by Peter Taylor
The clergymen had prepared a document to which they hoped to get the IRA’s agreement and then present it to HMG as a basis for a settlement and an end to the violence.
The meeting came to a rather abrupt end, however, when the Irish Special Branch arrived armed with sub-machine guns, hoping to arrest Twomey, Mallon and O’Hagan. The Branchmen stormed the hotel and found McKee and O’Bradaigh comparing notes downstairs. When asked where the ‘others’ were, they replied, ‘Upstairs.’ The raiders dashed up to find a group of Protestant clergymen who were also comparing notes. Their quarries, who had received a tip-off, had already gone, this time using a less dramatic form of transport. The Branchmen left Smyth’s Hotel embarrassed and empty-handed.2
Michael Oatley regarded Feakle as a side-show and distraction from the enterprise upon which he and Frank Cooper were embarked, although the fact that the Feakle meeting subsequently became public would help draw the sting should it ever be revealed the Government was undertaking its own secret dialogue with the IRA.
At this stage, the existence of Oatley’s bamboo ‘pipe’ down which the signals were being sent was known to only a small handful of people and was certainly not known to the Government at large. Its own response to Guildford, Woolwich and Birmingham had been security force pressure, not seeking out the possibility of talks with the organization responsible for the outrages. Oatley admitted there was a ‘grotesque’ contradiction in the IRA’s position. ‘I think one of the things I’d come to understand at a fairly early stage was that the continuation of a violent campaign was not inconsistent with a willingness to consider political options,’ he said. As Christmas 1974 approached, Oatley was hopeful that the New Year might produce more positive soundings from Provisional representatives with whom he was not directly in contact. ‘The sorts of noises we’d been hearing over the previous weeks suggested that the communication, which had been at a very low level, could perhaps become really significant and that we had an opportunity to do something really important. So everybody packed their bags and went off to London feeling that we were probably all right for a week.’
Oatley had been informed via the ‘pipe’ that the IRA would declare a Christmas cease-fire, this time to create a climate in which a more meaningful dialogue might be pursued. On 20 December 1974 the IRA announced it was ordering ‘a suspensions of operations’ to last from midnight on 22 December until midnight on Thursday 2 January 1975 in order to give the British Government an opportunity ‘to consider the proposals for a permanent cease-fire’.3 The efforts of all those involved in the process, not least the Contact himself, finally seemed to be bearing fruit. The Feakle clergy had no doubt played their part too in helping to crystallize the IRA leadership’s thinking. On the day the cease-fire was due to begin, the IRA endeavoured to make it clear it was entering talks from a position of strength, as was now customary, by opening fire on two police stations and exploding six bombs in Northern Ireland and by hurling a bomb from a car at the London home of former Prime Minister Edward Heath.4 Heath was not at home and only a few windows were shattered. At midnight, the IRA’s guns and bombs fell silent. The IRA now waited for a reciprocal response from the ‘Brits’ and apparently expected it to come within the hour. When it did not materialize, the IRA felt it might be being conned and started threatening to go back to ‘war’ unless there was some response from the ‘Brits’.
Late on Christmas Eve, Oatley received an urgent call from the Contact, who had a habit of ringing in the middle of the night, with a warning that the situation was breaking down and the IRA was getting restless. He told Oatley that he needed to do something quickly to hold the position. Oatley took advice, probably from Frank Cooper, and got agreement that he could ‘say something encouraging about the sort of talks that would take place’ (he cannot remember the precise formula used). The Contact made a note of the conversation.
On Christmas Day morning, Ruairi O’Bradaigh was surprised to see a car pull up outside his house in Roscommon and from it emerge the Contact after a long drive from Derry. He gave O’Bradaigh a message in the form of a letter he had drafted after the late-night telephone call to Oatley. According to O’Bradaigh, the letter said that the British wished to meet the Republican Movement to devise ‘structures of British withdrawal from Ireland’ – or ‘structures of disengagement from Ireland’ (he told me that he could not remember the exact words). There was no doubt, however, in his mind what the thrust of the message was. I asked Oatley if he had been as specific as this in his telephone conversation with the Contact on Christmas Eve night. As ever, he chose his words with care.
I always made it clear that the Government’s ability to consider withdrawing from Northern Ireland was entirely dependent upon the will of the majority in Northern Ireland and that there was no question of a unilateral withdrawal of Crown Rule in Northern Ireland as a result of any conversations which might take place with the Republican Movement. But when asked what I was prepared to discuss, I said I am prepared to discuss anything you like. Whatever phrase was communicated to O’Bradaigh, it was nothing like a suggestion that the British Government was about to abandon the province to the embrace of the South.
But the phrase ‘structures of disengagement from Ireland’ or ‘withdrawal from Ireland’ is neatly ambiguous, isn’t it? It can mean one thing to them and something entirely different to you.
Well, I think that was the nature of our dialogue and I think that the ambiguity was recognized by both sides so that each could make what it wanted from it. Ambiguous phrases were very much the currency we were involved in.
But O’Bradaigh did not see any ambiguity in the communication. He immediately contacted the IRA’s Army Council (time was of the essence as the cease-fire had only a week left to run). The IRA leadership agreed to meet on 31 December 1974 to discuss the dramatic development and decided that the Contact should be there to authenticate himself and the message he had brought from the ‘Brits’. Billy McKee, who now also had a seat on the Army Council, was present at the meeting. At the time, British intelligence appeared to be unaware of how quickly McKee had been re-inserted in the IRA’s command structure. But they certainly believed he was a person of some integrity who, although a ‘hawk’ in military matters, was a potential ‘dove’ in the political field and therefore one with whom business might be done as he appeared to straddle both camps.
On New Year’s Eve, with only three days of the cease-fire left, the Contact arrived at the meeting in Dublin. O’Bradaigh vouched for the Contact’s integrity and assured the obsessively secretive Army Council that he could be trusted. McKee remembers the encounter. ‘He had a message that the British wanted to meet us and we asked him what was on the agenda. He said, “Withdrawal” and we said we were interested.’ The Contact said the man who wanted to talk was called Oatley and the only person he wanted to meet was Billy McKee. McKee was instinctively suspicious. The IRA had never heard of Oatley but assumed, correctly, that he was some kind of ‘spook’ although it would not have known of his precise connection with MI6. Twomey, who was chairing the meeting as Chief of Staff, asked McKee if he was willing to go and meet him. McKee had reservations, suspecting he might be walking into a British intelligence trap. ‘I said, “I’m not going to meet any British agent on my own. I want a witness there to hear what’s going on. Twomey agreed and it was decided that I should go with another man.’ The ‘witness’ deputed to accompany McKee was a senior IRA commander in Derry who was also a member of the IRA’s GHQ staff and a close colleague of Martin McGuinness with whom he had been in gaol in the South.
Oatley’s ‘message’, ambiguous or otherwise, had the desired effect and the IRA extended its cease-fire for another two weeks until 16 January 1975. Unionists were getting extremely nervous, suspecting that this would not have happened unless some sort of deal was being done. Loyalist paranoia, never far from the surface, began to intensify.
On 7 January, McKee and his GHQ colleague travelled to Derry for explora
tory talks with Oatley at a secret location set up by the Contact. When Oatley arrived and saw the senior IRA man accompanying McKee, he considered calling off the meeting. ‘I didn’t want to meet anybody who looked like a publicly recognized terrorist and cause potential embarrassment to the Secretary of State,’ he said. In the end, the Contact persuaded Oatley to stay, knowing that if the meeting fell apart, the whole enterprise might fall apart too.
McKee insists that Oatley mentioned ‘withdrawal’ at the meeting.
I asked him what was on the agenda and he said ‘Withdrawal’ and he said that he needed our help.
Are you sure he said ‘Withdrawal’?
Oh, he said ‘Withdrawal’ all right. ‘Withdrawal’ was used during the whole negotiations with Oatley and others. They said that’s what they wanted and they needed the IRA to help them so that there wouldn’t be a bloodbath. They said they wanted us to meet the loyalists and we said that could be arranged all right. I can tell you, if they hadn’t mentioned withdrawal, there’d have been no cease-fire and no truce at that time.
Oatley would dispute that he ever said anything as specific as that, maintaining that by agreeing to an ‘open’ agenda, nothing could be ruled out, including ‘withdrawal’. It was a clever and politically defensible form of words.
During further meetings in which O’Bradaigh took part in his capacity as President of Sinn Fein, and Oatley was joined by his Laneside colleague, James Allan, an indefinite cease-fire was negotiated. The IRA announced on 9 February 1975 that it would begin the following day and called it a ‘bi-lateral truce’. According to Frank Cooper, O’Bradaigh described the enterprise ‘as the most exciting thing that had ever happened to him. There is no doubt at all that they were delighted to be involved in what they saw as a political dialogue.’ According to the Republican Movement’s secret minutes of the negotations, to which I was finally given access as a result of republicans I knew in the South, the British agreed to the truce on consideration of a list of points, all predicated on ‘a genuine and sustained cessation of violence’.5 The most important were:
• If there is a genuine and sustained cessation of violence and hostilities, the army would gradually be reduced to peace-time levels and withdrawn to barracks.
• Discussion will continue between officials and representatives of Provisional Sinn Fein and will include the aim of securing a permanent peace.
• Once violence has come to a complete end, the rate of release will be speeded up with a view to releasing all detainees.
They did not give the IRA all it wanted but they seemed to contain a big enough hint. Certainly they were sufficient to merit an indefinite cease-fire. At the last minute, there was a problem over allowing two dozen IRA men to carry weapons for their personal protection but Cooper agreed to let them do so if that was all that stood between the two sides. He was not going to let the prospect of peace founder on twenty-four permits.
For republicans, the most tangible evidence of the truce was a series of ‘incident centres’ established across the province and manned by Sinn Fein to avoid the kind of confrontation that had brought the 1972 cease-fire to an end. Each one contained a ‘hot-line’, initially to Laneside where Oatley and Allan were based and subsequently to Stormont Castle, manned twenty-four hours a day by officials who had direct access to the Secretary of State. Historically, the incident centres gave Sinn Fein a political base and prominence within the nationalist community which the party had never enjoyed before. The rise of Sinn Fein and its growing influence over the next twenty-five years can be traced from this point.
There was movement on prisoners too. On 18 March 1975, the Price sisters, convicted for the Provisional IRA’s first London bombings in 1973, were transferred from England to Armagh gaol. Two more London bombers, Gerry Kelly and Hugh Feeney, were later transferred from England to Long Kesh, which had now become officially known as the Maze Prison. (Long Kesh had too many bad historical associations for the ‘Brits’ when they were trying to feel their way towards peace.) Kelly joined Gerry Adams in ‘Cage 11’ along with other prominent republican prisoners.
Inside the Maze, Adams and his colleagues watched with scepticism as they saw the IRA outside being drawn into a dialogue with the ‘Brits’ out of which, they believed (perhaps with a liberal dose of hindsight), no good could come. They knew that once Volunteers were stood down and remained inactive during an indefinite cease-fire, the initiative would lie with the ‘Brits’. Again with hindsight, and with some justification, they felt the Republican Movement was being led into a trap and the Dublin leadership, most notably O’Connell and O’Bradaigh, were too Mind to see it. Martin McGuinness, who had been released from Portlaoise prison in the Republic on 13 November 1974, having served his second sentence for IRA membership, which he admitted,6 was never directly involved in the negotiations and therefore was not tainted by them.
Increasingly, as the months went by, the indefinite cease-fire became meaningless as the loyalist paramilitaries lashed out with unbridled ferocity to force the IRA to retaliate and thus precipitate an end to the truce. Loyalists, seeing the incident centres in operation with Sinn Fein having direct access to Ministers, had no doubt that a deal had been done. In 1975, the UVF and the UDA killed 120 Catholics, the vast majority innocent civilians. The UVF was responsible for 100 of those deaths.7 Among its most horrific attacks were the bombing of the Strand Bar in Belfast on 12 April in which six Catholics, including three women, died; the massacre of the Miami Showband on 31 July in which three Catholics who were members of Ireland’s most popular band were killed; and the gunning-down of four Catholics during a robbery on 2 October at Casey’s wholesale wine and spirits warehouse on the edge of the Shankill and the Falls. One of the gunmen was Lennie Murphy who was soon to become notorious as the leader of the so-called ‘Shankill Butchers’ who tortured and carved up their Catholic victims with butchers’ knives before finally putting them out of their agonies. Over the years, eleven members of Murphy’s gang murdered nineteen people, clearly taking pleasure in rituals whose horror defies the imagination, even by Belfast standards.8
Despite the cease-fire, the IRA hit back in kind, not least because it felt it had to in order to maintain its own credibility as the ‘defender’ of its community. In retaliation for the Miami Showband, the IRA bombed the Bayardo Bar on the Shankill Road on 13 August 1975, killing four civilians and one UVF man. It was seen as a purely sectarian attack. Another attack followed a couple of weeks later on 1 September, when masked gunmen walked into the Tullyvallen Orange Hall near Newtownhamilton in South Armagh and sprayed it with machine-guns, killing four members of the Guiding Star Temperance Orange Lodge. Responsibility was claimed by a group calling itself the South Armagh Republican Action Force, a flag of convenience for the South Armagh Provisional IRA.
Towards the end of the year, however, events in London made utter nonsense of the ‘truce’, which by this time was little more than a name anyway. An IRA Active Service Unit (ASU) had been in place in England for many months and had brought back to the streets of the capital the kind of fear that had not been seen for almost a year. Workers went to their offices, fearful that they might be blown up on the way. Commuters shunned the Underground, suspecting it might be the next target for the bombers. Women refused to go shopping in the West End in case they never returned. And the intelligence services did not know who the IRA cell was or where it was. Its security had been kept very tight.
After lying low for the first half of 1975 as the secret talks between the Republican Movement and the British stumbled on, the ASU resumed its attacks once it became clear that the ‘Brits’ had no intention of delivering what the IRA wanted. On 29 August, its members booby-trapped a bomb in Kensington which killed an army bomb-disposal expert, Captain Roger Goad, as he attempted to de-activate the device. On 5 September, they bombed Park Lane’s Hilton Hotel, killing two people. There had been a twenty-minute warning but no indication as to where the bomb had been placed.9 On
22 September, they bombed the Portman Hotel off Oxford Street. The following month, they changed tack by targeting prominent people for ‘assassination’ on the grounds that the offensive was directed against the British ‘establishment’. On 23 October 1975, they returned to Kensington where they planned to kill the Conservative MP Sir Hugh Fraser by leaving a bomb under his car. The bomb exploded prematurely and killed an internationally renowned cancer specialist, Professor Gordon Hamilton-Fairley, as he was walking his dog near his home in Campden Hill Square.10 They then turned their attention to attacking prestigious restaurants. On 28 October, they bombed Lockets in Westminster, a favourite dining place for Members of Parliament, and on 18 November, they threw a bomb packed with miniature ball-bearings through the window of Walton’s restaurant in Chelsea, killing two diners.
By this time, London was on the verge of panic and its restaurants were virtually empty. Ross McWhirter, a founder of the Guinness Book of Records and a founder-member of a right-wing group known as the National Association for Freedom, offered a £50,000 reward for the capture of the bombers. On 27 November, members of the unit staked out his house, waited for his wife to come home and forced her to ring the bell at gunpoint. When her husband came to the door, they shot him dead. One of the gunmen is later alleged to have told the police that they killed him because ‘He thought it was the Wild West. He put a price on our head.’11 By now the ASU was acting as if it was in the Wild West, driving round London, bombing hotels and restaurants without getting caught. There was no ‘Det’ to put them under surveillance or RUC Special Branch informers to give the police leads. All members of the ASU came from the Irish Republic and were therefore difficult to trace. Unlike in Belfast, the intelligence services in London were working virtually blind.
But on 6 December 1975, the ASU’s luck finally ran out. The Metropolitan Police, now under huge pressure to produce results, flooded the West End with mobile patrols in the hope that the bombers would strike again and get caught in the police net. It was known as ‘Operation Combo’ and the gamble paid off. Four members of the ASU stole a car and raked Scott’s restaurant in Mayfair with gunfire. It was their second attack on the premises, an indication of how brazen they had become. The police gave chase and ran the gunmen to ground in Balcombe Street where they had abandoned the car and taken refuge in flat 22B, holding its occupants, John and Sheila Matthews, hostage.