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

‘What did your mummy say when she left?’ the interviewer asked.

‘She had a big squeal,’ Agnes said.

‘Do you know why your mummy was taken away?’

They didn’t. Helen was a lovely-looking teenager, with the same pale and narrow face as her mother, her dark hair swept to either side. She sat with Billy on her lap and nervously averted her eyes from the camera. The boys were fair and ginger. Tucker was sitting on Agnes’s lap, wearing a blue turtleneck and shorts, though it was the dead of winter, revealing his knobbly knees. The kids were twitchy, their eyes roving all over the place. Michael sat to Helen’s side, nearly cut out of the shot. He stared at the camera, blinking.

Michael, Helen, Billy, Jim, Agnes and Tucker McConville (Still from BBC Northern Ireland news footage, January 1973)

‘Helen, I believe you’re looking after the family,’ the reporter said. ‘How are you managing to cope?’

‘Okay.’

‘When do you think you’ll see your mummy again?’

‘Don’t know.’

‘Nobody’s been in touch with you at all?’

Agnes mentioned that they had seen Granny McConville.

‘She must be a fairly old lady by now,’ the reporter said.

‘She’s blind,’ Agnes said. Agnes was thirteen. She noted, hopefully, that her mother had been wearing red slippers when she was taken away. It was like an image from a fairy tale. A clue. Agnes said that the siblings would ‘keep our fingers crossed and pray hard for her to come back’.

Granny McConville may have been part of the reason that the children had not reported Jean’s disappearance to the police. She told people that she was afraid to, though she did not spell out precisely why. The children believed, fervently, that their mother would soon come home. But things began to look bleak. They were able to draw on Jean’s pension. But where one might expect the close-knit community in Belfast to rally around and care for such a family, dropping by with a hot meal or assisting Helen with the children, nobody did. Instead, it was as if the whole community in Divis simply chose to ignore the flatful of abandoned children on St Jude’s Walk. It might simply have been that this was a time of crisis in Belfast and people had worries of their own, or there could have been some darker reason. But in any case, nearly everyone in the community simply looked the other way.

A social worker did visit the children not long after Jean was taken. The authorities had received a call about a pack of siblings who had been looking after themselves. A bureaucrat created a new file and indicated that the children’s mother appeared to have been abducted by ‘an organisation’ – shorthand for a paramilitary group. The social worker spoke with Granny McConville, who did not seem overly perturbed. According to notes from the meeting, Jean’s mother-in-law asserted, primly, that Helen was ‘a very capable girl’ and seemed to be managing with the children. Helen did not get along with Granny McConville any more than Jean had. ‘No fondness there,’ the social worker wrote.

This was not exactly a healthy environment for young children, and the social worker recommended putting them into care – turning them over to the state, to be brought up at a group home. But the McConville children flatly refused. Their mother would be returning any day now, they explained. They needed to be at home when she got back.

They held on to one another, marooned inside the flat. Bedtime was suspended and dishes piled up in the sink. The neighbours, rather than help, started to complain to the authorities that they couldn’t sleep at night because the children were making so much noise, with nobody to supervise them, and you could hear the racket through the walls. Even the Catholic Church declined to intervene. One report from the social worker, just a week before Christmas, noted that a local parish priest was aware of the children’s predicament but was ‘unsympathetic’. As other local children were composing Christmas lists, the McConvilles were running out of food. They didn’t have much money coming in. Only Archie, who worked as an apprentice roof tiler, had a job. The children started getting into trouble. Michael would stay out late and shoplift food. Eventually he was caught, along with one of his brothers, stealing chocolate biscuits from a shop in town. Asked by the police why he had done it, he said that he and his siblings had not eaten in several days. They were starving. Michael was eleven years old. When the authorities questioned the McConville kids about their parents, Jim told them, ‘My daddy is dead and the IRA took my mummy away.’

There is no record in the files of the Royal Ulster Constabulary of any investigation into the disappearance of Jean McConville. She was abducted at the end of the most violent year of the conflict, and this sort of incident, horrible though it was, may not have risen to such a level that the police felt the need to concern themselves. A detective from Springfield Road police station did stop by the flat on 17 January, but the police were not able to offer any substantive clues and do not appear to have pursued the matter. Two local Members of Parliament, when they discovered what had happened, decried the kidnapping as ‘a callous act’ and appealed for help in finding Jean. But nobody came forward with information.

Belfast could sometimes feel more like a small town than a city. Even before the Troubles, the civic culture of the place was clotted with unsubstantiated gossip. Almost as soon as Jean McConville had disappeared, rumours began to circulate that she had not been kidnapped at all – that, on the contrary, she had absconded of her own free will, abandoning her children to shack up with a British soldier. The children, who were already seized with worry, became aware of these stories. They would hear people whispering, feel the hot glare of judgement when they saw their neighbours in the shop or on the street. Back at the flat, some of them would wonder aloud if it could be true. Could she really have left them? It didn’t seem possible. But how else to explain the fact that she had not returned? Archie McConville would later conclude that all that pernicious whispering amounted to more than just salt in the wound. It was a kind of poison, he decided, ‘an attempt to wreck our minds’.

One by-product of the Troubles was a culture of silence. With armed factions at war in the streets, an act as innocent as making enquiries about a vanished loved one could be dangerous. One day that February, a posse of boys from the youth wing of the IRA seized Michael McConville. They took him to a room where they tied him up and stabbed him in the leg with a penknife. They let him go with a warning: Don’t talk to anyone about what happened to your mother.

The interlude of freedom did not last. By February, social services had initiated the process of relocating the children to orphanages. One day, three women turned up at the flat and declared that they had been granted tenancy and were ready to move in. This was happening all the time in Belfast, a cruel expediency of wartime. It was like an awful game of musical chairs: no sooner was one family uprooted than another uprooted family would take their home. The children refused to leave. But the state had decided, and ultimately the kids were made wards of court.

The act of disappearing someone, which the International Criminal Court would eventually classify as a crime against humanity, is so pernicious, in part, because it can leave the loved ones of the victim in a purgatory of uncertainty. The children held out hope that they had not been orphaned, and that their mother might suddenly reappear. Perhaps she had developed amnesia and was living in another country, unaware that she had left a whole life behind in Belfast.

But, even then, there was reason to believe that something terrible had happened to Jean McConville. About a week after she was kidnapped, a young man whom the children did not know had come to the door of the flat and handed them their mother’s purse and three rings she had been wearing when she left: her engagement ring, her wedding ring, and an eternity ring that Arthur had given her. Desperate for information, the children asked where Jean was. ‘I don’t know anything about your mother,’ the man said. ‘I was just told to give you these.’

Years later, Michael McConville would look back and isolate that encounter as the moment he realised that his mother must be dead.

10

The Freds (#ulink_c30c606b-60ca-5257-865a-010c6ffd28e5)

One autumn day in 1972, a laundry van pulled into the Twinbrook estate, on the outskirts of Belfast, and Sarah Jane Warke got out and walked up to one of the houses. The van was a regular presence in the neighbourhood. There were not a lot of shops in the area, so it was common to see traders going door-to-door, offering their wares. The company was called Four Square Laundry, and once a week Sarah would come to the door, pick up a pile of dirty laundry, and then return it, clean and neatly folded, several days later. People liked the service; the prices were cut-rate. And people liked Sarah, a pretty, ingratiating young woman. The driver, Ted Stuart, was a young man from County Tyrone, who mainly stayed behind the wheel. But he was an easy-going fellow, and the local customers liked him, too. The kids on the estate called him Teddy. Twinbrook was home to both Catholics and Protestants, but it was relatively calm by the standards of Belfast at the time.

Sarah walked up to one of the residences. A housewife came to the door, and she and Sarah were exchanging a few words when suddenly they were interrupted by a loud cracking noise. Sarah spun round to see that two men had appeared. One of them held a machine gun; the other had a rifle. They were standing in a nimbus of smoke, crouched, with their backs to Sarah, spraying bullets from close range into the driver’s side of the laundry van, where Ted was sitting. Sarah stood frozen in the doorway, watching helplessly as Ted was killed. Then one of the gunmen turned in her direction.

After the debacle of the internment raids, the British Army and the Special Branch of the Royal Ulster Constabulary had continued to focus, with ever greater intensity, on cultivating sources within both loyalist and republican paramilitary groups. Brendan Hughes started to develop a suspicion, in 1972, that he might have an informant in D Company. His intelligence officer told him that a young volunteer, a former asphalt layer named Seamus Wright, had been arrested earlier in the year – and that ever since his arrest, he would go missing from time to time.

Wright, who was twenty-five, had recently married, and Hughes paid a visit to his wife, Kathleen. She said that Seamus had been arrested in February and held by the British, but then he had telephoned a shop near her home and left a message for her, saying that he had ‘scarpered’ – run away. Seamus was in England now, Kathleen continued. He was in Birmingham; she had an address. Hughes suggested that perhaps Kathleen should go there and see Seamus. He was enlisting the young bride of a suspected spy to serve as a spy herself: she would pay Seamus a visit and try to get him to return with her. Then she would report back to Brendan Hughes.

Kathleen flew to England. But when she got there, Seamus refused to come home. So she returned alone and met Hughes at a house on Leeson Street. During this debriefing, Kathleen confirmed his worst fears. Seamus had been turned by the British, she said. When she saw her husband, he had been accompanied by an Englishman – some sort of handler. But there was a catch, she continued: Seamus wanted out. He planned to flee, to escape his handlers. But he wanted a guarantee that if he came back to Belfast, he wouldn’t be shot by the IRA. This was a bold proposal from someone who had violated the trust of the Provos and gone into business with the enemy, a transgression that was generally punishable by death. But sensing an opportunity to learn how the British were going about their recruitment of double agents, Hughes consented, and gave the guarantee.

Not long afterwards, Seamus Wright returned to West Belfast, where he was interrogated in a house for two days. He explained that during his initial arrest by the British, they had told him that they could link him to an explosion that had killed a member of the security forces. They were so adamant that they had the goods on him that Seamus began to suspect he had been grassed – given up to the authorities by a ‘supergrass’, a paid informer. Once his handlers had secured his cooperation, they asked him about guns and explosives. But what they really wanted to know about was the Dirty Dozen. They told Seamus that if he would just give them the names of everyone in D Company, he would not be charged with any crime.

Hughes was dismayed to discover that he had a traitor in his company – a traitor who had revealed the identities of the Dirty Dozen. One irony of the Provos’ pretence to being a legitimate army was that in those early days, they were structured much like the British Army, with battalions and companies and a clear, legible chain of command. What this meant, in practice, was that if the enemy succeeded in turning someone – even a relatively junior player like Seamus Wright – they could discern the org chart of a large swathe of the organisation.

After agreeing to be an informant, Wright said, he was flown to England, for training as a double agent. Then he was flown back to Northern Ireland, with the understanding that he would now begin to gather intelligence on the Provos. As Hughes listened intently, Wright described a secret compound at Palace Barracks, where the army housed its prized informants. There was a clandestine unit inside the army, Wright said – they called it the MRF, and it managed both republican and loyalist informants. Wright explained that the army controlled a stable of individuals who had been induced to switch sides and were now working undercover for the British. Members of the MRF would show them newsreel footage of funerals and surveillance pictures of suspects, then ask them to pick out the people they knew. Sometimes Wright’s handlers would load him into an armoured personnel carrier and drive into the Falls. As they prowled through the narrow streets, Wright would peek through the vehicle’s gun slits and identify the pedestrians they passed.

The MRF had a name for this secret coterie of traitors. They called them the ‘Freds’. Nobody in the Provos ever learned the source of the nickname, but there was no way to read the work of Brigadier Frank Kitson and not recognise that the Freds were a counter-gang. Now the eye slits in those white hoods that Kitson’s Mau Mau informants wore back in Kenya had been replaced by the gun slits in a Saracen armoured vehicle. Wright said that the compound where the Freds were kept was segregated, so he could not identify most of the other informants. But there was one he could name. ‘There is a guy I have seen in there,’ Wright said. ‘He is one of us.’

The man Wright named was a young Provo, a boy, really, a member of Ballymurphy company named Kevin McKee. He was still a teenager, a handsome adolescent with big blue eyes, shaggy dark hair and a slight overbite. People called him ‘Beaky’. He had grown up in West Belfast and liked to sit in the front room of the family home, listening to records on the old-fashioned radiogram. He joined the youth wing of the IRA, throwing stones at the British Army and the RUC. When loyalists would string a Union Jack on a telephone pole, Kevin would shimmy up and pull it down, to cheers from the people below. He was a charismatic kid, caught up in the romance and intrigue of the Troubles. There was an innocence to him. But he also went on ‘snipes’ (as sniping operations were known) and planted bombs. As one of his IRA contemporaries in Ballymurphy put it, ‘He didn’t lack balls.’

One night, Kevin McKee was arrested and hauled into Springfield Road army barracks. Two of his aunts ventured to the barracks to see what had happened to him, but when they arrived, they were told that he had escaped. Eventually the family received letters from Kevin in England, and assumed that he must have moved there to hide from the army and the police.

But the truth was, he had become an informant. A British Army log from the night when he was arrested noted that after being taken into custody, he ‘gave information’ about a particular property. The log then listed a series of weapons that were recovered from an IRA arms dump at that address. According to the log, McKee was arrested just before 11 p.m., and the house was searched just after midnight. So he must have flipped almost immediately. Seamus Wright told Hughes that McKee ‘loved’ his involvement in the Freds. And the members of the military units in the MRF took a shine to the cocksure teenager. They liked his bravado.

When Frank Kitson was recruiting captured Mau Mau in Kenya to work in counter-gangs, he found that they needed to be ‘tamed’, in a process he described as if it were the breaking of a horse. He avoided fanatical believers, who were too difficult to bring across to the other side, and focused instead on recruiting people who had joined the movement for a reason that was essentially social: because their friends were joining. In one of his books, Kitson noted that the very best recruits were the ones with ‘a spirit of adventure’, people who ‘thought that it would be fun to be a gangster and carry a pistol’. They were ‘the easiest to handle because they were the easiest to satisfy’. In Kenya, these were the types of recruits to whom Kitson would give his own gun, letting them carry it on patrol to indulge their sense of adventure and make them feel like a trusted part of the team. In Belfast, the MRF gave Kevin McKee a pistol and a shoulder holster, which he wore around, flaunting the costume as if he were a Chicago gangster. As a Fred, he was entitled to carry the weapon and make use of the firing ranges on the army base.

McKee was wearing the shoulder holster when the Provos tracked him down. Under interrogation, he confessed to his betrayal, just as Seamus Wright had. But now the Provos found themselves in an interesting position. On the one hand, they had identified two defectors, who had betrayed the organisation by agreeing to work with the British. Normally, they would have been court-martialled, found guilty, shot in the back of the head, then dumped by the side of the road. But the British did not appear to know that Hughes had discovered this breach in the IRA’s security – and Wright and McKee would do anything, now, to save their own lives. If their confessions were to be believed, the British Army had orchestrated an elaborate spy operation targeting the Provos, yet the precise dimensions and operational details of that effort remained unclear. So Hughes was presented with an opportunity: rather than execute Wright and McKee, he could use them to gather intelligence on the British, as triple agents.

For Wright and McKee, such a move might be risky, but it was preferable to the alternative of a speedy execution. Wright actually went back to work for the Freds, with instructions, this time, to provide his British handlers with only low-level information or, better still, misinformation. Asked to identify a Provo on a street corner, Wright could tell the British he was a Sticky instead. This was a dangerous game. If the army discovered the deception, Wright could be sent to jail. He could also be shot by the MRF, which had shown little compunction about the occasional extrajudicial killing. But by demanding that Wright and McKee supply him with intelligence, Hughes was offering each man an opportunity to earn his life back: if they could deliver for the IRA, Hughes promised them, they would be granted ‘immunity’ for their initial crime.

The men delivered. What they described to Hughes was an extensive intelligence-gathering network that the British had developed around Belfast. The centrepiece of the operation was a laundry service, with an office in the city centre. Four Square Laundry operated an actual door-to-door laundry service, picking up clothing and linens and then subcontracting to an industrial laundry in Belfast to wash the clothes. But before they got there, the clothes were analysed by British authorities. Traces of explosives could be detected on garments in order to determine whether bombs were being made or stored at a property. Analysts could also compare the clothing being picked up at a given residence with the number, age and gender of the people ostensibly living there; a mismatch might indicate that it was an arms drop or a call house. The laundry van had been specially configured with a hollow roof, in which a soldier could conceal himself, snapping photos of people and houses outside through a hidden opening.

As soon as Hughes learned about the laundry operation, he wanted to sweep in and upend it. But Gerry Adams cautioned him to hold off. ‘Sit back,’ Adams said. ‘Do more intelligence.’ Hughes and his men learned that, in addition to the laundry service and the office in the city centre, the MRF was operating a massage parlour above a house on the Antrim Road, where customers would sometimes find themselves so blissfully relaxed that they casually disclosed things to the chatty masseuse. By early October, Hughes and his team decided that they had gathered enough intelligence. It was time to move. They couldn’t hit these locations one by one: as soon as they attacked the first one, the MRF would know that the whole operation was blown. So the Provos would launch three near-simultaneous strikes – on the van, the office and the massage parlour. The objective was to wipe out the whole intelligence-gathering apparatus in the space of a single hour.

The man behind the wheel of the Four Square Laundry van, Ted Stuart, was an undercover British sapper with the Royal Engineers. Ever since childhood, he had wanted to be a soldier. He was twenty and had been serving in Northern Ireland only since June. As the Provo hit team fired on the van, he died almost instantly.

When the gunmen turned on Stuart’s partner, Sarah Jane Warke, she plunged into the house of the local woman she had been talking to. Warke was also an undercover soldier, a member of the Women’s Royal Army Corps. She pulled the woman and her children in with her and – thinking quickly – told them that this must be a loyalist ambush. The woman helped Warke scuttle out of the back door and escape.

The gunmen had orders not just to kill the young pair who operated the laundry service, but to strafe the ceiling of the van with bullets, in order to kill the soldier inside. In their haste, or panic, however, they did not do so, and if there was a third soldier concealed in the van, he escaped alive. Elsewhere in Belfast, another team of gunmen shot up the massage parlour, and a third shot up the office, though neither managed to hit any other members of the MRF.

The Four Square Laundry operation marked a major victory for the Provos. Hughes was proud of how it had played out, and in a memoir, decades later, Gerry Adams would call it ‘a devastating blow’ to the British. The question now was what to do with Wright and McKee?

On the day of the Four Square operation, Wright came home and told his wife, Kathleen, that he would have to be careful, because before his release by the British, he had signed some papers relating to the Official Secrets Act. Then, that night, he disappeared. A car drove up to his family’s door on Bombay Street. Wright exchanged a few words with the driver, got into the passenger seat, and was driven off. When he did not return, Kathleen went to Leeson Street to ask the Provos what had become of him. They told her that he had not been taken by the IRA. After hearing that, Kathleen became convinced that her husband might have been snatched by the army. But the army, too, denied any involvement in his abduction. Military sources suggested to the press that Wright could have run off on his own and might be hiding out in Scotland.

At around the same time, McKee vanished as well. One of his aunts had told him, ‘The IRA’s been looking for you.’

‘I’ve done nothing wrong,’ McKee replied, confident as ever.