1. 24 HISTORY
TLS JUNE 3 2016
for radical internal reform and strategic open-
ing to the West. There is no better account than
Service’s of the internal machinations that
repeatedly threatened to foil Yakovlev and his
fellow reformers. Those who warned of the
dangers of moving too fast were ultimately
proven right. When the Soviet Foreign Minis-
ter,EduardShevardnadze,resignedinDecem-
ber 1990, he warned of a rising “dictatorship”
in Moscow, with Gorbachev in thrall to the
KGB and defence ministry. Less than a year
later came the failed August coup and the cas-
cading declarations of independence that tore
the Soviet Union apart.
The tapering off of the Cold War is also a
story of remarkable restraint, especially during
thepresidencyofGeorgeH.W.Bush,whotook
office in January 1989. By his first November
inoffice,Bushcouldhavegivenaspeechonthe
ruins of the Berlin Wall, a made-for-television
triumph after Reagan’s famous Berlin appear-
ance two years earlier. The copy would have
writtenitself:“Thepeople,notMr.Gorbachev,
have now torn down this wall”. Bush chose
instead to stay at home. In the summer of 1991,
after signing START, arguably history’s most
significant arms reduction accord, he could
havepubliclysupportedUkraine’sbidforinde-
pendence. The cheering crowds were there in
Kiev for the stoking. He instead urged caution
and denounced the perils of nationalism, a
movethathiscriticsdubbedhis“chickenKiev”
speech. In each instance, the American Presi-
dentknewthedifferencebetweenbeingatough
negotiator and a gloating one.
The real heroes of the late Cold War were
that particular species of public servant – the
boring but visionary realist – who turned out to
be the critical link between the theoreticians of
change and the leaders who had to produce it.
In the Soviet Union and the United States, the
principal figures were the respective foreign
policy chiefs, Shevardnadze and the Secretary
ofState,GeorgeP.Shultz.Theirmajortriumph
was to convince their own governments of the
sincerity of the other side. It was a vast game of
three-dimensional chess played against multi-
ple opponents at the same time, both internal
and foreign. Service’s telling of it is sympa-
thetic and imaginative, even thrilling, reading.
Forallthat,Shultzhadaratherconventional
ex-Washington afterlife. He floated away into
the world of think tanks, board memberships,
andblack-tiedinners.Atninety-five,heisnow
instrikingdistanceofGeorgeF.Kennan’slon-
gevity on the US foreign policy scene. She-
vardnadze, by contrast, went on to become the
president of a country, his native Georgia. He
was thrust from the role of adviser into that of
leader, but his real talents lay in prodding a
superior,notsteeringanunrulystate.Heended
up playing a doubly historic role – as the last
Soviet foreign minister and the rescuer of his
homeland, which had descended into civil war
before he became its president – but left both
positions under a cloud. He had denounced the
turn towards dictatorship in the Soviet Union
but, by 2003, was labelled a dictator himself, if
aratheravuncularone.Hewasoustedfromthe
Georgian presidency in a bloodless coup.
If there are lessons from the end of the Cold
War, they are about the power of strategy,
good sense and caution, not the natural victory
of liberal democracy and the free market.
These points are all the more important today
when, for the first time in a quarter-century,
there is again a reasonably coherent philoso-
phyofnationaldevelopmentthatdirectlychal-
PAUL BEW
motivated by a low-grade sectarian agenda
and absolutely nothing to do with the secular
and progressive ideals of Republicanism. An
Official IRA man would certainly not seek
their support if in a spot of trouble with the
law, especially as the easiest way to get to
Dublin without bother would be simply to get
the train from Belfast, which would deposit
you there in about two hours. As a regular
traveller on this line during the Troubles I
recallnotasinglesecuritycheckoneitherside
of the border, though I do also recall meeting
several Official IRA people making their way
back and forth across the border. Equally I
recall no daylight stops driving over the
border on the main road in this period, though
someone driving at night might well be
stopped.
Nairacfellintothehandsofadrunkenlynch
mob made up of Provisional IRA supporters
and two IRA members. He was brutally tor-
tured and then shot dead in a remote rural area
near Ravensdale Forest. Liam Townson, the
IRA man who shot him in the head and who
was later convicted for the crime, has said that
Nairac revealed nothing under torture. Nai-
rac’s body has never been recovered. The
author thinks that it was not unreasonable of
Nairac not to know the names of Official IRA
men in the Border area – as emerged under
Townson’s interrogation – but as some of
these people, for example the late Dessie
O’Hagan, were well-known figures in the
press at the time, this was another example of
Nairac’s lack of preparation for this mission,
whatever it was.
The author is a gallant and serious
researcher quite willing to pursue numerous
blind alleys with enthusiasm. Charles
Guthrie, now Field Marshal Lord Guthrie, is
said to have reassured another senior officer
worried by Nairac’s impetuous nature that he
would be “looked after”, but Guthrie can
recall nothingofthis conversation. Someoffi-
cers believed that Nairac’s interest in Ireland
derived from his time at Trinity College
Dublin. In fact Nairac was never a student
there,butthisdoesnotstoptheauthoroffering
some sense of the intellectual heritage he
would have encountered had he been there.
Kerr signals his nervousness about his lack of
an Irish historical background but in fact
makes a very solid effort to fill in this context.
The two major errors are nothing to do with
Ireland. Lenin was not Jewish and Winston
Churchill’s expiatory time at the front after
Gallipoli lasted seven months, not two years.
A l i s t a i r K e r r
B E T R A Y A L
The murder of Robert Nairac GC
474pp. Cambridge Academic. £27.95 (paperback,
£16.95).
978 1 903499 85 6
W
hat is it about the British and their
attitude to those who fall in the
intelligence war against the IRA?
In November 1920 when Michael Collins’s
hitmenkilledeightBritishintelligenceagents
in Dublin in one night, Winston Churchill
reacted initially not with sympathy but with
grumpy exasperation. When a young guards
officer, Robert Nairac, was murdered after
being taken from a South Armagh pub in May
1977, as Alistair Kerr shows in this fascinat-
ing book , the initial reaction of some of his
fellowofficerswasalsogrumpyexasperation.
Nairac was seen as an impulsive cowboy type
of intelligence officer and had been a source
of concern to at least some of those who had to
work with him. On the night in question he
had dispensed with back-up but the Army
response and search operation – when it was
clear something had gone badly wrong – even
so appears to have been less than impressive
in Kerr’s view.
The truth is that Nairac, at first sight a
Boy’s Own hero, and in some ways exactly
that, was a more complex personality. He was
notanentirelytypicalproductofthefinemili-
tary tradition of Catholic patriotism of his
public school, Ampleforth. He is commemo-
rated in the school today just as his friend Col-
onel H. Jones, who died in the Falklands, is
commemorated at Eton. At Oxford Univers-
ity, Nairac was what was known contemptu-
ously by some dons at the time as a “twice
boiled chicken”, meaning that he came from
afamilywiththeresourcestoallowhimayear
off to re-sit a failed entrance exam. Despite a
university boxing career, Nairac had his
troubles at Oxford, enduring a nervous break-
down. One early sign of his addiction to
excitement was a violent and from Nairac’s
point of view successful fight with four
“townies”whothoughttheyhadencountered,
late at night, some feeble undergraduate, not
a boxing champion.
There is no doubt, however, that Nairac’s
cover story in that pub in South Armagh was
just about as feeble as it could be. He claimed
to be an Official IRA man for whom things
had got hot in Belfast, and was seeking advice
on how to cross the border into the safety of
the Irish Republic. It is entirely possible that
the police might be on the heels of an Official
IRA man who was engaged in criminal activ-
ity at this moment. Nonetheless it is utterly
inconceivable that an Official IRA man
would choose to go to the Provisional IRA
heartland of South Armagh and ask for assist-
ance. No wonder the young woman in the bar
Nairac approached with his story was imme-
diately suspicious and fingered him to the
local Provo heavies who were nearby. The
Official IRA had fought a brutal and bloody
feud with the Provos in the 1970s which left
behind a legacy of bitterness and hatred on
both sides. A Belfast “Stickie”, as the Official
IRA were known, would typically regard the
South Armagh Provos as rural primitives
Failure of
intelligence
The unexplained murder of a British agent
lenges what used to be called the Western
model. Xi Jinping, Narendra Modi, Shinzo
Abe and, for that matter, American politicians
such as Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, have
described versions of it. But Putin has become
its most vocal proponent. Through his head-
line-makingMunichspeechofFebruary2007,
followed by other major addresses in Moscow
and Sochi in March and October 2014, he has
articulated a sustained and coherent critique of
American foreign policy that is also a rethink-
ing of the principles that the US and most of its
allies have long taken for granted.
This new model might be described as the
five S’s: sovereignty, spheres of influence,
security, statism, and social conservatism.
Those who subscribe to the model see their
own national boundaries as sacrosanct, but
they believe in a penumbra of influence radiat-
ingoutfromtheirownborders.Thatinfluence,
they believe, should be explicitly recognized
byotherpowers,andtheyseethegreatestguar-
antee of peace in the world as a patchwork of
mutually exclusive zones policed by regional
hegemons. They privilege the idea of security,
seeing a strong national defence as paramount,
but they also define security in extremely
broad terms: journalists, opposition figures,
dissenters and even cheeky musicians can all
bethreatstosecurity,especiallyiftheyareheld
to be somehow in league with foreign forces.
This model expects that the state will be
dominantandpowerful,thatitwilldemandthe
allegiance of its citizens, and that it will act to
root out any potential domestic threats. The
state is perceived as the maker of law but only
occasionally its subject, especially when it
comestomattersofsecurity.Thisstate-centric
view, however, is fully compatible with the
idea of the market, so long as state-sanctioned
monopolies or business interests with direct
ties to governing elites hold the lead role in
finance, trade, industry and the selection of
political winners.
It is also compatible with relatively open
borders. During the Cold War, communists
attempted to silence dissenters by imprisoning
them or preventing them from going abroad.
Savvier leaders are happy to see them leave.
The model also stresses the power of social
conservatism, especially in opposition to an
ideal of tolerance and multiculturalism that is
seen as weak and licentious. From Russia to
China,NigeriatoNorthKorea,itisnotdifficult
to see elements of this model at work, in vari-
ous guises and with different emphases.
Althoughthetriumphoftheliberal-democratic
model was once famously hailed as the end of
history, this alternative vision for states and
societies is emerging as its greatest challenger.
That is why it is all the more important to
appreciate the serial miracles of the period
between 1985 and 1991: when the world
rejected suicide, learned how to talk, and dis-
mantled its largest country in relative peace.
Diplomacy is the art of talking to people one
can’t yet imagine as friends. Its requirements
are pragmatism, a belief in the value of com-
promise, and the expectation that you will
leave the table with both less and more than
you originally imagined. These are ancient
skills, but they wither easily, especially in his-
torical moments when one’s opponents seem
not just misguided but ill-intentioned or even
evil. Given the stand-off over Ukraine, the
confusionoverSyriaandIraq,andtheburbling
disputes in the East and South China Seas, it is
probably time to revive them.