Attack on Brendan Hughes

The Attack on Brendan Hughes was a failed assassination attempt in West Belfast on 2 September 1972, carried out by a covert British Army team associated with the Mobile Reconnaissance Force. Its significance lies in the reversal at its centre: Hughes first encountered gunmen disguised as civilians, then recognized their military connection when armoured vehicles carried them away. The attack turned a familiar neighbourhood into both a battlefield and a contested intelligence network, where residents’ assistance helped Hughes survive and the state’s hidden methods became briefly visible.

Setting and Target

On the Saturday morning of the attack, Hughes stood with associates from D Company near a vacant house on Leeson Street, opposite Varna Gap. The derelict building was one of many in a cityscape marked by burned, gutted or abandoned homes, their openings covered with plywood. At twenty-four, Hughes commanded D Company in a particularly dangerous part of West Belfast. He was a target not only for loyalist paramilitaries, the police and the British Army, but also for the Official IRA. His predecessor and cousin, Charlie, had been shot dead by the Officials eighteen months earlier.

Hughes was living underground, moving between houses and rarely sleeping in the same bed on consecutive nights. In Belfast, where people knew one another, staying on the run was especially difficult. Yet he chose to remain in the city, among the people and volunteers of D Company, rather than retreat across the border. The company’s small original membership had earned it the name the Dirty Dozen. Hughes’s leadership rested in part on sharing danger: he went on operations himself rather than asking others to take risks he would avoid.

His immediate vulnerability that morning was practical. Hughes normally carried a handgun, but an associate had borrowed it to steal a car. He was therefore unarmed when he noticed a green van approaching along Leeson Street. The driver, a stranger who appeared nervous, passed him and continued towards McDonnell Street and Grosvenor Road. Hughes remained uneasy and sent a runner to fetch a weapon. The van’s first passage had offered a warning without yet revealing its purpose.

The Pursuit

About five minutes later, before the runner had returned, the same van came back. It again passed Hughes, then stopped farther along the street. Its rear doors opened and several men in ordinary-looking clothes—tracksuits and trainers—jumped out. One carried two .45 pistols; two others had rifles. They opened fire as Hughes turned to flee.

Bullets struck the fronts of the abandoned houses as Hughes ran onto Cyprus Street, with the gunmen pursuing and shooting. He knew the local maze of narrow streets, alleys, fences and vacant properties. In West Belfast, some residents allowed paramilitaries to pass through their homes or hide there. Their help did not have a single explanation: some people felt intimidated into cooperation, while others offered it out of solidarity. Hughes also paid compensation when his operations damaged local property, part of his effort to sustain relations with the community on which his survival depended.

The narrative places that mutual dependence in ordinary acts amid extraordinary violence. During raids, fires and street disorder, Hughes sometimes carried an invalid neighbour, Squire Maguire, to the pub for a pint and brought him home afterward. On another occasion, an elderly woman stepped between a British soldier aiming at Hughes and the street, telling the soldier he would not shoot anyone there that evening. The attack’s escape route depended on the same neighbourhood knowledge and civilian presence: Hughes could use places and passages inaccessible to pursuers who did not belong to the streets.

The Safe House and Counterfire

Hughes turned towards a call house on Sultan Street, a family home that also served clandestine purposes: a refuge, waiting place, dead drop or arms depot. Such homes could provide a night’s rest to volunteers on the run, with families sometimes lifting sleeping children from beds to make room. As Hughes sprinted past a baker’s van at the corner, his pursuers fired into it, puncturing the vehicle and shattering its windows. He kept running towards the house.

The choice of destination carried a specific tactical consequence. Hughes had learned that his small Second World War-era .45 was a poor match for the British Army’s more powerful weapons. An acquaintance who was a sailor had brought back a catalogue for the Armalite rifle, which Hughes persuaded the Provisionals to import. He arranged for weapons to be smuggled aboard the Queen Elizabeth II through Irish crew members, some of whom worked for him. The new rifles became a conspicuous change in the conflict’s balance, celebrated in graffiti across West Belfast. At the call house, Hughes nearly overshot the door; when he stopped and swung it open, his momentum carried him through the front window. He got his bearings inside and retrieved an Armalite.

When he came back outside, the gunmen were bearing down on the house. Hughes aimed and fired, forcing them to scramble for cover and return fire. Then two Saracen armoured vehicles appeared and stopped on the road. The attackers disappeared into them. Hughes recognized the contradiction that had been concealed by their clothes: the men who had looked like civilians had escaped in British Army vehicles. He was left panting and bleeding, with the assailants gone.

Exposure and Aftermath

The vacant building opposite the point where the van first discharged its gunmen had concealed another part of the operation. British soldiers had spent the night inside, behind a partly bricked-up façade, using the house as an observation post in the heart of D Company’s territory. The attackers had not merely happened upon Hughes in the street; the attack emerged from surveillance conducted from a hidden position within the area he commanded.

A later-declassified British Army account described the operation not as an attempted targeted killing but as a snatch attempt. Its wording preserved the institutional framing while acknowledging that soldiers in civilian dress had confronted Hughes and his associates. The team failed to kill or capture him, but the operation had achieved one intelligence result: its members now knew what he looked like. Hughes was stitched up after the encounter, and Gerry Adams, who came to him himself, urged him to leave Belfast temporarily. Hughes eventually went to Dundalk, though he returned after about a week, impatient to resume his place in the city.

The attack was later placed within the wider record of the Mobile Reconnaissance Force, a secretive unit whose name itself was disputed. Its members, drawn from across the British Army, wore civilian clothes, conducted surveillance in republican neighbourhoods and used covert observation posts. The unit also carried out shootings, sometimes using weapons associated with paramilitaries so that responsibility might be attributed to armed groups rather than the army. That broader practice gives the Leeson Street episode its force: the apparent distinction between civilian attackers and state agents collapsed when the Saracens arrived. The failed pursuit exposed not only Hughes’s vulnerability but also the hidden contest over who could move through, watch and use the streets of West Belfast.