VIII
‘And now, to my grief, the state, like a thief, Camouflaged by Emergency Orders, Just pockets the coin, with the most knavish design, To bolster its Budget disorders.’
A poem by captured German spy JOHN FRANCIS O’REILLY,
November 1944
From the moment he entered the internment camp in Athlone, Görtz’s mind was fully focused on escape. The Irish authorities had succeeded in keeping his messages under control, and having also dealt with Andrews, many in Ireland considered the Görtz case closed. However, Görtz was to prove more trouble than the authorities realised. In September 1942, the Irish authorities had come to the chilling realisation that somebody new was using Görtz’s code.
An Irish customs official in Swanlinbar, Co. Cavan, had stopped a man crossing the Irish border and a routine search of his pockets revealed he was carrying a piece of paper with a strange series of codes on it. The customs officer felt that the gentleman in question was acting suspiciously, but as he had no contraband on him he was unable to detain him. To make matters worse, the customs officer failed to take details of the man’s identity and address. The piece of paper containing the series of code groups eventually made its way to G2, who passed it on to Dr Hayes to analyse, and it was Hayes who noted that the message was sent using Görtz’s code.
There was one discrepancy, however, in that the codes were arranged into groups of four as opposed to five, which was the system favoured by the Abwehr. When Hayes deciphered the message he came to the conclusion that another agent was active in Ireland, and that they were passing messages on to the Germans. Despite Hayes’s best efforts the mystery of the sender and receiver of the message was never solved. Ultimately the failure of the customs official to identify the man who carried the message left Hayes and G2 with very little to go on.
Later the same year a restaurant car attendant on the Great Northern Railway was arrested after he was found carrying three letters to the IRA’s northern command, which requested a meeting with the southern command, as well as details on Allied troop movements in Northern Ireland. When questioned by the authorities, the attendant claimed the letters he was carrying originated from Kingston Shirts in Dublin, the business owned by Caitlín Brugha. The authorities believed that the IRA may have been interested in sending such information to the Germans for future operations. And Görtz continued sending messages, which were being intercepted by the authorities. Hayes deciphered the messages, and G2, along with the Gardaí, used the information in the messages to build cases against Görtz’s accomplices.
Meanwhile in Athlone Görtz was finding it difficult to integrate into his new surroundings. Although concessions had been made to the prisoners in order to provide them with more comforts, Görtz remained tense during his incarceration. He was allowed to associate with the other German internees, however, and he soon formed a relationship with Unland and Preetz. The three Germans gained the trust of the camp commandant, James Power, who played bridge with them once a week. Power was able to gain insights into the men’s characters, as they generally let their guard down while playing cards. He noted that Görtz always seemed tense, and held his cards tightly in his hand. The weekly bridge game became something of a novelty in the camp, and eventually the other internees were allowed to attend as spectators.
Unland had appointed himself as leader of the prisoners, something all the prisoners acknowledged apart from Görtz, who often distanced himself from the others. Jan van Loon was the only prisoner Görtz formed a close relationship with, and until the end of the war he acted as Görtz’s closest friend.
After biding his time for a short period Görtz’s thoughts turned to escape. Within 18 months of the German’s arrival in Athlone Unland began painting an eagle and a swastika on the wall of the recreation room in the camp. This was a diversion to distract from the fact that the other prisoners were digging a tunnel in van Loon’s cell. Unland had cleverly positioned his mural so that he could keep an eye on the movements of the prison officers. Preetz also stood guard on the lookout for the prison authorities.
The plan was discovered when the prisoners’ cells were suddenly raided early one morning. The raids were routine but the Germans blamed Obéd, who was disliked by all. They believed he had revealed their plans to the authorities, despite the fact that they had no evidence to prove this. Preetz eventually showed his disdain for Obéd by throwing a cup of scalding tea in his face one evening in the prison mess.
Görtz and van Loon also plotted escape together. Görtz had continued sending messages and had shown van Loon his enciphering method. Van Loon worked diligently in his cell at night by candlelight to encrypt messages that were to be taken to the Farrell sisters and others outside the jail. Both men were unaware that Görtz’s code had been compromised, however.
Görtz was so impressed with van Loon’s loyalty that he even tried to enrol him into the Waffen SS; such was Görtz’s level of delusion in his belief of the seniority of his position as an officer. Görtz duly informed his superiors in Berlin of the promotion – who of course in reality were actually G2. In an amusing turn of events G2, masquerading as Berlin, confirmed van Loon’s enrolment, assuring Görtz that he had been fully welcomed into the organisation.
Görtz himself was to prove a divisive figure within the camp, causing the German internees to organise themselves into pro- and anti-Görtz factions. Schütz, Tributh and Gärtner were distrustful of the other group, which consisted of Görtz, Preetz and van Loon. Obéd, who was being detained separately for racial reasons, aligned himself with Schütz and his faction. Weber-Drohl and Simon distanced themselves from either group. The factions arose for a variety of reasons. In terms of status Görtz, Schütz, Tributh and Gärtner were German soldiers and the others were civilians.
Görtz, Preetz and van Loon were also Nazis, having joined the party before the outbreak of the war. This conflicted with the other detainees, who were not open converts to the ideals of National Socialism. Schütz and Görtz in particular clashed regularly. Schütz, for example, liked to listen to English radio broadcasts, an activity Görtz considered to be treasonous. Görtz assured Schütz he would have him executed for this once the pair returned to Germany, and in a somewhat advanced state of paranoia Görtz began listening in to Schütz’s conversations.
In one exchange Schütz tried to persuade a prison doctor to send chocolates and silk stockings to his mistress in Germany. At a meeting of the prisoners Görtz used this information to accuse Schütz of being a spy, exclaiming, ‘There is a traitor among us and I think that traitor is Marschner.’ A fistfight developed, with Tributh attacking Görtz, and the men had to be separated by prison authorities. Dr Hayes visited the internees and later noted that ‘Schütz also clashed regularly with Walter Simon who taunted him by calling him a “dirty Jew boy” and threatened to beat him up.’
Weber-Drohl did not fit in with the other internees in Athlone, and campaigned to be transferred to another jail, informing the prison authorities that he would go on hunger strike until his demands were met. At 65 years of age, Weber-Drohl was the oldest of the internees, and he suffered from medical problems which caused him to be a frequent visitor to the prison hospital. He was eventually discharged from the prison hospital for making lewd sexual remarks to a young nurse working there. The doctor on duty refused to keep Weber-Drohl there any longer and he was promptly returned to the mainstream prison population.
Weber-Drohl, an Austrian, felt that associating with the German internees would scupper any hope he had of an early release. In a letter to the Irish Department of Defence, he argued that he had become ‘the target of mean and filthy lies and conspiracy of the Germans in the camp’. In one instance he referred to Preetz as a ‘teapot thrower’, a reference to a fight that Preetz had with Schütz which had resulted in him smashing a teapot on Schütz’s head. Weber-Drohl insisted he would refuse all food until he was transferred away from the other prisoners. Such was his displeasure at his situation that he even went as far as contacting the American Minister in Ireland, David Gray, to protest his situation.
Out of all of the prisoners, Obéd seemed to have the most difficult time in Athlone. The Irish climate affected his health, and he soon began to suffer from chronic bronchitis. He was also severely unpopular with the other inmates, who ostracised him and often taunted him. Walter Simon in particular made life difficult for Obéd, accusing Obéd, for example, of playing ‘nigger music’ in his cell. Preetz, who was by far the most nefarious character housed in the camp, at one stage attempted to assault Obéd, and was only prevented from doing so by the intervention of the prison authorities. When Capt. Joseph Healy of G2 toured the camp to look into the conditions in which the prisoners were being held he noted that Obéd’s claims were accurate.
Görtz had positioned himself within the prison as a senior officer, but on various occasions his paranoia got the better of him, and he engaged in petty squabbles with other detainees. He accused Obéd of being an informer who had alerted the prison authorities of one of many of the prisoners’ escape attempts. In reality the authorities had found out through Görtz himself. They had gleaned the information from one of his letters which he believed he had sent outside the prison successfully. Gärtner and Tributh, who were somewhat close to Görtz, had a better time in internment in Athlone than Obéd or the others. But even though their lot was easier, Tributh lost all his hair through stress during the six years he spent in incarceration.
In 1944, Görtz grew increasingly frustrated at his situation, and made one last attempt at escape. Writing to the Farrell sisters, he outlined his plan:
My Friends, I ask you to help me get out of this prison. It has become impossible for me to get out without help from outside. At the first opportunity I had sent from here an important message to Germany to support you with all means in your fight against our common enemy. I have reason to believe that this message has reached Germany however I also have reason to believe that in order to make this help real it needs personal contact and explanation. I still think I am the best man to re-establish this contact – perhaps the only man. I think it is best to try and get out of the city the same night and morning by bicycle. If all works well the escape will not be detected before eight o’clock in the morning. A man could direct me to a place outside a place in the fields or bogs or shed where I can rest for the day. I need a road map and compass. Work quick as the ring gets tighter and tighter around me. The nights get shorter – only the actual climbing must be done in complete darkness – moonless nights – let the men darken their faces and have gloves on.
Much like his attempted escape from Arbour Hill, Görtz intended to make his exit through the roof. He had selected the camp’s common room ceiling as the best location from which to escape. He would then make his way down the prison walls and out into the fields or bogs, where he hoped to be picked up. When this plot was foiled Görtz resorted to hunger strike in order to try to gain his freedom.
Such was Görtz’s determination in carrying out his protest that he managed to last 21 days without food. He eventually had to be fed through a tube and upon its insertion ended his protest. Now at his wits’ end, Görtz began to slip back into a state of depression. In an attempt to lift his mood he wrote voraciously and during this period in Athlone he worked on a number of short stories – and a play about Stephen Hayes.
The German authorities now had to look elsewhere for spies to send to Ireland. They were fast running out of luck with the agents who had been sent, and it wasn’t long before Nazi Germany looked to the Irish expatriate community for solutions. The Irish community during the war was quite small, but it provided an adequate hunting ground for the Abwehr and the SD to recruit from. Irish citizens resident there who supported the Nazi regime were of huge value in terms of propaganda, moral support and local knowledge for planning operations.
Although Ireland was neutral, it didn’t declare complete independence from the United Kingdom until 1949. Therefore it was still technically part of the UK. This brought with it a myriad of legal difficulties for Germany if it were to use Irish citizens living in the Reich as spies. Technically any Irish citizen who aided Hitler could have been tried and executed for treason, as Ireland was still part of the Commonwealth of Nations. Despite these peculiarities of international law, several Irish men aided Nazi Germany from within the Reich. One such gentleman was Sgt John Codd.
John Codd was born in Mountrath in Co. Laois but emigrated to Canada in 1929. In 1931 he moved to England and enlisted in the Royal Welsh Fusiliers. After serving abroad he was recalled to England in 1939 on the outbreak of the war. Codd was a self-educated man who spoke a variety of languages, including French, Spanish and Chinese. He was a veteran of the evacuation at Dunkirk, and was wounded providing cover for the fleeing British Expeditionary Force. Codd himself was unable to escape, and was captured and brought to a German field hospital to recover. Once he was well enough he was brought to the Stalag Luft III camp.
The Stalag was established in March 1942 in the German province of Lower Silesia near the town of Sagan (now Żagań, Poland), 160 km southeast of Berlin. The site was selected because its sandy soil made it difficult for POWS to escape by tunnelling. During his time here he was approached by a German, who offered him improved conditions if he would consider working for Ireland against the British. Codd, for whatever reason, agreed to the offer, and was transferred to Friesack Camp. Friesack had been set up as a camp for Irish prisoners of war with the aim of using them as Abwehr agents for espionage missions to Ireland.
Upon his arrival at the camp, Codd was met by an officer recruiting volunteers for espionage work with the Abwehr. The officer promised money, freedom and an eventual return to Ireland for any volunteers. The offer sounded too good to turn down, and Codd eagerly volunteered for German service. He was joined by several other Irishmen who had also been interned at Friesack. Among this number was Private Frank Stringer, a native of Kells, Co. Meath. Stringer had joined the British Navy and later the Royal Irish Fusiliers, and had been in Jersey when German forces invaded in 1940.
Private James Brady of Strokestown, Co. Roscommon was also a volunteer. Brady had been stationed in Norway with the British Army and had also come into contact with the Germans in the Channel Islands. Another volunteer, Private Patrick O’Brien from Nenagh, Co. Tipperary, had been captured at Dunkirk and taken to Berlin to be trained for espionage; however while there he had been arrested for attempted rape and was later transferred to Friesack Camp. The group was completed by five other volunteers, who hailed from counties Louth, Laois, Tipperary and Wexford. Codd, along with the others, was to be given a fake name and transferred to Berlin, where he would be trained by the Abwehr.
The Germans planned to send Codd along with a colleague on a sabotage mission to London, where he would use a radio transmitter to communicate with Berlin. Until the time was ready for him to be called into service he was given civilian clothing and allowed to explore Berlin at his leisure. Codd enjoyed his time in the German capital, visiting beer halls and dating local ladies, as well as many other extravagances that his newfound freedom allowed him. When the time came for him to be put into active service he was ordered to report for intensive espionage training in Potsdam.
During his training his mission objectives changed several times. He was to be tasked with a sabotage mission in the United States, but this was soon abandoned and he was later ordered to report to Cologne for wireless training. Upon his arrival here he was also given an intensive training course in the use of Morse code.
After a series of unfortunate events that resulted in the arrest of many of the other agents, Codd’s mission changed yet again. This time he was to be sent to Northern Ireland and was given a new cover name for the purposes of his mission. He was retrained in cryptology but the course was brief, and as a result the encoding method he had been trained in was relatively basic.
In April 1943, Codd was taken to the SD school in Lehnitz for further training in coded radio transmissions and disc ciphers. His training at the SS Training School at The Hague was to be Codd’s last, as the events of 6 June 1944 were to drastically alter the course of the war. The location of the Normandy landings came as a complete surprise to the Axis Powers. Hitler had placed Field Marshall Erwin Rommel in charge of protecting the Atlantic Wall, but misinformation spread by captured German agents in the Double-Cross system saw Germany hold back her forces from Normandy.
With German troops now all being diverted to deal with the onslaught, the idea of sending German spies to Allied countries suddenly became ludicrous. Codd avoided being sent to the front line and quietly bided his time until the end of the war at the SD school in Lehnitz. In March 1945, along with his wife he successfully made it to liberated France, and from there made it back to Dublin. Codd was arrested soon after his arrival and was interrogated by G2, who released him when nothing of use came from his interviews.
After the war Dr Hayes interviewed Codd, and noted that he had been trained in using a substitution cipher based on a 25-letter square which was created by first writing the keyword followed by the rest of the text. The first figure in the substituted text was then switched to the end and the figures substituted back into letters to give the final cipher text. Hayes theorised that it was a primitive version of the cipher which Görtz later travelled to Ireland with. Codd was also trained in a new innovation: the SD disc cipher which would later be used to great effect by other German agents.
Codd eventually bought a house at 59 Montpellier Hill, which was only a stone’s throw away from G2 headquarters on Infirmary Road. Here he opted to live a much quieter life, although he found it difficult to obtain work. In 1948, he wrote to the Irish government offering to show the Minister for Defence the skills that he picked up during his time in the SD, and asked whether they would be of any use to the Irish authorities. His request was politely declined. Codd received more favourable treatment from the Irish than he might have gotten from the British. His work with the SD was enough to see him executed as a traitor, but the British were never able to trace his location, and he lived out the rest of his days quietly.
Apart from Codd, one other prisoner was selected for training in espionage by the Germans. James O’Neill of Co. Wexford had been captured on board a freighter, and had the misfortune to find himself incarcerated in Friesack. Eager to get back to Ireland, he accepted a role with the Abwehr and agreed to train in espionage for a special mission. Given the codename ‘Eisenbart’, he trained in Hamburg in radio with a view to being sent to Northern Ireland, where he was expected to report on the movements of British and American convoys as well as the shipbuilding industry in Belfast.
The Germans took him to the Spanish border and he was told to make his own way to Ireland. O’Neill was also given cover addresses for the purposes of his mission. He hoped to contact Leopold Kerney, the Irish Minister in Spain, and organise his transport back to Ireland through him. By the time O’Neill had been sent on his mission he had been given a very basic cipher. This was perhaps an indication of the pressure the Germans were under, as well as the fact that they perhaps didn’t rate O’Neill very highly.
O’Neill made it to Portugal, where he surrendered to the British. He was eventually interrogated in London by MI5, who released him after coming to the conclusion that he was unsuitable for intelligence work. They felt he was not trustworthy enough for the Double-Cross system, and he was set free rather than being interned. MI5 released him on the basis that he had surrendered immediately rather than attempt to carry out his mission for the Abwehr. His cipher, which used a poem to operate its system, eventually made its way to Richard Hayes, who solved it with little difficulty.
Hayes observed that the cipher was by far the most simple that had been given to any German agent during the war. He noted that it operated by using a sliding rule, and that the poem was used to give a series of letter positions for fixing relative positions of the rule before enciphering each letter. Hayes dismissed the cipher as amateurish in nature, stating, ‘It is of a type described in all standard works of cryptography and calls for no further comment.’
By December 1943, G2 were fairly convinced that Germany had lost interest in Ireland. All known agents were now in custody, and since Joseph Lenihan had parachuted into Summerhill there had been no further attempts to land in Ireland by German agents. The Irish authorities believed that Germany hadn’t the resources to send agents to Britain or Ireland since the German invasion of Russia. The Führer was now fighting a war on two fronts, and in their estimation his main focus was in the east. While this was certainly true in one respect, the idea of using Irishmen as German agents in the same way as Lenihan still remained an option for the Germans. This set the scene for the arrival of John Francis O’Reilly into Ireland.
O’Reilly, a native of Kilkee, Co. Clare, was the son of Bernard O’Reilly, a sergeant in the Royal Irish Constabulary who had famously arrested Sir Roger Casement on Banna Strand in Co. Kerry during the 1916 rising. John Francis was born in Kerry that same year but moved to Clare with his family once Bernard had retired. After attending school in Kilrush, John Francis attempted to join the Irish customs in 1936, but failed the Irish exam. He decided to move to England to join the priesthood, but only lasted a brief period before moving to London, where he got work as a hotel receptionist. He left London after war was declared in 1939 and moved to the Channel Islands, eventually settling on Jersey, where he worked as a potato picker.
Undeterred by the German invasion of France, O’Reilly stayed on Jersey, and was present when German forces invaded the islands in 1940. Determined to take advantage of any opportunities with the occupying power, O’Reilly took a job at the Luftwaffe airfield on the island and eventually worked his way up the ladder, becoming a translator between the island’s Nazi commander and other Irish citizens who had decided to remain on the island after the invasion. O’Reilly eventually gained the confidence of the island commander, and one day approached him, asking him about the possibility of getting permission to travel to Germany for work.
O’Reilly reasoned that he could contact the Irish Legation in Berlin with a view to returning home. The commander agreed on the condition that O’Reilly would recruit other Irish workers to go to Germany with him. O’Reilly agreed, and successfully recruited 72 other Irishmen. The group travelled by train to work in the Hermann Göring plant in Watenstedt. On arrival to Germany O’Reilly volunteered as an interpreter to the German forces, a role that gained him access to and the confidence of the German forces there. O’Reilly’s Irish citizenship was to be his greatest asset, and in 1941 he was accepted into the Irish service of German radio, where he worked as a broadcaster. He began broadcasting to Ireland using the alias ‘Pat O’Brien’, but eventually reverted to his actual name.
O’Reilly’s time as a broadcaster was very successful, and during this period he became acquainted with Francis Stuart. Growing tired of working in radio, he made the acquaintance of an American gentleman working for the SS, who informed him of the possibility of obtaining work in Spain contacting sailors who might have news of events in Northern Ireland. The American turned out to be a recruiter for the Abwehr and the SD. The two organisations were in competition with each other, and given a slew of failed security operations, the SD were rapidly gaining ground on the Abwehr.
O’Reilly applied to work for German Intelligence, indicating that he would like to be sent on a mission to Northern Ireland if possible. When his application was accepted O’Reilly stayed with the radio station until he could be accepted for espionage training. After finding a replacement for himself at the radio station he travelled to Bremen, where he began training with the Abwehr in September 1942 for a mission to Northern Ireland. O’Reilly was given the codename ‘Agent Rush’ and his mission was given the codename ‘Isolde’.
O’Reilly was tasked with reporting back to Germany on naval and air intelligence matters from Londonderry, Belfast, Liverpool and Lough Foyle. In order to be given the mission O’Reilly had sexed up information of his contacts within the IRA, and as a result the Abwehr were extremely enthusiastic about their newfound genuine Irish agent. O’Reilly was trained in intelligence in Bremen and became skilled in the use of invisible ink and radio. He undertook an intensive radio course and achieved a degree of competency in Morse code that far outstripped that of any of the other agents sent to Ireland.
O’Reilly also excelled in training he received in clandestine photography and microphotography. With his training complete, the matter of how he would be inserted into Ireland arose. A number of strategies were considered. Initially the Germans considered the idea of transporting him to his home in Co. Clare via U-boat. They also considered transporting him through the Irish consulate in Berlin, a plan that was also eventually scrapped. Eventually O’Reilly’s mission was cancelled by Admiral Canaris, who felt that it was a waste of precious resources that would clash with other more important operations.
O’Reilly was then released from duty with the Abwehr, but was soon picked up by the SD, who saw an opportunity to use the Irishman as an agent of their own. While the Abwehr had primarily concerned itself with military intelligence, the SD instead dealt with political intelligence, and they felt that O’Reilly would fit nicely into their plans. After his Abwehr mission was cancelled O’Reilly returned to Berlin, intending to rejoin the radio station that had previously employed him; instead he received a phone call from the SS, who offered him employment. It was an offer that O’Reilly felt was too good to turn down.
He remained in Berlin and began training with the SD, eventually travelling to the south-western suburb of Wannsee, where he received additional training in wireless operation. While his experience with the SD was broadly similar to that in the Abwehr, his mission parameters were to change. O’Reilly was now tasked with collecting political intelligence in England, primarily the infiltration of Scottish national groups. He was also required to join the British Labour Party, with a view to establishing contacts in the British political system.
In addition to these objectives he was also expected to visit Northern Ireland and report on the relationship between British and American troops, as well as naval and air convoys. O’Reilly met with Oscar Pfaus, who briefed him before he set out on his mission. He was equipped with two radios and a supply of invisible ink to be used for ordinary letter correspondence. Before he set off on his mission the SD felt it necessary that he be accompanied by another agent. In conjunction with colleagues in the SS, O’Reilly selected another Irish man named John Kenny to go to Ireland with him.
Kenny was born in Dublin in March 1916 and was raised by his uncle in Kilcummin, Co. Kerry, after his father died while Kenny was still a child. Much like O’Reilly, Kenny left for England to find work in 1937. After working in a series of menial jobs and eager to avoid conscription, he left London for Jersey to work as a seasonal labourer, picking potatoes. Once settled on Jersey, Kenny found work in a hotel as a waiter and driver of a naval engineering officer. It was from here that he was first recruited by O’Reilly.
Kenny answered the door one day to O’Reilly and a Gestapo officer, who promised him that in return for training as an agent he could travel to Germany and wouldn’t have to do factory work any longer. O’Reilly also assured Kenny that were he to volunteer he would be back home in Ireland by Christmas. The assurances were enough for Kenny, and he enthusiastically agreed to accompany the two men back for espionage training. Kenny was sent to Berlin, where he was given lodgings in a hotel and a stipend for expenses during his stay.
He was eventually summoned for training at the SD headquarters on Berkaerstrasse, Charlottenburg, in West Berlin. Kenny was trained in the repair and maintenance of wireless transmitter sets, a task that he took to with extreme difficulty. Kenny was not very well educated, and found much of the intelligence training challenging. The fact that Kenny’s training was condensed into a very short timeframe further compounded his problems. Despite his clear incompatibility with spycraft, Kenny was given a short course in Morse code, and was dispatched for duty with O’Reilly in December 1943.
O’Reilly was displeased with Kenny’s lack of ability, and feared he would jeopardise their mission. Nonetheless, both men were transported to Rennes in the north-west of occupied France to be flown to Ireland and dropped by parachute. O’Reilly pondered his mission as they made their way to Rennes:
There was a plane leaving the base at about midnight, that night, on bomber reconnaissance and that he had arranged to take the place of the pilot of that plane and had made excuses for doing so … I left the town in his car for the aerodrome and we took precautions by pulling down the car blinds and I sat in the rear well back.
O’Reilly was sceptical of Kenny’s motives and suspected he was simply using the mission to get back to Ireland. Despite his reservations he was determined to go ahead with the mission. Kenny and O’Reilly were to be dropped together in Co. Clare on 16 December 1943, but the pilot tasked with carrying out the mission felt that logistically he would be unable to take both men. Instead it was agreed that he would drop O’Reilly first and Kenny the following night.
While O’Reilly made his jump successfully, things became further complicated when thick fog over Co. Clare scuppered chances of Kenny being dropped on the 17th. The pilot of the Heinkel He111 carrying Kenny decided that a successful drop of Kenny was impossible, and opted to return to France instead. The plane was attacked on its way back as it flew over England. The drop was tried again on 19 December, when conditions were more favourable, and this time Kenny landed successfully in Co. Clare.
Lessons learned from Görtz’s jump were implemented, and as a result O’Reilly and his suitcase were weighed separately, so that both would reach the ground at the same time. Both agents were also given flares to indicate to the Heinkel crew that they had reached the ground below safely. Despite O’Reilly’s safe drop the Heinkel had been spotted. Volunteer John Blake, who was stationed at Loop Head lookout post that night, reported to the air message centre at Limerick that an aircraft of unknown nationality had been sighted about a mile to the north of his post. It was flying from the west in an easterly direction at 500 ft, with both its internal and navigation lights on.
On reaching the coast the aircraft followed the route to Foynes taken by British and American civilian flying boats. The SD thought they were cunning, having planned the drop to coincide with the arrival over Kilkee of a scheduled transatlantic flight from New York. However their plan backfired; O’Reilly’s plane had been spotted, and it wasn’t long before G2 and the Gardaí were aware of the presence of another illegal parachutist.
O’Reilly was dropped within a mile of his family home, and his family were shocked to say the least when he walked in the front door at two o’clock in the morning. As far as they were concerned he was still in Germany but despite their initial shock they were pleased to see their prodigal son, who hadn’t been home in almost three years. Despite the fact that his family didn’t notify Gardaí of their son’s arrival home the authorities soon found out. O’Reilly’s forays into radio had made him somewhat of a local celebrity, and word of mouth in the small town eventually reached the local barracks.
Shortly after 7.30 p.m. Sgt Carroll of Kilkee Garda Station was given confidential information that ‘a strange man wearing grey clothes and strong boots and carrying a heavy valise’ had made enquiries about the way from Moveen to Kilkee, and that he had arrived on foot in the town earlier that morning. The sergeant was aware of the overflight and suspected that the person in question was John Francis O’Reilly. Gardaí eventually called around to the O’Reilly home, and after discovering that John Francis was out asked his mother to tell him to call into the barracks when he had the chance.
O’Reilly obliged, calling into the Garda station at eleven o’clock that night, where he was questioned and then released. He was rearrested the next morning, and this time was held for further questioning. In the interim Gardaí had discovered evidence to suggest the presence of two parachutes as well as two spades. O’Reilly had also been carrying with him an Abwehr suitcase radio, a Morse key, a transmitter and receiver and a code-wheel for enciphering messages. He was interviewed by Garda Superintendent Dawson, and told the superintendent, without hesitation, that he had ‘jumped out of a plane and come down by parachute that morning at Moveen’ and, producing his passport, asked if he had broken any law.
The superintendent said that his method of entry into the state was a breach of the Emergency Powers regulations, according to which arrivals and departures from the state could only be made at designated seaports and airports. On the morning following his arrest he made a lengthy statement to Superintendent Dawson, following which he was detained under the Offences Against the State Act. On the morning of 18 December 1943, he was brought to Garda Headquarters, Dublin, where he was interrogated by Superintendent Dawson and two military intelligence officers before being placed in Arbour Hill military detention barracks.
O’Reilly initially tried to mislead G2 as to how his ciphers worked but the systems were later figured out by Dr Hayes. Gardaí searched the family home for the wireless transmitter, which they found in a suitcase hidden in the yard, but the cardboard folder that contained the transmission codes could not be found. Gardaí believed that O’Reilly’s father had disposed of the folder. They had more difficulty locating the parachute, however. O’Reilly was brought from Arbour Hill in February 1944 and showed the Gardaí where it was hidden, along with small spades and packing material for the radio set.
If O’Reilly’s entry into Ireland was eventful, Kenny’s can only be described as disastrous. His lack of training in espionage and basic spycraft was to prove to be his downfall. During his jump on 19 December he failed to collapse his parachute on landing, and as a result it caught the wind and dragged him through numerous fields in the Clare countryside, only stopping when Kenny hit a stone wall. He suffered a deep cut to his forehead, and had heavy bruising over his body. After freeing himself of his parachute Kenny made his way to a neighbouring house.
The sight of Kenny bloodied and dazed from the jump frightened the neighbours, who promptly called the Gardaí. Kenny was brought to Kilrush Hospital, and eventually to Ennis Hospital. After he made a significant recovery he was brought to Arbour Hill prison, where he was interned until the end of the war. Dan Bryan, Richard Hayes and others in G2 had hoped that the jailing of Hermann Görtz might have provided some reprieve for them, but O’Reilly’s arrival in Ireland brought with it new problems. Writing in 1946, Hayes noted:
During Christmas week 1943, when it seemed that no further ciphers would appear and a period of relaxation might be hoped for, O’Reilly arrived with new types of ciphers in his possession. From January to April these ciphers were studied and the systems analysed. There were no messages in our possession in these ciphers but it took several months to correct all the false statements made by Reilly in relation to the working of his ciphers.
Both Kenny and O’Reilly were given better lodgings than some of the other prisoners in Arbour Hill, and were the only two German agents to remain there during the war and not be taken to Athlone. Kenny’s interrogation was to prove to be as fruitless as O’Reilly’s, and the authorities quickly came to the conclusion that he hadn’t been trusted with any useful information due to his low intellect. Kenny eventually contracted a severe back complaint due to being kept in an unheated cell. He served the rest of his time in Arbour Hill without incident and was released on 11 May 1945. Upon his release he moved to a house in Jones’ Road, in the shadow of Croke Park. In 1949, he was charged with arson, but nothing about his fate after that is known.
O’Reilly proved a lot more troublesome to the authorities. His arrival into Ireland had been noted by the US Legation, which proved a source of difficulty for the Irish government. Dr Hayes immediately went to work on a code-wheel cipher device that O’Reilly had brought with him. After a period of time Hayes felt he had garnered sufficient information as to the workings of the code-wheel:
A pair of discs with two jumbled alphabets were used in making this substitution cipher. The relative positions of the discs were designed to be altered before each letter was enciphered in ten positions corresponding to the numbers 0–9. There were two systems in use for providing a long series of numbers to control the alteration of the positions of the discs. The first and simplest was to write down a number followed by the date of the month and number of the month and continued by adding each figure to the figure immediately after it to give an endless series.
Hayes theorised that O’Reilly hadn’t intended to use this particular system, and instead his spymasters in the SD had elected for him to use a system of microphotographs to communicate with Germany. The microphotographs contained 400 sets of five-figure groups which could be used from an agreed point. Hayes was able to crack the cipher disc as the letters chosen on it were derived from a predetermined keyword as opposed to a random sequence. Therefore the number of possibilities was greater, and the disc was more susceptible to frequency analysis.
During his analysis of O’Reilly’s coding system Hayes made a number of discoveries. The Germans had begun using a method of turning letters into figures on a keyword in such a way that some letters were represented by a single figure and others by a number of two digits. Hayes discovered this new innovation the Germans were using when studying rough work found in O’Reilly’s cell; little did he know that he was about to make a groundbreaking discovery that would help turn the tide of the war.
O’Reilly had been asked to prepare specimens of his messages using his disc cipher. While he was initially compliant, he soon abandoned the attempts and refused to do any more specimens. But Hayes had noted the method O’Reilly used by the time O’Reilly destroyed his rough work. Chillingly, by 1944 the Germans had developed an entirely new system of carrying out substitution and transposition ciphers. This new single-and-double-digit substitution system was entirely unknown to the British and the Americans. Hayes shared the information about the system with Dan Bryan, who passed it onto the Americans.
It was later noted by the Allies that a whole series of ciphers could not have been solved without Hayes’s discovery. In reality what seemed like a minor detail in O’Reilly’s rough work turned out to be of huge significance to the greater war effort. For a period of three months towards the end of 1944 the British were unable to read the ciphers in use by the German High Command. After terrific efforts during which the fullest use was made of calculating machines, all the ciphers were finally broken.
The ‘black-out’ where the enciphering system was changed coincided with Field Marshall Gerd von Rundstedt’s Ardennes counter-offensive to the Normandy landings. The Germans officially referred to the offensive as Unternehmen Wacht am Rhein (‘Operation Watch on the Rhine‘), while the Allies designated it the Ardennes Counter-Offensive. The phrase ‘Battle of the Bulge’ was coined by contemporary press to describe the bulge in German front lines on wartime news maps, and as a result it became the most widely used name for the battle. The German offensive was intended to stop Allied use of the Belgian port of Antwerp and to split the Allied lines, allowing the Germans to encircle and destroy four Allied armies and force the Western Allies to negotiate a peace treaty in the Axis Powers’ favour.
Dr Hayes’s discovery helped play a crucial role in the Allied victory. On 7 January 1945 Hitler withdrew all his forces from the Ardennes, including the SS-Panzer divisions, thus ending all offensive operations. In an address to the British House of Commons following the battle Winston Churchill announced, ‘This is undoubtedly the greatest American battle of the war and will, I believe, be regarded as an ever-famous American victory.’ Privately it was noted by the security services that the victory would not have been possible without Dr Hayes’s work.
O’Reilly proved himself to be a well-equipped agent, and perhaps demonstrated how the SD were a more sophisticated group than the Abwehr. Apart from the code-wheel cipher that O’Reilly brought with him, G2 were also anxious to find out how O’Reilly came to be in possession of what looked like a genuine Irish passport. He also was carrying on him an exit permit signed by William Warnock, the Irish Minister in Berlin.
O’Reilly would have had contact with Warnock during his time in Berlin, but G2 felt that Warnock should have been more astute than to give a visa to someone who could potentially cause political fallout. Dr Hayes took the passport to a laboratory in the Garda Forensic Unit in Kilmainham and studied it in detail. Hayes put the document under ultraviolet light and took infrared photographs of it in order to test if it was genuine. He came to the conclusion that the document was authentic, although page 12 of the passport was fake, and had been inserted at a later date. Hayes noted that the visa stamp had been altered to read 1943 instead of 1939, and that William Warnock’s job title was out of date, as he had been promoted since the document was originally issued.
The discoveries that Hayes had made in relation to O’Reilly’s documents and coding systems were vital to the Allies and the Irish authorities. However O’Reilly was to cause further trouble when he escaped from prison in July 1944. O’Reilly escaped out through a window after allegedly being aided by a sympathetic prison guard. After breaking the window he climbed on top of a nearby unused sentry tower, loosened the barbed wire and made his way over the prison wall.
In the dead of night O’Reilly moved through Arbour Hill, passing undetected by the front door of G2 headquarters on Infirmary Road. He hid until daylight in a potato field near the Phoenix Park, from where he walked to Inchicore to the home of a distant relative. He was given breakfast and, having borrowed five pounds for a train fare, he then left for Kingsbridge (now Heuston) Station bound for his home in Clare. Writing later of the train journey, O’Reilly spoke of his fear of being apprehended:
During the whole journey I stood chatting in the corridor with a young merchant seaman. He was returning from leave from Portsmouth to his home in Limerick. His description of the German V1 raids on Portsmouth filled many a gap deleted by the heavy hand of the British censor. I thought regretfully of my lost radio transmitter. I arrived at Limerick around 2p.m. As I stepped from the railway station onto the street my heart missed a couple of beats. Walking in front of me I saw two ‘Redcaps’. Between them was a young man whose height, build, and hair colour tallied with mine. It occurred to me immediately that this civilian had been taken in mistake for me. I later heard that he was an Irish Army deserter whose guilty conscience had betrayed him at the sight of the military police on the station platform.
In reality O’Reilly had hidden under a seat waiting till the coast was clear. Upon reaching Limerick he borrowed a bicycle and set off for Killkee. The chain broke soon after he left the train station and he was forced to walk the rest of the way.
As dawn broke in Dublin the prison authorities raised the alarm and a major manhunt for O’Reilly began. Given the ease of his escape the authorities suspected that collusion might have been a factor. The Irish government offered a reward of £500 for information leading to the capture of O’Reilly, who was described as being 5’11”, weighing 152 lbs and being of slim build with fair hair, blue eyes and a fresh complexion. He was also described as wearing a dark brown suit with red stripes, black shoes and a sports shirt. In a twist to the tale, the reward was claimed by O’Reilly’s father Bernard, and John Francis was rearrested within three hours of arriving back in Kilkee.
O’Reilly’s father applied for the reward and was granted it. Dan Bryan and Minister for Justice Gerald Boland had debated the merits of paying out the reward to him but ultimately they decided to go ahead with it in an effort not to deter public response to the issuing of any further awards. Upon his arrest O’Reilly claimed that his escape was a protest against the unfair conditions in which he was being held. He was interned once again in Arbour Hill, where he would stay until the end of the war.
In 1944, O’Reilly applied to have his espionage money added to his bank account, but it wasn’t given back to him until the end of the war. During his time in Arbour Hill Dr Hayes noted that he felt O’Reilly was ‘a cocky young man who believed that the cipher method in which he had been trained in Germany was impenetrable and he fell for a challenge’. Hayes asked O’Reilly to encipher an unbreakable message, but while O’Reilly was out in the exercise yard Hayes collected the burnt notes that O’Reilly had used for the enciphering process from the grate of his cell. He treated these in the Garda Forensic Laboratory in Kilmainham and mounted them on glass slides.
Using this information Hayes broke the code and duly informed Dan Bryan of his findings. Bryan wrote to Cecil Liddell in London, noting, ‘messages just read, doctor’s notes provided solution’. O’Reilly proved to be a thorn in the side of Hayes, who was unimpressed with the young man’s cockiness and ‘red herrings’. However by the time the war had ended Hayes had identified most of his codes’ secrets and shared these with MI5.
O’Reilly was released from custody on Saturday 12 May 1945, receiving the balance of £96 10s 6d of the money he had on his person when arrested. Unlike the German agents in Athlone, who would be interned for another two years, O’Reilly was released within 24 hours of VE Day. Upon gaining his freedom he travelled to Kilkee, where he received a warm welcome from his family. His father presented him with the reward money and O’Reilly found himself relatively wealthy when he combined this with his espionage money.
In October 1945, he bought the Esplanade Hotel in Dublin and later opened a pub on Parkgate Street, a short distance from Irish Military Intelligence Headquarters on Infirmary Road. The pub was named ‘O’Reilly’s’, but it became colloquially known as ‘the Parachute Bar’, and for many years afterwards O’Reilly himself had the nickname ‘the Parachutist’. He serialised his memoirs in a London newspaper, the Sunday Dispatch, before eventually moving overseas once more. He was alleged to have lived in Nigeria and Lima in Peru, where he was said to have worked as an electrician.
He was also reputed to have worked as a radio operator for the British in Cairo during the 1967 Six-Day War. O’Reilly married shortly after his release and fathered six children. The marriage broke up and the children were taken into care. The body of his wife was found in Hume Street in 18 April 1956, victim of a botched abortion performed by Mary Anne Cadden, who was convicted and sentenced for her murder.
O’Reilly worked abroad for many years before returning to work in the Shannon industrial estate in the early 1960s. He remarried and fathered another child. During his time back in Clare, O’Reilly taught German classes with Clare VEC, and successfully helped attract German Foreign Direct Investment to the Shannon region using his old contacts in Germany. He moved one last time to England, settling in Westminster. At the age of 54 he was seriously injured in a road accident there and died in Middlesex Hospital on 4 May 1971. He was buried in Glasnevin Cemetery in an unmarked grave.
O’Reilly and Kenny’s arrival into Ireland coincided with Hempel’s radio set being confiscated by Capt. John Patrick O’Sullivan. Hempel declined the offer of a new set from Berlin, as he feared that the timing might be seen as an act of provocation, and could lead to an Allied invasion of Ireland. The whole episode had caused consternation in the Dáil, and Deputy James Dillon brought the matter up with the Taoiseach. De Valera gave Dillon a quick summary of the facts relating to O’Reilly and Kenny, hoping to placate the deputy. However, Dillon demanded to know why Germany was sending parachutists into Ireland. De Valera explained to Dillon that he could not discuss the matter in any detail, and refused to acknowledge that Hempel had been questioned about the two parachutists.
Angered by de Valera’s stonewalling, Dillon angrily replied, ‘Good, I’ll give you time to think about it’, before resuming his seat. The O’Reilly and Kenny landings were significant for a number of reasons. Undoubtedly they helped provide G2 and ultimately MI5 with crucial information with regard to the German enciphering systems, and they also marked the end of German agents beings sent to Ireland. However they were more significant in the fact that they highlighted how the Abwehr had faded in stature and had been superseded by the SD. Perhaps most significantly, it is notable how once in Ireland O’Reilly and Kenny made no effort to get in contact with Berlin, perhaps signalling their motives all along may have been simply to try and get a way out of occupied Europe.
O’Reilly and Kenny’s landing in Ireland caused panic within the jails. Görtz and the other prisoners were aware of their arrival as they were able to read news reports in their cells. The prison authorities feared that there would be a prison breakout, and immediately tightened security on the remaining prisoners. In addition to fears of a breakout the authorities also worried that O’Reilly and Kenny would attempt to free the prisoners in Athlone. Such a breakout would have been disastrous, and would have caused huge consternation with the British at such a sensitive time in the war.
The prison governor encouraged informers within the prison to report on any suspicious activity, and the German agents were routinely subjected to cell searches. Two officers arrived in the prison one day and questioned Görtz as to his knowledge of O’Reilly and Kenny. Looking at them incredulously Görtz denied he had any knowledge about the two agents, and berated the officers for thinking he had anything to do with the landing. At this stage the tide in the war had turned. The Normandy landings stretched Hitler’s forces to their absolute limit, and after some resistance the Allied forces made their way to Paris.
The Allies entered the city on 19 August 1944, and following intense fighting, the German Garrison under Gen. Dietrich von Choltitz surrendered the French Capital on 25 August 1944 at the Hôtel Meurice, the newly established headquarters of French Gen. Philippe Leclerc. Parisiens celebrated the liberation their city, which had been under Nazi domination since the signing of the second Compiègne Armistice on 22 June 1940. Hitler had instructed Choltitz that Paris ‘must not fall into the enemy’s hands except lying in complete debris’, ordering Choltitz to bomb and blow up all the city’s bridges, however, Choltitz disobeyed the order, and personally allowed the Allies to take the city without obstruction.
This prevented the French Resistance from engaging in urban warfare, which would have undoubtedly destroyed large parts of the city. With Paris liberated the long march to Berlin soon began. It was the beginning of the end for the German forces, and Görtz and his fellow agents would soon find themselves in the unenviable situation of being jailed in a neutral country with the Allies looking to recall all German agents worldwide to Berlin to begin a process of denazification. As news filtered through on radio stations throughout Ireland about the Allied successes in the war, the German prisoners knew their lives were about to change forever.
In March 1945, the Irish authorities were struck by good fortune when the German submarine U-260 was scuttled approximately 7 km south of the coast of Cork. The U-boat was deliberately sunk after damage suffered from striking a mine which had been laid by the HMS Apollo, a British Abdiel-class minelayer which had taken part in the Normandy landings before being transferred to the British Pacific Fleet. On 7 June 1944 it was used to transport Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower, Naval Commander in Chief Bertram Ramsay and Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery to visit the assault areas. Its role as minelayer was to prove vital in yielding more crucial information from the German forces. U-260’s crew of five officers and 48 sailors were interned until the end of the war.
As the vessel sank beneath the waves of the Celtic Sea, a sealed box containing some of the most closely guarded German war secrets made its way to the surface. In their haste the German crew had failed to adequately sink the metal box, in which numerous papers had been stored. The box was taken under armed escort to G2 headquarters near Arbour Hill. When Dr Hayes examined the box’s contents he could scarcely believe his eyes.
Hayes immediately contacted his superiors to inform them that the box contained the codes and enciphering system of the Kriesgmarine, the German Navy. He began to hurriedly catalogue material and made several observations about the naval code. Hayes noted that the codes were extremely elaborate, and included two substitutions after the original encoding from a code book. He also observed that the substitutions were based on pages of figures and letters which were changed every day. Hayes came to the conclusion that without some good fortune the system was virtually unbreakable, and involved a great deal of work in both encoding and decoding.
In 1940, fragments of decoded messages had been recovered from a crashed German aircraft. Hayes had studied these, and when looking at the naval code ciphers noticed some similarities. He rushed to his notes in an effort to see if a comparison between the two systems could yield any clues. Hayes was able to surmise that the naval code was more sophisticated than the Air Force code, and after studying both systems Hayes came to the conclusion that the naval code system was theoretically close in its make-up to the enciphering system used by Hermann Görtz. The similarity lay in the fact that the process involved substituting letters into numbers and back into letters again. Once Hayes had made his observations G2 contacted MI5 to inform them of their discovery. A cryptographer from Bletchley Park was sent to examine Hayes’s findings, which were later noted to be of huge help to the British authorities.
While he worked on the German naval code Hayes also intercepted a British cipher, which was picked up from a transmission to a resistance group inside Germany in March 1945. The cipher was a double transposition, with each transposition being based on the same keyword. Hayes deduced that the keyword was 31 letters in length. Despite gaining an in-depth knowledge of the cipher, Hayes was unable to say whether or not the cipher was in widespread use by the British. After two days Hayes had broken the cipher, and noted its composition for posterity.
Despite these successes the end of the war in 1945 brought with it a myriad of new problems; chief among these was how to deal with the release of the German spies detained in Athlone, as well as the diplomatic fallout from Ireland’s dealings with the German Minister and his staff in Dublin. The scene was set for the most dramatic turn of events yet.