The Codebreakers: The True Story of the Secret Intelligence Team That Changed the Course of the First World War (20 page)

And then there was the Irish question. In 1912, the Third Home Rule Bill for Ireland – violently opposed as ‘Rome Rule’ by the Ulster Unionists – had riled supporters and opponents on both sides of the Irish Sea. The bill’s eventual success – it would receive royal assent in 1914 – led to sectarian violence and the simmering threat of civil war. But the Irishman who was most on the mind of Blinker Hall at the beginning of 1916 was in Germany, with a bold plan to open another front on which to further bleed the depleted British military. And he was a revolutionary from within the British establishment, which made him that much more dangerous.

Roger Casement, an elegant 50-year-old bachelor, had come to the United States in the summer of 1914 as a knighted servant of the British Crown who had won his title for his work in the British consular service in the Congo, and then in Brazil. Casement had done more than bid for the interests of the state in his 18 years in the Foreign Office. He had been a bold emissary of justice, investigating – and publicising – with zeal the crimes committed against rubber plantation workers by their corporate and government exploiters, especially the genocidal rule of Belgium’s King Leopold II in the Congo, and the slavery and torture inflicted by the Peruvian Amazon Company on the Putomayo Indians in South America.

Casement had been born into a life of seeming Anglo-Irish comfort in Sandycove, just outside Dublin, in 1864. His father, the son of a bankrupt Belfast shipping merchant, was a captain in the 3rd Dragoon Guards of the British army, and a Protestant. His mother, a Dubliner, had her son secretly baptised as a Catholic when he was three years old. By the time he was 13, Casement was an orphan, and was taken in by an uncle, who raised him as a Protestant and sent him to boarding school.

The tall, handsome Casement cut a striking figure when he ventured into the Congo, as caught by the eye of Jessie Conrad, the wife of his friend, novelist Joseph Conrad: ‘He was a very handsome man with a thick, dark beard and piercing, restless eyes. His personality impressed me greatly. It was about the time when he was interested in bringing to light certain atrocities which were taking place in the Belgian Congo.’

And indeed he did. In 1911, Casement named the perpetrators, many of whom were charged and convicted, and detailed their crimes in his report to Britain’s Parliament on human rights abuses in the rubber industry, an account framed by the crimes he had seen in the Congo and reported on in 1904. His work won him a knighthood, and international celebrity as a humanitarian crusader. Yet despite his success in the Foreign Office, he was disillusioned by the sins of empire, and especially those he now saw committed by the British in his home country. He had become increasingly politicised by the vigorous and violent opposition that Protestant Ulster Unionists successfully demonstrated against Irish Home Rule in 1912, a form of Irish self-government still overseen by Britain, which the UK proposed as a solution to the Irish Question. Casement realised that he was on the other side – the side of total Irish liberation.

Delving into Irish history and studying the Irish language, he left the Foreign Office in 1913 and helped to found the Irish Volunteers, a republican organisation whose mission was to help usher in self-rule in Ireland. That same year, he visited Connemara, in the west of Ireland, whose poverty shocked him even more than the misery he had witnessed in his consular work in Africa and South America.

The following year, with both sides having formed paramilitary organisations, Casement was in charge of a committee to buy arms for the Irish Volunteers. With a budget of £1,500 to buy 1,500 rifles – in contrast to the funds available to the Protestant Ulster Volunteer Force, which purchased 35,000 guns and three million rounds of ammunition – Casement shipped arms to the Irish Volunteers on the yacht of novelist and Republican sympathiser Erskine Childers, who would serve with distinction in the Royal Navy during the war.

In the summer of 1914, Casement travelled to the United States at the invitation of John Devoy, the 72-year-old patriarch of Irish nationalism in the US. Devoy had been exiled there in 1871 as one of the ‘Cuba Five’, Irish revolutionaries who were released from British prison on the condition they did not return to England until their original sentences had expired. He had been sentenced to 15 years for treason in trying to organise an uprising of Fenian soldiers he had met while serving in the uniform of the British army. It was this idea that fuelled Casement’s war against the English.

In a display of Irish republican enthusiasm that annoyed the British, Devoy had been welcomed to the United States at the very seat of national government: the House of Representatives. Irish nationalism was a strong force in American political life, buoyed by the promise of Home Rule that had first been mooted by the British more than half a century before the 1914 war began in Europe. After such a warm embrace in the new world, Devoy had no interest in returning to the old, save for his politics. He became a journalist for the
New York Herald
, and eventually, leader of the Clan na Gael, which was the American branch of the Irish Republican Brotherhood. Under Devoy’s direction, Clan na Gael had risen to become the most powerful Irish republican organisation in the USA, and it gave Casement a mighty platform from which to advance his cause of Irish nationalism with money and men. And then the war gave him an even bigger one.

In September 1914, Casement attracted the attention of his government, in a way that would ultimately become fatal, when he wrote an open letter to the Irish people from New York. In it he urged all Irishmen to refuse to fight against Germany, and declared himself a founding member of the Irish Volunteers. The British Foreign Office suspended his pension, and MI5 opened a file on him.

For the British, hoping to convince the United States – by whatever means necessary – to enter the war on the side of the Allies, the Irish Question was especially sensitive. The Great Famine had ravaged Ireland in the mid nineteenth century, killing a million people and speeding another million to distant shores, many of them staying in the place where they’d arrived in the United States: New York City. The large, and largely urban Irish population wielded considerable influence in President Woodrow Wilson’s Democratic Party, where they favoured peace because it was good for the American economy – and the Irish working man. The British knew that some of the Irish in America saw the war as a chance for Ireland to free itself from Britain once and for all. It was a dangerous game, and Blinker Hall was keeping a close watch on Irish republican traffic, including Roger Casement in New York. And Hall had some powerful local help.

Sir Roger Casement and John Devoy

While in New York, Casement was lodged at the home of John Quinn, a second-generation Irish-American lawyer who, in addition to being influential in the art world as a collector and patron, was also deeply involved in the world of Irish politics. The dapper 44-year-old Quinn was an energetic supporter of Irish Home Rule, and would help write an Irish Home Rule Convention in 1917. In 1914, however, he was also working on behalf of the Allied cause, feeding intelligence to the British consulate at 44 Whitehall Street. Back in London, Blinker Hall learned everything that Casement was plotting in America.

On 10 August, the swaggering, impassioned Casement met with Germany’s opportunistic military attaché Franz von Papen at the German Club in New York, along with the German ambassador Count von Bernstorff, Quinn, Devoy and others. Casement’s war plan for Ireland so inspired von Papen that he sent a memo to Germany introducing Casement as the ‘leader of all the Irish in America’. Two weeks later, Casement wrote to Kaiser Wilhelm himself, outlining the rich possibilities that the war presented to Irish freedom from English rule: ‘Thousands of Irishmen are prepared to do their part to aid the German cause for they recognise that it is their own.’ In his letter, Casement argued that of the 150,000 British soldiers taken prisoner by the Germans, 35–40,000 were Irish, and they should be separated and organised into a separate Irish brigade, ready to land in Ireland and fight the English.

The British naval blockade of the Atlantic made that kind of armada unlikely, but the Germans realised that even the possibility of an invasion of Ireland would stretch British resources. So too did the British, who were keenly monitoring von Bernstorff’s communiqués with Berlin. Though Blinker Hall had his eye on Casement in New York in order to trail the dangerous renegade diplomat, Casement – having honed his survival skills in the brutal African and South American imperial jungles – managed to leave the teeming city undetected and sail for Germany via Norway on 15 October 1914 under the false identity of James E. Landy.

In Kristiania (Oslo), Casement had a narrow escape when his manservant – and possibly lover – Eivind Adler Christensen, a Norwegian sailor whom he had met in New York, was corralled by the British and offered money to hand his master over. Christensen would later recall that the British actually wanted him to kill Casement, but once again the Irish war missionary made his escape, landing in Berlin on 31 October. Sir Roger Casement, Knight of the British Empire, seeker of Irish freedom, had now irrevocably gone over to the side of the enemy.

Things began well for Casement’s Irish Brigade plan, after enthusiastic meetings with Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs Arthur Zimmermann and Count George von Wedel, head of the German Foreign Office’s English section. Von Wedel sent a memo to Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg recommending that Irish Catholic prisoners should be transferred to a special camp to undergo training by the unlikely team of Casement and Irish priests. On 20 November, Casement received a rousing public endorsement when the German government announced in the
Norddeutsche Allemeine Zeitung
newspaper that it was in sympathy with Irish nationalism, and would help make that cause a success. On 2 December, he travelled to Limburg to make his pitch to the nearly 2,500 Irish Catholic prisoners of war whom he expected to meet.

Problems began immediately. Not only were there nowhere near 2,500 potential recruits in Limburg, but the Germans had not discriminated by religion, and so there were Protestant Irishmen there as well as Catholic, along with Scottish and English prisoners who had volunteered hoping for better treatment from the Germans. After explaining to the men that Home Rule was an English trick, and the Irish in America were behind them, Casement managed to get just two volunteers.

While Casement wrangled more German logistical support for his fledgling brigade out of a sceptical Bethmann-Hollweg, Blinker Hall went to work back in Room 40. There was no direct communication between Germany and the Irish Volunteers in Ireland, so Hall was intercepting communications sent to the German embassy in Washington DC and then transmitted back to Ireland.

In December 1914 he learned that a Danish ship had been commissioned by the Germans to take Casement to Ireland. Hall, proving his mettle at the practicalities of intrigue, chartered a yacht, the appositely named
Sayonara
, and crewed it with a group of sailors faking American accents and Irish republican politics. The yacht was commanded by a Royal Navy officer, and owned by one Colonel MacBride of Los Angeles, an Irish-American pro-German, who was in reality Major W. R. Howells, a Special Intelligence Service officer. Hall’s intelligence was inaccurate, and once again Casement eluded him, but the
Sayonara
aimed to draw out republican sympathisers as it put into ports along the Irish coast, its mission achieving unexpected realism due to the fact that Royal Navy patrols, unaware of its true purpose, harassed it off the west coast of Ireland.

Members of Casement’s Irish Brigade in Germany, 1915

Meanwhile, Robert Monteith, a former British soldier who had served in the Boer War and was deported from Ireland in 1914 under the Defence of the Realm Act, was dispatched by Clan na Gael to help Casement whip his crew of freedom-fighting soldiers into shape. Casement had only managed to recruit 55 men, for despite his talents as a human rights crusader, he didn’t speak the common-man language of the soldiers, and could not convince them that by supporting his brigade they were not, in fact, fighting for Germany, nor against their Irish kin serving in the British army.