……in 1864

Another interesting personality from the history of counter-terrorism is this chap, Dr Henri Le Caron aka Thomas Billis Beach.

Born in Colchester, England, he moved as a young man to Paris and then to the US where he joined the Union Army – rising to the rank of lieutenant and heading up a scout unit in the Civil War.  After the war circumstances caused him to have the opportunity to join and spy on the Fenian Brotherhood, and later the Clan na Gael, another militant Irish revolutionary organization.

Le Caron was “commissioned “ as a Major and “military organizer” in the IRA on 60 dollars salary a month and $7 per diem expenses. He was subsequently promoted to Colonel and became the Inspector General of the IRA, then Brigadier and Adjutant-General while all the time feeding information back to England and also to the Canadian authorities about Fenian activity including the Fenian “invasions” of Canada in the 1860s and 70s. The invasions failed miserably in part due to the information passed by Le Caron. At one stage every document issued from the Irish Brotherhood organisation was passed by Le Caron to his handler in England, the infamous Mr Anderson.

Le Caron’s book about his 25 years undercover is available free on-line, here, and gives many still valid tradecraft tips built from his experience.  In places it’s also highly amusing, and it is remarkable that he was so deep under cover and he lasted so long. His descriptions of the leaders of the “terrorist” group are insightful.

Of course, depending on your view of history, Le Caron is either a forgotten hero, or a scoundrel and a traitor. You take your pick, it’s long enough ago to be history

Le Caron wasn’t the only military leader in the Irish republican movement to be a spy feeding information to the British – more about the other guy in future blogs. (before anyone gets twitchy :- ), his name was “General” Frank Millen and his military career started as a Gunner in the British Army in the Crimean war.) Millen’s story is even more remarkable, so wait out for that.

Strange things occurred in the late 1800s  It was a time when the recent development of dynamite and other explosives coupled with the not unrelated fevers of Irish nationalism and anarchy became ever more febrile.  The Irish Republican Brotherhood joined the mix of fashionable secret societies and gained a significant following in the US where it became the “Fenian Brotherhood” and “Clan na Gael”.     Large quantities of arms were acquired  and the Fenians even organized raids into Canada from the USA with the US government curiously ignoring their efforts initially probably because of antipathy towards  the UK for its less than fulsome support for the Union during the Civil War.

In the 1880s a new face appeared on the scene, calling himself “Professor Gaspodin Mezzeroff”.  Claiming a Russian background he portrayed himself as a scientist/chemist and explosives expert imbued with the experience of Russian nihilism… but one who embraced the Irish republican cause.  He lectured extensively at public meetings, raising money and advocating the use of dynamite by terrorists to further the political cause of the Irish republicans.

O’Donovan Rossa, a key Irish republican activist and leader,  advertised courses in IED manufacture, (for $30) taught by Mezzeroff, and Mezzeroff’s meeings were widely reported in the press of the time.  Certainly he came to the attention of the British and their nascent “Special Irish Bureau” of the London Metropolitan Police.

Mezzeroff was decribed as “ a tall, sharp-faced man with curly hair arranged around his pate and a ‘grizzly moustache’, Habitual wearing of black clothes and steely spectacles rounded off the sinister effect of a character straight out of Dostoevsky or Conrad. His origins were mysterious, although he had the accents of an Irishman.  At a public meeting in 1885 in New York to pronounce the death penalty on the Prince of Wales, Mezzeroff was introduced as “ England’s invisible enemy” and he dared the US congress to make laws preventing Irishmen from using dynamite in England – an act recently suggested by General Abbott of the US Army Engineers .

Mezzeroff issued pamphlets with IED designs and certainly IEDs constructed in the US were shipped clandestinely into England, and used in a number of attacks.  An amusingly skeptical, indeed hilarious report of one of Mezzeroffs meetings from the New York Times is worth reading, here

Mezzeroff’s IED designs are curious and worthy of examination, perhaps in a future blog. One included an exploding cigar and indeed I have a contemporaneous photo of such a device from the Scotland Yard museum that I found in a  book published in 1902.

Mezzeroff published a letter in an anarchist pamphlet “The alarm” stating:

“and I won’t stop until every workingman in Europe knows how to use explosives against autocratic government and grasping monopolies.“

He claimed to always carry an IED:

“I take it through the street  in my pocket; I carry it about in horse cars – if you carry two or three pounds (of nitro-glycerine) with you people will respect you much more than if you carried a pistol.”

As it happens, Mezzeroff was a pseudonym.  It was an elderly New Yorker ,a gentleman called Richard Rogers by some sources or “Wilson” by other sources, who by day ran a liquor shop in New York. Another pseudonym was “Dr Hodges”.

Mezzeroff ran a bomb making school in the Greenpoint area of Brooklyn and a number of his graduates went on to short if partially successful IED planting campaigns in the UK. By 1886 however the public interest in such things waned, especially with the implication of an IED causing the events that led to Chicago’s “Haymarket massacre”. It is clear too that the US government became much less tolerant of these exhortations to violence.

As for Mezzeroff, he disappeared from view, probably returning to his real name (whatever that was) and liquor selling shop.

I should also note that there is a fascinating side story about British intelligence operations in the USA against the Fenian bomb makers – numerous paid informers, secret agents, “dirty tricks”, intercepted IEDs and sting operations –  a real “defeat the network” campaign and including a report from the Pinkertons agency describing how, when operating undercover on behalf of the British consul-general in New York, they were shown a number of IEDs made by a Patrick Crowe of Peoria, Illinois. More on this to come.