The Squad (2 page)

Ned Broy, a confidential typist in his mid twenties at the detective division headquarters in Great Brunswick Street, Dublin, was from a farming family in Ballinure near Rathangan, County Kildare and had two great passions, a love of athletics and a hatred of the British empire. He was assigned to type up lists of Sinn Féin members who the crown police intended to round up for their republican activities. He gave a copy of the list to his cousin, Patrick Tracy, a clerk at Kingsbridge railway station. He did not know when the round up was to take place but he promised to warn Tracy in advance. Tracy passed on the complete list to Harry O’Hanrahan, a Sinn Féin sympathiser who ran a shop and whose brother, Michael, was one of the leaders executed following the Easter Rebellion.

On the day of the round up, Broy gave the further warning: ‘I met Tracy and told him,’ he said. ‘Tonight’s the night. Tell O’Han-rahan to tell the wanted men not to stay in their usual place of abode and to keep their heads.’ Detective Sergeant Joe Kavanagh of the DMP, passed on a similar warning to Thomas Gay, a librarian in the public library in Capel Street.

Broy was summoned to do telephone duty that night at Dublin Castle by Detective Superintendent Owen Brien, the deputy head of the detective division. ‘You will be much more comfortable here,’ Brien told him. Broy looked forward to what he thought was going to be one raiding party after another coming up empty-handed.

‘ To my astonishment, continual telephone messages arrived from the various police parties, saying that they had arrested the party they were sent for. A telephone message came from a detective sergeant at Harcourt Street railway station saying, “That man has just left”.’ That was de Valera who was returning to his home in Greystones.

‘That man will get the suck-in of his life!’ a smug Detective Superintendent Brien remarked. He immediately rang the RIC headquarters to say that de Valera was on his way home.

‘I did not know what to think of the whole raid and what had gone wrong, but I thought that de Valera would surely get out at some intermediate station and not go home all the way to Greystones to be arrested there,’ Broy noted. ‘ To my further astonishment, about an hour afterwards, a telephone message arrived from the RIC at Greystones to say: “That man has been arrested”.’

De Valera and the others had apparently allowed themselves to be taken in the belief that their arrest would help their cause. They were purportedly arrested for their part in a ‘German Plot’. Ever since being forewarned by American intelligence of plans for the Easter Rebellion, Admiral Sir William Reginald ‘Blinker’ Hall, the head of British naval intelligence, had been anxious for an excuse to suppress Irish nationalism. He had not tried to stop the rebellion because he believed it would afford an excuse to suppress this nationalism. He gained a great reputation for his handling of intelligence matters in the fight against Germany but exaggerated the significance of German efforts to enlist the support of Sinn Féin in 1918. ‘If he believed that the scrappy and inconclusive information which he held was definite proof of an actual plot then he was a fool,’ historian Eunan O’Halpin concluded. Hall clearly was no fool; he deliberately deceived his political masters into thinking that the Sinn Féin leaders were involved in some kind of plot with the Germans. While the war continued Hall had enormous influence, but this disappeared with the armistice and naval intelligence faded into the background. No credible evidence of any Sinn Féin involvement in the so-called ‘German Plot’ was ever produced, with the result that it had little credence in Ireland, where people concluded that Sinn Féin leaders were really arrested because of the success of their campaign against conscription. A few weeks later, Arthur Griffith, one of the founders of Sinn Fein, won a by-election from prison. This was a deadly blow to the Irish Parliamentary Party, which was now essentially moribund. After three successive defeats, Sinn Féin was on the move again.

Collins had managed to avoid arrest and this left him in an even stronger position to exert his influence over the movement in the following months. ‘The Sinn Féiners boasted that their most important man had escaped arrest,’ Detective Superintendent Brien remarked to Broy a few days later.

Opposition to conscription was so strong that the British did not dare to introduce it in Ireland and Sinn Féin got the credit.

With de Valera and the other recognised leaders in jail, Collins and colleagues like Harry Boland extended their influence. They selected many of the candidates to stand for Sinn Féin in the snap general election called following the end of the Great War. Sinn Féin stood on a platform promising to abstain from Westminster and to establish a national parliament in Ireland that would seek international recognition at the post-war peace conference. The democracies had supposedly fought for the rights of small nations and Sinn Féin was determined to call their bluff. The party won 73 of the 105 seats and that included all but one of the contested seats outside the six counties of the northeast, where the Unionist Party was strongest.

Collins had been functioning as adjutant general and director of organisation of the Irish Volunteers, who were soon to become known as the Irish Republican Army (IRA). In January 1919 he took over as director of intelligence from Eamonn Duggan, who had merely run intelligence as an adjunct of his legal practice and had only one man working for him.

Collins set up a far-reaching network, incorporating intelligence gathering, counter intelligence and matters relating to prison escapes and smuggling (both arms and people). He was the brain behind the whole network and his industry was phenomenal. He retained personal control over work similar to that done by three different intelligence agencies in Britain: MI5, MI6 and MI9.

An intelligence office was set up over the print shop of J. F. Fowler at 3 Crow Street which was just off Dame Street and right under the nose of Dublin Castle. Collins generally stayed away from that office. Joe O’Reilly acted as his main courier to the office and everyone in it. Members of the staff were supposedly ‘manufacturing agents’, but they spent much of their time in the office decoding intercepted messages.

Liam Tobin, another Cork man, was in charge of the intelligence headquarters in Crow Street. He was an inconspicuous individual, tall and gaunt, with a tragic expression. He walked without moving his arms, which made him seem quite listless, in marked contrast with Collins who bounded from place to place. Tobin’s deputy was Tom Cullen, an affable, quick-witted individual from Wicklow who had fought in the Easter Rebellion. He was not only intelligent but also a good athlete and a handsome young man with a fresh complexion and sparkling eyes. Frank Thornton was next in the chain of command at the headquarters, along with Frank Saurin, who stood out as one of the best-dressed men in the movement. He turned out in an impeccable suit and often wore lavender gloves. Some of the British made the mistake of assuming he looked too respectable to be a rebel, with the result that his sense of dress often amounted to a pass allowing him to saunter through enemy cordons.

The developing staff of intelligence officers included people like Joe Guilfoyle, a veteran of Frongoch, and Joe Dolan, who wore a British army badge in his lapel with a red, white and blue ribbon. The badge, which was inscribed ‘For King & Country’, frequently allowed him to get out of sticky situations as the British assumed that he was a loyalist. Charlie Byrne, another of the new men, was called ‘the Count’ by colleagues, because of his appearance and his sense of humour. They were joined by Paddy Kennedy from Tipperary, Ned Kelliher and Charlie Dalton, Dan McDonnell from Dublin and Peter McGee.

Each company of the Volunteers had its own intelligence officer (IO) and they reported to a brigade IO, who, in turn, reported to the intelligence headquarters under Tobin. Each IO was encouraged to enlist agents in all walks of life, but especially people in prominent positions who boasted of their British connections. ‘It is amazing the number of this type of people who, when it was put to them, eventually agreed to work for us and did tremendous work for us afterwards, whilst at the same time keeping their connection with the British forces,’ Thornton noted.

Intelligence was divided into two areas. First there was the gathering of information on the movement of British forces, and second, information on the activity of British agents, whether they were members of the special intelligence service, military intelligence, or members of the various police intelligence units.

‘I was given the daily papers to look through,’ Charlie Dalton wrote of his first day on the job. ‘I was told to cut out any paragraphs referring to the personnel of the Royal Irish Constabulary, or military, such as transfers, their movement socially, attendance at wedding receptions, garden parties, etc. These I pasted on cards, which were sent to the director of intelligence for his perusal and instructions. Photographs and other data, which were or might be of interest were cut out and put away. We often gathered useful information of the movements of important enemy personages in this manner. We also traced them by a study of
Who’s Who
, from which we learned the names of their connections and clubs. By intercepting their correspondence we were able to get a clue to their movements outside their strongholds.’

Each of the intelligence officers had an area. ‘Mine covered hotels, restaurants, sports meetings and such other places where the auxiliaries and British secret service agents foregathered – Jammets, The Wicklow, The Shelbourne, Fullers, The Moira, The Central, etc.,’ Frank Saurin noted. ‘We had contacts in these hotels and restaurants, who passed on any information concerning enemy agents that might be of use to us. Through our agents I was enabled to get to know by sign a number of enemy personnel – the object being their extermination if and when the opportunity offered.’ He also handled one of the most important Irish agents, Lily Mernin, a young woman typist working in the British army command headquarters under Colonel Hill Dillon, the chief intelligence officer in Ireland. Mernin suggested other typists who were willing to provide information from their perspectives working with different military staffs around Dublin. She was the ‘one to whom a large amount of the credit for the success of intelligence must go’, according to Thornton.

‘One of the earliest jobs given to GHQ intelligence at Dublin was to ascertain the possibilities of getting at least one individual in every government department who was prepared to work quietly and secretly for our Army,’ Thornton recalled. ‘We were fairly lucky in having one individual who was working with us from the very commencement in records, who secured for us photographs and the names and addresses and history of practically all the typists and all the clerical workers in the most important departments of the enemy. These photographs and descriptions were handed out to the various intelligence officers throughout the areas in which these people lived and in a very short space of time we had a complete and full history of the sympathies and activities of each and every one of these individuals, resulting in quite a number of them, when contacted, agreeing to work for us inside the enemy lines.’

Others worked in the sorting office of the General Post Office or the telephone exchange, and Collins had a number of men who were serving as warders in Mountjoy Jail. They facilitated some of the early escapes, which played a significant part in boosting republican morale. ‘There were four warders in Mountjoy who were most helpful and sympathetic to us at the time,’ Paddy O’Daly recalled. ‘Frawley was one, Daly was another and I am almost certain that Breslin and Berry were the names of the other two.’

Patrick Joseph Berry, a Kilkenny native in his thirties, was a plumber and a warder on the staff in the jail from 1906. It was he who got out word to Liam Tobin’s family that Liam was about to be deported to England so that they would be able to come and see him off. Presumably as a result of this incident Tobin informed the Big Fellow about Berry, and Collins approached him. ‘I was more or less their intelligence officer in the prison,’ Berry explained. ‘I was with Collins day and night carrying dispatches from and to prisoners. These were written dispatches. In spite of the fact that the prison authorities must have been aware of my sympathies following the Ashe Inquiry,* no attempt was ever made to search me. Of course I was pretty diplomatic and made no profession of my sympathies.’

In much the same way contacts were made within the police, as Collins set about demoralising the police forces in Ireland. At the time there were two separate police forces – the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) and the Dublin Metropolitan Police (DMP). The latter, which functioned only in the Dublin area, was divided into seven divisions, lettered A through G. Divisions A, B, C and D were uniformed police dealing with different sections of the city, while E and F dealt with the remainder of County Dublin, and G was an overall division of plain clothes detectives.

G Division was modelled on the London Metropolitan Police. It was divided into three sections dealing with routine crime, political crime and carriage supervision. The total strength was between forty and fifty active detectives, under a commissioner, superintendent and a chief inspector. There were five detective inspectors, fifteen detective sergeants, fifteen detective officers and ten detective constables. Most of the men were based at the division’s headquarters at No. 1 Great Brunswick Street, but the commissioner, Colonel Walter Edgeworth-Johnson, and Detective Superintendent Owen Brien spent most of their time at Dublin Castle, where the headquarters of the RIC was located.

The members of the intelligence staff were essentially aides of Collins. Their initial task was to gather as much information as possible about the police, especially G Division. Information such as where they lived, and the names of members of their families would prove invaluable to Collins in the coming months. His agents were a whole range of people, with no one too humble to be of use.

‘We compiled a list of friendly persons in the public service, railways, mail boats, and hotels,’ Dalton explained. ‘I was sent constantly to interview stewards, reporters, waiters, and hotel porters to verify the movements of enemy agents.’