I asked him how this was brought about he was cagey, admitting that he had faced a desperate moral dilemma, given that some of the weapons had probably been used to kill people and might well be used to do so again. ‘I had two choices,’ he said. ‘Either do it or not do it.’ He decided to do it. All he would say was that the process wasn’t interfered with by either the army or the police.
On 31 July 1972, ten days after Bloody Friday, 12,000 soldiers with bulldozers and tanks moved into the so-called ‘no go’ areas across the province and re-established control. It was called Operation Motorman, the biggest British military operation since Suez.6 The IRA offered no resistance. For the moment, Brendan’s work was done.
A year later, Brendan’s life was to change forever. Although it was known to only a tiny handful of people, in October 1971 Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) had stationed one of its officers in the province alongside the diplomats living at Laneside. The IRA’s increasingly violent campaign clearly indicated the need for improved intelligence-gathering on those who were killing British soldiers and policemen, and bombing the hearts out of its cities, with Derry in the front line. The first MI6 officer to be posted there was Frank Steele, a former Foreign Office diplomat who had served in the Middle East and Africa, and now found himself seconded to Northern Ireland, about which, as he told me, he knew virtually nothing. It was Steele who had organised the abortive meeting between William Whitelaw and the leadership of the Provisional IRA at Cheyne Walk in July 1972. He was a remarkable man. I interviewed him not long before he died of cancer in November 1997. Knowing that he had only a few months to live, he sat in a wheelchair and talked, wishing to place on the public record what he had done and what he had tried to achieve. He told me how depressed he was after Cheyne Walk, and how he left the province in May 1973 with a heavy heart. ‘I don’t think either community had suffered enough to make peace an absolute imperative,’ he said wearily, ‘and so we settled down to twenty-five years of waste and murder.’7
Steele was succeeded by his fellow MI6 officer Michael Oatley, who was very different in temperament and style, but equally accomplished. At Laneside he found a message from Steele suggesting that he might find it useful to look up a businessman in Derry called Brendan Duddy. Oatley made enquiries, and found that one of the contacts he had met through Steele, a prosperous local businessman, knew Brendan. A meeting was arranged at the businessman’s house. That was where Brendan first met Michael Oatley, and where a relationship that was to last for almost twenty years began. At the time Brendan was not aware that Oatley was an MI6 officer. He thought he was simply a British diplomat who had come to Derry to find out more about Northern Ireland. Brendan was impressed by Oatley, who he said had the appearance and polished manners of a film star: ‘He could listen for approximately five hours, drinking tea without once going to the toilet. The perfect spy man.’ Brendan learned a lot from Oatley, and Oatley learned a lot from Brendan. They both came to need each other. Oatley carried on where Frank Steele left off in working towards the long-term aim of finding a way of getting the IRA to end its campaign. Brendan became the key to that end as they walked the tightrope together between the British government and the IRA’s Army Council.
Oatley admitted that he was inexperienced when he first set foot in the province. ‘I knew nothing about Northern Ireland,’ he told me. ‘In that sense I was typical of most of the people who went to help the Secretary of State with this new problem.’ But he was clear about what he had to do. ‘I thought that it was a situation in which intelligence would not be a matter of simply reporting on situations, but trying to influence them. If I was going to spend two years or longer in Northern Ireland, I ought perhaps to try to concentrate on seeing whether my particular skills and background could enable me to find a way to influence the leadership of the IRA, or to make some kind of contact through which they could be influenced.’8 Brendan was to become that contact. He was perfectly placed. He had established his credibility with the IRA on two critical occasions, in the days leading up to Bloody Sunday and Operation Motorman. He had met senior members of the Army Council like Seamus Twomey and, perhaps most importantly, he knew Martin McGuinness well from the days when he used to deliver burgers to his chippie in William Street. He also knew Rory O’Brady, the President of Sinn Féin, whom he’d met during his earlier negotiations over the removal of weapons. Brendan was Oatley’s means to a very distant end, although at the time Oatley probably had little idea just how distant that end was likely to be. He knew that at some stage he, and ultimately the British government, would have to talk to the ‘terrorists’ if they were to bring an end to the conflict. It could be seen as a win-win situation. If talking to the IRA led to a lasting peace, that would be a win. If, on the other hand, it led to a series of ceasefires and splits that weakened the IRA through internal divisions, that would be a win too. But he was under no illusions that difficult and dangerous political terrain lay ahead.
I asked Brendan what he thought Michael Oatley’s game plan was at the time. ‘I don’t think he had one. My job was to teach Michael, and Michael’s job was to teach the Prime Minister or whoever he could get access to. The idea was to share this information.’ And that meant talking to the IRA? ‘Absolutely. That was the point. I was not an IRA man, not a Sinn Féin man. At the end of the day my job was to get these people talking.’ I asked if he felt that Oatley was using him for his own purposes and the purpose of the British government. He was frank. ‘Yes. Absolutely. And I was perfectly happy with it.’ He was happy because he and Oatley shared a common view of the way forward. There had to be engagement with the IRA. ‘I was saying all the time, “You’ve got to talk to them. This has got to stop, and the way to stop it is to talk to them.”’ But for Oatley there was a problem. After the fiasco of Cheyne Walk, and subsequent political embarrassment when news of the meeting with the IRA leadership was leaked, a strict prohibition was placed on any further contact with the ‘terrorists’. Oatley was well aware of this, and used metaphors and analogies when he talked to Brendan. ‘It’s very cold at the moment,’ he would say. ‘Put on your woolly [long] Johns.’ This was his way of warning Brendan that the government wasn’t interested in any political initiatives.
By 1974 the weather was positively arctic following the IRA’s bloody campaign in England. On 4 February a coach carrying military personnel along the M62 from Manchester to Catterick army camp in North Yorkshire was bombed. The fifty-pound bomb concealed in the boot of the coach killed nine soldiers, one woman and two children aged five and two.9 By the autumn the IRA had intensified its mainland campaign. On 5 October it struck at two pubs in Guildford – the Horse and Groom and the Seven Stars – which it claimed were ‘military targets’, as they were used by off-duty soldiers from nearby camps. Four soldiers, two of them women, were killed. A civilian also died and fifty-four people were injured. A month later, on 7 November, there was a further bomb attack on the King’s Arms pub in Woolwich, killing a soldier and fatally wounding a part-time barman. Two weeks later, on 21 November, came the most shocking IRA attack of all, when two pubs in Birmingham were bombed – the Mulberry Bush and the Tavern in the Town. A warning was given, but only minutes before the explosions. Twenty-one people died and 182 were injured.
In such a climate it seemed unthinkable that any representative of the British government should put out feelers to the IRA, let alone meet them. Oatley knew full well what the IRA was up to. ‘One of the things that I’d come to understand at a fairly early stage was that the continuation of a violent campaign was not inconsistent with the IRA’s willingness to consider political options.’10 But he and Brendan agreed how tightly those political options were circumscribed, and accurately reflected the British government’s position in terms of negotiating any settlement to the conflict. Brendan spelled out two unshakeable principles. ‘The British made it clear that they were not going to speak as violence continued – and Michael and I made it clear too.’ The second principle was that the British weren’t going to ‘get on their boats in Belfast’, sail away and abandon the Unionists. These principles remained the cornerstones of the British government’s position right through to the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 that was designed to settle and