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Hughes was tearing along so fast that he almost passed the call house, and when he staggered to a sudden stop and swung open the door, he had acquired so much momentum that he went crashing, instead, right through the front window. He tumbled into the front room, got his bearings – and retrieved an Armalite. Then he stepped outside, saw his pursuers barrelling towards the house, trained the Armalite on them, and started shooting. The men scrambled for cover and fired back. Then, out of nowhere, two Saracen armoured vehicles materialised, rumbling down the road. They stopped abruptly, and suddenly the men were gone. Hughes stood there, panting, processing what he had just witnessed. The gunmen had been dressed like civilians. But they had escaped in a British Army vehicle. They weren’t civilians – they were British Army. That was when Hughes looked down and realised he was bleeding.
Hughes had grown up surrounded by Protestants, in a predominantly Protestant enclave of West Belfast. When he was a child, during the 1950s, many of his friends were Protestant kids. There was an old woman who lived on the street who would spit every time he passed her house and ask if he had blessed himself with the pope’s piss that morning. But for the most part he coexisted peacefully with the Protestants around him. Hughes was not yet ten years old when his mother died of cancer, leaving his father, Kevin, a bricklayer, to care for six children alone. Kevin never remarried. Two of Brendan’s brothers emigrated to Australia in search of work, and he stepped up, helping his father raise his younger siblings. Kevin would go out to work, and Brendan would be in charge of the kids at home. His father described him, in a modest expression that still counted as the highest praise, as a ‘lad you could depend upon’.
In 1967, Hughes joined the British Merchant Navy and went to sea. He voyaged to the Middle East and to South Africa, where he witnessed up close the horrors of apartheid. By the time he returned two years later, Belfast had erupted into violence. Though he never spoke of it, Brendan’s father had been a member of the IRA in his youth. One of Kevin’s friends from that era was Billy McKee, the famous hard-line paramilitary who had helped to establish the Provos, and Brendan was brought up to revere McKee as a legendary patriot and gunman. When the family walked to Mass on Sunday mornings, they would pass McKee’s house on McDonnell Street, and Brendan felt as though he should genuflect out of respect for the man. Once, in some scullery where tea was being made after a funeral, he spotted McKee in conversation with some other adults. Brendan deliberately brushed against him and felt the bracing hardness of the .45 under his belt. Unable to control his curiosity, Brendan asked McKee if he could see the weapon, and McKee showed it to him.
When Brendan Hughes left to join the merchant navy, his father made a peculiar request: ‘Never get a tattoo.’ It was common for sailors to tattoo their bodies, and Hughes would have found himself in various tattoo parlours across Europe and the Far East, waiting while his mates submitted to the needle. But he honoured his father’s request. Kevin never gave any specific rationale for the admonition, apart from suggesting, vaguely, that a tattoo was an ‘identifiable mark’. But years later, Brendan would reflect on that moment, wondering whether his father might have had some premonition about the road that he would end up taking.
At the call house on Sultan Street, he was losing blood quickly. But not from a gunshot. When he crashed through the front window, the broken glass had severed an artery in his wrist. The call house was blown now; it would not be safe to remain there. So several colleagues hustled Hughes to another house a short distance away. He badly needed medical attention, but getting him to a hospital was out of the question: the army had sent men to execute him, and there was no policy of sanctuary that might protect him in a medical facility. The alternative was getting a doctor to come to Hughes, but that would pose a different sort of challenge. The men who tried to kill him had disappeared, but Saracens were still patrolling the neighbourhood, no doubt searching for him. Hughes was trapped inside the house, like some wounded animal, the blood pumping out of his arm with each beat of his heart.
Half an hour went by. Things were looking grim. Then Gerry Adams arrived, with a doctor. Adams might have been the best friend that Brendan Hughes had. They had met two summers earlier, during the riots of 1970, when Adams was directing rioters. Hughes couldn’t remember Adams himself actually throwing stones or petrol bombs, but he was very effective at orchestrating others. That was Adams’s role, in Hughes’s view – he was ‘the key strategist’ for the Provos, whereas Hughes was more of a tactician. Fearless and cunning, Hughes could mastermind any operation, but Adams had the sort of mind that could perceive the broader political context and the shifting tectonics of the conflict. Like a general who stays behind the battle lines, Adams was known for avoiding direct violence himself. If a convoy of cars loaded with Armalites arrived in the neighbourhood, Adams would ride in the ‘scout’ car – the one without any weapons – whereas Hughes tended to be wherever the guns were. Dolours Price liked to joke that she never saw Hughes without a gun and she never saw Adams with one. To Adams, it seemed that Hughes was always very much in the thick of things. He had a ‘tremendous following’ among the lads on the street, Adams later observed, adding that Hughes ‘compensated for any inability to articulate politically at great length by doing the right things instinctively’.
If there was something faintly patronising about this observation, it fitted, more or less, with the role Hughes saw for himself in the conflict. He regarded himself as a soldier, not a politician. He considered himself a socialist, but he wasn’t consumed by ideology. He considered himself a Catholic, too, but Adams said the Rosary and read his Bible every night, whereas it was an effort for Hughes to get to Mass. Hughes sometimes remarked that his reverence for Adams was such that if Adams told him that tomorrow was Sunday when he knew that it was Monday, it would be enough to make him stop and think twice. Brendan’s own little brother, Terry, remarked that Brendan’s real family was the IRA – and his brother was Gerry Adams.
A later photo of Gerry Adams and Brendan Hughes
The doctor whom Adams had summoned was a local heart surgeon. But because he had come in such a hurry, he had no equipment. So someone fetched a needle and thread and a pair of tweezers, and the surgeon plunged the tweezers into the wound in Hughes’s arm, grasping blindly for the recessed end of the severed vessel. Securing it, finally, between the tweezers’ prongs, he pulled the artery down so that he could carefully sew it up. This rough procedure was conducted in close quarters, without anaesthetic, but Hughes could not scream, because the army was still looking for him, patrolling the street outside. At one point while the doctor was working, a Saracen pulled up right in front of the house and lingered there, its powerful engine rumbling, while they all waited, frozen, wondering if men with rifles were about to break through the door.
That Adams had come personally meant a great deal to Hughes, because it was risky for him to do so. According to the Special Branch of the RUC, Adams had been commander of the Ballymurphy unit of the Provisionals, and later became the officer commanding of the Belfast Brigade – the top IRA man in the city. He was a marked man, more wanted by the authorities than even Hughes.
But Adams felt a deep bond of loyalty to Hughes. In addition to the genuine affection they shared, it mattered to Adams that when Hughes went ‘on the run’, he remained on the streets of Belfast, rather than flee the city and retreat to the countryside or across the border to the Republic. He could have fled to Dundalk, just over the border, which had become a sort of Dodge City for republicans who were hiding out; they would sit in the pubs, getting drunk and playing cards. Instead, Hughes stayed in the city, close to his loyal soldiers in D Company, and he never let up the frantic pace of operations. ‘Local people knew he was there,’ Adams remarked. ‘And that was the kind of incentive they wanted.’
Adams saved Hughes’s life that day, and Hughes wouldn’t forget it. He could have sent someone else, but he came himself. When Hughes was stitched up and the doctor had left, Adams ordered his friend to get out of Belfast and lie low for a while. He had clearly been targeted for assassination – it was a sure bet that they would try to kill him again. Hughes didn’t want to leave, but Adams insisted. So Hughes travelled to Dundalk and booked a room in a bed-and-breakfast. But he was not one for R&R: he was itchy, impatient to get back to Belfast. In the end, he lasted only a week – which, given the pace of events in those days, felt to Hughes like an eternity.
In the vacant building across from where Hughes stood when the green van first discharged the shooters, something stirred. Behind the partially bricked-up façade, a team of British soldiers had spent the night. The paramilitaries were not the only ones to repurpose local real estate in service of their tactical objectives. The abandoned house, in the heart of D Company’s territory, was being used as a clandestine observation post.
In the secret internal records of the British Army, a brief account of this botched mission survives. A write-up by the army, which has since been declassified and released, acknowledged that soldiers in civilian dress had engaged in what was described, for the purposes of the official record, not as an effort at targeted assassination, but as a ‘snatch attempt’. From their hidden observation post, the soldiers had been conducting surveillance on Brendan Hughes and his associates from right inside their own territory. They had failed to kill or capture him this time. But now they knew what he looked like.
7
The Little Brigadier
Frank Kitson, like Dolours Price and Gerry Adams, was born into a family tradition. His father was an admiral in the Royal Navy. His brother was in the navy as well. His grandfather had served in the Indian Army. Kitson joined the British Army’s Rifle Brigade and ended up marrying a colonel’s daughter. But by the time he became a soldier, at eighteen, it felt as though he might have got started too late: it was 1945, and Kitson was sent to Germany, where the fighting had ended and the only thing left to do was watch the postscript to the war. There didn’t seem to be much prospect of another world war, so Kitson spent his time living the life of a gentleman officer – going to the opera, racing horses, fishing – and trying to suppress the nagging suspicion that he might have missed his moment.
In 1953, he was assigned to Kenya, which was then still a British colony, to help put down an uprising by an elusive rebel group known as the Mau Mau. As he packed his bags for this assignment, Kitson’s greatest fear was that by the time he actually arrived in Kenya, the ‘colonial emergency’, as it was called, might have ended, and he would be forced to come home again without ever having seen any action.
He needn’t have worried. When Kitson arrived in Kenya, he took immediately to what he called ‘the game’. He was a methodical type, so he wrote down his ambition on a little piece of paper: ‘To provide the Security Forces with the information they [need] to destroy the Mau Mau.’ He tucked the paper into the Bible that he kept by his bed.
Kitson was short and stocky, with piercing eyes and a jutting chin. He carried himself ramrod straight, as if on a parade ground, and swung his shoulders as he walked, which gave the impression that he was a larger man than he was. Beneath his peaked and tasselled army cap, he was gradually losing his hair, and as the years went on he was seldom photographed without the cap. He had a slightly nasal voice and was prone to a sportsman’s vernacular, describing people as ‘off net’ and seasoning his conversation with other clubby expressions. He was known to dislike small talk. One story about Kitson that circulated in the army (and was almost certainly apocryphal, but revealing nonetheless) involved a dinner party at which the wife of one of Kitson’s colleagues found herself seated next to him and announced that she had made a bet with a friend that she could get ‘at least half a dozen words’ out of him.
‘You’ve just lost,’ Kitson said, and did not speak another word to her all evening.
In Kenya, he found himself in a completely new environment: the forest. Before leaving on a night mission, he would apply black camouflage to his hands and face and, to complete the disguise, pull an old African bush hat over his head. By ‘blacking up’ in this manner, he supposed he might be mistaken, at a distance and in poor light, for a native. Like a character out of Kipling, Kitson would plunge into the bramble, in search of the mysterious Mau Mau. As he navigated the dense bush, he was struck by how quickly you could adapt to the most alien milieu. In a memoir of his time in Kenya, he wrote, ‘Everything is strange for the first few moments, then after a time normal existence seems strange.’
One day, Kitson came across a group of Kenyans draped from head to toe in white robes. Their faces were completely obscured, with thin slits cut in the fabric for their eyes, noses and mouths. When Kitson enquired about who these strange men were, he learned that they were Mau Mau who had been induced to betray their fellow rebels and work with the British Army. With their identities shielded by the robes, they could observe a group of prisoners, then tell their British handlers who was who.
This was an epiphany for Kitson, a defining episode, as it introduced him to the ‘counter-gang’, a concept that he immediately perceived could be fashioned into a highly effective weapon. In fighting an insurgency, Kitson realised, quality intelligence is essential, and one way to obtain that intelligence is to inveigle some members of the insurgency to switch sides. He began to devote a great deal of thought to how one could best go about persuading a rebel to betray his compatriots. Clearly, trust was a key ingredient, because any potential source, by agreeing to assist his enemy, would effectively be placing his life in the enemy’s hands. But trust is a bond that can be cultivated. When Kitson was courting a new recruit to work as his agent, he would take the man on patrol with him. When they were deep in the bush, Kitson would hand his own pistol to the man, keeping only a machete for himself. This was a risky gesture, but Kitson believed that entrusting his secret agent with a weapon was a way of conveying ‘that he was absolutely one of the team’.
Frank Kitson in Kenya (Still from ‘Kitson’s Class’ in documentary series War School, BBC One London, 9 January 1980)
The British eventually suppressed the rebellion, but at a staggering human cost. Nobody knows precisely how many Kenyans were slaughtered, but the number may reach the hundreds of thousands. Some 1.5 million people were detained, many in internment camps. Mau Mau suspects were subjected, during interrogations, to electric shocks, cigarette burns and appalling forms of sexual torture. This brutal campaign did not forestall the British withdrawal from Kenya, in 1963. Yet, back in London, the operation against the Mau Mau was celebrated as a great success. Kitson had been awarded the Military Cross, for valour, in 1955, for his ‘gallant and distinguished services in Kenya’. ‘I wondered if perhaps some of my good fortune might have been due to the fact that I did think just a little bit more like a terrorist than some of our commanders,’ he mused afterwards. ‘I wondered how much of the African mentality I had absorbed. Was I becoming callous and ruthless and treacherous – to mention some of their less attractive characteristics?’
Kitson had found his calling. There might be no more world wars to fight, but there were plenty of colonial insurgencies. In 1957, he ventured to Malaya, where he battled communist guerrillas in the jungles of Johore and was awarded a Bar to his Military Cross. From there he was dispatched to the Sultanate of Muscat and Oman, to contend with a rebellion in the desert. Next he did two stints in Cyprus, where Greek and Turkish Cypriots had gone to war, and was given command of his own battalion.
In 1969, Kitson spent a quiet year away from the battlefield, on a fellowship at Oxford University. Amid the Gothic architecture and manicured quadrangles, he embarked on a new project: an effort to systematise his thinking about counter-insurgency. He studied Mao and Che Guevara and drew on his own combat experience, to produce a manuscript with the anodyne title Low Intensity Operations. In this book, Kitson advanced an argument that would become a cornerstone of later counter-insurgency thinking: it is important not merely to put down an uprising but to win the hearts and minds of the local population. The book also focused heavily on the gathering of intelligence. It made a point so obvious that it almost went without saying: if you want to defeat an insurgency, it helps to know who the insurgents are. By the time Kitson finished the book, in 1970, he had emerged as perhaps the pre-eminent warrior-intellectual of the British Army. When he finished at Oxford, he was promoted to brigadier and sent to the site of Britain’s latest small war: Northern Ireland.
Army headquarters at Lisburn lay eight miles outside Belfast, behind fortified blast walls lined with sandbags and barbed wire. The number of British troops in Northern Ireland had escalated dramatically in a short period of time: during the summer of 1969, there were 2,700; by the summer of 1972 there were more than 30,000. The soldiers were often just as young and inexperienced as the paramilitaries they were fighting: gangly, pimply, frightened young men who were scarcely out of their teens. They were spread across the country, at bases and barracks and makeshift billets. Two companies of Black Watch soldiers were billeted in a vast aircraft hangar. Another company resided in a bus depot, where soldiers bunked down in empty buses. The soldiers were being deployed to Northern Ireland for four-month tours, before rotating home again.
It could be a hugely dangerous assignment, with a multitude of armed factions blending into close-knit communities. In light of the constant risk of getting picked off by a sniper or torn apart by a homemade bomb, some of the more introspective soldiers were forced to wonder: What would success look like? How would you define victory? They had been sent to Northern Ireland to quell the unrest during the summer of 1969, but since their arrival, the bloodshed had only intensified. What would they have to achieve before they could all go home? The army that deployed in the Troubles was not the army that had fought the Nazis. It was an organisation that had come of age fighting small wars of colonial disentanglement. But what was Northern Ireland? Was it part of the United Kingdom? Or was it one of those restive colonies?
When Frank Kitson arrived, in 1970, he was not the overall commander of British forces. But he was in charge of the army’s 39 Airportable Brigade, which had responsibility for Belfast, and his influence far exceeded his station. As one of Kitson’s subordinates later put it, ‘Within his area of responsibility he was the sun around which the planets revolved, and he very much set the tone.’
The biggest challenge facing the army when Kitson arrived was a shortage of solid intelligence. The men and women who became paramilitaries, whether republican or loyalist, looked like everyone else in the civilian population. So how to identify them? In previous decades, the membership of the IRA had been relatively static – the same names came up year after year. But the old police files were in desperate need of an update, now that there were new recruits flocking to the cause every week. This difficulty was only exacerbated by the blunderbuss approach favoured by the army. ‘When I was first there, the tactics were rather to stand in a line, pump the place full of gas, and let people chuck bricks at you until they got tired of it,’ Kitson later recalled. ‘Not a very good idea because the gas did so much damage to the local people. It made them hostile.’
In Low Intensity Operations, Kitson had observed that the aim in counter-insurgency situations should be to ‘destroy the subversive movement utterly’. But it’s difficult to destroy a target that you cannot see. Kitson became obsessed with intelligence. The first challenge is always ‘getting the right information’, he liked to say.
In particular, Kitson was interested in D Company of the Belfast Brigade, the IRA unit operated by Brendan Hughes and the one that was doing the most damage. British soldiers referred to Hughes’s operational area in West Belfast as ‘the reservation’ – Indian country, where soldiers should tread carefully, if at all. Among themselves (and occasionally in the press) the soldiers would decry their adversaries’ lack of humanity, saying, ‘These people are savages.’ Hughes and his men were out there, invisible and silent, embedded in the community. At Palace Barracks, outside the city, where many of the soldiers were stationed, you could hear the bombs going off in Belfast at night. The windowpanes would shudder.
With blasts in central shopping areas, you might suppose that the army would have no trouble finding frightened or disaffected civilians who were willing to help them by furnishing information. But soldiers complained that in West Belfast, a ‘wall of silence’ protected the IRA. Informers were known as ‘touts’, and for centuries they had been reviled in Irish culture as the basest species of traitor. So there was a profound social stigma against cooperating with the British.
Brendan Hughes was not the only one with a habit of quoting that Mao line about the fish and the sea. Kitson liked it, too. But he put his own spin on the sentiment. A fish can be ‘attacked directly by rod or net’, he advised. ‘But if rod and net cannot succeed by themselves it may be necessary to do something to the water.’
Just before dawn one morning in August 1971, three thousand British troops descended on nationalist areas across Northern Ireland. Soldiers broke down doors and dragged men from their beds, hauling them off to internment. Under the Special Powers Act, it was legal to hold someone indefinitely without trial, and internment had been used periodically in Northern Ireland. But not on this scale. Of the nearly 350 suspects arrested that day, not a single one was a loyalist, though there were plenty of loyalist paramilitaries engaged in terrorism at the time. This disparity in treatment only compounded the impression, in the minds of many Catholics, that the army was simply another instrument of sectarian oppression. In planning the sweep, the army had relied on intelligence from the RUC, and, as one British commander later acknowledged, the largely Protestant police force consisted of people who were ‘partial to one extent or another, in many cases, to a considerable extent’.
But the lists of suspects that the RUC produced were not merely skewed to target Catholics – they were also out of date, and included many people who had no involvement whatsoever in the armed struggle. Because of the Irish tradition of naming sons after their fathers, elderly men were dragged off under the mistaken assumption that they were their sons, and sons were arrested because the authorities thought they were their fathers. (Sometimes, finding both father and son at home and uncertain about which one they were after, the army simply took both.) Nearly a third of the suspects seized that morning were released after two days. The army had arrested a bunch of people it wasn’t looking for while failing to arrest most of the people it was looking for, all while further embittering a Catholic population that was highly embittered to begin with. An official study by the British Ministry of Defence later conceded that internment had been ‘a major mistake’. In the words of one British officer who took part in the sweep, ‘It was lunacy.’