Letter from Frederick H. Boland to Seán Nunan (Dublin)
(Confidential) (Copy)

With reference to your personal and confidential letter of the 19th February¹ about the Kerney case and my reply of the 3rd March,² I beg to report that, at his request, I went to see Sir Percivale Liesching at the Commonwealth Relations Office on the 15th March.

2. Sir Percivale told me that Professor Williams had approached the Foreign Office to secure their agreement to release certain German Foreign Office documents which he required for his defence to the action taken against him by Mr. Kerney. Sir Percivale told me that, after discussion of the matter between the Foreign Office and the CRO, it had been decided that if the Irish Court trying the case asked for the production of the documents the British Government would be prepared to make them available. Sir Percivale said they had considered whether the documents should not be made available at the request of the Irish Government. It had been thought, however, that this would put an unfair onus on the Government in Dublin and it was, accordingly, decided to make the production of the documents dependent on a request by the Court trying the case.
3. Sir Percivale read to me a brief extract from a minute made by the legal adviser of the Foreign Office³ on the file containing the relevant papers, which were before Sir Percivale on his desk. In the course of this minute, the legal adviser expressed the opinion that the papers on the file did not, in his view, justify the criticisms of Mr. Kerney which had been made in Professor Williams’ articles in the ‘Leader’ and in the ‘Irish Press’. The legal adviser commented that Mr. Kerney’s attitude, in the conversations he had had with the emissaries from Germany, seemed to him to have been cautious and perfectly proper in every way.
4. At this point, Sir Percivale gave me to read, for my personal information, the four documents which it was intended to produce if a request were made by the Irish court. They consisted of a report made by Mr. Clissmann of a conversation he had had with Mr. Kerney in 1941; a minute from Herr Veesenmayer to the High Command discussing the possibilities of an arrangement with Ireland and referring to Mr. Kerney’s conversations, although not quoting them directly; another memorandum from Herr Veesenmayer to his superior authorities referring to conversations with Mr. Kerney and asking that 120 picked parachute troops should be made available for operations in Ireland in conjunction with the IRA; and a general memorandum, the provenance of which was not quite clear, discussing the political situation in Ireland and referring, in so doing, to conversations between Mr. Kerney on the one hand and Mr. Clissmann and Herr Veesenmayer on the other.
5. These four documents, which I had necessarily to peruse rather rapidly, seemed to me to bear out what the legal adviser of the Foreign Office had said in his minute. Only the first of the four documents (Mr. Clissmann’s report of a visit he had paid to Mr. Kerney in Madrid) purported to report Mr. Kerney directly and what Mr. Kerney said to Mr. Clissmann, according to this report, seemed to me quite unexceptionable. If Professor Williams is relying on these four documents to substantiate the suggestions he made in his articles, I doubt whether he will find them of very much use to him.
6. What struck me in reading the four documents, however, was that they bore little or no relation to the account which Professor Williams gave me in 1948 about what he had found in the German Foreign Office archives with regard to Mr. Kerney. When he was speaking to me then, he referred to statements by Mr. Kerney which don’t appear in the four documents at all and which he apparently made the basis for his criticisms of Mr. Kerney in his published articles. The only explanation of this which occurs to me is that the four documents which the British Foreign Office have picked out are not the particular documents which Professor Williams had in mind at all. If that is so, it would clearly be important to Professor Williams to clear up the confusion before any request is made by the Court and complied with by the Foreign Office; but obviously the matter is hardly one in which any official action can be taken to advise Professor Williams.