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

by James Wyllie

  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.

  The Germans were stretched on two fronts in Europe and would not give Casement more of their own soldiers, so he appealed to Clan na Gael to send Irish-American reinforcements – which they did not. Monteith, however, had procured new uniforms for the men and, astonishingly, had persuaded the Germans to let them have machine-gun training. Casement was snobbish about Monteith, who, after being discharged from a ‘real’ army in the ranks, had now been awarded the Irish Volunteer rank of captain. He wanted someone of higher legitimate officer stature to lead his ‘Army of Deliverance’, but he was stuck with Monteith.

  Clan na Gael did send money, but as Casement’s plan wavered, changing from an invasion of Ireland to fighting the British in Egypt, back in New York the old Irish patriot John Devoy was losing patience. With the threat of conscription looming in Britain, Devoy saw that his force of Irish Volunteers could soon be drafted into the British army, or arrested. On 10 February 1916, Blinker Hall’s team intercepted a golden piece of intelligence: a decrypted message from John Devoy delivered to the German embassy in Washington for transmission to Berlin, telling the Germans unequivocally what the Irish wanted:

  Unanimous opinion that action cannot be postponed much longer. Delay disadvantageous to us. We can now put up an effective fight. Our enemies cannot allow us much more time. The arrest of our leaders would hamper us severely. Initiative on our part is necessary. The Irish regiments which are in sympathy with us are being gradually replaced by English regiments. We have therefore decided to begin action on Easter Saturday. Unless entirely new circumstances arise we must have your arms and munitions in Limerick between Good Friday and Easter Saturday. We expect German help immediately after beginning action. We might be compelled to begin earlier.

  Three weeks later, on 4 March, Room 40 intercepted another message, from Berlin to the German embassy in Washington, which detailed a bold plan:

  Between April 20–23, in the evening, two or three steam trawlers could land 20,000 rifles and ten machine-guns, with ammunition and explosives at Fenit Pier in Tralee Bay. Irish pilot-boat to await the trawlers at dusk, north of the island of Inishtooskert at the entrance of Tralee Bay, and show two green lights close to each other at short intervals. Please wire whether the necessary arrangements in Ireland can be made secretly through Devoy. Success can only be assured by the most vigorous efforts.

  Subsequent interception of communication between Berlin and Washington by the British later that month gave them a full picture of the rebellion that Casement had planned. The one thing they did not know was that Casement had changed his mind. With 20,000 guns and no Irish or Germans to carry them, he believed that the rebellion was doomed. He would go to Ireland and convince his colleagues in person to call it off.

  He did not convey his revised mission to the Germans as he boarded the submarine U-20 in Wilhelmshaven on 12 April, accompanied by Robert Monteith and Daniel Julian Bailey, a POW recruit to the Irish Brigade. The three men transferred to submarine U-19 due to technical woes after a day and a half at sea, and at midnight on the 20th they arrived at the entrance to Tralee Bay, to rendezvous with the Aud, a captured British ship disguised as a Norwegian steamer, commanded and crewed by German sailors wearing civilian clothes. In addition to 20,000 Italian-made rifles, the Aud carried 10 million rounds of ammunition, 10 machine guns and a million rounds of machine-gun ammunition, as well as explosives, landmines, bombs and hand grenades.

  The Aud, however, was not there. The skipper had made navigational errors and the ship was several miles away, shadowed by the Royal Navy. HMS Bluebell’s captain challenged her, and, unsurprisingly, was sceptical of her claim to be en route to Genoa from Bergen, in Norway, and taking bearings off the west coast of Ireland. He ordered the ship to put in at Queenstown for inspection. About a mile out of port, the Aud stopped, raised two German naval ensigns and evacuated her sailors – now in German naval uniform – into lifeboats. There was an explosion, and the Aud sank to the bottom of the bay.

  The pilot b
oat that was supposed to meet the submarine failed to materialise, and as the commander of U-19 didn’t want to go too close to shore, Casement and his two colleagues floated in from the U-boat on an inflatable dinghy. The Royal Irish Constabulary had alerted coastal dwellers to watch for anything suspicious along the waterfront. At 4 a.m., Mary Gorman, who was milking her cows, spotted the three men landing on the beach, soaked to the skin after their dinghy had overturned. She raised the alarm.

  Casement sent Monteith and Bailey off to find help in the countryside. Bailey was arrested; Monteith evaded capture and eventually made it back to the United States. Casement himself was found ‘sheltering in an old ruin called M’kenna’s Fort, where, on being arrested, he gave [as his] name [that] of a friend with whom he used to stay in England’.

  Basil Thomson, head of Special Branch, happened to be on Zeppelin duty at New Scotland Yard that Saturday night, when the phone rang at 10.30 p.m. ‘You know that stranger who arrived in the collapsible boat at Currahane? Do you know who he is?’ asked the unidentified caller on the other end. Thomson knew well the caller’s voice, and thought he was joking. ‘“I am not,” replied the caller, “and he will be over early tomorrow morning for you to take him in hand.” It was not necessary for either of us to give a name. We had been expecting Casement’s arrival for many weeks.’

  So while the armed Easter Sunday uprising that Roger Casement had planned, reconsidered, and then failed to stop was preparing to launch its attack on the British in Ireland, Casement was being interrogated by Basil Thomson in London. ‘He walked into the room rather theatrically – a tall, thin, cadaverous man with thick black hair turning grey, a pointed beard, and thin, nervous hands, mahogany-coloured from long tropical service,’ Thomson recalled. Once Casement had admitted to high treason, and the shorthand reporter had been dismissed, he opened up, telling the Special Branch boss that while the Germans had wanted him to go to Ireland on the gun-running ship, he’d insisted on travelling by submarine ‘to warn the rebels that they had no chance of success … He was very insistent that the news of his capture should be published, as it would prevent bloodshed.’

  On Easter Monday, 24 April, the Irish rebels launched their attack, which ended the following Saturday with their surrender, despite having lost only one of their captured positions to the British army. Blood had indeed been shed: 466 people had been killed, with more than 2,000 wounded. The leaders of the rebellion were swiftly executed, martyrs to the Irish cause and immortalised in republican history. It was not the glorious victory imagined by Casement’s Army of Deliverance, but the Irish republic had bloodily emerged into the light of political day.

  Sir Roger Casement, with his knighthood, his international celebrity and his powerful British and American friends, was not the type of case for a rough-justice military tribunal. His trial in London in June 1916 was prosecuted by no less a light than the British government’s highest-ranking law officer, Attorney General Sir F. E. Smith, who two years earlier had been one of the loudest Tory advocates of resistance in Ulster to Home Rule, and as such was seen by Casement and many others as a traitor himself.

  Even so, his prosecution of Casement was, according to Casement’s Irish lawyer, Serjeant Sullivan (no Englishman would represent him), ‘chivalrous and generous to the weaker side’. Indeed, it was Sullivan who ensured Casement would be executed, despite appeals for clemency from the cream of the Anglo-Irish literary establishment: W. B. Yeats, Arthur Conan Doyle, George Bernard Shaw, and G. K. Chesterton among others. Sullivan refused to use Casement’s so-called ‘Black Diaries’ in his defence as proof of insanity, diaries dating from 1903 that had been found earlier in 1916 in a trunk Casement had forgotten about in his London flat. As Basil Thomson later wrote, expressing a sentiment of a time when homosexuality was still a half-century away from decriminalisation in Britain, ‘It is enough to say of the diaries that they could not be printed in any age or in any language.’ Thomson and Blinker Hall made sure that the most extreme passages circulated among influential members of the government and media in order to damn Casement to death by scuppering any sympathy for the ‘statesman’.

  Sir Roger Casement during his trial in London 1916

  The diaries contained explicit accounts of Casement’s considerable homosexual encounters at home and abroad, with an obsessive notation of the genital size of his partners. Indeed, a sample from 14 December 1911 in Manaus, Brazil, would suggest that Casement was either freakishly superhuman or a fabulist:

  Out to Joao Pensador by tram, bathed there and walked back to cricket and to the bathing pool there. Seven school boys (one a cafuzo [of mixed parentage] 17–18) and 5 of them white and 4 had huge ones and all pulled and skinned and half cock all time. One a lad of 17 had a beauty. All ‘gentlemen’. After dinner out at 7.10 met Aprigio on seat. Stiff as poker and huge. So together to terracos baldia [uncultivated terraces] where sucked and then he in. Left and met Antonio my sweet Caboclo of last time and he followed and showed place and in too – hard. Huge testeminhos [‘witnesses’, i.e., testicles] and loved and kissed. Nice boy. Then young Alfandega Guarda mor [chief customs inspector] darkie big and nice – bayonet and felt it huge and stiff as his bayonet. Awfully warm. Nice lovely Italian boy passed at 11 and smiled and so to bed.

  Such diaries could be used as proof of insanity due to their fantastic nature; any competent counsel could have argued, invoking the morality of the time, that Casement couldn’t possibly have had that many homosexual encounters, with that many superlatively well-endowed partners, and so in fact was mentally unhinged. Nevertheless, Serjeant Sullivan not only refused to read them, he refused to use them, as he wanted Casement to plead not guilty. In an interview four decades later he explained, ‘I finally decided that death was better than besmirching and dishonour.’

  In other words, it would have been impossible for Casement to be lionised as an Irish patriot once portions of the diaries were published to justify the leniency. The lurid diaries, combined with the discovery of a document proving that Casement planned to use his Irish Volunteers to fight the English in Egypt, were enough to remove support from even the most fervent apostles of clemency. And so, after being received into the Roman Catholic Church and thus completing his Irish circle, Casement was hanged on 3 August 1916 at Pentonville Prison. Thanks to Room 40, Britain had narrowly avoided full-scale Irish civil war. But the war in Europe and the Middle East was only getting worse.

  Chapter 12

  TESTING TIMES

  1916 saw the British armed forces enter Hell. On the Western Front, the Battle of the Somme was the largest land battle ever seen, while in the North Sea the Battle of Jutland was, while much shorter in duration, the naval equivalent. These titanic military encounters were matched on the home front by unprecedented mobilisation of men and resources as the state took complete control of every aspect of its citizens’ lives. Conscription was introduced and women were entering the labour force, taking jobs previously done by men, in ever-increasing numbers.

  To meet the scale of the challenges ahead, Room 40 needed to expand its staff. During 1916, Hall added a couple of lords, a scientist, three Foreign Office men – one of whom was ‘chiefly remarkable for his spats’ – several writers and actors, three professors of German, a number of classicists, some City men, a caricaturist, and a handful of wounded or disabled army officers who collected the material arriving by pneumatic tube, increasing the team to around 40 members.

  A sense of what the atmosphere was like in this thriving and busy little community was provided by Captain William ‘Bubbles’ James, who’d served under Hall on the Queen Mary and who now replaced Captain Hope, Room 40’s previous naval expert. A traditionalist, James insisted the codebreakers wear uniform, and was less collegiate than his predecessor. Nevertheless, he brimmed with enthusiasm and was immensely proud of his men, a sentiment that shone through in his recollections of Room 40 life, which he described as ‘vibrating with excitement, expectation, urgency, friendship and
high spirits’, filled with people ‘all talking a strange language and doing strange things’.

  For Dilly, a welcome addition to the Room 40 team was his good friend Frank Birch. Born in 1889 and educated at Eton, Birch met Dilly when he was an undergraduate at Cambridge studying history. A gifted conversationalist and actor, he proceeded to become a don but yearned for a theatrical career. Not long after the war, he abandoned his life as a historian and took to the stage, gaining fame for his portrayal of the Widow Twankey in the pantomime Aladdin, a part that led to minor roles in a string of films.

  Before joining Room 40, where he was in charge of collecting and collating information, Birch was in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve and saw active service in the Channel, the Atlantic and the Dardanelles. He and Dilly shared a house in Chelsea, where Birch held musical parties every weekend featuring the world-famous cellist Madame Suggia. Dilly avoided these soirées by signing up for the night shift.

  The rhythm and mood of Room 40 was set by the Germans’ habit of changing their cipher keys every 24 hours at midnight. The job of deciphering the new key therefore fell to the night watch; their success or failure would set the tone for the day. According to James, ‘a visitor entering the watch keeper’s room in 1916 would either have seen three or four men, very tired and drawn, who had for the last eight hours been straining their brains to discern the cipher key … and had been defeated, or would have seen the same men looking very cheerful and waiting to tell the relief … that they had nothing to worry about.’