British Documents Prove Casement Forgery

The following is a two-part investigation of official documents held in the UK National Archives.
These specific documents written by Home and Foreign Office officials are of crucial importance in
the controversy about the diaries attributed to Roger Casement. Despite their importance, the
extensive literature of the last sixty years has carefully avoided revealing their true significance.

This article explains why.

Foreign Office confirms diaries forgery

In 1967 the British Government authorized the public release of once top-secret files to the Public Records Office. Among these were Foreign Office files relating to Casement in the period 1914 to 1916. Also in 1967 a new biography of Casement was commissioned from journalist-author Brian Inglis who was the first to access the secrets in those files. However, far from revealing those secrets in his 1973 book, Inglis ensured they would remain unknown to his readers. His book rapidly became the most influential study of Casement eventually producing a broad consensus that the former consul and humanitarian pioneer had been a disturbed pederast loner, an emotional fanatic traitor with a fractured personality. This portrait was copied verbatim by subsequent authors and Inglis went unchallenged for decades. Only in recent years has there been critical scrutiny of Inglis’ operation and that scrutiny has revealed the extent of his duplicity and sophistry.

Inglis contended the diaries were authentic but not from probative evidence; rather he created a portrait of Casement which made authenticity seem probable and credible. At the centre of this portrait we find the ambiguous figure of his manservant Christensen as a treacherous homosexual plotting to betray Casement to Findlay, Minister at the British legation in Christiania, Norway. It was Inglis who invented the allegation of Casement’s betrayal and it proved to be a potent propaganda weapon which was taken up by many later authors. Above all, it served to reinforce the defamation of Casement as pederast in the intensifying controversy about the diaries. To achieve this manipulation Inglis was constrained to suppress one of the secrets he had read in the released Foreign Office files. That secret was written in 1915 by Foreign Office official Arthur Nicolson who clearly confirmed that no betrayal took place or was contemplated.

The file in question is FO 95,776 and the narrative which emerges from its hundreds of pages reveals in convincing detail that no betrayal by Christensen took place and that, contrary to the allegation, Christensen successfully deceived Findlay for over two months with bogus letters, charts and fictions about Casement’s location and plans. Thus the magnitude of the false betrayal allegation is sufficient to discredit all Inglis’ supporting allegations and claims. Falsus in uno falsus in omnibus.

These documents were marked Private & Most Secret and they were written by British officials which signifies that their narrative constitutes an official account of events in those months. That account, kept secret until 1967, was contradicted by Inglis’ 1973 account which began with Christensen’s version of his encounter with legation secretary Lindley only to deny its veracity; “When the Foreign Office’s files on the subject were eventually opened for inspection, they told a different story.” Inglis’ ‘different story’ is a brief paraphrase of the top-secret memo invented by Findlay in October 1914 and sent at once to Foreign Secretary Grey. This shabby unconvincing document was also released in 1967 and it contains the first poisonous innuendo of homosexual scandal which Inglis cites. His paraphrase established the standard portrait of Christensen as a devious scoundrel who having ensnared Casement went voluntarily to the legation to sell him.

However, the official account was written in real time by the actual players Findlay and Nicolson and it is not credible that Inglis did not believe their account. Therefore, we must conclude he suppressed it in his book because he knew it was true and its truth compromised his plan to exploit the unknown Christensen as purported betrayer as the 1914 memo had insinuated.

Readers should note the following as symptomatic of the incoherence of the diaries controversy; at the same time that Inglis said nothing about the official account, US author B.L. Reid confirmed the official account and cited generously from FO 95,776 for his 1976 study.

Therefore the contents of that file testify not only to the falsity of Inglis’ version of events but also to all that derives from his version. What follows directly from Inglis’ version is the widely-believed claim that the diaries are authentic. It is important to note that Inglis contradicted the official account by replacing it with a paraphrase of Findlay’s invented memo. In the end it is the fact that no betrayal took place which is verified by FO 95,776 and it is this bare fact which demolishes all of Inglis’ subsequent claims for authenticity.

From late October 1914 until early January 1915 Findlay’s correspondence intensified with letters and telegrams almost daily to and from Nicolson in the FO; file FO 95,776 contains over fifty communications at this time which offer a detailed narrative of how Christensen systematically duped Findlay on Casement’s instructions.

TIMELINE

29 October: Findlay sent Lindley’s false memo to London. 30 October: Findlay met Christensen who on Casement’s instructions began the entrapment of Findlay. 28 November: Nicolson authorized the £5000 bribe. 3 January 1915: Findlay gave the handwritten bribe to Christensen. January 4: Nicolson advised nothing to be written, verbal only. January 6: Findlay apologized for written bribe. 13 January: Findlay apologized for the total failure of his coup against Casement. 14 January: Findlay sent a long typed letter to Nicolson apologizing again for his failure and errors. 14 January: a draft letter in FO 95766 reprimanded Findlay for his ‘great mistake’ in falling for ‘a ruse to get something from you in writing.’

A final most important fact is that on 5 January Christensen personally surrendered the bribe document to Meyer of the German Foreign Office thus definitively demonstrating the utter falsity of the Inglis betrayal claim.

This is what Nicolson wrote to Findlay on 14 January, 1915. “You will see that Christensen was playing a double game and that his reluctance to go on at the last was … merely a ruse to obtain something from you in writing. You made a great mistake in giving it … I have no doubt that Casement and his German friends will make the most of it.” What this confirms is that Christensen did not betray Casement and never intended to betray Casement. Expertise in hermeneutics is not required since no other interpretation is possible. It follows that the specific claim made by Inglis and repeated by Reid, Sawyer, Dudgeon, Ó Síocháin that Christensen betrayed Casement at the legation is categorically denied by the Foreign Office in the person of Arthur Nicolson CMG, KCIE, KCB, KCVO, GCVO, GCMG, GCB, Permanent Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs.

The deeper significance of Inglis’ duplicity is that the alleged betrayal of Casement slyly effects a fusion between treachery and sexual deviancy which infects and condemns both men as depraved politically, morally and sexually. The demonstrated falsity of the claim has serious repercussions for the dispute about the diaries. This is because the false claim of betrayal has conditioned the diaries dispute since 1973 and it constitutes the foundation stone of all authenticity accounts since published. All are dependent on this single deceit which effectively creates an illusory coherence in a subsequent pattern of interlocking deceits consisting of altered, forged and non-existent documents, selective framing, false attributions, omissions, circular reasoning, bogus logic and much innuendo. This elaborate web of duplicity is now without foundation and logically it follows that what it asserts is also without foundation.

Therefore the claim that the diaries are authentic cannot be sustained because it is founded on the demonstrated falsehood of an event which never happened. As it is false for Inglis so it is false for the other authors and likewise it is false for all claims that depend upon it as in a chain reaction. Therefore, it was the Foreign Office which guaranteed a priori the falsity of any future authenticity claims long before Inglis’ claim in 1973. Nicolson’s statement and Findlay’s apologies in FO 95,766 constitute a de facto proof of forgery.

Home Office proof of forgery

In October 1995 the British cabinet finally sanctioned the unrestricted release of the notorious diaries along with a large quantity of documents relating to Casement. Among these papers were extensive files compiled in 1958-59 when the Home Office was deliberating over the future of thediaries after the Home Secretary had come under increasing pressure from MPs and the press. At that point no-one outside government knew if the diaries even existed far less if they were genuine. Having refused all comment on the diaries for decades, the 1959 publication in Paris of the police typescripts finally forced the Home Secretary to instruct a Working Party to investigate, report and advise on a solution to the predicament.

The report of the Working Party of March 1959 contained a five-page ‘History of the Casement Diaries’ (PRO HO 144/23481). On page two we read “There is no record on the Home Office papers of the diaries or the copies having been shown to anyone outside the government service before Casement’s trial.” Although there is no official Home Office record, the typescripts were indeed shown to many influential non-government persons in the two months before the trial. They were also shown after the trial as confirmed by an official Note of the Working Party dated 7 May, 1958 which states “It was clear … that the diaries or copies of them, had been shown to a considerable number of people before Casement was executed. It would be difficult … to discover …the exact sequence of events in 1916 and who was responsible …”But while there are records of persons seeing the typescripts there are no records anywhere of anyone seeing manuscript diaries before or after the trial.

On the same page we also read “After the dismissal of the appeal a typescript copy was shown, on the Home Secretary’s instructions, to Mr. (later Sir John) Harris …” On that page and the next we read “Either copies or the diaries themselves were shown by Mr. (later Sir Basil) Thomson, Assistant Commissioner at Scotland Yard, to the American Ambassador, apparently at the Ambassador’s request. The Ambassador was given photographs of two passages from the typescripts.” Therefore in 1959 the Home Office did not know exactly what was shown to the Ambassador. Nonetheless, Thomson confirmed the showing in a letter to Blackwell, cabinet legal advisor, who described ‘the diary’ as “ … many pages of closely typed matter.”

Theobald Mathew, Director of Public Prosecutions, also confirmed “there is no written record of what use was made of the copy extracts from the diaries …” In a letter dated March 9 we read “ … it was taken for granted in 1916 that the diaries were genuine …” Clutterbuck, Ambassador to Dublin, admitted his uncertainty about when the police found Casement’s luggage and accepted the possibility of its seizure long before Casement’s arrest. “The story of the diaries as revealed in the Home Office papers does not provide conclusive evidence that no forgery took place.”

What this signifies is that in 1959 the British government did not possess a single document which gave the name of any independent person who had seen manuscript diaries in 1916. But it did possess the names of several independent persons who had seen the police typescripts in 1916. Moreover, in 1959 it did not possess any of the photographs of the typescripts which were made and did not possess any of the photos allegedly made of manuscript diaries in 1916. In short, the Home Office in 1959 did not possess anything which would testify beyond all doubt to the material existence of manuscript diaries in 1916.

What is revealed in the Working Party papers is that the four civil servants were handicapped by an irrational cognitive model which compelled them to believe the diaries were self-evidently authentic which conveniently made empirical evidence unnecessary since there was none. This hostile cognitive trap led them to announce “…the diaries speak for themselves and are likely to convince all but fanatics of their genuineness.” They were aware of persistent claims of forgery both in Ireland and elsewhere but a kind of ‘patriotic faith’ sustained them against those they
called “nationalist fanatics”.

To these facts we must add the following; the various biographies attesting to authenticity – by MacColl, Inglis, Sawyer, Dudgeon, Ó Síocháin, Philipps – some of these do give the names of independent persons who allegedly saw manuscript diaries in 1916. But in all these cases official documents confirm that only police typescripts were shown to the alleged witnesses. Sawyer, Dudgeon and Ó Síocháin falsely claim that Baptist missionary John Harris was shown manuscript diaries and the books by Dudgeon and O’ Siochain ignore HO 144/23481 which was available to
them at Kew. Philipps too falsely claims that Harris was shown “the photographs of the extracts” while he ignores the fact verified by HO 144/23481 that the photos shown to the US ambassador were photos of typescripts. Certainly photographs were made but none have survived; the destruction of official evidence betrays the evidence is false. Philipps ‘solves’ the problem by simply ignoring the existence of the police typescripts thus obliging his readers to assume manuscript diaries were shown; even so, Philipps fails to verify a single showing. Reid proves unable or unwilling to distinguish between the typescripts and manuscripts by referring vaguely to ‘diary materials’. Despite his claim on page 418 that “Apparently anyone of influence could have a look.” at the diaries, he is unable to name anyone who did ‘have a look’.

In conclusion, of these six authors whose research covers a seventy-year period with 3,400 pages, not one of them can state the name of a single independent witness who saw manuscript diaries in 1916. Taken together, the above verified official facts constitute sufficient grounds for asserting that today’s manuscript diaries were not shown to anyone in 1916 because they did not exist. From this it follows that PRO HO 144/23481 provides a de facto proof of forgery.