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

by Patrick Radden Keefe

In the police station at Antrim, the cops asked Adams about the Boston College interviews. Presumably, they walked through the statements by Price and Hughes and others and spelled out what they knew about the structure of the Belfast Brigade. But Adams had a simple, implacable answer to all of that. There was just one problem with their theory: he could not have been the commanding officer of the Belfast Brigade in 1972, because he never joined the IRA in the first place. Describing his own theory of how best to survive under interrogation, Adams had once recalled the time he was arrested as a young man and questioned before being locked up on the Maidstone. That was the interview in which he stubbornly insisted that his name was not Gerry Adams. The whole pretense had been an obvious charade, he conceded later, but it was also “a crutch to withstand their inquisition.” To remain silent was the best policy, he had decided as a young man. “So even though they knew who I was, it was irrelevant. I couldn’t answer their questions, on the basis that I wasn’t who they said I was.”