Qualla: Irish Military Intelligence Service

Irish Military Intelligence Service: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Thirteen Nazi spies were sent to neutral Ireland during the Second World War. Irish Military Intelligence caught every single one. Colonel Dan Bryan ran the operation as Director of Intelligence in an organisation that was officially code-named G2 - a designation borrowed from the NATO continental staff system used to denote a military intelligence branch - and his cryptologist Richard J Hayes broke German codes throughout the war and shared the results with British MI5 and the American OSS. Ireland was officially neutral. Its intelligence service was something else.

Irish Military Intelligence Service: G2, J2, IMIS

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The service began life in the mid-1920s following the Anglo-Irish Treaty, when the Office of the Directorate of Intelligence was established as the intelligence arm of the new Irish Army. Its codename G2 referred to an army intelligence branch. As the service expanded to include ...

Irish Military Intelligence Service: The Emergency

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

During what Ireland called The Emergency (the rest of Europe called it the Second World War), G2 operated under a peculiar set of constraints. The state was officially neutral and non-belligerent. The Defence Forces had to defend the island against potential invasion from any dir...

Irish Military Intelligence Service: The Arms Crisis

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 1970, an Irish Army intelligence officer named Captain James Kelly became the centre of a national scandal. The Arms Crisis exposed an unauthorised covert operation to smuggle weapons to the Provisional IRA in Northern Ireland, using fifty thousand pounds diverted from a hundr...

Irish Military Intelligence Service: Cold War Files and Modern Operations

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Declassified intelligence files released after thirty years show that during the Cold War, the Director of Intelligence Colonel L Buckley briefed the foreign minister in November 1983 about the possibility that British or NATO nuclear weapons might be stored at underground facili...