Voices from the Grave: Two Men's War in Ireland

by Ed Moloney

  Q. Do you think there’s any merit in the suggestion that the [IRA] leadership, as much as the British, needed certain areas removed, areas that would have been opposed to a ceasefire or a peace process, areas such as Tyrone and South Armagh?

  A. I suspect that to be the case now; I didn’t then. I thought then that it was a mistake, that we had thrown caution to the wind. Now looking at … the way things have developed, I suspect that there may well have been a great deal of collusion there, a great deal of conspiring.

  Q. But it has to be said that it’s speculation …?

  A. It’s speculation … I don’t know. It’s because I’m so suspicious of the people in positions of power now that [it] leads me to think that there’s a possibility that there was collusion there. I don’t know – it may be fair, it may be unfair.

  Hughes’s doubts, however, grew slowly and in the months that followed his release from jail his confidence in Gerry Adams remained undimmed and unaffected, as was Adams’s support for Hughes. In 1987, he was brought into the inner circle and given a seat on the Army Council, the ultimate expression of the leadership’s confidence in him. In retrospect it was the high-water mark in the renewed Adams–Hughes friendship, but from thereon it was mostly downhill.

  … I was on the Council, but I wasn’t happy being there. I was asked to go to America by Adams because of my profile, because of who I was – ‘Darkie’ Hughes, ex-hunger striker and all the rest. And I was sent to America … and met the Noraid people, who supplied the money. There was one group of people I met in a hotel outside New York and they had a suitcase full of money … I had already met small groups of people in New York, in the Bronx area, who were unhappy with the type of people giving the money. They were basically socialists. There was one guy called Kilroy who was a lawyer, who fought cases for Mexican immigrants … he was arrested, badly beaten, tortured and dumped across the border. He was one of the people I tied in with in New York, and other younger radical-type people. Kilroy was seen as a socialist, so he was disliked by these people with the briefcase and [they were] suspicious of people like me. I argued Kilroy’s case, that the guy was a Republican, he was an Irish Republican, [but] it finished up in an argument in the hotel room. And this particular person who … had the briefcase full of money, he said he was taking the money away, and I said, ‘OK, go, I don’t want your fucking money.’ I was there as an Irish Republican. I was there to try and build support among ordinary working-class people. This particular person was not prepared for that and he upped and left with his briefcase full of money … I’ll give you an example of the type of person that he was. He reckoned that we were not fighting the war properly, that we should be shooting the Queen, anybody who wears a crown on his helmet or anybody that’s associated at all with the British regime. And I said to him, ‘Do you mean postmen; we shoot postmen?’ He says, ‘Yes.’ I says, ‘Right, I’m going back to Belfast in a couple of days, and we’ll get another ticket and you come back with me and you shoot the fucking postmen.’ That’s when he walked out of the room … I don’t even think he’d ever been in Ireland, never mind Belfast, but he had the money and he was trying to dictate to me how to fight the war. But he held a pretty high position in Noraid. So he came back into the room and I eventually got the money … I eventually raised something like a hundred thousand pounds; I’m not sure exactly what the amount was. But I was staying with a group of young people, practising lawyers, sympathetic to the Irish cause. And I used these people; one would have brought ten thousand pounds, another fifteen thousand pounds, whatever, back in, into Ireland …

  Q. Well, what was the money for? Was it for Sinn Fein or was it for the Army [the IRA]?

  A. Absolutely not for Sinn Fein. I raised this money; I went to meetings with people. I met one particular person in New York who was a millionaire, a Tyrone man [in the pub trade], and I met him in one of his pubs, or one of his restaurants, and I was asking for donations and … he asked me was the money going to politics or was it going to the Army. I says, ‘Going to the Army; it’s for weapons; it’s for keeping IRA Volunteers on the streets or in the fields.’ And that was the only condition. He gave me the ten thousand dollars.

  Q. But did the leadership who sent you out agree with this, that it was going to the Army, and it wasn’t going to the party?

  A. Well I never thought for a minute that it was going to the political organisation. I went to America to raise money to buy weapons, to buy explosives, to continue the war.

  Q. You weren’t sent out on a Sinn Fein brief; you were sent out on an Army brief?

  A. I was sent out on an Army brief. Obviously other people had different ideas, but the money that was sent back, I did not think for one minute that it wasn’t going anywhere except towards the Army. I raised the money in America, to prosecute the war, not to prosecute political objectives.

  * * *

  Sinn Fein’s entry into electoral politics after the 1981 hunger strikes was accompanied by persistent allegations from across the political spectrum that Sinn Fein’s impressive performance was due in no small measure to an extensive vote-stealing effort. Personation, as the practice is called, has always been and still is a regular feature of elections in Ireland (and wherever the Irish have migrated) and nowhere was it practised with more skill and enthusiasm than in Northern Ireland. While personation was present long before the Troubles, there were unwritten rules that ensured that it never really got out of hand. That all changed, or so it was said, when Sinn Fein started fighting elections in the 1980s and brought a degree of military planning, magnitude and discipline to the effort, which badly tipped the scales.

  At first, personation was clearly visible to the electoral authorities, as a Northern Ireland Affairs Committee report on electoral malpractice in 1998 noted: ‘The Chief Electoral Officer was shocked by the organised personation which he saw during his visits to polling stations during the two 1981 by-elections in Fermanagh–South Tyrone. Afterwards, he reported his concern to the Secretary of State.’69 The British then pushed through a legal requirement on the part of voters to provide some form of identification at the polling station. Medical cards turned out to be the most popular document used by voters and soon there were allegations that a small industry existed devoted to forging them. After that, though, the evidence of personation became much harder to find, as that same Westminster Committee admitted: ‘ … the allegations have not always been precise. Much of the evidence of fraud is anecdotal and circumstantial. Gossip has not translated into hard evidence. In particular, there is a notable lack of concrete information on the prevalence of voting fraud. As a result, the extent of the problem is hard to define.’70

  The Provos indignantly denied the charge and countered that the allegations came from rivals and elements opposed to everything Sinn Fein did. On one occasion Gerry Adams was confronted by reporters who had seen what looked like a batch of medical cards in a Sinn Fein caravan parked outside a polling station, but he denied that forged cards were being used to steal votes: ‘The allegations are not true. The electoral office has asked the SDLP on numerous occasions to produce evidence and they have not been able to do so. It’s the worst sort of negative campaigning.’71 While one former Sinn Fein official, Willie Carlin, had publicly claimed that a huge voting fraud in Derry had got Martin McGuinness elected to the 1982 Assembly, the value of his claim was devalued by the fact that he had been working secretly for the British at the time.72 There was a lot of smoke, to be sure, but not much sign of flames.

  All of which makes Brendan Hughes’s account of his role in Sinn Fein’s personation efforts all the more significant. He ran, he told Boston College, the personation campaign for Gerry Adams’s first re-election bid to the House of Commons in 1987 and did the same in the 1989 council poll, each time stealing ‘massive’ numbers of votes. Adams held on to his seat and his success might well have been due to Hughes’s efforts since the gap between Adams and his SDLP rival, Joe Hendron, was around the two-tho
usand-vote mark, close enough to mean that personation could have influenced the outcome. As the years went by the conviction that something needed to be done to clean up elections in Northern Ireland grew and in 2002 legislation was passed obliging voters to produce photographic identification. But by that time, as Hughes noted wryly, the Sinn Fein boat was sailing the high seas, leaving him and others like him behind.

  … I worked on the elections out of Connolly House.** I was the main person in charge of personation. I organised busloads, carloads; I’d a fleet of taxis at my disposal to bring people to the polling booths … I did this right after I got out of prison, during the council elections and the [Westminster] election … I hear Unionists complaining about it all the time, [and] they’re right, it was massive … I was the impersonation master. I did it from my house, from Connolly House, I did it from the Sinn Fein centre on the Falls Road; I had loads of dead people, I had babies’ names, I had babies who weren’t born, babies who were in the graveyard; they all voted. And that’s how we got to the position that we’re in now. It was like getting a hundred people to push this boat out; a boat that is stuck in the sand … and then the boat sails off, leaving the hundred people behind. That’s the way I feel; the boat is away, sailing on the high seas … and the poor people that launched the boat [are] left behind sitting in the muck and the dirt and the sand.

  * * *

  Hughes began to develop concerns, as he put it, about the direction the Provisionals were taking when he saw how Seamus Twomey had been thrown onto the scrap heap by his successors and had died lonely and mostly unvisited in a Dublin hospital despite his lengthy service with the IRA and the career boosts he had given years before to people like Gerry Adams.†† The other influence on him was a legendary IRA figure from the 1940s, Harry White, who was a leading participant in the so-called ‘Northern’ campaign between 1942 and 1944 led by the semi-autonomous Northern Command. When Tom Williams was due to be hanged in Sept ember 1942 for killing an RUC officer, White took part in a raid on a British Army base near Crossmaglen in South Armagh, hoping to capture a British officer and hang him if Williams was executed. The plan failed when an RUC patrol came upon the IRA unit and a gun battle ensued. White and another IRA man, Maurice O’Neill, moved to Donacloney in Dublin, where they were pursued by the Irish Special Branch. A detective was shot dead during a raid on their hideout and O’Neill was captured and later executed, while White escaped but was subsequently arrested and sentenced to death. Sean MacBride, the lawyer son of the 1916 leader and a former IRA Chief of Staff, managed to get the death sentence commuted to a lengthy jail term. When the Provisionals were formed, White was an early and enthusiastic member and, as a devotee of physical-force politics, he later became something of a sounding board for criticism of the Adams strategy.

  I started to have concerns when Seamus Twomey was treated the way he was. People like Harry White began to have doubts. Harry actually threw Danny Morrison out of his house and Harry White is his uncle. Harry was a 1940s man. People like Harry began to become disillusioned. I was going in and out of Harry’s house and Harry was putting up objections to the direction that the war was taking. Harry was one of the hard men in the IRA. There was one time at the funeral of Jack McCabe,‡‡ the Gardai tried to stop a firing party and Harry pulled a weapon and put it to a policeman’s head. So that, that’s the sort of person that Harry was. Now, I was involved, as I say, largely naively involved in the Army structure and I missed a lot of the things that were going on, politically … Harry didn’t. Harry realised what was going on.

  Brendan Hughes’s concerns about the IRA’s political direction might have been growing but they were dwarfed by his realisation that the organisation had been heavily infiltrated by British Intelligence. He had been appointed to one of the IRA’s most important posts, heading up the Security Department, and was charged with running its counter-intelligence operations, designed to uncover and remove British double agents.

  There was a major problem with informants. And one of the jobs that I had taken on was to try and find informers. The Army, the IRA, always had a problem with informers; there were always informers around – low-level informants, high-level informants – but by that stage, by the late 1980s, there was an awful sense of mistrust. Certainly the South Armagh men believed the major problem was in Belfast. I was one of those trusted by the South Armagh people … and the South Armagh people did not trust Belfast. They believed there was a major problem in Belfast with informants and what I believe now, looking back, was [that this was about getting to] where we are today … people like Gerry Adams, who I had 100 per cent trust in, Martin McGuinness, people of that calibre, were actually directing the movement towards the position they’re in now where they’ve become part of the Establishment. I believe people in places like South Armagh, Kerry, Cork, saw this long before I did; they mistrusted the people at leadership level; they were physical-force people, but they were not stupid people … I believe they had detected what was taking place within the movement and that was to establish … a constitutional political party.

  When Gerry Adams and Ivor Bell set about reorganising and reviving the IRA after their release from Long Kesh in the late 1970s, the guiding star in their journey was the concept of the ‘long war’, which brought along with it the necessity for a whole new and systematic way of dealing with British Intelligence’s penetration of the IRA’s ranks. The ‘long war’ idea was itself an admission that the violence of the early 1970s could never be repeated. It was also an acknowledgement that British Intelligence had put the IRA on the defensive, and between them the three groups ranged against it – MI5, Military Intelligence and the RUC Special Branch – had a better measure of the IRA than at any point before.

  Although it was never explicitly stated, the ‘long war’ doctrine also seemed to be founded on the hope that if the IRA could survive long enough then something might come along to improve its fortunes in a dramatic way. As it turned out that was not a bad approach, the 1981 hunger strikes being evidence that this is exactly what did happen. But to do all this, the IRA had to pay closer attention to its internal security than ever before. It is an astonishing feature of the IRA’s story that for the first decade or so of its existence it had no dedicated section entrusted to countering hostile penetration. Keeping an eye out for treachery was a job performed by Company Intelligence Officers (I/Os) but that was only part of a brief that otherwise devoted more resources to collecting information for targeting purposes. Occasionally, as in the case of the Four Square Laundry operation, an I/O such as Brendan Hughes would hit paydirt, but as Gerry Adams himself admitted, the IRA ‘took their eye off the ball’ after that success.73

  By the late 1970s the integrity of the Company structure had been undermined by British penetration, forcing Adams and Bell to propose a cellular structure for the IRA so as to make infiltration more difficult. Inside Long Kesh, Adams and Bell made the debriefing of new internees and sentenced prisoners mandatory. Newcomers to their cages would be closely questioned about their experiences at the hands of RUC interrogators for any clue that they might have been turned. Reports would be smuggled out to the IRA leadership for any necessary follow-up. This was the start of a much more rigorous and organised approach to counter-intelligence. When Adams and Bell had secured control of the IRA, by 1979 or so, this debriefing requirement was extended to every IRA member arrested for questioning by the RUC. To handle this task, the Security Department was established and the hunting of agents became a priority for the IRA. Initially the Department’s brief was confined to Belfast but gradually its reach was extended throughout the organisation, making the Security Department a larger and more powerful part of the IRA. As part of this process, the so-called ‘Green Book’ was drawn up to give IRA recruits lessons in how to resist police interrogation and what the consequences would be if they failed. The manual instructed IRA members to stay silent during questioning, but it became accepted in the IRA that any recruit who h
ad not been ‘green-booked’, that is who had not been given the chance to read what it said about resisting interrogation, could not be executed for informing. At its peak the Department had a staff of around a dozen and it had sweeping authority to investigate virtually any aspect of the IRA. And like all secret police forces, the Security Department was feared and hated in equal measure by those it kept under watch, not least because its members policed the IRA for signs of dissent.

  The Security Department worked a little bit like an electrical junction box in the IRA. So many wires passed through the box, so extensive was the Department’s knowledge of activists and operations, that British Intelligence made penetration of this inner sanctum the highest priority, not just because of the information that would come its way but because this could help Intelligence Chiefs protect and advance agents in other parts of the IRA. Not surprisingly therefore, the story of the Security Department is replete with allegations of high-level treachery. At least two former Directors of the Security Department are suspected of having worked for the British over the years. The first to fall under suspicion was a former British special-services soldier, John Joe Magee, who headed the Department for around a decade. The extraordinary aspect of his tenure is that it should never have happened. Magee had been sentenced to death by the IRA in the mid-1970s after it was learned that he had been consorting with two members of the UVF and a number of prostitutes. He and the Loyalists were to be shot dead and the prostitutes given punishment shootings but the operation against them had to be postponed and then it was somehow forgotten. Magee rehabilitated himself and then made his way into IRA Security by joining a bombing team attached to the Second Battalion in Belfast that would later form the core of the new Security Department. During Magee’s time with the team a number of city-centre bombs failed to explode, creating the suspicion that the devices had been tampered with. When he was put in charge of security in North Armagh, the IRA there ‘collapsed’.74 Those who oversaw John Joe Magee’s appointment, in the mid-1980s, would later claim they had known nothing of the IRA death sentence against him. In such a way, the person given the job of protecting the IRA from British infiltration had a track record sure to make any agent handler salivate in anticipation of what was possible.