May 20, 2026
On the morning of Monday, 2 October 1972, at a corner of Andersonstown in West Belfast, a man in a parka who had been the Officer Commanding of the Provisional IRA’s Belfast Brigade for fourteen months stood at the wall of a house with a radio that did not officially belong to him and waited. His name was Brendan Hughes. He was twenty-four years old. He was waiting for confirmation that three British Army intelligence operations had been simultaneously terminated within a six-mile radius of where he stood. Two miles to the west, a green van bearing the false signage of a civilian laundry was about to be ambushed on a housing-estate cul-de-sac. Four miles to the northeast, a Belfast brothel on the Antrim Road was about to be raided by a four-man IRA squad. One mile south of where Hughes stood, an MRF office on College Square East was about to be hit. All three had been compromised by the same counter-intelligence cell. All three were going down inside the same forty minutes. The man on the corner had given the order. That is one way to tell the story of the morning of 2 October 1972. It is the story Hughes himself told, on a series of tape reels recorded between 2001 and 2002, in a Belfast back room, to a former IRA prisoner named Anthony McIntyre, for an oral history project archived at Boston College and embargoed until the contributors were dead. Hughes died on 16 February 2008, in Belfast City Hospital, of a chest infection that progressed to coma. The embargo lifted. The tapes emerged. The journalist Ed Moloney published them, in 2010, in a book called Voices from the Grave. The Officer Commanding had finally given his version of the morning, and the morning had its inside narrator. This is that narrator’s morning. To understand the man on the corner, you have to start in the Lower Falls.
canisgallicus 