Ireland's Secret War: Dan Bryan, G2 and the Lost Tapes that Reveal The Hunt for Ireland's Nazi Spies

By Marc McMenamin

A thrilling account of the true extent of Irish–Allied Co-Operation during World War II.
Ireland's Secret War reveals strategic Nazi intentions for Ireland and the real role of leading government figures of the time, placing Dan Bryan and G2 – the military intelligence branch of the Irish Defence Forces – at the centre of the country's battle against Nazi Germany.
With the help of over thirty-five hours of previously unpublished audio recordings that were held in storage in northern California for over fifty years, Marc Mc Menamin reveals the extraordinary unheard history of WWII in Ireland, told from the point of view of the main protagonists.
Fascinating and entertaining, Ireland's Secret War reassesses the legacy of the Irish contribution to the Allied war effort through the voices of those involved at the time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gill Books
• Release date: Apr 14, 2022
• ISBN: 9780717192892

Marc McMenamin

Marc McMenamin is a journalist and documentary maker. A specialist in exploring uncharted corners of Irish history, he is the maker of several acclaimed radio documentaries, including Good Cop/Bad Cop, exploring the life of controversial former NYPD officer Peter Daly, and Richard Hayes, Nazi Codebreaker.

Book preview

PROLOGUE: AN OLD BOX OF TAPES

This story is a sequel of sorts to my 2018 book Codebreaker: The Untold Story of Richard Hayes, the Dublin Librarian who Helped Turn the Tide of World War II. I felt very strongly when writing that book that it was important to tell Dr Hayes’s story, which had been sadly neglected in the historical record of World War II in Ireland. Hayes had done amazing deeds for the country and was instrumental in breaking a number of German codes during the war. While he was celebrated in the intelligence communities for his achievements in cryptography, he was less esteemed in Ireland, where he is probably better known as an academic and librarian. His Manuscript Sources for the History of Irish Civilisation is still consulted widely by historians and researchers alike.

The book was largely built on the 2017 radio documentary Richard Hayes: Nazi Codebreaker, broadcast on RTÉ Radio 1’s multi-award-winning Documentary on One slot. The press coverage that followed the book’s publication led to numerous offers of TV projects and film scripts inspired by Hayes’s story. Naturally this piqued my curiosity as to whether there might be film footage or audio tapes of Hayes and Dan Bryan (whose name came up repeatedly during my research on Hayes – indeed, in truth you can’t separate one man from the other), perhaps in a private collection that had hitherto lain undiscovered. While there is some material in RTÉ’s television and radio archives of both men, in which they mostly talked about other topics – Hayes on Islamic art and Bryan on the War of Independence – material on World War II was thin on the ground. This got me thinking about a book I had consulted while writing Codebreaker. The Shamrock and the Swastika, a ground-breaking study of German espionage in neutral Ireland during the Emergency, was written by Professor Carolle J. Carter of San José State University in northern California, who carried out the research for it between 1970 and 1973. The book had its genesis in Prof. Carter’s master’s thesis, which she carried out under the supervision of Professor Charles B. Burdick, one of the foremost authorities on World War II and the author of 10 books on the subject, as well as numerous scholarly articles and book chapters. He is still regarded as a pioneering historian on the history of the German High Command throughout the war.

After much research online I discovered that there was a large archive at San José State University, named, in the professor’s memory, the Burdick Military History Project. I was aware that Prof. Carter’s book had been mainly written using personal interviews she had carried out with Dan Bryan and Dr Hayes during the early seventies while on a research trip to Dublin. Was it possible that Carter’s audio tapes, recorded so many years before, still existed? I decided to contact San José State University directly. After navigating my way around the college switchboard, I was advised to put my request in writing to Dr Jonathan Roth, who today presides over the Burdick collection. Within 24 hours I received a reply from Dr Roth putting me in contact with the university archivist, Carli Lowe. Carli offered to look through the Burdick collection for material relating to Ireland and found that the archive included primary sources consulted by Professor Burdick in his research, as well as research notes and personal correspondence.

While nothing immediately seemed to pop up in the library catalogue of the collection in relation to Ireland during World War II, Carli suggested that I speak directly with Prof. Carter. I immediately emailed her to introduce myself and inquire if she still had copies of the tapes that she had used in her research for The Shamrock and the Swastika. The email I received the next day opened a Pandora’s box that eventually became the basis of this book. I suggested to Prof. Carter that we should organise a Zoom call to talk through things further and so that I could explain my rationale for wanting to obtain the tapes she had recorded so many years before. During the course of our initial Zoom call, I discovered that the tapes in Prof. Carter’s possession were utterly priceless. They were in effect the untold history of World War II in Ireland told from the point of view of the main protagonists. A precious resource that existed nowhere else in the world.

Prof. Carter had carried out the interviews on vintage audio cassette tapes using old-style field equipment, over multiple visits to Ireland between 1969 and 1971. Naturally, I was worried that these tapes might not have stood the test of time. After all, they had been in storage in the professor’s attic for the best part of 50 years. Over the course of one of our many Zoom calls Prof. Carter told me she would catalogue the material in her attic, a ‘fun thing to do to alleviate the boredom of lockdown’. At the time California was suffering badly from the Covid-19 pandemic, with record daily cases and deaths, despite the best efforts of Governor Gavin Newsom to halt the course of the virus. Prof. Carter and her husband were adhering to California’s ‘shelter in place’ order, so the chance to catalogue the tapes was a welcome distraction from all the bad news.

After a week I received an email from her telling me that the tapes were in a very healthy state and that she had catalogued and labelled all the material on them. She had also gone through her notes and research and had a wealth of information from the period that she felt would be of use to me. I read the list Prof. Carter had compiled with utter fascination and sheer excitement that I would be able to hear the voices of those from the war in Ireland tell their own stories.

The earliest tapes date from August 1969 and were recorded in the Republic of Ireland as Derry was about to explode into the violence that became known as the Battle of the Bogside. The first tapes consisted of interviews with Helmut Clissmann, a prominent Dublin businessman, originally from Germany, who had been involved with the Abwehr, the intelligence service of the German Wehrmacht during World War II. Another interview recorded in 1969 was carried out in Enniscorthy, County Wexford, with Stephen Hayes, one of three wartime Chiefs of Staff of the IRA. This tape is a unique audio recording of an IRA Chief of Staff from the 1940s. Also included in the 1969 batch of interviews was a tape of the testimony of Commandant James Power of Athlone, a member of the Irish intelligence services dealing with Nazi prisoners interned in Athlone during the war. One of the most interesting tapes from these 1969 recordings was a tape of IRA leader James O’Donovan (also known as Jim and Seamus), who helped establish the initial links between the IRA and Nazi Germany just before the outbreak of the war in 1939. O’Donovan travelled several times to Berlin and his oral testimony of the period is fascinating.

Prof. Carter returned to Ireland the following summer to carry out interviews with retired members of the Irish intelligence services, including Richard Hayes, as well as with the writer Francis Stuart, who himself had been embroiled in espionage with Nazi Germany during this period. By far the most important tapes were a series of seven interviews with Colonel Dan Bryan, the head of Irish Military Intelligence for the bulk of the duration of the war. Bryan was a towering figure in the history of the Emergency and is perhaps one of Ireland’s least-known heroes. He masterminded Irish intelligence services throughout the war and was regarded by those who knew him with whom I have spoken, and by historians of the period, as a man of honour. The Bryan interviews, which were mainly carried out during Prof. Carter’s last visit to Ireland in 1971, were perhaps the most important of all the tapes since they were the oral testimony of the man who knew most about Ireland’s secret war against Nazi Germany.

It occurred to me that these tapes were so important that it was crucial that they be preserved and that, once the details in the tapes were properly logged to tell the story of their contents, some sort of project should be put in place for this purpose. Prof. Carter agreed and gave me her permission and her blessing to use the tapes in whatever way I saw fit. Thus the idea of this book, and an accompanying radio series with RTÉ, was born. If the content of the tapes was as significant as I thought, it was important that the public should get to hear them and read more about them. A huge bee in my bonnet is the fact that the history of World War II in Ireland is often undersold or misrepresented in the history curriculum taught in schools. The curriculum is the foundation stone on which a lot of the Irish understanding of the war is built and sadly at present it is mostly a tale of glimmer men, rationing and little else. Irish history is often taught through a nationalist lens, so it is hardly surprising that this basic version of the war in Ireland is uppermost in the public consciousness. Finally, I felt that these tapes, if presented in the right way, could, alongside some of the already great scholarly work out there on the period, begin to change the conversation in Ireland about the war. But one big problem remained. How do you get a big box of audio tapes from California to Donegal in the middle of the biggest global pandemic in a hundred years?

There was only one person who could help me resolve this quandary: Liam O’Brien, the series producer of RTÉ Radio 1’s multi-award-winning Documentary on One series. Nobody gets the worth of a story more than Liam, and nobody understands better how to tell it. Since Liam took over the Documentary on One strand in 2006 it grew from a little-known programme to one of the most successful radio documentary units in the world, winning over 250 international awards and becoming the envy of public service broadcasters throughout the world. So I called Liam and we had a long conversation about the box of tapes in California and how to get them to Ireland. We both agreed that transporting the tapes themselves was out of the question; the risk of damaging them was too great. Liam agreed with me that we should use the tapes to form the basis of a radio documentary series, along the lines of such recent RTÉ programmes as 2020’s The Nobody Zone and 2021’s Gunplot, with this book to accompany it. The best course of action, we felt, was to get the tapes converted into digital audio files that could be sent over the internet to Ireland, where we could listen to the content and restore the audio if need be. Liam promised the finances to do this and was an enthusiastic backer of the project from the outset.

Then began the process of trawling the internet to find a suitable place to digitise the tapes. Making digital copies of anything that was recorded as far back as the 1970s is a laborious process. The audio has to be played in real time while the files are copied into a computer program. Given there are almost 35 hours of audio in the tapes, this would be no mean feat.

After searching numerous audio shops in southern California that could do the conversion process, I was able to narrow the possibilities down to three or four businesses in the San Francisco Bay area. Of course, Covid ruled out many of the businesses as they were severely curtailed by the pandemic, which at this stage was affecting the United States worse than any other country in the world. I had almost given up hope when I decided to get in contact with Sean Sexton at the Digital Roots Studio in Oakland, California. Sean couldn’t have been any more helpful and we arranged to have the tapes picked up at Prof. Carter’s house and then transferred to digital files before being dropped back. By the time all this had been arranged it was much safer in terms of Covid in California, so the professor insisted that she and her husband would bring the tapes to Oakland themselves – they were dying to get out of the house after having spent so long in lockdown, and it would also be a great opportunity to go for a drive in their new electric car. Sure enough, the tapes and transcripts were dropped off and three weeks later I received an email from Sean to say that he had digitised all the audio and would send it over to me later that night. In the meantime, I was in Donegal, having returned home for the Christmas break from my job as a teacher, and I had planned on spending two weeks at home. I ended up staying for two months. As soon as Covid cases began to improve in California they began to spiral out of control in Ireland; schools here were closed, and it would be April before all students returned to their classrooms.

Sean began to send the audio files over on a Saturday afternoon. Given the sheer volume of audio, it took quite a bit of time to download the files. It was going to take at least an hour, so I decided to have a beer to congratulate myself on all the hard work getting the files as far as my computer in the first place. As I sat with a sense of anticipation, I couldn’t help being struck by the marvels of technology. Only a few years ago such a feat would have been impossible and these tapes would likely have never seen the light of day, at least not in Ireland. As I mulled over how things had changed, a ping from my laptop let me know the downloads were complete and that it was now, after all the effort, time to listen to them.

I opened the first recording. It came from an interview with Dan Bryan in 1971, long before I was born. Expecting to hear some sort of fearsome five-star general, I was struck by Bryan’s speaking voice. This gallant man, who had singlehandedly helped thwart the Nazi’s plans for Ireland, sounded more like a rural GP than a military man, with his soft-spoken intonation and a hint of a rural Kilkenny accent. I couldn’t help marvel at the sound of his voice and it reminded me very much of a line from the 2014 film The Imitation Game about another unsung hero of World War II, the famous codebreaker Alan Turing: ‘Sometimes it is the people no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one can imagine.’ That is certainly true of Dan Bryan and Richard Hayes.

It was also incredible to hear the voices of Helmut Clissmann, Stephen Hayes and Jim O’Donovan telling their own stories of the war. I was struck in particular by Hayes and O’Donovan, who, even though they disagreed with each other within the IRA, both felt that they were continuing the pure republicanism of the 1916 leaders. Hayes sounded like a typical rural Wexford man, while O’Donovan’s Roscommon accent hadn’t been in any way diminished by years spent living in Dublin and elsewhere. In his own way, Clissmann also takes the listener by surprise, sounding more like a businessman – which he was at that stage – than a former intelligence agent for the Abwehr. His interviews, like those of the others, were thoughtful and reflective and very much true to his own version of events. It is only by taking all these tapes together, alongside the body of secondary source literature that exists out there, that one can begin to paint the bigger picture and to sketch the story of Ireland during the war through the eyes of those who lived it.

With the tapes finally in Ireland, work began in earnest to try to develop a radio series with them, which I hope will see the light of day sometime soon. I also began to draft what would eventually become this book. From the outset I was determined that the book would tell the story as much as possible in the first person, so there are many quotations from the various protagonists. Naturally, there will be gaps in any narrative and what is contained in the tapes isn’t by any means a definitive account of the period. Therefore, I have filled in some of the gaps using testimony taken from files released by the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs as well as Foreign Office and MI5 and MI6 files from the British National Archive at Kew. I have also consulted Dan Bryan’s papers and a portion of an incomplete memoir dictated to the historian Eunan O’Halpin, which were all deposited in Bryan’s alma mater, University College Dublin. To flesh out the story further, I have drawn on a rich body of secondary sources on various aspects of this period written by Professor O’Halpin, Dr Mark Hull of Kansas, journalist Enno Stephan, who was the first person to write about German espionage in Ireland during WWII, and of course Prof. Carolle Carter herself. I have also consulted works by historian T. Ryle Dwyer, perhaps the best-known authority on much of the history of the war years in Ireland. In doing so I have been able to sketch a broad narrative of the war in Ireland, inserting the first-person testimony of those interviewed in the tapes at appropriate intervals. I have augmented all this with the extensive archival research I have carried out over the last number of years.

This book does not purport to be the definitive history of the war in Ireland. It is intended to illuminate this period for the casual reader of Irish history and to illustrate that there are many facets of it, such as World War II era, that have been neglected in terms of commemoration and acknowledgement over the years. The story presented here isn’t entirely chronological, as various events over the period intersected and overlapped, and to follow a strictly chronological approach would not do justice to the bigger picture; neither would it, in my opinion, be as entertaining. The narrative unfolds in an episodic manner, dealing with the major issues and themes of the war: the origins of G2; republican intrigue; Allied attitudes towards Ireland; Nazi spies; and so forth. What I hope will set this work apart from others is that I have consciously tried to make it about the individuals involved and to allow them, as much as possible, to drive the narrative from their own perspectives. It can often be said that personalities loom large in the telling of Irish history. For example, the World War II period is often read as the triumph of de Valera – but the reality is much more nuanced, and de Valera was often at odds with Bryan and others in the intelligence services. This history hopes to document the period using oral testimony in a bottom-up fashion and bring previously unheard voices to the fore.

As I write, Ireland is coming to the end of the greatest national emergency since the days of World War II. Covid-19 has wreaked untold havoc, the likes of which have not been seen on this island in a century. What has been notable has been the sacrifice of those nameless faces in the medical profession who have put their lives on the line for the common good. This book is a tribute to that same spirit, a spirit that characterised the lives of Dan Bryan, Richard Hayes and many others during the course of World War II, people whose selfless interventions and quiet patriotism did a great service to this country during one of its darkest hours. What follows is the story of Bryan, G2 and the hunt for Ireland’s Nazi spies and how we as a country are still learning to reckon with the legacy of World War II. In order to tell that story, it is necessary to go back to the beginning. Back to the most unlikely of places, back to rural Kilkenny at the turn of the century. As Ireland approaches its centenary as a nation, I hope that someday I will be able to pass a statue of Dan Bryan and Richard Hayes in Dublin or, indeed, Kilkenny or Limerick. But perhaps most of all, I hope that having read this book many others will also share in that aspiration.

I

THE STORM CLOUDS GATHER

I regard certain events during World War II as the high point of my career.

COLONEL DAN BRYAN, FORMER DIRECTOR OF IRISH MILITARY INTELLIGENCE, DUBLIN, 16 FEBRUARY 1984

Perhaps all tales of heroism begin in the most unlikely places. This story is no different. And, while this tale is multifaceted, first and foremost it’s the story of how one man, Dan Bryan, the son of a small middle-class farmer from County Kilkenny, masterminded the most sophisticated security operation in the history of the Irish state. A clandestine operation that helped thwart a Nazi invasion of Ireland during World War II, the story of which has remained hidden in plain sight for over 80 years. It’s also the story of republican/Nazi intrigue and the competing narratives of patriotism that characterised the early years of de Valera’s Ireland. In truth, the fate of independent Ireland rested on the shoulders of Bryan, a most unconventional army officer who resisted the narrow definitions of republicanism espoused by some of his peers in the National Army and who truly saw the gravity of the looming threat of Hitler’s Brownshirts and Mussolini’s Black Brigades as the dark clouds of fascism began to gather over Europe in the 1930s. Bryan was undoubtedly one of Ireland’s greatest unsung heroes, and his origins in rural Ireland were far from the corridors of power in Irish Military Intelligence in Dublin, where he oversaw Irish state security for over a decade.

Dan Bryan was born in a small rural townland near Gowran, County Kilkenny on 9 May 1900. He lived the early part of his life on the family farm with his widowed grandmother Bridget and his parents, John and Margaret Mary (née Lanagan), of Maddoxstown, County Kilkenny. Dan, the eldest child, was followed by eight brothers and five sisters. The family farm of 500 acres, inherited by Dan’s father from his own father (whom Dan was named after), gave the family financial security. Young Dan had a happy childhood, working with his brothers and sisters on the farm. By the time Dan was a young boy his parents were able to employ three farm hands and a domestic servant.

John Bryan was a firm believer in the power of education and put considerable financial resources into the schooling of his children; he had to let go of two of the farm hands to put four of the children through school. As the eldest, Dan held a certain level of responsibility and had to help with the family’s financial situation. With his father’s encouragement, he went to University College Dublin to study medicine (though he had initially wanted to study law). When he left Kilkenny and made his way to Dublin, he was taking his first steps into an Ireland that had changed utterly since the turn of the century.

The Dublin of this period was a hotbed of republican activity and the city had been convulsed by the fallout from the 1916 Rising, the scars of which were still visible. Many of the landmarks on O’Connell Street lay in ruins and the General Post Office, the site of Pearse’s reading of the Proclamation, was a burnt-out shell – it wouldn’t open to the public again until 1929.

Dan initially roomed at various boarding houses on the South Circular Road and on the Rathmines Road in south County Dublin. He loved life in the city, but Kilkenny was always close to his heart and he returned home once a month to visit his parents. He settled easily into life as a student at UCD, but it wasn’t long before he became aware of the many separatist organisations that had emerged in the city in the wake of the Rising. Dublin was hot with nationalist fervour, manifest in cultural and political institutions such as the Gaelic League, the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) and the GAA. A separate, unique Irish identity was espoused in most walks of life and it was no surprise that Dan became hugely influenced by the spirit of the time, despite his wealthy land-owning family background. The British occupation of Ireland left scars that ran deep throughout the Irish countryside, with old resentments harking back to the penal times and beyond, and Kilkenny was no exception. Following the executions of the 1916 leaders, anti-British sentiment was rife. Such a changing of the tide culminated in May 1917 when former Easter Rising participant W.T. Cosgrave, who would become a colleague of Bryan’s in later years, won a by-election in the county.

After two years as a medical student Bryan joined the Irish Volunteers as a seventeen-year-old in November 1917 and served in C and G companies of the 4th Battalion of the Dublin Brigade. He almost immediately became involved in raids, armed patrols and observation work and carved out a reputation as a formidable and dedicated Volunteer. Owing to the erratic British response to the public outcry in the wake of the 1916 executions, the Dublin Brigade was allowed to blossom. Indeed, in the months up to when Dan Bryan joined, most of the remaining leaders from the Rising had been released from Frongoch internment camp in Wales and many had reintegrated into the Volunteers. The Dublin Brigade grew into a considerable force, which benefited from new enlistees who had travelled to Dublin from the