I explained that no one could attend Hasbaiya, or any of the other Palestinian training camps for that matter, without being vouched for by someone the Palestinians trusted, and I had been the person who verified that the trainees I took to the camp were who they claimed to be and not some American or Israeli agent.
“And you introduced eight IRA men to the camp?” the woman asked.
“Four IRA men, one woman, and three Basques. The IRA didn’t really think their guys needed outside training, but every now and then they’d send someone.”
“So how long did it take you to make these introductions?” the woman asked. “A day?”
“Five minutes. I’d take the person to the commandant’s office, say hello, and that was that.”
“And then you’d leave?”
“Sometimes. Sometimes they invited me to stay a few days.”
“Tell us about the camp.”
I described it. Hasbaiya was built in the grounds of an old winery on the upper slopes of Lebanon’s Beka’a Valley. Most of its territory was used as a training ground to turn Palestinian refugees into storm-troopers, but at the top of the camp was a more secret area where terrorists came to perfect their skills of ambush, assassination and destruction. Hasbaiya’s creed preached that death was the ultimate deterrent and that so long as the world feared death, so long was killing the terrorist’s best friend, but for death to be useful it also had to be familiar, and so Hasbaiya used death as an integral part of its syllabus. Every trainee went there knowing that men and women died there, and that to be squeamish in the face of that slaughter was to demonstrate an unworthiness of the cause.
Gillespie broke in. “Let me clarify this. You’re saying trainees died?”
“Sometimes, yes.” I paused, and I was thinking of Roisin, but when I spoke again I talked of another American girl who had gone to Hasbaiya full of the fervor of one who would change the world. “Her name was Kimberley Sissons,” I said, “and she came from Connecticut. I think she said her father was a corporate lawyer. She had a degree from Harvard.”
“You’re telling us they killed her,” the Langley woman asked.
“Yes.”
“For what reason?” Gillespie asked in his precise manner.
“They didn’t have to have a reason.” I hesitated again, wondering how to explain the inexplicable. “Were you ever in the army?” I asked Gillespie.
“The Marine Corps.”
“Well I’m told that sometimes the army or the Marines will give a recruit a live rabbit and tell him it’s dinner, but if the recruit doesn’t have the guts to kill the rabbit then he goes hungry. I think that’s how they treated the girls at Hasbaiya.”
Gillespie and the woman stared at me for a few seconds. “Girls?” It was the dark-haired woman who asked.
“It was mainly the Western girls who were killed. Not always, but usually.”
Carole Adamson intervened. “Was this a religious prejudice?”
“It was more to do with the fact that the Western girls argued.”
“Argued?” Gillespie at last sounded shocked.
“Look,” I tried to explain, “the Palestinians come from a culture that says a woman’s role is to be subservient to the authority of men. Then these middle-class American girls arrived, full of revolutionary fervor learned from some Marxist professor at Stanford or Harvard, and there was bound to be friction. The girls were all feminists, all argumentative, and all deeply into inter-cultural bonding, and they found it quite difficult to understand that their ordained place in the revolution was to be bonded between a lice-ridden mattress and an unwashed Palestinian.” I had sounded callous, but beneath the table my hands had been shaking. The dark-haired woman had gone silent and just watched me.
“So they were shot?” Gillespie asked. “For arguing?”
“Not always shot. Kimberley Sissons was strangled with copper wire.”
“Just for arguing? For standing up for her rights?” Carole Adamson sounded horrified.
“I told you,” I said, “it was a demonstration.”
“So who was the demonstrator?” Gillespie asked.
“Another trainee was ordered to kill her, and if he’d hesitated or disobeyed, then he’d have been the next to die. It was their way of making the trainees rethink their attitude to death.” I paused, knowing I had not given the real flavor of Hasbaiya; the febrile excitement that infected the place, the enthusiasm for killing and the triumph of mastering its dangers. “Maybe they were trying to destroy conscience?” I suggested.
“Did you kill anyone at Hasbaiya?” Gillespie asked.
“I told you, I wasn’t a trainee. I just escorted people there.”
“That doesn’t answer the question,” Carole Adamson said with an unaccustomed asperity.
“I did kill a man, yes,” I admitted.
“Why? Were you ordered to?”
I shook my head. “It was a fight.”
“Who was he?”
“A guy called Axel,” I said, “just Axel. I didn’t know his other name. He picked the fight, not me.”
“When was that?” Gillespie asked.
“On my last visit.”
“In ’86?”
“Yes.”
“And you’d simply escorted someone there?”
“Yes.”
“And he picked a fight? Why?”
I shrugged. “God knows.”
“How did you kill him?”
“With a spade,” I said, “like an axe-blow.” I had told the truth, but only a tiny shred of the truth, but the rest of the tale was my nightmare and not to be shared with Gillespie’s notebooks or Carole Adamson’s diagnosis or the dark woman’s encyclopedic knowledge of the Palestinians and Libyans.
Gillespie was consulting the early pages of his notebook where he had written down the framework of my story, the chronology. “Eighty-six,” he said. “Was that when the IRA stopped trusting you?”
“Yes.”
“Was that anything to do with Hasbaiya?”
I hesitated again. Outside the window the snow was dazzling, glinting with a billion specks of light. “Yes,” I admitted, knowing that in the end I would have to tell a part of the story. “I took an American girl to Hasbaiya,” I said, “and she accused me of being a CIA agent.”
“The girl’s name?” Gillespie was writing in his book.
“Roisin Donovan,” I said as casually as I could. “I think she spelt her first name R-O-I-S-I-N.”
“American, you say?” He frowned at me.
“Like me,” I said, “tribal Irish. But she came from Baltimore.”
“So tell me about her.”
I feigned ignorance. “To be honest I didn’t know too much about her, except that she’d moved to Northern Ireland and was very active in the Women’s Section of the Provisional IRA.” I could feel my heart thumping and I was sure Carole Adamson must be registering my discomfort. I myself was horribly aware of everything in the room; the crackle of the poor fire, the creak of my chair, the scrape of Gillespie’s pencil on the pages of his notebook, the skceptical gaze of the dark-haired woman.
“Why did she accuse you?” Gillespie asked. “Describe the circumstances.”
I took a breath. “I took her to Hasbaiya. We reached the camp and I took her to Malouk’s quarters. Malouk was the commandant. She went inside, spoke with him, and ten minutes later he asked me to stay on in the camp. Which I didn’t want to do because I had a boat-delivery job lined up for the following week, but Malouk wasn’t a man you argued with, so I said sure, and that night he arrested me.”
“Because Roisin Donovan had accused you?”
“Yes.”
