In the autumn of 1993 I was working for a Fleet Street newspaper on assignment in Belfast during one of the most harrowing weeks of the Troubles. Between October 23 and 30, 24 people were murdered. The killings began with the IRA bombing of Frizzell’s fish shop on the Shankill Road in which ten people, including one of the bombers, were killed. Loyalist terror gangs staged a series of revenge attacks, targeting Catholic workmen and families.
The memories of that week have stuck fast: a solitary shoe on the bloody floor of the pub; the piles of rubble on the Shankill; the raw grief and seething anger at funeral after funeral. Serious voices talked of all-out civil war, and optimism about talks between the moderate nationalist leader John Hume and Gerry Adams, the head of Sinn Fein, dissolved.
I also remember being in a huddle of reporters talking to a senior Sinn Fein figure at the funeral of the Shankill bomber Thomas Begley. He argued that what was happening that week was not a signal of civil war but the death throes of the conflict. There was outrage when Adams shouldered Begley’s coffin; my newspaper reported that peace was “in ruins”. But I was pleased that one paragraph I had written survived the subeditor’s cut: “Sinn Fein leaders traditionally attend IRA funerals and carry the coffins of the dead. If Mr Adams had not done so yesterday he could have risked a split in republican ranks.”
Adams needed to keep his movement together as he and Martin McGuinness, the most important IRA commander, pursued a high-risk strategy. What very few people knew at the time was that, alongside the Hume-Adams talks, McGuinness was involved in secret discussions with the British government. Earlier in 1993, McGuinness had held face-to-face talks with an MI5 operative whose mission was to keep open a line of communication between the IRA and the British government. By 1991 that back channel, which had existed since the 1970s, had become Operation Chiffon, the aim of which MI5 described as “to achieve a ceasefire and talks” with the IRA.
What very few people knew in 1993 was that Martin McGuinness was involved in secret discussions with the British government.
The BBC correspondent Peter Taylor, who has reported on Northern Ireland for 50 years and earned the trust of all sides, tells the extraordinary story of Operation Chiffon in his latest book, published to coincide with the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday agreement. But the book is also the story of three unsung heroes of the peace process.
The first is Michael Oatley, the MI6 officer who established the line of communication with the IRA leadership. He described this as a “hollow bamboo pipe … down which nothing was being said, but if one sort of blew down it gently the person at the other end could feel the pressure and blow back”.
The second of Taylor’s subjects is the Derry businessman Brendan Duddy, who knew everyone in his home city and abhorred the violence that engulfed it. From the early 1970s onwards Duddy became a crucial go-between, working tirelessly to turn the IRA away from its campaign of death and destruction. It was in Duddy’s house, with a turf fire burning and the whiskey bottle close to hand, that some of the most important discussions about ending the violence took place. “There’s a notion that big things happen in the Oval Office in Washington or the Grand Hall in the Kremlin, but it doesn’t happen that way. It happens less formally and more simply,” Duddy told Taylor.
Duddy’s efforts were often met with suspicion and he was subjected to IRA interrogations as a suspected British spy. One night he was driven to an isolated farmhouse in Co Donegal where he was questioned for two hours by six people, including McGuinness, who spoke “in ice cold tones”.
“There’s a notion that big things happen in the Oval Office in Washington or the Grand Hall in the Kremlin, but it doesn’t happen that way. It happens less formally and more simply.”
The third man Taylor profiles, named only as Robert, was the MI5 officer who took over management of the back channel in the early 1990s. Taylor first tracked Robert down around 2000, but he flatly denied any involvement in the peace process and left the journalist standing on his doorstep in the pouring rain. Two decades later he contacted Taylor out of the blue and offered to “fill in some gaps”.
Robert’s is a true tale of espionage, a mixture of the dangerous and the humdrum. One night in March 1993, after creeping round the Bogside area of Derry in the dark to avoid an army checkpoint, he found himself chatting with McGuinness’s mother while the IRA leader was in another room deciding whether or not to talk to him face to face. The meeting went ahead, McGuinness believing that Robert was there as an official representative of the British government.
In fact, by contacting McGuinness directly Robert had disobeyed orders, calculating correctly that it was essential to persuade the IRA that Britain was serious about negotiating an end to the conflict. “I felt entirely alone and was carrying a heavy responsibility with high political risk and no prospect of support because I had acted without orders,” he says.
However, the outcome of the meeting seemed so positive that MI5 bought “a large bungalow” in the Ulster countryside to conduct formal ceasefire talks. It was never used because there were further obstacles to progress, including more terrorist atrocities. It was not until August 1994 that the IRA announced its first ceasefire, broken in 1996 with the Docklands bombing. The end of the IRA’s campaign finally came in 1998.
“Peace comes dropping slow,” William Butler Yeats wrote at the end of the 19th century, and so it was in Ireland 100 years later. Taylor’s detailed account explains that slow pace: the centuries of distrust, the wary ebb and flow, the political sensitivity of talking to men who were still bombing shopping centers. And while some peacemakers received the Nobel prize and presidents attended the funerals of others, Taylor draws our attention to those whose crucial behind-the-scenes contributions went uncelebrated.
Duddy died in May 2017 (two months after McGuinness) and Oatley, now in his eighties, attended his funeral. Robert retired to a quiet life on a sheep farm and explained to Taylor why he eventually decided to tell his tale: “I’d like what I did to be remembered.”
Sam O’Neill is a senior writer at The Times of London
