Talking terrorists and making peace with bad people

Talking to Terrorists: A Personal Journey from the IRA to al Qaeda

As the medium of television expires, so the clichés that inform it become more desperately obvious. Nowadays, every documentary presenter is obliged to take viewers "on a journey", in which he or she discovers stuff on behalf of the audience.

This convention underpins Peter Taylor's episodes from Irish Republican and Islamist terrorism, for his Talking to Terrorists is "not an autobiography but the story of a journey". Taylor has dealt with Irish Republican terrorism since the late 1960s, and earlier published a trilogy about the main actors in that conflict. His television documentaries may not be "art", in the sense that Adam Curtis's Power of Nightmares BBC series was "art", but the workmanlike Taylor is honest enough to recognise that the threat from terrorism is real, and not a conspiracy against our civil liberties.

Taylor's unexceptional thesis in his new book is that in most conflicts, governments have found covert ways of talking with people publicly branded as psychopathic monsters. British intelligence officers spoke via metaphorical "bamboo pipes" (notably through Brendan Duddy, a freelance intermediary) with the Provo leadership. Taylor shares the view of Tony Blair's chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, that it is always good to talk, even if this means airbrushing the efforts of the British Army from the picture.

Taylor writes that 9/11 "marked a turning point in my journey", which is one way of describing the murder of three thousand people. He has ventured far and wide in order to talk with low-level jihadis and those who seek to thwart their murderous activities. Among the choice moments in the book is a British jihadist preparing to record his shaheed video: "When you mention Allah, do that [points finger]. When you're making a point. You're warning the kuffar. Give a bit of aggression, yeah, a bit loudly if you want," advises a comrade in footage MI5 secretly recorded.

Taylor gets to talk with many low-echelon moralising morons, rather than the main instigators, namely the "imams" and "sheikhs" who radicalise the willing dupes and set them on their lethal trajectory. He has also talked with those captured jihadists who were taken to the West's own "dark side": interrogation centres from Poland to Thailand, via Egypt and Morocco.

The Ethiopian asylum seeker Binyam Mohamed gets yet more publicity here. He voluntarily left Britain to spend 40 days learning to use weapons in al Qaeda's Al Farouq training camp in Afghanistan. Subsequently picked up by the Pakistanis in Karachi, they handed him to the CIA, who "rendered" him to torturers in Morocco.

MI5 has been absolved of knowingly posing him questions while this was going on.

Taylor thinks we should cut a deal with al Qaeda, with Bin Laden in the role of Martin McGuinness, sharing biscuits and a cup of tea. Taylor believes al Qaeda might be ready to "park" the goal of a Caliphate. And then the way forward is all too clearly revealed: "With President Obama in the White House, Palestine could be the issue that begins to unlock al Qaeda, with Bin Laden able to claim a victory of sorts as American support for Israel is reduced."

So there we have it. Set aside all the thousands of victims of al Qaeda atrocities, murders which Bin Laden directly ordered, and sacrifice Israel, and there will be no Islamist threat in Bradford, Luton or Walthamstow. That is a journey's end I rather wish Taylor had not arrived at.