That was the most difficult part to explain to the American who sat across from him and did not speak. “Love of one’s country—” O’Neill had begun at one point, but the gray eyes that stared at him did not seem to comprehend the words, let alone the motive.
“You don’t know what it is to be an Irishman and a Catholic in the North,” O’Neill had said finally.
“Nor what it is to be black in America or a Jew in Russia or a stateless Palestinian,” Devereaux had added. And O’Neill had shrugged because there were some things beyond explaining.
O’Neill had volunteered his services to the IRA shortly after the British moved to illegally intern thousands of suspected IRA sympathizers in August, 1971. O’Neill himself had been arrested and held briefly and then released without apology. The incident had angered and humiliated him.
None of this greatly interested Devereaux, but he probed carefully at the edges of the life story with the methodical interrogation rhythm he had used debriefing Russian defectors.
The IRA had decided to use O’Neill as a courier because of the large territory he covered for the shoe firm in both the Republic to the south and to western Scotland. He was trusted and considered an ideal man to move sums of money from the South to the North (much American money was being laundered through southern Irish banks) and to move certain “packages” from the Belfast “factory” to Scottish postal addresses where they would be sent to targets in England.
All of which had led to O’Neill’s “problem”—as he put it.
One bright August morning in 1972, two CID men from Scotland Yard seized O’Neill as he debarked from the British Rail ferry at Stranraer in Scotland. He was carrying fourteen letter bombs in his luggage, all addressed to various London banking officials and all to be mailed from a box in Glasgow central station.
O’Neill hesitated as he told this part of the story. But the probing never let up; gently, insistently, Devereaux pried it out of him.
First they took him to Manchester, and then moved him to a jail in Birmingham for reasons he never fathomed. And they beat him. With rubber truncheons. All afternoon. All night. He was forced to stand for hours. They took all his clothing and made him stand naked. They beat his kidneys until burning urine dribbled down his naked leg. They would leave him for a time and then they would return and beat him again.
In the morning — the second morning — they told him he would probably spend the rest of his life in Her Majesty’s prisons.
In the afternoon, he received his first visit from Hastings. They had kept O’Neill — naked and shivering — in a cell without windows. He had wrapped his stinking body in a rough blanket. That is the way Hastings first saw him. The light from the corridor beyond the cell blinded O’Neill. He did not know if it was day or night.
Hastings was civilized and O’Neill wept when the man offered him tea and biscuits.
They sat in O’Neill’s cell and talked for a long time. About Northern Ireland and the IRA and the problems of being the Catholic majority in the North ruled by a Protestant minority.
Hastings was so sympathetic.
Said he was a Catholic as well and that his family had been persecuted in the days of the first Elizabeth when it was a capital crime to hear Mass or hide a priest. Yes, Hastings sympathized entirely.
Although, this business with letter bombs. Well, old darling, this was really shameful. Didn’t he think so?
Hastings went away that afternoon and, as promised, O’Neill was given his clothing back and transferred to a cell with a window that allowed O’Neill to tell it was night.
They didn’t beat him anymore.
On the third morning, Hastings returned and they had breakfast together. At that point, O’Neill had turned to the Englishman almost as a friend and asked him to get word to his wife at least about his situation. Hastings said he would.
And again, Hastings expressed sympathy for O’Neill’s plight. But added that O’Neill had gotten his quite commendable sense of Irish patriotism all mixed up with service to these criminals now operating under the disgraced banner of the IRA. “I mean, the ‘troubles’ of the twenties were one thing, but this. Come on, ducks, it isn’t patriotic to go blowing off the hands of mail clerks, is it?”
Another day passed. No sounds from beyond the cell. O’Neill sat alone. Hastings’ words worked on him. O’Neill prayed to God and promised to atone for his sins.
The next morning, they got down to business. It was quite simple, really. Hastings explained it gently: O’Neill would now work for British Intelligence.
“Now, now, old luv, don’t become agitated. There’s really nothing for it. On the one hand, we have these letter bombs and a certain sentence of at least thirty years in Wormwood Scrubs or some other perfectly awful hole and hardly a chance of ever seeing kith and kin again — and that means those nine lovely children, darling — or, really a quite safe and painless service for Her Majesty’s government which would put a couple of extra quid in the old pay packet — certainly could use that, I’ll be bound, ducks — and a chance to save poor, dear Belfast from the ravages of both the IRA and all those soldiers. I mean, it’s hardly a contest, is it?”
Devereaux rose and went to the window to stare at the castle in the fog while O’Neill told his story of becoming an informer for the English. Devereaux could hear something like a sob in the Irishman’s voice. He did not look at O’Neill again until he was through.
In the end, commercial traveler O’Neill resumed his journeys and turned up at home quite recovered from the rubber-truncheon beatings — except for the pain of urinating — and no one was the wiser. And just as routinely, the Daily Mirror told a splashy story about a mail clerk in Glasgow who discovered a cache of letter bombs in a London-bound bag and heroically flung the lot of them in the Clyde river.
“So, you see, sur, they had me and turned me into an informer,” O’Neill said at last. “I’m not proud of it. I will wear it to me grave. But what was I to do, sur?”
Devereaux had cleaned the vomit from the rug himself, compulsively smoothed the bedclothes, and examined the bullet hole in the plaster ceiling, while he listened. But he did not know what to say to the sad little Irishman with nine kids caught up in a game he could not play well.
He prodded O’Neill with another question, and O’Neill — almost gladly — went on: Hastings had fiddled O’Neill’s papers in British Intelligence before he retired and O’Neill the informer had become an unperson in London. But not to Hastings, who still held those papers over O’Neill. Hastings and O’Neill transferred their total allegiance to the new masters in Washington and O’Neill still felt the chains around him.
“So you looked in his room—”
“After you. After you — after he died. I saw his body—”
“After?”
“I couldn’t kill a man—”
“Only by letter. Only by bomb,” said Devereaux.
O’Neill turned his eyes down. “I’m a coward then as well as a traitor.”
“Yes,” said Devereaux. His voice was too hard, too without pity.
“O my God,” O’Neill began, and stopped.
“You looked around the room, didn’t you?” said Devereaux gently.
“Yes,” whispered O’Neill.
“For the papers about you,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Stepped around the body?”
“Yes.”
“And you didn’t find them.”
O’Neill looked up. “You have them—”
Devereaux shook his head. “No one has them, I’ll bet. I doubt very much that dossier still exists.”
“Do you now, sur?”
“It seems unlikely Hastings would keep it around, and it would be doubly dangerous — for him — if it were discovered. No, I think our departed brother undoubtedly destroyed the fact of O’Neill’s existence when he retired from Intelligence.”