The publication of this book has come as a welcome surprise. On numerous trips to the National Archives in Washington in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I had searched in vain - and with the expert help of archivists, Larry McDonald and military-documents expert John Taylor - to find Office of Strategic Services of the Joint Chiefs of Staff(OSS) reports on Ireland during World War Two.
My motivation was quite simple; I believed that the reports from US spies in Ireland during the war had had a strong and positive influence on Washington's Irish policy - and reports from those spies had helped counteract the unreliable, unprofessional and sometimes zany (and I mean just that) dispatches of the US envoy in Dublin, David Gray. The latter disliked Eamon de Valera and his government's wartime policy of neutrality. He was loud-mouthed and indiscreet, and his posting had little to do with any innate wisdom or diplomatic skills. He was bereft on both counts.
But he had the good fortune to be married to an aunt of President Roosevelt. Hence the reason for this novelist/journalist's posting to wartime Dublin. The head of OSS, William J. Donovan, also a wartime visitor to Ireland, was no admirer of Gray or his reporting skills. Hence the importance of counter-balancing inferior diplomatic reports with dispatches from reliable OSS operatives in the field.
Martin S. Quigley, the author of this book, was one of a handful of US spies sent over during the war. He proved to be a happy choice overall. Discovered by the indefatigable Larry McDonald, many of his reports were declassified in 1997 and are reproduced in the second part of this valuable volume. (Historians await with interest the release of the remainder - that is, if they have survived.) The first part of this book is a very useful memoir which helps set his reports in their contemporary context.
A graduate of Georgetown, Martin Quigley worked after college in his father's publishing house, which specialised in trade books on the film industry. Recruited to the OSS, a young Quigley was given orders to spy in Ireland at the end of 1942. (The first OSS report reproduced in this book begins in May 1943). Quigley's cover was strong, or so he thought. Sent as a commercial representative of the American film industry, he arrived in Dublin armed with a briefcase filled with introductions to senior political, commercial and ecclesiastical figures. He took up residence in the Shelbourne Hotel and began his covert operations. Col. Dan Bryan, who was the head of Irish Military Intelligence (G2), had an excellent counter-intelligence record as a wartime spycatcher or spy-watcher. G2 had easily broken the cover of OSS operatives assigned to Dublin before Quigley's arrival.
Martin Quigley writes that Bryan said many years after the war: "Quigley's cover was perfect. We did not know he was OSS". This is hard to accept at face value. Bryan may not have acted against him. But that does not mean he did not know that Martin Quigley was working for OSS. Why, Bryan would have asked, did the US film industry require a full-time commercial representative in Ireland in 1943?
In my many interviews with Col. Bryan, he repeatedly made clear that he always had Allied spies watched during the war. They were usually left alone once they did not step out of line. That was almost certainly so in Martin Quigley's case. This gentleman spy operated out of the Shelbourne. He had interviews during his time here with Eamon de Valera, Frank Aiken, Gerald Boland (Minister for Justice) Sean T. O'Kelly, William T. Cosgrave and Archbishop John Charles McQuaid. He travelled the country and talked to the editors of provincial papers and also to leading members of the film trade.
It is most unlikely he would have been permitted access to such leading Irish public figures if Col. Bryan had not first established that a useful purpose would be served by having reports of those interviews sent back to the right OSS sources in Washington. Martin Quigley was, after all, a gentleman and an intelligent observer of local affairs, unlike the diplomatically-challenged David Gray. He was as impressive as the US envoy proved to be not merely a nuisance, but a direct and malign influence on the formation of President Roosevelt's Irish policy.
In essence, Martin Quigley's reports proved to be an important counter-balance to the waffle which Gray was sending through back-channels, often directly to the desk of the president. Thanks to Quigley and his spy predecessors, the Irish desk at the OSS could provide the State Department with another perspective - a perspective which demonstrated just how compromised "neutral" Ireland was to bring about the aim of an Allied victory. Martin Quigley states that, in certain cases, there was an agreement to send copies of dispatches from Irish envoys on the continent to US intelligence sources. This may be so but I have never found evidence of the practice.
The author records only one episode where he took the first steps towards influencing a change in existing Irish policy. He used Emmet Dalton, a comrade of Michael Collins who worked during World War Two for Paramount, to sound out the British military on the idea of lending the Treaty ports to the Allies. But where was the need in 1943? The Allies had worked out a satisfactory secret modus operandi with de Valera and the Irish armed forces.
His reports also throw additional light on the wartime attitudes of leading Irish personalities to censorship and the power of the film industry as an educational medium. For example, Eamon de Valera saw the motion picture as a way to help spread a knowledge of the Irish language. Frank Aiken spoke to him about the absence of good historical films on US topics and encouraged the making of a life of George Washington which he felt would "have great appeal."
Quigley, on occasions, found it hard to understand the logic of wartime film censorship. On the direct instructions of the Archbishop of Dublin, John Charles McQuaid, a Mass filmed under the direction of the Servite Fathers was rejected for private or public viewing in Ireland. It carried the endorsement of the Cardinal Archbishop of Chicago and a commentary by Fulton J. Sheen. De Valera explained to him - and that may have been the reason advanced by McQuaid - that " this country is so Catholic that representation of a Catholic religious service, no matter how treated, would be objectionable."
Martin Quigley, who has always been a great help to historians, including this reviewer, has written a revealing book. It is a unique insight into wartime Ireland in 1943 by a sympathetic and perceptive observer.
It is to be hoped that his two long OSS reports - undoubtedly containing his most frank analysis of the country - have survived and that they will be published in his next book.
Dermot Keogh is Professor of History at University College Cork. He is the author of Twentieth Century Ireland and, most recently, Jews in Twentieth Century Ireland