At around the same time on July 18, 1973, that Queen Elizabeth signed Whitelaw’s Constitution Bill into law, a British army patrol was briefed to carry out one of the most important arrest operations of the Troubles so far: the capture of most of the Belfast Brigade’s key staff. Early the following morning Adams, his operations officer, Brendan Hughes, and another staff officer, Tom Cahill, arrived at the appointed call house in the Iveagh district of the Falls Road, and this was the signal for the soldiers to swoop. Adams, Cahill, and Hughes were dragged off to Springfield Road RUC barracks, where another senior brigade officer, Owen Coogan, joined them not long afterward.
Adams was stripped and for several hours was badly beaten by his interrogators. Eventually the beatings ended, and Adams and his comrades were trussed up and then photographed, almost as if they were prize trophies, before being flown by helicopter to Long Kesh internment camp. When Adams was welcomed once again by IRA comrades into the huts and cages of Long Kesh, it was two days short of the first anniversary of Bloody Friday.
The IRA was never quite sure how the British army knew about the brigade staff meeting in Iveagh, but it was clear that a well-placed informer had been at work. The loss of the Brigade staff made this a disastrous day for the IRA, but worse was to come. Only hours after the capture of Adams, Hughes, Cahill, and Coogan, the entire Third Battalion staff was arrested at a house in Ardoyne in North Belfast. That day the Belfast IRA saw at least sixteen of its most skilled and experienced leaders incarcerated by the British.
It was not until two years later that the identity of the informer responsible for these losses was established with any certainty, and by then the damage he had done elsewhere to the Provisional IRA’s personnel, resources, and structures was irreparable. The informer’s activities were to have major long-term significance for the IRA, but they were also eloquent testimony to the IRA’s failure in Belfast to sustain the brief counterintelligence successes enjoyed under Adams’s command. The Four Square Laundry operation of late 1972 had been a flash in the pan.
The name of the informer was eventually pieced together in the Long Kesh prison camp, where IRA inmates worked out that their brigade quartermaster in Belfast, Eamon Molloy, was the one figure who had featured in each of their sad stories. A message was smuggled out to trusted colleagues suggesting that he should be closely questioned, and Molloy was tricked into admitting his secret role. Under interrogation he confessed that he had been working for the British since early 1972 and had betrayed dozens of IRA members and revealed the whereabouts of enormous amounts of arms and equipment. After a court-martial in the summer of 1975, Molloy was killed, felled by a bullet to the back of the head, and, like Seamus Wright, Kevin McKee, and Jean McConville, his body was buried in a secret grave, by now the Belfast IRA’s established way of dealing with its embarrassing secrets.
Molloy’s remains were recovered by the IRA, placed in a coffin and left in a graveyard near the Irish Border in May 1999, a year after the Good Friday Agreement was signed. The scandal of the “disappeared,” which surfaced as the peace process gathered pace, had forced the IRA to end years of lying and admit that it had abducted, killed and hidden nine people, mostly in the early and mid-1970s, and all but one from Belfast. To that list have been added five other names who were “disappeared” by the IRA in later years. Some sources have hinted that there is yet another category of such victims, people who could be said to have been “double-disappeared,” i.e. their secret executions and burials have never been acknowledged by the IRA. There may be two or even three such victims, the first of whom was executed and “disappeared” after his alleged misuse of IRA procedure, weapons and personnel led to a serious clash with the rival Official IRA and the death of one Official IRA member. Another of the possible “double-disappeared” was an alleged undercover MI5 agent killed by the IRA in County Kerry. The remains of only five of the fourteen people that the IRA admit to having “disappeared” have been recovered despite claims from the IRA to have provided details of the location of their bodies to the authorities.
That Molloy was able to inflict such damage was due in large measure to the refusal of his immediate superior to believe that one of his own men could be a traitor. It was a weakness in IRA commanders that the British learned to exploit well. Brian Keenan, the IRA’s quartermaster general at this time and Molloy’s commander, has entered IRA mythology as one of its