Brendan Hughes’s 1974 arrest after his disguise was exposed

Brendan Hughes’s 1974 arrest at Myrtlefield Park ended his return to Belfast under the carefully constructed identity of Arthur McAllister, a middle-class toy salesman. The raid exposed not only Hughes’s disguise but also the scale of the clandestine operation he had resumed: the house contained weapons, ammunition, tapped military communications and plans for a possible sectarian emergency. In custody, the authorities tried to turn the captured commander into an informer, but he refused.

From escape to a new identity

After escaping from Long Kesh in a rubbish lorry, Hughes made his way through a series of uncertain rides, reaching Newry and then taking a taxi across the border to Dundalk. Once safe in the Republic of Ireland, he nevertheless felt drawn back to Belfast. Months behind the wire had kept him from running operations, but he knew that returning to his old West Belfast area was too dangerous: he was well known, and his arrest with Gerry Adams the previous summer had been a major success for the authorities. His escape, in turn, had become an embarrassment for them.

Hughes’s solution was to make a return possible by making himself appear to be someone else. He rented a house on Myrtlefield Park and assumed the name Arthur McAllister, a real person who had died in infancy and would have been about Hughes’s age. He shaved off his trademark moustache, cut and dyed his hair, and shaped an outward persona at odds with the scruffy figure recorded in photographs after his earlier arrest. The result was what spies call a legend: a coherent double identity, supported by a three-piece suit, a driver’s licence and a case of toy samples and catalogues. Hughes later suggested that the tradecraft owed something to the 1973 film of The Day of the Jackal.

The disguise did more than conceal him at a single address. As McAllister, Hughes could cross Belfast’s sectarian lines and use the ordinary rounds of a salesman to move through the city, carrying toys and arranging clandestine meetings. British troops sometimes stopped him, but accepted his story. The contrast between the respectable merchant and the escaped commander made the identity useful precisely because it looked mundane.

The raid at Myrtlefield Park

In spring 1974, that appearance of suburban quiet was broken by a convoy of police cars and armoured vehicles, which rushed through the streets and stopped outside the house. The British Army had been watching the property. A soldier in camouflage had spent the previous night concealed in a rhododendron bush in the front garden; the surveillance had lasted so long that fellow soldiers worried he might have no food. An attempt to resupply him discreetly went wrong when someone carrying fish and chips threw the food into the wrong bush.

The target was the toy salesman himself. Soldiers and police stormed the house and shoved McAllister against a wall. He protested indignantly that he was an innocent civilian and objected to officials barging into his home. They did not accept either his assumed identity or his claim to be an ordinary salesman. One officer addressed him as Darkie and told him he had had a long enough run. The disguise that had let Hughes return to Belfast had finally failed; the operation ended in arrest.

What the authorities found

A search of the house revealed four rifles, a sub-machine gun and more than three thousand rounds of ammunition. The officers also found six tapes of telephone calls tapped from army headquarters. Hughes had been seeking intelligence about the authorities, and the tapes showed the scale of that effort; their presence in the house also made clear how much sensitive material his cover had allowed him to gather and hold.

Among the seized documents was a contingency scenario that became known as the IRA’s “Doomsday Plan.” It envisaged an all-out sectarian war in which Hughes and his colleagues would have to defend Catholic areas. The papers included maps of evacuation routes and a prepared statement presenting the Irish Republican Army as having no alternative but to defend its people, while warning that harsh measures might be imposed to achieve military success. They also anticipated a radio station broadcasting information about food supplies. The documents gave the raid a significance beyond the exposure of one fugitive: they showed that the house contained preparations for a feared emergency as well as the materials of an active intelligence operation.

How the authorities discovered Hughes’s identity remained unclear. He had been spying on them, but they had also located his hideout and identified the dapper merchant as the escaped commander. The uncertainty carried its own danger inside the Irish Republican Army. Observers noted that the Provisionals were likely to investigate whether a major informer had penetrated their ranks. The arrest thus exposed a vulnerability without resolving how it had arisen.

Refusal in custody

This arrest differed from Hughes’s earlier capture. On that occasion, his captors had beaten him and taken trophy photographs beside him. Now, RUC Special Branch officers approached him as a potential recruit. They argued that, as a central figure in Belfast operations, he was well placed to help bring the conflict to an end and prevent further bloodshed. Hughes said he was not interested. The officers then offered him a suitcase of money.

Hughes later recalled being offered fifty thousand pounds to become an informer and said that even fifty million would not sway him. His refusal closed off the course the officers were proposing, but it did not answer the suspicions raised by the raid: the source of their knowledge about the Myrtlefield Park hideout remained uncertain. The event therefore joined two opposed forms of secrecy. Hughes had returned under a fabricated life, moving openly through the city, while the authorities had quietly watched him; after his arrest, they tried to make his knowledge serve their side. He rejected that offer, even as the capture dismantled the identity that had made his return possible.