Michael Collins's Intelligence War: The Struggle Between the British and the IRA 1919-1921
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Michael Collins's Intelligence War: The Struggle Between the British and the IRA 1919-1921
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Overview
Michael Collins is often thought of as Ireland's lost leader: a man born into a revolutionary environment who became a skilled statesman and military leader. This book looks in at Collins' key role in the Anglo Irish War using primary sources which have not previously been available.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780752495903 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | The History Press |
| Publication date: | 08/01/2008 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 360 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
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Read an Excerpt
Michael Collins's Intelligence War
The Struggle Between the British and the Ira 1919-1921
By Michael T. Foy
The History Press
Copyright © 2013 Michael T. FoyAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7524-9590-3
CHAPTER 1
The Road to Conflict
MICHAEL COLLINS AND THE ONSET OF THE ANGLO-IRISH WAR, 1916–1919
Michael Collins was born on 16 October 1890 at the hamlet of Sam's Cross in west Cork, the eighth and last child of a 75-year-old tenant farmer and his 30-year-old wife. Collins's personality was decisively shaped by his birthplace, family environment and education, all of which permanently instilled distinctive attitudes, values and modes of behaviour and speech. While Collins left west Cork relatively early, in a sense it never left him. Before dying in 1897, Michael senior had taught his son respect for learning, and he read voraciously about politics, war, history, poetry and English literature. Steeped in west Cork's revolutionary past, Collins learned about Irish republican heroes such as Tone and Emmet. He was especially influenced by Denis Lyons, who taught a militantly nationalist interpretation of Irish history at the first of Collins's two local national schools (Lisavaird and Clonakilty), where he also excelled in mathematics, French, Greek and Latin.
Choosing among one of rural Ireland's traditional escape routes for ambitious achievers – the priesthood, emigration or the British civil service – Collins passed the latter's entrance examination in 1906 and became a junior clerk at the West Kensington post office savings bank in London. He resigned after two frustrating years in a dead-end job, but neither a stockbroker's office nor a trust company proved any more satisfying. By his late teens Collins was still a shy and rather socially inept young man, channelling his restless energies into Irish culture, politics and sports. Although friendly with English colleagues, he never assimilated there, staying firmly within the expatriate Irish community, living with his sister Hannie, socialising in Irish clubs and pubs, learning Gaelic and joining the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB). Rising political tensions at home during the third Home Rule crisis made Collins even more of a republican revolutionary, and by 1914 he was prominent in the London IRB, honing his conspiratorial ability and talent spotting for new recruits at Gaelic games throughout Britain.
In January 1916 Collins moved to Dublin, partly to evade conscription (which had not been extended to Ireland) but primarily to participate in the coming rebellion. As adjutant to Joseph Plunkett, a member of the Military Council planning the rebellion, he was able to observe the inner circle's expertise in plotting, duplicity and ruthlessness – an invaluable crash course in revolutionary politics. During Easter week Collins performed competently if unspectacularly in the GPO. Subsequently he was interned at Frongoch camp in North Wales, where, according to a fellow prisoner, he 'got his taste of [sic] scheming and trickery ... as well as making friends and contacts with people who were deeply involved with the IRB organisation'. Collins's circle included Joe O'Reilly, who later became his personal assistant, and Mick McDonnell, the first leader of the Squad. In December 1916, when Lloyd George became British prime minister, he released Frongoch's prisoners as a gesture of reconciliation to Ireland. They received a rapturous Christmas reception in Dublin, now literally Ireland's central political battleground and Collins's home for the rest of his life.
Although he returned unemployed and virtually penniless, Collins's head start over more senior republicans who were still incarcerated at Lewes Gaol in England got him the post of secretary to the Irish National Aid and Volunteers' Dependants Fund. Tom Clarke's widow Kathleen had established it, ostensibly as a charity for the relatives of executed and dead Volunteers and former internees, but really to help resuscitate the republican movement. She sensed Collins had the ability to use the Fund as a cover for legally resurrecting political resistance and particularly liked his insistence that 'the fight for freedom must be continued, the Rising to count as the first blow. With his forceful personality, his wonderful magnetism and his organising ability, he had little trouble in becoming a leader.' A Fund employee remembered Collins as
exacting, businesslike and orderly. Sometimes he growled at being asked to do things, but he always got them done. On one occasion early in 1917 I heard him say to a helper, my fiancée, that the office was closed, that he was going out, and that he could not wait, but he did take down the name of a man whom she wanted helped, closed the notebook, put it in his pocket and walked away without a word. He cycled out that same evening to Rathfarnham, saw the man and solved his problem.
While travelling freely throughout Ireland meeting widows and orphans, Collins simultaneously reorganised the IRB, on whose reconstituted Supreme Council he now sat. Already secrecy and power were investing his persona with an aura of command, enhanced by Collins's formidable manipulative skills and an expanding network of republican activists whose names Mrs Clarke had given him.
In the spring of 1917 Collins entered national politics when republicans were challenging a Home Rule party weakened by widespread disillusion at its failure to deliver Home Rule and its apparent subservience to the British war effort. Furthermore, the post-Rising executions had generated enormous popular sympathy for the rebel leaders. The most credible political alternative was Sinn Fein, especially as the British had mistakenly blamed it for the Rising. And, despite republican scepticism about party leader Arthur Griffith's moderate separatism and his espousal of a dual monarchy with Great Britain, Sinn Fein struck lucky in May 1917 when a by-election occurred in South Longford. The contest made opposition unity essential if a traditionally impregnable Home Rule majority in the constituency was to be overcome, and Collins supported a Sinn Fein candidate. But, though he argued for a strong local man, Joe McGuinness, a Volunteer prisoner in Lewes, the doctrinaire McGuinness opposed standing for the British parliament and was backed by the gaol's republican leadership. Collins refused to accept defeat and cunningly circumvented this opposition by appealing to Thomas Ashe, the only prisoner capable of overriding the rejectionists. Head of the IRB and a Volunteer hero after his victory at the battle of Ashbourne in 1916, Ashe agreed that winning South Longford would allow republicans radically to reshape Sinn Fein policy, and he authorised Collins to push ahead with McGuinness's candidacy. As campaign manager Collins marshalled Volunteers as election workers and used the emotive slogan 'Put him in to get him out' to secure a narrow but mould-breaking Sinn Fein victory.
The party quickly followed up by winning East Clare in July and Kilkenny in August – a decisive breakthrough for a resurgent republican movement. South Longford was a nerve-racking experience for Collins but ultimately a triumphant vindication. Having successfully taken a calculated gamble, he had proved his mettle. For the first time Collins had also demonstrated his pragmatism by outflanking revolutionary purists whose dogmatism risked losing everything. The realist who would sign the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1921 was already in place.
Collins's use of Irish Volunteers as political shock troops was visible proof of that organisation's revival, which had started the previous winter when Cathal Brugha, a hero of the Rising, established a temporary Volunteer Executive. It accelerated after December 1916, as Frongoch's returning internees restored leadership to their local units. When the Lewes prisoners returned in June 1917, Collins worked closely with Ashe, whom he accompanied to public meetings, Volunteer gatherings and IRB conclaves. But in mid-August 1917, after being arrested and charged with inciting disaffection, Ashe began a hunger strike for political status in Mountjoy Prison. He died on 25 September while being force-fed, and his funeral five days later became 'the most formidable act of defiance to British authority since the Rising'. Mourners poured in from all over Ireland, bringing Dublin to a standstill, and sealed off the Castle in a symbolic rejection of British rule. The procession included 200 priests and representatives from every public organisation; 9,000 Volunteers also turned out, most in uniform and some carrying arms. Richard Mulcahy, commandant of Dublin's 2nd Battalion who had been Ashe's second-in-command at the battle of Ashbourne, organised Volunteers to escort the coffin from its lying-in-state at the City Hall and marshal vast crowds lining the route to Glasnevin Cemetery. Chosen by an IRB-dominated funeral committee because of his closeness to Ashe, Collins was to deliver the graveside oration. Despite never having made a major public speech in his life, he was ready for the occasion. Like other prisoners at Frongoch's 'university of revolution', Collins had practised oratory in preparation for future leadership, and his moral and physical courage were not in doubt.
The proceedings at Glasnevin were modelled on those at the same cemetery two years earlier for a venerable republican, O'Donovan Rossa, when Volunteers had fired shots after Patrick Pearse's graveside declaration that 'Ireland unfree shall never be at peace'. Collins's tribute to Ashe consisted of only a few words in Irish and a simple proclamation that 'Nothing additional remains to be said. That volley which we have just heard is the only speech which it is proper to make above the grave of a dead Fenian.' But Collins spoke with great intensity, and his speech, accompanied by a volley of rifle fire, linked Ashe with an undying tradition of national resistance to foreign domination.
The funeral not only transformed Collins into a major republican figure but also established him as a politician in his own right by setting him free of Ashe's dominance. Ashe's preeminence had been largely fortuitous, as he had taken the credit for an Ashbourne victory that had really been engineered by his second-in-command, Mulcahy. Subsequently he had displayed insufficient modesty about his very modest abilities, and his continued leadership of the republican movement would have stifled the far more talented Collins. Although Ashe's demise clearly saddened Collins, it also freed him to be his own man. The funeral also fused Dublin's four uncoordinated Volunteer battalions into a new city Brigade whose first O/C was Mulcahy, while his closest associate, Dick McKee, succeeded him as 2nd Battalion commandant.
At a vastly expanded Sinn Fein convention in Dublin on 25 and 26 October 1917, continuing republican reservations about Griffith's moderation forced him to stand aside as leader in favour of de Valera. Collins endorsed de Valera and was himself elected last to the party executive – confirmation that his influence was still largely confined to an inner circle. An Irish Volunteer Convention on 27 October then created a new Resident Executive to equip and train an estimated 60,000 men. Cathal Brugha became chairman, Richard Mulcahy Director of Training, and Collins was appointed Director of Organisation. Mulcahy liked Collins's 'smiling buoyancy, his capacity for bearding tension, clearness of mind, perfectly controlled calm and a devil-maycariness completely concealed. His clarity of mind, his whole manner and demeanour, together with his power of concentration on the immediate matter in hand, gave him a very great power over men.' Clearly, Collins was a born leader: charismatic, forceful and ambitious, whose all-consuming passion for politics amply compensated for his lack of wealth, a university education and influential connections. A powerful, soaring imagination, a vision of the future and an unbreakable will to realise it accorded with Lawrence of Arabia's dictum that 'All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of the mind, wake in the day to find it was vanity. But the dreamers of the day are dangerous men for they may act their dreams with open eyes to make it possible.' Lawrence – a man who shook an empire – was, of course, really describing himself; but Collins likewise dreamed and sometimes achieved the seemingly impossible. In time he too would shake an empire.
In March 1917 Collins's growing prominence prompted G Division to enter him on its suspects register. This was being constantly updated by a 30-year-old clerical officer, Eamon Broy, an unusual political detective who secretly nursed a fanatical hatred of British rule. His farming family lived in a remote area of County Kildare, whose history of rack-renting landlords, agrarian violence and revolution ensured that 'we of the rising generation hated the very name of England'. Broy had only joined the Dublin Metropolitan Police in 1911 because of its excellent sporting facilities, a liberal reputation and an apparently imminent transfer to a Home Rule government. Shifting from the uniformed branch to G Division just before the Rising, he rose swiftly, as many detectives were retired, promoted or transferred in a mistaken belief that the revolutionary threat had evaporated. Increasingly disaffected with British policy, Broy passed many days alone in his office digesting rebellion documents and pondering ways of helping republicans.
I spent my time thinking what the Sinn Feiners could do to win and whether, in fact, they had the slightest chance of winning. I was well aware of all the dangers that the national movement would have to encounter, some of which were: – traitors in the movement, spies from outside, drinking and boasting by members of the organisation; loose talking, the respectable, safe type of person who wanted to be arrested and be a hero: leakages of information from the USA; accident, papers discovered, on arrest or otherwise, coincidence, chance, unauthorised shooting. Notwithstanding all these dangers, I made up my mind that I would go all-out to help them, regardless of the consequences. The question then was how I could help.
Fascinated by men wrestling with conflicting loyalties or leading lives as double agents inside an enemy system, which they ostensibly served, Broy was a textbook study in duplicity. From espionage literature he knew about Russian Nihilists infiltrating the Czarist secret police. Broy was also intrigued by Lady Gregory's play The Rising of the Moon and its depiction of an Irish policeman being torn between duty and fidelity to his own community, foreseeing 'the possibility of acting, as it were, in a highly modernised version of the RIC Sergeant in that play'.
In Broy's version of the play, though, the characters would be flesh and blood and their deaths all too real. Broy relished the prospect of secretly shaping the lives of others and exercising a dramatist's power of life and death by killing off those cast members he most disliked. Clearly he immensely enjoyed outwitting his supposedly more intelligent superiors, settling old scores and watching panic and confusion become etched in colleagues' faces. In March 1917 Broy finally decided to cross over and work for the other – or, as he saw it, his own – side. Calculating that only an extreme republican would risk responding to a G-man's approaches, he tried Harry O'Hanrahan, whose brother Michael had been executed after the Rising. Initially Broy established his credentials by warning about the imminent arrest of two middle-ranking republicans. Then he began passing on every confidential document and police code that came his way, ranging from slips of paper to substantial files, including the Volunteers' own plans for resisting conscription, which an internal spy had leaked to the British. For some time Broy knew nothing about his information's final destination. O'Hanrahan was one of Collins's IRB couriers.
In early March 1918 a great German spring offensive on the Western Front compelled the British Government to mobilise new troops and the possibility that it might extend conscription to Ireland prompted the Volunteer Executive to create a General Headquarters Staff to lead resistance. Although Collins was a leading candidate for the post of Chief of Staff, it went to the better known Mulcahy, who was strongly supported by Dick McKee, the 2nd Battalion commandant who succeeded him as Dublin Brigadier. Mulcahy later recalled McKee's relief at the outcome, 'because there was a certain feeling that Collins was an impetuous fellow; they didn't know very much about him in any case and Dick was quite satisfied that Collins was not the Chief of Staff'. Collins settled for the posts of Director of Organisation and Adjutant-General and shrewdly exhibited no bitterness towards Mulcahy and McKee. He needed them more than they needed him. Only by winning both men over could Collins play a major role in the capital's Volunteer movement. Fortunately for him, Mulcahy had discerned Collins's potential in Frongoch and now began discreetly nurturing it: 'One of my achievements in the work of the Volunteers was that I created a kind of shelter for Collins to get known and to get appreciated.' Collins also worked assiduously to change McKee's lukewarm opinion of him, and the future of the Irish Volunteers – and much else besides – was largely determined by this burgeoning triangular relationship.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Michael Collins's Intelligence War by Michael T. Foy. Copyright © 2013 Michael T. Foy. Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Map,Acknowledgements,
Prologue,
1. The Road to Conflict: Michael Collins and the Onset of the Anglo-Irish War, 1916–1919,
2. Director of Irish Intelligence: The Organisation Takes Shape, 1919,
3. Stumbling into the Haze: The British Response, January–July 1920,
4. Duel: The Struggle between the British and IRA Intelligence, July–November 1920,
5. Seeking a Knockout Blow: Collins and Bloody Sunday, 21 November 1920,
6. Slugging it out: Bloody Sunday to March 1921,
7. Looking for a Way out: The Quest for a Truce, May–July 1921,
Conclusions,
Notes,
Bibliography,