The Casement conundrum

This month sees the publication of The Amazon Journal Of Roger Casement, the transcription of manuscript material held almost entirely in the National Library in Dublin, which was irrefutably written by Casement during his voyage into the north-west Amazon in the last four months of 1910. In the introduction to the book I set out the broad thesis as to why I consider The Black Diaries Of Roger Casement (1959) are forgeries.

At the same time, Roger Casement's Diaries 1910: The Black And The White, edited by Casement's most recent biographer, Dr Roger Sawyer, is published in London. In his book, containing the first fully-corrected version of the 1910 Dollard's Black Diary, Dr Sawyer argues why he is certain the Black Diaries are genuine. Casement, he says, kept two diaries during this Amazon voyage - a "black" or sexual diary and a "white" or non-sexual one. I believe British Intelligence used Casement's genuine diary to forge the sexual version. A dirty trick not only to disgrace Casement at the time of his execution but to cover up the real issues underpinning Casement's humanitarian investigations. Either Sawyer or I must be right and the publication of both texts now allows historians the chance to decide for themselves in the public domain on an issue that continues to haunt Anglo-Irish relations.

Certainly Dr Sawyer has the weight of public opinion on his side. Despite a tradition of Irish "forgery theorists" who have tried to argue foul play, the widely accepted view, 80 years after Casement's execution, is that the Black Diaries are genuine. Casement's recent biographers all maintain that while making investigations into atrocities committed by the rubber-gathering industry in the Congo and Amazon, Casement indulged in a private sexual odyssey.

When I first became interested in Roger Casement's investigation in the Amazon I too had no reason to doubt that the Black Diaries were genuine. In November 1993 I was commissioned by Chatto & Windus to write a book called The Putumayo Atrocities chronicling Casement's campaign to alert public and political attention to the widespread extermination of Amazon tribal people. My intention was to knit in the rather racy sex life he enjoyed as related in the Black Diaries and give the book a "sexiness" - that the British publishing industry considers mandatory if a book has any hope of a wide audience.

By coincidence, in March 1994 the Black Diaries were released into Kew Public Record Office and I was surprised to discover that three of the four Black Diaries covered the first year-anda-half of Casement's Putumayo investigation. In the spring of 1995, with a completed working draft of the book, I signed a further contract with another publisher, Pimlico Books, to co-edit Casement Diaries with Dr Roger Sawyer. It was our intention to publish main excerpts form the Black Diaries and from Casement's diaries held in Dublin although neither of us was very sure exactly what form those Dublin diaries took.

In the summer of 1995 I spent six weeks in Dublin working in the National Library. There I found two large tin boxes containing a mass of Casement's writings dealing with the three years he spent investigating the Putumayo atrocities. Among these papers was the 160,000-word Putumayo Journal - a document that Casement's biographers had seen fit to neglect completely. As I pieced this material together I began to have my first suspicions that the Black Diaries were forged.

In October 1995, a further 180 Casement files were released at Kew Public Record Office, most of it information that was already known. There was, however, one letter that showed that Peter Singleton-Gates, the writer responsible for publishing the Black Dia- ries in 1959, had worked as a publishing "front" for Sir Basil Thomson - the likely architect of the forgeries. In an article in The Irish Times I aired my concerns and, while a long controversy raged in the letters page over the next few months, I began my own investigations into the whole diaries controversy.

Among the de Valera papers held at the Franciscan Library at Killiney, Co Dublin, I found a letter written in 1966 from an Irish journalist, Kevin MacDonnell, addressed to President de Valera. He said that while researching in the vaults of the Imperial War Museum in London he had found the Tricolour that flew over the Post Office during the Easter Rising of 1916. At the end of the letter he added:

"May I also take the chance to mention that in the course of further work I was informed by an ex-British Naval Intelligence source, whose name I cannot reveal, that the Casement diaries were fabricated by his chief, Admiral Hall. He has had the matter on his conscience ever since and though he has great respect for Hall in all other ways he feels this was an evil piece of work"

In his reply, de Valera stated that "the important thing is to get some positive proof. Nothing else will suffice".

De Valera was absolutely right. Certainly the Black Diaries fit in with the type of offensive (as opposed to defensive) intelligence strategies used by British naval intelligence during the first World War when forgery was a frequently adopted method of confusing the enemy. It was also clear that from the autumn of 1914 both British special branch (Thomson) and naval intelligence (Hall) were obsessed with Casement's capture.

But could I prove the Black Diaries were forged? I thought so. In February 1996 I wrote a long letter to my publishers explaining that the opinions I had held when signing my book contracts had gone through a complete turnabout. The material I had uncovered in Dublin and other material released in 1995 had convinced me that the Black Diaries were "cooked". My letter reached them from Brazil a few days after the IRA decided to break the peace process with the bomb at Canary Wharf. When I returned to London in June, I found my publishers completely unsympathetic with my change of heart. The Putumayo Atrocities remains unpublished and I withdrew from the Pimlico collaboration with Dr Sawyer.

MY opinion is that the only way to prove effectively that the Black Diaries are forged is to reconstruct Casement's movements during the period covered by the Black Diaries from indisputably genuine source material. In doing this one is able to see (I think quite clearly) that the Casement portrayed by the Black Diaries is so different from Casement the tireless, humanitarian campaigner and emerging revolutionary, as to be irreconcilable. The string of inconsistencies, inaccuracies and omissions between the Black Diaries and the constructed narrative have a cumulative effect in building the case exposing forgery. Next year I will publish a companion volume of Casement documents, Roger Casement's Heart-of-Darkness, concentrating on Casement's movements during 1911 and his second voyage up the Amazon.

The art of a good forger is to make the forgery appear as convincing as possible and certainly the Black Diaries have been expertly forged.

If British intelligence went to the lengths to forge 80,000 words of Black Diaries, then it would certainly have gone to further lengths to keep the matter secret. The publishing of both "white" and "black" diaries by Dr Sawyer and I (neither of us, incidentally, are Irish) should help to settle the matter. The opinion of so-called hand-writing experts is not enough and certainly cannot be considered conclusive historical evidence. What is needed is what Alfred Noyes asked for in the 1950s: a proper, independent jury of historians to investigate the issue. Forensic experts should be involved too.

Whether Casement was or wasn't a homosexual is only the superficial issue at stake. My belief from studying the late years of the Amazon rubber boom is that Casement was a singular witness to the most apocalyptic moment in the history of the Amazon rainforest. He compiled a quasi-judicial case exposing a widespread genocide that has yet to be acknowledged properly and which continues to this day. Far more than the historical or sexual reputation of Casement rests with these documents.

The Amazon Journal Of Roger Casement edited by Angus Mitchell will be published in Ireland by the Lilliput Press, Dublin, on October 23rd. Price £20 paperback; £40 hardback. It will be pub- lished in Britain by Anaconda Editions in November.