Why De Valera got a bum rap on being pro-Nazi because of U.S Ambassador

U.S, Envoy to Ireland David Gray communed with ghosts, hated De Valera

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Eamon De Valera

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However, Gray did eventually persuade them to ask for the removal of Axis diplomats from Dublin. The OSS and British Intelligence were satisfied with Irish security, but went along somewhat reluctantly with Gray’s political ploy.

De Valera’s refusal was used in the Allied press to depict him as unsympathetic to the Allied cause. The whole thing was just a political stunt.

After the success of the D-Day landings, Marlin returned to the United States, and the OSS decided to station Edward Lawler in Dublin as liaison with Irish Intelligence.

“We received 100% co-operation from the Irish authorities,” Lawler wrote to me. “The cooperation and information we received from the Irish was every bit as extensive and helpful as it would have been if Ireland had been a  full partner with us in the war effort.”

Thus all of the OSS agents in Ireland believed the Irish were fully cooperative with the Allies, but Gray claimed he had “better sources of information.”   In his memoir, he argued that de Valera and Walshe secretly schemed for a German victory in the hope that Hitler would end partition.

Of course, he did have different sources.  A strong believer in spiritualism, Gray was getting advice from supposed ghosts and he was passing this information on to the White House.

Shortly after arriving in Dublin, he wrote to Roosevelt about “the memories and the ghosts that are here” in his official residence in Phoenix Park, where the late British Prime Minister Arthur Balfour had lived as Chief Secretary of Ireland in the 1880s.  Balfour had engaged in séances with the writing medium Geraldine Cummins, would go into a kind of trance and write out messages from supposed ghosts.  She began holding séances in the residence for Gray.

On November 8, 1941 Balfour’s ghost supposedly warned Gray about Joe Walshe. “He, from what I can see, is hand and glove with the German Minister,” the message read. “The organization of Fifth Columnists in this country is now complete.” Walshe, the message added, “is the leading
Quisling.”

At a further séance on December 2, 1941 Cummins produced a supposed message from the late President Theodore Roosevelt. “I want to tell you,” he supposedly wrote, “that I think Franklin will hold the Japs for a while; at any rate from our country’s point of view. I see no immediate Armageddon for young America, possibly not at all.”

This was the Tuesday before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, but Gray’s conviction that he was in touch with those ghosts was not shaken. “Four days after this communication,” Gray wrote to President Roosevelt, “the Japs attacked Pearl Harbor. They had T.R. fooled. I suspect that if these communications come through pretty much as given our friends on the other side don’t know very much more than they did on this side.”

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