It's taken 60 years to discover the extent to which Britain spied on Ireland during the second World War, but new material offers a fascinating insight into the attitudes of the British and their headstrong prime minister towards its neutral neighbour, writes EUNAN O'HALPIN, the author of a new book on the subject
The Irish activities of a range of British intelligence are discussed in Spying on Ireland. Using the records of a range of British secret agencies, from the codebreakers of Bletchley Park to MI5, the irregular warfare and black propaganda organisations Special Operations Executive and the Political Warfare Executive, it also explores the impact of intelligence activities upon British policy towards Ireland. The Irish case is also compared with British treatment of other neutrals, particularly Afghanistan and Persia.
Such a study is possible because of recent liberalisation of policy on the release of security and intelligence records. This has also facilitated important works by younger scholars - Kate O'Malley's Ireland, India and Empire and Paul McMahon's British Spies and Irish Rebels will both appear shortly.
Five days after the Allied invasion of France began in June 1944, an MI5 officer noted that Winston Churchill "seems to have three bad bees in his bonnet. The first is de Gaulle. The second is Ireland . . . " That Churchill should still be brooding on Irish affairs, in the aftermath of the Allies' successful landings, which had rendered Irish neutrality strategically insignificant, shows that he regarded Irish neutrality as a personal affront. This was clear to colleagues: in September 1943, he had stunned the cabinet by announcing, "to the surprise of all of us . . . that he proposed now, during the war, to solve the Irish problem". Other ministers spoke strongly against his ideas, and his loyal supporter Leo Amery wrote that Churchill withdrew his proposals "with not too good a grace . . . I am afraid that unless he draws in his horns . . . we shall be in for trouble both in Ireland and internally in the Cabinet . . . I have always been afraid that at some point Winston might lose his balance and it may be that this is the one." During the "American Note" crisis of February-March 1944, Churchill "accused" the head of MI6 "of putting a spoke in his wheel" by arguing against forcing the Irish to expel the Axis legations - by then the communications of these missions, like those in other sensitive neutral capitals, were being systematically decoded by the Allies, who were also feeding Axis diplomats with strategic disinformation.
CHURCHILL'S VIEWS ON Ireland were influenced by the work of the various intelligence and security agencies, from codebreakers to the security officers of MI5 and the spies of MI6. He had a particular appetite for raw intelligence concerning Ireland, obtained by intercepting and decoding the communications of enemy, neutral and even friendly powers. Just three weeks before Pearl Harbor, he saw a decoded cable from Washington to the US minister in Dublin about Irish protests on Northern Ireland. Churchill saw a large number of decodes concerning Ireland. These included many Irish diplomatic reports from Rome and Berlin in 1943 and 1944-1945 - although for a time in early 1944 the British were unable to decode some of this traffic. He also saw Italian, Japanese and German traffic to and from Ireland, although officials generally tried to keep material from him that might set him off on a rant. That was what happened in October 1942. He was shown an innocuous Italian report from Dublin summarising Irish newspaper comments on a possible British offensive in the Middle East. These comments were doubly censored, being gleaned from British press sources and then subjected to the remorseless blue pencil of the Irish censor. Yet Churchill took the decode as proof of a serious security leak, and MI5 and MI6 had to go to considerable lengths to calm him down (not least because they were feeding the Italians in Dublin false information that they hoped would get back to Rome).
The most significant communications for the British were those between Berlin and the German minister in Dublin, Hempel. Until January 1943, Britain was unable to break this traffic. Thereafter they generally read it with ease. It disclosed a state of affairs less alarming than London had supposed: while Hempel was increasingly willing to gather intelligence as the war turned against Germany, even at the risk of provoking a diplomatic break with Ireland, his access to significant war information was virtually nil, largely due to tight Irish surveillance. But there was always the danger that some vital news might reach him, perhaps through the thousands of Irishmen and women returning home on leave from Britain from time to time, and that he would relay this to Berlin, whatever the cost.
The British first obtained confirmation that Hempel had a secret radio through a decoded Italian message of December 1940. This discovery, although unwelcome, came as no great surprise: even in London the Swedish, Hungarian and Soviet embassies all had secret transmitters, but the British were unwilling to act against these for the simple reason that they in turn had secret transmitters in their missions abroad. The radio was a vexed issue in Anglo-Irish relations until unremitting pressure saw Hempel hand over his set in December 1943 (decodes showed that Berlin urged him to fob off the Irish with an older set).
The records also disclose the activities of various British agents and would-be agents to collect intelligence in Ireland. In 1939-1940, amateur informants sent back a flood of alarmist reports about supposed U-boat sightings and bases along the west coast. Despite the dispatch of an efficient naval attaché who soon demolished such claims, the belief persisted that the IRA and other pro-German elements were providing succour for German submarines. This remained an element in British open and covert propaganda against Irish neutrality, particularly in the US, long after London realised that such stories were groundless. Irish and British records also indicate that Britain did not set out to spy on the Irish State nor, as she did in some other neutrals, to secretly court opposition parties or even to foment a coup d'etat (as she did in Yugoslavia in 1941).
BRITISH RECORDS CAST light on the remarkable case of Joseph Lenihan, the ne'er-do-well member of a prominent Athlone family (his nephew, the late Brian Lenihan, rose to be tánaiste; his niece, Mary O'Rourke, was also a cabinet minister; and his grand-nephews Brian and Conor Lenihan are members of the current Government). German intelligence dropped Lenihan by parachute in July 1941. His mission was firstly to radio weather reports from Sligo, and then to travel to Britain to report on conditions.
Instead he travelled to Northern Ireland and handed himself over to the British. Lenihan explained that, although a convinced republican, he disliked Nazism even more than he did Britain. His MI5 interrogators were amazed at his remarkable memory, describing him as by far their best source on German intelligence organisation in France and the Low Countries. One officer thought him too good to be true and suspected he was a German plant; others pointed to his "moral courage", the honesty of his anti-British convictions, "which he could easily have withheld", and to the quality of his information. He was assigned the cover name BASKET in the "double cross" system for playing back captured agents, and fruitless efforts were made to radio his German controllers. Lenihan later handed back money offered to him to keep quiet: "characteristically he had a good deal to say about us and our methods . . . He obviously resented any sort of restriction on his liberty and the fact that we obviously did not trust him entirely."
Anglo-Irish security liaison grew in depth from very cautious pre-war beginnings. The relationship was based on self-interest, and mutual though qualified trust between intelligence professionals. On the Irish side it was closely overseen by the department of external affairs, whose minister was Éamon de Valera, a key point that London never grasped. If anything, Britain proved the more naive partner: London never realised that the MI6 spy network set up in Ireland in 1940 was quickly penetrated by G2 (Irish army intelligence). Close links were also built up between Garda headquarters and the RUC, which continued after the war. The RUC Inspector General Sir Charles Wickham insisted in 1940 that the Garda were "quite expert" at dealing with the IRA, and was also a strong critic of the Stormont government: their call for conscription in Northern Ireland in 1941 was a political ploy - "they intended to conscript the Catholics and leave the Orangemen in the factories". In 1944 he said he favoured a united Ireland, and blamed de Valera and Lord Brookeborough equally for the persistence of partition.
Post-war security policy towards Ireland was influenced by wartime experience. When Ireland left the Commonwealth in 1949, the army asked that she be made an intelligence target. This "silly" proposal was blocked by Britain's Joint Intelligence Committee.
Some years later the head of MI5 argued strongly against clandestine intelligence gathering in Ireland: this might cut across "Garda lines". It was wiser to rely on Garda/RUC and MI5/G2 links.
Spying on Ireland shows that British management of the intelligence and security challenges arising from Irish neutrality closely resembles their treatment of other neutrals contiguous to the empire, particularly Afghanistan. Like Ireland, these were subjected to a combination of covert security co-operation, invasion threats, and diplomatic coercion, the latter enthusiastically urged by Churchill against the advice of officials. It is in the experience of newly independent Near and Middle Eastern neutrals, rather than in that of European states, that the closest parallels with Ireland are to be found.
Spying on Ireland: British Intelligence and Irish Neutrality During the Second World War by Eunan O'Halpin is published by Oxford University Press on Thursday, £30