Top Secret Memo

It is widely believed that the rumours of Casement’s secret life began in 1916 when it was claimed that scandalous diaries were found in his luggage. However, Foreign Office documents demonstrate that this is entirely false. The scandal first appeared in a Foreign Office memo some 18 months earlier in October 1914 but this fact was kept secret then and again in 1916. Only in 1973 was this memo first publicly mentioned. The account here is the first and only investigation of this highly significant document since 1914. 

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On the night of 29 October 1914, Mansfeldt de Cardonnel Findlay, minister to the British legation in Christiania, placed a handwritten document into the diplomatic bag, along with a short covering letter addressed to Foreign Minister Edward Grey. The diplomatic bag was collected that night by Hugh Gurney from the Copenhagen legation.

Findlay’s documents reached Grey the following day and were passed to British Intelligence. The letter described the document as a memorandum written by Francis Lindley who had interviewed Adler Christensen, Casement’s servant, that afternoon. The memo stated that Christensen had shown copied documents and had revealed that his unnamed master was travelling to Germany ‘about trouble in Ireland’ and that he was an English nobleman who had been decorated by the king. The memo also included the following: ‘I understood that his relations with the Englishman were of an improper character’.

The four-page memo sent to the foreign office by Findlay on 29 October contains handwriting which is often illegible, with letter and word formation compromised; the document looks untidy and improvised, with many cancellations, interpolations and corrections. It is not addressed to anyone and the term memorandum does not appear. Overall, it is very unprofessional and does not look like the work of an Oxford-educated diplomat. In the bottom right-hand corner of the last page, squeezed into the margin, there appear to be Lindley’s initials—F.O.L.—with the date, but written in a different ink or perhaps in pencil.

Despite its improvised appearance, the so-called memo was written by the Winchester and Oxford-educated diplomat and future ambassador Francis Lindley. Within days it was in the hands of Major Frank Hall, former secretary of the UVF, who prepared a typed version for circulation.

Hall was born in Warrenpoint, Co. Down, and had been one of the masterminds behind the illegal 1914 Ulster gunrunning from Germany that aimed to militarily defy the UK parliament over Home Rule. He had become a high-ranking British Intelligence officer with special responsibility for Ireland. With reference to the memo, Hall wrote: ‘I am awaiting further information on this point, and also as to his habits (natural & un-natural!)’. The memo had arrived precisely where Findlay had intended—in the hands of Casement’s sworn enemies.

Neither Hall, Lindley nor Findlay had ever met or even seen Casement, but with these thirteen fateful words the conspiracy began: ‘I understood that his relations with the Englishman were of an improper character’.

Scrutiny of the memo reveals seventeen cancellations and 21 interpolations, some in a lighter ink or in pencil. Several parts have been squeezed in after composition was completed. The document is not addressed to anyone and bears no heading as memorandum. Many words are scribbled and almost illegible owing to poor or non-existent letter formation. Overall, the impression is of hastily improvised and untidy work. It would be reasonable to think it improbable that a diplomat would produce such a document for presentation to his superior. It is inexplicable that any Crown official would send such a shoddy, partly illegible document to a famous cabinet minister. Improbable and inexplicable—but that is what happened. An analysis of the circumstances of the creation of the document will illuminate why and how it happened.

In the first place, the document, which is mentioned by only one Casement author (Inglis), is extremely difficult to find in the UK National Archives because it does not resemble what is usually called a memorandum with the conventional identifiers ‘from X’ and ‘To Y’. Indeed, it was located only after the intervention of an archive researcher. It cannot be confirmed that Casement’s biographers have not seen this document; if they have seen it, however, they chose (with the exception of Inglis) not to mention it. Given that this document contains the first ever reference to the homosexual dimension, it is significant that it has not received the attention it deserves. When it is examined, anomalies, incongruities and a major contradiction emerge.

Lindley met Christensen at around 2pm on 29 October in the British legation. Christensen returned to the Grand Hotel after the meeting and informed Casement. Accounts suggest that the meeting was relatively short, perhaps 30 minutes.

In the memo the crucial words are ‘I understood that his relations with the Englishman were of an improper character. It is just possible I may have been wrong in this, but I don’t think so.’ The second sentence has been cancelled with single strokes on each line. The locution ‘I understood …’ suggests that Christensen somehow implied this ‘improper character’. But it cannot be explained why he would make a self-incriminating implication to a complete stranger. However, later remarks made by Findlay reveal the desired effect. On 30 October Findlay wrote ‘with whom he evidently has unnatural relations’ and on 31 October he wrote ‘He implied that their relations were of an unnatural nature …’. Later, on 24 February, he converted this alleged implication into statements made by Christensen, when he wrote ‘… informer stated the unnatural character of their relations to myself and Lindley’. Findlay conjured the initial innuendo in the memo into an implication the following day and then into a statement without any evidence for such implication or statement.

The first sentence, however, makes no reference to any speech, act or gesture by Christensen that might constitute an implication. Lindley does not say that Christensen made any implication; he says ‘I understood …’ , which refers to his own mental process during or after the encounter. He attributes nothing to Christensen. The sentence merely reports a subjective mental impression without explanatory evidence to give it context. The second qualifying sentence indicates that Lindley perceived no clear signals. Both sentences require analysis.

The concept of implicature developed by H.P. Grice allows a deeper understanding of how these sentences function logically and semantically. ‘Implicature’ is a technical term in linguistics that refers to what is suggested in an utterance, even though neither expressed nor strictly implied. For example, ‘John is meeting a woman this evening’ suggests that the unidentified woman is not his mother, sister or wife. By not identifying the woman, the speaker tacitly invites the hearer to assume that John is involved with the woman. By contrast, the statement ‘John is meeting his wife this evening’ entails that John is married. If John is not married the statement is false. The truth of the statement is predicated upon John’s being married.

Entailment statements cannot be qualified or cancelled without compromising their truth value. Implicature statements can be cancelled and can be qualified. The two sentences in the memo constitute an implicature in which the second sentence qualifies the first sentence and then is cancelled in order to disguise that together they function as an implicature—a suggestion, an innuendo unsupported by facts or evidence. The truth value of implicature statements cannot be determined from the statements themselves. Entailment statements convey bare information, whereas implicature statements convey unstated meanings that require external verification. Therefore the memo sentences have no intrinsic truth value until verified by external evidence. They have the same status as gossip.

Lindley’s ‘I understood …’ is a self-referential report that precludes external verification of that which is reported. Nothing can verify Lindley’s report of a mental impression because his words refer to an exclusively subjective invisible state rather than to a fact in the tangible world. The written words do not entail the experience reported. Therefore nothing can establish the truth or falsity of those words. Statements that cannot be verified or falsified cannot contribute to the determination of facts. Lindley’s sentence does not refer to facts or even to alleged facts; it is innuendo, but on the basis of this innuendo a defamatory conspiracy was founded.

Further scrutiny of the memo reveals incongruities that indicate that the plot began in Oslo on the evening of 29 October, 1914. By definition, conspiracy requires at least two persons and scrutiny indicates that Findlay was co-author of the memo.

A highly significant anomaly is the verb tense used in the qualifying sentence—‘I may have been wrong …’—which indicates that the words were written in a later time-frame, distinct from the time of the meeting. If these words had been written in the same time-frame as the event, it would have been more natural to write ‘I may be wrong …’ . For precision, the two time-frames are (a) the meeting at around 2pm and the minutes after and (b) later that evening of the 29th, several hours after the meeting. The tense used strongly indicates the evening time-frame as the time of the hasty composition of the document. Since the document, despite its improvised look, was placed in the diplomatic bag that evening by Findlay along with his brief covering letter, Findlay’s presence during composition that evening is a near certainty. The many interpolations and corrections strongly indicate the intervention of a second person assisting with composition before final approval. It is reasonable to deduce that the document is the joint work of Lindley and Findlay, improvised in haste for immediate dispatch. This deduction explains why the so-called memorandum lacks the normal identifiers ‘From’ and ‘To’. It never was a memorandum in any normal sense of the term. This deduction is further supported by Findlay in his letter of 31 October to Grey: ‘He [Christensen] went over much the same ground as he had covered with Mr. Lindley on Thursday evening’ (emphasis added). It is undisputed that Christensen met Lindley in the early afternoon. The ‘ground’ referred to in Findlay’s letter is that covered by himself and Lindley that evening when they composed the document.

The grounds for holding that the memo was composed in the evening as a joint effort outweigh the grounds for believing that it was written by Lindley alone earlier that day. Evening composition means that it is not a memorandum at all, since both supposed sender and recipient were involved in its composition. The fact that such an unkempt bout de papier was sent that evening to the Foreign Office indicates that it was composed for that specific purpose and in a hurry. This is supported by the fact that no fair copy was written out or typed up, as would be professional and correct when sending legation documents for the attention of Foreign Secretary Edward Grey. To this must be added the observation that Lindley did not need to write any memo to a colleague in the same office whom he would in any case see in person later that same day. (See Appendix II.)

On 30 and 31 October Findlay wrote two drafts and two letters to Grey at the Foreign Office, three of which refer to the memo. It is clear from Findlay’s unfinished short draft of 30 October that this was written after the 11am meeting with Christensen and before the 3pm meeting, but it does not refer to any implication by Christensen to him at that 11am meeting. In that draft Findlay wrote ‘with whom he evidently has unnatural relations’, which refers only to the memo of the 29th, since this allegation would not be ‘evident’ to Grey except from the memo already sent to him. Therefore this idea of a confirming implication made at the 11am meeting on the 30th came to Findlay after he had written the incomplete draft letter following that 11am meeting. The implication allegedly made by Christensen on the 30th appears only on the 31st, when Findlay wrote the longer draft letter to Grey. Neither the draft of the 30th nor the first short letter of the 31st mention any implication made by Christensen at either meeting on the 30th. For greater precision: Findlay’s first two written records after his meetings with Christensen do not record any implication about unnatural relations made to him. Since the short letter of the 31st was written after both meetings on the 30th and omits any implication, a rational person would deduce that no implication was made at either meeting.

In his second and much longer letter to Grey on the 31st, however, Findlay wrote: ‘He implied that their relations were of an unnatural nature and that consequently he had great power over this man who trusted him absolutely’ (emphasis added). It is not clear which meeting is referred to. On page 4 of the eight-page draft of that letter Findlay’s first version of the above sentence reveals three corrections, including ‘their relations were improper’ with the word ‘improper’ inexplicably cancelled and replaced by the incongruous ‘of an unnatural nature’. By this ‘correction’ Findlay avoided repetition of the word ‘improper’ previously used in the memo. The memo contains detail on page 4 which is attributed to Christensen but which it is extremely improbable that he could possibly have known – that there were eight German officers with false passports travelling on the SS Oscar II. It is not credible that these officers would have revealed such compromising information to anyone, far less to an unknown Norwegian travelling second-class. The true source of this information was Emile Voska, a Czech spymaster in New York, who had obtained a list of German reservists living in the US who had bought false passports in order to return to Germany for war service. The list was passed to Captain Gaunt of British Naval Intelligence in the US, who passed it to Captain Hall in London, who in turn sent it to the Foreign Office. From there the list was sent to legations and embassies in Europe and thus to Findlay in Oslo, who fed the information to the Norwegian police hoping that the returning officers could be arrested for possession of false identity documents. (See Appendix III.)

Most importantly, there is a contradiction in the memo itself that can only be explained as an oversight owing to the haste of its composition. This concerns two pencil-copy letters allegedly shown to Lindley, one addressed to the German chancellor ‘outside’ and one to Harden, both in Berlin. Another two letters allegedly mentioned by Christensen had not been copied and therefore were not shown to Lindley. But on page 4 the memo mentions the two copied letters (to the chancellor and to Harden) allegedly shown and then refers to a third letter ‘addressed to the G.Minister here, which I also saw in copy …’ (emphasis added); this refers to the minister at the German legation in Oslo and not to the chancellor in Berlin. Yet the memo states clearly on page 2 that only two letters were allegedly copied and shown: ‘There were four letters and my informant steamed them open (before returning them) and had made pencil copies (of two) which he showed me’ (parentheses added to indicate interpolations). The page 4 affirmation contradicts the alleged fact on page 2. This means that Lindley claims to have seen a third copied letter which he also states did not exist. Page 2 and page 4 cannot both be true but both can be false. Page 2 was written before page 4, and whether page 2 is false or true it follows that page 4 is false. The affirmations on page 4 refer to three copied letters allegedly shown. The demonstrated falsity of page 4 entails the falsity of page 2. Therefore, no copied letters were shown.

This contradiction has implications that reach beyond the veridical status of the memo itself, and those implications compromise the drafts and letters subsequently written by Findlay in support of the memo. The detail about copied letters in the memo amounts to 56% of the overall length of 463 words, and that detail has been demonstrated as false. (Word count of the memo includes all cancelled and interpolated words.) That 56% of the document is false does not entail that the remaining 44% is also false; 7.56% of the document is certainly true and is undisputed. These are the 35 words on page 1 which refer to Christensen’s afternoon presence in the legation, his being Norwegian and that he arrived from the US on the Oscar II. The remaining 36.29% is, however, compromised, if only because it cannot be verified and therefore no facts can be derived. This includes the innuendo on pages 1 and 2. Therefore 92.44% of the document contains text that is either false or compromised. Only a lawyer who wished to commit professional suicide would present the memo as evidence in a court of law. Only those in a severe state of cognitive dissonance would insist that the memo is authentic.

The scrutiny above represents the first and only analysis of this faux memorandum since 1914. The fact that the principal Casement authors have avoided it cannot be due to negligence, since it is a fundamental document in the Casement story. It constitutes the birth of the homosexual conspiracy, which will pass through further phases of development in the hands of Findlay and of British Intelligence.

The extensive unverifiable references to copied letters and to German officers with false passports are intended to furnish illusory authentic detail as a supportive framework for what is merely an innuendo. The probability of Findlay’s claims that Christensen made a self-incriminating implication (later a statement) of homosexual conduct can be safely left to the impartial reader’s judgment, based on his/her knowledge of human nature and on common sense.

It was the unverifiable and improbable nature of the memo which convinced British intelligence that it could not be exploited in 1914 or later. In short, it is too obviously the invention of Findlay. And the same absence of supporting evidence and the inherent improbability induced later biographers to ignore it. But it planted the poisoned seed of the false homosexual allegation that later grew into the equally false diaries scandal.