Casement claimed that during the interrogation at Scotland Yard he asked to be allowed to appeal publicly for the Easter Rising in Ireland to be called off in order to ‘stop useless bloodshed’. His interrogators refused, possibly in the hope that the Rising would go ahead and force the government to crush what they saw as a German conspiracy with Irish nationalists. According to Casement, he was told by Blinker Hall, ‘It is better that a cankering sore like this should be cut out.’20 Though the formal transcript of the interrogation finished before these comments were made, a note in Home Office files confirms Casement’s version of events:
Casement begged to be allowed to communicate with the leaders to try and stop the rising but he was not allowed. On Easter Sunday at Scotland Yard he implored again to be allowed to communicate or send a message. But they refused, saying, ‘It[’]s a festering sore, it[’]s much better it should come to a head.’21
Even if Casement had been allowed to issue an appeal to ‘stop useless bloodshed’, however, it is unlikely he would have deterred the seven-man military council of the Irish Republican Brotherhood from going ahead with the Easter Rising.22
Despite the polite tone of Casement’s interrogators, it is clear that they despised him. One example of this contempt is their reaction to a moving poem written by Casement in prison, dated 5 July 1916, just under a month before his execution, while waiting to be received into the Catholic Church, which was preserved in MI5 files:
Weep not that you no longer feel the tide
High breasting sun and storm that bore along
Your youth on currents of perpetual song;
For in these mid-sea waters, still and wide,
A Sleepless purpose the great Deep doth hide:
Here spring the mighty fountains, pure and strong,
That bear sweet change of breath to city throng,
Who, had the sea no breeze, would soon have died.
So, though the Sun shines not in such a blue,
Nor have the stars the meaning youth devised,
The heavens are nigher, and a light shines through
The brightness that nor sun nor stars sufficed,
And on this lonely waste we find it true
Lost youth and love, nor lost, are hid with Christ.
After reading the poem, Frank Hall wrote scornfully to Basil Thomson, ‘Is this working up a plea for insanity think you?!!’
While Lody had been respected as a patriot, Casement, despite his self-sacrificial bravery in the cause of Irish independence, was despised as a traitor who had tried by underhand methods to persuade Irish soldiers fighting for King and Country to desert to the enemy. Casement’s interrogators had read, and doubtless been infuriated by, the evidence (preserved in MI5 files) of wounded Irish POWs repatriated from Germany during 1915, who described Casement’s efforts to recruit them to an Irish Brigade. According to Private Joseph Mahony:
In Feb. 1915 Sir Roger Casement made us a speech [at Limburg POW camp] asking us to join an Irish Brigade, that this was ‘our chance of striking a blow for our country’. He was booed out of the camp . . . After that further efforts were made to induce us to join by cutting off our rations, the bread ration was cut in half for about two months.23
Reports such as this help to explain why British intelligence chiefs were both so determined to ensure that Casement did not escape the gallows and so ready to blacken his name.
A further reason for their contempt for Casement may have been homophobia (a prejudice then common to both British intelligence and Irish nationalists). Christensen had told Findlay in October 1914 that Casement was homosexual. Sir Edward Grey reported to some of his cabinet colleagues that Casement and Christensen had ‘unnatural relations’.24 The relations appeared all the more ‘unnatural’ because of Christensen’s admission that they began when he was a seaman aged only fifteen or sixteen and Casement was British consul in Brazil. According to Christensen, Casement followed him into a lavatory in a Montevideo hotel where they had sex.25 Casement’s ‘Black Diaries’, which were discovered while he was being interrogated at Scotland Yard and record in graphic detail his numerous sexual encounters with male lovers and prostitutes as well as his obsession with ‘huge’, ‘enormous’ genitalia,26 reinforced the contempt of his interrogators. Though recent forensic examination has established their authenticity beyond reasonable doubt,27 the suggestion that they were forged by British intelligence has always been deeply implausible. Neither MI5 nor any other British intelligence agency had the capacity to produce a forgery on the scale and of the complexity that would have been required. Even the KGB, whose disinformation department, Service A, made far more use of forgery than any Western intelligence agency, never fabricated a handwritten document of comparable length.28
The relatively harmonious collaboration in London before Casement’s trial between Frank Hall of MI5, Captain Hall and Basil Thomson contrasted with the confusion of British intelligence organization in Ireland itself. Military intelligence work was poorly co-ordinated with that of the police. Within the police the lack of co-ordination between the detective unit of the Dublin Municipal Police and the Special Crimes Branch of the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) added to the confusion. As the Inspector General of the RIC complained in 1916, it made little sense ‘to have Dublin under the supervision of one secret service special crimes system and the remainder of the country under another’. There was no clearly defined role for MI5. Thomson concluded a month after Casement’s execution: ‘There is certainly a danger that from lack of coordination the Irish Government may be the last Department to receive information of grave moment to the peace of Ireland.’ Until the end of the war, military and police intelligence was chiefly directed against the wrong target, concentrating on tracking down comparatively minor German intrigues rather than on following the much more important development of Irish nationalism. GHQ Ireland was later to regret that ‘the opportunity was not taken to create an intelligence branch of trained brains working together to examine the military possibilities of the Sinn Fein movement’,29 which by 1917 was campaigning for the establishment of an Irish republic.
Germany’s wartime subversion strategy against Britain had an imperial as well as an Irish dimension. Almost from the outbreak of war, while the British used the term ‘Great War’, the Germans spoke of ‘World War’ (Weltkrieg)30 Both the German government and the Prusso-German General Staff were well aware that the Empire was crucial to the British war effort, mobilizing three million men, half of them in the Indian army. The greatest potential threat from German subversion thus came in India, the only part of the Empire with which MI5 was already in contact at the outbreak of war, communicating with the Director of Criminal Intelligence in Delhi through his London representative, Major John Wallinger.31 Before the war, the main responsibility for dealing with Indian ‘seditionists’ in Britain fell to the Special Branch rather than Kell’s Bureau.32 In the summer of 1914, however, the Director of Criminal Intelligence complained that ‘for some time past the information given by Scotland Yard about the doings of Indian agitators in England had been rather meagre’ because ‘the officers in Scotland Yard were so fully occupied with the Suffragette movement that they had very little to devote to Indians.’33
In September 1914 the German Chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, told his Foreign Ministry: ‘England appears determined to wage war until the bitter end . . . Thus one of our main tasks is gradually to wear England down through unrest in India and Egypt . . .’34 A newly created Intelligence Bureau for the East, attached to the German Foreign Ministry, was given the task of working out how to do so. It began by setting up an Indian Committee in Berlin, led by the academic and lawyer Virendranath Chattopadhyaya, who had become a revolutionary while studying at the Middle Temple in London.35 Berlin’s hopes of stirring up disaffection among Britain’s Muslim subjects were greatly encouraged when the Ottoman Empire entered the war on Germany’s side on 5 November 1914. The Ottoman government issued f
atwas calling on all Muslims to wage jihad against the Allies: among them the Muslims who made up one-third of the Indian army.36 Censorship of a sample of the correspondence of the 138,000 Indian troops who fought on the Western Front in 1915 provided welcome reassurance for the Indian government and the wartime interdepartmental Whitehall committee on Indian ‘revolutionary’ activity. It revealed no significant support either for Indian ‘revolutionaries’ or for pan-Islamism, though one censor reported a worrying trend among Indian soldiers to write poetry, which he considered ‘an ominous sign of mental disquietude’.37
Kell’s main Indian expert early in the war was Robert Nathan, who, after qualifying as a barrister, had spent twenty-six years in the Indian civil service, becoming vice chancellor of Calcutta University, but had been forced to return to England because of ill health early in 1914.38 He joined MO5(g) on 4 November 1914,39 serving with Kell as one of the Bureau’s representatives on the wartime interdepartmental Whitehall committee on Indian ‘revolutionary’ activity.40 Nathan also worked closely with Basil Thomson, who praised his collaboration in all the Indian cases which came his way at Scotland Yard. Indeed Nathan was the only MI5 officer whose assistance Thomson acknowledged in his memoirs. Contrary to the impression given in the memoirs, Nathan was the more influential of the two; Thomson did not sit on the interdepartmental committee.41
Intercepted correspondence indicated that Indian revolutionaries in 1915 were planning an assassination campaign in England, France and Italy. Though the campaign did not materialize, Nathan had good reason to take it seriously.42 The last political assassination in Britain had been the killing in London of Sir William Curzon Wyllie, the political aide-de-camp of the Secretary of State for India, by an Indian student, Madan Lal Dhingra, in the summer of 1909. Even Winston Churchill, despite his hostility to Indian nationalism, had seen Dhingra as a romantic hero, calling his last words before execution ‘the finest ever made in the name of patriotism’.43 It was reasonable to expect that the First World War would produce other Dhingras. In the summer of 1915 the Indian Department of Criminal Intelligence (DCI) reported that, according to information from ‘a trustworthy source’, the Indian nationalist Dr Abdul Hafiz and other German agents in Switzerland were plotting to assassinate Italian government ministers. Though Hafiz was expelled from Switzerland, reports of assassination plots continued. On 29 November Nathan sent a request through the Foreign Office to the Italian government for all Indians arriving from Switzerland to be stopped at the border and, if possible, deported to England.44
In October 1915 an Indian ‘revolutionary’, Harish Chandra, confessed during interrogation by Nathan and Thomson that he had been working for the Indian Committee in Berlin, seeking to subvert the loyalty of Indian POWs, and revealed German attempts to persuade the Amir of Afghanistan to join in a Muslim jihad against the British Raj. Nathan and Thomson succeeded in persuading Chandra to work as a double agent. In October 1915, they also recruited another Indian, Thakur Jessrajsinghji Sessodia, whose involvement in assassination plots had been discovered from his intercepted correspondence. Both Chandra and Sessodia proved to be reliable double agents. Their intelligence, some of which was corroborated by other sources, increasingly exposed the unrealistic nature of German plots to stir up Indian unrest. The interdepartmental committee in Whitehall concluded in the course of 1916 that the best plan was to continue to monitor the development of the plots and encourage the Germans to waste money and resources on them.45
In the spring of 1916 Nathan left to head an office established in North America by the DCI to track down Indian revolutionaries.46 His office provided the US authorities with much of the evidence used at two major trials of members of the Indian Ghadr (‘Revolt’) Party, charged with conspiracy to aid the Germans by plotting revolution in India. The first trial, in Chicago, ended with the conviction of three Ghadr militants in October 1917. The second trial, in San Francisco, reached a dramatic climax in April 1918 when one of the accused, Ram Singh, shot the Ghadr Party leader, Ram Chandra Peshawari, dead in the middle of the courtroom.47 Basil Thomson commented:
In the Western [US] States such incidents do not disturb the presence of mind of Assize Court officials: the deputy-sheriff whipped an automatic from his pocket, and from his elevated place at the back of the court, aiming above and between the intervening heads, shot the murderer dead.48
One of Nathan’s assistants wrote delightedly: ‘I think the whole case is a great triumph and has done a lot to help us in this country. It has shown to the public the utter rottenness of the Ghadr Party . . . More than this, it has been a very successful piece of propaganda work.’49 Veterans of the Indian army, police and civil service continued to make up a significant minority of MI5 personnel. Of the twenty-seven officers in G Branch (investigations) early in 1917, eight had served in India.50
The Indian National Congress seems to have attracted no significant wartime attention from either MI5 or any other section of the British intelligence community, because it had no German connection and posed no threat of violent opposition to British rule. Before the First World War, Congress was a middle-class debating society which met briefly each December, then lapsed into inactivity for another year. There was nothing in 1914 to suggest that it would emerge from the war as a mass movement which would become the focus of resistance to the British Raj. The man who brought about this transformation was M. K. ‘Mahatma’ Gandhi, an English-educated barrister of the Inner Temple who, more than any other man, set in motion the process which, a generation later, began the downfall of the British Empire. When Gandhi returned to India in 1915 from South Africa, where he developed the technique of satyagraha, or passive resistance, which he was later to use against the Raj, the DCI assessed him as ‘neither an anarchist nor a revolutionary’ but ‘a troublesome agitator whose enthusiasm has led him frequently to overstep the limits of the South African laws relating to Asiatics’.51
In the course of the war MI5 extended its involvement in imperial intelligence from India to the Empire and Commonwealth as a whole. In August 1915, with the support of the Colonial Office, it began an attempt to ‘secure rapid and direct exchange of information’ between its own headquarters and colonial administrations. A year later, according to a post-war report, it was in touch with ‘the authorities responsible for counter espionage in almost every one of the colonies’. In the autumn of 1916 the section of G Branch responsible for co-ordinating overseas intelligence became a new D Branch, headed by Frank Hall,52 which was also responsible for ‘Special Intelligence Missions’ in Allied countries, notably in Rome and Washington DC. According to a post-war report on D Branch, couched in unrealistically grandiloquent terms, ‘particulars were obtained of German activities in all parts of the world, from Peru to the Dutch East Indies and the Islands of the Pacific, and a watch was kept on German propaganda through missionaries or otherwise on every continent.’53 Henceforth MI5 saw its role as ‘more than national’: ‘it is Imperial.’54
Subversion in mainland Britain first became a serious concern for MI5 in 1916. ‘It was not until 1916’, wrote Thomson later, ‘that the Pacifist became active.’55 The immediate cause of the pacifist revival was the introduction of conscription for men of ‘military age’ (between eighteen and forty-one), first for unmarried men in February 1916, then for married men two months later. Within MI5 the lead role in investigating the anti-conscription movement was taken by Major Victor Ferguson of G Branch, who had joined on the outbreak of war and had a combination of skills characteristic of a number of MI5 officers. He listed hunting, shooting (‘some big game’) and fishing as his chief recreations (followed by motoring, skiing, cricket and ‘formerly football’). As well as following outdoor pursuits, he was an Oxford graduate with, again like many of his colleagues, a gift for foreign languages. Ferguson had translator’s qualifications in German, Russian and French (the languages of the main foreign revolutionaries and subversives who attracted MI5’s attention), in addition to having som
e competence in Spanish, Dutch and Arabic.56 In June 1916, by agreement with G Branch, Special Branch officers raided the London headquarters of the No-Conscription Fellowship and removed its records and papers, as well as three-quarters of a ton of printed material. They seized a further 1½ tons of documents next day from the National Council Against Conscription (NCAC). This vast mass of paper was then examined by MI5 officers with a view to bringing prosecutions under the Defence of the Realm Act.57 Ferguson sent a sample of the material seized to the Legal Adviser at the Home Office.58 The real aim of the NCAC, he believed, was ‘to work up feeling, especially in the workshops, against measures necessary for the successful prosecution of the war’:
Whatever their policy may have been originally, and it is not denied that it was, to commence with, quite legal, there is not the least doubt that it has been divorced from its original purpose and has become a dangerous weapon whereby the loyalty of the people is being prostituted and the discipline of the army interfered with . . . If they are not for the success of our country it is not unreasonable if they are classed as pro-German. That, at any rate, is what the mass of the public consider them; and the public is substantially right.59
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