V
And once there came from out the sky
A most mysterious German spy.
He came not to plunder or to pillage
But said on seeing our sleepy village,
O Gute Nacht Ballivor, Ich werde schlafen Trim.
JOHN QUINN, GOODNIGHT BALLIVOR, I’LL SLEEP IN TRIM (1996)
Francis Stuart’s initial trip to Berlin had re-established contacts between the IRA and Nazi Germany and while the Ryan/Russell affair played out in the city, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris was ultimately able to send over a dozen German spies to Ireland to link with the republican movement and to carry out acts of economic and political sabotage. Another crucial element of their work was to gather weather reports and information relating to the sea conditions, which of course were of huge strategic importance in terms of the plans for Operation Sealion. Despite the significance of the mission, the Abwehr’s first choice of agent was scarcely a top-level spy.
Ernst Weber-Drohl was a former circus strongman and wrestler, and when he was sent to Ireland on board U-37 he was suffering from arthritis. The landing was planned for Killala Bay on the north Mayo coast, but other sites, such as Clew Bay, Dungarvan Bay and a number of sites in Co. Kerry, were also deemed to be suitable.
The northwest coast was selected because the German could be met in an IRA safe house in Sligo town. Weber-Drohl then travelled to Dublin, where he stayed with Jim O’Donovan and helped him establish a cover address in London that the IRA could use for communicating with Germany. Weber-Drohl also made contact with Eduard Hempel at the German Legation, but his stay in Ireland was not to last long – he was soon picked up by the Garda Special Branch working with their colleagues in G2. Weber-Drohl’s time in Ireland up this this point was a complete failure, although he was able to pave the way for the arrival of another spy, codenamed Dr Schmelzer, who, it was hoped, would work as a link man between the IRA and Nazi Germany. ‘Dr Schmelzer’ was Dr Hermann Görtz, the German spy whose mission had coincided with Seán Russell’s arrival in Berlin in May 1940. In a carefully worded secret Abwehr document given to Prof. Carter by O’Donovan, Weber-Drohl outlined to O’Donovan what preparations should be made for his successor’s arrival:
A Dr Schmelzer should come as an American in about a month or so, to Ireland in order to put up a sender [transmitter]. Jim should see, that that man gets a proper room to work in and a good place to put up the sender. Jim should look for a good place to bring this Dr Schmelzer under, so as he will get in no trouble, if possible, Jim should select a few young men to take up and study the Morse code from Dr Schmelzer.
Weber-Drohl was to spend the rest of the war in the internment camp for German prisoners at Custume barracks in Athlone. His presence in Ireland and the furore it raised with G2 and the Gardaí irked Hempel, who warned Berlin that sending any more agents like Weber-Drohl would damage the already delicate diplomatic situation that he found himself in. Little did he know what lay ahead. Hermann Görtz’s time in Ireland was to cause Hempel even further distress.
Hermann Görtz was born in Lübeck, northern Germany in 1890, the fourth of seven children. He was descended from Schleswig peasantry on the maternal side of his family – his mother’s family hailed from East Friesland – and his maternal grandfather was a director of the county court in Lübeck. His paternal grandfather was a merchant in Bremen, and his own father was a solicitor and notary in Lübeck. Görtz received a classical education, graduating with good grades, then studied law at university in Kiel, eventually earning a doctorate in jurisprudence. He married Ellen Aschenborn in 1916 and the couple had three children, Wiebke, Rolf and Ute. Görtz joined the Nazi Party in 1929 and in 1935 made his first forays into the world of espionage by volunteering for the Abwehr as a civilian. His original plan to join the Luftwaffe had been thwarted after he made a false declaration on his application form and he felt that by volunteering to work for the Abwehr he could curry enough favour to get into the Luftwaffe. A somewhat arrogant man, he attempted to use his role as a solicitor and respected member of society to present himself as an attractvive candidate for the air force, but this plan failed. Such an act was indicative of his arrogance given that he had no background in aviation and assumed his good standing in society would be sufficient to get such a role. In the end Görtz was able to gain an introduction to influential officials in the Reichswehr Ministerium (the Ministry of Defence) and an arrangement was made. If he went to England to spy on the RAF this would be used as a lever to get him into the Luftwaffe – provided, of course, his mission was a success.
Görtz travelled to England in 1935 with his typist, the tall and glamorous 19-year-old Marianne Emig, who had been employed in his solicitor’s office. Emig was born in Mainz in 1916 and was 26 years Görtz’s junior. The couple’s mission was to spy on an RAF base in Kent, and they rented a cottage in Broadstairs, near Manston RAF station at Ramsgate. Görtz aimed to collect enough sensitive information to impress his colleagues in the Abwehr, and he hoped this would be enough to get him into the Luftwaffe. Unfortunately, he and Emig stood out to the bemused public and it wasn’t long before the couple raised the suspicions of British airman Kenneth Lewis, whom they had befriended. After a brief trip to Germany, Görtz was arrested at Harwich on suspicion of espionage. His landlady had falsely alerted the police to a burglary, and when his lodgings were raided the police had found incriminating materials, mostly consisting of sketches of Manston RAF base. Görtz’s fate was sealed. He was convicted of espionage and sentenced to four years in prison at the Old Bailey in March 1936. He was released in February 1939, just as the IRA was making its initial contact with the Abwehr. Görtz’s first foray into spying was soon to be followed by an even more unfortunate sequel.
In January 1940, Görtz was selected for deployment to Ireland and to complete Ernst Weber-Drohl’s abortive mission. Sending Görtz at all was a strange decision; having served a prison sentence in England he was, in his own words, ‘already a marked man’. But Görtz was thrilled to be given another opportunity to show his worth to his superiors in the Abwehr. According to an account he gave later:
My mission was from the Operational Department of the Supreme Command and was to be considered as a strategic support to the activity of the German Navy. The southern and western ports of Ireland were denied to the British by neutral Eire and as things were, the Supreme Command were very satisfied with the result. It had no wish to look for a change, and it was impressed upon me that I must avoid everything which could disturb this favourable situation. On the other hand, there was a national revolutionary body in Ireland the IRA which wanted to fight our common enemy. The Supreme Command wished to make use of this situation and to direct all the energies of these Irish national forces to a point where it became strategically important. This point was for us the Northern Irish harbours.
Görtz’s job was to support the navy and help it to prevent the enemy using the northern ports. Görtz, it was hoped, would make contact with the IRA and use them to create instability in Northern Ireland in order to create a bridgehead for an invading German army. He was also tasked with collecting weather reports and general espionage activities. However, there were two fatal flaws in this plan: the IRA had descended into a faction-riven farce that would be completely incapable of mounting an insurrection; and Hermann Görtz himself was not of sound mind. One of the last things he asked for before heading to Ireland was a vial of poison in case he was captured. Remarkably, this didn’t ring any alarm bells with his handlers.
The plan was that Görtz would be parachuted into Northern Ireland, where he could link up with a number of IRA men who were expert in guerrilla warfare. A proposed guerrilla campaign involving Görtz and the IRA would then later be supplemented with arms and men from Germany if the possibility were to present itself.
In reality, the mission was a small sideshow for the Abwehr, but Görtz had a penchant for exaggeration and was determined to make something out of the trust that had been placed in him. It was envisaged that while Germany would try to support the IRA in their fight against the common enemy, it wasn’t in a position to offer any troops to help either Görtz or the IRA. Görtz wasn’t given any specific parameters within which to carry out his mission, but he was given one strict instruction; under no circumstances could he act in any way to cause friction between Germany and the Irish government. Admiral Canaris personally sanctioned Görtz’s mission, but it was kept secret from the rest of the German High Command. Delighted with the opportunity to prove himself to his superiors, Görtz set off for Ireland as Seán Russell was travelling to Berlin.
Hermann Görtz left Jever airfield in southern Germany on 5 May 1940, bound for Ireland. After passing unobserved over British airspace – thanks to cloud cover – and entering Irish airspace, he hoped to parachute from the plane and land on farmland in County Tyrone. The farm, which he himself had selected, straddled the border with County Monaghan and the secluded area would provide Görtz with a soft landing. Then he hoped to be picked up by sympathetic republicans. Laragh Castle in County Wicklow, the home of Francis Stuart, was a back-up location should his drop be unsuccessful, but for political reasons he was advised to avoid using this option if at all possible.
Unfortunately for Görtz, the plane, a Heinkel, became hopelessly lost. He and the pilot, Karl Eduard Gartenfeld, knew they were over Ireland, but had no clue exactly where. Görtz had prepared two parachutes for the drop, one for himself and the other for his AFU wireless broadcasting radio. Görtz was to leave the aircraft first, then the pilot would drop the transmitter; but because it was so much lighter it drifted to the ground much more slowly and Görtz never retrieved it.
In reality Görtz was far from Tyrone; he had actually been dropped over the sleepy village of Ballivor in County Meath. As he parachuted gently to the ground in full Luftwaffe uniform, believing – or hoping – that he was landing in Northern Ireland, Görtz felt confident that his outfit would protect him from any ill treatment by the British. He was also carrying papers legitimising him as an officer of the Luftwaffe. Without his radio set and with no food, he found himself lost in the Irish countryside, where he was soon accosted by a pair of local farmers. After gaining his bearings he headed off into the night towards Laragh, where he hoped to find safe lodgings from which he could contact the IRA. However, it wasn’t long before his incompetence had raised the suspicions of G2 and the Irish security services, who made him their number one target.
After many trials and tribulations, Görtz made his way to Francis Stuart’s house in Wicklow, where he was taken in by Stuart’s wife, Iseult, and her mother, Maud Gonne. Iseult went to Switzer’s clothing store in Dublin to buy Görtz a suit and some clothes, but this gesture was to prove his undoing. The manager of the store became suspicious that Iseult was buying men’s clothes when it was common knowledge that her husband was in Berlin, and he notified the Gardaí, who passed the information to G2. G2 already suspected that a parachutist had entered Ireland illegally because postal censors had intercepted postcards that Görtz had sent to his family in Germany.
In his new civilian clothes, which he hoped would help him blend in, Görtz went to stay with Jim O’Donovan, who was to introduce him to Acting Chief of Staff Stephen Hayes and other members of the IRA. After a period at O’Donovan’s house in Shankill, County Dublin, Görtz was moved between a number of houses on Dublin’s southside, including addresses in Rathmines and Donnybrook, during which time he met with Stephen Hayes. The meeting didn’t go well, and neither man made a good impression on the other. Hayes grossly overexaggerated the IRA’s capabilities, while Görtz found Hayes to be lacking any sort of leadership qualities.
At Görtz’s request, an IRA team was sent to Carbury bog in County Kildare to retrieve his – missing – transmitter and parachutes, which he had hastily buried. However, gardaí had found one of the parachutes and had immediately briefed G2. Hayes and Görtz arranged to meet again, this time at the house of an IRA sympathiser with German origins, Stephen Carroll-Held, in Templeogue, but Garda Special Branch had already begun to close in on both men. Acting on intelligence from MI5 via the Dublin link, which had been monitoring Carroll-Held and his mistress, G2 was able to ascertain the time and location of the meeting and make plans to apprehend those in attendance. The British contacted Dan Bryan because Liam Archer was on sick leave at a spa in Droitwich in Worcestershire, suffering with rheumatism in his leg. In his absence, Bryan was Acting Chief of Intelligence.
Bryan had his own suspicions that Carroll-Held’s house in Templeogue was being used for illicit purposes. An army officer had told Bryan that he had been approached by a businessman living near Carroll-Held’s house who said that he felt something suspicious was happening at the property. He told the officer that he was unable to get a radio signal on his FM radio, which he owned for private use. It was discovered that an illegal wireless being operated in the back garden of Carroll-Held’s house was in effect blocking the radio signals for all other frequencies in the area, and it transpired that the IRA had provided the transmitter for Görtz to use during his stay. This information, coupled with the MI5 intelligence, gave Bryan and G2 enough information to pass on to the Gardaí, who would carry out a raid on the house. With the plan in place, Bryan settled into bed.
Bryan awoke in the middle of the night to a phone call confirming his suspicion that a spy had landed in Ireland. The Irish authorities would have to act quickly to catch Görtz, but they had the element of surprise on their side. Bryan recalled the phone call in an interview with Prof. Eunan O’Halpin years later:
The Görtz case as far as I was concerned opened by getting a phone call sometime in the very early hours of the morning. I can’t say the date – but it is 1940. The phone call was to go to the house of a person of German origin, but possibly Irish nationality called Held. His father had been a real German. Held’s mother was Irish. Once the house was reached it was obvious that a lot of material which it took some time to examine was in the house.
Garda Special Branch had raided the house at 10 p.m. the night before and had broken into a locked room. An officer immediately contacted Bryan to let him know what they had found. Bryan made his way to the house in Templeogue and, on arriving, he discovered Luftwaffe and Nazi paraphernalia, a significant sum of money, and maps that contained military and geographical information on Ireland. Bryan was informed that Görtz and Carroll-Held had been out for a walk during the raid and while Carroll-Held had been arrested on his return, Görtz had escaped into the night. The material found during the raid, coupled with material containing Luftwaffe logos retrieved from Carbury bog, confirmed G2’s suspicions that there was an illegal parachutist on the loose in Ireland. Bryan was also horrified to discover documents containing veiled references to Hempel at the German Legation in the house.
Bryan immediately took the documents to Garda headquarters to have photostatic copies made of them, but the machine was cumbersome and the gardaí inexperienced in using it, and it was taking longer than he hoped. If word reached government officials that a German spy had evaded capture, it could have a disastrous impact on security arrangements and particularly on Irish relations with the British. Bryan arranged an emergency meeting with Minister for Defence Oscar Traynor to brief him on the raid. Traynor contacted Minister for Justice Gerald Boland, who arranged for the photostat process to be speeded up and for the documents to be sent to him immediately.
As soon as the documents were copied, Bryan hurriedly took them to the Army Chief of Staff Dan McKenna and briefed him on the deteriorating security situation caused by Görtz’s arrival. Then he went to Dublin Castle to brief Garda Commissioner Michael Kinnane, and then to the Department of External Affairs, where he had a hastily arranged meeting with Assistant Secretary General Frederick Boland. (The Secretary General himself was in London.) Bryan stressed the need to act quickly as rumours were already circulating around the city. The British were bound to hear about what had happened, but he was keen to make sure that they didn’t receive a distorted version of events, which could perhaps provoke them into unnecessary action. Bryan stressed to Boland the need to inform the British of exactly what had happened in relation to the raid on Carroll-Held’s house and the suspicion that a parachutist had successfully evaded the Coast Watching Service, entering the country without their knowledge. Bryan supplied Boland with copies of all the documents that had been seized in the raid and instructed him to forward them to his counterparts in England. As Bryan returned anxiously to his home in Ballsbridge, and Boland rushed the copied documents to British representatives in Dublin, Görtz was on the run. Over the next few days he made his way through ditches and fields back to Laragh Castle, surviving only on wild berries.
Early the next morning Bryan was awoken by another phone call, this time from Frederick Boland in the Department of External Affairs. Boland asked Bryan for a second set of the copied documents to keep at the Department of External Affairs, and a messenger took another set of copies to Dún Laoghaire, where they were put on the next boat to Holyhead. Cecil Liddell arranged for a messenger to collect the documents from Holyhead and they were ferried to MI5 in London.
Of course, news of a German spy spread through Dublin like wildfire and, despite the government’s intention not to comment on an ongoing security issue, the matter was raised in the Dáil. In a meeting of the Finance Committee on 15 May 1940, Fine Gael TD Patrick Belton joked about it in an exchange with Fianna Fáil TD and future President of Ireland Erskine Childers: ‘Deputy Childers spoke in very general terms. I was waiting to see if he would come down to earth. He did not, because, I suppose, like the parachutist, he did not know where he was going to land.’ The affair of the mysterious parachutist was splashed across the local papers, and a statement was made in error in the Dáil that the documents recovered contained an invasion plan for Ireland. Public fear that Ireland could be adversely affected by the war was at an all-time high. The government would have to act quickly to assuage the sense of apprehension that spread over the country.
Meanwhile, the Liddell brothers were visiting Liam Archer at the spa in Droitwich. Guy, who at this stage had risen to be the third most senior officer in MI5, tried to suss out from Archer Irish attitudes to German invasion and whether the Irish would support the British or resist them. Archer flew back to Northern Ireland with British Brigadier Dudley Clarke and on to Dublin, where they attended meetings with de Valera and the Cabinet. Clarke’s mission and the subsequent British–Irish meetings appear to have led to many new security arrangements, including greater information-sharing between Dublin and London. Guy Liddell recorded the meeting with Archer in his diary on 15 May 1940, clearly highlighting the British position:
I arrived at Droitwich about five o’clock and found Colonel Liam Archer at his clinic. We told him that although it was our original intention to discuss particular cases, recent events in Holland had very much brought home to us the dangers of something similar happening in Eire. There was this probability which had a certain amount of supporting evidence. Archer said that as far as he could see there was nothing to prevent the Germans landing in Eire and he did not see how any resistance could be maintained for more than a week. Archer seemed to think that if the Germans landed in Eire there would be general resentment and a certain amount of resistance, but he thought there might be quite a number of people who would say ‘Oh, well, they are here in force, we can’t do anything about it’ and be prepared just to accept the situation. He was quite emphatic that Eire would be thinking about her independence and that many people would not mind Great Britain getting a licking.
With Archer back in Dublin, attention turned to locating Görtz. The trial of Stephen Carroll-Held, who had been arrested and charged after the raid on his house, garnered more information on the Germans’ intentions for Ireland. He was eventually sentenced to five years’ imprisonment for his involvement in the Görtz affair, while Iseult Stuart, who herself had also been arrested as part of the hunt for Görtz, was acquitted after a two-day trial, despite the fact that she was clearly guilty of harbouring Görtz. Following Carroll-Held’s arrest a series of raids were carried out and 400 IRA men and people thought to be politically suspect were detained. Many of them were placed in makeshift internment camps, including the camp at Custume barracks. While this was happening, de Valera made an appeal to Irishmen to join the army to defend the country from attackers from all quarters:
I’m sure the deputies will have seen the statements I have recently made on the dangers that threaten our country. These dangers are now obvious and I only refer to them now that the Dáil and the country may see the urgent necessity for the defence measure which the government is taking. The reservists of the regular army and the first line volunteers are all being called to the colours. A campaign to call thousands more volunteers to the army will at once be undertaken. Those who are willing to give their services to the nation are being registered at once so as to be called up for training the moment we can take them. In view of the dangers that confront us I am sure all our people will be united as one man behind the government, ready to face aggression from whatever quarter it may come.
At the same time, Hempel alerted Berlin that news of the raid on Carroll-Held’s house was making headlines across the world and had even been reported in the Washington press. Hempel was keen to avoid any association with Görtz due to the precarious position he found himself in diplomatically.
In the aftermath of the Carroll-Held raid, G2 was able to study some of the material found during the search of the premises, in particular the transmitter and a series of coded messages that Görtz had left behind. The transmitter had been made by a soft-spoken civil servant from County Louth, Anthony (Tony) Deery, to replace the one Görtz had lost parachuting from the Heinkel. Deery, a Post Office telegraphist, was to function as Görtz’s radio operator to enable him to communicate with German High Command. The homemade transmitter was similar to the models used by Irish Lights, the oversight body for Irish lighthouses. Bryan had received an earlier tip-off about an IRA attempt to source a similar model from an Irish Lights employee in County Wicklow, so he was familiar with the type found in the Carroll-Held raid. He had sent Commandant Nelligan of the signals section of G2 to deal with the Wicklow transmitter:
Görtz then was after the IRA to get transmitters, radio communications and the IRA found they had a friend, a transmitter on one of the Irish Lights’ vessels. They went to this fellow and asked him could he provide them with a transmitter or could he do something and he said he could. He lived in the town of Wicklow next door to a policeman. The Irish Lights were actually controlled, they still are, by the British government. They’re a kind of semi-state service. The Garda regarded this man as kind of a member of the establishment. I sent Commander Nelligan with them to raid this fellow’s place. They had the authority to go and raid the place and the Garda that lived next door said ‘Oh, he’s a very respectable man. He’s employed by Irish Lights. He’s spending so many days on the ship and then so many ashore, and all that kind of thing. There couldn’t be anything wrong with him. He lives next door to me. He’s a highly respectable man.’ But when Nelligan and the others went up they found he was trying to bring transmitters too.
The transmitter fiasco showed that the IRA was far from an efficient organisation. Bryan correctly surmised that the transmitter that Deery had constructed for Carroll-Held and Görtz could have been put together by anyone with even a passing interest in electronics and a basic competency as an electrician. The fact that the IRA would go to the bother and jeopardy of sourcing one from Wicklow was evidence of how haphazardly it was operating. The IRA had trouble constructing the transmitter themselves because it needed to source special amplifier tubes. This was hugely sensitive – even being seen to purchase them would have been highly suspicious and would have drawn too much attention to whoever made the purchase, even more so following the restrictions and rationing that had been brought in as part of the Emergency Powers Act.
The Carroll-Held raid also shed light on how the Germans were planning to keep their communications with Görtz secret. The Gardaí had confiscated handwritten notes written in code by Görtz which outlined much of the intent behind his mission. Görtz had been entrusted with a very special coding mechanism for enciphering his messages which was Russian in origin but which had been put to special use by the Germans during the war. Indeed, such was the secretive nature of the code that only Görtz had been trusted with using it for his mission. The coding mechanism was extremely intricate, consisting of a polyalphabetic substitution cipher. Crucially, it was later learned, Görtz had memorised the keyword used for deciphering the methods in an effort to thwart the Irish authorities.
As G2 was learning more about the as yet unidentified parachutist, Görtz had successfully trekked back to Laragh Castle, where he was dismayed to find that Iseult Stuart had been arrested. He was greeted at the castle by Helena Moloney, who arranged for him to be taken back to Jim O’Donovan’s house in Shankill. Moloney, who was born in Dublin in 1883, came to prominence through her work as an actress, republican, trade unionist and feminist. She had been active in the 1916 Rising and was involved in the same unit of the Irish Citizens Army as fellow Abbey Theatre actor Sean Connolly. The group were active on Easter Monday in the vicinity of Dublin Castle, where Connolly is said to have fired the first shot of the Rising, killing DMP Constable James O’Brien. Moloney first became acquainted with Maud Gonne through the Women’s Prisoners’ Defence League, the People’s Rights Association and the Anti-Partition League. A lifelong advocate of militant Irish republicanism, she was one of many women to harbour the fugitive Nazi spy. As Görtz disappeared into the ether, moving from safe house to safe house in the dead of night, G2 was busy combing the country for any clue that would lead them to the elusive parachutist.
The Görtz affair was compounded by the arrival of new Abwehr spies in June 1940. Walter Simon, travelling under the alias Karl Anderson, arrived in Ireland on 12 June by U-boat, landing in County Kerry. After rowing to shore on Minard beach he made his way to Dingle, the nearest town, and after an alcohol-fuelled tirade in what is today known as Neligan’s pub he went to Tralee, where he boarded a train to Dublin. Simon had attracted so much attention that concerned locals had reported him to the Gardaí and he was apprehended by Special Branch detectives when he arrived at Knightsbridge (Heuston) Station in Dublin. He was convicted in the Special Criminal Court under emergency legislation and interned in Custume barracks until the end of the war. The spy who would follow him on 25 June caused considerably more trouble.
While Simon was something of an opportunist, Wilhelm Preetz was a committed Nazi, having joined the party in 1933, and he was only 34 years of age when he arrived in Ireland. At five feet nine inches, with a slender build and light blond hair, he blended in well, but this was not the only reason he was chosen as an agent. He had visited Ireland before, and had married an Irishwoman, Sally Reynolds from Tuam in County Galway, in 1932. Preetz had a mail-order business in Bremen and in January 1939 was selected to go to Ireland under the pretext of selling two newly acquired lines of merchandise (cameras and dental equipment). While the Abwehr provided him with no actual training, it hoped that he would be able to gather crucial weather reports and garner information on troop movements in Northern Ireland. He was given a transmitter to send information back to Germany once he was able to do so.
Preetz was briefed for his mission in Gestapo headquarters in Berlin by his superior officer, Fritz Schmidt, and was given foreign currency by the Bremen Chamber of Commerce at the Gestapo’s behest, on the condition that he obtain information for them in Ireland. The Abwehr also instructed Preetz to ascertain the attitude of Irish people towards Hitler and the war and towards the IRA. Preetz compiled a 25-page report on his observations and furnished his Abwehr handlers with it. Delighted by what they saw, they decided to send Preetz back to Ireland for a second mission, but this time they entrusted him with some more specific tasks.
Preetz was asked to go to Dublin to find out all he could about the Vickers Aircraft Company’s operations in Ireland, specifically whether Vickers was building aircraft parts in or near Baldonnel and to find out if an aircraft factory was under construction at Baldonnel airport in west Dublin. Vickers was the primary supplier of aircraft and armaments to the RAF and any information on them was of huge interest to the Abwehr. Preetz was also to travel to Kilkishen in west Clare to find out whether an arms factory was being constructed there and, if so, when construction had begun; and to Collinstown near Dublin to find out if work on the aerodrome had started and how long the construction process had been going on. While he was in Ireland it was also expected that he would locate and document as many suitable emergency landing fields as possible. Preetz returned from his mission via Antwerp as a stowaway on a ship, arriving back in Bremen on 6 December 1939. He met his handlers and gave them an oral report on his activities in Ireland. While his mission was largely unsuccessful, he had managed to record a number of landing sites for the Abwehr; however, these turned out to be a number of well-known airports. Despite his lack of success, it was decided to send Preetz back to Ireland for a third time. Neither party suspected that it would be his final trip.
The Abwehr summoned Preetz to Hamburg in January 1940 to meet some officers from Berlin. It was initially planned to train him in the use of explosives and chemicals, but when he refused, they trained him to use a wireless transmitter. Preetz didn’t take to the training and the Abwehr realised that he couldn’t be trusted with such a mission. In the end, it was decided to send him to Ireland after all – his fluent English and familiarity with Ireland would be useful – but alternative arrangements would be made to operate the transmitter. Preetz was tasked with installing a radio transmitting set in a secret location in Dublin, where he would be joined by a trained operator to help communicate back to Berlin. He was also asked to find a trustworthy Irishman to help him. In the months leading up to his departure in June 1940 he was trained at a farm outside Berlin in how to install the transmitter.
Preetz was to be paid £520 for his trip and was reimbursed £30 he had borrowed from his in-laws on a previous trip. He would also receive a monthly payment of £350, which would be forwarded to his wife in Bremen. Preetz gave the Abwehr three addresses in Ireland where they could contact him if wireless contact failed: the Ormond Hotel on Ormond Quay; the Dublin Hibernian Hotel; and a sweet shop at 32 Park Street. In early June 1940, the final preparations were put in place for Preetz’s mission, and the transmitter was delivered to his lodgings on 11 June. Preetz took the afternoon train to Wilhelmshaven, where he was met by a naval lieutenant and escorted to a hotel. The next morning, he was taken by car to a submarine that had been loaded with his transmitter and supplies. The U-boat sank beneath the surface of the North Sea and made its way to Ireland with Preetz on board later that night.
On the night of 25/6 June, Preetz’s U-boat surfaced near the Irish coast at Minard, near Dingle, much the same location as where Walter Simon’s U-boat had arrived a fortnight earlier. Once on land, Preetz buried his transmitter, hitched a ride from a local farmer in the back of a cattle truck and made his way to Tralee, from where he took a taxi to Limerick. He stayed in Limerick for one night in a hotel paid for out of his spy money and then took the next bus to Dublin. Before he left Limerick, he visited a local department store and bought a suit and aftershave. On arriving in Dublin, he contacted a man named Joe Donohue, a native of Tuam, whom he had met on previous trips to Ireland and whom he trusted. He hoped that Donohue would be able to operate the wireless transmitter for him. The two men bought a second-hand car and Preetz drove back to Dingle two weeks later to dig up the wireless transmitter that he had buried on the beach at Minard. He was relieved to find it was still there and intact. With the radio set in the back of his car he returned to Dublin and set it up at a property at 23 Westland Row, from where he hoped to begin broadcasts back to Germany.
In order to code his messages Preetz was given a particularly detailed method of communicating with his handlers. He had an agreed number – the number 10 – which he would add to the date of any given day. The total would indicate a page in the book Hide in the Dark by Francis Noyes Hart. The first three letters of the page would serve as the call letters for both parties in any communications. Once both parties were satisfied the line was secure, messages would be broadcast in Morse code over a high frequency.
Preetz’s lifestyle in Dublin proved to be his downfall. His flash lifestyle and dubious contacts soon brought him to the attention of Dan Bryan, Liam Archer and G2, who had been monitoring him on his previous trips to Ireland. His house in Westland Row was also put under radio surveillance by a number of G2 men in the Signals Corps. Bryan and Archer also detailed Luke Patrick Smith, one of their most trusted men, to keep an eye on Preetz’s radio traffic and to observe him from a distance and make a note of anyone visiting the house.
Smith was born in Dublin in 1901 and joined the IRA after the Easter Rising. During the War of Independence, he served as an IRA assistant company quartermaster and was involved in an IRA attack on British forces on Terenure Road, Dublin in January 1921. He was a close confidant of IRA Director of Intelligence Michael Collins, who initiated him into the world of intelligence-gathering and surveillance, and was frequently photographed alongside him. During the Truce period Smith continued his IRA service and joined the National Army on 21 July 1922 following the outbreak of the Civil War. Smith took part in the fighting at the Four Courts at the outbreak of the Civil War in late June/early July 1922 and served throughout the remainder of the conflict before being demobilised on 7 March 1924.
After the Civil War Luke Smith resumed his role as a second-class library assistant with the National Library, a role he first took up on 1 January 1921. He had previously worked at the library as a boy attendant prior to the outbreak of hostilities against the British in 1916. Through his civilian work Smith became friendly with the director, Dr Richard Hayes. Like Hayes, Archer and Bryan, he was seconded back into the National Army via the Department of Defence at the outbreak of the war. Once back in the army, Smith was reacquainted with his old colleague Dan Bryan, with whom he had worked closely in the war against the British. Smith married Mary Anne Smith, known affectionately as Molly, and after living in various places in the city, the couple settled in Belton Park Avenue on Dublin’s north side.
Smith was tasked with monitoring radio traffic in the city and reporting any illicit findings to his superior officers. His eldest son, Luke Jr, a former director of news at RTÉ and one of the inaugural class of studio trainees at the state broadcaster in 1961, recalled his father ‘retiring to the attic to listen to football matches in England. It wasn’t till we were much older that we realised that he was actually listening to radio traffic and keeping an ear out for German broadcasts.’ Smith also monitored Preetz’s house and on one occasion encouraged Luke Jr to go to the door and knock and ask ‘if this is the house with the apples for sale. Of course, there were no apples for sale and I got the door slammed in my face.’ It was all a ruse, of course; Luke Sr would get a good look at who answered the door and make a note of it for a larger intelligence file on the residence, which he would later forward to Bryan and his superior officers in G2 HQ at the Red House. All of this helped build a very detailed security picture, which was further bolstered by the British, who were also monitoring the airwaves. Luke Smith Sr died on 25 January 1977 and was said to have been on active service until that day. His expertise had been sought on numerous occasions in relation to Northern Ireland and emergence of the Provisional IRA.
MI5 had also been keeping tabs on wireless broadcasts from Ireland and were soon alerted to illicit broadcasts coming from Dublin via Group 1, the radio security service used for monitoring suspected Abwehr wireless traffic intercepted on monitored frequencies. Guy Liddell noted the intercept in his diary on 27 July 1940 and subsequently made contact with Archer and Bryan about it:
A Group 1 message has been intercepted between Ireland and Germany and refers to a man named Donohue, presumably a German agent, who is coming over here in the course of the next few days. A new branch has been formed in the office called the O Branch, which is to deal with organisation. I should have a lot to do.
During his time in Ireland Preetz had made friends with an Italian national named Staffieri, who soon joined him and Donohue in their illicit dealings. The trio later purchased a flashy Austin car and rented rooms in Great George’s Street for partying and entertaining women. They also rented an address on Parkgate, which they were unaware was just a few doors up the street from the Red House, Irish Military Intelligence HQ. In August Preetz upgraded his car to a Chrysler, which didn’t go unnoticed by his neighbours on Westland Row. At this stage he was attracting a lot of attention and it wasn’t long before G2 put his apartment under 24-hour surveillance. His whirlwind few months in Ireland finally came to an end when he and Donohue were arrested outside their flat on 26 August. When G2 searched the flat they found his transmitter and various other spying materials such as a Morse key and numerous enciphered documents. Among this treasure trove of illegal material were coded requests from the Abwehr for Preetz to find out information on troop movements in Northern Ireland as well as shipping traffic between Ireland and England. Bryan and G2, it seemed, had acted in the nick of time.
Archer wrote to Guy Liddell to tell him that Preetz had been apprehended and the wireless set found. Liddell correctly concluded that Joe Donohue was the Donohue mentioned in the broadcast whom they had intercepted the previous month and about which they had alerted G2. Archer decided to make a full study of the wireless set, to interrogate both Preetz and Donohue and to provide a report to Liddell on the findings. Richard Hayes was called on to carry out both tasks. Hayes was unimpressed with Preetz, whom he found an uncompromising and arrogant man, and not a very intelligent one at that. Donohue, it was felt, was simply going along with Preetz, but it was noted that he was extremely anti-British and was an ardent supporter of Nazi Germany.
After G2 had obtained information from Preetz on his coding methods, he was sent to the internment camp for German prisoners at Custume barracks in Athlone, but to Archer and Bryan’s shock, the authorities were instructed not to charge Donohue and to release him immediately. The directive came directly from Minister for Justice Gerald Boland and G2’s protests were to no avail. Privately G2 believed that Donohue had got off because of his links to Fianna Fáil in Galway. Bryan felt that the release didn’t matter in the long run as Donohue wasn’t a major player in the German espionage network. Speaking to Prof. Carter in her taped conversations, Bryan revealed that when Donohue tried to relocate to England, G2 alerted the British about his past activities:
But the thing about it was the authorities here released Donohue from internment, probably the Department of Justice said he was of no importance, he was only with Preetz. We wouldn’t have done that kind of thing, after a period. And then Donohue went off to work in England, having nothing to do here, and by some process, he probably talked in England. The British authorities picked Donohue up in England and said, ‘Oh you were the one who was in western Ireland with this man Preetz’ and interned him in England. I mean he was an idiot to go to England, but the Gardaí and the Department of Justice acted very much on their own accord and didn’t understand the international situation. They didn’t keep Donohue for the whole war and after a year or two they let him out.
After dealing with Preetz and Donohue, G2 and the Gardaí turned their attention to Staffieri and the rest of the duo’s Italian accomplices. Working in conjunction with the Department of External Affairs, raids were carried out among the Italian community living in Dublin to root out any supporters of Preetz who might have slipped through the net.
Having successfully apprehended the Italian nationals who had been working alongside Preetz and Donohue, G2’s energies turned back to Hermann Görtz, who had all but disappeared following the raid on Stephen Carroll-Held’s house in Templeogue. Tracing Görtz and incarcerating him was becoming more and more of an issue as the days and months of 1940 went by. Ireland’s policy of neutrality was coming under greater scrutiny from all quarters. Little did de Valera, Bryan and G2 know that Ireland would soon suffer death and destruction at the hands of Göring’s dreaded Luftwaffe. De Valera thought that he had until this point spared the country from the horrors of the war, but he would learn to his cost that no country was safe from the destruction of Hitler’s forces.