A US spy in Ireland

November Lecture at Glucksman Ireland House details US suspicions about Irish relationship with Germany in WWII

By Michael Norby

In 1943, Major Martin Quigley, then just 25-years-old, successfully infiltrated Ireland using commercial cover - the only US military operative to do so throughout the entire war.

Now 92-years-old, Quigley and his son, Kevin, will talk about his experience in Ireland at Glucksman Ireland House on Thursday, November 12.

Quigley, pictured here with Walt Disney, posed as a motion picture executive during his intelligence gathering time in Ireland.

“We are fully aware that, in a world at war, each set of belligerents is over ready to regard those who are not with them as against them; but the course we have followed is a just course.” – Eamon De Valera, December 12, 1941.

In World War II, or what was known nationally as “The Emergency,” the Irish government declared and maintained a policy of neutrality. Despite its historical belligerence towards Great Britain, Ireland, realizing that a significant step in either direction would most likely result in bombing, invasion and occupation, elected to honor its stance throughout the war.

The government swayed a little from time to time. Dublin came to the aid of its stricken neighbors in Belfast during the Luftwaffe’s destruction of that city two years into the war. On that tragic evening, April 15, 1941, a dispatch of 13 fire tenders from Drogheda, Dundalk, Dublin and Dun Laoighre raced north to help with the firefighting and rescue efforts. The Nazi reaction to that act, disputed by the German government at the time, was a bombing raid directed at Dublin which claimed the lives of 28 people in the North Strand, Phoenix Park and North Richmond Street areas.

Taoiseach Eamon De Valera also allowed the Royal Air Force to employ areas of Irish airspace above Co. Donegal for the take off and landing of military aircraft flying to and from Northern Ireland on combat sorties. Couple that with the fact that over 130,000 Irish nationals fought in the British Armed Forces (and many more in other Commonwealth forces) and it would be hard to come to any conclusion other than Irish neutrality, with a slight sway towards the Allied side, was in effect throughout the war.

Nevertheless, from the beginning of hostilities in 1939, suspicions about the role of Ireland in wartime Europe consistently landed on political desks in Washington. The German and Japanese legations were allowed to remain open, spies from both countries operated across the country and, of course, IRA involvement was questioned. Erroneous reporting of Irish collusion with Nazi Germany struck a chord in the US political psyche and President Franklin D. Roosevelt decided to investigate.

From the outset, Roosevelt had an exceedingly hard time selling US involvement in the war. That changed with Great Britain’s steadfastness during the Battle of Britain in 1940 and, to a greater extent, with the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor. Those two events in particular meant that the President had both a tenacious ally in Europe and a seething population at home chomping at the bit to strike back at those who would harm them.

American suspicions

Due to the strategic military and political consequences of an Ireland in bed with the Germans - the US at the time was still heavily Irish American – Roosevelt decided that is was of the utmost importance to either confirm or otherwise contradict De Valera’s sworn neutrality. Indeed, it wasn’t just the United States that held suspicions about Ireland’s role, and Ireland’s men and women, at times, paid a heavy price. On occasion, clearly marked Irish commercial vessels, using full navigational lights, were attacked from submarines representing both sides of the war, resulting in the deaths of merchant seamen from the 26 counties.

Roosevelt, who had just recently developed and commissioned the US Office of Strategic Services (OSS) under the command of World War 1 hero General William J. Donovan decided to send a trio of spies to Ireland to investigate. Two were quickly uncovered by the Irish government but the third, Major Martin S. Quigley, retained his cover and spent most of 1943 traveling the country in search of information.

After graduating from Georgetown University in 1939, Quigley, like many of his countrymen, knew that war was coming and immediately investigated how best he could help if the war arrived at the doorstep of the United States. He was turned down from joining the Navy because of poor eyesight, but family connections brought him to General Donovan’s fledgling OSS organization (which would later become the CIA) and onto a career as an intelligence officer.

He spent his initial months in the service gathering and dissecting propaganda material from all of the major belligerents involved in the war. As soon as the Irish mission was drawn up, however, the highly connected Irish-American was chosen straight away. He relished the challenge to set the record straight about where the Irish government stood.

“Ireland being so close to England and so near the war zone was of interest prior to the German invasion [of Poland] in 1939,” Quigley, now 92-years-old, told The Irish Emigrant. “The Irish position was not clear. They had professed neutrality but what was their real position? That was the question.”

The perfect cover

His cover was perfect. Quigley’s father, as the author of the Motion Picture Production Code in 1929, just when films were transitioning from silent to talkie, was extremely well known and highly regarded. A first generation Irish American whose father had fled%2