Abwehr buster

Years ago, we used to hop in the car at weekends and go for a spin. In due course, we paused at the German Military Cemetery in Glencree, Co Wicklow.  Most of the interees are unfortunate sailors and airmen who arrived in Ireland already dead. One exception is Dr. Major Hermann Görtz who arrived by parachute in May 1940 and led the security services a merry dance for 18 months. He liaised with a raggle-taggle collection of IRA operatives, old-fashioned Nationalists, wannabee Nazis moving from house to safe-house before finally being busted and imprisoned. It was a bit like [hidden in plain sight etc.] GUBU 1982 when an unhinged murderer was run to ground in the home of the Irish Attorney General. 

Görtz killed himself rather than be deported back to Germany in 1947 and was buried with full military honours including "Heil Hitler", a hakenkreuz flag and Luftwaffe greatcoat. His grave in Glencree is marked with a dagger sheathed in barbed wire. 

The Irish Security Services (Garda Special Branch and G2 military intelligence] arrested 10/12 of the known Nazi spies within 48 hours of their arrival. One of them was Joseph Lenihan, who was picking spuds in Jersey when the Germans invaded the Channel Islands in 1940. He was recruited by the Abwehr to wireless back weather reports to Germany. He was also the uncle of FF ministers Brian Lenihan Snr and Mary O'Rourke.  Far from being ashamed, the Lenihan family rather leaned into the story of their scapegrace Uncle Joe. A bit like our family acknowledge the red-headed cook who was the unwed mother of my Gt Grandfather. There's a rather handy executive summary of all the spies here: it's a blog written by Giselle Jakobs, grand-daughter of spy Josef Jakobs who was the last person executed in the Tower of London.

I had almost finished an entire 100,000 word e-book on the story of Ireland's Abwehr spies before I came across Giselle's neat summary. Code Breaker: The untold story of Richard Hayes, the Dublin librarian who helped turn the tide of WWII [2018] by Marc McMenamin. Richard Hayes [R] was director of the National Library when he was recruited and seconded to G2 in 1940. He was fluent in Arabic, English, German, French, Irish and Italian and aced crosswords on a daily basis. Like the then Taoiseach Eamon de Valera he was a math-wonk. It's not quite like with like, but he was probably as successful at code-busting (in person hours per result) as Alan Turing across the water at Bletchley Park. He cracked Görtz's code by working out that the keyword must be Cathleen ni Houlihan. This enabled G2 to masquerade as the Abwehr and abstract extra information from that source. It's probably true that he was the first person to catch a microdot in the wild. 

The book has a good insight into the hypocrisy, double-standards and nudge-wink of Ireland's neutrality during The Emergency. We now believe that de Valera's government tilted the neutrality playing field in favour of the Allies . . . because Nazis are Bad. Maybe: no English spies were arrested and interned in Ireland during WWII. Hayes and his immediate boss seemed willingly to have shared their key code findings with their opposite numbers in the UK. Everyone knows that de Valera, as head of government, formally called the the German Legation after the death of his oppo Adolf Hitler. According to McMenamin, de Valera failed to extend the same courtesy to David Gray, United States minister to Ireland, after FDR died. The Victors write the history.