Prologue: ‘They’ll never find it’

PROLOGUE

‘They’ll never find it’

I NEEDED A FRIEND TO get rid of something – my detailed source notes relating to the break-in at a police Special Branch office at Castlereagh in Belfast and the political intelligence-gathering scandal that came to be known as ‘Stormontgate’. In 2002 the IRA was linked to both events and denied involvement in both. I didn’t believe them then. I don’t believe them now. Some years after these events, the British Security Service, MI5, was seeking pre-publication access to a book I was writing at that time. There had been correspondence, and I had taken advice. It was 2008, three years after I had felt the need to escape from the story of our past, and I was back in a tug-of-war. There could be a raid or a search of my home. I was told to get the information out of the jurisdiction.

In my continuing research on those 2002 events, I had obviously trespassed into the intelligence world, discovered too much about a bugging and surveillance operation that was part of the response to Stormontgate, and found

out about a Special Branch ‘source’, who opened the door to the IRA’s secrets. MI5 was also concerned about what I might write about agents operating at the top of loyalist organisations. The letters sent to me were from solicitors acting, I was informed, on behalf of Her Majesty’s Government. One, which came by registered post and was dated 31 January 2008, stated: ‘My client is concerned that your book might contain information that would put lives in danger and/or be damaging to national security. Without access to the manuscript my client cannot be more specific but my letter to you dated 10 January 2008 highlights an example of the sort of information that if published might have this effect.’ In the letter of 31 January, I was encouraged ‘to obtain independent legal advice as soon as possible’.

Requests for access to the manuscript became a demand, and the need to get my notes out of the way was now pressing. I contacted two journalist friends to ask if they would take them. The first, Mervyn Jess, thought that he was far too obvious. His would be the first place they would come looking. I then called Seamus Kelters, another colleague from my days at the BBC. Within hours, he was at my home. We took a walk, without phones, and I explained my predicament. When we got back to the house, he asked me to tape shut the box into which I had placed my files. He put it in his car, left and, in a brief telephone conversation that evening, assured me: ‘They’ll never find it.’ I pictured him burying it in deep ground, muck up to his oxters. But, years later, after his death from cancer, I was told he had hidden the box in

plain sight. We survive on humour. I joke with Jess that in this moment of need I discovered the difference between a Catholic friend and a Protestant friend. It’s something that, in all the seriousness of that moment, we can laugh about and that Kelters would laugh about if he was still here.

The real learning I took from the official letters was that the ‘war’ might be over, but efforts to bury its secrets continued, and continue even today. MI5 wanted the manuscript for the purpose of redaction. These are the new battles being fought on all sides; the long fight in the peace to hide uncomfortable truths.

This incident also confirmed to me that you can’t just walk away – it is not that easy. This was something I realised very quickly after leaving the BBC. We are living with ghosts, a phrase used by Dr Joanne Murphy in an interview with me in 2021, when she described how we are ‘constantly pulled back to what are environments of huge pain’. For my own part, in the conflict period, I was speaking with sources on all sides who knew the details of numerous killings. That’s how close I got. And these many years later, I know more about the sick acts that have left us in that place of shadows and ghosts – still, at times, afraid of talking in our sleep.

I struggle to explain how I became involved in coverage of that war. It was not a road that I had planned to travel. I left school at an early age. I could run a bit then, and I ran a couple of times for Northern Ireland. I was interested in the detail of athletics and, for a while, I was a member of the UK-wide National Union of Track Statisticians and became

involved with the then Northern Ireland Amateur Athletics Association. I remember how in 1981 Olympic champion Steve Ovett saved the UK Athletics Championships on the Antrim Forum track, competing when others stayed away. They were frightened by the news of the hunger strike at the Maze prison and the headlines of the street violence that resulted from that. The veteran Belfast journalist Jim McDowell was, at the time, an athletics correspondent at the News Letter and I have the piece he wrote, composed in his very distinctive style:

The biggest hush-hush athletics operation in the history of the game here turned what were, candidly, the nine-carat UK Closed Championships at Antrim into twenty-four-carat Olympic gold. The jewel of a meeting jaundiced by withdrawals because of Ulster’s political trauma jetted in late yesterday afternoon. His arrival had been kept a close secret by the athletics hierarchy, but when Moscow Olympics gold medallist Steve Ovett trotted out onto the track at Antrim Forum for the last event of yesterday’s GRE Games, the atmosphere among a 5,000 festival crowd [sic] basking in bright sunshine was as intoxicating as poteen.

What McDowell was writing about was what I was interested in. The big milers of that era: Ovett, John Walker, Eamonn Coghlan, Seb Coe. I was scribbling a few words for a number of athletics magazines and, later, McDowell opened doors

for me. Initially I was to provide some coverage of track and field and cross-country for two Belfast newspapers and was then given a training opportunity as a sub-editor. That came out of the blue. Years later, McDowell told me he recognised something in me – that interest in facts and figures and analysis. He could see some wider potential. It was something I hadn’t thought about. Then I worked in a press agency, learning alongside him. Without him, my career in journalism would not have happened.

Long before any meetings with the IRA and the loyalist organisations, I had reported from two World CrossCountry Championships: Gateshead in 1983 and Lisbon in 1985. Carlos Lopes and Zola Budd were the winners at the latter championships in what was an electric atmosphere. What, then, made me want to talk to the IRA, the loyalists and those in security, military and intelligence, all of them dug into the different corners and trenches of that conflict period?

Part of it, I think, was a journey of discovery linked to what we as a family had experienced in the early 1970s. Like so many others, we were forced from our home. There had been a period of attacks and intimidation. We still talk about a particular incident in that period: being at Mass when the windows of the church came falling in – shattered by bricks or bottles. In the dark, cars had also been damaged. I remember the priest opening a door to look outside. My sister, Roisin, who was eight at the time, still talks about how she thought she was going to die.

Our family experience is a tiny jigsaw piece in a much bigger picture. I remember men in combat jackets speaking with my mother at the door of our home, telling her we would be all right, that we had nothing to fear from them. But the attacks on our home continued until we had to leave – leave a house that had wire grilles on its front windows. At times, it felt like we were living in a cage. Perhaps this explains, in part at least, some of my interest in finding out more – how it started, why I took those difficult steps into that conflict arena and into a world of secrets. Then, I suppose, the news took over – a fascination with this war that was on our doorstep, that was so close to us all, that sucked us in.

As I look back, it is not about one side. It is about all the sides. Not just about who started it, but why it started. Unless we try to understand it all, we understand nothing. We stay lost and trapped in our own opinions. And, more than that, we shovel those opinions on top of others, damaging them. It is such a sin.

In 2003 the former Sinn Féin publicity director Danny Morrison was writing about a book I had just published, The Armed Peace. He talked about those steps I took in the 1980s, away from sport and into this other world. How I ‘moved on and established a reputation for breaking news stories, particularly for exclusives on IRA GHQ claims of responsibility for major operations and, later, during the peace process, IRA leadership policy statements’.

What started for me in the late 1980s was a whole new experience. It is different now. I no longer have to go to the

IRA and the loyalist organisations and others for the statements and explanations of war, for their words on the dead and wounded. But the past is not over, not yet. For some, not ever. There is this continuing scrutiny of what happened and why. The mysteries. The questions. The silence. The dead. The injured. The sickness. The brokenness of it all. It broke me at times. But I better understand now. Most importantly, I understand why it should never be repeated.

P. O’Neill has gone quiet. The loyalist codewords have fallen into disuse. The landscape has been demilitarised. So, there is a space now to think some more and to explain some more. For me, this is the purpose of the pages that follow. Of course, with age and time, wrinkles appear in the memory and in the mind, so I have used my extensive archive notes and statements and interview transcripts to do my best to recall events, times and dates as accurately as possible. I’ve gone back to some people to try to get a better understanding of then and now. This is my story from a period in our wars and of a time when we found a way to peace. What I thought then and what I think now. Knowing, also, that sometimes we can think too much.