Mary O’Rourke: my uncle, the Nazi spy and British double agent

Dear Mairead, my first cousin, Co Offaly

Dear Mairead,

Our uncle, Joseph Lenihan, was a double spy, a spy for Germany and then a spy for England. Now if that is not a startling opening to a letter, I don’t know what is.

I thought that you, in particular, would like to see the story about Uncle Joe in print, because you love to hear all about our family history when we meet in the Court Hotel in Tullamore for one of our lunches. There’s you, me and Gráinne, of course. We all get on so well and there’s nothing we like better than gossiping and talking about the family.

We are fascinated by Uncle Joe, brother to my father, PJ, and to your mother, Maura. His story is an exciting and a tragic one, as you know, dying far away from his family in Ireland. I suppose some might use the term “black sheep” to describe him, but I don’t think that’s right at all. Every family has characters in it. Every family likes to talk about an aunt or an uncle or a brother who was exceptional or eccentric. For the Lenihan family, Joe was that person.

Joe was one of five Lenihans, as I told my other cousin, Deirdre, in my letter to her. My father PJ, Maura, Willie, who went to America, Joe and Gerry. His mother had died of TB, leaving a young family behind. As the youngest, Gerry was sent to an aunt to be reared, which was not uncommon then. Joe was very clever, winning a scholarship to Galway University from St Flannan’s in Ennis, to study medicine. He had brains to burn, but he gave up medicine after a year. Who knows why, Mairead? He was clever, but maybe he didn’t have the appetite for all the learning that medicine requires. He didn’t have the temperament, certainly, being given to tall tales of his adventures, and to getting into scrapes. From this beginning, the full tale of Joe unfolds.

Joe studied for the examination to be an officer in the Customs and Excise Department, passing it, of course, because of his intelligence, and getting a job there, which he kept until 1931, when he was dismissed because of a work scandal. Undaunted, Uncle Joe then sat the Employment Clerk’s exam and he was placed second in Ireland. Of course, then his earlier dismissal was laid bare, so that was the end of that.

Joe then left Ireland and went to America to try his luck for a couple of years, before coming home to Ireland, where he was convicted in July 1933 for creating a public disturbance, and this was followed by a minor conviction for which he received a sentence of nine months in jail. Trouble just seemed to follow Joe wherever he went.

During the 1930s, the trail goes cold, but the next episode reads like a novel, Mairead. Uncle Joe appeared on Jersey, just before the German occupation of that island in July of 1940. He had worked as a labourer there, picking potatoes among other things, but when he attempted to escape from the island in a stolen boat, the motor flooded and he was washed ashore on the Cotentin Peninsula in Normandy. There, he was captured by German forces and interrogated. I’m not sure if he would have been able to tell them much, Maura, but we know that he was approached by two German officers who offered to release him from Gestapo custody if he would spy for Germany.

Perhaps the readers might be shocked by this and who knows why Joe agreed? Perhaps he felt that he had no choice, or maybe his wayward temperament came to the fore once more. In any case, off he went to Paris, where he was lodged until the end of 1940 near the headquarters of the Abwehr, or German intelligence, at 22 avenue de Versailles. Here, he received instructions in various aspects of spying and was given a cover address in Madrid, where he was to send any communications. According to Professor Eunan O’Halpin’s book, Spying on Ireland, Uncle Joe was to be parachuted into Ireland to give meteorological reports from Sligo, and then he was to do the same in Britain. He landed in Summerhill, Co Meath, on July 18th, 1941, and he went to visit his brother Gerard, telling him a cock-and-bull story about having been in Valparaíso in Chile, a story that he also told my father. Used and all as they were to Joe’s tall tales, they didn’t believe him.

When Professor O’Halpin’s book came out, I came across this account of Joe’s escapade in The Irish Times:

German intelligence dropped Lenihan by parachute in July 1941. His mission was firstly to radio weather reports from Sligo, and then to travel to Britain to report on conditions.

Instead he travelled to Northern Ireland and handed himself over to the British. Lenihan explained that, although a convinced republican, he disliked Nazism even more than he did Britain. His MI5 interrogators were amazed at his remarkable memory, describing him as by far their best source on German intelligence organisation in France and the Low Countries. One officer thought him too good to be true and suspected he was a German plant; others pointed to his “moral courage”, the honesty of his anti-British convictions, “which he could easily have withheld”, and to the quality of his information. (Irish Times, 2008)

I was a very young child at the time, but I do have a memory, or a story that is part of family folklore anyway, of Joe’s return home to Ireland when he was dropped into the country. The story goes that during this period he came to stay with my father in Athlone. The Garda had been alerted about him and came to see my father one night to tell him to get Joseph out of Athlone, otherwise they would be calling to arrest him. My father told Joe that he had to go and he took my mother’s bike, with the beautiful new basket that she had just purchased for it, and he cycled off to Geashill in Co Offaly, where your own mother, Maura, ran a two-teacher school with her husband, Jimmy Blake, who was the principal. I could only have been about six years of age at the time, but what I remember of this incident was my mother berating my father, saying, “I don’t want to see that man here again”, or words to that effect. She constantly bemoaned the fact that he had made his getaway on her bike and that he had taken the beautiful new basket that she had only just attached to the front for her messages in town. Such stories stick in little girls’ minds and I have a vivid recollection of all of that and of the excitement I felt about Joe’s escape.

We know that Joe arrived at Maura’s in Geashill on the “stolen” bike and that she kept him for a few days until she, in turn, was visited by the Garda, so he set off for Dundalk and the border. When he crossed into Northern Ireland, he turned himself into the RUC, asking to be taken to a representative of MI5. Here, the story takes yet another twist, as Joseph was sent to London and given the code name “Basket” (I wonder if that was reference to my poor mother’s bicycle basket!). He was put to work there sending coded letters to his Abwehr cover address in Madrid. Uncle Joe was now part of the famed MI5 operation Double Cross or XX, which was so important in winning the war. It would seem that every single German agent living in Britain was known about and contacted to spy for Britain. Of course, our relationship with Britain was strained at the time, due to our neutrality, and Professor O’Halpin’s comments prove how difficult it must have been for Joe.

After a lot of toing and froing, B Division of MI5 finally decided that Lenihan/Basket was not a suitable candidate for Double Cross. Cecil Liddell, Head of MI5’s Irish Section (B9) at the time, and brother to Guy Liddell, of course, was quite complimentary about the Irish spy and wrote:

“Though of rough appearance, he was fairly well educated, intelligent and with a phenomenal memory for facts and faces. He gave more fresh and accurate information about the Abwehr in The Netherlands and Paris than any other single agent.”

I suppose that we can feel proud of that, Maura! Apparently, even though Uncle Joe spied for the British, he refused to take their money, which was typical of the man, but I cheered when I read what Professor O’Halpin said in the Irish Independent a few years ago: “He was a wideboy but he had plenty of moral courage. There’s no doubt the British thought he had a brilliant mind.”

His brush with MI5 didn’t work out as planned, but Joseph was not interned for the war and was allowed relatively unsupervised freedom. We know that the British continued to give him fairly free rein in England, though he was under observation, and they even allowed him leave for a short holiday in Ireland, though there is no account that he ever took it.

When the war was over, the British settled many people who had been “useful” during the war. They gave Joe a job sorting mail at a post office in Manchester. There he lived out his life, earning his salary, keeping out of trouble, but never making any communication with Ireland or with America where his brother Willie (Liam) lived. After all the years of fighting and trouble, Joe would seem to have settled down and made a kind of peace with himself.

The years passed and nothing further was heard about Uncle Joe until 1974, when my brother Paddy received a telephone call from the Garda in Dublin, who in turn had received a telephone call from the police in Manchester to say that a Joseph Lenihan had died in a boarding house there. Paddy contacted Maura, your mother, and you, and off the three of you went to Manchester, where Joe had lived for so many years.

At the boarding house, they met his lovely landlady, who had nothing but praise for Joseph Lenihan. She said that he worked hard, had very few friends and went to the library constantly. In fact, the library often telephoned the house with news of books he’d ordered for collection. It would seem that his mind had stayed lively to the last.

Paddy often recalled that Joseph’s room in the lodgings in Manchester was sparsely furnished, but that it was a good, large and bright room. He died with very few personal effects, which I always thought was a sad thing, Maura. As we go through life, we accumulate so much: family photos, mementoes, gifts, but Joseph had none of these.

The Irish trio quickly made arrangements for Uncle Joe’s body to be brought back to Ireland. Here I come into the story. Paddy and Maura and you had made arrangements for Joseph to be buried at Esker Graveyard in Lucan, Co Dublin, and I can vividly remember going into the funeral home to see him with my two young sons, Feargal, who was 10 years old, and Aengus, who was six at the time. It was the first time they had ever seen anyone laid out, I think. I remember that Joe was tall, much taller than my father, with what I thought was a very refined face. There was a Mass in the church in Lucan and then he was buried in Esker. Professor Robert Dudley Edwards, then Professor of History at UCD, and father of Ruth Dudley Edwards, gave a great graveside oration – with his wild white hair, he looked as if he was born to give orations. Dudley Edwards’s mother was a sister of Hannah McInerney, Joe’s mother and my grandmother, so there was a great connection there. Dudley Edwards spoke very passionately about the Lenihan family at the graveside and we all felt a great sense of pride at this. Dudley Edwards had given Joe his place in the family, and that was fitting.

Mairead, as you and I know, this is not the full story of Uncle Joe’s life, but just the bare outline, and many of the historical details come from Professor O’Halpin’s work. It would seem that Uncle Joe’s work as a double spy, a spy for Germany and then a spy for England, never really had any catastrophic effect on either country.

I’m not sure if this is a matter of pride or not, Mairead, but what matters to me isn’t the spying, but the way Joe’s life played out. What I think is so sad about this story – and I know you feel it too – is that during all those years he lived on his own in Manchester, the landlady reported that he didn’t seem to have many friends. He didn’t seem to drink a lot, he kept to himself, he read a lot and was a very quiet lodger. It is particularly poignant that during those years, my father made many trips to Manchester to the Royal Exchange, one of the international centres for the cotton trade. On many, many occasions he would have been physically close, I am sure, to where Joseph worked and later lived. I often wonder how my father might have felt, had he known his brother was so close?

And yet, Joseph never saw fit in all that period to contact my father or your mother, of whom he was very fond, because she had been a mother to him, as we both know. I wonder why he kept himself apart? I understand that you and Paddy found newspapers in his room with articles about Brian Lenihan Snr in them, which indicated that Joe was following my brother’s career from afar. Perhaps he felt that he wouldn’t measure up, if he returned? Or perhaps Joe felt that we would disapprove of his wartime activities. None of this is true, Mairead, as you know. We would have made so much of him if he had come home. My father, I know, would have welcomed him with open arms. My mother might never have forgiven him for taking her basket, but she would ultimately have made him welcome, too, and so would we all.

Whatever his reasons, I can only think of the lonely life he led. I know he seemed to be put together and self-contained with his books and his good lodgings and his small pension from the postal service, but he didn’t have his family, and family is so important, as we both know – where would we all be without family?

Be that as it may, Mairead, that is the story of our Uncle Joe – his intelligence, his fancy imagination, which allowed him to invent stories about Valparaíso and having fought the Japanese among others. I often think he might have remembered that poem from school long ago, Tháinig Long ó Valparaíso by Pádraig de Brún, and used it in one of his more far-fetched stories. Perhaps this might explain more about Joe, that real life could never quite match up to that of his imagination; so much of him remains a mystery to us.

Now, as I write this letter to you, all this talk of secret money, radio equipment, a cipher, invisible ink and an address in Spain for communication purposes sounds so strange and so alien to us and yet this was the stuff of Joe’s life, the background to that day when he landed in Summerhill, Co Meath, by parachute. I am reminded of the lines from the poem by William Wordsworth, The Solitary Reaper: “For old, unhappy, far-off things/And battles long ago”. Yes, when I write, I am reminded of these long-ago battles and memories, not all of which are happy, but he was worthy of the memory we now pay him.

I never tire of talking about him when we meet, Mairead, and I know that we will go over those old, unhappy, far-off things again and Uncle Joe’s story will be further enmeshed in our family story; it is part of the glue that binds us all together, which I think is very fitting. May Uncle Joe rest in peace.

God Bless, talk to you soon.

Your loving first cousin,

Letters

This is an extract from Letters of My Life by Mary O’Rourke, published by Gill Books and available now, priced at €19.99, £17.99.