The Cairo Gang was a group of British military intelligence agents who were sent to Dublin during the Irish War of Independence to identify prominent members of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) with, according to information gathered by the IRA Intelligence Department (IRAID), the intention of disrupting the IRA by assassination. Originally commanded by British Army General Gerald Boyd, they were known officially as the Dublin District Special Branch (DDSB) and also as D Branch.
Twelve D-Branch members, including British Army officers, Royal Irish Constabulary officers and a civilian informer, were simultaneously assassinated in Dublin on the early morning of Sunday 21 November 1920 by the IRA assassination unit known as The Squad. The operation was a meticulously planned decapitation strike masterminded by Michael Collins. The 14 deaths were the first killings of what was later dubbed Bloody Sunday.
Tim Pat Coogan's biography of Michael Collins asserts that the "nom de guerre" of the British unit derived from a common history of service in the Middle East,[1] but that is disputed by some Irish historians, such as Conor Cruise O'Brien, and it has been suggested that they received the name because they often held meetings at Cafe Cairo, at 59 Grafton Street in Dublin. Earlier books on the 1919–1923 period do not refer to the Cairo Gang by that name.
Background
By 1920, the IRA's Dublin headquarters, under the direction of Michael Collins, had, through assassination and intelligence penetration, eliminated the G Division of the Dublin Metropolitan Police, previously the mainstay of the Crown's intelligence operations against Irish Republicans. The Dublin Castle administration, the headquarters of the British government in Ireland, were forced to look for external intelligence support.
In January 1920, the British Army Intelligence Centre in Ireland formed a special plain-clothes unit of 18 to 20 demobilised ex-army officers, and some officers still on active duty, to conduct clandestine operations against the IRA. The officers received training in London, most likely under the supervision of Special Branch, which had been part of Britain's Directorate of Home Intelligence since February 1919. They may also have received some training from MI5 officers and former officers working for Special Branch. Army Centre in Dublin hoped these officers could eventually be deployed to the provinces to support its 5th and 6th Division intelligence staff, but it decided to keep the unit in Dublin, at the Dublin District Division, commanded by Boyd. It was known officially as the Dublin District Special Branch (DDSB) and also as D Branch. In May 1920, Lieutenant Colonel Walter Wilson arrived in Dublin to take command of D Branch.
Following the events of Bloody Sunday, 21 November 1920, when twelve D Branch officers were assassinated by the IRA under the command of Michael Collins, D Branch was transferred to the command of Brigadier-General Sir Ormonde Winter in January 1921. Winter had been placed in charge of a new police intelligence unit, the Combined Intelligence Service, in May 1920, and his charter was to set up a central intelligence clearing house to more effectively collate and coordinate army and police intelligence. Those members of D Branch who survived Bloody Sunday were very unhappy to be transferred from army command to CIS command and, for the next six months, until the Truce of July 1921, D Branch continued to maintain regular contact with the Army Intelligence Centre while undertaking missions for Winter's CIS.[2][3][4]
A photo purportedly of the Cairo Gang, but more probably the Igoe Gang
A famous photograph from the Piaras Béaslaí collection that is purported to show members of the Cairo Gang is lodged in the National Library of Ireland's photographic archive (five copies). An inscription describes the men as "the special gang F company Auxiliaries". The men in the photo are numbered, but there are no names or details on the back of the photos. Three other photos in the collection show Auxiliaries posing on vehicles in the grounds of Dublin Castle. Those three photos are similarly numbered.
The IRA Intelligence Department (IRAID) was receiving information from numerous well-placed sources, including Lily Mernin, who was the confidential code clerk for British Army Intelligence Centre in Parkgate Street and Sergeant Jerry Mannix, stationed in Donnybrook. Mannix provided the IRAID with a list of names and addresses of all the members of the Cairo Gang. Collins's case officers on the intelligence staff – Liam Tobin, Tom Cullen and Frank Thornton – were meeting with several D Branch officers nightly, pretending to be informers. Another IRA penetration source, participating in the nightly repartee with the D Branch men at Cafe Cairo, Rabiatti's Saloon, and Kidds Back Pub, was Dublin Metropolitan Police Detective Constable David Neligan, one of several moles Collins had recruited to infiltrate the G-Division. The IRA recruited most of the Irish domestic servants who worked in the rooming houses where the D Branch officers lived, and all of their comings and goings were meticulously reported to Collins's staff.
All the members of the D Branch were under IRA surveillance for several weeks, and intelligence was gathered from sympathisers, for example, who was coming home at strange hours, thereby indicating that they were allowed to violate the military curfew. The IRA Dublin Brigade and the IRAID then pooled their resources and intelligence to draw up a hit list of suspected Cairo Gang members, and set the date for the assassinations to be carried out as 21 November 1920, at 9:00a.m.
Assassinations
The operation was planned by several senior IRA members, including Michael Collins, Dick McKee, Liam Tobin, Peadar Clancy, Tom Cullen, Frank Thornton and Oscar Traynor. The killings were planned to coincide with a Gaelic football match between Dublin and Tipperary, because the large crowds around Dublin would allow the members of The Squad to move about more easily, and make it more difficult for the British to detect them before and after they carried out the assassinations.
Clancy and McKee were picked up by Crown forces on the evening of Saturday, 20 November. They were tortured and later shot dead "while trying to escape". Tortured and killed with them was Conor Clune, the nephew of Archbishop Clune of Perth, who had been senior chaplain to the Catholic members of the Australian Imperial Force in World War I.[5] Clune was manager of the seed and plant nursery owned by Edward MacLysaght near Quin, and Clune and MacLysaght travelled to Dublin on the morning of Saturday, 20 November 1920, bringing with him the books of the Raheen Co-op for its annual audit. Clune was arrested in a raid on Vaughan's Hotel in Dublin, where he was a registered guest.
28 Pembroke Street Upper
At 9:00a.m., members of the Squad entered 28 Pembroke Street. The first British agents to die were Major Charles Milne Cholmeley Dowling and Captain Leonard Price.[6][7]Andy Cooney of the Dublin Brigade removed documents from their rooms.
Captain Brian Christopher Headlam Keenlyside, Colonel Wilfrid Woodcock and Lieutenant-Colonel Hugh Montgomery were also killed. Woodcock was not connected with intelligence and had walked into a confrontation on the first floor of the Pembroke Street house as he was preparing to leave to command a regimental parade at army headquarters. He was in his military uniform and, when he shouted to warn the other five British officers living in the house, he was shot in the shoulder and back, but survived. As Keenlyside was about to be shot, a struggle ensued between his wife and Mick O'Hanlon. The leader of the unit, Mick Flanagan, arrived, pushed Mrs Keenlyside out of the way and shot her husband.
119 Morehampton Road
At 119 Morehampton Road, Donnybrook, 2.3km from the scene of the first shootings, another member of the Cairo Gang, Lieutenant Donald Lewis MacLean, along with a suspected informer, T. H. Smith and MacLean's brother-in-law, John Caldow, were taken into the hallway and about to be shot, when MacLean asked that they not be shot in front of his wife. The three were taken to an unused bedroom and shot. Caldow survived his wounds and fled to his home in Scotland.[8][9]
92 Lower Baggot Street
Just 800 metres away, at 92 Lower Baggot Street, another Gang member, Captain William Frederick Newberry, and his wife, heard their front door come crashing down and blockaded themselves into their bedroom. Newberry rushed for his window to try to escape but was shot while climbing out by Bill Stapleton and Joe Leonard, after they had broken the door down.[10]
38 Upper Mount Street
Two key members of the Gang, Lieutenant Peter Ashmun Ames and Captain George Bennett, were made to stand facing the wall on a bed in a downstairs rear bedroom and shot by Vinny Byrne and others in his squad.[11][12] A maid had let the attackers into 38 Upper Mount Street and indicated, at gunpoint, the rooms occupied by the two targeted men. Despite many accounts to the contrary, Byrne was not involved in the killings in Morehampton Road that morning.
28 Earlsfort Terrace
Sergeant John J Fitzgerald, of the Royal Irish Constabulary, also known as "Captain Fitzgerald" or "Captain Fitzpatrick", whose father was from County Tipperary, was killed a kilometre away at 28 Earlsfort Terrace.[13] He had survived an assassination attempt when a bullet grazed his head. This time he was shot twice in the head. The documents found in his house detailed the movements of senior IRA members.
22 Lower Mount Street
An IRA unit led by Tom Keogh entered 22 Lower Mount Street to kill Lieutenant Henry Angliss, alias Patrick Mahon and Lieutenant Charles Ratsch Peel.[14] The two intelligence specialists in the Gang, Angliss and Peel, had been recalled from Russia to organise British intelligence operations in the South Dublin area. Angliss had survived an assassination attempt when he had been shot at in a billiard hall. He was targeted for killing Sinn Féin fundraiser John Lynch, mistaken for General Liam Lynch, Divisional Commandant of the 1st Southern Division, IRA. Angliss was shot as he reached for his gun.
Peel, hearing the shots, managed to block his bedroom door and survived even though more than a dozen bullets were fired into his room. When members of Fianna Éireann, who were on lookout, reported that the Auxiliary Division were approaching the house, the unit of eleven men split up into two groups, the first leaving by the front door, the second through the laneway at the back of the house.
119 Baggot Street
At 119 Baggot Street, a three-man unit killed Captain Geoffrey Thomas Baggallay, a barrister who had been employed as a prosecutor under the Restoration of Order in Ireland Act 1920 regulations and who had appeared for the prosecution in multiple military tribunals that sentenced alleged IRA volunteers to death.[15][16]
Gresham Hotel
Captain Patrick McCormack and Lieutenant Leonard Wilde were in the Gresham Hotel in O'Connell Street. The IRA unit got to their rooms by pretending to be British soldiers with important dispatches. When the men opened their doors they were shot and killed. A listing in The Times for McCormack and Wilde does not indicate any rank for the latter – in fact, he was a discharged army officer who had been a British consul in Spain.[17] McCormack's killing was a mistake. He was a member of the Royal Army Veterinary Corps and was in Ireland to buy horses for the British Army. He was shot in bed and Collins later acknowledged the error. Unlike the other British officers, McCormack, a Catholic from Castlebar, was buried in Ireland, at Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin.[18][19]
Fitzwilliam Square
Captain John Scott Crawford, in charge of motor repair of the British Army Service Corps, narrowly escaped death after the IRA entered a guesthouse in Fitzwilliam Square where he was staying, looking for a Major Callaghan. On not finding their target, they debated whether or not to shoot Crawford. They decided not to shoot him because he was not on their list. Instead, they gave him 24 hours to leave Ireland, although the major left Ireland in no hurry despite that close call.
Eastwood Hotel
In the Eastwood Hotel at 91 Lower Leeson Street, the IRA failed to find their target, Captain Thomas Jennings. Other targets who escaped were Captain Jocelyn Hardy and Major William Lorraine King, a colleague of Hardy who was missing when Joe Dolan burst into King's room.[20] According to the prim Todd Andrews, Dolan took revenge by giving King's half-naked mistress "a right scourging with a sword scabbard", and setting fire to the room afterwards.[21]
Major Frank Murray Maxwell Hallowell Carew, an intelligence officer who, with Captain Price, had almost cornered 3rd Tipperary Brigade commander Seán Treacy a month before, was on the list. (Treacy had been killed by G men as he tried to shoot his way out of a trap on 14 October, a week before the day of the Cairo Gang assassinations.) When the IRA came calling for Murray, he had moved to an apartment across the street. He heard the gunfire at his former lodging and fired his revolver at an IRA sentry outside. The sentry was hit and took cover inside the house. The Volunteers moved on.
Several IRA men carried sledgehammers with them the morning of 21 November, because they expected to encounter bolted doors. They did not find any, but T. Ryle Dwyer claims that they used them to smash the skulls and faces of some of the officers they had shot.[22]
Two members of the Auxiliary Cadet Division, Temporary Cadets Frank Garniss, aged 34, and Cecil Augustus Morris, aged 24, were among a patrol of Auxiliaries who responded to the scene of one of the attacks, armed with .45 calibre Webley revolvers and a carbine.[23][24] Garniss and Morris were shot and killed as they sought to cordon off the rear of one of the scenes of assassination.[25][26]
A listing in The Times of killed and wounded notes that, in addition to Caldow, Captain Brian Keenlyside, Colonel Hugh Montgomery, Major (Wilfrid) Woodcock and Lieutenant Randolph Murray were wounded. On 10 December 1920, Montgomery died of the wounds he received on Bloody Sunday.[27]
Fatalities
Nineteen men were shot. Fourteen were killed on 21 November and Montgomery died later, making fifteen in all. Five were wounded (including King's mistress). Ames, Angliss, Baggallay, Bennet, Dowling, Fitzgerald, McCormack, MacLean, Montgomery, Newberry, Price, Wilde, Smith, Morris and Garniss were killed. Keenlyside, Woodcock, Murray and Caldow were wounded. Peel and others escaped. The dead included members of the "Cairo Gang", British Army Courts-Martial officers, the two Auxiliaries and a civilian informant.
Aftermath
Of the IRA men involved, only Frank Teeling was captured during the operation. He was court-martialled and sentenced to hang but escaped from Kilmainham Gaol. He was later tried for shooting a member of the National Army, and convicted for killing a man for bringing a bag of tomatoes into the bar at the Theatre Royal, Dublin.[28]Patrick Moran and Thomas Whelan were arrested later and, despite their protestations of innocence and 19 false witnesses attesting to alibis, were convicted and hanged for murder on 14 March 1921.[29]
The remaining Cairo Gang members, along with many other spies, fled to Dublin Castle or England, fearing they were next. Another member committed suicide in Dublin Castle. The deaths and flights dealt a severe blow to British intelligence gathering in Ireland.
The Igoe Gang
Eventually, another group of intelligence operatives, known officially as the Identification Branch of the Combined Intelligence Service (CIS), took the fight to the IRA. The group was known informally as The Igoe Gang, named after its leader Head Constable Eugene Igoe, who was from County Mayo. Igoe reported to Colonel Ormonde Winter. The Igoe Gang consisted of RIC personnel drawn from different parts of Ireland who patrolled the streets of Dublin in plain clothes, looking for wanted men.[30] The gang posed a serious threat to Collins's apparatus and even caught a Volunteer whom Collins had brought to Dublin to identify Igoe.[31]
The Igoe Gang was accused of using excessive force while interrogating prisoners – prior to his hanging, IRA man Thomas Traynor (a member of The Forgotten Ten) was badly beaten by members of the gang.[32]
The Gang was never penetrated by the IRA. Igoe later conducted secret service operations for Special Branch over many years in other countries, but never returned to his farm in Mayo out of fear of reprisal. Brigadier General Winter appeared on Igoe's behalf to obtain an increase in his pension in view of his many services to the Crown in Ireland and elsewhere.[33]
The Irish Republican Army was an Irish republican revolutionary paramilitary organisation. The ancestor of many groups also known as the Irish Republican Army, and distinguished from them as the "Old IRA", it was descended from the Irish Volunteers, an organisation established on 25 November 1913 that staged the Easter Rising in April 1916. In 1919, the Irish Republic that had been proclaimed during the Easter Rising was formally established by an elected assembly, and the Irish Volunteers were recognised by Dáil Éireann as its legitimate army. Thereafter, the IRA waged a guerrilla campaign against the British occupation of Ireland in the 1919–1921 Irish War of Independence.
The Irish Civil War was a conflict that followed the Irish War of Independence and accompanied the establishment of the Irish Free State, an entity independent from the United Kingdom but within the British Empire.
Christopher Thomas Ewart Ewart-Biggs, was the British Ambassador to Ireland, an author and senior Foreign Office liaison officer with MI6. He was killed in 1976 by the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) in Sandyford, Dublin.
The Irish War of Independence or Anglo-Irish War was a guerrilla war fought in Ireland from 1919 to 1921 between the Irish Republican Army and British forces: the British Army, along with the quasi-military Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) and its paramilitary forces the Auxiliaries and Ulster Special Constabulary (USC). It was part of the Irish revolutionary period.
Bloody Sunday was a day of violence in Dublin on 21 November 1920, during the Irish War of Independence. More than 30 people were killed or fatally wounded.
The Auxiliary Division of the Royal Irish Constabulary (ADRIC), generally known as the Auxiliaries or Auxies, was a paramilitary unit of the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) during the Irish War of Independence. It was founded in July 1920 by Major-General Henry Hugh Tudor and made up of former British Army officers, most of whom came from Great Britain and had fought in the First World War. Almost 2,300 served in the unit during the conflict. Its role was to conduct counter-insurgency operations against the Irish Republican Army (IRA), acting mainly as a mobile striking and raiding force. It operated semi-independently of the RIC and was mainly deployed to southern and western regions where fighting was heaviest.
Lieutenant-General Sir Henry Hugh Tudor, KCB, CMG was a British soldier who fought as a junior officer in the Second Boer War (1899–1902), and as a senior officer in the First World War (1914–18), but is now remembered chiefly for his roles in the Irish War of Independence (1919–21) and the Palestine Police.
The Squad, nicknamed the Twelve Apostles, was an Irish Republican Army (IRA) unit founded by Michael Collins to counter British intelligence efforts during the Irish War of Independence, mainly by means of assassination. The Squad engaged in executing informants, police active in harassment of IRA personnel, enemy agents and worked in counterespionage.
This is a timeline of the Irish War of Independence of 1919–21. The Irish War of Independence was a guerrilla conflict and most of the fighting was conducted on a small scale by the standards of conventional warfare.
Seán Allis Treacy was one of the leaders of the Third Tipperary Brigade of the IRA during the Irish War of Independence and one of a small group whose actions initiated that conflict in 1919. He was killed in October 1920, on Talbot Street in Dublin in a shootout with British troops during an aborted British Secret Service surveillance operation.
Brigadier-General Sir Ormonde de l'Épée Winter, KBE, CB, CMG, DSO, was a British Army officer and author who, after service in the First World War, was responsible for intelligence operations in Ireland during the Anglo-Irish War. He later joined the British Fascists and fought for the Finnish Army in the Winter War.
Lieutenant-Colonel Gerald Bryce Ferguson Smyth, DSO and Bar, French Croix de Guerre and Belgian Croix de guerre was a British Army officer and police officer who was at the centre of a mutiny in the ranks of the Royal Irish Constabulary during the Irish War of Independence. He was shot and killed by the Irish Republican Army in Cork in 1920.
Liam Tobin was an officer in the Irish Army and the instigator of an Irish Army Mutiny in March 1924. During the Irish War of Independence, he served as an IRA intelligence officer for Michael Collins' Squad.
Peadar Clancy was an Irish republican who served with the Irish Volunteers in the Four Courts garrison during the 1916 Easter Rising and was second-in-command of the Dublin Brigade of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) during the War of Independence. Along with Dick McKee and Conor Clune, he was shot dead by his guards while under detention in Dublin Castle on the eve of Sunday, 21 November 1920, a day known as Bloody Sunday that also saw the killing of a network of British intelligence agents by the Squad unit of the Irish Republican Army and the killing of 14 people in Croke Park by the Royal Irish Constabulary.
Conor Clune was one of three men along with Dick McKee and Peadar Clancy killed in controversial circumstances in Dublin Castle on Bloody Sunday, 1920, a day that also saw the killing of a network of British intelligence agents by the "Squad" unit of the Irish Republican Army and the killing of 14 people in Croke Park by the Royal Irish Constabulary. Clune was 27 years old.
The Criminal Investigation Department (CID) in the Irish Free State was an armed, plain-clothed counter-insurgency police unit that operated during the Irish Civil War. It was organised separately from the unarmed Civic Guard police force. The unit was formed shortly after the truce with the British and disbanded in October 1923.
Francis 'Frank' Teeling was a member of the Irish Republican Army and one of Michael Collins' Squad who took part in the assassinations of members of the Cairo Gang on Bloody Sunday.
G (detective) Division was a plainclothes divisional office of the Dublin Metropolitan Police concerned with detective police work. Divisions A to F of the DMP were uniformed sections responsible for particular districts of the city.
Peter Ashmun Ames was an American British Army intelligence officer and member of the Cairo Gang who was assassinated by the Irish Republican Army.
↑ Imperial War Museum, General Hugh Jeudwine Papers, A Record of the Rebellion in Ireland, 1919–1921 and of the part played by the Army in it. Volume II
↑ Caroline Woodcock, Experiences of an Officer's Wife in Ireland(London and Edinburgh: Blackwood and Sons, 1921).
↑ Charles Townsend, The British Campaign in Ireland 1919–1921 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975)
↑ The Irish War of Independence by Michael Hopkinson ( ISBN978-0717137411), p. 91
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