Secret Asset

33

In these post-9/11 days identification was needed even on a UK flight. In his combination-locked cupboard in Thames House, there was an operational passport, in an alias identity, but he did not want to risk that name appearing on a flight manifest, getting caught up in the net of a random check which would trigger a request for an explanation. That would be fatal.

But he had another passport. It too was in an alias, but not one countenanced by any British government authority. Procuring it had been complicated—he’d used a Czech forger, now retired, who’d done work on and off for years for Mossad—and very expensive. It was his insurance policy and it was proving its worth now.

Like the professional he was, he assumed his false identity as soon as he left his house. He was Sherwood, a businessman with interests in Northern Ireland. He had scheduled the day tightly, catching the seven o’clock flight from Heathrow, along with an unremarkable bunch of corporate types and civil servants.

With any luck at all, he would be back in London at two o’clock. His absence was covered by a few days off work. He had told his secretary that he had some medical appointments and would work from home. That sort of excuse deterred all but the most tactless questioner.

Sherwood thought about the don, as he had done virtually non-stop since receiving his phone call. Would he be called a “don” in Belfast? Almost certainly not. Anyway, he was probably a professor by now. There was no doubting his intellect. His judgement was a different matter. That was why he had to go on this quick visit.

What an impressive man the don had seemed—articulate, passionate, charismatic when they’d first met, especially to a fresh-faced undergraduate. Did the don have a “personal life,” that euphemism for sex? Possibly, though it had never been clear. There was that girl he spoke about so often, the firebrand back in Dublin.

There were other ambiguities. The don spent his days in a cloistered world of history and ideas, but was entranced by the world of action. Just talking about it excited him, like an actor who only comes to life onstage. Yet as Sherwood knew from experience, the don lived vicariously. Like one of those armchair Irish-Americans, happy to send money to his IRA cousins from the safety of a Boston barroom, though he’d be insulted by the comparison.

How strange to think of America now, for it was America that had fuelled his own resentments and brought him into touch with the don in the first place.

He had gone to the States during his gap year before university, travelling with Timothy Waring, his best friend from school. They had started in New York, which was to be the first stage of a grand tour by Greyhound bus, the time-honoured mode of travel for English youth keen to see the vast United States.

He never got on the bus. He gave Timothy the $200 they had agreed as the price of collusion, and a selection of postcards, purchased in a pack at a tourist shop on Fifth Avenue. Niagara Falls, Lake Superior, the Rockies, Glacier National Park, the Golden Gate Bridge. Each one carrying a pre-composed message for home, and each one dutifully posted by Timothy as he visited, solo, all those famous sites in the following weeks.

During which time—three weeks—Sherwood had remained in New York, trying to find out as much as he could about the father he had last seen ten years before, six months before he had suddenly died.

He had learned more than he’d bargained for, once he unearthed his father’s closest friend. Harry Quinn, retired features writer on the New York Daily News, now living on Long Island, was happy to meet up with his former pal’s son at his old watering hole, Costello’s Bar on Forty-fourth Street.

They had sat in a booth surrounded by hard-drinking hacks. Quinn made small talk for a while as he drank four steins of beer, then explained, with surprising sobriety, what had really happened to his father. It was not the swift heart attack described by his mother. Instead, his father had jumped off the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge. A suicide, prompted by disgrace.

Disgrace—there was no other word for his father’s downfall, or for the opprobrium that had been heaped upon him. Visiting the New York Public Library’s newspaper holdings on East Fortieth Street, his son had discovered the whole seamy story, recounted in the microfilms of the newspapers of the time.

It had begun altogether differently. In a series of three articles for the New York Daily News, all trailed in a banner on the front page, his father had recounted the confessions of one Samuel Lightfoot, a former member of the SAS. In a long career in the military, Lightfoot had served four event-filled tours of duty in Northern Ireland.

As retold by his father, Lightfoot described a history of brutality and violence by the SAS in Northern Ireland which surprised even its most vigorous detractors. Put simply, according to Lightfoot, he and his fellow SAS members had operated a policy of shoot to kill that was premeditated and sometimes indiscriminate. He described a mission in which he and two other SAS men had shot dead two IRA men on their way to plant a bomb in a Lisburn restaurant; reported in the press at the time, it was viewed only as a successful British counter-terrorism operation. What had gone unreported according to Lightfoot was the fact that the two men, when challenged, had attempted to surrender, but were cut down anyway. Both were unarmed, and contrary to reports, no bomb or trace of a bomb was ever found.

On another occasion, Lightfoot had said, a man crossing a field at night in the countryside of Armagh was assassinated, only to turn out to be a local farmer taking a shortcut home from the pub, with no connection to the IRA at all. The killing was never admitted to by the British military authorities, and remained a mystery, though speculation appeared in the Belfast press that it was just another in a long line of unsolved sectarian murders.

Throughout all three articles, a wealth of documentary detail was produced, specifying times, locations and people involved in what one New York columnist dubbed “BA”—which stood not for British Airways, but British Atrocities. It seemed obvious to readers that only a witness to these SAS operations could describe them so vividly and in such factual detail.

The effect of the exposé had been explosive. In the House of Representatives, the Speaker Tip O’Neill, often attacked by his fellow Irish-Americans for his criticism of the IRA, now lent his name to a resolution demanding an end to all British undercover activity in Northern Ireland. The wire services picked up the Lightfoot story at once, ensuring its appearance in several thousand newspapers throughout the country. Even the august New York Times, usually sniffy about its plebeian counterpart the Daily News, acknowledged the impact of the articles, and one of its Op-Ed columnists suggested their author would be a shoo-in for a Pulitzer Prize.

For at least three days his father would have enjoyed a success most journalists would not even dare to dream about. He would have been endlessly congratulated and feted, and would have basked in the triumph of what was indisputably one of the major stories of the decade.

And then the roof had caved in. Four days after his first article appeared, the Sunday Times of London had run its own bombshell on the front page. The Lightfoot articles, it declared unequivocally, were built upon a mountain of sand; their source, Samuel Lightfoot, was a conman of the first order and a notorious liar. Far from serving in Northern Ireland, his military career had consisted of a brief part-time membership of the Territorial Army, where his sole contact with the SAS had been a solitary weekend outing to their training facilities in Here-fordshire. To add insult to ignominy, Lightfoot had been convicted of fraud in the sixties and served three years in prison.

The uproar had dwarfed even the initial reaction to the articles themselves, making the national evening television news. In Washington Tip O’Neill said “No comment” seven times to one importuning reporter, and the House of Representatives’ resolution was hastily withdrawn. The British Ambassador declared himself “satisfied that the truth has at last emerged.”

In New York the Daily News ran an unprecedented front-page retraction, published an editorial remarkable for its supine contrition, and summarily fired his father. All of which the New York Times gleefully reported, with an exhaustiveness missing from its earlier account of the original articles.

Two months later, his father’s death merited a one-inch story in the Metropolitan section of that newspaper. The Daily News did not report it at all.

The young man had returned to England, where he said nothing about what he had found to his mother or his odious stepfather. They merely thought him uncommunicative, when he proved reluctant to describe much about his bus tour around America.

Inside he was in turmoil, feeling a mixture of bewilderment and shame. How had his father got it so wrong? How had he been fooled by such an obvious charlatan—whose real name, it had emerged, wasn’t even Lightfoot? Was the duped author of these discredited articles really the man of his memory? A gallant, confident, carefree figure—eliciting respect, admiration, and devotion to his memory by his son?

The young man felt only misery now, a state which lasted throughout his first year at Oxford, where he found both its academic and social worlds oddly dispiriting in the face of what he now knew. He did his coursework diligently, but kept himself to himself, brooding about what he now saw as an irredeemably tainted kind of inheritance. He even took to religion, to losing himself in every kind of purely conventional behaviour: to imitating the very kind of person the father he remembered had never been.

It was O’Phelan who saved him, though any gratitude on his own part had long evaporated in the face of the tutor’s own ultimate betrayal.

In his second year he’d met a girl at a dance in St. Hilda’s, an all-women’s college clinging singularly to its exclusion of men. She had been very left wing, and had asked him to a political talk, one of a series given at the Old Firehouse. He’d gone and been bored half to death—the lecturer, a veteran of the Paris Riots of 1968, had droned on for almost an hour about the “battle” for the Sorbonne and the iniquities of the CRS riot police. When the girl had asked him to the next one, he was about to decline, until he saw its title: “From Boston to Belfast: British Dirty Tricks in Northern Ireland and Abroad.” Something like that. It was being given by a lecturer from one of the colleges.

In the event, his left-wing friend couldn’t make it, so he had sat alone, in an audience of only twenty or so Trotskyists and Marxists, while a thin young man spoke in a soft voice (only a hint of Irish there) about what he said the British were really up to.

The thesis was simple stuff, familiar to anyone who had ever listened to an IRA spokesman on TV: far from acting as peacekeepers, the British wanted to retain the status quo of imperialist occupation and would do anything (anything, the lecturer had stressed) to keep it that way.

But the effect of his talk on his undergraduate listener soon became absolutely hypnotic, for after these prefatory nationalist pieties, Liam O’Phelan (that was the speaker’s name) had begun to talk with articulate passion about an undeclared policy of shoot to kill which he said was being conducted by the SAS in Northern Ireland. To the young man’s astonishment, O’Phelan even mentioned the murder of the innocent Armagh farmer that had appeared in his father’s articles.

Afterwards he had gone up to the young don, waiting patiently while some Irish acolyte had chatted with him. When it was his turn, he had asked him whether it wasn’t true that many of his accusations had long ago been discredited.

“What do you mean?” O’Phelan had asked sharply. “Discredited how?”

Well, he had explained, hadn’t there been that scandal in New York, where a reporter, making accusations not dissimilar to those made by O’Phelan tonight, had either colluded with or been duped by a conman? The charges he had made had been fabricated from the start.

O’Phelan looked at him witheringly. “Honestly, you Brits,” he said. “You’ll believe anything your tame press wants you to. The whole thing was a set-up. The man calling himself Lightfoot—he was the source of the story—was a plant of British Intelligence. The poor journalist never stood a chance. Most of what he wrote was completely true, but because Lightfoot set him up no one believed any of it. Bloody clever of the Secret Service,” he said, but without admiration. He added with a shrug, “Not that you’ll believe me.”

So perhaps he was surprised to see the student’s face, for he was nodding, with the hint of a smile—his first smile in a long time. “Oh, I believe you all right. The poor journalist was my father.”

And so began their peculiar relationship. O’Phelan had taken him under his wing, and he had resided there quite willingly, becoming (unofficially of course; he continued with his degree) a sort of pupil of the man. He had even affected an interest in Irish history and Irish nationalism to please the tutor, visiting both the North and the Republic. If O’Phelan ever suspected the sincerity of his attachment to his own cause, he never said so, for by then they had hatched their plot. Anyway, who in the IRA would care about his deepest motives, if they managed to insert him into the very heart of their enemy?

And they shared that enemy. The young man fully accepted O’Phelan’s assertion that his father had been the victim of a conspiracy. Who were the conspirators? Probably the British Consulate in New York, its “cultural attaché”—the usual slot for the MI6 resident—working overtime. Add a few Anglophile American officials, briefing hard to a sympathetic reporter, and presto—one life destroyed. His father summarily fired, left without reputation or livelihood, watching a lifetime’s hard graft lost in the front-page smear of a tabloid. He may technically have killed himself, but by any humane standard he had been killed. They might as well have pushed him off the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge, such was the blood on their hands.

Thanks to O’Phelan he saw his father’s killers in the raw—the members of the English Establishment that people claimed no longer existed. What nonsense, thought Sherwood, as the plane climbed to its cruising level. The Establishment not only survived, it prospered. He was part of it himself.

He remembered how O’Phelan had seen this as an advantage from the start, and gradually persuaded him that he should not feel any embarrassment about his manifest Englishness. He should instead use it as a secret weapon in what they both now agreed was a necessary war.

“No one will ever suspect,” the don had told him. “They’ll think you’re English through and through. Trust me, they never turn on their own. Look at Philby; they believed him when he said he wasn’t a mole. Or Blunt. Even when they knew Blunt was a spy, they let him go on working for the Queen.”

Now as the aeroplane moved over North Wales, Sherwood looked down at Snowdonia. The Welsh managed to be despised by the English, he thought, and yet remained so passive. A few holiday cottages torched, an insistence on bilingual road signs; as far as he could tell, this was the sum of their nationalist efforts.

But were the Irish really any better? His father had hoped so, and for those crucial years at the beginning of his career, so had his son. Yet more than eighty years after Partition, the country was no closer to unification than in 1922. More fools them, he thought bitterly. He’d tried to help (just as his father had, God knows), but they hadn’t wanted any of it. They’d given up the fight just as he was preparing to join them.

The seduction of power—O’Phelan had been right about that. He’d always said the greatest danger Ireland would ever face was the day the English wanted to negotiate.

Over the Irish Sea he remembered his student visits to Ireland, how he had braved the crossing from Holyhead to Dun Laoghaire in wooden boats the size of oversized tugs. Most of the passengers were male, boisterous and happy to be going home, drinking in the bar until they went out on deck and threw up over the railings.

His plane landed in Belfast in light drizzle with a hard bump that threw spray up under the wing. Disembarking, he moved through the terminal quickly, not making eye contact with anyone, gripping his thin briefcase tightly and pulling up the collar of his coat while he joined the taxi queue. Like many of his fellow passengers, he was on his way to a day meeting in Northern Ireland.

The taxi dropped him in the city centre, busy with office workers hunched up in their coats against the rain. At this early hour of the day Belfast looked like any other city—no bag checks, no soldiers carrying rifles, no sign of armoured cars. As he set out walking quickly towards Queen’s, he inspected the people he passed—well dressed, prosperous—so obviously living for the moment and the moment alone. Don’t they understand? he thought bitterly, as he looked at them: an old man in a new cloth cap; a couple under one huge umbrella, trendily dressed and holding hands; a black teenager in a hooded top, moving jerkily to the rhythms of his Walkman.

But then, he had never really felt he was doing it for them. They had moved on.

“How punctual,” said O’Phelan, with a thin-lipped smile. As he turned back into the room, his visitor entered and closed the door behind him.

“Have a seat, and I’ll make some tea. Or would you prefer coffee? There’s whiskey, if you’d like a drink. No? It is a bit early.”

O’Phelan was excited, finding it hard to stand still, gripping the back of his chair with both hands, then letting go and taking a step back to inspect his visitor. “You haven’t aged much, I have to say.” He ran a hand through his thinning hair. “Would that time had been so kind to me.” He sounded self-mocking.

“I thought we might go out somewhere for lunch. There’s a bistro down the road that’s rather good. Would that be safe? But first, I want to hear what you’ve been up to all these years. Tell me all. Oh, but first the coffee, or will you have tea?”

And in his excitement he darted back to the small alcove in the far corner of the room, where he turned on the kettle and busied himself extracting milk from the small fridge, then sugar from the cupboard and two spoons, and of course the china cups and saucers.

“How do you like it, black or white?” he called back over his shoulder. There was no reply, which puzzled O’Phelan only momentarily. For suddenly he was choking, and something was blocking his windpipe. By the time the kettle boiled O’Phelan was dead.