Meeting Penelope Tremayne

Penelope Tremayne is a bit like a female version of Zelig. At minimum she seems better suited to being a star character in an enlightened James Bond film or John LeCarre thriller. Born in 1921, Ms. Tremayne has at various times served British intelligence in various capacities, written for the Times of London, authored several books, lived in places such as Greece, Cyprus, and Singapore, she has been a nurse and a worker for the Red Cross and now is a poet who often publishes for children. And in many of these capacities she has been an effective spokeswoman against terrorism, and she was doing so long before it became popular in the wake of 9-11.

Penelope Tremayne knows of what she speaks on the matter of global terrorism. Some rather hair-raising encounters with members of the Tamil terrorist group in Sri Lanka in 1985 led her to take another, more investigative trip to that island nation in January 1986. After just a few days she was kidnapped and taken hostage by the Tamil, who held her for five weeks before releasing her. She tells her tale in an eloquent and insightful memoir, Nor Iron Bars a Cage.

My college friend Gillian, whom I am visiting here in Cornwall, met Ms. Tremayne some time ago when interviewing her for a feature in the Western Morning News. Gilly wanted me to meet Ms. Tremayne, and given my (comparatively modest) own work, I was very much interested. Ms. Tremayne lives in a comfortable, cozy home in Cornwall with her husband Tony, not too far from Gillian's home. Gillian, her lovely daughter Sophie, and I went to the Tremayne's this evening. It was a wonderful experience. Showing the hospitality to which I have grown so accustomed on the British Isles, they led us out to their patio garden and plied us with wine and homemeade lemonade and black olives and assorted finger sandwiches and fresh cucumber slices. That alone would have made the trip well worth our while. But the conversation sealed it.

Ms. Tremayne and I almost immediately fell into a deep and involved conversation on terrorism ranging from Israel to South Africa to Russia to the United States and of course to her experiences, especially in Sri Lanka. From her decades of work and her abduction, she has drawn some valuable lessons. She makes a compelling case in Nor Iron Bars a Cage about how little support the radical Marxists of Tamil had among the Tamil people, and even among those who advocated separatism.

One of the larger conclusions she draws from this is how often terrorists claim to speak for people who do not share their views, their means, or their goals. Another of her most important points is that after 9-11 the romance of the terrorist appears, thankfully, to be over. These people are not"freedom fighters" or"revolutionaries," they are terrorists. This must be understood. Now of course there are such things as freedom fighters, and there is some freedom for which people absolutely must fight -- anti-Apartheid South Africa is a good example of this. Yet Ms. Tremayne makes an interesting case, even if it is not airtight: It seems to her that one good way to guage the difference between a"freedom fighter" and a terrorist is how many of their own people the alleged freedom fighters have killed. Thi surely holds for most of the examples we have in today's world.

It was a pleasure and an honor meeting Ms. Tremayne and her husband. It was far too short an evening, but as 17-month-olds are wont to do, Sophie began to become fussy, then demanding, as it was time for a bath and then food. Nonetheless, the time we had was quite wonderful. One of her comments to me was how happy she was to see younger people engaging in serious work on these questions. While I sometimes fear that we will disappoint her, my sincere hope, for generations to come, is that we will not.