A British Secret Intelligence Service file, released in London today, sheds new light on two of Ireland's least successful German agents, who were arrested and interned shortly after they parachuted into fields in Co Clare in December 1943.
As German agents working at the height of the second World War, John Francis O'Reilly and John Kenny were hardly in the same league as the British spies named in the Mitrokhin files this week. According to the MI5 file, unveiled as part of a rolling release of security service papers, Germany considered both men were willing, but not able.
Kenny, an IRA sympathiser, volunteered to work in German propaganda in 1940 and, according to MI5 records, was trained in assembling radio transmitters in Bremen. His mission was to contact his IRA friends and gather information from dockers in Liverpool who would be willing to plant bombs on British ships. O'Reilly, son of Bernard O'Reilly, the former RIC sergeant who arrested Roger Casement when he landed in Ireland in 1916, went to Berlin in 1941, where he became a radio broadcaster for the Ministry of Propaganda.
In 1943 their German handlers decided that they should go back to Ireland. They were equipped with radio transmitters to send back information on British ships, the location of airfields, ball-bearing factories and munitions factories in Northern Ireland and in Britain.
Kenny's first mission began badly. The Luftwaffe dropped him into Co Clare, but problems with his parachute meant that he was dragged through several fields, sustaining severe cuts. He was spotted by a local man and detained.
O'Reilly landed close to his home in Kilkee, Co Clare, in an arrangement with his German handlers which meant that he had less than a mile to walk to his family home, and supposed safety. But, as the recently published Hitler's Irish Voices by David O'Donoghue records, he was given up to the authorities by his father. When O'Reilly was released, his father gave him the reward money.
The MI5 file, a collection of mostly unsigned intelligence re ports which are now brown with age, states that British intelligence considered O'Reilly to be "intelligent, but conceited and unreliable".
Elsewhere in the documents, a German intelligence report states that Kenny was "typically Irish-looking. V-Mann [part of Kenny's codename] has light red hair, blue eyes, healthy reddish-brown colouring. He makes an excellent and trustworthy impression".
O'Reilly was also briefed for a political mission. Given just £143 (sterling) to complete his mission, he was charged with collecting information about left-wing members of the Independent Labour Party and other political parties.
But the efforts of the two men came to nothing. Interned at Arbour Hill, O'Reilly and Kenny were not released until 1945. Kenny surfaced briefly in Britain, where MI5 kept an eye on him. O'Reilly went on to better things. A month after his release, with the German cash and the reward money from his father's betrayal, he bought the Esplanade Hotel at Parkgate Street, Dublin.