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

by Patrick Radden Keefe

futility of nonviolent resistance, when Eamonn McCann and a huge mass of peaceful protesters assembled in Derry one chilly Sunday afternoon in January 1972, British paratroopers opened fire on the crowd, killing thirteen men and wounding fifteen others.

In February, protesters set fire to the British embassy in Dublin. In March, London suspended the hated Unionist parliament in Northern Ireland and imposed direct rule from Westminster.

In fighting an insurgency, Kitson realized, quality intelligence is essential, and one way to obtain that intelligence is to inveigle some members of the insurgency to switch sides.

Nobody knows precisely how many Kenyans were slaughtered, but the number may reach the hundreds of thousands. Some 1.5 million people were detained, many in internment camps. Mau Mau suspects were subjected, during interrogations, to electric shocks, cigarette burns, and appalling forms of sexual torture. This brutal campaign did not forestall the British withdrawal from Kenya, in 1963. Yet, back in London, the operation against the Mau Mau was celebrated as a great success.

By the time Kitson finished the book, in 1970, he had emerged as perhaps the preeminent warrior-intellectual of the British Army. When he finished up at Oxford, he was promoted to brigadier and sent to the site of Britain’s latest small war: Northern Ireland.

The number of British troops in Northern Ireland had escalated dramatically in a short period of time: during the summer of 1969, there were 2,700; by the summer of 1972, there were more than 30,000.

The army that deployed in the Troubles was not the army that had fought the Nazis. It was an organization that had come of age fighting small wars of colonial disentanglement. But what was Northern Ireland? Was it part of the United Kingdom? Or was it one of those restive colonies?

When Frank Kitson arrived, in 1970, he was not the overall commander of British forces. But he was in charge of the army’s 39 Airportable Brigade, which had responsibility for Belfast, and his influence far exceeded his station.

Kitson became obsessed with intelligence. The first challenge is always “getting the right information,” he liked to say.

In particular, Kitson was interested in D Company of the Belfast Brigade, the IRA unit operated by Brendan Hughes and the one that was doing the most damage. British soldiers referred to Hughes’s operational area in West Belfast as “the reservation”—Indian country, where soldiers should tread carefully, if at all.

But soldiers complained that in West Belfast, a “wall of silence” protected the IRA. Informers were known as “touts,” and for centuries they had been reviled in Irish culture as the basest species of traitor. So there was a profound social stigma against cooperating with the British.

Just before dawn one morning in August 1971, three thousand British troops descended on nationalist areas across Northern Ireland. Soldiers broke down doors and dragged men from their beds, hauling them off to internment. Under the Special Powers Act, it was legal to hold someone indefinitely without trial, and internment had been used periodically in Northern Ireland. But not on this scale. Of the nearly 350 suspects arrested that day, not a single one was a loyalist, though there were plenty of loyalist paramilitaries engaged

This disparity in treatment only compounded the impression, in the minds of many Catholics, that the army was simply another instrument of sectarian oppression. In planning the sweep, the army had relied on intelligence from the RUC, and, as one British commander later acknowledged, the largely Protestant police force consisted of people who were “partial to one extent or another, in many cases, to a considerable extent.”

As the presiding counterinsurgency intellectual in Northern Ireland, Frank Kitson would forever be associated with internment. But he would later insist that he had not approved of the decision—that, on the contrary, he had warned his superiors that such a measure would prove counterproductive.

While allowing that it was “not an attractive measure to people brought up in a free country,” he argued that internment could nevertheless shorten a conflict “by removing from the scene people who would otherwise have become involved in the fighting.”

Kitson’s chief critique of internment in Northern Ireland was that it did not come as a surprise.

What John McGuigan did not know was that his son had been selected, along with eleven others, for a special fate. A thick hood was placed over his head, muffling his senses. It had the stale smell of dirty laundry. Francie was loaded, along with several other prisoners, onto a Wessex helicopter.

Then, under the roar of the helicopter’s rotor, he heard a sucking sound and a louder roar and realized that, though they were still flying, someone had just slid open the helicopter’s door.

Now the people who had caught him were hustling him into a mysterious facility. It was a remote barracks on an old Second World War airfield in County Derry. But Francie McGuigan did not know that at the time, since he was still hooded, and, technically, it was an undisclosed location, selected by the army because it was remote, anonymous, and far from any mechanism of accountability. McGuigan and his fellow detainees were stripped naked and examined by a doctor, then subjected to a series of procedures that were classified, in the army’s euphemistic bureaucratese, as “interrogation in depth.”

For days, the prisoners were deprived of food, water, and sleep and made to stand for long periods in stress positions, their vision negated by the hoods over their heads. They were also subjected to piercing, high-pitched noises. The British had learned these techniques by studying the experiences of soldiers who were held as prisoners of war by the Nazis or by the North Koreans and the Chinese during the Korean War.

When the torture ended, after a week, some of the men were so broken that they could not remember their own names. Their eyes had a haunted, hollow look to them, which one of the men likened to “two pissholes in the snow.” Another detainee, who had gone into the interrogation with jet-black hair, came out of the experience with hair that was completely white. (He died not long after being released, of a heart attack, at forty-five.)

Rough tactics were a signature of the colonial campaigns in which he specialized. When his treatise on counterinsurgency was released, one review noted that “the four Geneva conventions of 1949, many parts of which are explicitly relevant, and which Britain has signed, are not mentioned.”

But in a controversial 1978 decision, the European Court of Human Rights held that the techniques, while “inhuman and degrading,” did not amount to torture. (In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, when the American administration of George W. Bush was fashioning its own “enhanced interrogation” techniques, officials relied explicitly on this decision to justify the use of torture.)

But perhaps the most concrete application of Frank Kitson’s colonial philosophies in the context of the Troubles was the MRF. This was an elite unit so murky and clandestine that nobody seemed to agree even on the baseline matter of what precisely the acronym MRF stood for. It might have been Mobile Reconnaissance Force. Or Military Reconnaissance Force. Or Military Reaction Force. The MRF consisted of thirty or so special operators, both men and women, who were handpicked from all across the British Army.

Soldiers of Irish origin were deliberately recruited, in order to blend in with the locals.

In December 1971, Kitson wrote a memo entitled “Future Developments in Belfast,” in which he explained that one critical means of bringing the fight to the IRA was “building up and developing the MRF.”

But the unit was doing more than gathering intelligence. It was assassinating people, too. Men in plain clothes would drive around in an unmarked Ford Cortina, with a Sterling submachine gun hidden under the seat.

These hit squads deliberately carried particular makes of weapons that were used by the paramilitaries, so that when someone was murdered, the ballistics would suggest that it was the IRA or loyalist killers who were responsible, rather than the army.

Frank Kitson was a maestro of press manipulation.

For a group with an alarming tendency to kill people by accident, the IRA had an elaborate internal mechanism for determining whether to kill people on purpose.

The Unknowns did not fit neatly into the regimented org chart of the Provos. Instead, they answered directly to Gerry Adams.

The responsibility for transporting Joe Lynskey across the border to his court-martial and likely execution fell to the Unknowns, and to one member of the unit in particular: Dolours Price. She had joined the Unknowns with her friend Hugh Feeney, the bespectacled pub owner’s son.

Why doesn’t he jump out of the car? she wondered. Why doesn’t he smack me on the head and run away? Why doesn’t he do something to save himself? But as she drove on, she realized that he could not act to save himself for the same reason that she could not act to save him. Their dedication to the movement would not allow it. She had vowed to obey all orders, and Lynskey, it seemed, had chosen to accept his fate.

Between the two bombs that detonated, nearly 250 people were injured, and ambulances rushed in to deal with casualties.

Dolours Price would blame the casualties from the blast on British authorities, for moving too slowly after the telephone warnings to locate and defuse the bombs and to alert civilians. Other members of the bombing team took the same view. This was clearly a convenient excuse, and as a moral matter it was conspicuously disingenuous.

A British prosecutor would later speculate that the intention of the IRA mission was to kill people, and that it was no coincidence that the warning call had been made only after the gang had been arrested at the airport. He suggested that the warning was nothing but a selfish, last-minute bid to mitigate the severity of the punishment, once the IRA knew that their comrades had been captured. But however callous and incompetent the bombers were, it seems unlikely that their objective, when they journeyed to London, was mass slaughter. “If the intention was to kill people in London, it was quite easy to kill people in London, to kill civilians,” Brendan Hughes said later. As with Bloody Friday, the London mission was envisaged as a symbolic, and ideally bloodless, attack.

When they were offered prison uniforms, some of the team accepted them. But the Price sisters and several others refused. This was a republican principle: they thought of themselves not as criminals but as captured soldiers from a legitimate army—as political prisoners. Given this distinction, they would not accept the prison scrubs of the ordinary criminal. Dolours and Marian draped rough prison blankets over their bodies. Hugh Feeney refused even a blanket and stood in his cell, brazenly naked.

The remaining defendants were convicted. When it came time to sentence them, Shaw delivered the maximum penalty—a so-called life sentence, which for five of the bombers would mean twenty years, in practice. For Dolours and Marian Price and for Hugh Feeney, Shaw handed down a more severe punishment, on account of their leadership role: thirty years. Dolours said, audibly, “That’s a death sentence.”

Before they were removed from Winchester Castle, Dolours and Marian Price made an announcement: they were going on a hunger strike. They would refuse food until they were granted status as political prisoners and returned to Northern Ireland to serve their sentences.

When Adams was first elected to Parliament, in 1983, the British government lifted a ban that had prevented him from traveling to the mainland, so that he would be able to take his seat at Westminster. But Adams had no intention of actually participating in Parliament, in any case. Throughout the 1980s, Adams played a delicate game. He was elected president of Sinn Féin in 1983.

“I would certainly not attempt to justify any action in which civilians are killed. I naturally regret very much all such deaths.” But, he continued, “since it is not the policy of the IRA to kill civilians, I could not, by the same token, condemn them for accidental killings.” Such calibrated sophistry became another Adams signature, always delivered with unwavering certainty, in his unflustered brogue, and many Adams critics came to loathe his caveated expressions of “regret.”

With his smart blazers, carefully trimmed beard, and ever-present pipe, Adams had acquired the air of a hip, if slightly pompous, public intellectual. He published a book of gauzy remembrances about his childhood in the Falls. He stroked his beard. He appointed a press aide.

Martin McGuinness, who had won a seat in the Northern Ireland Assembly elections in 1982, solemnly announced that, “after some discussion, the IRA decided that shooting a young lad in the leg, leaving him crippled for life, is not a just and fair punishment.”

Indeed, even as Adams began to contemplate, and then act upon, a scheme to bring an end to the conflict, the IRA carried out more deadly operations. Just before Christmas in 1983, the Provos detonated a bomb at Harrods department store, in London, killing five people and injuring ninety. (Adams said that the bomb “had not gone right.”) The following October, a volunteer placed a time bomb in a room at the Grand Brighton Hotel, where Margaret Thatcher and her cabinet would be staying during a conference. The bomb exploded, killing five people, but not Thatcher. The IRA issued a statement, eloquently capturing the strategic advantage of terrorism: “Today we were unlucky, but remember, we only have to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always.”

Adams defended the Brighton bombing as not merely justifiable but necessary. The fatalities, he said, “are sad symptoms of the British presence in this country.” The bombing was not a blow against democracy, as some had charged. It was actually “a blow for democracy.” Thatcher may have survived the attack, but she was shaken. Privately, she became convinced that the Provos would eventually succeed.

But the request had been rejected, to nobody’s surprise, by the RUC. Adams had taken to predicting his own death, saying, “I think there is a ninety percent chance I may be assassinated.” Not long after the car left the court, it slowed in traffic on Howard Street, and a brown vehicle appeared, pulling alongside it. Two gunmen fired a dozen shots at Adams and his associates. Adams was hit three times, in the neck, shoulder, and arm, but not killed. (Three others in the car were also wounded, but none of them died.) “Christ said that those that take the sword shall perish by the sword,” the Reverend Ian Paisley declared upon hearing of the shooting.

The shooters were quickly apprehended, and identified as members of the Ulster Freedom Fighters.

There were places in Belfast where hard men congregated, and Hughes could go and sit and be accepted among such men, but Adams could not, because even before his rote denials of IRA membership, he had never been perceived as much of a soldier. Even so, Hughes and Adams had always been a team, and Hughes maintained a deep sense of loyalty to his comrade.

There were vastly more Irish Americans than there were people in Ireland itself. This demographic anomaly was a testament to centuries of migration caused by poverty, famine, and discrimination, and there was strong support for the cause of Irish independence among the Irish in America.

Indeed, it could occasionally seem that support for the armed struggle was more fervent in Boston or Chicago than it was in Belfast or Derry. The romantic idyll of a revolutionary movement is easier to sustain when there is no danger that one’s own family members might get blown to pieces on a trip to the grocery store.