Ormonde Winter

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Brigadier General Sir Ormonde del'epee Winter.(1875-1955) Royal Engineers 1914-1918. Retired as Colonel. Chief of the British Army intelligence branch in Dublin, known as derisively 'O' though this name was his own brainchild and 'the holy terror.' Appointed by Winston Churchill, home Secretary, though without much experience in the espionage field. 'O' impressed a few people at the time with his initial reorganisation of heavily centralised departments. 'O'looks like a wicked little white snake, he can do anything.' wrote Mark Sturgis of the Dublin castle regime, but the facts told a different tale. Within hours of his arrival in Dublin, shot at while driving through the city, making it clear who had the upper hand in intelligence matters. Winter was criticized among other things 'cloak and dagger' operations which achieved little apart from at least once shooting dead the wrong person.(a John Lynch rather than the well known Liam) His exotically named Cairo Gang many of whom met their end on bloody Sunday November 1920 thanks to drunken confessions and carelessly dropping their names and addresses into paperbins and some smart intelligence work from housemaids. The resulting action thereby ended any hopes of revival of 'British intelligence' in Eire. Many of the Cairo gang who incidentally met in the Cairo Cafe in Central Dublin, to get information out of men who were really working for Michael Collins had been enjoying the company of some of their killers for several weeks. They marvelled at the way that their 'friends' had mastered the Dublin accent! Several of his subordinates are said to have committed suicide (5) under his draconian command. One of his plans was for potential informers to write to a secret address in England, and the net result as he freely admitted was a pile of hoaxes and abusive mail. According to his biography, one Cairo gang member was a close friend and he swore to one day return to Ireland and take vengeance on the killer. This as far as we know never happened. In the 1920s he joined the directorship or dictatorship! of the burgeoning British Fascisti, which held several massive meetings (12000 at one) in the London Parks, their followers mainly being women, and many ex suffragette types as the papers reported though here, he may have been an agent provocateur. Through mismanagement and scandal the BF faded into obscurity in the late 20s and membership was swallowed up by other fascist movements. In his book he made virtually no mention of this period, perhaps under the offcial secrets act. In 1940 he offered his services to the Finnish Army at the age of 55. He was a master of five Russo-Slavic languages and was a chain smoker. His obituary read that he neither feared God nor man, and boasted of having being cleared of murder in his student youth, in an incident when a man was struck on a river with a rowing oar. He resembled the comedy Colonel of the theatre, slight, white, and monocled. Publications (Winters Tale 1955) rare-also read 'British Intelligence in Ireland the final reports' Peter Hart (available)