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

by Ed Moloney

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  Brendan Hughes was released from the Maze in November 1986, thirteen years after he and Gerry Adams were arrested at a Belfast Brigade staff meeting. The world had changed enormously in that time for the Provisional movement. Adams was into his third year as an MP and Sinn Fein was well established as a political force, albeit mostly in the North. The South was still unfriendly territory while in the North Sinn Fein had hit an electoral ceiling. One way and another, Sinn Fein had mobilised virtually all of its base support by the mid-1980s and any further expansion could come only by persuading SDLP voters to switch over, an unlikely prospect as long as the IRA was killing people. By this stage it was becoming painfully clear to the Sinn Fein leadership that IRA violence was a check on Sinn Fein’s growth on both sides of the border, and very soon pressure would grow to put the military wing on a tighter and tighter leash, to avoid operations that could lose Sinn Fein votes. At the same time IRA violence was at a fraction of the level it had been when Hughes was vaulting backyard walls in the Lower Falls. As things stood, the IRA certainly couldn’t defeat the British but neither could the British defeat the IRA; a military stalemate had been reached. But while Sinn Fein activists debated the reasons for the party’s stalled growth, IRA militarists dreamed of renewed military vigour and success. An embryonic split existed in the Provisional movement in which the Armalite and ballot-box factions found themselves more and more at odds and as these tensions were developing, Sinn Fein leaders worked secretly on a plan to end the war while the IRA plotted to intensify it.

  Sinn Fein’s political plans were ambitious. Gerry Adams had opened secret peace talks with Father Alex Reid, Cardinal O Fiaich and others in the Catholic Church not long after the 1982 Assembly elections and, when Hughes got out of the Maze, approaches aimed at advancing their ideas, including an IRA cessation, would soon be made to the Fianna Fail leader, Charles Haughey, the SDLP leader John Hume and the British government.67 Sinn Fein’s growing electoral success had given Adams and those around him a political alternative to violence and a route to power. The peace process was about to come into its own but not quite yet. Gerry Adams and the small group of advisers around him had, with one hand, approved an ambitious plan to end the IRA’s war while, with the other, and in concert with hardliners on the Army Council, given the go-ahead to import hundreds of tonnes of modern weaponry from Libya which they planned to use to launch a Vietnam War, Tet-style offensive designed to sicken British public opinion and stimulate withdrawal sentiment. By the time of Hughes’s release, the first shipments had arrived safely and their cargo been stored away. The last and largest shipment, on board the vessel Eksund, was due to sail to Ireland in 1987 and once it arrived the IRA’s version of ‘Tet’ would begin. But the Eksund was betrayed, dashing the IRA’s military ambitions and leaving the Provisionals little choice but to pursue the surviving option, the peace process. That would all come later. Unaware of any of this when he was released from prison, Brendan Hughes had only one thing on his mind: rejoining the IRA.

  I remember clearly the day I was released. My first thought was I just couldn’t believe that I was getting out of that place … I had my mind up that I would go back into the IRA … I insisted on that, and I went straight to the IRA and reported back the day I got out. I still had faith in the leadership; I still believed that they were going for a thirty-two-county democratic socialist republic. I went straight back and immediately I was put on GHQ staff as Operations Officer.

  Brendan Hughes’s domestic situation had changed for the worse during his imprisonment. Because his marriage had disintegrated Hughes had no home to return to when he was released, so Gerry Adams and his wife Colette took him in, giving him a bedroom in their spacious detached home off the Glen Road in West Belfast.

  … when I got out of prison I actually lived with [Gerry] in his house in the Glen Road. We had … many conversations and again I say that I trusted the man at that time; I trusted his political manoeuvring and his political direction. I saw myself then as more of a soldier and not a politician … [I was] not as naive as I was in the early 1970s where I would say, ‘I’m a soldier, not a politician.’ By and large I saw my strengths [as being] within the Army [the IRA] and I was pretty well accepted throughout the whole of Ireland with IRA Volunteers. There were places … I could go and sit down with IRA Volunteers where … Gerry could not because some people believed … that Gerry was not really an IRA soldier, that he was more of a politician. I saw myself [being] in the position where I could strengthen Gerry’s position by being … his physical-force arm within the movement. That’s the position I saw myself in. And you had to remember that we had been fighting the war together for a good few years and we were very, very close …

  Q. Did you still feel at that time he and the leadership were totally committed to the prosecution of the armed campaign?

  A. I did, I did.

  Hughes threw himself back into the IRA and was placed near the very top of the organisation, a sure indication of Gerry Adams’s friendship and patronage, at least at that time. Given a double brief in GHQ as Director of Operations and assistant to the Director of Intelligence, he was to plan and organise IRA activity outside of Northern Command – which meant, inter alia, taking an interest in IRA activity in England – while helping the Intelligence Chief, Pat Doherty,¶ §uncover the British spies who now riddled and weakened the IRA. Doherty’s brother Hugh was arrested in London in 1975, a member of the so-called Balcombe Street gang, while he himself was named in the House of Commons as a member of the Army Council, along with Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness.68 Hughes soon discovered that distrust of the Sinn Fein element in the IRA – and of the Belfast IRA – was widespread, fuelled by a suspicion, which he later came to share, that the politicians in the Provos were trying to run down the IRA and its war to facilitate the peace process. By the late 1980s there were two types of Provisional Republican leadership figures: military men who distrusted politics and never had any truck with Sinn Fein, and those who rode both horses, balancing their IRA and Sinn Fein careers. Brendan Hughes was instinctively in the first camp and his ear was on the same wavelength as the IRA’s militarists. The Provos’ soldiers had a sensitive nose for compromise, and were always on the lookout for potential sell-outs. It had been that way in the IRA for as long as the organisation had existed and it was in Hughes’s political DNA. The ‘disarray’ that he found the IRA in after his release, the shabby treatment of Seamus Twomey, the angry words of military men and veterans whom he respected and the havoc caused inside the IRA by informers hardened his suspicions. Steadily, Hughes moved to question and then doubt his old friend Gerry Adams. Ivor Bell had broken with Adams in 1985, a year or more before Hughes’s release from the Maze and, by the end of the decade, Brendan Hughes would do the same and for the same reasons. It was the oldest story in the IRA, friends and comrades parting ways over compromise. Michael Collins had Harry Boland. Gerry Adams has Ivor Bell and Brendan Hughes.

  I reported straight back to the IRA and I was sent to Intelligence on the GHQ staff [where] my job was to work with a man called Pat Doherty who was GHQ Director of Intelligence. I was his assistant. My job entailed travelling around the thirty-two counties and going into any particular area I needed or wanted to go into, [as well as] planning particular operations. At that time I didn’t know what was going on but there was a rundown taking place within the IRA … in many places, especially Cork and Kerry, Pat Doherty was not trusted because he was seen as [one of those] intent on running the IRA down and … he was deeply mistrusted by people. I didn’t understand where the mistrust was coming from because I had just come out of prison; I didn’t have an ear to the ground, and so on many occasions I defended Pat Doherty – but on many occasions my defence of him was not accepted. Operations were my thing and … my priority, and I wasn’t a great deal into the politics of it. I remember going into Parnell Square, which is Sinn Fein headquarters in Dublin, and seeing all the activity taking place,
but I wasn’t actually part of that … Not that I was opposed to political activity – I believed it was necessary. But I also believed in the war, and I was primarily an operative. The IRA was in a very bad state; it was in disarray. I argued on many occasions that operations should not take place, especially in places like South Armagh, Tyrone and Donegal; they should be suspended until such time as the Army [the IRA] was strengthened, reinforced and [made] more disciplined. But I believe now – I didn’t believe then and didn’t realise then – that it was probably being done purposely, that the Army was being run down purposely.

  Q. What did you think was the major cause of the Army’s weakness at the time?

  A. Lack of leadership, lack of discipline, lack of foresight about where we needed to go. I believed we needed to go to England and that we would be more effective by attacking England.

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  On 8 May 1987, some six months after Brendan Hughes had rejoined the IRA, the cream of its East Tyrone Brigade was wiped out in an ambush mounted by the elite British special forces unit, the SAS. The East Tyrone unit had just blown up the unmanned police station at Loughgall in County Armagh when the SAS opened fire on them from hidden positions, riddling the IRA men with a withering fusilade. When the SAS ceased fire, eight of the most experienced activists in Tyrone were dead. It was the single most devastating blow suffered by the IRA in over three decades of violence and, in the intervening years, recurring questions inside the Republican community about how and why such a disaster could have happened have made the Loughgall ambush a constant focus of speculation and suspicion. The bulk of the unit was on the verge of defecting and forming a rival unit when they were killed. Seven or so months earlier, in the autumn of 1986, the IRA and Sinn Fein had separately dropped the rule forbidding members to take seats in the Irish parliament, Dail Eireann. Although Stormont and Westminster remained off limits there was little doubt that the decision was a key moment in the Provisionals’ political journey. The move forced out the older generation of IRA leaders, people such as Ruari O Bradaigh and Daithi O Connail who had been clashing with Gerry Adams and his supporters ever since the ceasefire in 1975. The East Tyrone unit was wiped out before they could follow suit. At first the Loughgall ambush was for Brendan Hughes an example of everything that was wrong with the IRA – infiltration by informers along with poor intelligence, planning and training – but, alongside that criticism, a mustardseed of doubt was planted in his mind that the neglect of the IRA had been done deliberately, encouraged by Gerry Adams and his new right-hand man, Martin McGuinness, so as to accelerate the move into politics. He saw evidence for this not just in Loughgall but in the neglect of the vitally important England Department, which organised bombing operations in London, and in the rush to launch the ‘Tet’ offensive in the face of evidence that the IRA was just not fit for that purpose.

  I don’t believe [the Loughgall ambush] was bad luck. I believe there were informers involved there. I also believe that the operation went ahead without the proper intelligence, without proper organisation and without proper training. I remember arguing against operations [like this] going ahead. I sat in a house in Donegal along with Martin McGuinness and the rest of the GHQ staff where they were planning … this major upsurge in the campaign; we were going to go in and take over [British] army billets and so forth, major operations involving major weapons. Gaddafi had come on board. Shipments of weapons came in, money came in, all the weapons were there, all the money was there. What was lacking was the training but there was this sort of bullish attitude from people like McGuinness to push ahead with these operations. I argued against them because we didn’t have the proper training. I had done a tour of the whole six counties, I went round and spoke to most of the operational companies … and I believed that [the IRA] wasn’t ready for a major push. This meeting took place … over a twenty-four-hour period; I mean, we sat well into the night and slept in this house in Donegal, and the next morning as well. We were not ready for those type of operations. We didn’t have the intelligence, we didn’t have the organisation, we didn’t have the discipline. But people wanted to go ahead with it, and one person in particular … Martin McGuinness … I believed that what we needed to do was to pull as many operators out of the North into the South, retrain them and beef the whole Army [IRA] structure up. The structure was not secure enough for these type of operations to take place [but] it didn’t happen; what I was suggesting did not happen.

  I didn’t meet outright opposition [but] a passive type of opposition where I didn’t get any encouragement, I just got negative thoughts back … there were people like Kevin Mallon|| … who agreed with me. But this push seemed to be coming from the top; there were invisible people pushing [for] this, Army Council people like Joe Cahill.

  Q. Do you ever get the sense that there may have been an attempt by some elements within the leadership to sabotage the whole war by pushing Volunteers into a conflict, a confrontation too early and for which they weren’t ready?

  A. I believed that then and I believe that now; that things were moving so fast, people were coming on board, weapons were coming in, and I think some people got frightened by it. I think people did not want this to happen … I think there were other people there who were scared of this escalation … I think there were people there who didn’t want it to happen. There was the English Brigade, people like —— and the handful of people who ran the English operations. They were burnt out; I met them in Dublin and … I argued for them to be pulled out of England … and for a new group to be formed. I really believed in the England Department because it could be the most effective … [but] there was opposition to that from people, I can’t pinpoint … I wish I could point the finger at particular people, to say that they planned this or stopped this or discouraged it. I suspect, I know … who was behind this … I was working with Paddy Doc [Doherty] at the time and people … believed that he was the person who was holding back the war. I don’t believe it was him in particular, because Paddy Doc wouldn’t have had the strength for it.

  Q. He was somebody else’s front man?

  A. Yes, I believe so. I believe it was probably Adams behind it.

  Q. Although there’s no proof of this?

  A. No, I have no proof of it, no.

  Q. Do you think his responsibility at any rate lies in the fact that he made a bad decision and ultimately that bad decision meant that people moved prematurely and in Tyrone, Loughgall, May 1987, eight lost their lives?

  A. Aha. I believed at the time that it was a mistake. I suspect now because of the situation that we’re involved in now, that there might have been intent as well, to bring about a disaster …

  Q. Sabotage?

  A. Yes. Yes. I believe that there’s a possibility of that, [and] that … this premature move was intentional … you’re talking about McGuinness and Adams, who … were involved in the decision to go ahead [with the ‘Tet’ offensive]. I remember [by contrast] the Four Square Laundry. I was one of the those who interrogated Seamy Wright, and we got the rundown on the other people [involved] like Beaky McKee and the rest of the squad … involved in the MRF. I wanted to move quickly, to remove these people and to remove the Four Square Laundry and the offices in College Square and so forth. And Adams held me back: ‘Sit back, sit back, do more intelligence, do more intelligence.’ And we did hold back, and it was the right thing to do … I would have moved too quickly, prematurely, and we might have missed some of the people that we eventually did get. When … Loughgall and the other operations happened, when I was arguing to hold back, to get more intelligence, to get more training, I was vetoed, which was a contrast to the Four Square Laundry …

  Q. But was Adams at any of these meetings, for example, where McGuinness was advocating a military push?

  A. Yeah, always.

  Q. And was he of the same frame of mind?

  A. He was, yeah. And it was a complete reversal of positions that I found myself in, as I say, from the Four Square La
undry – where I wanted to push ahead right away. I was advocating caution and to take our time. These people wanted to go ahead right away, a total reversal of positions.