The history of contacts between the IRA and the British government was, by 1986, a long but unhappy one. British ministers, including the then Northern Ireland secretary, William Whitelaw, had met a delegation of IRA leaders, including Gerry Adams and Martin McGuin ness, in London as far back as June 1972 during the first IRA cease-fire. In 1975 there were further contacts, although this time no British politicians were directly involved, and instead the talking was done between British officials and representatives of the Army Council. The talking in both cases ended in angry recrimination. In 1972 the cease-fire was abandoned within days of the contact amid IRA accusations of British bad faith, while in 1975 Adams and others alleged that the British had tricked the IRA into the cessation in order to buy time to devise the IRA’s defeat. Officially the Army Council was in 1986 so hostile to the notion of a cease-fire that it was committed never to talk to the British again, unless it was about their withdrawal from Ireland.
All this meant that when Gerry Adams decided to open a dialogue with the British about the burgeoning peace process, he chose Father Reid to act as his go-between and representative. The Redemptorist acted as a sort of clerical cutoff, providing cover to all involved, both republican and British, and it was a task he performed with diligence and discretion when, finally, the moment came for Adams to move. Precisely when the pair made contact with the British government is not known, but the evidence strongly suggests that sometime in 1986, courtesy of Father Reid, a highly secret line of communication was opened between the Northern Ireland secretary, Tom King, and the Sinn Fein leader.
In the intervening years both the British and the Sinn Fein leadership have, for reasons best known to themselves, gone to considerable lengths to persuade the outside world that the first contact between them did not take place until much later, in 1990, when British intelligence made contact with the IRA and commenced a dialogue with Martin McGuinness.1 But both parties have been extremely economical with the truth about the full extent of their dealings with each other.
They each had very good reasons. Adams had not told his Army Council colleagues about his dialogue with Father Reid, much less the indirect contact opened up on his behalf with the British through the Redemptorist priest. Had they known just about the talks with Reid, Adams would have faced some hard questions from other IRA leaders. But knowledge that Adams was talking to the British government, especially one led by the woman most Republicans blamed for the 1981 hunger strike deaths, and was doing so without their sanction, would have set off alarm bells in the Army Council, possibly with serious consequences for Adams. The government of Margaret Thatcher had equally compelling reasons to keep a tight lid on the story. Mrs. Thatcher’s hatred and contempt for the IRA was renowned and although she had allowed MI6 officers to speak to the IRA during the hunger strikes, by 1986 there was another reason to keep her government’s contact with Adams, albeit filtered through Father Reid, a tightly guarded secret. Two years earlier, in October 1984, a 20-pound IRA bomb exploded in a bathroom of the Grand Hotel, in the south-eastern English coastal resort of Brighton, during the annual Conservative Party conference. The bomb exploded just before 3 a.m. and came very close to killing Thatcher and other members of her Cabinet. Five people were killed, including Sir Anthony Berry MP, while Thatcher’s hard-line Trade and Industry Secretary, Norman Tebbit, was badly injured in the blast. Mrs. Thatcher herself had a narrow escape; a bathroom she had been in a few minutes before the explosion was destroyed. In a statement the IRA said: “Today, we were unlucky, but remember, we only have to be lucky once— you will have to be lucky always.” In fact this statement was mostly bluster; the IRA never again attempted to kill Mrs. Thatcher, while senior figures, including Adams, were said by colleagues to be privately thankful that the effort had failed in its primary aim. Even so, the Thatcher government was taking an extraordinary political risk by opening up communication with Adams. Common sense suggests that someone in British officialdom with sufficient influence and knowledge of the background may have advised that the risk was worth taking.
As can now be revealed for the first time, confirmation that Gerry Adams was in indirect conversations with the British government as early as 1986, or at least 1987, has been given in interviews with the author by two former British secretaries of state for Northern Ireland who conducted these dealings with the Sinn Fein leader. One was Tom King, who came to Belfast in September 1985, just before the Hillsborough agreement was signed, and the other was his successor, Peter Brooke, secretary of state between 1989 and 1992, a figure whose term of office is most identified with the emergence of the first public clues about the secret diplomacy that lay behind the peace process. Both men have since been elevated to the British House of Lords.
A scion of the British establishment, Brooke came to Northern Ireland with what seemed like impeccable unionist credentials. His father had been a Tory home secretary in the early 1960s when the unionist and British Conservative parties were as one, and his family roots in Ireland went back 250 years to the heyday of the Anglo-Irish ascendancy. Although welcomed at first by unionists, he was viewed with some unease and doubt by the end of his term, since his sometimes less than forthright approach to the Provisionals unsettled them. Their alarm bells were triggered very early on in his ministerial term when he took a soft line on the defining question of how the British would respond to an IRA cease-fire. A charming and often amusing man, Brooke was well liked by the media and became extremely popular with nationalists, not least because unionists distrusted him.
In an interview given to a press agency in November 1989 to mark his first one hundred days in office, Brooke conceded that the British and the IRA were in a military stalemate. He then made remarks that came so unexpectedly that they confounded observers at the time. Now, in the knowledge of the secret Reid-Adams diplomacy, they make perfect sense. “There has to be a possibility that at some stage debate might start within the terrorist community,” he said. “Now, if that were to occur, then you would move towards a point, if in fact the terrorists were to decide that the moment had come when they wished to withdraw from their activities, then I think the government would need to be imaginative in those circumstances as to how that process should be managed.”2
In an interview at his office in Westminster, many years later, Brooke explained to the author what lay behind his words. “That 1989 interview was based on a mixture of what I had heard from John Hume, MI5, and military intelligence and finally what I had heard about Reid,” he said. “I had heard about Reid during a briefing I got from Tom King. What Reid was saying to us was that there was an opportunity here to end it, and one of the aims of what I said in the interview was to communicate my attitude on talks to Sinn Fein.”3
What Peter Brooke learned about the Reid-Adams diplomacy suggests that the dialogue had begun not long after Tom King had become secretary of state. “I… saw intelligence [on Reid-Adams],” he told the author, “going back as far as 1986, intelligence which underlay my November 1989 interview.”4
Tom King also confirmed the existence of the Reid-Adams pipeline to the author during interviews conducted at Westminster in 2000. A former British army officer and gentleman farmer-businessman turned MP for one of England’s more affluent shire constituencies, King was fortunate to have been made a minister. A close friend of Michael Heseltine, a major critic of Thatcher’s right-wing ideology, King was on the wrong end of the Tory Party spectrum for many of Thatcher’s allies, but when he arrived in Belfast he made efforts to get in the unionists’ good books. He hit the headlines when a few weeks after the Hillsborough pact had been signed, he said the Irish prime minister, Garret FitzGerald, had “accepted that for all practical purposes and into perpetuity there will never be a united Ireland.”5 The remark ruptured relations with Dublin but delighted unionists.
King could not say whether or not the Redemptorist pipeline to Adams was in place before he arrived in Belfast, but he did confirm that it was working while he was there. “I became aware of it,” he said. “I may have asked questions, but I think I knew there was a Clonard connection.”6 King also confirmed that Margaret Thatcher was aware of the contact with Adams and had approved it.
King said that he was first active in the communication “at the turn” of 1986–87; in other words, that the dialogue did begin sometime in 1986.7 This accords with Peter Brooke’s memory of the intelligence briefing he received, which also suggested that the pipeline was opened sometime in 1986—at the very least. The matter is important not just because it fundamentally challenges other accounts of the peace process, which have the first contact between republicans and the British happening much later, but because it suggests that the British must have had an invaluable insight into the mind and intentions of the republican leader on the eve of what proved to be a turbulent and violent period in Northern Ireland, encompassing the smuggling of huge amounts of Libyan arms to Ireland and an intensification of IRA violence. The knowledge that Adams was at least prepared to talk about peace at this time was priceless information.
Other evidence suggests that the Adams-King dialogue continued until late 1987 or mid-1988 when spectacular bursts of IRA violence—the postponed “Tet offensive”—caused the British to cool the diplomacy. Either way, it is clear beyond contradiction that secret talks between the British and Adams began much earlier than any of the participants have so far admitted, a disclosure that demands a fundamental reassessment of the genesis and origins of the Irish peace process.
This disclosure also challenges another long-held belief about the peace process—namely, that it was the Irish government in Dublin with which Reid and Adams first made contact and that this was followed, in an admittedly lengthy and tortuous manner, by attempts from Dublin to coax the British to join the process. That is clearly not true. It is now evident that at the very least the British were contacted at the same time as Dublin, and that, far from having to be cajoled by Dublin into joining the process, the British, very possibly, were engaged first. What also emerges from this account is that the peace process was well advanced by the time the Eksund set sail from the Mediterranean and into the trap laid between them by British intelligence and the well-informed IRA traitor. Had the vessel and its deadly cargo gotten through and the IRA been able to launch its “Tet offensive,” then a well-developed peace process would have been its first casualty. Whoever betrayed the Eksund saved the process, whether wittingly or otherwise.
It is also clear that the Reid-Adams dialogue with Tom King played an enormously important part in the evolution of the peace process even if the Provisional representation was confined to Gerry Adams and his close advisers and did not, at that stage, embrace the rest of the IRA leadership. Both Brooke and King believed, they told the author, that Adams was acting with the approval and knowledge of the Army Council. They were wrong, but they were not to know that. Adams was engaged in an enterprise of which the Army Council knew nothing, and had it been privy to these events it is likely that it would have heartily and angrily disapproved. The Reid-Adams initiative was a hugely dangerous exercise for the Sinn Fein leader.
A crucial moment in the secret contact came early on when King received a lengthy letter from Adams, which posed a number of questions about Britain’s policy in Northern Ireland and its attitude toward the Provisionals. King has confirmed that this happened and indeed believes there may have been two letters from Adams. “I had one or two letters but I can’t remember the detail, just the opening, ‘A Chara,’” he said.8 “A Chara” or “friend” is the traditional Irish opening to a letter and the equivalent of “Dear so-and-so.”
In an earlier interview King said that he had received a series of questions from the Reid contact, and it is apparent that this was a reference to the Adams letter. “We received questions,” he said, “asking us, ‘Is this right?’ ‘Is that right?’ ‘How can that possibly be?’ ‘Surely there are strategic and economic reasons to hang on in Northern Ireland?’”9
There were six questions in Adams’s letter. Although Tom King says he has forgotten what they were, another well-informed participant in the peace process does remember. They were the following:
1. What is the nature of the British government’s interest in Ireland?
2. What is the British government’s attitude toward self-determination, and what will it do to ensure that there is no veto exercised which would militate against the exercise of self-determination?
3. Will the British government play a positive role in persuading unionists toward self-determination?
4. Will the British government publicly state its position, assuming the appropriate replies to these questions?
5. Will the British government accept that the republican movement will represent itself in any negotiations?
6. In the context of dialogue free from interference, will the British government publicly state its intention to withdraw from Ireland and give a date by which such withdrawal will be complete?10
Taken at face, the questions contained nothing that any of Gerry Adams’s IRA colleagues could have quarreled with. They were all seemingly embedded in traditional IRA dogma, all apparently predicated upon the analysis that Britain’s presence in Northern Ireland prevented the Irish people as a whole from freely deciding their own future. But the questions opened the way for the British to offer Adams an exit from armed struggle by redefining what was meant by concepts such as “self-determination” and “withdrawal.”
Tom King has declined to say whether he or someone else wrote the document that was sent in reply to Adams, but that there was a reply is not in doubt. It came in an undated, unsigned statement, twelve paragraphs and nearly a thousand words in length, that responded to four of Adams’s six questions in the order in which they were asked.11
The British answers set the agenda for the rest of the peace process and created a template for negotiations that after delays and many failures of nerve were to lead some ten or so years later to the Good Friday Agreement of April 1998. Most of the concepts and much of the language that characterized the process during the long years of its gestation and development were contained in the secret British reply to Gerry Adams’s letter to Tom King. If the peace process has a philosophical fountainhead, this is it.
The British reply, now revealed for the first time, is possibly one of the key, historic documents of the peace process. It reads in full:
The Provisional IRA say they are fighting a war of independence to win freedom and self-determination for the people of Ireland. They maintain that force must be used to persuade the British government to acknowledge such a freedom because it has a colonial self-interest in remaining in Northern Ireland and in exercising authority there. This interpretation of the political situation in Northern Ireland is based upon the false assumption that Britain has some interest of her own in remaining there and is therefore engaged in some way in defending those interests by force of military strength.
Britain of course has an interest in Northern Ireland which is to respond with a warm goodwill and friendship to the needs of the people of Northern Ireland as a whole. (We respect and admire the contribution which they have made to the union in peace and war.) But let me be very clear! In the second half of the 20th century no matter what has been the position in the past the British government has no political, military, strategic, or economic interest in staying in Ireland or in the exercise of authority there that could transcend respect for the wishes of the majority in Northern Ireland.
The political and security situation as it has now developed in Northern Ireland is due to the historical, political, religious and cultural divisions which separate the people of the nationalist tradition from the people of the unionist tradition in Ireland. These divisions are at the root of the conflict there and not any self-interested dominion policies of the British government.
The central issue in the conflict therefore is not to persuade the British government to decide on the question of self-determination in Ireland but to bridge the divisions between the people of both traditions there in a way that will enable them to decide it freely and democratically for themselves. The political consensus and agreement which would bridge these traditional divisions and so open the way to a peaceful resolution of the questions of Irish self-determination can only be achieved through the processes of political debate and dialogue between the peoples of both traditions.
Should they through their political representatives agree to engage in such dialogue the British government would do everything possible to accommodate and facilitate it. It would, for example, provide the necessary framework and forum which could take the form of an ongoing conference or convention composed of the official representatives of the people of both traditions. It would confine its own role in such a dialogue to that of facilitator and so would not officially take part in it or, much less, seek in any way to dictate to it.
This means the British government is prepared to withdraw from the central area of historical, political, religious and cultural conflict and from the central forum of political debate that would seek to resolve it so that the parties to the conflict, namely the people of the nationalist tradition and the people of the unionist tradition can engage freely, independently and democratically in the political dialogue and in agreement-making which would bridge their divisions.
Should this dialogue result in agreements based on the consent of the people of the two traditions which would bridge the political divisions between them and to define the forms of new political structures which would embody, institute and organise such agreements the British government would respond with the necessary legislation.
We hope that this statement will clarify our present policies in Northern Ireland. We also hope that it will prompt the Provisional IRA to review their present policies and to see that the use of violent tactics against “colonial interests” which in fact do not exist is a mistake and a tragedy beyond words not only for the people of Ireland generally but also for themselves.
Questions about Irish political self-determination can only be answered by the people of the nationalist and unionist traditions in democratic conference among themselves. Britain can assist them but she cannot answer for them because the problem is not that the British government will not agree to Irish self-determination but that the people of the two divided traditions do not at present agree amongst themselves on how to exercise it.
It is our fervent hope that what we have said in our statement will convince the Provisional IRA and the Sinn Fein party that the political divisions between the people of the two traditions in Ireland which are at the heart of the conflict cannot be bridged much less healed by force. Their use of force is, in fact, holding back the day of justice and peace for the people of both traditions because the political debate which would bring that day forward cannot take place freely and democratically while they or indeed any significant section of either tradition are using the argument of the gun.
We accept that the republican tradition within the nationalist community should be represented at the peace conference table but we cannot and will never accept that the Provisional IRA and the Sinn Fein party should be represented there while they continue to use the tactics of violence. Apart from other considerations they themselves would never really expect to sit down with representatives of the unionist tradition to confer and decide about the political future while unionists feel as they do that Republicans are holding a gun to their heads.
The strategies of peacemaking are the strategies of political dialogue, political persuasion and political force. These alone can create the political agreements whatever their developing or final form which would breach the divisions between the people of the nationalist tradition and the people of the unionist tradition in Ireland. Only on such a bridge can the conflict be ended and the foundation of a just and lasting peace for both traditions be soundly and progressively established.12
The secret British document made three significant and important statements to Adams. It said first that, contrary to IRA dogma, Britain had no interests in Northern Ireland, no selfish reason for remaining there, and was indifferent about the nature of any settlement as long as it was not imposed by force and did not offend the principle of consent. Britain was also prepared to allow Sinn Fein to have a part in the forging of any settlement, but that would be conditional on an IRA cease-fire. That was not a departure from policy. Britain had always made it clear that IRA violence was the obstacle to Sinn Fein’s taking part in normal political life. What made this offer interesting was that Britain also offered to convene the sort of conference that Irish nationalists had long asked for and promised that it would not attempt to impose its will upon its deliberations. Sinn Fein could attend, providing the IRA ended its violence, while Britain also gave a pledge to implement any settlement in legislation, a hint that the 1920 Government of Ireland Act, which upheld the partitionist settlement, could be significantly amended and even replaced.
The most intriguing and momentous part of the British reply came with the novel redefinition of what British withdrawal would actually mean. The traditional republican interpretation of this was straightforward. The British would physically leave, their troopships would sail from Belfast harbor, and their politicans and officials would decamp while Irishmen, Protestant and Catholic, got on with the business of constructing a new government for the whole of Ireland. Irish and British constitutional politicians had long rejected this scenario as unworkable, largely on the grounds that Protestants would resist it probably to the point of civil war. But now the British came up with an ingenious reworking of the idea. Britain would not physically withdraw but it would withdraw politically, that is, it would promise not to interfere or intervene in the decision-making process—the all-party negotiations in other words, aimed at securing a final settlement. Irishmen would be allowed to construct the deal while the British acted as impartial facilitators.
Two of Adams’s questions went unanswered, and many of the ensuing problems faced by the peace process would be caused by this. The British did not respond to Adams’s request to make their position public—that would not happen for two or three years, until Peter Brooke gave his neutrality speech. Nor would the British name a date for the end of the process, the point at which they would finally leave Ireland. At the time of this writing the answer has still not been given.
Nevertheless, it is possible to see in the secret British letter the blueprint for the peace process as it unfolded in the coming years. Armed with this redefinition of British disengagement and a statement of neutrality, Adams could happily continue the secret diplomacy with Reid while the road map showed that all-party negotiations, an IRA cease-fire, and adherence to the principle of peaceful consent were the way forward. This is precisely what did happen, although it would be nearly eleven years before the destination was reached. The argument that the peace process was a precooked deal and that much of what happened in the process was about managing the various forces involved, not least the IRA and Sinn Fein rank and file, finds its origin in this document.
AT THE START of their dialogue Tom King had responded diligently to the Reid-Adams pipeline, but other diplomacy was under way as well, albeit more tentative. Sometime in early 1987, and separately from the more considered response to Adams’s letter, King authorized a statement to be delivered to the Sinn Fein leader saying that there was no strategic or economic interest in staying in Northern Ireland as far as Britain was concerned, nothing “that would override the democratic will of the people of Northern Ireland.”13 According to King this was in response to an overture from the SDLP leader, John Hume, rather than the Reid-Adams pipeline, and King’s memory is that it happened in early 1987. “It was before Loughgall [the SAS ambush that killed eight IRA members] because after Loughgall things slowed down, and we were annoyed by this,” he recalled.14
Tentative peace talks may have been opened with Gerry Adams, but the latter’s colleagues in the IRA continued with their armed struggle regardless. Unaware of the secret diplomacy, certainly ignorant of the correspondence between Tom King and Adams, the Army Council authorized the launch of the much delayed and reduced “Tet offensive.” It was this decision, later on in 1987, that brought the dialogue between King and Reid-Adams to its first crisis.
At the end of August 1987, three Irish people—two men and a woman, all with Dublin addresses—were arrested in the grounds of King’s estate near Bridgeport, Wiltshire, and later charged with conspiracy to murder the Northern Ireland secretary. Paramilitary-style equipment, notes of King’s car registration numbers, and a large cash sum were found in their campsite nearby. The three were initially convicted but later cleared on appeal. Nevertheless, King was convinced that all the while he was sending messages to and receiving them from Gerry Adams, the IRA had been plotting to kill him, and he was furious. A few months later, in March 1988, the attentuated “Tet offensive” was launched with an attempt to bomb the Mediterranean colony of Gibraltar, and that was followed by a wave of violence culminating that September in an effort to kill the head of the Northern Ireland civil service, Ken Bloomfield, in a bomb attack on his home outside Belfast.
The alleged IRA surveillance of his home caused an incandescent King to cut the cord to Alec Reid. “He told Adams to get stuffed,” recalled one informed source. “He took Bridgeport as a very personal affront, and I also suspect that he was getting a lot of support from Mrs. Thatcher for cutting off the talks.”15 In autumn 1988 the Thatcher government responded to the IRA upsurge with a tough package of security measures, which included a ban on radio and TV interviews with members of Sinn Fein, a change in the law that eroded the suspect’s right to silence during police interviews, and a mandatory oath of nonviolence for all candidates in local elections in Northern Ireland. What brought matters to this point was the stark difference between the desire for peace of which Reid and Adams talked and the reality of the IRA’s violence, a difference the British might have better understood had they realized just how secret the Reid-Adams diplomacy was.
From then on and for years ahead, there were two distinct British views of Adams’s and the Provos’ motives, as one participant with a ringside seat remembered:
At the start Tom King saw this as something that had to be pursued, that it was an historical chance. He saw it as the IRA going through their dying throes, and they were looking for a way out. It was only after what happened at Bridgeport that he concluded they were spoofing. The Foreign Office was very positive all the way through. I can’t remember a time when they were negative. In the Northern Ireland Office it depended very much on who was there, but the prevalent view was that they were doing something new but for the same purpose. The difficulty was that it was so hard to take Reid seriously; he was so passionate about things [but] with no evidence of change.16
The letter from Adams to King that produced the remarkable British reply was undated—as is the secret reply itself—but public comments by the Sinn Fein leader suggest that the ideas contained in the British correspondence were circulating inside Adams’s head toward the end of 1986 and the beginning of 1987. In a December 1986 interview with the Irish Times, for example, he stated, “I say the British still have an interest in this country. If they don’t, let them say it. What they should be saying, quite simply, is that they have no interest in Ireland and they’re going to leave. That would have the effect very quickly of bringing everyone—and people might say that includes us—to their senses and starting to work something out.”17 That point was dealt with in the secret British answer.
Three months later there was more of the same. In a speech to the Oxford Union, Adams called “for the establishment of an all-Ireland constitutional conference consisting of elected representatives of the Irish people that would draw up a new constitution for an independent Ireland and organise a new system of government open to all significant organisations of political opinion in Ireland.”18 The British reply also dealt with that matter. With hindsight it is difficult not to conclude that these comments were an intriguing public glimpse of a still very secret diplomacy.
One unresolved question concerns the identity of the British civil servants who were dealing directly with Father Alec Reid, those who very probably drafted the secret answer to the Adams letter. The conduit between Tom King and those who were talking to Alec Reid was Ian Burns, then the deputy under secretary of state at the Northern Ireland Office, who retired in the early 1990s.19 According to informed sources, Burns was a consistently optimistic influence on NIO thinking during this period, and to some of his colleagues this suggests he was privy to much of Adams’s thinking. There is also evidence that he was the conduit to King for highly confidential information coming from a second source in or near to the Pro visionals, this time in Derry. The contact civil servant in that case was Mark Elliott, a Foreign Office official seconded to the NIO who was in charge of the British side of the joint Irish-British secretariat, which had been set up as part of the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement. Elliott made regular monthly trips to Derry, and his subsequent reports were considered so sensitive that for security reasons he wrote them out by hand and delivered them directly to Burns.20
Elliott’s role had its roots in the bureaucratic structure erected by the British when the outbreak of violence in August 1969 and the deployment of British troops forced a more direct involvement by London in the day-today running of Northern Ireland’s affairs. To keep an eye on the increasingly volatile situation, the British sent over a senior civil servant to be its official representative, a sort of ambassadorial figure, to liaise with the unionist government. Over the years the office became the regional headquarters of British intelligence, and it was eventually located in a secluded villa called Laneside, in the pleasant seaside town of Hollywood, east of Belfast. It was from Laneside that British officials like Michael Oatley of MI6 made discreet contact with the IRA in 1974 and 1975 on the eve of the cease-fire, and it was there that secret meetings with IRA leaders were held. Laneside was the nerve center of British policy in Northern Ireland.
Eventually Laneside was closed down. Some of the office’s functions were transferred to the Political Affairs Bureau (PAB) at the Northern Ireland Office, and the interest of Whitehall was signified by the presence of a Foreign Office official at its head. In later years the job was given to Mark Elliott. The intelligence section of Laneside went its own way and was later housed in a new office block in the Stormont complex along with MI5.
Neither Tom King nor Peter Brooke can say, will say, or can remember who on their staff dealt with Father Alec Reid. “I don’t know who was dealing with Reid,” said King bluntly; “probably the political relations side.”21 But the evidence is that the Political Affairs Bureau in the NIO was kept firmly in the dark about the secret communications with Gerry Adams, as one former British official explained: “I never had the slightest wind of it, no hint of it all. I can’t believe that the way the office was organized it could have been possible. No one would have thought of doing it that way, because it would have got out almost immediately,” he said.22 This official, like other of his former colleagues interviewed by the author, is convinced that the intelligence services must have handled the contacts.
We were very much part of the ordinary office, and it’s conceivable that one person could have been up to it, but I just find it impossible to believe that. I think it was done through other channels. And frankly I suspect if you were doing something like that, you would have left it to someone who perhaps had some training and background. They are the sort of people who are trained to do that sort of thing, and they are probably better placed for that sort of endeavor. What you also have to remember is that when this started (a) it was not stated government policy, and (b) it easily could have gone very, very pear-shaped, and I would have thought whichever minister or ministers [were] involved would have wanted some cover.23
Some aspects of the diplomacy suggest that it embraced a strong “need to know” element of the sort that usually indicates an intelligence role rather than the conventional duties of a mainstream government department. Both King and Brooke denied all knowledge of the secret British reply to Gerry Adams and said they had never read the document until shown a copy by the author. Had they known about it at the time, the political risk to them would have been enormous. The document was explosive, its content an absolute contradiction of stated British policy toward the IRA in the mid- to late 1980s, which was to shun and isolate both it and Sinn Fein. Had the document or any of its contents leaked, the sitting secretary of state, either King or Brooke, would have been forced to resign.
The piece of evidence that suggests that both King and Brooke may have been kept in the dark about the secret reply to Adams is that one of them, Peter Brooke, had no knowledge at all of Adams’s original letter to Tom King until this writer told him. He had not been told about it during his initial briefing as NI secretary from civil servants, and Tom King had not disclosed it to him either, even though, according to Brooke, King had briefed him on the Reid-Adams conduit. It seemed that someone, somewhere in the NIO or possibly in the intelligence apparatus had decided it would be better if Brooke remained ignorant about the correspondence. When the author told Brooke about the King letter during lunch in Westminster, he was astonished and frankly incredulous. It was the first he had heard of the letter.24 But the existence of the Adams correspondence is undisputed by King himself, even if he disavows all knowledge of the reply. The British politicians, it appears, were only partly aware of the full picture.
There is another clue that strongly suggests intelligence involvement. It also comes from Peter Brooke’s memory of events. Previous accounts of the peace process have told how in late 1990 a senior MI5 officer called John Deverill met Brooke with a proposal to initiate secret talks with the IRA leadership and that when Brooke gave the go-ahead, back-channel negotiations began.
In an interview with the author in June 2000, Brooke explained that what really happened was that Deverill came to see him not to get authority to start talks with the IRA but to inform him that a different intelligence officer would be taking over day-to-day handling of what appeared to be an already ongoing operation.
What was put to me in relation to political cover—and I was being told because of a change in personnel—was that a channel existed, represented by an individual in Derry, there was a vehicle or conduit under which British intelligence services acting on behalf of the British government was in a position to say things to him by which Sinn Fein could test if they wished what we meant by some action by us. The circumstances suggest that the dialogue with the IRA had been going on for some time.25
If British intelligence was conducting covert conversations with the IRA behind the backs of British ministers, then, equally, it could have been sending secret letters to Gerry Adams, and figures like Peter Brooke and Tom King would have known nothing about them. Although this is necessarily conjecture, there is no doubt that there was a British letter to Adams and that it laid the foundations for the Good Friday Agreement. Someone in the British administration wrote it.
By the time the secret Reid-Adams pipeline to the British was opened, the Redemptorists and British intelligence were not exactly strangers to each other. During the 1980 hunger strike a Redemptorist priest, Father Brendan Meagher from the congregation’s Dundalk House, had acted as a messenger between Michael Oatley of MI6 and leading Provisionals, Gerry Adams, Martin McGuinness, and other IRA figures in Belfast, as well as the leader of the hunger-striking prisoners, Brendan Hughes. According to one account, members of the Provisional leadership who wanted a settlement to the protest26 had initiated the contact, and some republicans believe that had Father Alec Reid been fit and healthy, he would have performed the role played by Meagher. Code-named Angel, Meagher met Oatley, code-named Mountain Climber, at Belfast airport to receive a copy of last-minute British proposals to settle the prison dispute.27 Meagher took the document to the prison and then to a house on the Falls Road to show to Adams, McGuinness, and Danny Morrison.
Five years later, in 1986 and 1987, another Redemptorist priest, this time Father Alec Reid, would shuttle between Gerry Adams and the British government. But this time his mission was much more historic than settling a hunger strike. This time it was about ending the IRA’s ancient war with Britain.