Peacerunner

by Penn Rhodeen

  Mitchell later said that the members of the commission hadn’t anticipated Major’s reaction to the report. Although he saw Major’s pivot to the elections idea as an adroit political move, the world at large—and especially the IRA—heard Major’s answer to the recommendation of parallel decommissioning loud and clear: unavoidably, unalterably, unequivocally “No!” His elections idea barely registered, something Major himself would soon acknowledge.

  Bill Clinton had gone home, George Mitchell and his co-chairmen had tried their best, and now John Major had spoken. It was hard to imagine that the ceasefire could last much longer.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  After a Year and a Half, the IRA Loses Patience

  The surveillance video opens on a tree. This is February in London, so the tree is bare. In the harsh glare of the streetlights, its trunk and branches arrest the eye. Orange is everywhere: not the familiar bright and warm hue but a cold, acrid orange of sodium vapor streetlights trailing down to South Quay, reflecting harshly on the road surface, and giving an unpleasant tinge to the dark sky above the hulking forms of the buildings at the bottom of the hill. The camera, apparently set up after the warning call came, is stationary, looking straight down toward South Quay Station, where the truck is parked. The Docklands and Canary Wharf, the high-end, mixed-use development that would give the attack its name, are nearby. The date—96-02-09 —can be seen on the left side of the screen. In the upper right-hand corner, a clock shows the time to the second, and another time counter spins in increments even smaller than that. Traffic cones close off the street, and a bespectacled man clutching a metal briefcase crosses in front of the camera.

  Unlike a typical surveillance video, this one has sound: first a male voice, then a female one, then a loud metallic buzzing. The picture jars, then the buzzing stops. A figure in the distance crosses the street, headed right toward South Quay. The picture becomes clear again, and then the explosion—a distant bang and an intense flash topped by a plume of smoke and dust bending to the right as if driven by a crosswind. Debris showers down onto the roadway. Lights go out. There is the sound of excited voices, wailing and crying. Then a second flash and a huge cloud sweeps across the street. Two figures running away from the blast are silhouetted against the cloud. Lights come back on in less than thirty seconds.

  It began and ended in no time: A massive truck bomb exploded. Two men working at a newsstand nearby were killed, forty-three people were injured, and the damage sustained by the surrounding buildings cost more than 100 million pounds. After nearly eighteen months, the ceasefire was over.

  The IRA was roundly denounced in London, Dublin, and Washington. Gerry Adams, who shortly before the blast told the White House that he was “hearing disturbing news” but gave no details, would not be welcome at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue until the ceasefire was restored. Adams said later that he believed a more positive British response to the Mitchell commission proposal could have kept the ceasefire alive: “At least it would have given us something to work with.”

  Morrison weighed in, deploring the attack, as did Ted Kennedy and other prominent Irish Americans. Someone called Chuck Feeney at his San Francisco office to tell him about it, and when he hung up the phone, tears were rolling down his cheeks. Most people were discouraged but not surprised. George Mitchell had told David Frost in a televised interview just days before that he was afraid the ceasefire wouldn’t last much longer, citing his understanding that the vote within IRA to authorize it had been close and that many were running out of patience. His words seemed so prescient that some were sure Mitchell had inside information; he staunchly denied it, writing later that it had just been a matter of “plain common sense. . . . The IRA had declared a ceasefire in August 1994 in the expectation that inclusive negotiations would begin immediately. Now, eighteen months later, there were no negotiations in sight.”

  There was every reason to fear that this violent end to the ceasefire would be so discouraging that Clinton would no longer be willing to stick his neck out in hopes of helping end the ancient warfare. But, miraculously, the eyes of the Americans on the front lines—Clinton, Soderberg, Morrison, O’Dowd, Feeney, Flynn, and Mitchell—never left the prize. In fact, the Americans doubled down on their commitment. Soderberg said later that the image of the thousands of hopeful faces she saw as she looked out from the stage in the Belfast plaza the night Clinton lit the Christmas tree made it impossible for her to walk away: “People just so wanted it, and the people were so far ahead of the politicians. The people who opposed us doing this in the first place would say, ‘Okay, now you’ve got to cut these guys off.’ But honestly we never seriously considered it, because you don’t want those who are trying to destroy the peace process to win.”

  Morrison wasn’t surprised that Soderberg kept the faith: “Once the 1995 trip to Belfast happened, she became a total convert. She saw what it was all about in very personal terms and never stopped working to implement it. It’s very easy in the White House to lose touch and forget about why you got involved, but that was never the case with her.”

  Less than three weeks after the bombing, John Major met with his Irish counterpart John Bruton, and later the same day he told Parliament that the two had agreed on “a way forward.” A “broadly acceptable elective process” would be devised to select participants in “all-party negotiations with a comprehensive agenda” that would start in early June—and include Sinn Féin if the ceasefire has been restored. Prior decommissioning wouldn’t be a requirement for entering the talks, but Britain’s preoccupation with decommissioning hadn’t gone away. Major went on:

  At the beginning of the negotiations, in order to build confidence, all participants, including Sinn Féin if the ceasefire has been restored, will need to make clear their total and absolute commitment to the principles of democracy and nonviolence set out in the Mitchell report and to address also at the beginning of the negotiations Senator Mitchell’s proposals on decommissioning of weapons.

  These weren’t new points: Major had mentioned them during his late January speech before Parliament in response to the Mitchell commission report. But then they’d been mostly lost in the smoke of his roundabout rejection of the commission’s central recommendation of parallel decommissioning.

  Even Major conceded that his elections proposal “has been misunderstood widely.” It was true that he had stressed the proposal more clearly in his remarks after his speech in Parliament, but at that point the sound bites and headlines had taken over—“Major puts the report in the shredder” ran one in the Irish Times—and drowned out everything else. That was no surprise to Morrison, because Major’s approach had been to say (however indirectly) “No” to Mitchell’s astute finessing of the decommissioning obstacle, instead of “Yes, but . . . ,” which would have offered a perfect segue to the elections idea to which he was now such an ardent convert. The difference between those two approaches may seem small and subtle, but it was crucial: It would determine what the world—a world that included the IRA—would hear as Major’s answer to Mitchell’s core proposal.

  Major’s disregard for such a basic principle of political communication felt to Morrison like something from the realm of personal limitations and vulnerabilities. His defective sense of how to make his elections proposal heard was exceeded by his even more defective sense of the timing of the proposal. Unionist leader David Trimble had been pushing the elections idea since the fall of 1995, and there had been some significant American and Irish support for it. If Major had taken it up at that time, the process would have played out in the context of an ongoing ceasefire. Whatever complaints Sinn Féin and others might have had about going through elections at Major’s command wouldn’t have seemed so important if all-party talks really were right around the corner. But in making the elections proposal when he did, Major made it a virtual certainty that the idea would be seen by republicans and nationalists alike as just another stalling tactic in the seemingly inexhaustible British supply.
Even worse, there was no realistic prospect at that point that elections would lead to prompt all-party talks, since no one—not the British, not the unionists, not the Irish Republic, not the Americans—would let Sinn Féin join the negotiations while the IRA was back at war. Yet without Sinn Féin—which, in Major’s biting phrase, “has of course excluded itself”—any talks that started in June would have been incapable of producing an agreement that worked. George Mitchell said later that he was hopeful that Sinn Féin would come in eventually, “because I felt it would be necessary to have them there to get an agreement on the nationalist side.”

  As for the prospects of a new ceasefire, there was no possibility that an IRA—in which the ceasefire skeptics, who had been sure all along that the only thing the British understood was the bomb and the gun, now had the upper hand—would quickly agree to a new one. The real question was whether the IRA would ever take that leap again.

  To make matters even more complicated, the situation of Sinn Féin itself changed after the Canary Wharf attack in a fundamental way that wasn’t evident to Morrison then but has become increasingly clear with the passage of time. The attack was indeed a watershed moment, but not in the way the British interpreted it. As Morrison came to see it, before Canary Wharf, the central drama was about Sinn Féin finding a way to get into the negotiations; after it, the focus shifted to the others chasing after Sinn Féin to get them to join the talks, which would basically be fruitless without them, and about a supremely political Sinn Féin determined to extract every possible benefit in return for agreeing to come to the table. Morrison later made this analysis:

  After Canary Wharf the realization seemed to hit the British government that they really needed Sinn Féin and the IRA to come back into the process. The fact that they finally understood that was another example of how the Clinton big-tent approach had taken over the process. There was a long time in which the British assumed they could do the deal without Sinn Féin and make it stick, and it became clear after Canary Wharf that they didn’t believe that anymore. They were profligate with their opportunity, and now they scrambled to find a way back to a ceasefire and back to a road to negotiations.

  But now the republicans saw the British pursuing them for negotiations, when just months before they couldn’t seem to get the British to do anything. So the signal was quite clear that the balance had shifted. The lesson was, for all the talk about resisting violence, violence has gotten the attention of the British. That was hardly the lesson one would hope the British government wanted to teach.

  I think the republicans concluded something else, and that was, if for no other reason than the required electoral calendar, this British government was in its last year. Since their experience with Major was that he would not do a deal, they became pretty convinced that they need not be in any rush: Nothing was going anywhere without them, and soon there would be a new government. This really was a holding pattern in which a new prime minister, a new day, wasn’t that far away and was worth waiting for.

  It was a perfect example of what Morrison calls “revolutionary patience,” which had long been characteristic of Sinn Féin. Their view was the long view and their only calendar was their own calendar, no matter what the world said or demanded. “They didn’t accept deadlines,” Morrison says. “They viewed themselves as revolutionaries who would wait out those who made demands that they were not going to accept. Their stance was, ‘It will come to us on our terms.’”

  As Morrison saw it, British intransigence had given the upper hand to the IRA fighters who had opposed the ceasefire from the beginning. They blew up South Quay and with it the ceasefire itself. Now the British were promising all-party talks without the requirement of prior decommissioning. Despite Major’s vehement protestations to the contrary, the IRA had undeniably “bombed its way to the conference table,” and, even worse, the question of when and how Sinn Féin would join the discussion was now entirely in the hands of the IRA. Such an absurd situation exasperated Morrison to no end, while at the same time leaving him astonished at what the British had wrought: “The British didn’t hold their cards; they threw them down, and the IRA hard-liners wound up in the catbird seat. They got to reset the bargain and got a better deal after the ceasefire. This would have been a republican masterstroke if they had planned it that way, but it was really the result of British blundering.” The ghosts of the sixteen executed after the Rising couldn’t have devised a more exquisite revenge.

  It would be a long slog to a new ceasefire. Bill Clinton, ever determined, remained ready to do his part. How bold and pragmatic Clinton was willing to be came across to Morrison during the St. Patrick’s Day Shamrock ceremony in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in March of 1996, shortly after the IRA bombed South Quay. In his remarks Clinton, while arguing for a new ceasefire, offered a startlingly candid analysis. When asked what he would say to those on the IRA ruling body to convince them to trust Major and the British, he answered bluntly: “You don’t have to all of a sudden start trusting people. You just have to show up, start, and go to work.”

  Asked how confident he was that the IRA would listen, he responded:

  What’s been done in the past hasn’t worked. What’s been done in the last couple of years has a chance of working. There’s nothing to be lost here by taking a leap of faith. You know, everybody can always go back to behaving in the terrible way they once behaved—that’s true of every human being in the world. If it’s ultimately unsatisfying, if it leads to a dead end, what’s to be lost in trying? Nothing, nothing. That’s the argument I make: It’s in everyone’s self-interest to go forward. It is in no one’s self-interest to keep their foot on the brakes of this process.

  The extraordinary directness of Clinton’s statement stunned Morrison, but it didn’t seem to strike anyone else. Clinton was in truth describing precisely the essence of the ceasefire—fighters who decide a ceasefire isn’t working out for them can always go back to the warfare—but it was remarkable for the president of the United States to lay it out so candidly. It was a revealing glimpse into how committed Clinton was to his Northern Ireland policy, how determined he was to have it succeed, and the risks he was willing to take to get it done. Morrison was genuinely startled:

  I thought what he said was true, but I was surprised to hear it uttered in public rather than whispered in private to Adams or something like that. So I wasn’t talking about it to anyone else; I kind of kept it my little secret. I thought that broad reporting of that point would not have been helpful, that it would have brought forth a lot of criticism of Clinton going soft on terrorists. But it kind of went over people’s heads or under people’s noses or whatever. I didn’t hear a gasp from the press corps. The only gasp I heard was my own.

  In Northern Ireland, Major and Bruton went ahead with the plan for elections in May. John Hume reversed his angry opposition to the plan and said the SDLP would participate, which forced Sinn Féin to reevaluate its own opposition. Ultimately, after a fair amount of grumbling from Adams, Sinn Féin set aside its initial reluctance and participated fully. To those in the British government who thought Sinn Féin would do so badly at the polls that their legitimacy as a political force would be fatally compromised, this was surely good news. If it came out that way, Britain could revert to its insistence that peace could be made (on terms much more congenial to the British) between moderates who were unalterably opposed to the use of political violence—and there would be no need to even consider having Sinn Féin at the table.

  But that’s not how it worked out. Sinn Féin increased its share of support to 15.5 percent of the Northern Ireland electorate—more than a 50 percent gain—and drew closer to Hume’s SDLP party, which got 21.4 percent. That outcome might have been a surprise to the British, who had routinely disparaged Gerry Adams as “Mr. Ten Percent,” but it was no surprise to Morrison:

  It’s hard to say what John Major would expect to happen in an election in Northern Ireland, but the one thing you c
an know is that the door-to-door, neighborhood-based politics of Sinn Féin would be completely unfamiliar to him. In the British Parliament, people represent districts that they don’t live in, that they never lived in, that they don’t have any connection to. The minister for Northern Ireland never has to set foot in Northern Ireland. There is a top-down structure in British politics that is the opposite of the grassroots politics Sinn Féin did so well.

  Another strength of Sinn Féin was its ability to tap emotion much more effectively than anybody else. They were just better at capturing the political emotions of the nationalist community than the SDLP, and that was going to be felt if you created elections that had high symbolic content.

  Throughout the spring of 1996, Morrison met with the British, sometimes during elegant embassy dinners, to discuss how to get Sinn Féin into the talks. The British understood that he had special access to the thinking of Sinn Féin, but his ideas never got traction with the British, who told him they were seeking a “formula of words” to get the peace process on track again. Morrison was struck by that phrase “a formula of words”—certainly throughout the ceasefire John Major’s only search seemed to have been for which words to deploy, as opposed to what action to take. It was painfully clear to Morrison that until the British accepted that the road to peace had to be paved with deeds and not words, the fighting wouldn’t stop. Whether or not the British understood this reality was beside the point: Only when they accepted it and took action accordingly would peace be possible. As Morrison recalls,