In 1974 the above letter was published in The Irish Press. It was written by an Irish priest named Gerard Smith who was based in Lima, Peru. This ‘telltale’ letter provides evidence that the homosexual plot began in earnest in 1915 and that British intelligence even sent agents to Putumayo seeking corroboration but found none. The intriguing letter is published here for the first time since 1974. 

The author of this little-known letter, Gerard Smith, was born in Ballintemple, Co. Cavan in July 1913. He joined the Columban missionaries and was ordained priest in 1940. Thereafter he worked in England, China, USA, Ireland, Peru, Chile and Argentina. Much of his working life was everyday parish ministry. He retired in 1990 in Ireland and died in 1997; he is buried in the Community Cemetery, Dalgan Park.

In the early 1960s Smith was involved in photographic work and promotional movie making (for the Society of St. Columban) in Peru. Chile and Argentina. He took courses in film making in the US and by all accounts he was a good movie maker and a man who did not let the grass grow under his feet and one who was not slow to speak his mind.

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Gerard Smith makes apparently reasonable conjectures about the motives for these enquiries in 1916 but upon examination it becomes clear he has assumed too much. He is wrong to state that it was Thomson of Scotland Yard who settled on 25 April as the date of discovery of the diaries. Thomson gave no precise date and his various accounts allege discovery months earlier. 25 April was announced officially only in 1959 by UK Home Secretary Butler. Smith is also wrong to assume that the English-speaking agents had knowledge of the diaries. It is more likely that, like others in Scotland Yard, they believed the rumours of homosexuality which followed Findlay’s ‘top secret’ memo of 1914.  We must remember that in 1916 at the time of the trial, the entire Asquith cabinet and many, many others held the same belief without ever seeing diaries. And as we now know, there is no independent evidence to demonstrate the material existence of bound diaries in 1916. These two officers were sent to Putumayo by those in Scotland Yard who also believed the homosexual allegation on the basis of Findlay’s memo; in that case they would be seeking testimony which might be used to support the imprecise suspicion of homosexuality. Such testimony they failed to find. 

Smith writes “Thompson knew about the “Diaries” long before April 25, 1916.” This too is a misleading assumption; what Thomson knew about in 1915 was an ongoing plan to concoct diary narratives for eventual forgery. The enquiries in Putumayo in January 1916 would be both a contribution to the ‘geographical perspective’ of the narratives and a search for testimony as corroboration of the basic homosexual allegation. Smith writes “Homosexuality was a predominant question.” This indicates that the officers believed the allegations of homosexuality to be true but had no supporting evidence for them because no incriminating diaries were found at any time.  Possession of genuine incriminating diaries would have made corroboration from Peru totally superfluous.

Smith is also understandably confused when he asks if “these two men already knew that the “Diaries” were already forged and were attempting to induce witnesses who would clinch the authenticity of the “Diaries”?” If the diaries are forgeries, there cannot be any witnesses to imaginary events in the diaries. Smith must have meant persons who would confirm the general belief about homosexuality. They found nothing to confirm the belief.  

It is possible that the men who travelled to Putumayo in January were the same police officers who in May later that year travelled to Philadelphia purportedly to interview Christensen. If so, their names were Chief Inspector Alfred Ward and PS Brewer. Gonzalez Cristobal as a speaker of Spanish and without English would fail to pronounce either name correctly.

It is probable that Smith had read Alfred Noyes’ 1957 book Justice for Casement because it was the principal source at that time providing details of Thomson’s conflicting versions of the diaries’ provenance. He had perhaps been spurred to write this letter to The Irish Press after reading the Inglis biography of 1973 but of course Inglis did not refer to Thomson’s conflicting versions. 

What is of considerable significance in this letter is the fact that two British agents were sent to Peru to actively seek testimony and background to support a secret plot to defame Casement with homosexual allegations. This was done while he was still in Germany and when there was no certainty he would ever be captured. It follows that the decision to send these agents was taken in 1915 after the defamation plot had been sanctioned.  This alone demonstrates that no evidence of homosexuality had been found in 1915 despite the allegation in Findlay’s secret memo. And no supporting testimony or other evidence was found in Peru or elsewhere before Casement’s unexpected arrest in April 1916. That the arrest was unexpected is significant because its timing compelled Thomson and Hall to change their original plan for eventual forgery of personal diaries. With Casement facing the preliminary hearing in mid-May, they had to hurriedly complete composition of the narratives for typing by the Metropolitan Police. Obviously the defamation campaign had to be started before the trial proper and no start could be made until the typescripts were ready to be shown.

Thus the letter provides evidence that in 1915 Thomson, Hall and their intelligence colleagues intended to defame Casement with allegations of homosexuality and that they went to considerable effort early in 1916 to find supporting testimony but found none. This need for supporting evidence was felt because they had only the groundless Findlay allegation. It is a fact that Thomson himself attributed the idea of finding incriminating diaries to his informer Maundy Gregory who proposed this while Casement was still in Germany. We must recall that until May 1916 there was nothing in the public domain about diaries or homosexuality in relation to Casement. But the rumours and suspicions were still confined to a small group of people who had no evidence to support them. Since it is an undisputed fact that the typescripts were produced by the police in May and June, it follows that these were either copied from original diaries or were copied from fabricated narratives already prepared. It is also an undisputed fact that there is no independent testimony verifying that original diaries were shown in 1916; there is, however, both independent and official evidence that the police typescripts were shown. No explanation can be found for not showing diaries although the defamatory motive would have been fulfilled by showing them. The motive for preparing the typescripts is wholly consistent with the defamatory intentions formed long before Casement’s arrest and that motive is sufficient reason for showing the typescripts. However, showing the typescripts is not sufficient reason for not showing diaries. It follows that not showing diaries is inconsistent with the ongoing defamatory plan. Therefore the defamation depended entirely on the typescripts as both sufficient and necessary conditions. That a sufficient condition became also a necessary condition indicates that there was no alternative. In short, Thomson and Hall had nothing else to show – they had no diaries. 

Those who deny forgery of the diaries are unable to produce verified evidence that Casement was the author because no such evidence exists. Nonetheless, they persist irrationally in denial. This is a well-known phenomenon often referred to as denialism which is defined as an irrational action that withholds the validation of a historical experience or event when a person refuses to accept an empirically verifiable reality. In science, denialism is the rejection of basic facts and concepts that are undisputed, well-supported parts of the scientific consensus on a subject. Widely-cited examples of denialism involve Creationism, AIDS, climate change, smoking-related illnesses, the Holocaust and the Armenian genocide. Despite the weight of scientific and historical evidence verified over many decades, these issues are still disputed by many people. While no comparison can or should be made between the squalid forgery of the diaries and the abominable implications of the above examples, it is obvious that they share only the irrational aspect.

However, it was Deborah Lipstadt who noted ‘… the irrational has a fatal attraction even to people of goodwill. It can … persuade people to regard the most … untenable notions as fact … when the public does not have the … knowledge necessary to refute these irrational … claims … truth is far more fragile than fiction … reason alone cannot protect it.’ 

Despite the accumulated evidence and testimony of many historians, scientists and witnesses, irrational denial persists. Most deniers are ideologically motivated by a variety of sentiments, beliefs and prejudices, sometimes downright weird and sometimes not. Whereas these people are for the most part still a minority today, the same cannot be said about those who deny forgery of the diaries; today they represent a considerable majority of those who have read about Casement. To understand why this is the case one must note the crucial difference between these phenomena. 

In the decades of the diaries controversy, very little penetrating evidence for forgery has been published while an avalanche of deceitful propaganda has flooded the market, all of it hostile to forgery. Against some eleven volumes from 1956 to 2024 by ten authors who deny forgery, there is only one rigorously researched study setting out the evidence and arguments for forgery: Anatomy of a lie.  The twenty-five editions and reprints of those eleven volumes over sixty-eight years has meant the continuous availability of publications denying forgery. The broadcast media and the press in both the UK and Ireland have also denied forgery. That the deniers are now a majority is a logical result of these decades of propaganda. 

When one realizes that forgery denial is now official policy of the Irish state, it is no surprise that when Anatomy of a lie first appeared in 2019, besides much praise it also met considerable hostility such that the publisher felt apprehensive. The book’s launch was cancelled and the book was withdrawn temporarily. No reviews appeared in any of the national or regional newspapers and it has been ignored by the broadcast media. Despite the fact that the diaries are manifestly homophobic documents, Ireland, official and unofficial, does not want the truth about them to be revealed. With this cowardly and dishonest policy ‘modern’ Ireland endorses the original homophobic hatred of the British establishment a century ago. If reason alone cannot protect the truth, nothing can.