by Peter Taylor
Hughes became concerned when one of his men failed to turn up for the daily meeting at the ‘call house’ where members of ‘D’ Company routinely assembled to be given their orders. ‘The Company would have been doing five or six operations a day,’ Hughes told me. ‘They would rob a bank in the morning, put a sniper out in the afternoon, put a “float” [a roving ambush] out that night, put a bomb in the town. There was a whole series of operations taking place and every day the Volunteers would have had to report in. So within twenty-four to forty-eight hours it was obvious that one of the people were missing.’
The absentee was Seamus Wright (25). Hughes described him as ‘a quiet, unassuming character and a good Volunteer’. Hughes had never had any reason to doubt his loyalty. Wright had recently married a young woman from a staunch republican family from Leeson Street in the heart of ‘D’ Company’s area, although Hughes says that Wright’s new bride was not involved in the IRA. Wright had been arrested on 5 February 1972 and interrogated at Palace Barracks, which at the time was notorious for the brutal methods that were alleged to have been used to extract information from suspects.7 The chances are that he was ‘turned’ then and given the choice of going to gaol, being interned, or joining the ‘Freds’ and working for the MRF. He appears to have chosen the latter and was installed and trained in the ‘Freds’ quarters at Palace Barracks. At some stage, Wright went to England, almost certainly under army protection, perhaps when his handlers thought that things might be getting too hot. Whilst he was away, he phoned his wife and said he wanted to see her. Mrs Wright consulted Hughes who said she should go and tell Seamus to come back. A week or so later, she returned without her husband. She told Hughes that Seamus had told her that he had broken under interrogation and wanted to come home but was frightened to do so. She said she met him ‘in a house with two soldiers’. The IRA then told Mrs Wright, who still had a means of communicating with her husband, that under the circumstances he was free to come home. With this assurance, Wright finally did so and returned to their house in the Kashmir Road. The following is based on Hughes’s account of what happened.
The next day, he was arrested by his former comrades in ‘D’ Company and began to talk. ‘I think he wanted to clear the sheet and get the military personnel off his back,’ said Hughes. ‘I think that’s the reason why he gave up the information.’ Wright apparently mentioned a laundry van with a secret compartment above the driver that concealed a soldier with an SLR rifle. Shortly afterwards, the IRA ‘arrested’ two other ‘Volunteers’ who were also suspected of working for the ‘Freds’. One of them, Kevin McKee, was from the Second Battalion’s ‘B’ Company based in Ballymurphy. The other person’s name is not known.
It soon became clear that Wright’s revelations had implications far beyond ‘D’ Company’s patch, and others would have to be called in to continue the questioning. It was the nightmare every informer dreaded, arrest and interrogation by the IRA’s feared internal security squad, the ‘Unknowns’. The ‘Unknowns’ worked to the Belfast Brigade with a roving brief to cover all the IRA’s three Battalions in the city, rooting out suspected ‘touts’ and getting as much information from them as they could. No doubt their methods would not withstand scrutiny. Wright and McKee, and possibly the third man, were taken across the border and the ‘Unknowns’ set about their work. Wright apparently told all that he knew, about being trained in a compound at Palace Barracks with the ‘Freds’, about the activities of the MRF and, crucially, about the Four Square laundry. The interrogation of McKee and the third person apparently confirmed and amplified the picture.
Gradually, the Belfast Brigade pieced things together. Hughes, who had been ‘devastated’ when he found out that there had been an informer in ‘D’ Company’s midst, was then debriefed on what Wright and the others had revealed under interrogation. He was even more astonished and shocked. ‘We had no idea that British intelligence was running a laundry service and massage parlour,’ he told me. ‘Obviously people at that period would have been watching out, gathering intelligence, watching for suspicious cars and so forth but until this information came in, no one suspected the Four Square laundry team were military personnel.’ Hughes was all for hitting the laundry van as soon as possible before the ‘Brits’ discovered it had been rumbled and closed it down, but another senior IRA figure, who subsequently became a prominent Sinn Fein politician, argued that the IRA should bide its time so all three targets – the laundry, the massage parlour and back-up team in College Square – should be attacked at the same time. Hughes was finally persuaded that this was the better plan and that the IRA should bide its time. ‘The idea was to wipe out the whole intelligence set-up and to try and deal a blow to British military intelligence,’ he said.
The combined operation was planned for 2 October 1972 and masterminded by the Belfast Brigade. The IRA’s Third Battalion was to attack the massage parlour and the Second Battalion was to take out College Square and the Four Square laundry. The plan was to intercept the van during its rounds in the republican Twinbrook estate, kill the driver and riddle the area above the cab that was believed to conceal the soldier doing surveillance. Four Volunteers were chosen, one to drive the car and three to do the shooting, armed with a Thompson sub-machine gun, an M1 carbine and a pistol. The original plan had been to ambush the van when it stopped by the parade of shops in Juniper Park to buy some fish and chips, which the IRA had established was part of the laundry crew’s routine. It was, however, aborted when one of the IRA unit decided it was too risky. ‘There were too many kids swarming around,’ he told me. So the van was attacked further up the street. The gunmen got out of the car and ‘sprayed the whole ‘heap’, with the Thompson raking the top of the van, ‘although we had no proof there was anyone there’. One of the gunmen was hit by a ricochet and ‘did some squealing but was not seriously hurt’.
There was no soldier concealed above the cab but the driver, Sapper Edward Stuart of the Royal Engineers, was hit five times and killed. The woman from the WRAC was collecting and delivering laundry at the time and took refuge inside the house. According to Hughes, the occupants thought loyalists were attacking the van and kept the woman safe. A year later, she received the Military Medal, the first member of the Women’s Royal Army Corps to receive the award.8
About an hour later, the same IRA unit attacked College Square. They headed upstairs but there was no one there. The only shot fired was an accidental discharge.
A unit from the IRA’s Third Battalion attacked the Gemini massage parlour, which they had also been watching, and made for the room upstairs from where they believed the army had been carrying out surveillance on the clientele below. They claimed they hit three undercover soldiers, two men and a woman whom they believed to be the daughter of a senior army officer. However, no casualties were ever admitted.
Although two of the three operations were largely unsuccessful, the IRA maximized the propaganda potential of its attack on the Four Square laundry and its ‘unmasking’ of the army’s undercover operations. Brendan Hughes, who was familiar with what happened that day, was delighted with the outcome. ‘It was a great morale booster for the IRA and for the people that were involved. They believed it would be a massive blow against the British military machine.’ Hughes was dismissive of the way in which the ‘Brits’ had handled the Four Square laundry. ‘It was very amateurish. The very fact that the British army knew, or should have known, that two of their operatives were in enemy-controlled territory, should have cancelled the operation right away. To me it was a very, very amateurish and very badly run military operation.’
But Sapper Edward Stuart was not the only victim. At some stage, only the IRA knows when, the ‘two operatives’ Seamus Wright and Kevin McKee were ‘executed’ by the IRA. Although never forgotten by their families, their names caught the public’s attention again in 1999 when, as part of the Good Friday Agreement, the IRA agreed to help the authorities trace the bodies of nine people it had killed.
They became known as the ‘disappeared’. Some bodies were found but those of Wright and McKee were not amongst them.
Some weeks after the Four Square laundry was ambushed, a ‘very honest’ army NCO came to see Gavin at Army Headquarters with the profits made by the operation. He asked him what to do with the money as the laundry was no longer in business. Gavin was slightly embarrassed. ‘It certainly wasn’t designed to be profit-making,’ he said. ‘So we arranged for the proceeds to go to a suitable charity and that was the end of that. It was a sort of loose end that hadn’t been tied up.’
The end of the Four Square laundry marked the end of the MRF. Soon afterwards, the organization was disbanded. Viewing its demise from the tower that housed the ‘funny people’ at Stormont Castle, Peter saw it as an inevitable part of the learning curve. ‘The Four Square laundry partly worked and partly failed with disastrous consequences,’ he said. ‘It was a major factor in realizing that things could no longer go on this way. It’s rather like the first parachute. Somebody has got to have the notion of a parachute, jump out of an aeroplane and be killed before somebody says, “Well, I think we’ve got to design a better parachute.” ’ After the disaster of the Four Square laundry, military intelligence set about designing it. There were to be no more ‘piratical ventures’.
Chapter Twelve
A Better Parachute
Early 1973
Brian, the Colonel of the 1st Battalion, The Gloucestershire Regiment, returned to Belfast with his men at the beginning of 1973. He was a colourful commander, patriotic, extrovert and larger than life, and his men thought the world of him. Headquarters for the Battalion’s tour was the disused Albert Street mill in the heart of the IRA stronghold of the Lower Falls and in the shadow of the notorious Divis Flats. To the Gloucesters, the mill was a sand-bagged fortress in the middle of the ‘reservation’. The ‘reservation’ was Indian country. Out there were the men of Brendan Hughes’s ‘D’ Company of the IRA’s Second Battalion that covered the Gloucesters’ patch. Inside Albert Street mill, the soldiers felt reasonably secure, barricaded in tiny rooms with a little red light and three bunks. The windows had been shot out months ago and the sandbags, three or four deep, came right up to the top, leaving only a sliver of natural light to pierce the gloom inside. Once a soldier ventured outside the fortress and set foot in the ‘reservation’, he never knew if he was going to return. George, one of Colonel Brian’s men, had no love for the people beyond Albert Street mill. The feeling was mutual.
It was a battleground. I don’t care what anybody says, we were at war and against an enemy that was good. The snipers were always out there, waiting for us and for the opportunity to have a ‘bang’. You could feel the hatred. It was like an animal, like something from Hell. And we hated them too with the kind of hatred I never thought could get into me because I’m quite a nice bloke. You could feel the fear. It was a place where they were going to kill you. You knew that some of us weren’t going to come out alive, that we were going to die in those gutters and die in those derelicts and inside those Flats. You try to keep this out of your mind but it’s always there. Every time you went out on patrol, you’d put one up the spout, suck in the old breath and gee each other up, you know, ‘Come on lads! Everything’s going to be fine!’ And you’d go and touch a little talisman, whatever you had. I had a cross and chain and I used to touch that and say, ‘Look after me and look after the lads.’
Colonel Brian knew what he was in Albert Street mill to do. ‘I had a very simple mission statement from 39 Brigade and that was to destroy the IRA in my area,’ he told me. ‘As a Battalion commander, that was meat and drink to me and that’s what we got on to do. It meant capturing or killing everybody who was killing and maiming innocent people in my area.’ Besides relishing his ‘mission statement’, the Colonel also had a wicked sense of humour and took full advantage of the mill’s giant chimney that could be seen for miles around.
So that we could make sure that the locals were aware of what was going on in their area, we got hold of the highest ladder available in Northern Ireland, you know, one of those gantries that put television cameras up to very high heights. Then we stencilled our back-badge1 at the top and put the scoreboard on it. For instance, Gloucesters 2, IRA 0. We used to update it regularly so that we could keep them up to date on what was going on. The locals used to go bananas and many, many, many were the requests we used to have to get this thing taken down but, sadly, when we got these requests, we could never get hold of the ladder!
Despite such light relief, the Gloucesters’ tour was overshadowed by the loss of two of its young soldiers, Christopher Brady (21) and Geoffrey Breakwell (20). The loss was all the more keenly felt because Colonel Brian’s Battalion was so close. They died on 17 July 1973 when an IRA booby-trap bomb exploded in Divis Flats whilst their section was examining a suspicious-looking rolled-up mattress. Two other members of the patrol were seriously injured. George was a member of the stretcher party swiftly dispatched to the scene. The sight was horrendous. I asked him how he felt about the Flats and the people in them, having just lost two of his mates and seen two more seriously injured. ‘We wanted to go in and tear the place down, basically. We wanted to go in and just pay them back but the Colonel knew what was going to happen and he kept us out. Then he put another Company in the Flats with orders to keep us out for 24 hours at least.’
Three weeks later, at 2 a.m. one morning, when George was patrolling Divis Flats, he heard that those suspected of planting the bomb were being detained. He went running down to another floor of the Flats where his mate, ‘Butch’, was located and to his astonishment, three ‘kids’ aged fifteen, sixteen and seventeen were being held. ‘We arrested them immediately and took them back to base. The Colonel came out to see us and he was very pleased. He said, “You haven’t touched them, have you?” I said, “No, they’ve not been touched.”’
I asked George if he had been tempted. ‘We wanted to throw them off the balcony of the Flats, you know, that’s the first thing that comes into your mind,’ he said. ‘But you just don’t do that. We knew that if we touched them in any way, they’d get away with it. They’d get some smart-arse lawyer with no scruples and he would get them off, even though two of our men had been killed and two others badly wounded. So, fair do’s, my lads didn’t touch them.’
When the case came to court, the murder charges were dropped and the defence offered guilty pleas for causing an explosion.2 Because the accused were juveniles, the sentences were relatively light. The seventeen-year-old was sentenced to four years. He was alleged to have cleared the area before the bomb went off to make sure none of his people were hurt. The sixteen-year-old juvenile, who was said to have triggered the bomb and who could not be named because of his age, was sentenced to be detained at an institution for five years. The fifteen-year-old was cleared of all charges. The ‘kids’ had been caught just before the Battalion’s tour ended.
At their trial, the accused claimed they had made confessions after being ill-treated by detectives during their interrogation but the judge, Mr Justice Kelly, ruled that their statements were admissible as evidence. Such allegations were common and invariably dismissed by the authorities as IRA propaganda but there is no doubt that some were often based on fact. Although it is rare to hear policemen admit what they did, soldiers tend to be more open. For George and those who served in hard republican areas, it was a matter of survival.
If we caught them with a rifle, we’d give them a good hiding, basically. Oh yes, you know, it did happen because they were going to kill us and it was the law of the jungle.
What was a good hiding?
A good thumping, basically, you know.
That wouldn’t endear you to the local population.
We didn’t need endearing to that lot, mate. There was no nice people in that area. You know, people don’t understand how much they hated us.
On one occasion during an incident in the Lower Falls involving George and his se
ction, a notorious IRA gunman from ‘D’ Company was shot in the leg.
He was hit in the thigh and the blokes trod on the wound just to try and get information out of the guy. He was a tough bloke and there was no way he would have bent or anything. You could have probably cut his legs off and he wouldn’t have said anything. It’s what happened in those areas. You lost a lot of humanity in there, you lost a lot of your decency. Some of the things I did then, I’m not ashamed of doing really but I do wish I hadn’t done them sometimes, you know.
Soldiers who did the questioning in the army’s interrogation centres at the time did not wear kid gloves. They were desperate for information. On ‘a bad night’ after some incident or other, about eighty suspects, usually between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five, could be hauled in. ‘It kept the little bastards off the streets,’ an army officer of the time told me. Once inside, they were given ‘a pretty hard time’. The words were a euphemism. Army intelligence knew who was in the IRA but not necessarily who pulled the trigger. Soldiers would put on ski-masks and hold a gun to suspects’ heads. Others were made to crawl over broken glass. Years later, the officer recognized that such methods were counter-productive. Many of his contemporaries came to share his view. ‘We got information and thought we were doing the right thing but we weren’t. We were turning those on the periphery of the IRA into the IRA or at least into their active supporters. In those early days, we failed to appreciate the difference between Borneo and Belfast. We’d learned the lessons but they hadn’t been transposed properly. By this time we’d done sufficient damage to keep the IRA going for the next ten years.’
