The Bloody Sunday inquiry heard yesterday how Mr Martin McGuinness addressed journalists at an IRA news conference about plans to resist any British attempt to reclaim Derry's "no-go" area.
Mr McGuinness, now Mid Ulster MP and Northern Ireland Education Minister, spoke about "tactics" that would be employed if the army tried to take back the Bogside and Creggan estates, Mr Nigel Wade, a retired journalist, told the Saville inquiry.
The news conference took place in the back of a disused terraced house near the Brandywell in Derry some time before Operation Motorman, the big military incursion into Catholic parts of Derry and Belfast in July 1972 which wrested control from the IRA, Mr Wade told the tribunal.
Giving evidence in the Guildhall, Derry, he said the news conference was the only IRA press briefing he had attended which featured Mr McGuinness and he said: "As I recall, the occasion was reported by me in the Daily Telegraph, quoting Mr McGuinness."
Questioned by Mr Edmund Lawson QC, acting for most of the soldiers, Mr Wade said that at the time of the news conference, some time after Bloody Sunday, Mr McGuinness was known as the Provisionals' Derry brigade commander.
"I never saw it gazetted. That was how he was thought of, not just among the reporters. It was how he was thought of in this town. It was the common assumption that he was running the show."
Mr McGuinness announced last week that he had told the inquiry he was the Provisional IRA's second-in-command in the city on Bloody Sunday, January 30th, 1972.
The leading republican denies allegations from an MI5 agent known as "Infliction" that he confessed to firing the shots which precipitated the killings of 13 men that day during a military operation in the Bogside in the wake of a civil rights march.
Questioned by counsel for the inquiry, Mr Christopher Clarke QC, Mr Wade said he was familiar with Derry at the time of Bloody Sunday and described other "less official" meetings between reporters and IRA personnel in the early 1970s.