Terrorism, Simon van Stryker told me back inside the Georgia house, is a means, not a cause. You can love the sinner, but you must hate the sin. Terrorism, by its very nature, is random. It must strike the innocent. Terrorism must kill the child if it is to shock the adult. Terrorism must hurt the helpless if it is to gain the world’s attention. Terrorism, he told me again and again, is evil. It did not matter how noble was the cause that the terrorist served, the methods were evil. You could wrap terrorism in a flag of the most delicate green, but that did not make it right.
“They have no choice!” I tried to argue with him.
“They chose evil,” he said. A terrorist chooses to use the bullet and the bomb because he knows that if he relinquishes those weapons then he is reduced to the level of ordinary politicians who had to struggle with the mundane problems of education, health, and unemployment. Terrorists, having no answer to those matters, talked in transcendent terms. They claimed their bullets would bring in the millennium and their bombs would make a perfect world. But in the end, van Stryker told me, it was still just terror, and if I wanted one creed to cling to over the years then I should remember that no matter how good the cause, it was wrong if it used terror as a means of achievement.
“What years?” I had asked.
“The years,” he said, “that you would otherwise have spent in prison for running drugs. I saved you from those years, so now you will give them to me. And to America.”
He explained that the CIA’s Division of Counter-Terrorism used the usual weapons of espionage against the various terrorist and insurgent groups which threatened American interests, but those usual weapons were rarely useful. Terrorists were too cautious to confide their plans to telephones that could be wiretapped, and they were too experienced to share their information with a circle of people who could be suborned into treachery. Terrorist cells were wonderfully designed to resist intelligence operations. It was possible to smash one cell, but to do no damage to any others. Terrorism’s secrets were protected by a wall of rumor and a moat of disinformation. Some terrorists did not even claim responsibility for atrocities they performed, preferring that the West should never learn who had inflicted the hurt.
“And the West is the target,” van Stryker told me. “We Westerners are the possessors, so we must be attacked and hurt and mauled and bombed and humiliated. But we in the West have one terrorist organization that is all our own, and which is trusted by the others, and if we can insert one good man into that organization then it’s possible, just possible, that he can travel far and deep into its darkness and one day, in his own good time, bring back news from that journey.”
“You mean me.”
“I mean you.”
“You want me to betray the Irish?”
“Which Irish?” He had rounded on me scornfully. “The IRA claims to detest the Free State’s Dublin government as strongly as they hate London. The Irish electorate doesn’t vote for the IRA and most of the Irish people want nothing more than to see the IRA disappear! Besides, my enemy is not just the IRA. My enemies are the friends of the IRA; the Libyans and the Palestinians.”
“So how do I reach them?”
“Let the IRA work that out. We’ll merely equip you with the skills that will suggest to them that you might make a perfect courier. IRA activists can’t move in Europe without the police of a dozen nations watching, but the Garda and the British Special Branch won’t take any interest in an American yacht-delivery skipper.”
We were walking along a damp path between the glistening leaves of the magnolias. “Supposing the IRA don’t do what you think they’ll do?” I asked van Stryker.
“Then I’ll have wasted your time, and a lot of government money.”
“And what do I make from it?” I had asked truculently.
“You’re free, Paul. You’re not in a Florida jail. You’ll be taught a trade, given the capital to start your own business, and a ticket to Ireland.”
“And when will you be finished with me?”
“When does a fisherman come home?”
“When his fish-hold is full.”
“So bring me back a rich catch in your own good time.”
We had stopped at the edge of the garden above a deep valley where a freight train wound its way northward. “Why me?” I asked him.
Van Stryker had laughed. “Because you’re a scoundrel, Paul, a bad lot, a rogue, a rascal. I can hire any number of MBAs, straight-arrows, Rhodes scholars every one, but how often do I find a scoundrel who runs guns to Ireland and who murdered his father’s killers? No, don’t deny it.” Van Stryker had offered me a quirky, almost affectionate smile. “When you sup with the devil, Paul, it is prudent to use a very long spoon and you’re my spoon.”
“And suppose I never come back?”
Van Stryker shrugged. “I didn’t say there was no risk. Maybe you’ll leave here and do nothing? Maybe you’ll betray this program? Maybe, probably perhaps, I’ll never hear from you again. All I can do is offer you a new life and what you make of it is up to you. You aren’t the only one I’m sending into the darkness, and if just one of you comes home it might be worth it.”
And now I had come home to tell my secrets.
All but one.
Gillespie spent the first few days constructing a framework of my years abroad. He wanted names, places, facts, dates. Then, when he had the chronology straight and a rough idea of just what secrets I could tell, he brought in the experts who came to the mansion by helicopter to pick my brains. They were the agency’s specialists on the Middle Eastern terrorist groups.
Gillespie imported no one to listen to my Irish tales, but instead took me through those years himself. I told him how I had gone to live in Dublin and then, at Brendan Flynn’s request, to Belfast where I had started a yacht-surveying and -delivery service that acted as a marvelous cover for the smuggling of weapons, explosives and gunmen across the Irish Sea. I described how I had planted two bombs in Belfast, not because the IRA had needed another bomber, but because they wanted to see if I could be trusted.
“Did anyone die in the explosions?” Carole Adamson asked.
“No,” I said. “We phoned in warnings.”
“We?” Gillespie asked.
“A guy called Seamus Geoghegan led the unit. They brought him in from Derry.”
“We know of Mr. Geoghegan,” Gillespie said. He told me Seamus was now in Boston, fighting off a British attempt to extradite him. Seamus’s defense was that he was a political refugee entitled to the protection of the American Constitution, while the British argued that he was a common murderer; the American Anglophiles claimed he was an illegal immigrant and the Anglophobes said he was a hero. It was a tangle out of which only the lawyers would emerge enriched. Gillespie asked me about Seamus, but I could add nothing to the public record.
“How did you feel about the two bombings?” Gillespie asked. Outside it was snowing gently, covering the already snow-heaped bushes with a new layer of glittering white.
“I was doing what van Stryker wanted me to do. I was infiltrating the IRA.” I said it defiantly.
“But did you enjoy it?” Gillespie probed.
“I got drunk after it. Both times.”
“Did you enjoy it?” He insisted on the question.
“It was exciting,” I allowed. “You take risks when you plant a bomb and you don’t want the excitement to end, so when the job’s done you go to a bar and drink. You boast. You listen to other men boasting.” That was true, but I could just as easily have said that we got drunk because we did not want to think about what we had just done. Because we knew that nothing had been achieved by the bomb and nothing ever would be achieved. The only believers in terrorism were the fanatics who led the movement and their very youngest and most stupid recruits. Everyone else was trapped in their roles. I remembered Seamus Geoghegan shaking like a leaf, not out of fear, but out of a kind of hopelessness. “It’s a terrible thing,” he had told me that day, “but if you and I had been born in Liverpool, Paulie, we’d be fighting for the focking Brits, wouldn’t we?” There was nothing ideological in the fight, nothing constructive, it was just a tribal rite, a scream, a habit, a protest. But it was also exciting, full of comradeship, full of jest and whiskey and daring. The cause gave our violence its license and it salved our consciences with its specious justifications.