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—Michael Collins 3 страница
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The collection of intelligence was one of the most interesting and risky games over there. Our intelligence was not too intelligent and methods employed were sometimes unorthodox; the only rule was ‘get the information’ … the means was most often left to the individual. 76
Throughout 1920 there was an intelligence war between Collins and the Castle. While it never developed into ‘open warfare’ on the streets of Dublin, there were many killings and assassinations of individual operatives from both sides. It was a savage battle of wits between the Irish and British services, fought without mercy in the shadows.
The Castle’s efforts were headed by Colonel Ormonde de L’Epee Winter, Chief of the British Combined Intelligence Services in Ireland from the spring of 1920 until the Truce. Despite having no previous full-time experience in intelligence, Winter’s brief was to reorganise the shambles that British intelligence in Ireland had become. 77 His biggest contribution was a centralised document archive and the production of meta-data to allow the intelligence to be summarised and disseminated—a very modern concept for the time. Unfortunately, in the pre-computing era, the meta- data were lengthy epitomes produced manually; the procedures for dealing
with captured documents were clumsy, and long delays could ensue before the intelligence was shared with the operatives or forces who needed the intelligence in order to function. The biggest problem for Winter was that, with the exception of Dublin, he did not control military intelligence. This reflected the poor command and control between the two parts of the British security forces. Earlier, the GOC in Ireland, General Macready, had been given the opportunity to control both the police and the army but turned it down. Thereafter, the police (including the Black and Tans and the Auxiliary Division) and the army often operated independently, with limited intelligence co-operation until the final months of the campaign. 78 In essence, the British intelligence effort under Winter addressed its shortcomings by deploying many more officers while still failing to co- ordinate efforts with the War Office, and army intelligence continued to act independently of the Castle administration. The net result was more and more British operatives, under separate military and civilian commands, never co-ordinating with each other, and the lack of an efficient organisation was telling. In desperation, the British even solicited informers by placing an advert in Irish papers:
During the last 12 months innumerable murders and other outrages have been committed by those who call themselves members of the Irish Republican Army. Only by the help of self- respecting Irishmen can these murders be put a stop to.
It is possible to send letters containing information in such a way as to prevent them being stopped in the post.
If you have information to give and you are willing to help the cause of Law and Order act as follows:
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Write your information on ordinary notepaper being careful to give neither your name nor your address. Remember also to disguise your handwriting, or else to print the words. Put it into an envelope addressed to:
D. W. Ross Poste Restante
G. P. O. London
Enclose this envelope in another. (Take care that your outer envelope is not transparent. ) Put it with a small piece of paper
asking the recipient to forward the D. W. Ross letter as soon as he receives it. Address the outer envelope to some well disposed friend in England or to any well known business in England.
You will later be given the opportunity, should you wish to do so, of identifying the letter and should the information have proved of value, of claiming a REWARD.
The utmost secrecy will be maintained as to all information received.
The intelligence war continued to escalate on both sides, and on 21 November 1920, in the quiet of a Dublin Sunday, small crews of IRA gunmen began the systematic assassination of a group of specially trained and recruited secret servicemen, mostly MI5 and SIS specialists, in the most noted intelligence coup in Dublin. 79 This British unit had been recruited in London in the summer of 1920 and placed in the charge of Major C. A. Cameron. In all, sixty agents were trained and dispatched to Ireland. It now appears certain that the majority of the men assassinated were members of this group, although the Irish made some mistakes in identification and civilians were killed in error. 80
Earlier that month, Prime Minister Lloyd George had confidently assured his audience at London’s Guildhall that the IRA was defeated and that the British ‘had murder on the run’. 81 The attack, coming as it did when the British forces felt that they had the IRA at breaking point, was a momentous act of reassertion. Its timing was also crucial for the Irish, since it became apparent to the police—and certainly to Collins—that the IRA boycott of the police was beginning to falter and that general allegiance to the Republican cause could be weakening. Hence Bloody Sunday not only removed a major threat to the IRA but also simultaneously gave a warning to the Irish people that any weakening of their resolve to continue the struggle and support the guerrillas would not be tolerated. 82
Intelligence chiefs in London were pragmatic: their goal was to locate Michael Collins, thus severing the head from the body of the IRA. Collins was aware of the intensification and knew that he would have to move soon to meet it. He received information from a contact in ScotlandYard that this group of men was coming to Dublin with the avowed intention of smashing the IRA/Volunteers, and particularly Collins’s intelligence operation. He
could not defeat the British in pitched battles but he could ‘put out the eyes and ears’ of the intelligence service upon which the military relied. 83
In late 1920 that special intelligence unit was organised by the British into one whose ultimate purpose was to break Collins’s organisation. Their chosen strategy was simple: to assassinate the political members of Sinn Fé in who were moving openly in public or who were involved in the military struggle. Following this, they felt, the IRA would be bound to make some moves that would flush its other leaders to the surface. After September 1920 the number of raids increased and intense searches were carried out nightly in the city. The men implementing this policy became known as the ‘Cairo Gang’. 84
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Colonel Ormonde Winter controlled and activated the ‘Cairo Gang’ in Ireland. The IRA/Volunteers knew him as the ‘Holy Terror’ because he was always prepared to descend to the most extreme methods to obtain information from prisoners. The British held him in no higher regard, as he was known to Mark Sturgis as ‘a wicked little white snake … probably entirely non-moral’. 85 In October Winter organised the Central Raid Bureau to co- ordinate the activities of his agents and the Auxiliaries. They soon began to make their presence felt. The Cairo Gang was ruthless and efficient, and had been primarily responsible for tracking down Dan Breen and Seá n Treacy, killing Treacy in Talbot Street on 14 October 1920.
For months Collins watched the British getting closer and closer. From their first appearance in Dublin he began gathering information on them, and found that they were usually living as private citizens in respectable rooming houses. He set his own spies to open their correspondence, had the contents of their wastepaper baskets taken by the housemaids and had duplicate keys made for their rooms. Crucially, the IRA co-opted most of the Irish domestic staff who worked in the rooming houses where the officers lived, and all of their comings and goings were meticulously recorded by servants and reported to Collins’s staff. He waited and accumulated evidence before he went to the cabinet to seek authorisation for his operation. 86 Lily Mernin worked at Ship Street Barracks for Major Stratford Burton, the garrison adjutant, who was in charge of court-martial proceedings as well as organisation of the billeting of the various military posts throughout Dublin, and she would always make an extra carbon copy of all reports and documents for Collins. She was instrumental in locating the addresses of the British
military officers assigned to Dublin:
Before the 21st November 1920, it was part of my normal duty to type the names and addresses of British agents who were accommodated at private addresses and living as ordinary citizens of the city. These lists were typed weekly and amended whenever an address was changed. I passed them on each week to the address at Moynihan’s, Clonliffe Rd, or to Piaras Bé aslaí. The typing of the lists ceased after the 21st November 1920. 87
Locating and eliminating Collins had become the prime goal of all the British intelligence organisations, and they were getting close. In an October meeting in the Cairo Café on Grafton Street, a member of the Gang joined Tom Cullen, Frank Thornton and Charlie Saurin as they were drinking and pretending to be British spies. The real British officer said to them: ‘Surely you fellows know Liam Tobin, Tom Cullen and Frank Thornton—these are Collins’s three officers and if you can get them we can locate Collins’. 88 If they knew the names of his lieutenants—numbers one, two and three of his intelligence staff—the British were getting uncomfortably close, even if they did not know what any of them looked like. It boded ill for any of Collins’s men who fell into their hands at that time.
In the first two weeks of November the Gang detained some of Collins’s closest advisers. They held Frank Thornton for ten days but he managed to convince them that he had nothing to do with Sinn Fé in. On 10 November they just missed capturing Richard Mulcahy. On 13 November they raided Vaughan’s Hotel and questioned Liam Tobin and Tom Cullen, but let them go. Collins, Cathal Brugha, Mulcahy and the military and intelligence leadership felt that they had no choice but to attack. Mulcahy commented: ‘We were being made to feel that they were very close on the heels of some of us’. He was quite clear about the responsibility of those against whom the IRA directed their operations on Bloody Sunday:
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They were members of a spy organisation that was a murder organisation. Their murderous intent was directed against the effective members of the Government as well as against GHQ and staff at the Dublin Brigade. 89
Collins, Brugha, Mulcahy, Dick McKee, Peadar Clancy and others sentenced over twenty British officers at their 35 Lower Gardiner Street meeting on 20 November. The names of fifteen out of the thirty-five selected for assassination were turned down because of insufficient evidence. 90 Earlier historians accepted that the men killed had passed through a rigorous process of elimination before being placed on the list for execution; more recent research, however, questions whether some of the men killed might not all have been intelligence officers, and some were less experienced than previously thought. 91 The operation was to start at
9. 00 a. m. sharp. Collins told them all that ‘it’s to be done exactly at nine. Neither before nor after. These whores [the British] have got to learn that Irishmen can turn up on time. ’92 Paddy Daly, the leader of Collins’s Squad, was not one of the men assigned to carry out the attacks on Bloody Sunday, but he was intimately involved in the organisation and planning. He recalled:
The four Battalions of the Brigade were engaged, and the OC of each Battalion was responsible for a certain area, not his own area because most of the spies were grouped in certain districts. If the 2nd Battalion Volunteers had been confined to their own area, they would not have done anything but the Gresham Hotel job. All other operations allotted to the 2nd Battalion were outside their Battalion area, in fact they were in the 3rd Battalion area.
Seá n Russell picked the men for the various operations, and in every case he appointed a member of the Squad in charge of the various groups. 93
On the morning of 21 November the operation began at 9 a. m., exactly as planned. Some of the men targeted refused to come out of their rooms and were shot in bed. Others came to the door and were shot as they opened it. Of the IRA/Volunteers who had taken part, some would never recover completely from the nerve-shattering work of that morning. 94 By 9. 30 the killings were finished. (See Chapter 6 for a discussion of Bloody Sunday as a terrorist event. )
The British military were slow to realise what had happened. About
9. 20 General F. P. Crozier was passing 22 Mount Street with a group of Auxiliaries when they heard some shooting. Crozier and the Auxiliaries jumped out and ran to the house. Tom Keogh, who burst through the soldiers as they surrounded him, shot two Auxiliaries who were in the back of the house. After Crozier saw what had happened upstairs he went to the garden, where he found an Auxiliary about to shoot Frank Teeling, one of the Squad who had been wounded. Crozier prevented the summary execution and saw that Teeling was taken to hospital, and then he headed to Dublin Castle. Throughout the city, panicked British officers and their families packed their belongings and moved into the Castle.
Collins’s men went out to kill twenty that morning, but some of them could not be found. The publicised and ‘official’ figures stated that eleven officers were killed and four escaped. The dead included British intelligence officers, British army courts-martial officers, two Auxiliaries, an RIC officer, a number of soldiers in the wrong place at the wrong time and two civilians. In fact eleven British officers, two Auxiliary cadets and two civilians (T. H. Smith and L. E. Wilde) were killed in eight locations:
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• 92 Baggot Street Lower: Captain W. F. Newbury (a courts martial officer).
• 119 Baggot Street Lower: Captain George (Geoffrey) T. Baggallay (a one-legged courts martial officer).
• 28 Earlsfort Terrace: Sergeant John Fitzgerald (he was in the RIC and was probably killed for that alone, as the Squad asked for ‘Colonel Fitzpatrick’).
• 117–119 Morehampton Road: Captain Donald L. McClean (an intelligence officer at Dublin Castle) and T. H. Smith (a civilian landlord not engaged in intelligence).
• 22 Lower Mount Street: Lieutenant H. R. Angliss (alias Patrick ‘Paddy’ McMahon, a British intelligence agent) and Auxiliary Cadets Garner and Morris.
• 38 Upper Mount Street: Lieutenant Peter Ashmunt Ames and Captain George Bennett (Ames and Bennett were leaders of the intelligence unit).
• 28–29 Pembroke Street Upper: Major C. M. G. Dowling (a British intelligence officer), Colonel Hugh F. Montgomery (a staff officer ‘in
the wrong place’ who took three weeks to die from his wounds) and Captain Leonard Price (a British intelligence officer).
• Upper Sackville Street, Gresham Hotel: Captain Patrick MacCormack (almost certainly buying horses for the Alexandria Turf Club and not engaged in intelligence activity at all) and L. E. Wilde (a civilian).
Colonel Wilfred James Woodcock DSO, Lancashire Fusiliers, Lieutenant
R. G. Murray, Royal Scots, and Captain B. C. H. Keenlyside, Lancashire Fusiliers, were all wounded at 28 Upper Pembroke Street. Woodcock was not connected with intelligence and had walked into a confrontation on the first floor of the house as he was preparing to leave to command a regimental parade at army headquarters. 95 He was in his military uniform, and when he shouted to warn the five other British officers living in the house he was shot in the shoulder and back, but survived. As Keenlyside was about to be shot, a struggle ensued between his wife and Mick O’Hanlon. The leader of the unit, Mick Flanagan, arrived, pushed Mrs Keenlyside out of the way and shot her husband. John Caldow, McLean’s brother-in-law and a former soldier with the Royal Scots Fusiliers, was wounded at 117 Morehampton Road. ‘Mr Peel’, the alias of an unidentified British agent staying at 22 Lower Mount Street, amongst others, escaped unscathed.
Of those killed by the IRA, Ames, Angliss, Bennett, Dowling, MacLean and Price were intelligence officers. Baggallay and Newberry were courts martial officers not involved with intelligence. McCormack and Wilde appear to have been incorrectly targeted or possibly were innocent ex- officers. Fitzgerald was a policeman who was probably mistaken for someone else. Smith was the landlord of a house where some of the army men were staying and was killed by mistake. Morris and Garner were Auxiliaries on their way to warn the barracks, as was Montgomery, who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. 96
Some of the targets escaped by virtue of not being home, and Collins’s men were able to recover only a few papers of import, but if every spy or agent in Ireland had been killed it could have not had a greater effect on Dublin Castle. Dave Neligan stated that the incident ‘caused complete panic in Dublin Castle. … The attack was so well organized, so unexpected, and so ruthlessly executed that the effect was paralyzing. It can be said that the
enemy never recovered from the blow. While some of the worst killers escaped, they were thoroughly frightened. ’97
In the British records, their review of the day concluded:
The murders of 21st November 1920 temporarily paralysed the special branch. Several of its most efficient members were murdered and the majority of the other residents of the city were brought into Dublin Castle and Central Hotel for safety. This centralisation in the most inconvenient places possible greatly decreased the opportunities for obtaining information and for re-establishing anything in the nature of a secret service. 98
Captain Robert D. Jeune, who was on the Irish list but slipped out of 28 Upper Pembroke Street just before the attacks, said that ‘those of us who had survived were shut up under guard in a hotel where it was impractical to do any useful work’. 99
The extent and the cold-blooded nature of the killing of the British officers even stunned some of the Irish. Desmond FitzGerald and William Cosgrave were shocked. Arthur Griffith was horrified: ‘In front of their wives on a Sunday in their own homes’.
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Later that morning, Collins discovered that two of the IRA’s most vital members had been captured. Dick McKee, Brigadier of the Dublin Brigade, and Peadar Clancy, Vice-Brigadier, had been caught the night before in Seá n Fitzpatrick’s house in Lower Gloucester Street—supposedly a ‘safe house’. (John ‘Shankers’ Ryan, the tout who turned them in, was later killed in Hyne’s Pub in Gloucester Place. ) McKee and Clancy had planned the operation. When he heard the news, Collins screamed, ‘Good God. We’re finished now. It’s all up. ’ He then ordered his police agent James McNamara to find out where they were being held; McNamara thought it was at the Bridewell. Collins sent McNamara and Neligan to search for them there, but they found that McKee and Clancy had been taken to Dublin Castle. Also on Saturday night, Conor Clune, a Gaelic Leaguer from County Clare, was arrested in Vaughan’s Hotel. Clune had nothing to do with the Volunteers and had only come to Dublin to confer with journalist Piaras Bé aslaí, but he was staying in Vaughan’s, which was a noted IRA meeting place, and so he was taken to Dublin Castle. McKee, Clancy and Clune
were killed in the Castle at 11. 00 a. m. on that Sunday morning and were dead before their capture became known. Mulcahy realised what their deaths meant to Collins in particular, and to their operations: 100
In McKee and Clancy he [Collins] had two men who fully understood the inside of Collins’s work and who were ready and able to link up the Dublin resources of the Dublin Brigade to any work that Collins had in hand and to do so promptly, effectively and sympathetically. 101
Prime Minister David Lloyd George said of the British who had been killed: ‘They got what they deserved—beaten by counter-jumpers! ’ ‘Ask Griffith for God’s sake to keep his head and not to break off the slender link that has been established. Tragic as the events in Dublin were, they were of no importance. These men were soldiers, and took a soldier’s risk. ’102
Collins said:
My one intention was the destruction of the undesirables who continued to make miserable the lives of ordinary decent citizens. I have proof enough to assure myself of the atrocities which this gang of spies and informers have committed. Perjury and torture are words too easily known to them. If I had a second motive it was no more than a feeling I would have for a dangerous reptile. By their destruction the very air is made sweeter. For myself, my conscience is clear. There is no crime in detecting and destroying, in wartime, the spy and the informer. They have destroyed without trial. I have paid them back in their own coin. 103
It was this incident, more than any other, that gained Collins his reputation as a gunman and a ‘murderer’. The British press made much of the fact that the men were British spies in civilian clothes, and under assumed names, playing a game of ‘kill or be killed’. That same press, for the most part, ignored the activities of the Black and Tans and Auxiliaries later that day at Croke Park.
Following the morning raids, a combined group of British soldiers, Black and Tans and Auxiliaries raided Croke Park. 104 According to the
police, the ‘official plan’ was that fifteen minutes before the final whistle there would be an announcement by megaphone. Instead of the usual ‘stewards to end-of-match positions’, the crowd would hear someone telling them to leave by official exits and that all men would be searched for weapons. In the event, however, no sooner had the police, Black and Tans and Auxiliaries arrived at the Park than they started shooting. The exact incidents that led to the shooting have never been proven, with each side contradicting the other. The only public and official statement was one by Dublin Castle blaming the IRA for starting the shooting. 105
Central to all inquiries with regard to Croke Park and still in dispute is the question of who fired first. All that is agreed on is that the firing started at the south-west corner of the pitch, where Jones’s Road crosses the Royal Canal. Some witnesses at the subsequent inquiries said that the firing started within the Park, presumably by armed spectators, before the British troops had entered the grounds. Fourteen innocent people attending the match were killed, sixty-two people were injured inside Croke Park during the raid and another twelve were injured in the stampede to escape. Whoever fired first, ‘of all the bloody days of the War of Independence, this was the bloodiest of them all—at least in terms of its impact on the public psyche’. 106 Oscar Traynor claimed that the effect of the IRA killings was ‘to paralyse completely the British Military Intelligence system in Dublin’. 107 Frank Thornton elaborated: ‘The British Secret Service was wiped out on Bloody Sunday’. 108 Both statements are exaggerations, but Bloody Sunday demonstrated not only the horrific logic of reprisal tactics but also the importance of the intelligence network. In fact, Bloody Sunday did not decisively affect the intelligence war for either side, and many British agents were more effectively on their guard, making a repeat of the attacks impossible. The collection and analysis of intelligence were crucial to the IRA’s activities, and it was the productive efficiency of Collins’s department in collecting accurate intelligence on the British that ultimately allowed
them to launch effective attacks while themselves avoiding detection. 109 Bloody Sunday was designed to be as spectacular as possible and was
intended to coincide with attacks on property in Britain, as much to demonstrate Irish resolve as to tackle the specific problem of dedicated British agents in Ireland. In sum, Collins’s 21 November attack was intended as a temporary measure to eliminate some agents, scare off some others,
achieve maximum propaganda impact with simultaneous killings, buy time and pre-empt his capture by British intelligence. All these goals had been achieved, but the cost, especially considering the attacks at Croke Park, had been terribly high. Charles Townshend comments that ‘though Republican propaganda made a brilliant job of portraying the operation as a body blow against the government, this did not alter the reality of the situation’. 110
At least in the short term, the IRA’s action had the intended effect on British intelligence. Its political effect was also dramatic. And when the news of the Kilmichael ambush in County Cork broke one week later, the British press made Lloyd George’s boast of having ‘murder by the throat’ seem like a fantasy statement. Until Bloody Sunday the British held to their opinion that the Irish were incapable of conducting co-ordinated attacks. After that, their assessment of Irish capabilities changed, as did their outlook and approach.
Since the Bloody Sunday raids, historians have debated whether the results had a greater effect on Irish and British intelligence operations or on politics and propaganda. The executions of the British agents had a shattering effect on the morale of the British in Ireland, as well as in Britain. The British public and government were shocked and could not believe that with all their mighty resources they could be so humiliated. Though Lloyd George fumed about ‘murderers’ in public, it was this event as much as any other that led him to begin sending emissaries to Ireland in search of peace.
In January 1921 there was another group of British intelligence officers headquartered in the Castle who were assigned to get Collins: the ‘Igoe Gang’, another ‘freelance’ group. Named after their leader, Head Constable Eugene Igoe from Galway, they gradually began to play a very significant role. Following Bloody Sunday, the greatest threat to Collins was this ‘Gang’, who arrived in Dublin early in 1921.
Dublin at this time was anything but a peaceful city. The Dublin Brigade were carrying out ambushes practically every day, despite the fact that the British military were patrolling the streets in armoured cars, Lancia cars and also a foot patrol extended across the roads. To add to this concentration of forces a new menace appeared on the scene. These were grange [sic] of RIC drawn
from different parts of the country under the leadership of Chief Constable Igoe. They wore civilian clothes, were heavily armed and moved along the footpaths on both sides of the road looking out for either city men whom they might know or Volunteers up from the country. They were not easy to deal with because they suddenly appeared at most unexpected places and, despite several attempts our men never got really into action against the gang proper. 111
The ‘Gang’ walked around the city heavily armed, often tailing IRA/Volunteers, unexpectedly dropping into pubs and shops and generally making a nuisance of themselves.
Igoe was an RIC man who hailed from the west of Ireland. Around him, the Castle authorities formed a group of RIC men who were selected from different parts of the country—especially those who had a good knowledge of the active officers of the IRA wanted by the British. Their routine was to visit different railway termini as trains were arriving or departing, and to see if any wanted men were travelling. If they happened to capture any such men, well, it was a gamble whether they ever lived to tell what had happened to them. The usual report would appear— ‘shot while trying to escape’.
This gang adopted the same procedure as did the squad. They moved along in pairs, on each side of the street or road, with a distance of a yard or two between each pair. So you will understand that it was going to be a very heavy operation to get the lot of them. Igoe and his gang had been moving around for a little while, when one day they picked up a Volunteer, named Newell, who was from the west, and who, before being picked up, was in touch with the Intelligence staff and hoped to be able to point out Igoe. Up to this time, we had no description of what he looked like.
… Igoe, himself, or the remainder of the gang, were never got. 112
Despite some assertions to the contrary, the Squad never did ‘get’ Igoe or any of his men. Following the Truce, Igoe seems to have left Ireland and never returned for fear of reprisal.
The British intelligence war is often thought of as being disastrous, with Collins and his men and women consistently out-spying His Majesty’s Secret Services. In the immediate post-war period the British made a detailed analysis of their intelligence failures in Ireland; in a flurry of activity, papers were published, conferences held, reports commissioned and lectures given in which the failures were fully acknowledged. It is known that as late as May 1920 the British chief of police in Dublin had an intelligence staff consisting of solely one officer. 113 Its primary source of information, from the political detectives of ‘G’ Division of the DMP, all but dried up, as Collins ordered the assassination of many of those detectives. Then, by late 1920, intelligence officers were appointed to each divisional commissioner of the RIC to co-ordinate military and police intelligence. The military, present throughout Ireland in force, together with Auxiliaries, had their own intelligence services with young officers, many of them noted for their zeal in intelligence matters. 114
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