When Francie McGuigan was finally returned to Crumlin Road jail, he saw his father, and the older man broke down and cried.
There is no record, at least in the public domain, of Frank Kitson’s views on ‘interrogation in depth’. But it seems unlikely that he was troubled by it. Rough tactics were a signature of the colonial campaigns in which he specialised. When his treatise on counterinsurgency was released, one review noted that ‘the four Geneva conventions of 1949, many parts of which are explicitly relevant, and which Britain has signed, are not mentioned’. A subsequent investigation by the British government found that some of the interrogation techniques used against the so-called Hooded Men constituted criminal assault. But in a controversial 1978 decision, the European Court of Human Rights held that the techniques, while ‘inhuman and degrading’, did not amount to torture. (In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, when the American administration of George W. Bush was fashioning its own ‘enhanced interrogation’ techniques, officials relied explicitly on this decision to justify the use of torture.)
But perhaps the most concrete application of Frank Kitson’s colonial philosophies in the context of the Troubles was the MRF. This was an elite unit so murky and clandestine that nobody seemed to agree even on the baseline matter of what precisely the acronym MRF stood for. It might have been Mobile Reconnaissance Force. Or Military Reconnaissance Force. Or Military Reaction Force. The MRF consisted of thirty or so special operators, both men and women, who were hand-picked from all across the British Army. They dressed in plain clothes, wearing bell-bottoms and denim jackets, and grew their hair long. Within the army, they were known as the ‘Bomb Squad’, because one of their responsibilities was reconnaissance, and they would stake out locations where they expected paramilitaries to plant a bomb. Soldiers of Irish origin were deliberately recruited, in order to blend in with the locals.
Members of the MRF drove around republican enclaves, conducting covert surveillance. But they also got out of their vehicles, in the heart of Indian country. They posed as road sweepers and dustmen. They huddled with the vagrants drinking methylated spirits by the side of the road. They also began to set up secret observation posts, creeping into shops and homes that had been damaged by rioting or fire. A single brick would be extracted from a walled-up façade, allowing an MRF member hiding inside to look out on the neighbourhood. One woman who worked for the MRF went door-to-door, selling cosmetics and gathering intelligence as she went. In December 1971, Kitson wrote a memo entitled ‘Future Developments in Belfast’, in which he explained that one critical means of bringing the fight to the IRA was ‘building up and developing the MRF’.
But the unit was doing more than gathering intelligence. It was assassinating people, too. Men in plain clothes would drive around in an unmarked Ford Cortina, with a Sterling sub-machine gun hidden under the seat. They had to keep the weapon out of sight, one MRF member would later explain, because they were camouflaged so effectively that if they passed an army outpost and were spotted with a gun, their own British colleagues ‘would open fire and we would be shot’. It was an MRF team that had burst out of the green van in West Belfast and attempted to murder Brendan Hughes. These hit squads deliberately carried particular makes of weapons that were used by the paramilitaries, so that when someone was murdered, the ballistics would suggest that it was the IRA or loyalist killers who were responsible, rather than the army.
‘We wanted to cause confusion,’ one MRF member recalled. If people believed the paramilitaries were responsible, it would erode their standing in the community and preserve the image of the army as a law-abiding neutral referee. This was particularly true in those instances where the MRF, seeking to assassinate a target, ended up inadvertently killing an unaffiliated civilian instead. One summer night in 1972, a twenty-four-year-old woman named Jean Smyth-Campbell was sitting in the passenger seat of a car at a bus terminal on the Glen Road when a bullet pierced the window and then her head. At the time, the police announced that ‘no security forces were involved’ in her death and implied that there might be some connection to ‘political bodies’ (a shorthand for paramilitary groups) in the area. Smyth-Campbell’s family came to believe that she had been shot by the IRA. It would be four decades before they learned that she was almost certainly killed by the MRF.
Frank Kitson was a maestro of press manipulation. In the aftermath of a spasm of violence, he would summon the local Guardian correspondent, a young writer named Simon Winchester, to visit him at army headquarters for a briefing. Kitson would proceed to spell out, with great certainty, the circumstances of the relevant incident, citing the army’s classified intelligence files on the victims. Winchester, feeling lucky to have the scoop, would then dutifully report that the dead man in question had been a quartermaster or an ordnance expert or a senior marksman for the Provos. Winchester liked Kitson, whom he thought of as ‘the little Brigadier’, and they became friends; the young correspondent would make social visits to Kitson’s family at their home on the army base and play cards with Kitson’s daughter. It was only later that Winchester came to realise how shoddy British intelligence on the Provos was at that stage, and to suspect that much of the information he had parroted was simply wrong. He eventually concluded, and acknowledged publicly, that he had been used by Kitson as a ‘mouthpiece’ for the army.
Kitson’s Strangelovean attributes made him an object of obsession for the IRA. The Provos studied Low Intensity Operations and featured Kitson in their propaganda. In the fevered imaginations of the paramilitaries, he became an outsize antagonist, talked about but rarely seen, ‘Kits the Butcher of Belfast’. Already prone to wartime superstition, the Provos began to attribute any freak occurrence that they could not otherwise explain to the mind games of the shifty British strategist, as if he were some sort of poltergeist. There were plans to kidnap Kitson, though none of them ever came to fruition. The Provos were said to have a ‘death list’, with the names of priority targets for assassination; Frank Kitson was right at the top.
But the Provos were not the only ones to keep a death list. As the MRF conducted its surveillance and developed intelligence, the unit had its own catalogue of targets whom the operatives were authorised to shoot on sight. In the MRF’s secret briefing room in the heart of Palace Barracks, the walls were plastered with surveillance shots of the biggest ‘players’ among the Provos – their targets. According to an account by one former member of the MRF, the key figures on the wall included Brendan Hughes, Gerry Adams, and Dolours and Marian Price.
8
A prison floated in Belfast Lough. The HMS Maidstone was a five-hundred-foot ship that had been used during the Second World War to service submarines for the Royal Navy. When the Troubles broke out, the vessel was hastily recommissioned as emergency accommodation for two thousand British troops arriving in Belfast, then recommissioned again, as HMP Maidstone – Her Majesty’s Prison. The ship slouched in the harbour, at a jetty, twenty feet from land. The prison quarters consisted of two bunkhouses beneath the deck: stuffy, overcrowded spaces in which prisoners were confined in three-tiered bunks. The light was dim, filtering through a few small portholes. The space was ‘not fit for pigs’, as one prisoner put it.
One day in March 1972, armed guards escorted a high-profile prisoner onto the Maidstone. It was Gerry Adams. After being on the run for months, Adams had been snatched by troops in a dawn raid on a West Belfast home, and now he was ushered roughly into the hold of the ship. He was greeted warmly by friends and relatives who were being held there, but he soon came to hate the place, which he thought of as a ‘brutal and oppressive sardine tin’. He may have been a hardened revolutionary, but Adams was not a man who was indifferent to nourishment. He liked a good meal, and the food on the ship was foul.
Adams was also in pain. When he was arrested, he had refused to acknowledge that he was in fact Gerry Adams. Instead he made up a pseudonym – Joe McGuigan – and insisted that was his name. He was taken to a police barracks and interrogated, and eventually one of the few RUC officers who knew him by sight came in, took one look at him, and said, ‘That’s Gerry Adams.’ Adams didn’t care. He continued to insist, stubbornly, that his captors had the wrong man. He had been ruminating, lately, about counter-interrogation techniques. ‘I had seized upon the device of refusing to admit I was Gerry Adams as a means of combating my interrogation,’ he later recalled. ‘By continuing to assert that I was Joe McGuigan, I reasoned that I would thwart the interrogation by bogging it down on this issue.’
The interrogators beat Adams, but he wouldn’t say a word. They tried good cop, bad cop – one of them going completely berserk, pulling out his gun and threatening to shoot Adams, only to be restrained by the other – but Adams didn’t break. It was only when he sensed that the interrogation was finally coming to an end that he acknowledged what everybody already knew: that he was Gerry Adams. By that time, his interrogators had been arguing with him for so long over the simple question of what his name was that Adams had managed to tell them nothing of any substance. ‘Of course, my strategy had been reduced to a charade by this time, but it had given me, I felt, a crutch to withstand their inquisition,’ he later observed. ‘To remain silent was the best policy. So even though they knew who I was, it was irrelevant. I couldn’t answer their questions, on the basis that I wasn’t who they said I was.’
When he was hauled onto the Maidstone, Adams saw the prison doctor and explained that, after all the beating, his ribs felt tender.
‘Is it sore?’ the doctor asked.
‘It’s sore when I breathe,’ Adams replied.
‘Stop breathing,’ the doctor said, without a flicker of a smile.
If the staff on board the Maidstone seemed bitter, and security was particularly tight, there was a reason. One frigid January evening a couple of months earlier, seven republican prisoners had stripped to their underwear, slathered their bodies in butter and black boot polish to insulate against the cold, sawed through an iron bar, squeezed through a porthole, dropped one by one into the icy water of the Musgrave Channel, and swum several hundred yards to the opposite shore. They had come up with the idea for the escape after watching a seal navigate the barbed-wire netting that had been placed in the water around the ship.
All seven men made it to the far shore and scrambled out of the water. They were soaking wet, dressed in their underwear and smeared with shoe polish. Looking as if they had just crawled out of the Black Lagoon, they proceeded to hijack a bus. Fortuitously, one of the escapees had been a bus driver before joining the IRA, and he piloted this unlikely getaway vehicle into central Belfast. When they stopped in a neighbourhood that was home to many republican sympathisers, local kids immediately set upon the bus, like a swarm of locusts, and started stripping it for parts. The prisoners hastened into the nearest pub, still mostly naked, and the patrons who stood around the bar looked up abruptly, shocked by this sudden, surreal intrusion. Then, without hesitation or, really, much need for explanation, the regulars started stripping off their own clothes and offering them to the fugitives. One of the patrons produced his car keys and tossed them to the men, saying, ‘Away youse go.’ By the time the army mobilised six hundred troops for a manhunt, the men had vanished. After slipping across the border, they held a triumphant press conference in Dublin, where the newspapers anointed them ‘the Magnificent Seven’.
Not long after Adams arrived on the Maidstone, British authorities elected to close the ship. The new prison that had been under construction for some time at the airfield outside Belfast was now complete. It was known as Long Kesh. One day, Adams was handcuffed to another prisoner, loaded into an army helicopter and flown to the new facility. Long Kesh was an eerie place. The paramilitaries who were confined there, adamant that they were not criminals but political prisoners, called it a concentration camp. And it looked like a concentration camp: on a windswept, desolate plain, a series of corrugated steel huts housed the prisoners, amid barbed-wire fences, floodlights and sentry towers.
Long Kesh came to occupy a vivid place in the Irish republican imagination. But Adams would not be staying long. One day in June 1972, a couple of months after his arrival, someone shouted, ‘Adams – release!’ At first he thought this must be a practical joke. Or, worse, a trap. But when he had gathered his belongings and stepped out of the prison, he saw Dolours and Marian Price waiting there for him, with a car to take him home. They drove him into Andersonstown, for a meeting with other members of the republican leadership on a matter of utmost delicacy.
While Adams was locked up, a secret back channel had been developing between the Provos and the British government. After some preliminary contacts, it seemed that an opportunity might exist to negotiate a possible ceasefire. One of Adams’s confederates in the IRA, a hard man named Ivor Bell, had insisted that a necessary precondition for any discussions with the British was the release from internment of Gerry Adams. He was still only twenty-three years old, but Adams had become such an instrumental figure in the IRA that there could be no peace talks without him. ‘No fucking ceasefire unless Gerry is released,’ Bell said.
On 26 June, the IRA initiated a ceasefire, and the British Army agreed to reciprocate. There had been an increase in the number of bombings and shootings just prior to the ceasefire; some suggested that this may have been a deliberate IRA strategy, in order to underline the contrast when the shooting stopped. But once the truce was called, IRA leaders committed to honouring it, vowing, in an unintentionally comical flourish, that anyone who violated the ceasefire would be shot. The Provos announced that they had formulated a ‘peace plan’, which they would reveal ‘at the appropriate time’.
Many people in Northern Ireland objected on principle to any such dialogue, insisting that there should be no negotiation whatsoever with IRA terrorists. But that July, Adams and a small contingent of fellow IRA members boarded a British military plane, under conditions of great secrecy. Along with Adams, the group included Seán Mac Stíofáin, Ivor Bell, a gregarious, curly-haired young man named Martin McGuinness, who was the OC in Derry, and two other IRA leaders, Dáithí Ó Conaill and Seamus Twomey. They landed at an air force base in Oxfordshire, where two immense limousines stood waiting.
If this mode of conveyance seemed ostentatiously swanky, it was also grounds for suspicion. Adams was a former bartender. Ivor Bell had worked as a mechanic. McGuinness had trained as a butcher’s assistant. Hyper-attuned to any hint of British pomposity, the rebels would not allow themselves to be patronised or cowed. In advance of the trip, Bell had announced that, while they might be an official delegation to a peace summit, he, for one, would not be putting on a suit and tie. If history had taught him anything, Bell said, it was that the British liked nothing more than to make the Irish feel ill at ease. If their hosts were conspicuously formal, he would answer with extravagant informality. Let them feel uncomfortable for a change. Gerry Adams took a similar view on the wardrobe issue: he selected a pullover with a hole in it for the occasion.
The limousines ferried the group into London and deposited them at a grand old house in Chelsea, facing the Thames. As they walked inside, a little awed despite themselves, Adams noticed a blue plaque on the front wall that said the painter James McNeill Whistler had once lived there.
The Irishmen were escorted up a staircase and into a book-lined drawing room. Then William Whitelaw, Her Majesty’s secretary of state for Northern Ireland, walked in and offered the men a genial greeting. Whitelaw was smooth and polished. He made a show of pronouncing Seán Mac Stíofáin’s adopted name correctly – a touch that Mac Stíofáin could not help but appreciate. But as they shook hands, Adams noticed that Whitelaw’s palms were sweating.
Whitelaw began by saying that, in light of the long history between England and Ireland, he could understand why his guests might regard the British with suspicion, but that he hoped that ‘in me, you will see a British minister you can trust’. That was the high point of the meeting. Mac Stíofáin had prepared a statement, which he proceeded to read out loud. It consisted of a list of demands: the Provos wanted a public declaration from the British government acknowledging the right of all Irish people – in the North and the South – to self-determination. They also wanted the British to declare their intent to withdraw all forces from Irish soil by 1 January 1975.
One of the British participants, an intelligence officer named Frank Steele, watched this presentation with quiet dismay. Mac Stíofáin was laying down his demands as if the IRA had already fought the British to a standstill. When Steele was initially sent to Northern Ireland, the view of the British government had been that it didn’t want to talk to the IRA – they wanted to defeat it. After the massacre on Bloody Sunday, many British officials were forced to realise that they were unlikely to win the war through military might alone. Steele had been working, in great secrecy, with the IRA representatives in advance of the meeting. He regarded these men with a certain disdainful amusement, particularly for their insistence on adopting the lingo and trappings of a conventional military organisation. ‘It was all rather sweet, really,’ Steele later observed. ‘They wanted to depict themselves as representing an army and not a bunch of terrorists.’
When the men strode into the meeting with Whitelaw and laid down their hard line, Steele found their posture to be hopelessly naïve. In demanding that the British withdraw from Northern Ireland, they were asking that the government give up the guarantee that it would not abandon the Protestant population in the North, a concession that it simply could not make. As the meeting progressed, Whitelaw grew frustrated. In his memoirs, he described the encounter as ‘a non-event’, sabotaged by the ‘absurd ultimatums’ of the IRA.
Gerry Adams said little during the meeting, but Steele watched the rangy, thoughtful young rebel and was impressed. He had been told that Adams represented the IRA in the North and that he was a senior officer in the Belfast Brigade. Steele had expected some arrogant, streetwise ruffian. But when he initially encountered Adams, at a preliminary meeting before the trip, he found him to be personable, articulate and self-disciplined. These were appealing qualities in an interlocutor, Steele thought, but they also made Adams a dangerously effective adversary. As Adams was leaving one of the preliminary meetings, Steele took him aside. ‘You don’t want to spend the rest of your life on the run from us British,’ he said. ‘What do you want to do?’
‘I want to go to university and get a degree,’ Adams replied.
‘We’re not stopping you,’ Steele pointed out. ‘Renounce violence and you can go to university.’
Adams grinned and said, ‘I’ve got to help to get rid of you British first.’
When the ceasefire was first declared that June, it had seemed to Brendan Hughes as though the war might soon be over. For people who had been on the run, the abrupt cessation of hostilities meant that they could venture out of hiding, go home, and reconnect with family. Ordinary civilians emerged, tentatively, from behind the barricades. It would be the first peaceful summer since the outbreak of violence three years earlier. Shops reopened. There was a sense of tentative optimism in the air.
For Hughes, the ceasefire meant that he could spend time with his new wife. In early 1972, just before his twenty-fourth birthday, he had married a local girl named Lily, who was nineteen. By the time the truce began, Lily was pregnant. Brendan’s father had disapproved of the union, on the grounds that Brendan could never be a husband to Lily in any conventional way. Having a family could be dangerous for a man on the run. Gerry Adams had also recently married, and it was because he was married that the authorities had been able to capture him and lock him up on the Maidstone: they had targeted the house where his wife, Colette, was living, and raided it on a night when Adams had sneaked in for a visit. Brendan’s wife, Lily, grew accustomed to raids by British troops who were looking for her fugitive husband. It made her too anxious to sleep at night, fearful that the door might be kicked in at any moment.
The truce meant that Brendan could slow down and see Lily. They could pretend for a while that they had a normal relationship. But the peace lasted scarcely two weeks. After the inconclusive talks in London, the parties had agreed to meet a second time, but the meeting never happened. On the ninth of July, fighting broke out once more, on Lenadoon Avenue, after the army refused to allow Catholic refugees to take up residence in homes that had been abandoned by Protestants. Announcing an end to the truce, Seán Mac Stíofáin said that he had instructed his men to resume their campaign of violence with the ‘utmost ferocity’. An order was passed down the chain of command until it reached Brendan Hughes: Get back to work.
Hughes set about planning one of the Provos’ most ambitious operations. A key element of the IRA’s strategy had been to detonate bombs in commercial districts in Northern Ireland. Because most businesses were owned by unionist or British companies, and because the government controlled the infrastructure, an attack on commercial property was regarded as a direct hit at the enemy. These operations may have been staged in civilian areas, but Hughes and his fellow rebels insisted that they were not directed at civilians. The point was to destroy property, not to murder people. Warnings were called in to the police and the media in advance of the blasts so that civilians could (in theory) vacate the area. Of course, these warnings had an added propaganda value: a panicked news bulletin alerting shoppers that the city was about to blow up only magnified the spectacle of each bomb.
One Friday that July, an IRA team planted nearly two dozen bombs – an unprecedented number – in bus stations, railway depots and shopping areas all across Belfast. Shortly after 2 p.m., when the city was thronged with shoppers enjoying the midsummer afternoon, the devices began to detonate, and for the next hour, a new bomb would go off every few minutes. People screamed and scrambled, but in many cases they would flee a blast in one area only to run into an adjacent area just as a new bomb was about to explode. Several buses were ripped apart. Nine people were killed, including a fourteen-year-old boy; 130 were wounded. The city was totally unprepared for the carnage. As a pall of smoke hung over central Belfast, one woman staggered through the rubble and spotted a strange shape on the ground. She thought it looked like something that had fallen off a meat lorry. Then she realised it was a human torso. Police officers picked through the rubble, retrieving stray body parts and placing them gingerly in plastic bags.
‘This city has not experienced such a day of death and destruction since the German blitz of 1941,’ the Belfast Telegraph declared, citing the ‘callous lack of remorse now so typical of the Provos’. The Irish Times pointed out, in an editorial, that the main victims of the attack were not the British Army or even big business, but ‘the plain people of Belfast and Ireland’. The article went on to wonder, ‘Can anyone now believe that anything worthwhile can be established by these methods? That the country of anyone’s vision can live with more memories of this kind?’
As one of the key architects of the operation, Brendan Hughes had hoped it would be a ‘spectacular’ event. But when the bombs started going off, he was stationed on Leeson Street, holding an Armalite, and he could hear the pace of the explosions – boom, boom, boom. ‘There’s too much here,’ he thought to himself. Some of the volunteers in the Lower Falls area were cheering as they heard the blasts, but Hughes shouted at them to get off the streets. They had planted too many bombs. They had overestimated the ability of the authorities to deal, in real time, with a calamity on this scale. Hughes would insist for years that his aim had not been to kill people, just to destroy property. Whatever the truth of his intentions, the episode filled him with guilt. At the time, however, he did not have much opportunity to dwell on it, because he was embroiled in a very different sort of crisis.
Hughes was in Belfast one night, just before the ceasefire, when one of his men told him that a Provo named Joe Russell had been shot. He immediately went to see Russell, and found him clutching a wound. He hadn’t gone to hospital – too risky – so there was still a bullet lodged in his gut. Hughes made arrangements to have Russell taken over the border, to a hospital in Dundalk that was known for offering treatment to wounded republicans, with ‘no questions asked’.
But a mystery remained: Who was the gunman? Russell had been at home at the time. A man came to his front door and, when Russell opened it, the man shot him and then ran off. Russell told Hughes that he thought his assailant was a member of the Stickies – the Official IRA. This theory was endorsed by Joe Lynskey, the soft-featured Provo intelligence officer whom people called the Mad Monk.
During the Troubles, unlicensed drinking clubs opened up in neighbourhoods all over Belfast. These establishments were known as ‘shebeens’. Many of the traditional pubs had been burned out or bombed, and in this notoriously thirsty city, such informal watering holes sprang up to meet a need. It had become so risky to venture outside one’s own safe ethnic enclave that when shebeens were established in residential neighbourhoods – often in former homes that had been abandoned – they provided a safe and convenient alternative to the pub. By the end of 1972, some two hundred shebeens were operating throughout Belfast. They were open seven days a week, with no fixed hours. The booze was often stolen from hijacked lorries, and the proceeds frequently went to whatever paramilitary group controlled the neighbourhood in question.
A number of these shebeens were operated by the Official IRA, and members of the Officials liked to congregate in them. One was called the Burning Embers (Brendan Hughes set fire to it once, and he liked to joke that he had burned the Burning Embers). Another Official shebeen was the Cracked Cup, an outfit on Leeson Street so named because it occupied a former shop that had sold second-hand crockery. The place was not much to look at. The floorboards were rotting, the lighting was dim, and patrons sat on rickety chairs, huddled around their pints. There were pictures of the Virgin Mary and Patrick Pearse on the wall.
Looking for the man who had shot Joe Russell, Hughes dispatched a posse of gunmen to the Cracked Cup. They strode in, weapons drawn, and barred the entrance. One of the patrons that night was a man named Desmond Mackin. He had come out to celebrate Father’s Day with his wife, Margaret, and his seventy-year-old mother. Mackin was not a member of the Official IRA; as it happened, he had a son who had recently joined the Provos. But as Hughes’s gunmen ordered the men to kneel on the floor and jostled Mackin’s wife and mother, Mackin made the mistake of resisting. A spurt of gunfire lit the gloom, and a bullet pierced Mackin’s thigh.
The gunman was a young Provo, barely out of his teens. It would later emerge that by the time the gunmen crashed into the Cracked Cup that night, they may have all been quite drunk. Mackin’s wife collapsed over his body, screaming. But the Provos would not let anyone summon an ambulance, for fear of attracting the authorities. For fifteen long minutes, they all stayed inside the Cracked Cup while Desmond Mackin bled to death on the floor.
The press would characterise the shooting that night as a ‘power struggle’ between the Officials and the Provos, and, at a glance, that certainly appeared to be the case. One newspaper suggested that the incident might spark an ‘all out war’. But, really, Desmond Mackin was just an innocent bystander, collateral damage in a badly botched operation. And when Hughes continued his enquiries into who it was that shot Joe Russell, he made an alarming discovery. It hadn’t been the Officials at all. On the contrary, it was one of his own men.
Of all the social conventions the Troubles upended, one that was seldom discussed was romantic relationships. With its combination of Catholic and Scots Presbyterian cultures, Belfast could be an oppressively prudish society. But as the violence warped everyday life, long-established social mores began to loosen. The omnipresence of mortal danger drove some people to live their lives with a newfound, and sometimes reckless, intensity.
The Mad Monk, Joe Lynskey, had entered the monastery when he was only sixteen years old. When he left the order, in his twenties, and returned to Belfast, he found a job at a silk and rayon factory in the Clonard area and began to reclaim the youth he had lost to his years of prayer and pious contemplation. He was, in the words of one relative, ‘very much into running after women and doing the normal things that young people would have done’. In the monastery, Lynskey had received a solid education. He studied history and, in particular, the matter of the injustices suffered by working-class Catholics in Ireland. He did not come from a republican family: his father was a timid man who would not have wanted his children to become involved in that sort of activity; his older brother was in the Royal Navy. But Lynskey eventually decided to join the IRA. He grew close to Dolours Price, who was fond of his awkward but gentle manner. ‘He was a mature man but he was in many ways immature in the ways of the world,’ she observed. Brendan Hughes had always seen Lynskey as ‘a strange fella’, an odd artefact of the older generation. He was smart and erudite, a chain smoker, and he carried in his pocket a book about his hero, the Irish revolutionary Michael Collins. But he could be a bit aloof. What Hughes did not know about Joe Lynskey was that he was having an affair with Joe Russell’s wife.