Britain's secret talks with paramilitaries: "Extremism", as it was called, was in a state of flux during the autumn and winter of 1974, according to a series of top secret reports on the state of Ulster paramilitarism compiled by the Northern Ireland secretary, Merlyn Rees, for consideration by prime minister Harold Wilson.
The chairman of the Ulster Defence Association, Andy Tyrie, was presented in one of the reports as being both "able" and "determined", but as presiding over a divided organisation.
The Ulster Volunteer Force, on the other hand, had a single-minded membership narrowly devoted to the one cause. Within this, there were some prominent exceptions with a more developed political awareness. But even these few, we learn, were "sadly naïve" and lacked the skills to pursue a moderate path.
But the most precarious position was seemingly held by the Provisional IRA, undecided between a ceasefire and a more refined campaign of terror.
Sections of the Provisional leadership in Dublin clearly favoured a dovish line, but they risked being badly "isolated" if they pushed their base too far.
In that event, according to Merlyn Rees, they could lose out to the angry teenage element in the movement, or "the International Socialist/Trotskyist influences which are again beginning to make themselves felt in Belfast".
Responding to one of Rees's briefings on the Provisionals, Wilson conceded that the movement appeared too divided to advance a negotiating position with credibility or "gold backing". He nonetheless endorsed continuing contacts with the IRA.
As Wilson's private secretary put it in a November 13th letter, "The prime minister is content that officials should continue these very secret contacts on a non-attributable basis" through two specific channels which the government had established.
The uncertain balance of power at the top of the Provisional movement was the result of an ongoing reassessment of strategy inaugurated after the arrest of high profile militants the previous spring.
The Belfast brigade commander, Brendan Hughes, had been among those arrested. During the swoop, hand-written instructions setting out the Provisionals' response to an anticipated "emergency" were also discovered.
The instructions included plans for occupying areas of Belfast identified on large coloured maps of the city. They also set out orders to raze key strategic points that could not, for logistical reasons, be held. In addition, the instructions contained a notice to the civilian population, "thought to be in the hand-writing of Hughes", as one official commented.
The notice was designed to explain what it termed the "harsh measures" the Provisionals might have to adopt in the face of an "armed offensive against the Catholic working class".
But however seriously the Provisionals' contingency planning was to be taken in the spring of 1974, the British assumed that the movement's military capacity had been significantly reduced by the following autumn.
Of course, the bombing campaigns in Birmingham, Guildford and London, ensured a high profile for Provisional republicanism. Yet despite this, Harold Wilson could refer to the "clear evidence of discontent within the IRA" regarding current strategy and tactics.
But, Wilson went on, if certain senior members within the organisation wanted a change of course, there remained "intransigent elements within the PIRA leadership" determined to wreak havoc on a more widespread basis.
Nonetheless, hoping for the best, the British government paid close attention to the freelance talks that were staged between members of the Provisional leadership and Protestant church leaders, in Feakle, Co Clare, in December 1974.
Ruairí Ó Bradaigh, Dáithí Ó Conaill, Maire Drumm, Jimmy Drumm, Seamus Loughran, Billy McKee, Seamus Twomey and Kevin Mallon were all reported to have attended the discussions, at least for a time. But it was left to Dáithí Ó Conaill to deliver the response of the Provisional army council to the peace plan put forward by the clergymen.
One element of that response, the demand for the establishment of a national convention to discuss the creation of a nine county Ulster within a newly confederated Ireland "did not mean a thing" remarked Ó Conaill, according to a report of his own assessment of the IRA response.
The British government, he is alleged to have advised, could shrug this off with the assurance that the matter was "out of our hands".
While the Provisional army council was insufficiently cohesive to present a common front to the British government, it nonetheless delivered a "total and complete" ceasefire intended to last from December 22nd, to January 2nd, 1975.
Soon after, a truce between the Provisionals and the British army was established, but there was little hope that the ceasefire would endure.
Even so, towards the close of 1974, the British government was happy to engage in dialogue with the Provisionals, expecting this to fragment the movement further.
All the British had to do was promise "withdrawal" and keep them talking.
But an intriguing minute in a top secret planning document from December 1974 gives the game away without fully spelling out how the deception was to be done.
"At the last meeting," the passage reads, "the home secretary [ Roy Jenkins] said that when this discussion was taken up again he would try to explain what he meant by withdrawal".