orbis quintus

I finally got around to reading the cover story in April’s Atlantic today.  It is an article about the ruthless world of double agents in the IRA.  All well and good.  The author of the piece, Matthew Teague, describes a meeting with Denis Donaldson:

In Belfast I met with Denis Donaldson, a Sinn Féin party leader and an IRA veteran alleged to have run the IRA’s intelligence wing. He’s a folk hero who led hunger strikes early in the Troubles, and British investigators say he traveled the world, cultivating terrorist contacts in Spain, Palestine, El Salvador, and elsewhere: a hard IRA man if there ever was one.

When I mentioned the names of Scappaticci and Fulton, Donaldson’s shoulders slumped. “I still can’t believe it,” he said, shaking his head. “My God.”

So here we have an IRA man expressing shock at the effectiveness of the spies.  Flip on to the end of the article and we get this:

A few weeks later, back in the United States, I received a phone call early one morning from a source in the United Kingdom. He said, “Yer man Denis Donaldson”—the legendary IRA hunger-striker who had met with me in his kitchen—“has just been expelled from Sinn Féin, about three minutes ago. For being a British spy.”

Donaldson, it turned out, had been spying on the IRA for two decades.

A revelation!  In the context of the article as a whole, it was an effective one. 

I closed the article and prepared to get some work done, when this caught my eye on the Reuters feed:

LONDON (Reuters) – A former senior member of Irish nationalist party Sinn Fein, expelled by the party in December after he admitted he had been spying for Britain, was found shot dead on Tuesday, Britain’s Sky television reported.

Denis Donaldson was found dead in County Donegal in the Republic of Ireland, the report said, without giving further details.

Donaldson was a convicted IRA bomber who spent time in prison with now Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams and was head of Sinn Fein’s international department.

Donaldson and two other men were arrested in 2002 and accused of spying for the Irish Republican Army’s political ally Sinn Fein at the Stormont parliament in Belfast.

It later emerged that he had in fact been a mole for the British inside the IRA for two decades.

Donaldson, who went into hiding after the revelations, said he deeply regretted his activities and apologized to his family and the Republican movement.

Adams said Donaldson had approached the party after police informed him his cover was about to be blown and his life was in danger.

I got chills.

This article is from November 2005, but I thought it was worth mentioning for a few reasons.

First, I like Ben Ehrenreich’s brief presentation of Kadare’s own views on his “dissident” status:

In a polite interview conducted through his translator, Kadare asserted that he had never claimed to be a dissident. “Open opposition to Hoxha’s regime,” he said, “was simply impossible. Dissidence was a position no one could occupy, even for a few days, without facing the firing squad. On the other hand, my books themselves constitute a very obvious form of resistance.”

To anyone who had been able to locate copies of those books, the controversy could only have come off as slightly ironic. With the exception of one untranslated novel featuring an embarrassingly flattering portrait of the tyrant Hoxha himself (according to his translator, Kadare has called the book “the price he had to pay for his freedom”), Kadare’s novels have largely been about collective guilt and the impenetrability of truth. After all, he writes, “ancient tragedies dealt exclusively with that: how to expunge the crime, how to detach it from the clan.” Covering his tracks with layers of myth and metaphor, Kadare again and again buried inexpiable crimes in the very foundations of the state, often quite literally. Blood spills into blood. Everybody hides their sullied hands, even from themselves. Truth itself becomes a labyrinth.

A tad purple, perhaps, but it raises questions on the nature of the life/art divide. Kadare did what he had to to speak out (however obliquely). Would he have been more valuable as a martyr than he has been as an author? Who can judge? Stanislav sent me a link to an Albanian rap video that featured Kadare’s visage rather prominently. The song itself was about Albanian pride, and Kadare was shown as one of the reasons to be proud of Albania. Would Albanian youth respect a craven opportunist? Perhaps, perhaps not…

The question was addressed at length on this very site. The Village Voice article refers to Ms. Renata Dumitrascu’s piece on MobyLives, but neglects to mention the prolonged debate that was carried out here, here, here, and here. David Bellos himself (Kadare’s translator here in the states, as well as the author of a remarkable biography of Georges Perec) even joined the fray.

Not bad for a site that is virtually ignored by the LitBlogs.

I’m sure this issue is long forgotten almost everywhere, but I thought a recap would be nice.