by Peter Taylor
Immediately, there was a request to trigger the operation but ‘Alan’ wanted to wait a little longer as he had just seen Ivor Bell, who was believed by the intelligence agencies to be the Belfast Brigade commander, ‘stick his head out of the front door of the Royal Victoria Hospital’ in a way that suggested he knew something was wrong. He then turned round and promptly disappeared. The operation was triggered and the ‘green’ army swooped, arresting Adams, Hughes and another senior Provisional, Tom Cahill (Joe Cahill’s brother). Before the arrest, Hughes had been uneasy at the sight of a ‘dodgy’ car in the area and had climbed over the back wall of the house and asked a couple of local republicans to check it out. They came back and said it was OK as they had seen two people get into the vehicle and drive away. It was not ‘Alan’s’ car. Hughes remembers vividly what happened next.
Within seconds, the house was surrounded. The British army kicked the door in and arrested us. There was a lot of shouting and bawling as soldiers do in a situation like that. They didn’t know what to expect. But they certainly knew that I was there and they knew who I was as soon as they came into the house. So it was a matter of putting your hands up and surrendering. They were quite enthusiastic about the whole thing. They knew who’d they’d got.
Adams and Hughes were taken round the corner to Springfield Road RUC station for questioning where they say they were badly beaten by men in plain clothes. Hughes said they put a gun to his head, cocked it and told him he was going to get killed and dumped in a loyalist area so loyalists would be blamed for his death. They then put his fingers on a desk and beat them with a toffee hammer ‘until they swelled up’. As I listened to Hughes describe what happened, I tended to believe him. ‘I’ve no reason to tell lies,’ he said. ‘Possibly if I’d been shot or killed by one of these soldiers, I would have no reason to complain. I’m not crying or complaining about it. I’m just telling what happened to me.’ Adams, too, says that he was severely ill-treated.
The ‘Brits’ were jubilant. ‘There was a general feeling of euphoria amongst politicians and senior army officers,’ ‘Alan’ said. ‘Amongst ourselves it was just a culmination of an operation that had been going on for a long time which we could have sprung at any moment.’ The Secretary of State invited ‘Alan’ and the other operators involved for a celebratory drink. ‘Certainly “Willie” Whitelaw seemed very pleased. He came and gave us a pep talk and brought a fairly large quantity of champagne with him, which went down well. He said that we were probably worth three or four Battalions to him.’
Hughes, Adams and the others were shipped off to the compounds or ‘cages’ of Long Kesh and interned. But ‘Alan’s’ elation was soon tempered by the killing of a friend and colleague two months later. The victim was Richard ‘Dusty’ Miller with whom ‘Alan’ had ‘milled’ during selection. It was believed to be the ‘Det’s’ first loss. An IRA gunman had shot him on 25 August opposite the Royal Victoria Hospital. He died from his injuries three weeks later. ‘Alan’ was close by on duty with him at the time of the shooting.
The vehicle that he was using on that particular day was a very old vehicle that we’d taken over from the MRF. It had been compromised in the past and I think that the Brigade staff of the IRA were monitoring our radio net and had broken our code. The operation had obviously taken them some time to plan. They hijacked a car at the end of the motorway, which was about two minutes’ driving time from the RVH, and got the gunman into it. The last thing I can remember ‘Dusty’ saying on the net was ‘It’s an orange Audi.’ They drove by and shot him with an Armalite.
Brendan Hughes did not remain in captivity for long. On 8 December 1973, he escaped wedged in a mattress like the meat in a sausage roll. The mattress was left out along with the rest of the compound’s rubbish to await collection by the Long Kesh refuse truck. Mattress and Hughes were dumped on the back and the unsuspecting rubbish collectors drove Hughes to freedom. The escape, which would have done credit to Mr Toad in The Wind in the Willows, caused the prison authorities and the ‘Brits’ huge embarrassment. Once outside the prison, Hughes hitched a lift to the border town of Newry and took a taxi across the border to Dundalk from where he was driven to Dublin. Hughes had no wish to languish there squandering his freedom and was anxious to get back to the ‘war’. The problem was that with his dark hair, moustache and swarthy complexion, which had earned him the nickname ‘Darkie’, Hughes was just about the most easily recognizable IRA figure in the North. He had a face that was made for a ‘Wanted’ poster. So he dyed his hair, shaved off his moustache and assumed a completely new identity. He became ‘Arthur McAllister’, a travelling toy salesman. (There had been a real Arthur McAllister who had died when he was a baby and would have been about Hughes’s age.)
Hughes, a.k.a. McAllister, returned to Belfast and moved upmarket from the Lower Falls to a house near an exclusive detached villa in Myrtlefield Park, a leafy suburb off the fashionable Malone Road. In fact, the villa became the headquarters of the re-organized Belfast Brigade of which Ivor Bell, who had escaped arrest with Hughes and Adams, was believed to be the commander. Bell remained at liberty for another seven months before he was finally arrested on 23 February 1974 and sent to join his comrades in Long Kesh. But he remained inside for an even shorter period of time than Brendan Hughes and escaped less than two months later, on 15 April, having changed places with a prisoner going out on parole to get married. But Bell was re-arrested a fortnight later, on 28 April, as a result of ‘Det’ surveillance.
With Bell back inside Long Kesh, Brendan Hughes is believed to have taken over command of the Belfast Brigade, directing operations from its new ‘des. res.’ in Myrtlefield Park. Hughes and the Belfast Brigade were confident that the IRA was one step ahead, despite the re-arrest of Bell. Astonishingly, the IRA was now eavesdropping on secret conversations between military intelligence and Special Branch. It was ironic as MI5 had only just published a report on the IRA’s ability to penetrate the security forces’ communications, which concluded that the communications were secure. They were not.
Hughes outsmarted the ‘Brits’. He had set up a ‘special personnel squad’ of republican-minded technical experts to penetrate the communications of the ‘Brits’. One of those who volunteered his services was a friendly telephone engineer who was installing a new back-up telephone exchange at the army’s Lisburn Headquarters. ‘Tom’ was not a member of the IRA but supported its cause, having apparently become a sympathizer when he saw the army shoot dead a stone-thrower in Andersonstown, two days after internment.
Because he lived in the republican stronghold of West Belfast, ‘Tom’ had given a false address which, surprisingly, the army had not rumbled. It gave him full security clearance which meant that ‘Tom’ could come and go as he wished at Army Headquarters. Initially, it seems, he tried to tap the GOC’s phone but decided that it was too difficult and, through a combination of looking at the internal telephone directory and trial and error, he finally tapped the telephone line that led to the desk of the army’s intelligence cell, ‘G2 Int.’. The tap itself was not particularly sophisticated and consisted of a voice-activated tape-recorder attached to the telephone line. Apparently the bug remained in place for several months. ‘Tom’ then delivered the tapes to Brendan Hughes at Myrtlefield Park. But at first there was a problem. ‘You couldn’t understand them,’ said Hughes. ‘It sounded like Mickey Mouse.’ But, ever resourceful, ‘Tom’ solved the problem by ‘borrowing’ a de-scrambling device from a room at Army Headquarters and adding it to the growing tape collection in Myrtlefield Park. Mickey Mouse then disappeared.
But what Hughes did not know was that Special Branch and the ‘Det’ were now hot on his trail and had been staking out Myrtlefield Park for several weeks, having received intelligence that it harboured an arms dump as well as Hughes. Finally, on 10 May 1974, Special Branch moved in. ‘Arthur McAllister’s’ days as a toy salesman were over. Hughes has never forgotten the day. ‘They came to the door and they knew rig
ht away who I was. I was protesting about the fact that they were raiding this house when the Special Branch man turned round to me and said, “Come on, Brendan, you’ve had a good enough run.” They were quite friendly this time.’4 The Special Branch man was ‘Paul’. He remembers it equally vividly too. ‘I think initially he made some derogatory comment that I don’t remember but then he quickly changed and said, “I suppose it’s a fair cop.” I said wasn’t he happy that we’d allowed him to have a reasonable run and I remarked that he shouldn’t be complaining. He did congratulate Special Branch on the operation, which I thought was a bit ironic.’ Had the operation been delayed a few more minutes, ‘Paul’ would also have netted ‘Tom’ who was on his way to Myrtlefield Park but had apparently stopped off en route for a sandwich.
When the security forces turned the house inside-out, they found four rifles, a sub-machine gun, two pistols and more than 3,600 rounds of ammunition. Fleet Street, as it then was, had a field day. ‘Pin-stripe Provo chief seized at £50,000 HQ’, triumphed the Daily Telegraph. The Press also made much of the fact that documents were found which they referred to as the IRA’s ‘Doomsday Plan’ to take out loyalist areas in the event of civil war. According to Hughes the documents were nothing of the kind but a plan to defend nationalist areas and avoid a repetition of August 1969. But what was tightly concealed from the media was the most sensitive discovery of all – the tapes and the de-scrambling device that ‘Paul’ and his colleagues had found hidden away inside the house. ‘IRA Bugs “Brits”’ was not a headline that HQNI wanted to read. The army’s spin doctors did their stuff.
Hughes was arrested and interrogated. Optimistically, ‘Mike’, the Special Branch handler, tried to ‘turn’ him. ‘I explained that he was in a great position to help us put an end to what was going on,’ he said. ‘But it fell on stony ground.’ What did Hughes reply? I asked. ‘Absolutely nothing.’
Hughes remembers it too. ‘He said I could have a suitcase full of money if I came over.’ How big was the suitcase? I asked. ‘I never said a word,’ Hughes smiled. ‘I never even answered.’ He was duly sentenced and sent off to Long Kesh, leaving others to fight the ‘war’ the IRA now feared it might be losing.
Hughes’s arrest took place on 10 May 1974, a time of great tension as loyalists were building up to a massive strike in opposition to the political structures Whitelaw and the British and Irish Governments had put in place in the hope of finding a political solution to end the conflict.
By this time, the Unionist Party had split. The former Prime Minister, Brian Faulkner, who had pressed HMG for internment and been devastated by the subsequent suspension of Stormont, had realized that if there was to be peace, an accommodation would have to be reached with John Hume and the nationalist SDLP. On 21 November 1973, he had agreed to set up an Executive in which for the first time unionists would share power with nationalist politicians. Sinn Fein did not figure in the political equation at this stage and did not do so until more than a quarter of a century later.5 A few weeks later, on 9 December, the British and Irish Governments, meeting in conference at the Civil Service College at Sunningdale in Berkshire, agreed to set up an ‘Irish Dimension’ to the new political structures. At its heart was to be a Council of Ireland consisting of Ministers from Dublin and the new power-sharing Executive in the North. Faulkner was in a unionist minority in accepting the new institutions and was faced with massive opposition from all shades of Protestant opinion in the province. Most loyalists saw what became known as the ‘Sunningdale Agreement’ as a sell-out to Dublin and a prelude to a united Ireland.
The Executive came into being on 1 January 1974 and as it did so, Direct Rule from Westminster ended. The first sign for the ‘Brits’ that big trouble was in store came with the result of the Westminster General Election on 28 February, which had become known as the ‘Who Rules Britain?’ election in the wake of the crippling coal-miners’ strike. Labour was returned to power although without a working majority. The good news for Harold Wilson was that he was back in Downing Street: the bad news was that a showdown was clearly on its way in the province. When Wilson walked out of Number Ten in June 1970, the situation seemed containable: when he returned four years later, it had reached crisis proportions. To the unionist majority in Nothern Ireland the election had been a referendum on Sunningdale and power-sharing. Unionist politicians opposed to the new political structures and to Brian Faulkner, whom they regarded as a traitor, united under the banner of the United Ulster Unionist Council (UUUC) whose leading light was Ian Paisley, and won a resounding victory, taking eleven of the twelve Westminster seats. Their spectacular success sent a clear message to Harold Wilson and his new Northern Ireland Secretary, Merlyn Rees, with whom he had secretly met the IRA at the house in Phoenix Park, Dublin, in 1972. On his first visit to Belfast, Rees was taken aback by the intensity of loyalist opposition to Sunningdale and power-sharing. ‘They saw it as the supreme sell-out, the supreme betrayal,’ he told me. ‘Brian Faulkner came to see me and told me in so many words that he couldn’t carry the Unionist Party with him. He said, “I cannot carry it. I have lost my reason to be. I’m beaten, overwhelmed by the vote against my sort of unionism or the unionism I’m trying to carry out.”’6
However, it was not Paisley and Faulkner’s opponents who brought the new political edifice crashing down but the working-class Protestants who ran the province’s economy and public utilities. They had come together under the banner of the Ulster Workers’ Council (UWC) and, on 14 May, four days after Brendan Hughes’s arrest, the UWC announced it was calling a province-wide strike in opposition to the new political structures. As their opening shot, the strike leaders declared that the province’s electricity supply would be reduced from 725 megawatts to 400. Few in the province had ever heard of the UWC and most took its declaration as a joke. It was not. Weeks of planning had gone into the organization of the strike in consultation with the loyalist paramilitaries of the UDA and UVF. At first, the UWC’s call to Protestants in the province to join the strike was ignored. Most went to work as usual only to find their routes blocked by barricades manned by loyalist paramilitaries in masks, some of whom wielded clubs. There was widespread intimidation in other ways, too, without which the strike would probably never have got under way. The port of Larne was sealed off. Soon attitudes changed as people realized that the UWC was serious and, backed by paramilitary muscle, could deliver what it promised. Support grew as the power-station workers gradually ran down their generators and the province slowly and dramatically ground to a halt. Seventy-five per cent of the power was cut in Derry and 60 per cent throughout the province as a whole. The giant Harland and Wolff shipyard fell silent after workers inclined to ignore the strike were warned that they might find their cars burned out in the car park.
The army did move in to remove the barricades, but paramilitaries manning them simply disappeared only to return once the soldiers had gone. The UWC strategy was to avoid any violent confrontation with the forces of law and order which might erode the broad base of support they were seeking beyond the Protestant working class. Two thousand extra troops were flown in to deal with the emergency and help run the power stations but there was a limit to what they could do. After a few days it became clear that the UWC was effectively running the province and not the ‘Brits’ – and certainly not Brian Faulkner and his power-sharing Executive. On 25 May, the eleventh day of the strike, Harold Wilson went on television and made a monumentally insensitive broadcast which far from weakening the strike, only strengthened support for it.
British parents, British taxpayers have seen their sons vilified and spat upon and murdered. They have seen their taxes poured out almost without regard for cost – over £300 million this year – going into Northern Ireland. They see property being destroyed by evil violence and are asked to pick up the bill for rebuilding it. Yet people who benefit from this now viciously defy Westminster, purporting to act as though they were an elected government, spending their l
ives sponging on Westminster and British democracy and then systematically assault democratic methods. Who do these people think they are?7
Wilson’s message would have played well in the living rooms of England but was disastrous in the Protestant parlours of Northern Ireland. The word ‘spongers’ was hugely offensive to the deeply ingrained Protestant work ethic. Furthermore, it wasn’t loyalists who were spitting on British soldiers and murdering them, but republicans and the IRA. It was hardly the ‘Brits” finest hour. One of the UWC leaders, Glen Barr, was ecstatic as he watched the Prime Ministerial broadcast to the nation. ‘I thought, Great stuff! This is fantastic!’ he told me. ‘We’ll make him an honourary member of the UDA after this. I think that was the best thing that happened to us. After that, we couldn’t go wrong.’ Meryln Rees had advised against the sentiments that Wilson intended to express but his advice was ignored. I asked Rees why the Government had not used its authority and ordered the army to confront the strikers and restore order to the paralysed province.
I didn’t let them win. They were going to win anyway. We couldn’t do a Prague. You can’t put down a popular rising by killing people. We’re not Russia. The [Protestant] police were on the brink of not carrying out their duties and the middle classes were on the strikers’ side. This wasn’t just an industrial dispute. This was the Protestant people of Northern Ireland rising up against Sunningdale and it could not be shot down.
Rees described it as ‘lancing the boil’ of a political initiative that he believed was never going to work in the teeth of opposition from the Protestant majority in the province. The lesson was not lost on his successors.