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’.
