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The article concerns the attempt by two agencies of German intelligence (the Abwehr and the SD) to use neutral Ireland as a base for wartime espionage directed against Great Britain. Though eleven agents were dispatched during a four-year period, a host of home-grown problems in the German system all but insured failure, and a brilliantly effective Irish army counterintelligence system mathematically eliminated any chance of German success. Because of the intelligence debacle in Ireland, German operations directed against England-including Operation Sea Lion-were hopelessly compromised.
DURING the Second World War, the German intelligence services dispatched a total of twelve agents to neutral Ireland. While not remarkable for the quality of their intelligence gathering, its Irish missions and personnel provide a unique insight into the story of German intelligence in the confines of a controlled environment. Though German espionage in Ireland also was connected to activities in Germany itself involving a host of other characters, this study focuses exclusively on agents who actually arrived in Ireland on covert missions. Recent studies in the field have focused on the technological breakthroughs (e.g., decipherment of the Enigma signals) or active counterintelligence operations (e.g. "Double-Cross") which enabled the Allies to dominate the espionage war, but the individual examination of the intelligence missions to Ireland paints a picture of an organization so organically flawed that outside interference was almost incidental to its global ineffectiveness.1 Both the Abwehr (the German military intelligence service) and the SD (the Sicherheitsdienst, the intelligence service of the SS) sent agents to Ireland. Germany failed in almost every aspect of intelligence planning as it pertained to Ireland: from hazy military intelligence objectives, flawed local and political information, questionable personnel selection, to sloppy execution.
This new look at the subject is made possible by the release of previously unavailable documentation from a number of sources, most notably the Irish Military Archives (the primary custodian for material relating to the Irish counterintelligence campaign, and for investigative and interrogation summaries of the various agents) and the Public Record Office in England. As part of an ongoing process of declassification of selected intelligence service (MIS) records, the British contribution to counterintelligence warfare in Ireland is gradually becoming clearer. Likewise, interviews with the surviving participants have sharpened the focus,...