spies call a ‘legend’ – a coherent double identity. (He would later suggest that this cloak-and-dagger tradecraft had been inspired by the thriller The Day of the Jackal, the film of which which was released in 1973.)
Becoming Arthur McAllister, middle-class toy salesman from Myrtlefield Park, meant that he could return to Belfast. What’s more, it opened the city up to him: suddenly he could traverse the sectarian lines, toting his briefcase full of toys, conducting clandestine meetings wherever he wanted. Sometimes he would be stopped on his travels by British troops, but they always bought his story – after all, he had his case of toys and a driver’s licence that said ‘Arthur McAllister’. The Provos knew that it would madden the British to think of Hughes out on the streets, at large, and they occasionally tempted fate by boasting publicly after he made appearances in disguise. At one point, following an Easter commemoration at Milltown Cemetery, which the authorities would have been monitoring closely, the IRA announced that Hughes had been in attendance, ‘under the noses of the British Army’.
‘My job at that time was to bring the war to the Brits,’ Hughes said later. ‘I was good at what I done and I done it.’ In the guise of Arthur McAllister, he was planning a number of ambitious operations. But his most audacious scheme during that period was a successful effort to wiretap army headquarters. The British were not the only ones with a taste for espionage. Hughes had appealed to republican technical experts to see if there was some way to penetrate the army’s communications. A local telephone engineer visited army headquarters at Thiepval Barracks, in Lisburn, to install a new backup exchange. The engineer was not an IRA member, but a supporter, and he secretly installed a tap on the telephone of the army’s intelligence cell, attaching a voice-activated recorder to the line. Because army intelligence liaised regularly with Special Branch, this would, at least in theory, provide Hughes with precious insight into the internal operations of both organisations.
The same technician who put the bug in place began to visit the house in Myrtlefield Park every few days, dropping off a fresh batch of tapes. But there was a problem: the tapes were garbled, unintelligible. They sounded, to Hughes, like Mickey Mouse. It appeared that, as an added precaution, the army had scrambled its calls. There was a device that could be used to unscramble such calls, but it was not the sort of thing you could walk into a consumer electronics shop and purchase. In fact, the only place where such a piece of equipment could be found was back at army headquarters. So Hughes ordered the technician to return to Lisburn, with instructions to steal an unscrambling device from the army. And he did.
Hughes may have been spying on the authorities, but he failed to realise that, at a certain point, the authorities were also spying on him. They had somehow got wind of his hideout and established that the dapper toy merchant, in his ivy-covered home, was in fact the escaped IRA commander Brendan Hughes. It was not at all clear how the police and the army might have come by such a compromising piece of information, but for observers at the time, it raised an obvious possibility. As one report noted after Hughes was taken into custody, ‘The Provisionals are certain to launch an intensive inquiry into whether they have a big-time informer in their midst.’
When the police raided the house where Hughes was staying, they discovered four rifles, a sub-machine gun, and more than three thousand rounds of ammunition, as well as half a dozen tapes of tapped phone calls from army headquarters. They also found a cache of materials that outlined a contingency scenario that would become known as the IRA’s ‘doomsday plan’. The situation envisaged by the documents was one of all-out sectarian war, in which Hughes and his colleagues would be forced to defend Catholic areas. There were maps showing evacuation routes, and a prepared statement that read, ‘An Emergency has been forced upon us and the IRA has no alternative to defend its people. It may be necessary to impose harsh measures to ensure that this succeeds militarily.’ The documents predicted a kind of apocalypse. They indicated that an IRA radio station would broadcast information about food supplies.
The first time Hughes was arrested, his captors had beaten him and taken trophy photographs while they posed alongside him.