Say Nothing: A True Story Of Murder and Memory In Northern Ireland

Frank Kitson, like Dolours Price and Gerry Adams, was born into a family tradition. His father was an admiral in the Royal Navy. His brother was in the navy as well. His grandfather had served in the Indian Army. Kitson joined the British Army’s Rifle Brigade and ended up marrying a colonel’s daughter. But by the time he became a soldier, at eighteen, it felt as though he might have got started too late: it was 1945, and Kitson was sent to Germany, where the fighting had ended and the only thing left to do was watch the postscript to the war. There didn’t seem to be much prospect of another world war, so Kitson spent his time living the life of a gentleman officer – going to the opera, racing horses, fishing – and trying to suppress the nagging suspicion that he might have missed his moment.

In 1953, he was assigned to Kenya, which was then still a British colony, to help put down an uprising by an elusive rebel group known as the Mau Mau. As he packed his bags for this assignment, Kitson’s greatest fear was that by the time he actually arrived in Kenya, the ‘colonial emergency’, as it was called, might have ended, and he would be forced to come home again without ever having seen any action.

He needn’t have worried. When Kitson arrived in Kenya, he took immediately to what he called ‘the game’. He was a methodical type, so he wrote down his ambition on a little piece of paper: ‘To provide the Security Forces with the information they [need] to destroy the Mau Mau.’ He tucked the paper into the Bible that he kept by his bed.

Kitson was short and stocky, with piercing eyes and a jutting chin. He carried himself ramrod straight, as if on a parade ground, and swung his shoulders as he walked, which gave the impression that he was a larger man than he was. Beneath his peaked and tasselled army cap, he was gradually losing his hair, and as the years went on he was seldom photographed without the cap. He had a slightly nasal voice and was prone to a sportsman’s vernacular, describing people as ‘off net’ and seasoning his conversation with other clubby expressions. He was known to dislike small talk. One story about Kitson that circulated in the army (and was almost certainly apocryphal, but revealing nonetheless) involved a dinner party at which the wife of one of Kitson’s colleagues found herself seated next to him and announced that she had made a bet with a friend that she could get ‘at least half a dozen words’ out of him.

‘You’ve just lost,’ Kitson said, and did not speak another word to her all evening.

In Kenya, he found himself in a completely new environment: the forest. Before leaving on a night mission, he would apply black camouflage to his hands and face and, to complete the disguise, pull an old African bush hat over his head. By ‘blacking up’ in this manner, he supposed he might be mistaken, at a distance and in poor light, for a native. Like a character out of Kipling, Kitson would plunge into the bramble, in search of the mysterious Mau Mau. As he navigated the dense bush, he was struck by how quickly you could adapt to the most alien milieu. In a memoir of his time in Kenya, he wrote, ‘Everything is strange for the first few moments, then after a time normal existence seems strange.’

One day, Kitson came across a group of Kenyans draped from head to toe in white robes. Their faces were completely obscured, with thin slits cut in the fabric for their eyes, noses and mouths. When Kitson enquired about who these strange men were, he learned that they were Mau Mau who had been induced to betray their fellow rebels and work with the British Army. With their identities shielded by the robes, they could observe a group of prisoners, then tell their British handlers who was who.

This was an epiphany for Kitson, a defining episode, as it introduced him to the ‘counter-gang’, a concept that he immediately perceived could be fashioned into a highly effective weapon. In fighting an insurgency, Kitson realised, quality intelligence is essential, and one way to obtain that intelligence is to inveigle some members of the insurgency to switch sides. He began to devote a great deal of thought to how one could best go about persuading a rebel to betray his compatriots. Clearly, trust was a key ingredient, because any potential source, by agreeing to assist his enemy, would effectively be placing his life in the enemy’s hands. But trust is a bond that can be cultivated. When Kitson was courting a new recruit to work as his agent, he would take the man on patrol with him. When they were deep in the bush, Kitson would hand his own pistol to the man, keeping only a machete for himself. This was a risky gesture, but Kitson believed that entrusting his secret agent with a weapon was a way of conveying ‘that he was absolutely one of the team’.

Frank Kitson in Kenya (Still from ‘Kitson’s Class’ in documentary series War School, BBC One London, 9 January 1980)

The British eventually suppressed the rebellion, but at a staggering human cost. 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. Kitson had been awarded the Military Cross, for valour, in 1955, for his ‘gallant and distinguished services in Kenya’. ‘I wondered if perhaps some of my good fortune might have been due to the fact that I did think just a little bit more like a terrorist than some of our commanders,’ he mused afterwards. ‘I wondered how much of the African mentality I had absorbed. Was I becoming callous and ruthless and treacherous – to mention some of their less attractive characteristics?’

Kitson had found his calling. There might be no more world wars to fight, but there were plenty of colonial insurgencies. In 1957, he ventured to Malaya, where he battled communist guerrillas in the jungles of Johore and was awarded a Bar to his Military Cross. From there he was dispatched to the Sultanate of Muscat and Oman, to contend with a rebellion in the desert. Next he did two stints in Cyprus, where Greek and Turkish Cypriots had gone to war, and was given command of his own battalion.

In 1969, Kitson spent a quiet year away from the battlefield, on a fellowship at Oxford University. Amid the Gothic architecture and manicured quadrangles, he embarked on a new project: an effort to systematise his thinking about counter-insurgency. He studied Mao and Che Guevara and drew on his own combat experience, to produce a manuscript with the anodyne title Low Intensity Operations. In this book, Kitson advanced an argument that would become a cornerstone of later counter-insurgency thinking: it is important not merely to put down an uprising but to win the hearts and minds of the local population. The book also focused heavily on the gathering of intelligence. It made a point so obvious that it almost went without saying: if you want to defeat an insurgency, it helps to know who the insurgents are. By the time Kitson finished the book, in 1970, he had emerged as perhaps the pre-eminent warrior-intellectual of the British Army. When he finished at Oxford, he was promoted to brigadier and sent to the site of Britain’s latest small war: Northern Ireland.

Army headquarters at Lisburn lay eight miles outside Belfast, behind fortified blast walls lined with sandbags and barbed wire. 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 soldiers were often just as young and inexperienced as the paramilitaries they were fighting: gangly, pimply, frightened young men who were scarcely out of their teens. They were spread across the country, at bases and barracks and makeshift billets. Two companies of Black Watch soldiers were billeted in a vast aircraft hangar. Another company resided in a bus depot, where soldiers bunked down in empty buses. The soldiers were being deployed to Northern Ireland for four-month tours, before rotating home again.

It could be a hugely dangerous assignment, with a multitude of armed factions blending into close-knit communities. In light of the constant risk of getting picked off by a sniper or torn apart by a homemade bomb, some of the more introspective soldiers were forced to wonder: What would success look like? How would you define victory? They had been sent to Northern Ireland to quell the unrest during the summer of 1969, but since their arrival, the bloodshed had only intensified. What would they have to achieve before they could all go home? The army that deployed in the Troubles was not the army that had fought the Nazis. It was an organisation 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. As one of Kitson’s subordinates later put it, ‘Within his area of responsibility he was the sun around which the planets revolved, and he very much set the tone.’

The biggest challenge facing the army when Kitson arrived was a shortage of solid intelligence. The men and women who became paramilitaries, whether republican or loyalist, looked like everyone else in the civilian population. So how to identify them? In previous decades, the membership of the IRA had been relatively static – the same names came up year after year. But the old police files were in desperate need of an update, now that there were new recruits flocking to the cause every week. This difficulty was only exacerbated by the blunderbuss approach favoured by the army. ‘When I was first there, the tactics were rather to stand in a line, pump the place full of gas, and let people chuck bricks at you until they got tired of it,’ Kitson later recalled. ‘Not a very good idea because the gas did so much damage to the local people. It made them hostile.’

In Low Intensity Operations, Kitson had observed that the aim in counter-insurgency situations should be to ‘destroy the subversive movement utterly’. But it’s difficult to destroy a target that you cannot see. 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. Among themselves (and occasionally in the press) the soldiers would decry their adversaries’ lack of humanity, saying, ‘These people are savages.’ Hughes and his men were out there, invisible and silent, embedded in the community. At Palace Barracks, outside the city, where many of the soldiers were stationed, you could hear the bombs going off in Belfast at night. The windowpanes would shudder.

With blasts in central shopping areas, you might suppose that the army would have no trouble finding frightened or disaffected civilians who were willing to help them by furnishing information. 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.

Brendan Hughes was not the only one with a habit of quoting that Mao line about the fish and the sea. Kitson liked it, too. But he put his own spin on the sentiment. A fish can be ‘attacked directly by rod or net’, he advised. ‘But if rod and net cannot succeed by themselves it may be necessary to do something to the water.’

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 in terrorism at the time. 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’.

But the lists of suspects that the RUC produced were not merely skewed to target Catholics – they were also out of date, and included many people who had no involvement whatsoever in the armed struggle. Because of the Irish tradition of naming sons after their fathers, elderly men were dragged off under the mistaken assumption that they were their sons, and sons were arrested because the authorities thought they were their fathers. (Sometimes, finding both father and son at home and uncertain about which one they were after, the army simply took both.) Nearly a third of the suspects seized that morning were released after two days. The army had arrested a bunch of people it wasn’t looking for while failing to arrest most of the people it was looking for, all while further embittering a Catholic population that was highly embittered to begin with. An official study by the British Ministry of Defence later conceded that internment had been ‘a major mistake’. In the words of one British officer who took part in the sweep, ‘It was lunacy.’

As the presiding counter-insurgency 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. His quarrel was not so much with the use of the practice in general as with the specifics of its application in this instance. Kitson had endorsed the use of internment in Kenya and elsewhere. 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’. He reportedly quipped, of locking people up without trial, ‘It’s better than killing them.’ This view may seem callous in retrospect, but the sentiment was echoed at the time in the British press. The Telegraph suggested that some of the Catholics who were locked up without charge ‘admit to preferring internment to the chances of being shot outside’.

Kitson’s chief criticism of internment in Northern Ireland was that it did not come as a surprise. Brendan Hughes, who knew a thing or two about intelligence himself, was not picked up in the raid – because he knew in advance that it was coming. In late July, the army did a kind of dry run, conducting searches and arrests, and the operation looked to Hughes like an effort to gather information. He was right. The army had devised this preparatory phase in order to make sure the addresses on its list were up to date. Another hint about the army’s intentions was rising from the ground twelve miles outside Belfast: on the premises of a former air force base, a capacious new prison camp was being constructed, a facility capable of housing large numbers of detainees. If you were paying attention, it was not a question of whether mass internment would be introduced, but when. Brendan Hughes, having realised this well in advance of the raid, simply went underground, along with his men. After the sweep, the IRA held a press conference to announce, with smug satisfaction, that the massive operation had succeeded in netting hardly any Provos at all.

Dolours Price was not one of those picked up. When the raids happened, she was out of town, on a visit to London. The army had come for her father, but he wasn’t there either. He knew they were coming and was already on the run. But Dolours’s childhood friend Francie McGuigan was arrested. It was not just Francie and his father, John, who were involved in the armed struggle; his entire family was. Francie was the oldest of seven children, all of whom would end up doing time. When the raid happened that summer, his mother, a sturdy woman named Mary, was already locked up, serving a sentence of almost a year in Armagh jail for taking part in a peaceful protest. It was around four in the morning and Francie was asleep in bed when the door burst open and soldiers flooded the room. They dragged him out of the house in his underpants while another soldier pulled his father onto the street. John McGuigan collapsed on the pavement, but Francie could not come to his aid. He was thrown into the back of a lorry. As it drove off, Francie looked out of the back window and caught a glimpse of his father, still on the ground.

John McGuigan ended up being held by the police for several days. When he got out, he could not find his son. Francie had not come home, so John assumed that he must still be in custody. But when he telephoned Crumlin Road jail, where many of the internees had been taken, they said there was no Francis McGuigan there. Next John telephoned the army, but they told him that everybody arrested in the raid had subsequently been turned over to the police. People were being killed in the streets, and John began to fear that Francie might be dead. He saw a local man he knew, who confirmed his worst suspicions. ‘There’s a boy down in the morgue,’ the man said. ‘I think it’s your Francie.’ Distraught, John made his way to the morgue and asked to see the body.

It was another boy. It wasn’t Francie. John was overcome with relief. But if Francie wasn’t dead, and he wasn’t being held by the army or the police – then where was he?

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, with several other prisoners, onto a Wessex helicopter. They flew for a period of time; it was hard to say how long. Nobody would tell Francie where they were going. Then, under the roar of the helicopter’s rotor, he heard a sucking sound and a louder roar and realised that, though they were still flying, someone had just slid open the helicopter’s door. Now Francie felt hands on him, jostling him, moving him. His handcuffs were removed and he managed to wrap his arms around his knees and draw them tight to his body, folding himself into a compact ball. He still couldn’t see anything because of the hood, and he was panicking, and now he felt the hands pushing him out of the open door of the helicopter and he was falling.

But another set of hands was on him now, and he felt the ground beneath him. What had seemed, in his blindness, to be a free fall to certain death ended up being just a few feet: the helicopter had been hovering close to the ground. 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, unable to see anything because of 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. As it happened, Anthony Farrar-Hockley, who until the month before had served as commander of land forces in Northern Ireland, had himself once been tortured as a prisoner of war in North Korea. ‘The IRA call themselves soldiers and say they’re carrying out warfare, so they must be prepared to be frightened if they’re captured and interrogated,’ he remarked.

Initially, the techniques had been taught to British soldiers as a way to resist harsh interrogation and torture. But eventually these methods migrated from the portion of the curriculum that was concerned with defence into the portion that dealt with offence. They had been employed for nearly two decades against insurgents in British-controlled territories – in Palestine, Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus. But they had never been memorialised in any written manual, and were instead passed down from one generation of interrogators to the next, an oral tradition of human cruelty.

‘What’s your position?’ the interrogators asked McGuigan. ‘Who is on the Belfast Brigade staff?’ They wanted names – names like Gerry Adams and Brendan Hughes, the names of McGuigan’s commanding officers and his fellow volunteers. As one day bled into the next, with no sense of time, McGuigan’s psyche became warped by sleep deprivation and hunger and the relentless noise. He felt as if he was starting to lose his mind. When the interrogators asked him to spell his own name, he would garble the answer. When they instructed him to count to ten, he found that he couldn’t. For a long time, they had him chained to a cast-iron radiator, and the cuffs chafed his wrists until the skin was raw and tender. Many of the men began to suffer from hallucinations. At one point, convinced that he would never make it out alive, McGuigan bashed his head against the radiator until blood seeped down his face.

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.) When Francie McGuigan was finally returned to Crumlin Road jail, he saw his father, and the older man broke down and cried.

There is no record, at least in the public domain, of Frank Kitson’s views on ‘interrogation in depth’. But it seems unlikely that he was troubled by it. Rough tactics were a signature of the colonial campaigns in which he specialised. 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’. A subsequent investigation by the British government found that some of the interrogation techniques used against the so-called Hooded Men constituted criminal assault. 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 11 September 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 hand-picked from all across the British Army. They dressed in plain clothes, wearing bell-bottoms and denim jackets, and grew their hair long. Within the army, they were known as the ‘Bomb Squad’, because one of their responsibilities was reconnaissance, and they would stake out locations where they expected paramilitaries to plant a bomb. Soldiers of Irish origin were deliberately recruited, in order to blend in with the locals.

Members of the MRF drove around republican enclaves, conducting covert surveillance. But they also got out of their vehicles, in the heart of Indian country. They posed as road sweepers and dustmen. They huddled with the vagrants drinking methylated spirits by the side of the road. They also began to set up secret observation posts, creeping into shops and homes that had been damaged by rioting or fire. A single brick would be extracted from a walled-up façade, allowing an MRF member hiding inside to look out on the neighbourhood. One woman who worked for the MRF went door-to-door, selling cosmetics and gathering intelligence as she went. 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 sub-machine gun hidden under the seat. They had to keep the weapon out of sight, one MRF member would later explain, because they were camouflaged so effectively that if they passed an army outpost and were spotted with a gun, their own British colleagues ‘would open fire and we would be shot’. It was an MRF team that had burst out of the green van in West Belfast and attempted to murder Brendan Hughes. 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.

‘We wanted to cause confusion,’ one MRF member recalled. If people believed the paramilitaries were responsible, it would erode their standing in the community and preserve the image of the army as a law-abiding neutral referee. This was particularly true in those instances where the MRF, seeking to assassinate a target, ended up inadvertently killing an unaffiliated civilian instead. One summer night in 1972, a twenty-four-year-old woman named Jean Smyth-Campbell was sitting in the passenger seat of a car at a bus terminal on the Glen Road when a bullet pierced the window and then her head. At the time, the police announced that ‘no security forces were involved’ in her death and implied that there might be some connection to ‘political bodies’ (a shorthand for paramilitary groups) in the area. Smyth-Campbell’s family came to believe that she had been shot by the IRA. It would be four decades before they learned that she was almost certainly killed by the MRF.

Frank Kitson was a maestro of press manipulation. In the aftermath of a spasm of violence, he would summon the local Guardian correspondent, a young writer named Simon Winchester, to visit him at army headquarters for a briefing. Kitson would proceed to spell out, with great certainty, the circumstances of the relevant incident, citing the army’s classified intelligence files on the victims. Winchester, feeling lucky to have the scoop, would then dutifully report that the dead man in question had been a quartermaster or an ordnance expert or a senior marksman for the Provos. Winchester liked Kitson, whom he thought of as ‘the little Brigadier’, and they became friends; the young correspondent would make social visits to Kitson’s family at their home on the army base and play cards with Kitson’s daughter. It was only later that Winchester came to realise how shoddy British intelligence on the Provos was at that stage, and to suspect that much of the information he had parroted was simply wrong. He eventually concluded, and acknowledged publicly, that he had been used by Kitson as a ‘mouthpiece’ for the army.

Kitson’s Strangelovean attributes made him an object of obsession for the IRA. The Provos studied Low Intensity Operations and featured Kitson in their propaganda. In the fevered imaginations of the paramilitaries, he became an outsize antagonist, talked about but rarely seen, ‘Kits the Butcher of Belfast’. Already prone to wartime superstition, the Provos began to attribute any freak occurrence that they could not otherwise explain to the mind games of the shifty British strategist, as if he were some sort of poltergeist. There were plans to kidnap Kitson, though none of them ever came to fruition. The Provos were said to have a ‘death list’, with the names of priority targets for assassination; Frank Kitson was right at the top.

But the Provos were not the only ones to keep a death list. As the MRF conducted its surveillance and developed intelligence, the unit had its own catalogue of targets whom the operatives were authorised to shoot on sight. In the MRF’s secret briefing room in the heart of Palace Barracks, the walls were plastered with surveillance shots of the biggest ‘players’ among the Provos – their targets. According to an account by one former member of the MRF, the key figures on the wall included Brendan Hughes, Gerry Adams, and Dolours and Marian Price.

8

The Cracked Cup (#ulink_047cb7f3-b56e-5a4c-bab0-0c25c9d183fb)

A prison floated in Belfast Lough. The HMS Maidstone was a five-hundred-foot ship that had been used during the Second World War to service submarines for the Royal Navy. When the Troubles broke out, the vessel was hastily recommissioned as emergency accommodation for two thousand British troops arriving in Belfast, then recommissioned again, as HMP Maidstone – Her Majesty’s Prison. The ship slouched in the harbour, at a jetty, twenty feet from land. The prison quarters consisted of two bunkhouses beneath the deck: stuffy, overcrowded spaces in which prisoners were confined in three-tiered bunks. The light was dim, filtering through a few small portholes. The space was ‘not fit for pigs’, as one prisoner put it.

One day in March 1972, armed guards escorted a high-profile prisoner onto the Maidstone. It was Gerry Adams. After being on the run for months, Adams had been snatched by troops in a dawn raid on a West Belfast home, and now he was ushered roughly into the hold of the ship. He was greeted warmly by friends and relatives who were being held there, but he soon came to hate the place, which he thought of as a ‘brutal and oppressive sardine tin’. He may have been a hardened revolutionary, but Adams was not a man who was indifferent to nourishment. He liked a good meal, and the food on the ship was foul.

Adams was also in pain. When he was arrested, he had refused to acknowledge that he was in fact Gerry Adams. Instead he made up a pseudonym – Joe McGuigan – and insisted that was his name. He was taken to a police barracks and interrogated, and eventually one of the few RUC officers who knew him by sight came in, took one look at him, and said, ‘That’s Gerry Adams.’ Adams didn’t care. He continued to insist, stubbornly, that his captors had the wrong man. He had been ruminating, lately, about counter-interrogation techniques. ‘I had seized upon the device of refusing to admit I was Gerry Adams as a means of combating my interrogation,’ he later recalled. ‘By continuing to assert that I was Joe McGuigan, I reasoned that I would thwart the interrogation by bogging it down on this issue.’

The interrogators beat Adams, but he wouldn’t say a word. They tried good cop, bad cop – one of them going completely berserk, pulling out his gun and threatening to shoot Adams, only to be restrained by the other – but Adams didn’t break. It was only when he sensed that the interrogation was finally coming to an end that he acknowledged what everybody already knew: that he was Gerry Adams. By that time, his interrogators had been arguing with him for so long over the simple question of what his name was that Adams had managed to tell them nothing of any substance. ‘Of course, my strategy had been reduced to a charade by this time, but it had given me, I felt, a crutch to withstand their inquisition,’ he later observed. ‘To remain silent was the best policy. 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.’

When he was hauled onto the Maidstone, Adams saw the prison doctor and explained that, after all the beating, his ribs felt tender.

‘Is it sore?’ the doctor asked.

‘It’s sore when I breathe,’ Adams replied.