In IrishCentral.com, an article dated 4 November 2012, T. Ryle Dwyer writes:
While working on my doctorate in the early 1970s,
I had access to the manuscript of a memoir written by David Gray, US Minister
(Ambassador) to Ireland from 1940 to 1947.
It was so distorted, it was not worth publishing, but it has now been
published by the Royal Irish Academy under the title, A Yankee in De Valera’s
Ireland.
The files of the Office of Strategic Services
(OSS), the wartime forerunner of the CIA, had not yet been released, so I wrote
to David Bruce who had been in charge of the European theatre of the OSS during
the war and had visited Dublin to discuss security matters in 1943.
His somewhat circumspect response provided clues
between the lines. He seemed to damn
Gray with irrelevant praise.
“Mr. Gray — a fine man, and a great authority on
foxhunting and sport, about which he had written delightfully and
authoritatively — had no previous familiarity with secret intelligence
activities, and was somewhat suspicious of them,” Bruce wrote. “If you can
locate ‘Spike’ Marlin, you would find him especially knowledgeable about the
affairs in which you are interested.”
“The Irish worked with us on intelligence matters
almost as if they were our allies,” J. Russell Forgan, Bruce’s deputy, assured
me. “They have never received the credit due them.”
The OSS initially selected “Spike” Marlin as
agent-in-charge in Ireland. Born Irving Hirsch, into a poor Jewish family in
New York City in 1909, he became a Protestant and formally changed his name to
Ervin Ross Marlin in 1928.
After working his passage to Ireland the following
year, he enrolled at Trinity College, Dublin, where he earned a degree in
Celtic Studies, before returning to the United States in 1932. He returned ten
years later under the cover of an economic adviser at the American legation.
As Marlin’s reports were transmitted in the
diplomatic pouch, Gray insisted on reading them. One of the earliest reports noted that Irish
Minister for Posts & Telegraphs Paddy Little was pro-German. Gray demanded to know the source of this
information.
Marlin reluctantly identified his source as junior
minister Erskine Childers, a future President of Ireland. A few days later
Marlin was confronted by an angry Childers, who told him that Gray had
complained to the government about Little and went on to commit the appalling
indiscretion of citing Childers as the source of the allegation.
Thereafter Marlin refused to divulge his sources,
and relations with Gray became distinctly strained.
The Irish quickly realized that Marlin was an OSS
agent, and Joe Walshe, Secretary of the Irish Department of External Affairs,
suggested that Irish security cooperate directly with Marlin.
The latter wished to avail of the offer, but Gray
balked. Hence David Bruce visited Dublin to meet with Walshe and Irish security
chiefs — Garda Commissioner Paddy O’Carroll, and Colonel Dan Bryan, head of G2
(Irish Military Intelligence). Bruce was convinced the Irish were serious about
helping. Gray wrote to Walshe that Bruce
and was “hopeful that some mutually useful arrangement may come out of it.” But
he added rather pointedly, “I am not responsible for Mr. Marlin.”
The Irish supplied Marlin with voluminous reports on IRA strength,
radio interceptions, airplane and submarine sightings, the names and addresses
of people in America to whom German nationals living in Ireland — or pro-German
Irish people — were writing, and files on German spies already captured. The
information was so detailed that the “Éire Desk” at OSS headquarters in
Washington found it necessary to prepare over 4,000 index cards on the
individuals mentioned in the reports.
The OSS had already sent another undercover agent to Ireland —
Rowland Blenner-Hassett. He was able to dismiss stories of Nazi intrigue, so he
felt he was wasting his time in Ireland, especially after the offer to
cooperate with Marlin. “So long as the American Government secures all the
information its desires about the activities of the IRA in Ireland, it is a
matter of indifference how, or by whom, this object is achieved,” Blenner-Hassett
argued. Gray wanted him out, too, so he was recalled.
Marlin’s cover as an adviser at the American legation was no longer needed.
Marlin’s cover as an adviser at the American legation was no longer needed.
“I was relieved of my assignment under Gray,” Marlin told me. “He
wanted me out also so we were at last in perfect agreement on one point.”
From April 30, l943 onwards Marlin worked out of London and
returned to Dublin only periodically. Between visits, the Irish forwarded
material to him in London in the Irish diplomatic pouch.
A third undercover OSS agent, Martin S. Quigley, arrived in
Ireland in May and quickly realized Irish authorities were favorably disposed
towards the Allies. As a result he was baffled by Gray’s attitude. “He never
knew what was really going on, or if he did, he refused to accept the truth,”
Quigley concluded.
That summer while Gray was in the United States for consultations,
Marlin suggested that the Irish would likely provide the OSS with information
from their diplomats in Germany, Italy and France. Carter Nicholas, the head of
the Éire Desk at OSS Headquarters in Washington, visited Dublin with Marlin in
September 1943 and asked Joe Walshe for such help.
After clearing the matter with the Taoiseach, Walshe read Nicholas
and Marlin extracts from messages describing conditions in Germany, Italy, and
France. He also agreed to send Marlin future reports of interest.
In the following weeks Marlin supplied questions for Walshe to ask
the Irish representatives in Berlin, Rome and Vichy. Walshe then forwarded
their replies to Marlin. In effect, Irish diplomats were being used as American
spies.
While in the United States Gray met personally with President
Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. He tried to
persuade them to invite de Valera to join the Allies. He assured them the
Taoiseach would refuse, but London and Washington were not taking any chance of
Ireland coming in the war. They also rejected Gray’s suggestion that they ask
for Irish bases, as the service chiefs were convinced those would only be a
liability.
However, Gray did eventually persuade them to ask for the removal
of Axis diplomats from Dublin. The OSS and British Intelligence were satisfied
with Irish security, but went along somewhat reluctantly with Gray’s political
ploy.
De Valera’s refusal was used in the Allied press to depict him as
unsympathetic to the Allied cause. The whole thing was just a political stunt.
After the success of the D-Day landings, Marlin returned to the
United States, and the OSS decided to station Edward Lawler in Dublin as
liaison with Irish Intelligence.
“We received 100% co-operation from the Irish authorities,” Lawler
wrote to me. “The cooperation and information we received from the Irish was
every bit as extensive and helpful as it would have been if Ireland had been a
full partner with us in the war effort.”
Thus all of the OSS agents in Ireland believed the Irish were
fully cooperative with the Allies, but Gray claimed he had “better sources of
information.” In his memoir, he argued that de Valera and Walshe secretly
schemed for a German victory in the hope that Hitler would end partition.
Of course, he did have different sources. A strong believer in
spiritualism, Gray was getting advice from supposed ghosts and he was passing
this information on to the White House.
Shortly after arriving in Dublin, he wrote to Roosevelt about “the
memories and the ghosts that are here” in his official residence in Phoenix
Park, where the late British Prime Minister Arthur Balfour had lived as Chief
Secretary of Ireland in the 1880s. Balfour had engaged in séances with the
writing medium Geraldine Cummins, would go into a kind of trance and write out
messages from supposed ghosts. She began holding séances in the residence for
Gray.
On November 8, 1941 Balfour’s ghost supposedly warned Gray about
Joe Walshe. “He, from what I can see, is hand and glove with the German
Minister,” the message read. “The organization of Fifth Columnists in this
country is now complete.” Walshe, the message added, “is the leading
Quisling.”
Quisling.”
At a further séance on December 2, 1941 Cummins produced a
supposed message from the late President Theodore Roosevelt. “I want to tell
you,” he supposedly wrote, “that I think Franklin will hold the Japs for a
while; at any rate from our country’s point of view. I see no immediate
Armageddon for young America, possibly not at all.”
This was the Tuesday before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor,
but Gray’s conviction that he was in touch with those ghosts was not shaken.
“Four days after this communication,” Gray wrote to President Roosevelt, “the
Japs attacked Pearl Harbor. They had T.R. fooled. I suspect that if these
communications come through pretty much as given our friends on the other side
don’t know very much more than they did on this side.”
Gray later spent years writing his memoir but then he suddenly
abandoned it around 1960, because, he said, the ghost of Franklin D. Roosevelt
had advised him forget it.
*T. Ryle Dwyer is author of Behind the Green Curtain: Ireland’s
Phoney Neutrality During World War II, which is published in hardback and
paperback by Gill & Macmillan.
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