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—Michael Collins 1 страница
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Intelligence is an absolute requirement for any government. In this case, intelligence can be defined very broadly as the gathering and processing of all information, whether open or secret, pertaining to the security of the state. 1 Von Clausewitz noted that ‘by “intelligence” we mean every sort of information about the enemy and his country—the basis, in short, of our own plans and operations’. 2 He went on to write: ‘A great part of the information obtained in war is contradictory, a still greater part is false, and by far the greatest part is doubtful’. Intelligence and tactics were one to Michael Collins. He determined to push and provoke the British to the ends of their will, and the key to that was intelligence—and counter- intelligence: protecting the Irish secrets from British intelligence. As Sun Tsu saw clearly in the fifth century BC, ‘All warfare is based on deception’. Early in the war the need for an organised Irish intelligence operation,
in the cities as well as in the country, became apparent. The Irish had to perfect their own intelligence systems, and to frustrate and disorganise British intelligence services. Even small actions required the gathering of some information in advance, which is the raison d’ê tre of all intelligence activity. Irish intelligence was divided into two areas: the gathering of information on British forces and the gathering of information on British agents. Each company of IRA/Volunteers had its own intelligence officer (IO), each of whom was encouraged to recruit people in all walks of life who boasted of their British connections.
Both Michael Collins and Florence O’Donoghue built up their intelligence organisations with two branches. One branch was composed of army personnel, comprising a representative from GHQ under the Director of Intelligence (Collins), a Brigade Intelligence Officer in each brigade, sometimes with some staff, a Battalion Intelligence Officer in each battalion, and a few men in each company detailed for such work. 3 The other branch included a wide variety of men and women, individually selected, who were engaged in duties or employed in positions where they could acquire valuable information about the enemy. 4 The main intelligence effort was directed towards penetrating and undermining all aspects of British government institutions, both civilian and military, including selective ‘assassinations’. 5 Through the efficient combination of the work of both branches the Irish were able to partially counterbalance any weaknesses they had on the military side. 6 In recounting the factors that contributed to the success of the IRA in its operations, the admitted superiority of the Irish intelligence services, particularly in the first years of the war, must be taken into account.
Inexperienced personnel who had no rigid ideas about the kind of design needed but who were entirely clear about the results that they wanted from any scheme built up the Irish intelligence organisation from nothing. As the war progressed, Collins in Dublin and O’Donoghue in Cork continued to organise and develop more Irish intelligence. Those living outside the capital often feel that, no matter what the arena (politics, industry, history), Dublin exerts a magnetic pull in terms of resources and exposure; that feeling can become stronger the further one gets from the Liffey, and in a time of crisis it’s easy to understand the grip that it exerts. O’Donoghue does not get the credit that he deserves and his operations were equally important to the Irish war effort, especially in south-east Ireland. In a humble yet correct assessment, O’Donoghue wrote:
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For most of the formative period, and continuing up to the Truce, the Director was Michael Collins, and to his initiative, energy and resourcefulness, much of the success of the service is due. Nevertheless, he would have been largely powerless outside Dublin, were it not for the work done in the local brigades. 7
Though Collins and O’Donoghue did not begin to collaborate formally until March 1920—after the arrival of the Black and Tans—they routinely shared information after that. O’Donoghue said:
Collins and I, each without the knowledge of each other, were trying to build up something similar but with this difference. I put down the basic organisation in the Companies and Battalions, but had made no progress in the intelligence aspect at that stage, where he had practically no organisation, but had made very considerable progress on the more valuable espionage aspect. Working in Dublin, and with his contacts in London, his opportunities in this regard were much more extensive than mine. Out of the Quinlisk case [see below] there arose a comparing of notes and close contact that proved valuable. 8
One of Collins’s most important services was to pass on to O’Donoghue the RIC police cipher keys for Cork. O’Donoghue organised a team to intercept RIC messages, to decode them and transmit the information back to his Brigade Headquarters. Collins eventually provided O’Donoghue with funds to support local intelligence operations in Cork. 9
In Dublin, the ‘G’ Division of the Dublin Metropolitan Police (DMP) was neutralised: after the killing of its most aggressive detectives, other detectives stopped helping the British. The British report after the war noted the effect of Collins’s attacks on the DMP:
Up to the summer of 1919, the military relied for their intelligence almost entirely on the DMP in the city and the RIC in the country, but these sources were practically closed by the end of 1919 by the murder campaign. 10
By 1920 the DMP was no longer a threat to the Irish and the IRA adopted a hands-off approach. 11 In the country, the RIC and their families were first ostracised and then the RIC were forced back into barracks in larger towns. This left the British intelligence network in tatters. Collins passed information to the country units for their use, and intelligence gleaned in the country was passed back to Dublin and was essential. In Cork,
O’Donoghue ran an intelligence system that rivalled the Dublin operation for efficiency in acquiring intelligence from both military and civilian sources, and in utilising that information for IRA operations. 12
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At the start, their inexperience led the Irish to make some amateurish mistakes. O’Donoghue ran afoul of his own intelligence service and almost ordered his own killing! When a new Irish intelligence officer in Cork, who did not know what O’Donoghue looked like, learned about a resident leaving his house early and returning late and with no apparent employment, he shadowed him to the main police barracks and determined that the suspect must be a detective. He also noted other strangers coming to the house after dark; their late-night business was suspicious and could not be determined. A few weeks later, O’Donoghue was asked to ratify the unknown spy’s execution. Fortunately, the procedures that he had laid down to guard against just such a mistake were followed, or he would have ordered his own execution. 13
Collins, too, experienced a learning curve. He was appointed Director of Intelligence in March 1918, replacing É amonn Duggan. Very shortly thereafter, on 15 May É amon Broy secured a list of prominent Sinn Fé in members who were to be arrested in the so-called ‘German Plot’. Broy passed the list to Patrick Tracy at Kingsbridge railway station, and Tracy passed the list to Harry O’Hanrahan (brother of Michael O’Hanrahan, who was executed after the Rising).
In the case of the German Plot arrests in May, 1918, a large list of names and addresses of those to be arrested in Dublin came to my hands. There were continual additions to the list but, finally, in May, 1918, the list was complete, and several copies were made. Indirectly, it became obvious to me that the arrests would soon start. I gave Tracy a copy of the complete list on the Wednesday forty-eight hours before the arrests took place. … On the day of the proposed arrests as far as I recollect it was a Friday I met Tracy and told him: ‘To-night’s the night. Tell O’Hanrahan to tell the wanted men not to stay in their usual place of abode and to keep their heads’. Meanwhile, preparations were made for the raid. All the detectives, no matter what their usual duties were, several uniformed men and a military party with a lorry were ordered
to stand-to. I had a talk with McNamara [another detective officer and one of Collins’s men], and we deliberated on the question of refusing to carry out the arrests and calling on the others not to do so, but we finally decided that such a course of action would do no good whatever, and would probably lead to our dismissal from the service. 14
Joe Kavanagh, who also worked for Collins in Dublin Castle, gave the list of those to be arrested to another Collins man, Thomas Gay, who passed the list to Collins. In an indication of Collins’s inexperience at the time, he gave Gay £ 5 to pay Kavanagh for the information. Gay knew that Kavanagh would be insulted that Collins would think that he would spy for money, so he never offered it to him. Collins had yet to learn that there were patriotic Irishmen even in the police and the Castle. Collins notified de Valera and the other leaders of the forthcoming arrests, but de Valera chose to ignore the warnings. It was an example of the efficiency of Collins’s network and how he seemed to have information even before the Castle had told the police. That series of raids on 17–18 May rounded up many, and these arrests were what brought Collins fully into the intelligence effort. The efficiency of Irish intelligence was due not only to Collins and O’Donoghue and the operatives working for them but also to three other
things:
• An appreciation of the value of intelligence.
• Efficient organisation and exploitation of sources.
• Every member of the Irish forces regarded it as a duty—and many of those who weren’t actively on patrol regarded it as such, too.
Even today, military intelligence has four parts: acquisition, analysis, execution and counter-intelligence. One secret to effective intelligence is the sharing of ideas; although there were some problems of communication between Collins, O’Donoghue, GHQ and the country units, for the most part the Irish understood what intelligence was needed and utilised it better than the British. 15 What the British needed in 1917–18 was not so much tactical intelligence on the Irish Volunteers—who were acting mostly in the open—as political intelligence on the shifts in Irish opinion. This they
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did not have, or ignored.
Any examination of intelligence in the period must also review the performance of the British. 16 In its record prepared after the war, the British War Department identified a combination of three problems that it blamed for its ‘failures’:
• A vacillating and negligent government.
• A hostile population.
• A jury-rigged intelligence system lacking unity, direction or leadership. 17
One RIC Divisional Inspector complained: ‘Before the war we knew everybody and what he was doing. Now we know nothing. The people are dumb! ’18
Collins’s Department of Intelligence office was on the second floor of a building at 3 Crow Street, above J. F. Fowler, printers and binders, just 500 yards from the entrance to Dublin Castle. Along with his office at 32 Bachelor’s Walk, this was technically Collins’s main Department of Intelligence office but he came here only infrequently. Sometimes his operatives called this ‘the Brain Centre’.
It was, as I say, early in 1919 that Collins began to create a regular Intelligence Department. He was fortunate in getting the services of Liam Tobin as Chief Intelligence Officer. Tobin had been previously doing Intelligence work for the Dublin Brigade. Later the Assistant Quartermaster General, the late Tom Cullen, was drafted into Intelligence. Next in command came Frank Thornton. The Intelligence Staff was built up slowly, as suitable men were not easily found. A good Intelligence Officer is born, not made, but even the man with a great deal of natural instinct for detective work requires to be taught a great deal of the technique of the business. 19
Immediately upon taking the position Collins began assembling a staff, and he promoted Liam Tobin to lead it. The trio of Tobin, Cullen and Thornton acted as an equal triumvirate: Collins was the boss, but the success enjoyed
by IRA intelligence is attributable at least as much to their canniness as to his direction. 20 Collins is often described as directing every minute detail of the intelligence department, but part of his success in managing as many projects as he did was his ability to delegate. His own interviews refer to ‘the trustworthiness of my chief aides’. 21 In contrast, Tony Woods, a veteran of the Dublin Brigade, went so far as to say, ‘Tobin, of course, was the real Intelligence man in Dublin in the Tan struggle, not Collins’. 22 This critique likely goes too far in attempting to shift credit for the intelligence war away from Collins, but it is important in that it emphasises the role of his subordinates, and there were differing views of Collins even in those years. Collins’s personality often enabled him to attract people who were willing to turn over intelligence to him. His ability to make connections with people and to forge personal bonds was one of his greatest assets. It could also lead him astray, however, as it did with the spies Jameson and Quinlisk, and Collins was very fortunate to have Tobin, Cullen and Thornton turn their more sceptical eyes on some of his ‘conquests’.
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Under the name of the Irish Products Company, Tobin, Cullen and Thornton operated and carried on the daily activities of intelligence analysis. 23
I was very happy about this transfer to Intelligence as I liked Michael Collins. I was a great admirer of him. I recognised at an early stage, even as far back as my first contact with him in Liverpool, that he was a dynamic type of individual and, although at that period he was not in any directive position, still he was an outstanding individual on that famous day in Liverpool in 1915. Later on, working with him on organisation, I had a very quiet admiration for him which developed as the years went on. Michael Collins was a man with a determination to make a complete success of everything he put his hands to. He had a marvellous memory, and as I saw repeatedly happen in later years, he would deal with men from all parts of the country at night in our headquarters in Devlin’s of Parnell Square, he would make a very casual note about the things which would have to be attended to on the following day or, as often as not, take no note of them at all, but never to my knowledge was anything left
unattended to the next day. He was full of the exuberance of life and full of vitality. He had no time for half measures and expected from those who were serving under him the same amount of enthusiasm and constructive energy that he himself was putting into the job.
Michael Collins took a lively interest in the private affairs of each and every individual with whom he came in contact and was always ready to lend a helping hand to assist them to meet their private responsibilities. During the height of the War he travelled from post to post and office on his old Raleigh bicycle and, as often as not, did not leave Devlin’s in Parnell Square until just on curfew. I think it is only right to say here, in view of the many and varied accounts given by various writers, who claim to have known Collins and his activities, that he never carried a gun during these journeys, neither was he accompanied by a bodyguard.
In the various activities carried out by the Dublin Squads, ASU and members of the Dublin Brigade, naturally from time to time men got either killed or wounded, but invariably Mick Collins was the first man to visit the relatives of these particular men, to either console them in their adversity or to see in what way he could help them to carry on their home affairs during the absence of their loved ones.
Mick Collins was the ideal soldier to lead men during a revolution such as we were going through and I think all and sundry, whether they subsequently fought against him in the Civil War or not, who had close contact with him, must admit that he was: the one bright star that all the fighting men looked to for guidance and advice during those great days, particularly during 1920 and 1921.
In some of the criticisms that have appeared from time to time about Mick Collins it has been suggested that he drank to excess. These statements are lies. As one who was very closely associated with him during those strenuous days, I can say that Collins rarely took anything and when he did it was a small sherry. Drinking was naturally discouraged everywhere those days
because of the necessity of keeping a cool head under the very strenuous circumstances.
In singling out Collins I am doing so only because of the fact that I had such close association with him and knew what the officers and men of the Volunteers thought of him generally, but in singling him out in this fashion I am in no way taking away from the activities of the other members of the staff, Cathal Brugha, Dick Mulcahy or Gearó id O’Sullivan. 24
The conduct of Collins’s war depended on intelligence and, with all their faulty judgements and inaccuracies, Collins realised that the British secret files still constituted Britain’s greatest intelligence on Ireland. After Broy let Collins and Seá n Nunan into the file rooms of the Great Brunswick Street police station on the night of 7 April 1919 to look over the ‘G’ Division files on theVolunteers, Collins determined that in order to defeat the British they would have to eliminate their spies. A natural realist like Collins realised how essential it was to shut off the sources of knowledge and blind Dublin Castle. He said that the British ‘could replace the men, but couldn’t replace what they knew’. He wrote in the NewYork American in 1922:
England could always reinforce her Army. She could replace every soldier that she lost … But there were others indispensable for her purposes that were not so easily replaced.
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To paralyse the British machine it was necessary to strike at individuals. Without her spies, England was helpless. It was only by means of their accumulated and accumulating knowledge that the British machine could operate. Without their police throughout the country, how could they find the man they ‘wanted’?
We struck at individuals and by doing so we cut their lines of communication and we shook their morale. Only the armed forces and the spies and criminal agents of the British government were attacked. Prisoners of war were treated honourably and considerately and were released after they had been disarmed. 25
Collins told É amon Broy: ‘I am a builder, not a destroyer. I get rid of people only when they hinder my work. ’ Collins warned the detectives to look the other way or suffer the consequences. Those who ignored his warnings paid the price. His grasp of the need for intelligence in order to conduct the guerrilla war was perhaps Collins’s greatest contribution to that war.
Collins’s main ‘military’ initiative at the start of the war consisted of an all-out offensive against the few indispensable British officers in Dublin: the detectives of ‘G’ Division of the Dublin Metropolitan Police, who were responsible for tracking and gathering information on political dissidents. At the end of the 1916 Rising Collins watched as they picked out republican leaders for court martial and execution. When he succeeded É amonn Duggan as Director of Intelligence in January 1919, there were already three G-men feeding intelligence to republicans—É amon Broy, Joseph Kavanagh and Eugene Smith—but their efforts were disorganised. 26 Collins undertook a policy of meeting face to face with these double agents and recruited as many more of them as possible. 27
When Collins took over from Duggan there was really no intelligence department as such. Duggan was a solicitor and kept the intelligence files mixed in with his clients’ files—and ultimately the British captured the files anyway. The files consisted of current press cuttings indicating the comings and goings of Castle and military personnel and had more social than intelligence value.
As was always the case, politics intervened in all aspects of the war, including the intelligence effort. Before the IRA’s offensive in the intelligence war could progress, politics became important in the pursuit of the British detectives. The Dá il’s second session opened on 1 April and during its third meeting, on 10 April, de Valera rose and called for all the police forces to be socially ostracised. In doing so, he revived a tactic that had played a large role in the Land War in rural Ireland during the 1870s and 1880s. He stated:
The people of Ireland ought not to fraternise, as they often do, with the forces that are the main instruments in keeping them in subjugation … Given the composition of these forces, boycott meant accentuating divisions among Irish people, including family members and community residents.
De Valera said that he was reluctant to move against the RIC and DMP because they were Irish as well. In the course of the speech he called the constabulary ‘England’s janissaries’, and said that they were
no ordinary civil force, as police are in other countries … The RIC, unlike any other police force in the world, is a military body … They are given full licence by their superiors to work their will upon an unarmed populace. The more brutal the commands given them by their superiors the more they seem to revel in carrying them out—against their own flesh and blood, be it remembered!
He said that ‘a full boycott will give them vividly to understand how utterly the people of Ireland loathe both themselves and their calling’. 28
At no time did de Valera either explicitly call for or forbid violent action against the police, but his call for social ostracism of the men and their families and the warnings issued by the intelligence department required time to take effect. 29 When it did, the ‘eyes and ears’ of British intelligence were eliminated. Constable John Regan wrote: ‘One day when meeting him [an Irish contact], I asked him if he had anything fresh
… “I’m finished” he said. “I tell you I’m finished. These fellows are serious, and if you take my tip you’ll go a bit easy, too”. That ended my getting information from him, and many others, too. ’30 The British were blind and dumb as far as intelligence in the countryside was concerned from then on. (See Chapter 6 for a discussion of the effect of ostracism on the RIC and their families, as well as on the Irish population. )
In Dublin Collins needed a dedicated band of men to carry out his ordered killings. ‘The Squad’was initiated on 19 September 1919 (though by that time it had been in operation for four months and had already carried out two killings). Collins and Mulcahy presided at a meeting at which the unit was officially formed. Its initial meeting was on 1 May 1919. 31
We met Michael Collins and Dick Mulcahy at the meeting and they told us that it was proposed to form a squad. This squad would take orders directly from Michael Collins, and, in the
absence of Collins, the orders would be given through either Dick McKee or Dick Mulcahy. Dick [Mulcahy] told that we were not to discuss our movements or actions with Volunteer officers or with anybody else. Collins told us that we were being formed to deal with spies and informers and that he had authority from the Government to have this order carried out. He gave us a short talk, the gist of which was that any of us who had read Irish history would know that no organisation in the past had an intelligence system through which spies and informers could be dealt with, but that now the position was going to be rectified by the formation of an Intelligence Branch, an Active Service Unit or whatever else it is called. 32
William Stapleton was soon chosen to be a member, and he described the method of working in the Squad: 33
Bill [Tobin] or Tom [Cullen] [from Collins’s intelligence staff] would come down and tell us who we were to get. It might be one of the Igoe Gang or a British spy sent over to shoot Collins. Two or three of us would go out with an intelligence officer in front of us, maybe about 10 or 15 yards. His job was to identify the man we were to shoot. Often we would be walking in the streets all day without meeting our man. It meant going without lunch. But other times the intelligence staff would have their information dead on and we could see our quarry immediately we came to the place we had been told he would be at. The intelligence officer would then signal us in the following way. He would take off his hat and greet the marked man. Of course, he didn’t know him. As soon as he did this we would shoot. We knew that very great care was taken that this was so. As a result we didn’t feel we had to worry. We were, after all, only soldiers doing our duty. I often went in and said a little prayer for the people we’d shot afterwards. 34
W. C. Forbes Redmond, Belfast RIC Assistant Commissioner of Police, was transferred to Dublin in December 1919 in an effort to bolster the
British intelligence operations in Dublin, and he was appointed as the Deputy Assistant Commissioner of the DMP in charge of the ‘G’ Division. He was completely unfamiliar with Dublin and so he was assigned a ‘minder’ by Dublin Castle: as luck would have it, the minder was Collins’s operative James McNamara. McNamara was thus able to follow Redmond’s movements and report to Collins.
Redmond led a raid on Batt O’Connor’s home on 17 January and assured Mrs Bridget O’Connor that he ‘wouldn’t bother her again’. 35 Collins’s men made sure of it. Redmond stayed at the Standard Hotel before being killed on 21 January 1920. 36
Redmond was stopping in the Standard Hotel in Harcourt Street, and Tom Cullen … a man who was high up on the Intelligence staff and in the confidence of Michael Collins, was sent to stop in the same hotel in order to get all possible information regarding Redmond, particularly about his times of leaving and returning to the hotel, and what he did in the morning and at night. 37
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One evening I saw Redmond coming down from the Castle but he turned back and went in again. Paddy Daly, Tom Keogh, Vinny Byrne and myself were waiting and Redmond came out again. Tom Keogh turned toVinny Byrne and myself and told us to cover them off. Redmond went straight up Dame Street, Grafton Street and Harcourt Street, and we followed him. Just as he came as far as Montague Street Paddy Daly pulled out his revolver and shot him under the ear and Tom Keogh pulled out his revolver and shot him in the back. Daly and Keogh carried out the execution, and Byrne and myself acted as a covering party for them. 38
The first shot shattered Redmond’s jaw and he tried to draw a gun, but the second shot in the forehead killed him. Redmond was the highest-ranking casualty in DMP history. The Times wrote days later that ‘the murder … is accepted as final proof of the existence in Ireland of a criminal organization of the most desperate kind. The crime must have been planned with much
care and skill’. 39 It was carefully planned. Daly and Joe Dolan stayed in the hotel for two weeks previously to learn about Redmond’s movements, and reported to Mick McDonnell, who was in charge of the Squad.
At the end of 1919 British raiders discovered a chequebook from the Munster and Leinster Bank on Dame Street where some of the Dá il Loan funds might be deposited. The bank itself was raided in February 1920, and about £ 18, 000 was seized. 40 These monies were under the name of Daithi Ó Donnchadha (O’Donoghue), and had been ‘transferred from Mí cheá l Ó Coileá in’ (Collins). 41 It was this raid that immediately precipitated the death of the bank auditor, Alan Bell.
Bell was particularly close to Lord French, and was specially assigned to this duty in order to cripple the Dá il Loan. He endeavoured to trace all the banks in which Collins deposited the proceeds of the Dá il Loan, and if he had succeeded the Loan would have been at risk. The final Loan total, subscribed by over 135, 000 Irish people, was £ 378, 858 in Ireland alone;
$5, 123, 640 was raised separately in the US. 42 Both were huge sums for the time. Of all the money collected for the Loan, the British were only able to confiscate approximately £ 20, 000 of it. Bell, however, had also been an active police agent since the 1880s and had undertaken numerous spying missions in the west of Ireland, sending back reports on Land Leaguers and IRB members. He also reported directly to Sir Basil Thomson, head of British intelligence at Scotland Yard, and the committee on which Bell sat recommended that Sinn Fé in ‘be infiltrated with spies and some leaders assassinated’. According to Piaras Bé aslaí, Collins regarded Bell as one of the most important British intelligence agents in Ireland. 43 Unfortunately for Bell, his inquiry into the Sinn Fé in accounts in March 1920 was much publicised in the newspapers, sealing his fate.
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