The Defence of the Realm (19 page)

By the end of the war, MI5 had a total staff of 844.
¹⁰
At its London headquarters there were 84 officers (some civilian but a majority with army rank), 291 female Registry and secretarial staff, 15 male clerks, 77 ‘subordinate staff' and 23 police. One of the greatest changes in the course of the war was that by the Armistice over 40 per cent of staff were stationed outside London at home ports, permit offices and missions in Allied countries: 255 Ports Police (who, in an era before air travel, monitored all arrivals to and departures from the UK), 49 officers, 34 female and 7 male clerks, 9 subordinate staff.
¹¹

With the decline of German espionage in Britain, MI5's main priority
during 1916 moved from counter-espionage to counter-subversion. It was entirely reasonable for MI5 to expect German intelligence to engage in a major campaign of subversion to try to undermine the British war effort. From the beginning of the war the Prusso-German General Staff developed a strategy of ‘fomenting revolution' (
Revolutionierungspolitik
), which it sought to implement by sponsoring subversive movements in Allied countries. As Thomas Boghardt has noted: ‘German agents financed French pacifists, American labour organisations and Indian nationalists. They supported Russian revolutionaries, Muslim
jihadists
and Irish republicans.'
¹²
The fact that, though MI5 and Whitehall failed to realize it at the time, German intelligence made no serious attempt at subversion in mainland Britain reflected not any lack of desire to damage the British war effort but the belief, particularly after the main German agents during the first year of the war had been arrested, that Britain was a harder target than its main Allies.

At the outbreak of war Berlin believed that the most effective way to subvert the United Kingdom was by assisting Irish Republican attempts to end British rule. Its main hopes were pinned on the Irish exile Sir Roger Casement, formerly a distinguished member of the British consular service, who sought German support for an Irish rebellion. The most important British informant on Casement's activities in the early months of the war was his bisexual Norwegian-American manservant and lover, Adler Christensen, who accompanied him on a journey from the United States to Oslo (then Christiania) in October 1914, en route to Germany. On his arrival in Oslo, Christensen made secret contact with the British minister, Mansfeldt de Carbonnel Findlay, and gave him copies of several incriminating documents Casement was carrying with him, including a ciphered letter of introduction from the German ambassador in Washington, Count Johann Heinrich von Bernstorff, to the German Chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg. The Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, found Christensen's information so important that he sent copies of Findlay's report to the Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, the Secretary of State for War, Field Marshal Earl Kitchener, the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, and the Chief Secretary for Ireland, Augustine Birrell.
¹³

Casement's rudimentary attempts to outwit British postal censorship were remarkably naive. On 7 December 1914 he posted a letter in Rotterdam to Alice Stopford Green in London for onward transmission to the chief of staff of the Irish Volunteers, Eoin MacNeill. As a well-known Irish nationalist, Mrs Green was an obvious target for postal censorship, as was
all mail from neutral Netherlands (which included items originating in Germany). Casement's short, unsigned covering letter was full of thinly concealed references to German support for the liberation of the ‘four green fields' (easily identifiable as the four provinces of Ireland) from the ‘stranger' (Britain). Though this primitive level of concealment would in any case have been unlikely to deceive the censor, it was rendered pointless by the unambiguous language used by Casement in the accompanying letter to MacNeill:

I am in Berlin and if Ireland will do her duty, rest assured Germany will do hers towards us, our cause and our whole future . . . Once our people[,] clergy and Volunteers know that Germany, if victorious, will do her best to aid us in our efforts to achieve an independent Ireland, every man at home must stand for Germany and Irish Freedom . . . Tell all to trust the Germans – and to trust me.

Casement's letter was unsigned. ‘You know who writes this,' he told MacNeill. So did MO5(g).
¹⁴

The most important intelligence in tracking German support for Casement came from the Admiralty SIGINT unit, Room 40. Between the outbreak of war and the eve of the Easter Rising in 1916, Room 40 decrypted at least thirty-two cables exchanged between the German embassy in Washington and the Foreign Ministry in Berlin dealing with German support for Irish nationalists. The first was a telegram from the German ambassador in Washington, Bernstorff, to Berlin on 27 September 1914, reporting a meeting with Casement to discuss raising an Irish Brigade from among prisoners of war captured by the Germans (though the date at which the telegram was decrypted remains uncertain).
¹⁵
The most important decrypts were those which revealed that German arms for the Easter Rising were to be landed in Tralee Bay in the spring of 1916 and that Casement was following by U-boat. The steamer
Aud
, carrying German munitions, was duly intercepted by HMS
Bluebell
on 21 April 1916, ordered to proceed to Queenstown and scuttled by its German crew just as it arrived. After his arrest Casement was jointly interrogated at Scotland Yard by Thomson, Captain Reginald ‘Blinker' Hall, the DNI, and MI5's main Irish expert, the Old Harrovian Major (later Lieutenant Colonel) Frank Hall (no relation to the DNI), a landowner from County Down.
¹⁶
The many conspiracy theorists attracted by the Casement affair have surprisingly failed to notice that before the war Frank Hall had been military secretary of the Ulster Volunteer Force and a gun-runner himself.
¹⁷
Like most officer recruits to MI5, his main recreations were outdoor pursuits, in his case shooting and yachting. As well as having a strong dislike of Irish
nationalism, Hall had a keen sense of imperial pride, claiming when he joined MI5 in December 1914 to have visited ‘every Imperial defended port N. of the Equator except Sierra Leone'.
¹⁸
Churchill later noted that Kell was ‘not specially acquainted with Irish matters' and relied on Hall's expertise.
¹⁹

Casement claimed that during the interrogation at Scotland Yard he asked to be allowed to appeal publicly for the Easter Rising in Ireland to be called off in order to ‘stop useless bloodshed'. His interrogators refused, possibly in the hope that the Rising would go ahead and force the government to crush what they saw as a German conspiracy with Irish nationalists. According to Casement, he was told by Blinker Hall, ‘It is better that a cankering sore like this should be cut out.'
²⁰
Though the formal transcript of the interrogation finished before these comments were made, a note in Home Office files confirms Casement's version of events:

Casement begged to be allowed to communicate with the leaders to try and stop the rising but he was not allowed. On Easter Sunday at Scotland Yard he implored again to be allowed to communicate or send a message. But they refused, saying, ‘It[']s a festering sore, it[']s much better it should come to a head.'
²¹

Even if Casement had been allowed to issue an appeal to ‘stop useless bloodshed', however, it is unlikely he would have deterred the seven-man military council of the Irish Republican Brotherhood from going ahead with the Easter Rising.
²²

Despite the polite tone of Casement's interrogators, it is clear that they despised him. One example of this contempt is their reaction to a moving poem written by Casement in prison, dated 5 July 1916, just under a month before his execution, while waiting to be received into the Catholic Church, which was preserved in MI5 files:

Weep not that you no longer feel the tide

High breasting sun and storm that bore along

Your youth on currents of perpetual song;

For in these mid-sea waters, still and wide,

A Sleepless purpose the great Deep doth hide:

Here spring the mighty fountains, pure and strong,

That bear sweet change of breath to city throng,

Who, had the sea no breeze, would soon have died.

So, though the Sun shines not in such a blue,

Nor have the stars the meaning youth devised,

The heavens are nigher, and a light shines through

The brightness that nor sun nor stars sufficed,

And on this lonely waste we find it true

Lost youth and love, nor lost, are hid with Christ.

After reading the poem, Frank Hall wrote scornfully to Basil Thomson, ‘Is this working up a plea for insanity think you?!!'

While Lody had been respected as a patriot, Casement, despite his self-sacrificial bravery in the cause of Irish independence, was despised as a traitor who had tried by underhand methods to persuade Irish soldiers fighting for King and Country to desert to the enemy. Casement's interrogators had read, and doubtless been infuriated by, the evidence (preserved in MI5 files) of wounded Irish POWs repatriated from Germany during 1915, who described Casement's efforts to recruit them to an Irish Brigade. According to Private Joseph Mahony:

In Feb. 1915 Sir Roger Casement made us a speech [at Limburg POW camp] asking us to join an Irish Brigade, that this was ‘our chance of striking a blow for our country'. He was booed out of the camp . . . After that further efforts were made to induce us to join by cutting off our rations, the bread ration was cut in half for about two months.
²³

Reports such as this help to explain why British intelligence chiefs were both so determined to ensure that Casement did not escape the gallows and so ready to blacken his name.

A further reason for their contempt for Casement may have been homophobia (a prejudice then common to both British intelligence and Irish nationalists). Christensen had told Findlay in October 1914 that Casement was homosexual. Sir Edward Grey reported to some of his cabinet colleagues that Casement and Christensen had ‘unnatural relations'.
²⁴
The relations appeared all the more ‘unnatural' because of Christensen's admission that they began when he was a seaman aged only fifteen or sixteen and Casement was British consul in Brazil. According to Christensen, Casement followed him into a lavatory in a Montevideo hotel where they had sex.
²⁵
Casement's ‘Black Diaries', which were discovered while he was being interrogated at Scotland Yard and record in graphic detail his numerous sexual encounters with male lovers and prostitutes as well as his obsession with ‘
huge
', ‘
enormous
' genitalia,
²⁶
reinforced the contempt of his interrogators. Though recent forensic examination has established their authenticity beyond reasonable doubt,
²⁷
the suggestion that they were forged by British intelligence has always been deeply implausible. Neither MI5 nor any other British intelligence agency had the capacity to produce a forgery on the scale and of the complexity that would have been required.
Even the KGB, whose disinformation department, Service A, made far more use of forgery than any Western intelligence agency, never fabricated a handwritten document of comparable length.
²⁸

The relatively harmonious collaboration in London before Casement's trial between Frank Hall of MI5, Captain Hall and Basil Thomson contrasted with the confusion of British intelligence organization in Ireland itself. Military intelligence work was poorly co-ordinated with that of the police. Within the police the lack of co-ordination between the detective unit of the Dublin Municipal Police and the Special Crimes Branch of the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) added to the confusion. As the Inspector General of the RIC complained in 1916, it made little sense ‘to have Dublin under the supervision of one secret service special crimes system and the remainder of the country under another'. There was no clearly defined role for MI5. Thomson concluded a month after Casement's execution: ‘There is certainly a danger that from lack of coordination the Irish Government may be the last Department to receive information of grave moment to the peace of Ireland.' Until the end of the war, military and police intelligence was chiefly directed against the wrong target, concentrating on tracking down comparatively minor German intrigues rather than on following the much more important development of Irish nationalism. GHQ Ireland was later to regret that ‘the opportunity was not taken to create an intelligence branch of trained brains working together to examine the military possibilities of the Sinn Fein movement',
²⁹
which by 1917 was campaigning for the establishment of an Irish republic.

Germany's wartime subversion strategy against Britain had an imperial as well as an Irish dimension. Almost from the outbreak of war, while the British used the term ‘Great War', the Germans spoke of ‘World War' (
Weltkrieg
)
³⁰
Both the German government and the Prusso-German General Staff were well aware that the Empire was crucial to the British war effort, mobilizing three million men, half of them in the Indian army. The greatest potential threat from German subversion thus came in India, the only part of the Empire with which MI5 was already in contact at the outbreak of war, communicating with the Director of Criminal Intelligence in Delhi through his London representative, Major John Wallinger.
³¹
Before the war, the main responsibility for dealing with Indian ‘seditionists' in Britain fell to the Special Branch rather than Kell's Bureau.
³²
In the summer of 1914, however, the Director of Criminal Intelligence complained that ‘for some time past the information given by Scotland Yard about the doings of Indian agitators in England had been rather meagre' because
‘the officers in Scotland Yard were so fully occupied with the Suffragette movement that they had very little to devote to Indians.'
³³