A Rebel and a Traitor by Rory Carroll Book Review
‘A Rebel and a Traitor: A fugitive, the manhunt and the birth of the IRA’ by Rory Carroll. Published by Mudlark (2026).
Espionage non fiction book review by David Hardman for Spybrary.com
There have been numerous books about Roger Casement over the years, but as far as I am aware this is the first one to explore the intelligence operation that hunted down this diplomat-turned-Irish republican revolutionary.
Indeed, Rory Carroll does not attempt to provide a complete biography of Casement’s life. Some basic information about his early years and diplomatic career is quickly dashed off, and then the bulk of the book is concerned with Casement’s attempts to drum up financial and military support for the Easter Rising of 1916, and the cat-and-mouse chase between Casement and his pursuers. A final section describes Casement’s trial, execution, and the aftermath.
Roger Casement was an Irish-born British diplomat who received royal recognition for his work abroad. In South Africa, he gathered intelligence on the rebellious Boers, and then went on to expose the horrors of colonialism in the Congo. This latter work led Belgium’s monarch to give up that territory, and Casement was made a Companion of the Most Distinguished Order of St. Michael and St. George. After being sent to South America, he exposed colonial abuses in Peru that were possibly even worse than those in the Congo. Casement was rewarded with a knighthood.
However, ever since witnessing Britain’s own abuses against the Boers, which included herding women and children into concentration camps, Casement had been uneasy. He began to worry about Britain’s imperial presence in Ireland, and his support for Home Rule was not a secret in the Foreign Office. Over time, though, his private views became more revolutionary. He devised the idea of getting German military support for an uprising against the British in Ireland. This was somewhat complicated by the outbreak of the first world war, but Casement persisted. He secretly travelled to America to gain the financial and moral support of the republican Clan na Gael organisation.
Then he travelled to Germany, via Norway (where he arranged the necessary entry papers with the German embassy), in the hope of securing German troops to support the Easter Rising, which rebels in Dublin were planning. This mission was unsuccessful, and Casement somewhat infuriated his German hosts. He also tried to raise an army of rebels from the Irish prisoners who had been captured while fighting for the British. But Casement had misjudged these men.
Whatever their views about the governance of their homeland, they mostly believed themselves to be fighting for a bigger cause and also had loyalties to their regiments. Casement was met with jeers and shouts of ‘traitor!’, although he eventually managed to recruit about 50 sympathisers. The Germans also agreed to supply guns for the Irish rebel cause.
All this time, Casement was taking precautions not to be detected by the British, including changing his appearance and making unnecessarily convoluted journeys. Initially, this was successful, but Casement had not reckoned on two significant factors that contributed to his undoing. Firstly, his assistant and secret lover, a Norwegian called Findlay Adler Christensen, betrayed him to the British legation during their stopover in Norway. This included revealing that Casement was an active homosexual. Extraordinarily, Christensen then told Casement that the British had somehow managed to wheedle details of his plans out of him. From this point, Casement’s efforts to avoid detection were not merely theoretical precautions. It is not clear exactly what motivated Christensen, apart from the possible opportunity for some financial advantage, but Rory Carroll suggests the expressionless and inscrutable Norwegian may have been a sociopath. Secondly, British Naval Intelligence, headed up by Captain Reginald “Blinker” Hall, came into possession of the codes that would help them read encrypted German wireless transmissions.
Hall was a diminutive figure, but he was clever and psychologically dominated those around him. He had been a feared and respected Navy captain, but chronic chest problems had led him to give up his command. At the Admiralty, he subsequently headed up their intelligence unit, based in Room 40. This was a precursor to Bletchley Park. Hall was ruthless, and he was perfectly prepared to break rules and to withhold information from his superiors in order to get the results he wanted.
After Casement is betrayed by Christensen, and the manhunt gets underway in earnest, the book becomes a real page turner, almost novelistic in its presentation. With regard to this, a couple of reviews of the book have questioned some of the thoughts or words attributed to Casement. I myself was struck by the opening paragraph of Chapter One, which describes Casement walking out into a rainswept street and needing to tread carefully due to a hole in his shoe. Surprised at this level of detail, I turned to the end notes (there are nearly 70 pages of these) and found that there were sources to evidence both the inclement weather and the state of Casement’s footwear. I occasionally checked the endnotes in relation to other points of detail, and almost always there was something to give support.
The great irony in the story is that the refusal of the Germans to provide troops led Casement to conclude that the planned uprising was doomed. Anticipating a massacre, he wanted to try and stop the rebels. After landing back in Ireland under cover of night, Casement and some other conspirators were spotted by a suspicious local who reported them to the Royal Irish Constabulary. Shortly after, Casement was arrested and turned over to Naval Intelligence. But Hall refused to allow Casement to contact the plotters in Dublin and implore them to call off the rising. The ruthless intelligence head decided it was better for the rebellion to go ahead and be decisively squashed.
Hall may have been hoping for a quick execution of Casement, to avoid any trial revealing that Hall had prevented Casement from appealing to the rebels to call off the uprising. Unfortunately for him, the rapid executions of some of the rebel leaders had stirred up a Republican mood among the Irish people, who for the most part had not shared the revolutionary fervor of the rebels.
Casement was afforded a trial at London’s Royal Courts of Justice. By now, though, Hall had uncovered the troves of diaries that Casement had stored in various locations. These revealed a plethora of homosexual encounters that Casement had engaged in over a period of many years and across several continents. Rumours about Casement had already been circulating, but now Hall was able to provide some solidity to these. Talk about Casement’s “unnatural vices” therefore overshadowed every other aspect of the trial. Although the mores of the time prevented excerpts being publicly released, the diaries were seen by a number of significant figures. Casement was found guilty and it is likely that the revelations of his homosexuality effectively deflated a campaign for clemency. He was hanged for treason.
Many Irish (and non-Irish) people believed the “black diaries” had been forged by the British in order to condemn Casement. This has been argued at length over the years and there have been forensic examinations. Carroll accepts that the diaries are real, not least because they were so numerous. The British would not have needed to go to such extreme lengths to damn Carroll on the basis of his homosexuality. Unfortunately for the British government (and Hall), the Republican genie was out of the bottle by this time. Within three years of Casement’s execution, the Irish Free State had been created.
Shortly after Casement's execution, Blinker Hall’s star waned. After the Americans cut ties with Berlin, the flow of telegrams between the two countries stopped and Hall was denied a key source of intelligence. In Carroll’s words, he became “a bumbler”, basing his actions on rumour and speculation. He left Naval Intelligence and got elected as a Conservative MP, but had little impact (he had a role in the notorious “Zinoviev letter”, an attempt to discredit the Labour government).
A Rebel and a Traitor is a gripping slice of history that reads like a thriller.
David Hardman for Spybrary.
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