Decoding the IRA (14 page)

From the late 1920s on, the IRA adopted left wing policies (ranging from the nationalisation of the banks to free secondary education and support for trade unions) and publicly associated itself with organisations aligned with the Soviet Union. However, the encrypted documents in this book show that the IRA's clandestine relationship with the Soviet Union was utilitarian and not ideologically based.
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This relationship was overseen by Twomey and Cooney and based on the financial and military needs of the IRA. There is no evidence that the republican socialists played any significant role in the alliance. In 1927, when Twomey proposed that he should go to Moscow to negotiate improved funding, he recommended that Seán Russell and not Peadar O'Donnell accompany him. In the encrypted correspondence, Twomey and Cooney fail to express any left-wing sympathy, aside for some anti-imperialist sentiment. The only (rather unimportant) references to O'Donnell in cipher are in connection with contacts with the Chinese nationalist representative in London. On the other hand, the apolitical Seán Russell figures relatively prominently. To a certain extent, O'Donnell's role in the IRA could be viewed as that of an ideological fig leaf – plus he happened to be a good newspaper editor to boot!

Peadar O'Donnell was most likely a member of the Army Council during this period.
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However, it's difficult to be sure what letter from the alphabet was his alias, though review of the council's minutes presents considerable circumstantial evidence that he was likely ‘D'. Some of the evidence is as follows. Just as O'Donnell was known to play a leading part in the Army Council's political initiatives, ‘D' proposed the formation of a ‘civilian Revolutionary Movement' and along with Twomey developed
a draft constitution for the movement.
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On 17 February 1927 the Army Council asked ‘D' to look into arrangements for IRA men to volunteer to fight in China, and the following day Twomey reported that
‘Peadar O'D'
had a letter for the Chinese representative in London.
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It is also known that O'Donnell helped draw up and promote the plan for a republican election pact in 1927, and similarly ‘D' is reported in the minutes to have been prominently involved, along with Moss Twomey and Andy Cooney.
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Seán Russell was the archetypical IRA militarist and admitted ‘he had no liking for political parties'.
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A Dubliner, he joined the Irish Volunteers on their inception in 1913 and, rising through the ranks, he was appointed the IRA's director of munitions in 1920. By 1927 he was quartermaster general and continued in that position until 1936.
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One veteran remembered him as ‘very sincere, but not so easy to get on with. You would not open up to him readily, nor he to you'.
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Tony Woods of Dublin alluded to similar characteristics but was more critical: ‘I never liked him very much. I don't know why. I had no reason not to like him except that I though he was a devious person, quiet and absolutely ruthless.'
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Seán MacBride disliked Russell and accused him of being overly secretive and of controlling ‘an organisation within an organisation'.
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George Gilmore claimed that Twomey kept a firm hand on him and didn't seem to take him seriously.
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Some of these reminiscences may have been influenced by Russell's subsequent disastrous takeover of the IRA in 1938.

It's clear from these papers and from other evidence that Russell was a powerful and influential figure within the IRA. In June of 1925 he was a member of the delegation that travelled to Moscow to solicit support and weaponry. In 1927 Twomey proposed that he should again accompany him to Moscow, and the same year Cooney suggested that he should visit America with him as part of a fundraising tour. Russell's responsibilities were key to the military plans of the organisation, and he ran an efficient network for the importation of explosives from Britain. His contacts were such that he felt that he could retrieve a cache of explosives captured by the customs in Dublin
‘without trouble'
.
⁹⁹

Russell appears to have been given the designation ‘E' in the Army
Council minutes. In 1926 ‘E' advocated attacks in Britain as a way to focus international attention on the IRA's struggle, rather than have the Irish question relegated to that of a ‘domestic wrangle'.
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This is similar to the position adopted by Russell in 1939 when he organised a bombing campaign in England. In 1927, ‘E' was the sole member of the Council who objected to the formation of ‘a civilian Revolutionary Movement' to promote public support of the IRA.
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This was also consistent with Russell's viewpoint.

Another militarist was George Plunkett, the brother of the executed 1916 leader, Joseph Mary Plunkett and the son of the Sinn Féin politician, Count Plunkett. He was a member of the GHQ staff and held similar views to Russell, whom he supported.
¹⁰²

Seán MacBride was also attached to the headquarters staff. Like Twomey he was a ‘centrist' and was to become one of his closest collaborators. He was likely appointed adjutant general in the late 1920s and in 1936 he was briefly chief of staff following Twomey's arrest.
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MacBride was born in Paris in 1904, and despite his relative youth (he was almost ten years younger than most of the other senior IRA leaders) he commanded respect and authority.
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He was intelligent, educated, well spoken and of an impeccable republican pedigree; his (alcoholic and abusive) father, John, an IRB man, had been one of the martyrs of 1916 and his mother, Maud Gonne MacBride (the beauty who inspired Yeats), worked tirelessly on behalf of republican prisoners throughout the 1920s. In January 1926, he married ‘Kid' Bulfin and they moved to Paris, where as a freelance journalist he wrote a number of articles for the
Herald Tribune
.

In Paris he was subjected to British secret service surveillance and he became aware that they were opening his correspondence. Additionally the IRA OC in Britain warned Twomey:
‘I have received information from two different sources that Seán is under close observation over there.'
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Living abroad, he continued to work for the IRA and was in regular communication with GHQ. In September 1926 he sent back papers for Art O'Connor of Sinn Féin along with ‘1,000 rounds of .45 ammunition'.
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Such was MacBride's stature within the IRA, that following Moss Twomey's arrest in November 1926, Andy Cooney sent him
a telegram requesting his return to Ireland.
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On his return he went on to resume his law studies, write for
An Phoblacht
and helped manage the jam factory that his mother and her companion Charlotte Despard had founded.
¹⁰⁸

MacBride travelled extensively throughout Europe – sometimes on the pretext of purchasing supplies and equipment for the jam factory – with his own selection of false passports.
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He was fluent in French and even spoke English with a French accent. He seemed to have a natural affinity for undercover work and ‘Peadar O'Donnell considered that MacBride shone in liaison with continental revolutionaries. He enjoyed being abroad and gave a good impression of the Irish movement.'
¹¹⁰
Interestingly, he failed to mention his clandestine Soviet contacts in his posthumously published memoirs.

In his encrypted correspondence MacBride used a fifteen-letter keyword (or keyphrase), the longest used in these documents. This would have made decryption without the keyword more difficult. The keywords used by other IRA officers averaged twelve letters (ranging from six to thirteen letters, with one of fourteen letters). The documents show MacBride to have had a sophisticated understanding of communications security. Aside from using a long and obscure keyword, he used a key that was not shared with other IRA communications networks, the key was not listed on any of the master lists that James and I reviewed, and MacBride also on occasion took the precaution of asking Twomey and Frank Kerlin to destroy his message after they had read it.
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In these documents there's considerable evidence that MacBride was known by the pseudonym ‘Mr Ambrose'. Some of the evidence is as follows. In 1924–5 Seán MacBride was asked to investigate the whereabouts of a substantial sum of IRA money that had been set aside for arms purchases in Germany and had ‘disappeared' – possibly into the personal bank account of Robert Briscoe, who purchased weapons for the IRA in the Anglo-Irish and Civil Wars.
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Coincidentally in early 1926 ‘Ambrose' wrote a letter to the chief of staff detailing the loss of several thousand pounds in transactions involving Briscoe.
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Just as MacBride was known to be living in Paris in 1926, the contact addresses for ‘Ambrose' in the IRA's communication log book were in Paris.
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In September 1927 the
IRA OC in Britain asked that ‘Ambrose' go over to Amsterdam to meet a Russian agent; however, Moss Twomey wrote back:
‘Ambrose is not available.'
And at this time Seán MacBride was one of the few IRA senior officers in jail, aside from George Gilmore (who doesn't fit the profile for ‘Ambrose').
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The IRA and republican women

The IRA's attitude to women reflected the beliefs of Irish society at the time. Though the IRA was heavily dependent on women in auxiliary roles – as nurses, couriers, informants, running call houses and safe houses, and providing support for prisoners – women were barred from becoming members. At its best the republican attitude was paternalistic and there was a reluctance to accept women as leaders – even in the political arena. For instance, in 1922 Joe McGarrity, the leading IRA supporter in America, requested that a ‘really competent' man and specifically not a woman, be sent over from Ireland as a republican representative.
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In contrast, the many socialist and communist groupings in Ireland were more ready to accept women in leadership roles. Maud Gonne, Charlotte Despard and Hanna Sheehy Skeffington (along with Peadar O'Donnell) were all on the executive committee of the Irish section of the Soviet-sponsored Workers' International Relief.
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However, there were a significant number of talented (and even extraordinary) women who were staunch republicans, many of whom were also socialists. Countess Markievicz was a prominent member of the socialist Irish Citizen Army, fought in the 1916 Easter Rising and in 1918 was the first woman elected to the British House of Commons. In 1926 she was one of the few republican women who went on to join Fianna Fáil. Mary MacSwiney was a leading member of Sinn Féin and was elected to the Second Dáil; she distinguished herself as one of the most intransigent of all republicans, refusing to recognise the Free State in any way. In 1927, Sighle Humphreys and a number of female comrades started a campaign to intimidate jurors in trials involving IRA volunteers. It was only with reluctance that Twomey and the IRA supported what was to become one of the most serious threats to the state in the late 1920s.
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Though prevented from joining the IRA, women could participate in
Cumann na mBan (Society of Women), which was essentially a women's IRA auxiliary – pledged to organise and train the women of Ireland to take part in ‘the military, political and economic movements towards the enthronement of the Irish Republic'. The leadership of Cumann na mBan showed itself to be independent of the IRA and at times not afraid to criticise IRA policy. In 1926, Eithne Coyle replaced Countess Markievicz as president, and Mary MacSwiney was vice-president. It was a small organisation and by 1928 had only fifty members in Dublin; its main centre of activity.
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A despatch sent by a member of the Army Council, Donal O'Donoghue, illustrates the attitude of many men towards women republicans. At the time O'Donoghue, himself a prisoner in Mountjoy (the 'Joy), suggested that a protest should be staged in support of the IRA prisoners. He wrote to Frank Kerlin, the director of intelligence:
‘[I] suggest [that there be a] daily picket [by the] girls, [of the] ‘Joy and [the] Gov't [Government] Buildings.'
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The
‘girls'
likely included the octogenarian Charlotte Despard!

IRA prisoners were often incarcerated in deplorable conditions and during the Civil War had been subject to torture and execution (judicial or otherwise). Maud Gonne and Charlotte Despard were the two most prominent and indefatigable champions for the rights and welfare of republican prisoners. In 1922 they formed the Women's Prisoners' Defence League (WPDL), with Gonne as the driving force and Despard as her right-hand woman.
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The group, though tiny, with only about twenty members, held vigils outside prisons, organised public protests and wrote to the papers, all of which managed to achieve considerable publicity and helped keep the government frequently on the defensive.
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The two women were also associated with the Political Prisoners Committee and the Irish Republican Dependents Fund.

Maud Gonne MacBride, known as ‘Ireland's Joan of Arc', was a romantic Irish nationalist, a tall striking woman who became the centre of attention whenever she entered a room.
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Yeats wrote of her: ‘I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams'.
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She was a fervent advocate for republican prisoners. On one occasion, after she was told about a republican family living in poverty in Donegal
whose son had been a prisoner, she drove to the family's home and left them her car so that they could start a taxi business.
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Another time Moss Twomey reported that a republican defendant, Mrs Maher from Cork, ‘was found here [in Dublin] after her trial by Madam Mc'Bride [
sic
] without a penny, nowhere to go in Dublin, and no money to take her home. Madam is paying her hotel expenses and gave her £1. 13. 0 for her train and car fares.'
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