As soon as it was in British territorial waters, the ship was intercepted by a British cruiser, the Hibernia, and ordered to proceed to Stornoway.
Casement felt he had been twigged, but how? He thanked his lucky stars he had Adler with him. He unlocked a case, threw some diaries and papers through a porthole and handed Adler some important official letters.
‘Make sure,’ he said, ‘they do not fall into the wrong hands.’
Christensen crossed his heart and went at once to his cabin where he steamed them open. Realizing he had struck gold, he started making copies.
At Stornoway, half a dozen Germans were removed from the Oskar II, one of them the ship’s bandmaster. Casement’s lack of a beard saved him from detection.
Adler returned his letters and Casement, suspecting nothing, locked them up again.
It was foggy when they arrived at Christiania at midnight on 28 October and booked into the Grand Hotel. Next morning, Casement went to the German Legation to present his credentials to the Minister von Oberndorff, then back to his hotel to await instructions on how to proceed to Berlin.
In the afternoon, Christensen took a stroll. Making sure he was not being followed, he made his way to the British Legation. A reluctant porter admitted him when he whispered, ‘I have precious information for the Minister.’
The Minister was out, so he had to make do with a junior official, Francis Lindley.
Christensen spoke English with a Norwegian accent spiced with American. He had come, he said, from the United States with an English nobleman who had been decorated by the King.
‘This Englishman and myself, sir, I must admit it, are doing, how shall I say, certain terrible things.’
Lindley, young and inexperienced, suspected this was a confession of homosexual practices but he was not sure. The reference might be to espionage.
Christensen spoke of letters that had come by chance into his possession.
‘These letters,’ said Lindley, ‘are from—?’
‘The German Legation in Washington. They contain ciphers. I make a copy.’ He waved a piece of paper in front of Lindley but refused to hand it over.
‘You don’t happen to know,’ said Lindley, ‘the name of this man?’
Christensen refused to say more except that he was travelling to Germany to stir up trouble in Ireland.
‘I wonder, Mr Christensen, if you would be good enough to come back tomorrow morning.’
When Adler returned to the hotel, Casement said, ‘Where have you been? I’ve been so worried about you.’
Christensen went on about how he had been waylaid in the lobby. ‘An Englishman shoved me into a chauffeured limousine and we drove a long way to a big building.’
‘The address, Adler. This is important.’
Adler thought deeply and came up with 79 Drammensveien. He had been asked about his employer, he said. ‘I didn’t give you away.’
‘Of course not, my dear boy, I never dreamed you would. But did they mention me at all?’
Christensen shook his head.
Casement looked up the British Legation in the phone book. As he suspected, it was at 79 Drammensveien.
He was so trusting, he failed to see the obvious flaws in Christensen’s account. How was he forced into a car in a crowded lobby? Was his assailant armed? Had he gone quietly, this muscular six-foot twenty-five-year old?
What Christensen said fitted Casement’s presuppositions. He was a marked man. The British would stop at nothing to silence him.
Casement was also deceived because of his infatuation.
In the British Legation, lights burned into the night. Wires to and from New York brought the information that Christensen was listed in police files as ‘a dangerous type of Norwegian-American criminal’.
Officials were puzzled. If the companion really was Sir Roger Casement, why was he employing a crook with a record?
Next morning, Christensen slipped back to the Legation where he was questioned by the Minister himself. Mansfeldt Findlay found him exactly as New York had given him to expect, fleshy and dissipated. Could he rely on the word of a criminal?
Christensen produced an article written by his master and a pamphlet, The Elsewhere Empire. Findlay glanced at them. They were pro-Irish, anti-British diatribes, meant obviously for American consumption.
‘But you still haven’t named this English gentleman.’
After a long hesitation: ‘Roger Casement, sir.’
Findlay counted out, very slowly, twenty-five kroner.
Christensen was shaken by such stinginess but the Minister assured him, ‘That is the normal fee. We pay better for some sorts of information.’
Christensen objected that what he had told him so far was important enough.
‘Hardly,’ the Minister said. ‘We knew that already, you see.’ He winked conspiratorially. ‘If, on the other hand, you let us know what happens when you both reach Berlin, that’ – he wagged a finger – ‘might be worth considerably more.’
Seeing he was willing to co-operate, the Minister produced from his drawer a simple code for keeping in touch. Then: ‘Mr Lindley tells me you have some sort of cipher.’
‘Not on me.’
Christensen returned, out of breath, to tell Casement, ‘I was on my way to breakfast when I was jumped again and told I would be paid well if I made another visit to that place.’
This time, he said, he was met by a very tall man, clean-shaven except for a very thin greyish moustache. He introduced himself as Mr Findlay. He looked unmistakably English in his tweed suit and with an accent very like Casement’s own. He already knew their identities.
Casement blinked in surprise. ‘What else?’
‘He said that as you are travelling incognito, no one would notice if you simply, well, disappeared.’
‘He said that?’
Adler dredged his memory. ‘His actual words were, “If someone knocked him on the head, and dropped him in a convenient fjord, that sort of thing, you would not need to work for the rest of your life. And who would be the wiser?” ’
As Casement tried to take this in, Christensen said that Findlay had given him a code to communicate with him. He showed it to a fascinated Casement.
Finally, he said, Findlay had given him twenty-five kroner for his cab fare home. ‘If I’m interested in a bigger reward, I’m to return this afternoon.’
Casement was in a rage. All his old antipathy towards the British at the way they had delayed his reports on atrocities in the Belgian Congo and South America bubbled over. He went to the German Legation to see Oberndorff.
‘Might it not be advisable, Minister, if I am whisked off to Germany at once?’
Oberndorff made arrangements for that evening.
Back at the hotel, Casement told Christensen to return to the British Legation and pretend to be interested in whatever plot they were hatching. Meanwhile, he himself would openly make arrangements to travel to Denmark.
When Christensen saw Findlay that afternoon, he showed him both the cipher and a sample of Casement’s handwriting. It included a letter in which Casement had written of his servant: ‘I am glad I brought him, he is a treasure.’
‘And so you are,’ Findlay crowed, ‘a treasure.’
Christensen asked for $100 but settled for 100 kroner.
‘And is your master intending to stay long?’
Christensen told him that Casement was pretending to travel to Denmark.
‘What a deceitful fellow he is,’ said Findlay, archly.
No sooner had Christensen left than Findlay pressed a buzzer. ‘You heard? Come in at once, please.’ He could not stomach Casement’s un-British behaviour.
‘Listen,’ he told his young naval attaché, ‘I want you to board Casement’s train as it’s about to leave. There’s a King’s Messenger travelling to Denmark in the same wagon-lit. Tell him these two men are dangerous.’
Christensen returned to give Casement a graphic account of blowing smoke f
rom his cigar in the Minister’s eyes.
‘I also used very foul language many times.’
‘What did he offer you?’
‘$5,000 if I lured you where you could be kidnapped. He also promised to pay me handsomely for any information I smuggle out of Germany. As an advance, he gave me these—’ he held up the 100 kroner.
Casement hugged him in delight. ‘Adler, you are such a treasure.’
Oberndorff made arrangements for Casement to travel with a German Foreign Office official, Richard Meyer.
At the station, Casement had just bought The Times and the Daily News when Christensen hissed, ‘I think we are being followed by a Britisher.’
The King’s Messenger was, in fact, easily identified by the cut of his suit.
Casement congratulated him on his powers of observation.
In the middle of the night they left the wagon-lit and switched to another part of the train. Eluding their watchers, they crossed by ferry to Sweden and reached the German frontier at Sassnitz without mishap. On the last day of the month they booked into Berlin’s Continental Hotel, with Casement signing himself in as Mr Hammond of New York.
On Monday 2 November, he went to see the Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office on the Wilhelmstrasse.
The porter showed him into a large waiting-room, a fine salon with oil paintings of former Emperors with medalled uniforms and bristling moustaches. Seated in an immense armchair of faded black leather, he brought his diary up to date.
The reason for his trip was nothing less than national resurrection, ‘a free Ireland, a world nation after centuries of slavery, a people lost in the Middle Ages refound and returned to Europe.’
Artur Zimmermann came in. Aged fifty-six, he was a big, jolly man with blue eyes, bushy moustache and receding reddish yellow hair. On one cheek was a duelling scar. He thought nothing of drinking four pints of moselle at a meal.
‘So sorry, Sir Roger, for the delay.’
He pleased Casement by reacting to his account of Findlay’s attempt to kidnap him with, ‘How perfectly dastardly’.
‘Yes, sir, they stick at nothing.’
After a brief chat, Zimmermann took him to meet the Head of the English Department. Count Georg von Wedel was of upright build, with brown eyes and an impeccable English accent.
‘You think you can raise a Brigade from Irish prisoners of war?’ asked Zimmermann.
Casement, with his experience of recruiting for the Irish Volunteers, said, ‘Scores, hundreds even, will join.’
Wedel wrote a favourable report to the Chancellor. He suggested that the General Headquarters should put all Irish PoWs in one camp to allow Sir Roger Casement to try and influence them in Germany’s favour.
That afternoon, seated under a portrait of King George V in his ornate Castle office, Sir Matthew Nathan was reading copies of telegrams from the Minister in Christiania. Birrell had forwarded them from London with a covering note.
‘It seems,’ he wrote, in his best pantomime manner, ‘that Roger Casement is drumming up German support for an invasion of Ireland. But are the Germans so much more unwise than the Romans that they want to come to Galway?’
With the Irish enlisting in the British army in their thousands, Nathan did not believe they would rise in support of the Germans. In any case, if there was even a hint of an invasion, the Admiralty would surely keep him posted.
*
Henry Oliver of the Admiralty had been promoted. His replacement as Director of Naval Intelligence (DNI) was Captain Reginald Hall.
Now forty-four years of age, Hall had the most penetrating eyes and a facial tick that earned him the nickname of Blinker. His broad jutting chin tried to link up with a long sharp nose and he had a voice that barked like a machine-gun. Within days, his subordinates felt they had been hit by a hurricane.
His job, he recognized, was the most important in the country. Luck had put his team in the position of being able to read German messages without them being aware of it. He could, if he wished, telegraph messages of his own to their agents and make them do his will. He might even order German ships and submarines into waters where they could be picked off by the British navy.
He began to recruit the best team available even against the traditions of the Senior Service. He took on board civilians, City brokers and merchants, bright sparks from Oxbridge colleges. In his team were a Director of the Bank of England, an art expert, and a Roman Catholic priest complete with pipe and dog-collar. Some were young, some long past their prime. What they had in common was a working knowledge of German and a love of puzzles of all sorts.
All German messages intercepted by wireless hacks found their way into Hall’s offices which had been moved out of the main building into the old to become known as Room 40 OB (Old Building). With the aid of the Magdeburg codes and German military codes recently provided by the French, there was little that Hall’s team could not unravel.
Behind the ‘No Admittance’ sign, long dark corridors now hummed with activity. Unused rooms without a lick of paint on the walls were taken over. They were seldom aired and no charladies were allowed to poke their noses inside them.
In one smoke-filled room there might be four or five experts around a table, trying to work out an intercept. Like a Quaker meeting, it might go on for eight hours without one word being spoken. Until someone said, ‘Is this it?’ Or, ‘Are we being led up the garden here?’
Hall enrolled one or two dilettante types belonging to gentlemen’s clubs such as St James’s. Their sole purpose was, while dining, to shoot their mouths off in the company of foreign diplomats who could be relied on to transmit the false information they were fed.
Hall even took on women as cipher experts and typists. They became known as ‘Blinker’s Beauty Chorus’.
Though he demanded and received absolute loyalty, he was no respecter of regulations. Britannia not only ruled the waves; in wartime she was entitled to waive the rules. His intelligence service had the edge over MI5 in that he had no scruples about employing agents abroad. He was even using Captain Guy Gaunt, the naval attaché in America, who was abusing diplomatic privilege as flagrantly as Bernstorff.
If a thing needed doing, Hall cut through red tape to do it and many a time licensed his agents to kill.
Casement was only three weeks in Germany when, on 20 November, the German Chancellor authorized a statement which Casement had drafted. It admitted that the well-known Irish Nationalist, Sir Roger Casement, was in Berlin and had been received by the German Foreign Office.
Should the fortune of this great war ever bring in its course German troops to the shores of Ireland, they would land there, not as an army of invaders to pillage and destroy, but as the forces of a government that is inspired by goodwill towards a country and a people for whom Germany desires only national prosperity and national freedom.
Devoy read this and was thrilled. He sent a message on behalf of the Clan to Casement through the German Embassy in Washington, assuring him that the Statement had made an excellent impression.
That was to be Casement’s one and only success.
Christensen, now code-named The Informer by the British, was giving Findlay letters written by Casement to his friends in America and England. Some confirmed that he was trying to organize an invasion of Ireland with German help. The British Foreign Office took the matter very seriously and forwarded them to Birrell.
The Foreign Office in Berlin disagreed completely with their British counterpart over the value of Christensen. Ever since they had learned of his meetings with Findlay, they had judged him a charlatan without one redeeming feature. He wore make-up, he had expensive habits and a big lying mouth.
Herr Zimmermann thought his story was a fabrication from beginning to end and Casement was a fool for believing him.
Casement’s real test came when he tried to fulfil his obligations to the Germans and form an Irish Brigade. Two pro-Nationalist priests, Fr O’Gorman and Fr Crotty, had been sent fr
om the Irish College in Rome to assist him.
The Irish PoWs were brought together in Limburg, thirty miles north-west of Frankfurt. On 3 December, Casement addressed them for the first time. Only success here would convince the Germans that he was genuine and effective.
He was in a foul mood, because he had been politely told by the German Foreign Office that his manservant was a scoundrel and had a wife in America, which he refused to believe.
He introduced himself to the PoWs and briefly explained that he was recruiting for an Irish Brigade, so called after the Brigade of 300 Irishmen who fought against the British in the Boer War. His brief address ended with handing out copies of the Gaelic American and putting up a poster calling for volunteers.
The PoWs read it in angry amazement: if they were willing to fight against England for their own country under its own flag, they would be treated as guests of the German government.
Having drawn a blank the first day, Casement tried again.
Many of the PoWs were campaigners with ten years’ service; comrades of theirs had been killed or wounded at Mons. He was jeered at and jostled, and boos went all along the line.
He perceived that this was no temporary set-back. His mission was doomed to failure. This, together with growing doubts about Adler’s loyalty, began to affect his health.
On the day Casement took to his bed a General Council of the Irish Volunteers met in Dublin. They formalized the break with Redmond’s National Volunteers and chose their own HQ personnel.
MacNeill became Chief-of-Staff; Patrick Pearse was Director of Organization; Joe Plunkett was Director of Military Organization; Thomas MacDonagh was Director of Training; The O’Rahilly was Treasurer; Hobson was Quartermaster-General.
From then on it became even clearer to Tom Clarke that this was the group to target for use in the rising.
Already Pearse was proposing to the new HQ staff that the Volunteers should fight back if the British imposed conscription on Ireland or tried to disarm them. Even MacNeill agreed with him on that.
Under Clarke’s guidance, the Brotherhood began making plans for a rising in the guise of self-defence.
Rebels Page 7
