Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland

by Patrick Radden Keefe

Whether we cremate a loved one or inter her bones, humans possess a deep-set instinct to mark death in some deliberate, ceremonial fashion. Perhaps the cruellest feature of forced disappearance as an instrument of war is that it denies the bereaved any such closure, relegating them to a permanent limbo of uncertainty.

Their plea was simple: Tell us what you’ve heard, tell us what you remember, help us find the bodies. The legislation that established the commission specified that anyone coming forward with information would receive a limited grant of immunity from prosecution.

This vigil was a reunion for the siblings, but a dissonant one. As children, they had fiercely resisted any effort by the state to split the family up, as though they knew in advance that once they were prised apart, they might never come back together. They had gone their separate ways, getting in touch only sporadically. As they gathered now, in the hope of finally recovering their mother, some of them worried that they would no longer know how to relate to one another as siblings.

They were particularly incensed at the IRA – over the decision to disappear their mother but also, perhaps even more so, over the suggestion that Jean McConville might have been an informant.

The children were gratified that the IRA was finally at least acknowledging their mother’s murder and might now cooperate in the effort to track down her remains, but they fiercely disputed any intimation that she had been a tout. Jean was a victim of bigoted animus, they argued, a Protestant widow in a nationalist Catholic neighbourhood at the apex of sectarian tension.

At one of his initial meetings with the McConvilles, Adams made it clear that he had what was, in effect, an alibi. ‘Thank God I was in prison when she disappeared,’ he said. This was not true. He had been released from Long Kesh in June 1972, in order to fly to London for the peace talks. Jean was abducted in December, and Adams was not locked up again until the following July. (‘That shouldn’t be taken out of context,’ Adams said later. ‘I got confused about the dates.’)

By the time he got the blindfold off, the thieves were long gone and the shelves were empty. The men had made off with a precious trove of highly classified information – notebooks and files containing details and code names of informants working inside the IRA and other paramilitary groups. Nobody noticed them leaving the building. They left behind only one clue – a lapel badge that one of the men had been wearing. In what was either one stray element of a convincing disguise or a smug joke on the part of the thieves, the badge said: SAVE THE RUC.

The very idea of Stakeknife was so unnerving to republicans that it was tempting to wonder whether the British had not simply concocted the rumour with the explicit aim of demoralising them.

For years, the Nutting Squad had been interrogating and killing suspected informants. Between 1980 and 1994, no fewer than forty people were executed by the IRA on suspicion of being touts, their bodies dumped unceremoniously.

the IRA was, in actual fact, hopelessly penetrated by double agents. In a subsequent submission to a tribunal in Dublin, one handler who worked in British military intelligence estimated that by the end of the Troubles, as many as one in four IRA members worked, in some capacity, for the authorities.

But just over a year after the Castlereagh break-in, several newspapers in England and Ireland published a bombshell story. Stakeknife was no figment of anyone’s fevered imagination. He was a real spy, who for decades had been a paid informant of British Army intelligence. His information was so prized that British ministers were regularly briefed on it, and he made the careers of a generation of spymasters. Stakeknife was ‘our most important secret’, in the words of one British Army commander in Northern Ireland. He was ‘a golden egg’. Stakeknife wasn’t Gerry Adams. He was Freddie Scappaticci.

He had been a double agent for a quarter of a century, since initially offering his services to the authorities in 1978. In fact, Scappaticci was reportedly a walk-in. It has been suggested that he was motivated, in the moment, by revenge, having recently received a beating at the hands of other members of the IRA. But it may never be known what precisely impelled him to become the most important double agent of the Troubles.

If the IRA burgled Castlereagh in the hopes of uncovering Stakeknife’s identity, they failed; Scappaticci’s name was presumably so sensitive that it was not kept in the files there. In fact, when Scappaticci was outed by the press, the shock in republican circles was so intense that a number of Sinn Féin leaders cast doubt on the idea that Scap really was Stakeknife at all, cautioning people to be sceptical of the ‘unsubstantiated allegations’ against him.

But if an agent is a murderer, and his handlers know that he is murdering people, does that not make the handlers – and, as such, the state itself – complicit? British Army sources would subsequently claim that the efforts of double agents saved many lives. But they allowed that such numbers could only be ‘guesstimates’, and this sort of thinking can degenerate pretty quickly into a conjectural mathematics of means and ends. If a spy takes fifty lives but saves some larger number, can that countenance his actions? This kind of logic is seductive, but perilous. You start out running numbers in your head, and pretty soon you are sanctioning mass murder.

the image that the British state had scrupulously cultivated for decades was that of the reluctant, impartial referee, stepping into the fray when nobody else would, to sort out two warring tribes. But the truth was that, from the beginning, the authorities perceived the Provos as the main enemy, where their energies should be focused, and regarded loyalist terror gangs as a sideshow – if not an unofficial state auxiliary.

Loyalist gangs, often operating with the tacit approval or outright logistical assistance of the British state, killed hundreds of civilians in an endless string of terror attacks. These victims were British subjects. Yet they had been dehumanised by the conflict to the point that organs of the British state often ended up complicit in such murders, without any sort of public inquiry or internal revolt in the security services.

One day in the late 1980s, Raymond White, a senior Special Branch officer who oversaw the handling of informants, met Margaret Thatcher and explicitly raised the danger of paramilitary collusion. ‘I’m sitting here, with the agents and handlers out there, and I feel somewhat uncomfortable,’ White told the prime minister. ‘Because I’m asking them to do things that technically could be construed as criminal acts.’

When Gerry Adams was wounded in the shooting by loyalist paramilitaries in 1984, he had suggested that the authorities must have known about the attack in advance. At the time, this charge may have seemed ludicrous – if the government had known beforehand of a plot to assassinate a Member of Parliament in a drive-by shooting during the lunch hour in busy central Belfast, surely it would have prevented the attack – but in fact the government did know about the plot, because Nelson had tipped off his handlers. The government allowed it to proceed.

As a lawyer, Finucane had advised many republicans. But he was not a member of the IRA himself. Nevertheless, the authorities felt that he had become too close to the organisation. Members of the RUC had complained about lawyers who were ‘effectively in the pockets of terrorists’. It was Nelson who gathered information about Finucane in advance of the shooting and supplied it to the execution team.

The British Army handlers fed Brian Nelson the name of a different potential target: Francisco Notarantonio. A Belfast Italian, like Scappaticci, Notarantonio was a former taxi driver. At sixty-six, he was a pensioner, a father of eleven, and a grandfather. What he wasn’t was a member of the IRA. But Nelson’s handlers made him out to be a major figure, a Provo godfather, someone easily on a par with Scappaticci. One morning, Notarantonio was at home in his bedroom with his wife of thirty-nine years when gunmen climbed the stairs and shot him dead in his bed.

In 2012, the British prime minister, David Cameron, acknowledged the existence of ‘frankly shocking levels of state collusion’.

What this meant was that the many unsolved murders of the Troubles would remain open criminal cases, in which ex-paramilitaries and ex-soldiers might yet be prosecuted.

When the remains of other individuals who had been disappeared were discovered, the chief focus was on recovering the bodies and burying them in consecrated ground. But the coroner in the McConville case ruled that Jean’s body did not fall under the limited amnesty agreement governing the disappeared, because she was found not through the assistance of the IRA but by a random member of the public who happened to walk on the beach. This had one very serious implication, the coroner declared: ‘The criminal case remains open.’

The gun was on display, he concluded, not because of any fear about what the clergymen might do, but because the Provos needed to guard against an ambush by dissident paramilitaries who were not quite ready to give up fighting and might endeavour to repossess the arsenal.

In the symbolic calculus of IRA politics, in which every funeral is a stage, Adams could afford to disassociate himself from Hughes in life, but not in death.

‘The only thing I know is that I’m not an informer.’ Yet as soon as the book was published, Bradley’s North Belfast neighbourhood was tagged with graffiti identifying him as a tout. ‘I’m just telling my story,’ he protested, insisting that he only wanted to ‘put on record the truth of life in the IRA’. Eventually Bradley was forced to flee Belfast, seeking exile in Dublin. Ostracised and in poor health, he drove one day to a car park beside a Norman castle on Belfast Lough and took his own life.

Sinn Féin issued a blanket pronouncement that anyone who participated in the Belfast Project had ‘a malign agenda’.

For instance, Wilson McArthur, Anthony McIntyre’s counterpart, who conducted all the interviews in the loyalist community, had been under the impression, as he was gathering the oral histories, that none of the interviews would be made public until all the participants had died. He was caught off guard by the news that Moloney intended to publish Voices from the Grave just a few years after the last of the interviews had concluded, thereby revealing the existence of the archive when the first participants had died, rather than waiting decades until the last ones had.

the history department at the college had not known, until the publication of Moloney’s book, that the project was happening at all. In fact, the archive had been so secret that almost nobody at Boston College, apart from Hachey and O’Neill, knew that it existed.

Morris had interviewed her fair share of ex-paramilitaries, and she was acquainted with the relevant hazards: warped by trauma, such men and women often navigated their days in a fog of alcohol and prescription drugs.

the implication was unmistakable: it appeared that Ciarán Barnes, a Belfast tabloid journalist, had somehow listened to the Boston College tapes of Dolours Price.

Allison Morris and Ciarán Barnes were friends and former colleagues who had worked together in the past, at the Andersonstown News. Moloney and Mackers knew about the abortive Irish News interview that had been halted by Marian Price. They concluded that, after publishing her own defanged version of the Price story, Morris must have shared the tape of her interview with her friend Barnes. In the article, Barnes wrote about hearing a ‘taped confession’ and also said that Dolours Price had made a ‘taped confession’ for the Belfast Project. The article implied that there was only one taped confession.

Gerry Adams, meanwhile, angrily contested Price’s claims, noting that she was ‘a long-standing opponent of Sinn Féin and the peace process’. Price was suffering from ‘trauma’, Adams pointed out, adding, ‘There obviously are issues she has to find closure on for herself.’ It was the same criticism Adams had levelled at Hughes, who he characterised as having ‘his issues and his difficulties’.

Adams himself seemed conspicuously undaunted by the past. So many others were tortured by what they had experienced in the Troubles. But he never looked as though he had lost a night’s sleep. ‘Brendan said what Brendan said,’ he told one interviewer. ‘And Brendan’s dead. So let it go.’

Nevertheless, she wrote, this situation was unique. ‘That family has suffered extensively because of the allegation that their mother was an informant,’ she noted, and because Jean was long since dead, no harm could come to her now. ‘She is not recorded as having been an agent at any time,’ O’Loan wrote, before concluding, more forcefully, ‘She was an innocent woman who was abducted and murdered.’

Ed Moloney and Anthony McIntyre also continued to believe that McConville had been an informant. Their confidence in the oral history of Brendan Hughes was unshakeable. To Moloney, it seemed that Nuala O’Loan, influenced by her obvious sympathy for the McConville children, simply chose to arrive at the categorical conclusion that would be most comforting for them.

If she had been a tout, and she was warned by the IRA to stop, it would look pretty terrible for the authorities to give her another radio and send her back to work, when such a move was so likely to get her killed.

When Michael McConville studied the recollections of Brendan Hughes, he was struck by the fact that Hughes never said that he had personally seen the radio in question. Perhaps this was just a rumour that got passed around Belfast for long enough that over the years it became accepted as fact. Perhaps it was a story that the people who murdered Jean McConville told one another (or told themselves) in order to feel less awful about what they’d done.

But it was tempting to wonder whether the children of Jean McConville, like the people who abducted her, had not constructed a legend around the vanished woman that they could live with.

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.

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’.

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.

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.

‘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’.

When McConville was taken for questioning, Price continued, she ‘made an admission’. She said that she had been an informer. ‘For money.’ With a level gaze, Price told Moloney, ‘We believed that informers were the lowest form of human life. They were less than human. Death was too good for them.’

Price’s friend Joe Lynskey might have known from the moment he got in the car with her that he was being ferried to his death, but Jean McConville had no such premonition. Price told her that she was going to be turned over to the Legion of Mary, a Catholic charity, who would take her away to a place of safety.

‘I don’t know the specifics of what she did and what she didn’t do,’ Price said immediately after her condemnation of McConville. She had no first-hand knowledge of McConville’s alleged crimes; what she knew was that the organisation had come to the improbable conclusion that the mother of ten was an informer. Even if the charge was true – and Price believed that it was – she doubted, deep down, that the penalty was appropriate.

If Price continued to malign McConville’s character at least in part to assuage her own nagging conscience, it may have been because she had done more than simply drive the widow to the border.

This is an old trick used by firing squads – one of the gunmen’s rifles will be loaded with a blank so that afterwards, each of the shooters can tell himself that he might not have been the one to take a life. It can serve as a comforting fiction, though in this case, because they had only one gun, there would not be much ambiguity about which of them did the killing.

As an IRA volunteer, Price said, ‘I was often required to act contrary to my nature.’ Sometimes she had to obey orders that were not easy to obey. At the time, she always did as she was instructed. But later, she had the opportunity to ask herself ‘all the complex questions that you don’t ask in the heat of the moment’. She added, ‘I’ve spent a lot of time talking to a lot of doctors about all of this.’