’ The Sinn Féin president and his outspoken antagonist might not have ‘pulled the trigger’, Helen allowed. But they were ‘as guilty as the people who did’.
One bright, chilly morning the following spring, Ed Moloney was at home in the Riverdale section of the Bronx when he received a phone call that filled him with alarm. Boston College had just received a subpoena. The US Department of Justice, acting under a mutual legal assistance treaty with the United Kingdom, was passing on an official request from the Police Service of Northern Ireland. The request was made, the subpoena stated, in order to assist the authorities ‘regarding an alleged violation of the laws of the United Kingdom, namely, murder’. Specifically, the subpoena demanded ‘the original tape recordings of any and all interviews of Brendan Hughes and Dolours Price’.
27
The Boston Tapes
‘I always, probably to the point of being boring, asked about the legal status and confidentiality,’ Mackers fumed. ‘Total confidentiality and total protection. This was the whole reason for putting them in a US university!’ An emergency conference call had been convened among the chief architects of the Belfast Project to discuss what to do about the subpoena. Along with Mackers and his wife, Carrie, outside Dublin, the call was joined by Ed Moloney (in New York), Wilson McArthur, who had conducted the loyalist interviews (in Belfast), and Tom Hachey and Bob O’Neill, at Boston College. Hachey announced that he had spoken with the president of the college, William Leahy, and that Leahy had assured him, ‘We are not going to allow our interviewers or interviews to be compromised.’
Mackers and Moloney were in a state of panic. During the years when they were compiling the oral history archive, they had never believed that British authorities might seriously endeavour to access the recordings. The very idea seemed ludicrous: just a few months earlier, the British government, along with the government of Ireland, had entrusted a raft of sensitive documentation associated with the post-Troubles disarmament process to Boston College, on the understanding that the records would be sealed for up to thirty years. Could officials from the same government really be seeking, now, to violate a similar embargo at the very same university?
Administrators at Boston College had been consulting with lawyers, and it was not yet clear how the university would respond. On the call, Hachey and O’Neill were unflustered, and reassuring. But Mackers expressed a fear that BC might ultimately comply with the request and turn over the tapes – that the interviewers and the ex-paramilitaries who shared their secret histories might simply be ‘hung out to dry’.
Moloney shared this fear, and, as a form of insurance against any quiet, dead-of-night handover, he had already gone public. He contacted the New York Times, which ran a front-page story, ‘Secret Archive of Ulster Troubles Faces Subpoena’. He also spoke to the Boston Globe, suggesting in an interview that Boston College might be left with no choice but to ‘destroy’ the tapes rather than turn them over to the authorities. To Moloney and Mackers, it seemed that nothing less than the principles of free speech and academic freedom hung in the balance, and the more publicity the case received, the more likely Boston College would be to do the right thing. But Hachey scolded Moloney for going straight to the press without consulting university administrators first, and he complained that the threat about destroying the archive had been ‘over the top’.
Nobody in the group knew what was driving this sudden request for the interviews, but Moloney had a suspicion. The Police Service of Northern Ireland might be striving, on paper, to become a new kind of department, but while the police had changed the name of the constabulary, they were still, in many instances, the same police. For decades, the men of the RUC had perceived Gerry Adams to be their chief antagonist, the figurehead of a paramilitary outfit that murdered nearly three hundred police officers over the course of the Troubles. Many old hands in the PSNI had lost loved ones – fellow cops, childhood friends, fathers – at the hands of the IRA. Now they had become aware that, across an ocean at Boston College, there existed an archive featuring testimony by former subordinates of Gerry Adams, and that these secret interviews might furnish the kind of proof that had eluded British authorities for decades: evidence that could put Adams away not just for IRA membership, but for murder.
‘This is a vendetta that is being waged,’ Tom Hachey said on the conference call, agreeing with Moloney. ‘They’re out to try to find something that they can nail a person like Gerry on.’ He added, ‘I’ll be goddamned if they’re going to use our archives to indict him, because that’s not what we undertook this enterprise for.’ Hachey certainly sounded adamant. But as he and Bob O’Neill questioned the others about the particulars of the project, Moloney thought that he detected, in the line of questioning, a hint that Boston College might not be feeling quite so resolute as Hachey was making it sound. They were very curious about the precise guarantees that McIntyre and Wilson McArthur had made at the time they conducted the interviews. What exactly had the interview subjects been promised in the way of confidentiality? Before he interviewed his loyalist subjects, McArthur said, he had assured them that there was an ‘ironclad’ guarantee of confidentiality. Their testimony would be released to no one, nor would it even be acknowledged that they had participated in the project at all, until after their death. McArthur reminded Hachey and O’Neill that they themselves had used that word – ironclad – when they first discussed the archive, a decade earlier. When he encountered skittish participants, McArthur would tell them that ‘Boston College’s legal counsel’ had vetted the whole arrangement.
As it turned out, this was not actually true. When Ed Moloney was preparing the contracts that the participants would sign, in early 2001, he emailed some proposed language to Bob O’Neill, writing, ‘You may want to refer this to your legal people before we use it.’ The following day, O’Neill wrote back to say that he was working on the wording of the contract and would run it by the university’s lawyers. But in the end, it appears, he never did. A lawyer would probably have advised him that the contracts should specify that any guarantee of confidentiality they might contain would not necessarily be able to protect the archive from a court order. The contract that each participant signed did not contain any such qualification, and no lawyer at Boston College ever reviewed those agreements.
Hachey ended the conference call on an upbeat note, like a team captain breaking up a huddle, as though the men would brace themselves and march into this battle as a team. But while they would exchange a few further emails, that was the last time that Hachey or O’Neill would speak to any of their partners in the Belfast Project. Before the end of May, Boston College turned over the Brendan Hughes interviews, on the grounds that Hughes was now dead and much of the content of his oral history had already been published in Moloney’s book. But whereas Voices from the Grave had been carefully edited to shield certain identities for legal and security reasons, the Hughes transcripts and recordings were unredacted. Moloney was irate to learn that the PSNI had come into possession of this material. ‘The authorities now have information upon which to act,’ he emailed Hachey. ‘I would bet the mortgage that at this moment there are teams of lawyers working in the bowels of the British government trying to discover ways to force BC to surrender the names of other possible interviewees.’
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p; Moloney proposed that, in order to avert a ‘huge disaster’, Hachey and O’Neill should immediately pack the entire archive into FedEx envelopes and send it overnight to Mackers in Ireland. Boston College might not have the stomach for a protracted legal fight, but Mackers did. Before he would ever turn the tapes and transcripts over, Moloney said, Mackers would ‘happily go to jail’. For the academics to send the material out of the country at that point might have constituted obstruction of justice. But Mackers agreed with Moloney that Boston College had a moral obligation to honour its commitment to confidentiality, and this pre-empted any niceties of law. People had risked their lives to entrust their stories to the Belfast Project; the least Boston College could do was engage in a little civil disobedience to protect them. Now that the authorities had the Brendan Hughes material, Moloney predicted, there was a ‘strong possibility’ that they would return with a second subpoena, seeking other interviews, based on what they had gathered from Hughes.
In a terse email, Hachey said that under ‘no circumstances’ would the university transfer the documents out of the country. In a line that would come to seem ironic in retrospect, he pointed out that promises had been made to the participants and argued that the safest place for their recollections was Boston College. The university agreed to fight the Price subpoena, arguing, in a motion to federal court, that releasing the material would violate the agreements made with the participants, undermine academic freedom, jeopardise the peace process in Northern Ireland, and throw into danger the lives of people associated with the project. ‘The IRA imposes a code of silence akin to the concept of “omerta” in the Mafia,’ the brief noted. As such, people like Dolours Price were willing to participate in the oral history only with the assurance ‘that the interviews would be kept locked away’. In an affidavit, Moloney noted that ‘it is an offence punishable by death’ for IRA members to reveal details of their paramilitary careers to outsiders.
But the US government hit back aggressively with its own arguments for why the Price interview should be handed over, suggesting that Moloney, McIntyre and Boston College had ‘made promises they could not keep – that they would conceal evidence of murder and other crimes until the perpetrators were in their graves’. The Belfast Project was not a work of journalism, and, as a legal matter, there was no ‘academic privilege’ that would shield the interviews from a court order. As for Moloney’s arguments about the dangers of revealing the archive, the government argued, Moloney himself had widely publicised the project. He published a book about it! Nobody had assassinated Mackers when it was revealed that he had interviewed Brendan Hughes and others for the project. So how dangerous could it really be?
The government also suggested, erroneously, that the Price interview had already been unsealed and shared with the reporter Ciarán Barnes for his article in Sunday Life. Lawyers for Boston College pointed out, in a filing to the court, that this was false – that US officials had clearly been duped by the ruse with which Barnes implied that he had heard the Boston tapes, without ever saying explicitly that he had. But by August, Moloney’s dire prediction had come true, and a second subpoena arrived at BC, demanding any and all tapes related to ‘the abduction and death of Mrs Jean McConville’. In December, a federal judge ruled against the university and ordered BC to hand over the tapes and transcripts to the court for review. The university chose not to appeal this ruling – a capitulation that Moloney and Mackers greeted with ire, if not surprise. So the two Irishmen hired their own lawyers and appealed the decision.
Unfortunately for the Irishmen, the legal case was cut and dried: there were few legal or constitutional protections that the men could invoke. But in parallel with their efforts in the courts, Moloney and Mackers, along with Carrie Twomey, pursued a political strategy, appealing to anyone they could for support. John Kerry, then a senator from Massachusetts, had close ties to Boston College (where he’d received his law degree) as well as to Ireland. Kerry wrote to the secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, urging her to work with British authorities on the issue, because the subpoenas might jeopardise the peace process. The Massachusetts branch of the American Civil Liberties Union filed a friend-of-the-court brief opposing the subpoenas.
In making their case that this controversy represented a crisis for academic freedom, Moloney and Mackers, and the university itself, might have turned to BC’s staff for support. But by the time the subpoenas arrived, most staff members had soured on the Belfast Project. Because of the secrecy surrounding the archive, almost nobody on campus had known about it before the publication of Moloney’s book. When it was originally conceived, the project was supposed to have a board of overseers from the university who could monitor its academic rigour, but, like the close reading of the contracts by lawyers, that idea never came to fruition. When the details of the project did come to light, some members of BC’s faculty took issue with what they learned: Anthony McIntyre might have had a PhD, but he was hardly a seasoned practitioner of oral history. Nor was Wilson McArthur. Both men appeared to be ideological fellow travellers – and, in some cases, close friends – with their interview subjects. Hardly a model of academic objectivity. Then there was the fact that Mackers had served nearly two decades in prison for murder.
Tom Hachey was regarded with suspicion by the faculty. He was an old friend of President Leahy’s, and he seemed to enjoy a sinecure with few actual departmental responsibilities. The same might be said of Bob O’Neill, who presided over the Burns Library. Neither man had a strong scholarly constituency on campus to which he could turn for backup. In an email to Moloney, Hachey remarked that there was ‘no visible support emerging from outraged academics’. Moloney may not have done the project any favours in this regard by endeavouring to bar access by graduate students to the archive. When the Boston College history department finally released a statement about the Belfast Project, in 2014, it did so not to come to the defence of academic freedom, but to make clear that the undertaking ‘is not and never was’ in any way associated with the department. ‘Nobody trusted the integrity of the project,’ one faculty member explained. Professors in the department believed in academic freedom. ‘But this was such a bad case to hang that principle on.’
Moloney and Mackers brought their case to the First Circuit Court of Appeals and lost. They obtained a stay, which barred the university from handing over the interviews pending an appeal to the Supreme Court. But in the spring of 2013, the Supreme Court refused to hear the case. In determining which of the interviews would fall within the scope of the second subpoena, which requested any material relating to the abduction and murder of Jean McConville, the judge, William Young, had asked Mackers for help. For security, each interview had been logged at Boston College without the name of the interview subject, and with the alphabet code name instead. But Mackers knew the identities of all the people he had interviewed, and he might recall which of them had discussed Jean McConville. He declined to help, however, saying that assisting the court would ‘lead me across the boundary that firewalls academic research from police investigation’. Judge Young asked Bob O’Neill for assistance, but he, too, demurred, claiming that he had not read the interviews. So over several days one Christmas, the judge read through the transcripts of all the republican interviews himself. He found that six of the participants mentioned Jean McConville, though one had done so only in passing. As a result, Young authorised the release of all the recordings associated with five of the participants.
One of those participants was Dolours Price. Mackers and Moloney had both been adamant that Price never spoke about McConville in her oral history. ‘Dolours Price did not mention Jean McConville nor talk about what had happened to her in her interviews for the Belfast Project,’ Moloney said in a press release in September 2012. ‘The subject of that unfortunate woman’s disappearance was never mentioned, not even once,’ he wrote in an affidavit that same month. This assertion had significant legal implications, as Moloney explained. ‘The truth
is that the interviews that Anthony McIntyre conducted with Dolours Price are notable for the absence of any material that could ever have justified the subpoenas.’
Technically, this was true. Dolours Price spent some fifteen hours in recorded conversations with Mackers, and on those recordings she never once mentioned McConville. But there was another set of recordings in the archive, in which Price did discuss the disappearance of Jean McConville, in great detail. The interviewer wasn’t Anthony McIntyre, however. It was Ed Moloney.
When the Irish News reporter Allison Morris went to interview Dolours Price at her home in Malahide in February 2010, the Belfast Project had long since concluded. Mackers and Wilson McArthur had finished the last of their interviews by 2006, and the archive lay in the Treasure Room at the Burns Library, apparently complete. But not long after Price spoke to Morris, Moloney visited her in Dublin, to conduct an interview of his own. What he proposed was not to publish his own version of her story, but to ask her about her past, in a level of detail that would go beyond her conversations with Mackers, and then safeguard the interview on the same terms that had applied to the Belfast Project: he would not release her account until after her death.
Price agreed. At the time, she was staying at St Patrick’s Hospital, where she was being treated for depression and PTSD. One morning, Moloney visited her there and the two of them spoke for several hours in her room. Moloney recorded the conversation on a digital recorder. A few days later they met again, outside the hospital, in a rented flat. This time, Moloney had assembled a small camera crew to film the interview. In both conversations, Price was sober and coherent, her hair tousled and platinum blonde, her eyes lined with mascara. She told Moloney about her aunt Bridie, about how, when Bridie came home, blinded and maimed after the accident in the IRA arms dump, Granny Dolan had put the house into mourning. Bridie’s sisters were not allowed to go out dancing, Price said. ‘It was like having a wake with a living body.’ It was Bridie’s suffering, in part, that had obliged her to join the struggle, she said, because it ‘vindicated her sacrifice’. She talked about getting beaten at Burntollet Bridge and joining the IRA, and then the Unknowns.
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