Michael Collins and the Anglo-Irish War: Britain's Counterinsurgency

Michael collins and the anglo-IrIsh War Related Potomac titles Flawed Patriot: The Rise and Fall of CIA Legend Bill Harvey by Bayard Stockton Ireland’s Most Wanted™: The Top 10 Book of Celtic Pride, Fantastic Folklore, and Oddities of the Emerald Isle by Brian M. Thomsen BRitain’s counteRinsuRgency FailuRe Michael collins and the anglo-IrIsh War J. B. e. Hittle Potomac Books Washington, D.C. Copyright © 2011 by Potomac Books, Inc. Published in the United States by Potomac Books, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hittle, J. B. E. Michael Collins and the Anglo-Irish War : Britain’s counterinsurgency failure / J.B.E. Hittle. — 1st ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-59797-535-3 (hardcover) ISBN 978-1-61234-128-6 (electronic edition) 1. Collins, Michael, 1890–1922—Military leadership. 2. Revolutionaries—Ire- land—Biography. 3. Ireland—History—War of Independence, 1919–1921. 4. Irish Republican Army—History. 5. Insurgency—Ireland—History—20th century. 6. Great Britain. Army—History—20th century. 7. Counterinsurgency—Ireland— History—20th century. I. Title. DA965.C6H58 2011 941.5082’1—dc23 2011019988 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper that meets the American National Standards Institute Z39-48 Standard. Potomac Books 22841 Quicksilver Drive Dulles, Virginia 20166 First Edition 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 To my parents This page intentionally left blank contents Foreword by Michelle Van Cleave ix Preface xiii Acknowledgments xxi Introduction xxiii 1 England’s Troubled Colony 1 2 Colonial Security Policy 10 3 The Irish Nationalist 33 4 The Phoenix 47 5 Revolution in Earnest 60 6 In the Shadow of Gunmen 72 7 Spies at the Window 91 8 Unification by Force 113 9 Within the Gates 141 10 Endgame 185 11 Conclusion 216 Appendix A. Sinn Fein’s Suspicious Cousins 239 Appendix B. On His Majesty’s Secret Service 245 Appendix C. British Intelligence Officers and Other Victims, November 21, 1920 251 Notes 253 Bibliography 283 Index 289 About the Author 297 This page intentionally left blank foreWord In 2005, when I was serving as head of U.S. counterintelligence, I traveled to London for my first meeting with the director of the British Secret Ser- vice (MI5). She received me at her formal office, a well-appointed room with one white orchid on her desk, that provided the perfect backdrop for intimate conversations. There was much to talk about. The U.S. Depart- ment of Homeland Security was barely two years old, and already Con- gress was deliberating yet another major governmental reorganization: the creation of a new director of national intelligence. What would all of this mean for American intelligence and counterintelligence? As we were saying our good-byes, she handed me the following passage: We trained hard but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up in teams we would be reorganised. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganising, and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralisation.1 Her Service had come by those lessons the hard way. “The Troubles” marked a pivotal point in the history of MI5 and Spe- cial Branch, and a time when Britain paid the price for its flirtation with an umbrella homeland security office. In the United States, we are still [ ix ] [ x ] FoRewoRd reaching for better answers to protect against threats to our homeland and to provide the intelligence insights essential to the nation’s security and the advancement of freedom, prosperity, and peace. Well-intentioned proponents of reforming U.S. domestic intelligence along the lines of “the British model,” which owes so much to the distinctive experiences of the Anglo-Irish War, would do well first to understand what in fact that means. Even today, nine years after its creation, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and its intelligence-related responsibilities remain something presumed (“of course the Homeland Security Department has an intelligence mission!”) rather than defined, i.e., what is the department supposed to do by way of collecting, analyzing, and disseminating domestic intelligence and threat information? Ask the congressional over- sight committees, the director of national intelligence, the secretary of the Homeland Department, CIA, and the FBI, and you are likely to get as many different answers as there are voices to be heard. Indeed, the history of Great Britain’s security services in the post– World War I years and contemporary American experience in the twenty- first century share at least one central lesson in common: new organiza- tions are no substitute for clarity of thought on what needs to be done and how to do it. Read through the current organizational documents and directives of the director of national intelligence, and you will unearth a labyrinth of reporting responsibilities and overlapping jurisdictions that leave even the most careful student wondering, “Who’s on first?” On that point, one might cite yet another insightful organizational theorist who cautioned, “If you don’t know where you’re going, you’re likely to wind up somewhere else.”2 As J. B. E. Hittle makes abundantly clear, Michael Collins never had that problem. Not only did he know where he was going, but that knowl- edge was the key to his charismatic leadership as well as his accomplish- ments as an intelligence strategist. What happened next is an engrossing case study of an intelligence/counterintelligence war. Counterintelligence is a contingent discipline, meaning that in order to understand and evaluate counterintelligence activities, one must start with an understanding and evaluation of the intelligence activities that are meant to be countered. In other words, one needs to understand British intelligence and security in order to understand the Irish counter- FoRewoRd [ xi ] intelligence successes, and vice versa. Hittle brings to that task the critical judgment of a professional assessing the tradecraft, strategy, and tactics of fellow professionals. Of course, as the author writes, a complete picture of the secret service’s activities against Collins and the Irish Republican Army (IRA) may never be fully revealed. But for the student of the intelligence disciplines, this book is an excellent place to start. An intelligence service suffering from confusion, inefficiency, and de- moralization is a ripe target for the adversary to penetrate, defeat, and exploit. That is why a strategically coherent counterintelligence capability is never more important than in times of turmoil and change. We see this in the story of Ireland that follows, and yes, we see this dynamic at work in the United States today. Michelle Van Cleave Washington, D.C. This page intentionally left blank Preface This book presents an analysis of Britain’s intelligence and counterinsurgency efforts in Ireland from 1919 to 1921, the period known as the Anglo- Irish War. It is not a history of the life and times of Michael Collins per se, nor is it a comprehensive history of the Anglo-Irish War. Virtually every aspect of the conflict and of Collins’s life has been studied, dissected, de- bated, and scrutinized by historians, journalists, novelists, playwrights, poets, and filmmakers over the past nine decades. Rather, this book examines the Anglo-Irish War as a case study of intelligence management under conditions of low-intensity conflict. The study tracks the key events of Michael Collins’s career and the Anglo-Irish War, a major national security crisis for Britain from 1918 to 1922. It examines Britain’s national-level and colonial intelligence systems as instruments of colonial security policy prior to the conflict, and reviews key weaknesses, vulnerabilities, and intelligence management errors within those systems that resulted in Ireland becoming a major intelligence failure. Further, the book reviews the ineffective system of parallel and competing civilian and military intelligence management at both the strategic and theater levels and explores how British security of- ficials struggled to create an ad hoc intelligence collection system to meet conditions of guerrilla warfare. Finally, it attempts to contrast these efforts with the intelligence performance of the Irish Republican Army. This analysis relies primarily upon contemporary memoirs and standard histories of the period, so a word of caution about the historiography [ xiii ] [ xiv ] PReFace of the Anglo-Irish War is necessary. Until fairly recently, a great deal of this history has been presented from a decidedly pro-Irish point of view. Consequently, Collins’s achievements as a revolutionary soldier, intelligence chief, statesman, and leader of men have assumed a larger-than-life quality. Beginning with Frank O’Connor’s 1937 biography, The Big Fellow, the historical literature of the period 1916–1923, known as “the Troubles,” is rich with colorful portrayals of Collins’s daring exploits. They describe a daredevil genius outsmarting Dublin Castle, the British Secret Service, and Lloyd George himself at every turn—all with a spring in his step, a smile on his face, a song in his heart, and a wisecrack on his lips. Such romanticized nationalism stems in part from the fact that the Anglo-Irish War—often called the Irish War of Independence—did not achieve independence, but rather Dominion status for an “Irish Free State” that left the country partitioned and firmly under Crown author- ity. This fell far short of the objective that thousands of IRA veterans had risked their lives for during the previous three years, and it led to Ire- land’s tragic civil war from 1922 to 1923.

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