Decoding the IRA (2 page)

In my quest to decipher the documents, I started with a search on Google, which did not turn up much of promise. I then talked to a colleague at work who was a reserve officer in the US army, and he made some inquiries of fellow officers who worked in intelligence. Understandably they were reluctant to use government computers, and time, for any unauthorised project. Next, I contacted a professor in the department of mathematics at the University of Hawaii. He had spent some time as a
post-graduate student studying cryptology and instantly recognised them as a form of cipher called columnar transposition. However, even with this insight I was no closer to unlocking the secrets.

Hoping for a lucky break I continued to surf the web. Among the sites I looked at was that of the CIA; then late one evening I came across the National Security Agency (NSA) website. The NSA is one of the most secret and important security agencies in the United States. It is the main centre for cryptanalysis in the country, with responsibility for collecting and analysing signals intelligence from around the world.
³
The website included a section on the history of cryptology; I sent an e-mail titled ‘history', explaining my dilemma.

A little later the NSA replied that they couldn't help but recommended I contact the American Cryptogram Association. I sent the association a sample of six brief ciphers, which Dave Smith kindly shared with the association's membership by e-mail. Exactly two hours later (to the minute) the solutions came back to me courtesy of Dr James Gillogly. One was a message on importing explosives to Ireland from Britain, while others talked of secret meetings. At last, I was on to something – or rather James was!

James became my new partner and together over the next three years we tried to reveal the secrets of the IRA. I corresponded with him by e-mail for a few years before we actually met face to face. In the meantime, I discovered that I had stumbled across one of the most brilliant cryptologists in the US. A quiet-spoken man, he approached each new cipher as a complex but logical word puzzle.

James had been fascinated with ciphers since his days as a cub scout, when his father challenged him and his brother with simple letter substitution ciphers. At university he majored in computer science, and in 1978 received a PhD from Carnegie-Mellon University. At that time he wrote TECH – one of the early computer chess programmes – with the aim of pushing forward the frontier of computer technology in the realm of artificial intelligence. TECH went on to take second place in a world computer chess championship and pioneered some of the search techniques used by Deep Blue, which in 1997 became the first computer programme to defeat a world chess champion, Garry Kasparov.

In 1977, James made his first break of a previously unsolved cipher – a vellum page with odd symbols from the reign of King Henry VI (1421– 1471) of England. It turned out to be an alchemical formula beginning ‘take 1 ounse of your gold tat is desoluid and chaue 22 …' To the best of my knowledge neither James nor his family have since made gold from base metal! Many other successes followed. The most famous of these was his decryption in 1999 of most of the cipher embedded in sheets of copper on the
kryptos
sculpture in a courtyard at the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.
Kryptos
is a Greek word that appropriately means ‘hidden'. James also worked on German codes from the Second World War which had been encoded by the Enigma machine and his method was used to break a number of previously unbroken messages from the war.

Over the years, he went on to found a software company with his wife Marrietta and to develop network security programmes for computer operating systems. Since his retirement in 1999, he has acted as a consultant to the FBI and designed software to support law enforcement cryptanalysts combating criminals and gangs who use cipher, including gang members communicating with their imprisoned colleagues.

Working on the IRA documents, James delighted in beating the IRA cryptographers, without having the need for the original keywords. He performed the decryptions by loading the cipher text onto his computer and then analysing it with highly sophisticated decryption software that he had developed himself. Several times, he deciphered messages that the original recipient had complained could not be decoded – messages where the wrong keyword was used or the numbering of the encrypted letters was incorrect. On occasion, he was able to decrypt messages where a part of the document had been damaged or torn. This is possible with transposition ciphers as the letters for each word are distributed throughout the text, whereas in plain text all the letters of a word are together in sequential order. Thus if the corner of a cipher document is torn off and a block of letters missing, there may still be most of the letters of each word available, allowing one to deduce the actual message. However, with plain text if a word is missing there are no components of it in the remaining portion of the document.

While I was interested in the contents of the cipher, James revelled
in this great puzzle and the variety of encryption and security techniques used by the IRA.

Over the course of several trips back to Ireland, I was able to accumulate the 300 or so documents with cipher, in addition to a large number of papers containing supporting or background information. This work was largely done at UCD Archives in Belfield, Dublin, one of the premier repositories of documents covering twentieth-century Irish history. The Twomey Papers and the Ernie O'Malley Papers, both housed in the UCD Archives, are among the most important primary sources relating to the IRA. These, and other, collections make the IRA perhaps the most comprehensively documented revolutionary group of the twentieth century.

Copies of the documents arrived at my home in Honolulu, Hawaii, where I copied them again, sorted them and forwarded them to James in Los Angeles. On receiving the decryptions back from James I tried to assemble the cryptic messages into a coherent narrative within the appropriate historical context.

The world described by the papers was difficult to comprehend at first. We were getting seemingly unrelated snippets of information. Few of the messages were understandable on their own without reference to other documents or without knowledge of the background in which the events described were taking place. It was rather like assembling a large jigsaw without a picture on the box. And at the beginning it seemed like all we had were a few blue pieces that could have been either sky or ocean!

For security purposes the IRA were deliberately indirect and cryptic, even in cipher. For instance, only rarely were IRA leaders or key agents referred to by their real names; instead they were assigned a pseudonym or referred to by rank. So we were left with a list of fictitious names – Mr Brown, Mr Smith, Mr Ambrose and Jack Jones. By cross referencing with multiple documents and correlating the movements of the characters with those of known IRA leaders I was eventually able to find out the real name behind many of the pseudonyms and make a probable guess at some of the others. In the case of unsigned letters, it was often possible to credit them to a particular author by their reference number, cross-referencing to other papers or by looking at subsequent letters acknowledging receipt of the original letter.

‘Mr Brown' (or Browne) and ‘Mr Smith' at GHQ oversaw most of the correspondence with the IRA's agents in America. So it seemed likely that they represented Moss Twomey and Andy Cooney, the IRA's two key leaders. From the cipher, we learned that ‘Mr Smith' had recently returned from a visit to America and later went to England to complete his studies. This fitted the profile of Cooney, who visited America in the summer of 1926 and resigned as chief of staff so he could complete his medical studies and qualify as a doctor. The proof finally came in a security lapse by Moss Twomey when he wrote to Connie Neenan in America:
‘send Cooney [a] copy of the addresses he had [in the US]'
. But then in the précis (or plain text summary of the cipher that was kept on file at GHQ) he made the error of writing: ‘send address to Smith'. Twomey should have written ‘Smith' in both cipher and the précis. This slip-up confirmed that ‘Mr Smith' was a cover for Andy Cooney.
⁴

Twomey was appointed chairman of the Army Council in January 1927 and the following month ‘the chairman' (Twomey) sent a despatch to ‘Mr Jones' in New York in which he acknowledged receiving two prior letters, which in turn had been addressed to ‘Mr Brown'. This is some of the evidence that supports the contention that ‘Mr Brown' was Moss Twomey.
⁵

Later in this book we present evidence that ‘Mr Ambrose' was Seán MacBride; that ‘HS' the IRA's commander in Britain was likely George Power, an IRA intelligence officer from north Cork and that ‘Mr Jones' (or ‘JB') an espionage agent in America was most probably Dan ‘Sandow' Donovan from Cork. There are also a number of despatches to and from ‘Jack Jones' a senior IRA leader based in the Portlaoise area. I suspect ‘Jones' was really Jim Killeen from Westmeath (who was appointed IRA adjutant general in 1927), but in this case the evidence is insufficient to be certain.
⁶

Two other interesting characters were ‘James' and ‘Stephen'. ‘James' was a frequent visitor or resident of London, while ‘Stephen' was in contact with the IRA in America. In a later chapter, we show that these were the cover names for two Soviet Red Army intelligence officers working with the IRA. Despite some research, I am (as of yet) unable to find their real names. Indeed Soviet agents frequently had so many pseudonyms that their true identity often remains unknown to this day.

Figure 2. Despatch from George (alias ‘HS'), the IRA's commander in Britain, to Moss Twomey. This letter includes the only direct reference to Moscow in the documents. George reported that ‘James', the Soviet intelligence officer, had written to inform him that the Soviets would improve their funding of the IRA:
I had a letter from ‘James'. He is in Moscow. He told me to inform you, that everything would be fixed up and he is anxious that you cable this decision to our representative in America. He also acknowledges the receipt of your letter, which was sent to him by hand. He will be back in less than two weeks.


 

It was also challenging trying to identify IRA operatives when they were referred to by rank rather than name. I frequently found it difficult to find out who held a specific appointment at a particular time – this was due not only to the organisation's secrecy but also to the high turnover in staff due to arrests and resignations. As soon as one officer became unavailable, a substitute was quickly appointed in his place. Andy Cooney was appointed chief of staff in November 1925 and Moss Twomey took over the position in the spring of the following year. However, the exact date for the change in command is uncertain and in the case of letters signed ‘chief of staff' in May 1926 it is unclear whether the sender was Twomey or Cooney. Similarly during the period of Moss Twomey's imprisonment in November 1926, it is uncertain who was the author of letters signed ‘chief of staff' – though Andy Cooney most likely stepped back temporarily into the role. Hopefully this gives an idea of some of the challenges James and I faced.

James was scrupulous in his attention to detail and accuracy. The
copies we worked on were sometimes of poor quality, due to the age and state of the originals, and individual letters could be unclear or a portion of the text missing. An ‘I' could be mistaken for a ‘T' or an ‘O' for a ‘D'. Additionally words were sometimes misspelled or abbreviated. James' decryption produced a long string of text and he manually entered word breaks and punctuation based on the context. This could be challenging in the case of misspellings or where colloquial Irish expressions were used. One decryption, without the word breaks, was as follows:
‘avolunteerwasapproachedbycidwhooffered-himtwopoundperweekforanyinformation-hecouldgivethemconcerningduuhsalsoonepound-foreachrifego'
.

After James entered the appropriate word breaks, symbols and numerals this became:
‘a volunteer was approached by cid who offered him £2 per week for any information he could give them concerning duuhs also £1 for each rifle go'
. James and I then worked together on this and realised that ‘duuhs' was a misspelling of ‘dumps' and that a ‘t' had been dropped from ‘go'. Thus the corrected text became the much more understandable:
‘a volunteer was approached by [the] CID [detectives] who offered him £2 per week for any information he could give them concerning [IRA arms] dumps, also £1 for each rifle got'
.
⁷
Many times James went back and forth over the interpretation of a single word or sentence. In this book simple spelling mistakes have been corrected, but where there remained any ambiguity in the text or the cipher was uninterpretable we left it uncorrected without making any assumptions.