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
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.
‘Stop breathing,’ the doctor said, without a flicker of a smile.
If the staff on board the Maidstone seemed bitter, and security was particularly tight, there was a reason. One frigid January evening a couple of months earlier, seven republican prisoners had stripped to their underwear, slathered their bodies in butter and black boot polish to insulate against the cold, sawed through an iron bar, squeezed through a porthole, dropped one by one into the icy water of the Musgrave Channel, and swum several hundred yards to the opposite shore. They had come up with the idea for the escape after watching a seal navigate the barbed-wire netting that had been placed in the water around the ship.
All seven men made it to the far shore and scrambled