Talking to Terrorists

A Personal Journey from the IRA to Al Qaeda

Peter Taylor

• Publisher: HarperPress
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780007325535
• eBook ISBN: 9780007433629
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Terrorisme

Chapter One
Talking to the IRA

There are moments that stick in the memory forever. At the time you may sense their significance, but it’s only long afterwards that their real importance sinks in. Standing by a public telephone in a new shopping mall in the centre of Derry in 1998 was one of those moments.

I’d made sure that I had enough coins in case the conversation was long, but I suspected I wouldn’t be needing them. I remember the empty feeling in the pit of my stomach. The reason for my apprehension was that I thought that, after months of trying, I’d finally identified the shadowy figure, known only as ‘the Mountain Climber’,^b who for almost a quarter of a century had been the key link between Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, and the IRA. I was about to ring him to see if he would meet me. His name was Brendan Duddy.

I put the coins in the slot, and remember hearing them go ‘clunk’ one after the other. I held my breath as I heard the ringing tone. Then someone at the other end picked up the phone. I suspected it would be in an office, and tried to sound as composed as I could. I asked if I could speak to Mr Brendan Duddy. ‘Can I say who’s calling?’ replied the person on the other end of the line. I thought it best to be open and say who I was. There was a pause, and I was asked to hold. The wait seemed endless, as lunchtime shoppers filed past me. Then another voice came on the line. ‘Brendan Duddy speaking.’ I took a deep breath and told him who I was, again trying to sound composed and calm. I expected to hear a ‘click’, marking the end of the conversation, but I didn’t. ‘I’ve been waiting to hear from you,’ he said. I could scarcely believe what I was hearing. To my surprise, he was familiar with my work in Northern Ireland over the years. I asked if I could come and see him to have a chat. He said that would be fine. When? ‘Today?’ I asked. He suggested I go to Rafters, one of the restaurants he owned, and someone would come and get me.

I put down the receiver, let out a huge sigh of relief that must have been audible to the shoppers, and went off for a cup of tea to collect my thoughts. I had to work out what I was going to say, and how I was going to present myself, to a man whose identity and top-secret work were known to no one apart from the handful of IRA men and spooks with whom he had dealt over so many years. The identity of ‘the Link’, as Brendan became known, was one of Northern Ireland’s most closely guarded secrets.

I drove to Rafters, a modern, barn-like steakhouse on the edge of the city, sat down at a table and ordered some food, although I wasn’t hungry. I had too much on my mind. My meal arrived, and so did a young man who introduced himself as one of Brendan’s sons and asked me to follow him downstairs. That was the first time I set eyes on Brendan Duddy. He was discussing finance with a banker from Dublin. He stood up, greeted me with a warm smile and a handshake, and introduced me to the banker, his wife Margo and others sitting at his table as if he had known me for years.

His financial business done, Brendan suggested we go to his home, where we could talk in private. In the hallway we were met by Tara, a Great Dane of Baskervillian dimensions. We adjourned to Brendan’s ‘wee room’ at the back of the house, with a peat fire smouldering in one corner. Margo brought us cups of tea and biscuits – as I was to learn she had done on many occasions for IRA leaders and assorted spooks. Then Brendan began to talk, a facility he has in abundance. I stressed that anything he said would be off the record, and that I would never repeat or publish any of it unless he gave me the green light to do so.

His story was extraordinary – the stuff of fiction. But as I was to discover, this was fact, not fantasy. He said that the seeds of peace had been planted in the very room in which we were sitting. They had been ripped up and then replanted on numerous occasions down the years before they finally grew into what became known as the peace process. He told me how IRA leaders had been smuggled across the border for secret meetings with the British at the height of the IRA’s campaign; how his family had learned never to ask questions about what was going on in their home, and never to utter the names of some of the most wanted IRA men who had taken tea with the British under the Duddy family roof; and of how he’d known Martin McGuinness for around thirty years. As the night wore on, Brendan produced a bottle of Irish whiskey and started to pour. I don’t normally drink whiskey, but under the circumstances it seemed both impolite and impolitic to refuse. As the alcohol hit home, I struggled to keep my mind clear: I did not want to miss anything. I seldom use a tape recorder – I usually take notes – but in these exceptional circumstances I feared that the presence of a notebook and poised pen might inhibit the conversation.

At about 4 a.m. I must have been visibly flagging, unlike Brendan. I thought it was time to go, but after several whiskeys I did not want to drive back to my hotel. Brendan said his son would take me, and I could pick up my car later that day. He also said that I should meet his family and, crucially, his close friend and accomplice in the Link, Bernadette Mount, so I could get the full picture. I woke up in my hotel room, not surprisingly, with a headache, scarcely believing what I had heard the night before, and started to make notes of my recollections. Brendan rang and asked if I’d like to have dinner at Bernadette’s house that evening.

We ate roast lamb. Bernadette is not only a very good cook, but a remarkable woman. She later told me of how she had given bed and breakfast to IRA leaders like Billy McKee and Seamus Twomey, and their less notorious counterparts in the IRA’s political wing, Sinn Féin, like its President Rory O’Brady.¹ Brendan’s wife Margo and one of their sons were also at the dinner. It was a bitterly cold evening as we talked round the fire. I asked if there was ever any chance of my telling their astonishing story, knowing that the answer would almost certainly be no. The time was not right. The peace process was at an uncertain stage, and it would have been far too dangerous for Brendan to have broken cover at that time. But they said they would think about it, if the time ever came. Ten years later, it did.

Brendan Duddy was born on 10 June 1936 and raised in the city of Derry, on the very edge of the United Kingdom, on the border with County Donegal in the Irish Republic. In the late 1960s it was an impoverished and neglected place, as if its distance from Westminster relegated it to an inferior status. The majority of its inhabitants were Catholic, and considered themselves to be Irish, not British. Discrimination against Catholics was institutionalised in the political, economic and social fabric of the city, and the electoral boundaries were rigged in a way that guaranteed a Protestant majority on the council. Fourteen thousand Catholic voters elected eight councillors, while 9,000 Protestant voters elected twelve.² This reflected the gerry-mandering of Northern Ireland itself.^c The province is made up of roughly a million Protestant Unionists, who wish to remain part of the United Kingdom, and half a million Catholics, most of them Nationalists and Republicans who wish to be part of a united Ireland. Nationalists favour bringing this about by peaceful means, while Republicans believe that violence is justified to achieve the goal.

In Derry, broadly speaking, Protestants got the best jobs and the best houses. These glaring inequalities, largely ignored by Westminster, and about which the majority of citizens in the rest of the United Kingdom remained unaware and indifferent, were the dry tinder that led to the explosion of the civil rights movement in 1968 and the subsequent re-emergence of the IRA. Brendan was simply one of the thousands of Catholic victims of the system. ‘I had no work in Derry. There was no work,’ he told me.³ To fill the emptiness of the days he used to go running in the beautiful countryside outside the city with a friend, Bobby Daly, who was a bin man. ‘I was hoping that some day I might get a job as his assistant.’ That was Brendan’s dream.

London called him, as it had so many young Irish men and women in the past. ‘It was the feeling of being boxed in in Derry. No work. No home. No house. England was a different world.’ It was an alien environment for Brendan, but at least there were jobs there. He finally found work at the Bush factory in Ealing, ‘putting the little knobs on brown Bakelite television sets’. He’d been expecting a replication of the discrimination he’d left Derry to escape, and that the English would look down on him because he was Irish. When it came to overtime, he assumed there wouldn’t be any for him. But he was wrong. The way he was treated in England conditioned forever the way he thought of his fellow citizens on the other side of the Irish Sea. ‘I met a group of people who were honest, easy to get on with and fair to me.’ This, combined with the experience of learning the Irish language at the feet of the IRA veteran Sean Keenan, equipped Brendan to understand and interpret both sides of the conflict, and made him a valuable intermediary in the secret dialogue between the British government – via its spooks and diplomats based at the Northern Ireland Office residence at Laneside outside Belfast – and the IRA’s ruling Army Council.^d

Like many Derry men and women who leave the city, the urge to come home proved irresistible to Brendan. He returned, and opened a fish-and-chip shop in William Street, on the edge of the Bogside area where the majority of Catholics live. ‘I loved every second of it. I was the best, and still am. I understand potatoes. I understand fish.’ In London he had been earning £11 a week, and now he was making £10 or £12 a night. But the shop was more than just a chippie. It was a salon for the emerging leaders of the civil rights movement, who would discuss politics way into the night. Brendan never put the chairs on the tables. The teenaged Martin McGuinness was a regular visitor, not to take part in the greasy political salon but to deliver the sustenance for it through the back door, in the form of beefburgers from James Doherty’s butcher’s shop down the street. ‘He was an innocent, handsome young boy,’ Brendan remembers. ‘He’d come in with the box of burgers, put them on the counter and chat up the girls, and I’d say, “Come on, Martin, there’s work to do here.”’ Did he have any interest in politics? ‘Absolutely none.’

The chip shop endured turbulent times in the late sixties and early seventies, with regular riots on its doorstep as the increasingly radicalised Nationalist youth of the Bogside fought pitched battles with their hated enemies the police (the RUC) and the British Army. It was ironic that the army was seen as the enemy only a few months after British soldiers had intervened in August 1969 to defend Catholics from Loyalist mobs in Derry, Belfast and elsewhere. British soldiers were initially welcomed as saviours, but the honeymoon was soon over. The army referred to the opposition as the ‘Derry Young Hooligans’ (DYH). Margo and Bernadette both served in the chip shop, and regarded the street battles as entertainment. ‘We used to sit upstairs and watch,’ Margo remembers. ‘The riots were fierce, but you didn’t feel in any danger. It was good fun.’

But on 30 January 1972, the fun ended. The day became known as ‘Bloody Sunday’.^e Everyone knew there was trouble coming. The army had made its own controversial assessment. Three weeks previously, Major General Robert Ford, the Commander Land Forces (CLF), who had visited Derry on 7 January, wrote a secret memorandum to his boss, Lieutenant General Sir Harry Tuzo, the General Officer Commanding Northern Ireland (GOC). He didn’t mince his words: ‘I am coming to the conclusion that the minimum force necessary to achieve a restoration of law and order is to shoot selected ringleaders amongst the DYH after clear warnings have been issued.’⁴

The ‘enemy’ was ready too. By this time, both wings of the IRA – the Officials and the Provisionals^f – had grown in strength, their ranks swelled by anger at the British policy of internment (the arrest and detention without trial of hundreds of Catholic Nationalists, and far fewer Loyalists) and allegations of torture being used by the army to extract information from detainees. Martin McGuinness had now risen to become second-in-command of the Provisionals’ Derry Brigade. His former lack of interest in politics had been transformed by internment and what he saw on the streets of his city, where British soldiers were now seen by Catholics as the aggressors and no longer their saviours. Brendan had grown increasingly concerned at the potential consequences of a showdown between the army and the IRA. And so had his old friend, the police officer in charge of Derry, Chief Superintendent Frank Lagan, who was one of the few Catholics in the almost exclusively Protestant RUC at the time.

As tension in the city mounted in advance of a huge anti-internment march that was being planned for Sunday, 30 January, Lagan came to see Brendan to seek his help. ‘He said, “I’m terrified. The IRA must not be there. There must be not a gun in that area.” I said that was a tall order.’ Lagan waved his hand, smiled and said, ‘You can do it.’ Brendan did his best. He talked to both wings of the IRA, and got assurances that guns would not be in the Bogside that Sunday. He reported back to Lagan that, as requested, there would be no guns. But there were guns – in the hands of soldiers of the First Battalion of the Parachute Regiment. And they used them. The army said the para-troopers came under fire from the IRA as they deployed into the Bogside to arrest rioters, the ‘Derry Young Hooligans’, who had been stoning soldiers stationed at the entrance to the area. The paras returned fire at what they claimed were gunmen and bombers. As a result thirteen civil rights marchers were shot dead. In his epic report into the shootings almost forty years later, Lord Saville concluded that all the dead were unarmed and innocent.^g His definitive findings ran to 5,000 pages, took twelve years to produce and cost £195 million. I was relieved when I first read his summary, which confirmed much of what I had concluded in 1992 in my own investigation into the events of Bloody Sunday on its twentieth anniversary, and about which I had given evidence to Lord Saville’s tribunal sitting in the Guildhall in Derry. A senior member of the Official IRA in the city told me that some weapons had been left in the Bogside for ‘defensive’ purposes.⁵ I had concluded that there was at least one Official IRA gun in the Bogside, and that a single shot was fired at paratroopers. I had wrongly deduced that the Official IRA had fired first. Lord Saville’s report stated that the first shots were fired by the paras, and the Official IRA’s shot was in response.

The day after Bloody Sunday, Frank Lagan came to Brendan’s house again. Brendan was furious, having arranged, as he thought, the removal of all IRA weapons from the Bogside. Lagan was shattered, and had no explanation of what had happened or why. ‘This is an absolute disaster,’ Brendan told him. ‘We are going to have a war on our hands.’ That is precisely what happened.

Bloody Sunday was my introduction to the conflict in Ireland. I was then a twenty-nine-year-old journalist, most of whose previous TV experience was limited to reporting for Thames Television’s Today programme, presented by the legendary Eamonn Andrews. I covered local government, social issues and lighter subjects too – from the ‘pumpkin nobblers’ sabotaging a village’s ‘biggest pumpkin’ competition to a man building a flying saucer in the Berkshire woods, with his coalshed acting as Mission Control. I hardly felt equipped to cover what I found when I arrived in Derry late that Sunday evening after the shooting was over. By then I was working for Thames’s This Week programme – ITV’s Panorama. We’d been planning to cover the march that day with three film crews – one with the army, one with the marchers and one just floating, since it was clear that there was going to be trouble. But our plans were stymied by the militant television technicians’ union, the ACTT, which demanded danger money on such a scale that the company refused to pay. The plan therefore was called off.

I remember shivering in my London flat that cold Sunday afternoon, sitting on the night-storage heater to keep warm, when I heard the news that there had been shootings and deaths in Derry. My programme editor, John Edwards, and I spoke on the phone, and along with a phalanx of other journalists I caught the next plane to Belfast. I confess I had to look at a map to find out where Derry was, such was my ignorance of Ireland. Like most of my fellow citizens, and many journalists too, I was equally ignorant of the roots and history of the conflict. I arrived in Derry just before midnight and checked into a B&B. As I undressed to go to bed I glanced at the window, wondering if an IRA sniper had me in his sights. I smile when I think of it now.

The following morning I went down into the Bogside. I found a scene I will never forget. There was not a soul around. I could almost touch the silence. Fresh blood was still on the ground. Nervously, I started knocking on doors to try to talk to people. Being a journalist from a country whose soldiers had just killed thirteen of their neighbours, I expected a hostile reception, but I was surprised to find the opposite. People asked me in, and gave me tea, biscuits and buns. They were eager to talk, wanting the world to know what had happened. I met some members of the IRA’s Derry Brigade. They were not what I’d expected. They weren’t hooded or threatening. Many of them were the sons or fathers of the families I had been speaking to. They were part of the community, and now after Bloody Sunday they were seen more than ever as its defenders. I also interviewed the Provisionals’ Commanding Officer, who was adamant that they had removed all their guns from the Bogside. He was a nervous man with no great natural authority, and first had to make a phone call to the IRA high command in Dublin to check that he could do the interview. It was the first time I had talked to an active ‘terrorist’. I remember being acutely embarrassed before filming began when my producer insisted on combing my hair.

I watched a torchlit procession wind its way through the Bogside and up to the church on the Creggan estate on the hill above, where thirteen bodies were lying in their coffins. I was standing next to the Nationalist politician John Hume, who in 1998 would jointly win the Nobel Peace Prize with his Unionist counterpart David Trimble. John pointed out one of the mourners, and said he was someone I should talk to. It was Martin McGuinness. Shortly afterwards I met McGuinness in the disused gasworks in the Bogside which was a sort of IRA gang hut. It was a bizarre experience to meet a senior member of the IRA in such unlikely surroundings, within sight and range of British Army rifles stationed high on the city walls above the Bogside. The army had made a decision not to go into the areas dominated by both wings of the IRA. The twenty-two-year-old McGuinness was charming, articulate and impressive, and seemed terribly young. Even then his eyes, into which I was to look on and off over the next thirty years, had the capacity to harden at a moment’s notice, and seemed capable of taking you out at ten paces. He talked passionately about the ‘armed struggle’ and why he was engaged in it. To my surprise, at the end of our conversation he said he’d much rather be washing the car and mowing the lawn on Sundays than doing what he was doing. I believed him, although I thought that I shouldn’t. I never imagined that one day one of Britain’s most wanted ‘t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction - Recognising Reality
• Chapter One - Talking to the IRA
• Chapter Two - From the IRA to Al Qaeda
• Chapter Three - Talking to Hijack Victims
• Chapter Four - Talking to the Interrogators
• Chapter Five - Talking to a Convicted Terrorist
• Chapter Six - Anatomy of a Sleeper Cell
• Chapter Seven - One Morning in September
• Chapter Eight - A Warning Not Heeded
• Chapter Nine - Bombs on Bali
• Chapter Ten - Understanding the ‘New’ Al Qaeda
• Chapter Eleven - Terror on the Ground
• Chapter Twelve - Clean Skins
• Chapter Thirteen - Terror in the Skies
• Chapter Fourteen - Jihad.com
• Chapter Fifteen - Talking to the Victims of Torture
• Chapter Sixteen - Journey to the Dark Side
• Acknowledgements
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Illustrations
• By the same author
• Copyright
• About the Publisher