The abduction and execution of Seamus Wright and Kevin McKee began as an intelligence reversal and ended in the killing of two men who had briefly been offered a way to survive their betrayal. After the Provisional IRA discovered that they were working with the British, Brendan Hughes used them as triple agents. Their intelligence helped expose the Four Square Laundry surveillance network, but their usefulness ended with the raids against it. The promise of immunity that Hughes had given them could not protect them: both men disappeared into IRA custody and were executed, leaving Hughes with a broken word that troubled him for the rest of his life.

Exposure and the double-agent plan

Wright and McKee had both confessed under interrogation to betraying the organisation and working with the British. McKee’s appearance made the arrangement especially visible: the Mobile Reaction Force had given him a pistol and shoulder holster, and he had worn the holster openly. As a Fred, he was permitted to carry the weapon and use the firing ranges at an army base. The Provisional IRA now knew that the British had recruited men from within its own world, although the full dimensions of the intelligence operation remained unclear.

The ordinary fate of a discovered informer, as the account describes it, was a court-martial, a guilty verdict, a shot in the back of the head, and a body dumped beside a road. But the British did not appear to know that Hughes had uncovered the breach, and Wright and McKee were willing to do whatever might save their lives. Hughes chose to exploit that opening rather than execute them immediately: they could return to their British handlers while secretly supplying information to the IRA.

The arrangement offered no safety. Wright was instructed to give the Freds low-level information or, better still, misinformation. If asked to identify a Provisional IRA member on a street corner, he could point to a Sticky instead. Discovery by the army might mean prison or death at the hands of the Mobile Reaction Force. Hughes nevertheless told both men that useful intelligence would earn them immunity for their original betrayal. Their continued lives now depended on serving two organisations whose interests were irreconcilable.

The Four Square operation and the loss of leverage

Wright and McKee delivered information about a British intelligence network built around Four Square Laundry. The business operated as a genuine door-to-door laundry service, collecting clothes and linens and sending them to an industrial laundry. Before the items reached the laundry, British authorities examined them for traces of explosives and compared the clothing with the reported number, ages, and genders of the people living at an address. A mismatch could suggest that a property was being used as an arms drop or call house. The laundry van had also been fitted with a hollow roof, allowing a concealed soldier to photograph people and houses through a hidden opening.

The Provisional IRA mounted simultaneous attacks on the network’s sites. Gunmen attacked the laundry operation and its associated locations, including an office and a massage parlour. Sarah Jane Warke, an undercover soldier who was with Ted Stuart, escaped into a local woman’s house and was helped out through the back door. The attackers had also been ordered to fire into the van’s ceiling to kill any soldier hidden there, but they did not do so; if a soldier was inside, he survived. The operation was a major intelligence success for the Provisional IRA. Gerry Adams later described it as a devastating blow to the British.

That success did not secure Wright and McKee’s freedom. On the day of the raids, Wright told his wife, Kathleen, that he needed to be careful because he had signed papers relating to the Official Secrets Act before his release by the British. That night a car came to the family’s home on Bombay Street. Wright spoke briefly with the driver, got into the passenger seat, and was driven away. When he did not return, Kathleen went to the Provisional IRA on Leeson Street and was told that it had not taken him. She feared the army had seized him, but the army also denied involvement. Military sources suggested to the press that he might have left for Scotland.

McKee disappeared around the same time. An aunt had warned him that the IRA was looking for him, but he replied that he had done nothing wrong. His family did not contact the police, believing the authorities would be more hindrance than help. Rumours placed him in art school or in England. The truth, as the narrative later establishes, was that the IRA had taken both men. Once the Four Square raids were complete, their intelligence had served its purpose and they no longer possessed leverage. Hughes had promised immunity, but he had not been authorised to guarantee it. Their initial betrayal remained unforgivable to the organisation, notwithstanding their subsequent work as triple agents.

Across the border and the executions

The Unknowns were summoned, and Dolours Price drove Wright and McKee south across the border into the Republic. She had been raised to despise informers, but concealed her contempt during the journey. The men were relaxed after the success of the operation and believed they had earned their lives back. They had been told they were going for a week of rest and recovery. Price assured them that they would get their strength back; as far as she knew, that was true, though she suspected otherwise and was following orders. In Monaghan, she left them with the local unit.

McKee was held in County Monaghan at a house belonging to the family of Fergal O’Hanlon, an IRA man killed in the 1950s. Senior leaders were expected to cross the border for McKee’s court-martial, so he waited with the people guarding him. They grew fond of him: he was a good cook and an engaging companion. At one point he borrowed the use of a nearby priest’s home to telephone his mother and ask her to bring a change of clothes. His mother and aunts made the journey, but when they reached the house McKee was gone. A man there told them to take the clothes away because he would not be coming back.

When the local volunteers were expected to execute McKee, they could not bring themselves to shoot a man they had come to like. Hughes understood their attachment as a reversal of Stockholm syndrome: the captors had grown attached to their hostage. Two gunmen from Belfast were sent in their place. Before the killing, a priest was summoned to give McKee the last rites. The execution followed a practised sequence: a bag over the head, hands bound behind the back, and the condemned man kneeling in the grass before the shot. The ritual preparations sharpened the contrast between the human ties McKee had formed with his guards and the organisation’s final decision to kill him.

Hughes’s broken promise and the event’s record

Hughes felt betrayed by the decision to disappear Wright and McKee. He had given them his word that they would not be killed, but the assurance exceeded the authority he actually possessed. Their executions therefore marked more than the end of the double-agent operation: they exposed the cost of a promise made in a clandestine organisation where one commander’s word could not overrule the organisation’s punishment for informing. Hughes remained troubled by the breach for the rest of his life.

The event’s later recovery depended in part on testimony produced under unusually guarded conditions. Ed Moloney proposed that former combatants speak for an oral-history archive whose contents would remain sealed until after participants’ deaths; Anthony McIntyre, himself a former Provisional IRA member, conducted long interviews and sent recordings and transcripts to Boston College under coded names. Brendan Hughes was one of those participants, identified in the project materials as C. The archive’s confidentiality assurances later proved vulnerable: Boston College’s contracts had not been reviewed by university lawyers and did not warn that a court order might compel disclosure. That history matters to the reconstruction of the killings because testimony about clandestine actions was gathered within a culture in which speaking could carry personal and legal risks.

The book also places the episode against the uncertainties that surround other disappearances and retrospective accounts of the conflict. In the case of Jean McConville, her children’s recollection of the abduction date differed from the date suggested by a police log later examined by Nuala O’Loan; the discrepancy affected how the sequence of warning and disappearance could be understood. That separate case does not resolve the fate of Wright and McKee, but it illustrates why chronology, official records, and remembered testimony must be distinguished rather than collapsed into a single seamless account. Here, the clearest sequence is the one the narrative traces: confession, conditional use as double agents, intelligence success, loss of leverage, secret transfer, and execution. The success against Four Square could be celebrated as a victory over British surveillance, but it did not redeem the men who had made it possible.