FIFTY-ONE

Peter: what follows went before us. It is as I clearly remember it. It is the truth. I entrust it to you as I once entrusted my heart. You knew what to do then. You will know what to do now. Tread carefully. But do not tread too fearfully. My love goes with you. Les.

HASKURLAY

My recollections of the three months in 1955 that I spent at Kilveen Castle in Aberdeenshire as a participant in Operation Tabula Rasa (better known as Clean Sheet) became ever more confusing as the years passed. Recently, thanks to the dubious wonders of regressive hypnosis and a greater clarity of thought and memory that seems to be just about the only beneficial side-effect of my illness, I have been able to sift the real from the imagined and the forgotten from the superimposed. The truth that has become known to me is a disturbing one. But the researches and enquiries I have carried out leave me in no position to deny, even if I wished to, that it is the truth.

I have not long to live. I am setting down the facts of this sombre matter so that an accurate record of what actually took place will survive me. The use others will make of it after my death is not for me to decide. The future is not something I need care about. That is one blessing of my condition. The past, however, I cannot escape. Nor do I wish to.

The avowed purpose of Operation Clean Sheet, as devised by Professor Alexander McIntyre of Aberdeen University, was to test the receptiveness of fifteen recalcitrant National Servicemen to academic teaching methods under experimental conditions in an isolated setting, the RAF generously supplying Professor McIntyre with his suitably unpromising students. The circumstances that led to my selection — it was an irresistibly attractive alternative to serving 56 days' detention for a second offence of falling asleep on guard duty — were typical. I think we all viewed our spell of intense tuition in the depths of Deeside as a soft option. And that, we believed, is precisely what it turned out to be. The time passed painlessly, with little in the way of learning imparted. Then we went our separate ways.

The experiment, it seemed, was a failure. So we all supposed. But I now know that Operation Clean Sheet had a hidden agenda and that improving our minds was never the object of the exercise. We were taken to Kilveen Castle for quite another and far more sinister purpose.

During our months there, we were given regular injections of a drug known in today's nomenclature as MRQS (modified re-entrant qualianized serotonaze). The effect of MRQS is to disrupt short-term memory, rendering the subject highly suggestible where recent experiences are concerned. The purpose of the experiment was to determine the exact dosages necessary to achieve complete erasure of memory. The value of such a drug in a Cold War world of state secrets and spying missions is obvious and can hardly have diminished since. No wonder the RAF was willing to supply fifteen guinea pigs at short notice to test its effectiveness.

What the experiment swiftly established was that we could be induced to forget certain specified events and activities, including the administration of the drug itself, and to extrapolate other memories to fill the resulting gap. The featureless weeks we spent failing to learn most of what Professor McIntyre's colleagues tried to teach us comprised in fact many more varied events and activities, all of which we obediently and obligingly forgot. MRQS was also administered surreptitiously to most of the academic and support staff, to prevent them giving the game away. Only a few key personnel knew what was really going on.

The need was felt as the experiment proceeded to establish whether the drug could wipe from our minds even the most highly memorable of experiences. An exercise was duly devised for the purpose. Ten of us were to be deposited on an uninhabited island in the Outer Hebrides, with provisions for a week and orders not to attract the attention of passing boats. No indication was to be given of precisely when the group was to be collected. The other five would remain at Kilveen, with no information supplied about the fate or whereabouts of their comrades. When the two groups were reunited after twelve days, it was expected that we would talk of little else but what had happened on the island. The results of the next injection of MRQS would therefore clinch the issue of its reliability under extreme circumstances. I understand it passed the test with flying colours. Once again, we all forgot. And, shortly afterwards, Operation Clean Sheet was wound up.

Professor McIntyre's paymasters in British Intelligence naturally paid no attention to the obscure case of a crofter and his son from the island of Vatersay who went missing during the time ten members of Operation Clean Sheet spent on the nearby island of Haskurlay. I have established that Professor McIntyre did become concerned about it, but took no action, feeling there was no action he safely could take.

I was one of the ten men marooned on Haskurlay. The others were Aircraftmen Askew, Babcock, Barnett, Chip-chase, Dangerfield, Lloyd, Nixon, Smith and Yardley. The five left behind at Kilveen were Aircraftmen Fripp, Gregson, Judd, Tancred and Wiseman. Those of us bound for Haskurlay were flown from Dyce to Benbecula, then shipped down to the island.

Haskurlay was not a congenial place for an open-ended stay. The ruins of a village and the presence of an ancient burial mound testified to former human occupation and I for one was not surprised the island had been abandoned. The weather was unpredictable and often harsh, spring turning back to winter with depressing frequency. The landscape was devoid of vegetation higher than grass or heather and the west coast was unapproachable due to the hostility of nesting seabirds. We pitched our tents near the deserted village on the relatively sheltered east coast and could do little but stay there in hope and expectation of early removal.

The uncertainty of when we would be taken off preyed on all our minds, some more than others. We had been supplied with one pistol and one rifle between us and had been instructed to use them only in an emergency. We had also been supplied with a radio on the same basis. We soon put the rifle to use, however, bagging rabbits for the pot. The island teemed with them. Sheep were also numerous, but we left them alone, knowing they were the property of crofters from the populated islands. The days passed, slowly and disagreeably, boredom alternating with the irrational fear that the ship would never return for us. There were several arguments, leading on one occasion to a fight between two of us. We were scarcely a credit to our uniform.

After a week had elapsed, we decided to radio for rescue, emergency or not. But there was no response to our message. I established later that this was a deliberate ploy to alarm us. It worked. Stuck on the island as we were, cut off from the world, often confined to our tents by ferociously stormy weather, we fell prey to paranoid fears and delusions. Perhaps an outbreak of nuclear war explained the radio silence. Perhaps the mainland had been laid waste. Absurd, of course, but it was what our anxieties reduced us to. We were not the strongest-willed of groups. But, then, we were not intended to be.

I was increasingly troubled in the decades after Clean Sheet by disturbing dreams and fragments of memory that did not fit with what I thought I knew of my past. MRQS is not an absolute guarantee of forgetfulness, it seems. Time slowly undoes its work, at least in some cases. I realized I was not alone in this when I learned of Leroy Nixon's death in Hebridean waters in the spring of 1983. It seemed clear he had committed suicide. The question was: what had driven him to it? The scattered pieces of my suppressed recollections fell into place — and that question was answered — when I travelled to Barra later in the year, visited Vatersay and Haskurlay and learned as much as I could of the disappearance of Hamish and Andrew Munro in 1955. Later discussions with Professor McIntyre, who in old age had come to regret conducting Operation Clean Sheet, and his recommendation of sessions with a hypnotist, enabled me to assemble an accurate picture of the real course of events during our stay at Kilveen and, in particular, during our stay on Haskurlay. It is not a complete picture, far from it, but it does mean I can state definitively how Hamish and Andrew Munro met their deaths.

It was our tenth day on the island. Only another two were to pass before the ship came for us, but we had no way of knowing that. We were running short of provisions of all kinds. Our spirits were low, despite a spell of fair weather. There was much bickering between us. We were not in a happy state.

Two of the party had gone out to shoot rabbits at the northern end of the island, where the warrens were most extensive. There was a landing-place in a cove nearby, of which we were unaware. Munro and his son came ashore there. Climbing up from the cove, they may well have heard a rifle report. Hamish Munro had a shotgun with him. Perhaps he feared for the safety of his sheep. They topped a rise and surprised the pair from our party. The man with the rifle reacted in the panic of the moment, shocked by the sudden appearance of two strangers, one of them armed. He fired at Hamish Munro, killing him. Then, realizing what he had done and knowing the son had just witnessed his father's murder, he shot and killed Andrew Munro as well.

The deed was done. It could not be undone. The pair returned to the main party and confessed to the killings. The rest of us were appalled and horrified. There was much anguished debate about what to do. Slowly, the realization dawned on us that we might all be condemned for the killings and very possibly accused of complicity in them. The pair who were actually responsible — and who steadfastly refused to say which of them had carried out the shootings — played on this fear to argue that we should bury the bodies and say nothing of what had occurred when we were eventually taken off the island. They had, they only then admitted, cast the boat the strangers had arrived in adrift. The falling tide had already carried it far out to sea. Without it, there was no proof anyone had come ashore. Additionally, of course, though they did not mention this, none of us could use the boat to leave the island. We were bound to remain there, cut off from the world, for as long as our superiors decreed. And we still had no way of determining how long that might turn out to be.

The isolation we had endured for ten days had led to many a spat. But it had also, without our being aware of it, drawn us together. Group loyalty had evolved, unsuspected and undetected, until this crisis forced it into the open. The decision we eventually took, reluctantly but unanimously, was in part the product of this unity of purpose, a unity which, speaking for myself, seemed both surprising and overwhelming. Emotional revelations of a more personal nature complicated my own feelings about what we should or should not do, but that is no excuse. I consented. I agreed. I aided and abetted. We all did.

We dug a hole in the lower slope of the ancient burial mound at the northern end of the bay and buried the bodies there. We thought they were probably father and son and took some small comfort from knowing they would lie together. Prayers were said. A form of ceremony was observed. There was nothing hugger-mugger about it. We did our best by them in the circumstances.

But we also swore to keep the fact and manner of their deaths secret. Morally — and criminally — our actions were and are indefensible. They did not seem so at the time, but I believe that is a testament to the enervated and irrational state of mind we had been reduced to. I have little doubt some of us would eventually have broken our pledge of secrecy after we had been restored to the wider world and had had the chance to view events on the island in undistorted hindsight.

Thanks to our unwitting participation in Professor McIntyre's memory-wiping experiment, however, that chance was to be denied us. The secret was safer than any of us could ever have imagined. It became the secret we did not even know we shared. Until, years later, in the baffled minds of a few of us, the wall of amnesia built around it began, little by little, to fall away.

I have said almost all I can about the murders of Hamish and Andrew Munro, to which I was undeniably an accessory, albeit after the fact. There remains only the issue of the identities of the two men who went hunting rabbits that day. I have searched my heart on this score and have concluded that I should make a clean breast of it. The truth must be entire or it is not the truth. I must name them.

Aircraftmen Barnett and Chipchase.