The MRF had a name for this secret coterie of traitors. They called them the ‘Freds’. Nobody in the Provos ever learned the source of the nickname, but there was no way to read the work of Brigadier Frank Kitson and not recognise that the Freds were a counter-gang. Now the eye slits in those white hoods that Kitson’s Mau Mau informants wore back in Kenya had been replaced by the gun slits in a Saracen armoured vehicle. Wright said that the compound where the Freds were kept was segregated, so he could not identify most of the other informants. But there was one he could name. ‘There is a guy I have seen in there,’ Wright said. ‘He is one of us.’
The man Wright named was a young Provo, a boy, really, a member of Ballymurphy company named Kevin McKee. He was still a teenager, a handsome adolescent with big blue eyes, shaggy dark hair and a slight overbite. People called him ‘Beaky’. He had grown up in West Belfast and liked to sit in the front room of the family home, listening to records on the old-fashioned radiogram. He joined the youth wing of the IRA, throwing stones at the British Army and the RUC. When loyalists would string a Union Jack on a telephone pole, Kevin would shimmy up and pull it down, to cheers from the people below. He was a charismatic kid, caught up in the romance and intrigue of the Troubles. There was an innocence to him. But he also went on ‘snipes’ (as sniping operations were known) and planted bombs. As one of his IRA contemporaries in Ballymurphy put it, ‘He didn’t lack balls.’
One night, Kevin McKee was arrested and hauled into Springfield Road army barracks. Two of his aunts ventured to the barracks to see what had happened to him, but when they arrived, they were told that he had escaped. Eventually the family received letters from Kevin in England, and assumed that he must have moved there to hide from the army and the police.
But the truth was, he had become an informant. A British Army log from the night when he was arrested noted that after being taken into custody, he ‘gave information’ about a particular property. The log then listed a series of weapons that were recovered from an IRA arms dump at that address. According to the log, McKee was arrested just before 11 p.m., and the house was searched just after midnight. So he must have flipped almost immediately. Seamus Wright told Hughes that McKee ‘loved’ his involvement in the Freds. And the members of the military units in the MRF took a shine to the cocksure teenager. They liked his bravado.
When Frank Kitson was recruiting captured Mau Mau in Kenya to work in counter-gangs, he found that they needed to be ‘tamed’, in a process he described as if it were the breaking of a horse. He avoided fanatical believers, who were too difficult to bring across to the other side, and focused instead on recruiting people who had joined the movement for a reason that was essentially social: because their friends were joining. In one of his books, Kitson noted that the very best recruits were the ones with ‘a spirit of adventure’, people who ‘thought that it would be fun to be a gangster and carry a pistol’. They were ‘the easiest to handle because they were the easiest to satisfy’. In Kenya, these were the types of recruits to whom Kitson would give his own gun, letting them carry it on patrol to indulge their sense of adventure and make them feel like a trusted part of the team. In Belfast, the MRF gave Kevin McKee a pistol and a shoulder holster, which he wore around, flaunting the costume as if he were a Chicago gangster. As a Fred, he was entitled to carry the weapon and make use of the firing ranges on the army base.
McKee was wearing the shoulder holster when the Provos tracked him down. Under interrogation, he confessed to his betrayal, just as Seamus Wright had. But now the Provos found themselves in an interesting position. On the one hand, they had identified two defectors, who had betrayed the organisation by agreeing to work with the British. Normally, they would have been court-martialled, found guilty, shot in the back of the head, then dumped by the side of the road. But the British did not appear to know that Hughes had discovered this breach in the IRA’s security – and Wright and McKee would do anything, now, to save their own lives. If their confessions were to be believed, the British Army had orchestrated an elaborate spy operation targeting the Provos, yet the precise dimensions and operational details of that effort remained unclear. So Hughes was presented with an opportunity: rather than execute Wright and McKee, he could use them to gather intelligence on the British, as triple agents.
For Wright and McKee, such a move might be risky, but it was preferable to the alternative of a speedy execution. Wright actually went back to work for the Freds, with instructions, this time, to provide his British handlers with only low-level information or, better still, misinformation. Asked to identify a Provo on a street corner, Wright could tell the British he was a Sticky instead. This was a dangerous game. If the army discovered the deception, Wright could be sent to jail. He could also be shot by the MRF, which had shown little compunction about the occasional extrajudicial killing. But by demanding that Wright and McKee supply him with intelligence, Hughes was offering each man an opportunity to earn his life back: if they could deliver for the IRA, Hughes promised them, they would be granted ‘immunity’ for their initial crime.
The men delivered. What they described to Hughes was an extensive intelligence-gathering network that the British had developed around Belfast. The centrepiece of the operation was a laundry service, with an office in the city centre. Four Square Laundry operated an actual door-to-door laundry service, picking up clothing and linens and then subcontracting to an industrial laundry in Belfast to wash the clothes. But before they got there, the clothes were analysed by British authorities. Traces of explosives could be detected on garments in order to determine whether bombs were being made or stored at a property. Analysts could also compare the clothing being picked up at a given residence with the number, age and gender of the people ostensibly living there; a mismatch might indicate that it was an arms drop or a call house. The laundry van had been specially configured with a hollow roof, in which a soldier could conceal himself, snapping photos of people and houses outside through a hidden opening.
As soon as Hughes learned about the laundry operation, he wanted to sweep in and upend it. But Gerry Adams cautioned him to hold off. ‘Sit back,’ Adams said. ‘Do more intelligence.’ Hughes and his men learned that, in addition to the laundry service and the office in the city centre, the MRF was operating a massage parlour above a house on the Antrim Road, where customers would sometimes find themselves so blissfully relaxed that they casually disclosed things to the chatty masseuse. By early October, Hughes and his team decided that they had gathered enough intelligence. It was time to move. They couldn’t hit these locations one by one: as soon as they attacked the first one, the MRF would know that the whole operation was blown. So the Provos would launch three near-simultaneous strikes – on the van, the office and the massage parlour. The objective was to wipe out the whole intelligence-gathering apparatus in the space of a single hour.
The man behind the wheel of the Four Square Laundry van, Ted Stuart, was an undercover British sapper with the Royal Engineers. Ever since childhood, he had wanted to be a soldier. He was twenty and had been serving in Northern Ireland only since June. As the Provo hit team fired on the van, he died almost instantly.
When the gunmen turned on Stuart’s partner, Sarah Jane Warke, she plunged into the house of the local woman she had been talking to. Warke was also an undercover soldier, a member of the Women’s Royal Army Corps. She pulled the woman and her children in with her and – thinking quickly – told them that this must be a loyalist ambush. The woman helped Warke scuttle out of the back door and escape.
The gunmen had orders not just to kill the young pair who operated the laundry service, but to strafe the ceiling of the van with bullets, in order to kill the soldier inside. In their haste, or panic, however, they did not do so, and if there was a third soldier concealed in the van, he escaped alive. Elsewhere in Belfast, another team of gunmen shot up the massage parlour, and a third shot up the office, though neither managed to hit any other members of the MRF.
/> The Four Square Laundry operation marked a major victory for the Provos. Hughes was proud of how it had played out, and in a memoir, decades later, Gerry Adams would call it ‘a devastating blow’ to the British. The question now was what to do with Wright and McKee?
On the day of the Four Square operation, Wright came home and told his wife, Kathleen, that he would have to be careful, because before his release by the British, he had signed some papers relating to the Official Secrets Act. Then, that night, he disappeared. A car drove up to his family’s door on Bombay Street. Wright exchanged a few words with the driver, got into the passenger seat, and was driven off. When he did not return, Kathleen went to Leeson Street to ask the Provos what had become of him. They told her that he had not been taken by the IRA. After hearing that, Kathleen became convinced that her husband might have been snatched by the army. But the army, too, denied any involvement in his abduction. Military sources suggested to the press that Wright could have run off on his own and might be hiding out in Scotland.
At around the same time, McKee vanished as well. One of his aunts had told him, ‘The IRA’s been looking for you.’
‘I’ve done nothing wrong,’ McKee replied, confident as ever.
When he disappeared, the family chose not to contact the police. The authorities would probably be more harm than help. But there were rumours: that McKee had gone off to art school; that someone had spotted him in England.
The truth was that both men had been taken by the IRA. They had played their final card by giving the information on the MRF and the Four Square Laundry. The moment the simultaneous raids were complete, Wright and McKee no longer possessed any leverage. Brendan Hughes may have assured them that they had immunity, but this was not really an assurance he was authorised to give. By initially betraying the Provos, they had committed an unforgivable sin – one that was not diminished by their subsequent work as triple agents. The Unknowns were summoned, and Dolours Price drove both men across the border to the Republic.
It was just Price driving the two of them. She had a particular loathing for informers. She had been brought up to revile them. But if she felt contempt for Wright and McKee, she kept it hidden, and on the drive south they were relaxed. After the success of the Four Square Laundry operation, they believed that they had earned their lives back. Someone had told Wright and McKee that they were going for a week of R&R across the border. ‘You’re just going to get a rest and get your strength back,’ Price assured them. As far as she knew, it was true, though she had her suspicions to the contrary. In any case, she had her orders. In Monaghan, she dropped them off with the local unit.
McKee ended up in a house in County Monaghan, which belonged to the family of a dead IRA man, Fergal O’Hanlon, who had been killed in the 1950s and had become the subject of a famous ballad, ‘The Patriot Game’. He was obliged to wait for a period of time so that some senior leaders could come across the border for his court-martial. The people who were minding him grew fond of him; he was a good cook, a fun guy, a personality. At one point, McKee telephoned his mother, from the home of a nearby priest, and asked her to bring him a change of clothes. She and his aunts drove down, but when they arrived at the house, Kevin was gone. A man was there. ‘Take the clothes with you,’ he said. ‘He’ll not be back.’
When it came time to execute Kevin McKee, the local volunteers who had been holding him hostage found themselves unable to shoot him. They had grown too fond of him. When Hughes heard about this, it seemed like a sort of Stockholm syndrome in reverse – the hostage taker gradually falling for the hostage. In their stead, a pair of dispassionate gunmen were sent from Belfast. Before the killing, they summoned a priest. This was not unusual: there were certain priests in that era who grew accustomed to the late-night phone call. They would be summoned outside by gruff men who were about to perform an execution and asked to deliver the last rites. The act of killing itself had a ritual character, a practised choreography that would have been familiar to McKee. A bag is placed over your head. Your hands are bound behind your back. You kneel in the soft grass. Then you flop forward when the bullet hits your brain.
Brendan Hughes felt betrayed by the decision to disappear Wright and McKee. He had given them his word that they would not be killed. It would trouble him for the rest of his life.
The Four Square operation might have been a success, but Hughes and Gerry Adams could hold off the army for only so long. One afternoon the following summer, in July 1973, Adams was heading to a meeting at a call house on the Falls Road. As officer commanding for Belfast, he met daily with Hughes, his operations officer, and a man named Tom Cahill, who handled the finances. July was a tricky time to be on the run in Belfast: because it was the peak season for loyalist marches, most Catholics who could afford to get out of town for a week or two chose this time of year to do it. With fewer people on the streets in Catholic neighbourhoods, it was harder to move around unnoticed. When he was about fifty yards from the call house, Adams hesitated, eyeing the building, observing the area for any signs of suspicious activity. He loitered there a minute, leaning on the bonnet of a parked car. Then he noticed that there was someone in the car, a businessman, consulting some papers in the front seat. Adams gave a little wave. The man waved back.
When he was convinced that the location had not been compromised, Adams crossed the street and entered the call house. Inside, he met up with Hughes and Cahill. But the men had not been talking long when there was a knock at the door. This was not, in itself, grounds for alarm; the British patrolled republican neighbourhoods, and it was standard to knock on the door and ask for a look around or a chat. They might not realise the significance of the house they had happened to stumble upon. A hasty decision was made: Cahill would answer the door while Hughes and Adams escaped out the back. But when they got into the yard, Hughes peered over the back wall and was startled to behold a sea of British troops. As soldiers flooded into the house, Adams casually pulled out some matches and lit his pipe.
The businessman in the car that Adams had leaned on was not a businessman. While Adams did surveillance on the house, the man behind the wheel was doing surveillance on him. An ambitious operation had been planned, with soldiers secretly massing on the perimeter, but they had orders not to start the raid until both Adams and Hughes were inside the house. When Adams opened the front door, he triggered the operation.
The Provos were taken to a police station on Springfield Road, where they were beaten and tortured for hours. Adams was beaten so badly that he passed out. His captors doused him with a bucketful of water to revive him, then started beating him again. One of the interrogators, a tall man in a pinstriped suit, pulled out a pistol and put it to Hughes’s head, then cocked it. He said that he was going to kill Hughes, then dump his body on the Black Mountain and say that the loyalists had done it.
The British forces were hugely pleased: in one swoop, they had caught several of their most high-profile targets – including Hughes, who had never been captured before. William Whitelaw, who had met Adams in London the summer before, came personally to congratulate the men involved, and brought with him a load of champagne. The soldiers took turns posing for ‘trophy’ photographs with the two captives, who had been so severely beaten that they could hardly walk. Even so, Hughes was defiant. ‘I’m going to escape,’ he told them.
He and Adams were loaded into a Saracen and taken to a helicopter, which transported them on the short ride to Long Kesh. When the helicopter touched down, they were marched, handcuffed, into the prison. As they were walking in, the whole place erupted in a massive cheer. To the republican prisoners in Long Kesh, Adams and Hughes were iconic figures, celebrities. When they entered the heavily fortified installation, they were hailed as conquering heroes. Hughes would later count that moment – black and blue, manacled, borne into prison on that great wave of enthusiasm – as one of the greatest in his life.
BOOK | TWO
HUMAN SACRIFICE
Man
passing a burning building (Colman Doyle/Colman Doyle Collection/Courtesy National Library of Ireland)
11
Close England!
The crocuses were already in bloom around London’s parks and monuments on 8 March 1973. It was a Thursday, a crisp, crystalline early-spring morning. After a wet English winter, people were venturing outdoors, beckoned by the sun. The Queen left Buckingham Palace to inspect the first blooms in her garden. There was a rail strike that day, and with train services suspended, commuters were forced to drive into the city. As a result, central London was overrun with cars. In order to accommodate the surge of vehicles, the city had suspended parking restrictions for the day. Cars were everywhere – in loading zones and other areas that were usually off-limits, or at meters that had long since expired.
Just after lunchtime, at around 2 p.m., a phone rang at the headquarters of The Times in London. A young woman named Elizabeth Curtis, who had just started working on the news desk at the paper, picked up the call. She heard a man’s voice, speaking very quickly, with a thick Irish accent. At first she couldn’t make out what he was saying, then she realised that he was reeling off the descriptions and locations of a series of cars. He spoke for just over a minute, and though she was still confused, she transcribed as much as she could. Before hanging up, the man said, ‘The bombs will go off in one hour.’
A journalist named Martin Huckerby was on duty that day in the newsroom. He overheard Curtis dictating details about the bombs to one of her colleagues. The nearest of the locations she mentioned was the Old Bailey, the central criminal court in London, just a short walk from The Times. Huckerby bolted out of the office. He was looking for a green Ford Cortina estate with a number plate that, assuming Curtis had transcribed it correctly, read YNS 649K. Huckerby left the office at 2 p.m. and arrived at the monumental stone courthouse a few minutes later. Built at the turn of the century, the Old Bailey had been the site of many celebrated trials. A great dome sat atop the heavy masonry, with a bronze figure of Justice, her arms outstretched, holding a sword and a set of scales.
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