Free Espionage and Assasination with Michael Collins' Intelligence Unit: With the Dublin Brigade by Charles Dalton Page B

contemplated arrests and raids on Volunteers’ houses. By communicating copies of these messages to the areas concerned, the police were frustrated. When the raiders arrived the men they were looking for were not at home.
    Other important information was gained in this manner, without which we would have been beaten very early in the fight. The odds were so powerfully against us that we had all the time to make up by our alertness and forethought for our material deficiencies.
    We compiled a list of friendly persons in the public services, railways, mailboats and hotels. I was sent constantly to interview stewards, reporters, waiters and hotel porters to verify our reports of the movement of enemy agents.
    After a time I became curious to know who was the occupant of the other office on our landing, as I could hear coming from it the constant sound of a typewriter. I was told that she was a Protestant and hostile lady who was a typist. ‘But do not be uneasy about her,’ they said, ‘she is quite deaf.’
    Though I knew that Michael Collins was the director of intelligence, I did not see him, nor did he ever call at our office. His messenger, Joe O’Reilly, a Volunteer, came twice a day, taking letters for the D/I, and leaving letters from him for Liam Tobin. Joe came always on a bicycle and was the only medium of direct communication between the assistant director and the director of intelligence. At least, in the daytime.
    I had not been engaged for more than a week on my new duties when the assistant D/I told us that he was increasing our staff. There were now about twelve men comprising the intelligence branch.

Chapter XV
    Since the General Post Office was destroyed in the Rising of 1916, the sorting of letters had been carried on at the Rink in Parnell Square.
    There had been seizures of the mails from time to time by the Volunteers, and the authorities took steps to ensure the safety of their official correspondence. Important letters were taken to the Rink for sorting and military escorts accompanied the vans carrying official letters to and from the sorting office.
    A military guard had been placed over the Rink, but was withdrawn subsequently, and a system of alarms installed in its place. These consisted of several electric buttons which communicated with the Castle. Immediately one of them was pressed the alarm would ring out there, and military and armoured cars could be rushed to the Rink.
    Since the withdrawal of the military guard, Michael Collins and his intelligence officers had been considering the possibility of effecting another coup.
    The director of intelligence got into touch with a friendly postal official and got him to make a plan of the Rink, showing the positions of the alarm bells and also of the racks which contained the various government mails.
    It was discovered that the mails were all sorted by eight o’clock in the morning and were collected by the military at nine. It was, therefore, possible that if the Rink could be entered shortly after eight o’clock and the officials taken by surprise so that they could not give the alarm, it would be a comparatively easy matter to seize the mails.
    I was sent for one evening by the vice-commandant, Oscar Traynor. He showed me a very good plan of the Rink and told me that he had instructions to carry out a raid there the next morning at eight-thirty. He had picked a dozen men for the job, and I was delighted to find that I was to be one of them.
    He then outlined the plan. We were to enter the rear or west side of the Rink. There were platforms there onto which the bags were unloaded from the vans, and from these platforms two chutes descended into the building down which the mail bags were discharged.
    He told me that three of our intelligence officers would unobtrusively enter the front or main entrance a few minutes before our party, and would take up positions by the three alarm bells and prevent them from being