Roger Casement And The ‘Black Diaries’:
Some Commonsense!
Review of Anatomy Of A Lie: Decoding Casement, by Paul R. Hyde
In general, most people make assumptions about the world without checking the veracity of what they are being told. So, for example it is widely believed that in 1969 the Americans managed to land astronauts on the moon. Most people don’t have any reason to doubt the official narrative. However, there are people who think it was a hoax and that the pictures showing the landing were filmed in a studio.
But such people tend to be dismissed as “lunatics”. It is not even considered necessary to examine their arguments.
However, it is not always the case that the official narrative is uncontested. Probably the most famous example of an event that has been disputed is the assassination of John F Kennedy.
And, in our part of the world, the most well known example of a disputed official narrative relates to Roger Casement’s “Black Diaries”.
While the JFK assassination is completely different to the “Black Diaries”, the reason why both are controversial is that allegations of a criminal nature were circulated and never tested in a court of law.
But, in the case of the JFK assassination, the American State had a good excuse. While it could be accused of being negligent in not protecting the chief suspect, the fact is that Lee Harvey Oswald was murdered a couple of days after the assassination and therefore could not be tried.
The British State had no such excuse. It decided not to prosecute Casement for the illegal activities documented in the Black Diaries. This, of course, meant that Casement had no way of defending himself against the odious charges. It could be said that, since Casement was convicted of treason and was sentenced to death, it was unnecessary to prosecute him for anything else. But that did not prevent the British State from persisting with its furtive campaign of character assassination.
It was not enough that Casement be hanged in Pentonville Prison; his reputation had to be destroyed also. And the State could not risk its allegations being subjected to legal scrutiny.
In the aftermath of the JFK assassination, the American Political Establishment knew that it could not just ‘move on’. It had to respond to the swirling rumours that had followed the extraordinary events of November 1963.
It set up a Commission consisting of some of the most distinguished people in American life to investigate the matters arising from the killing. It had at its disposal numerous technical experts and called on thousands of witnesses. Within twelve months the Warren Commission had produced a report consisting of 888 pages, as well as 26 volumes of supporting documentation.
Perhaps the demands on the British Establishment in 1916 were not as pressing. But a whispering campaign had been unleashed across two continents to prevent the reprieve of one the most distinguished people in British public life. It might be thought that the public had a right to know if the malicious rumours were true, if only for the historical record. But, instead, the hatches were battened down. The Black Diaries were not available for viewing until 1959—and even then access was restricted. Up until 1994 applications to view the diaries were routinely refused.
Could it be that, when a State lies, it finds that openness and transparency are not its friends?
The question of whether an official narrative is to be believed is often influenced by external events which are not directly related to the matter in hand. So, for example, in the case of the JFK assassination, it is widely believed that scepticism concerning the official narrative was caused by a decline in trust of State institutions following the Vietnam War and Watergate.
Regarding the Black Diaries, the trajectory has been in the opposite direction: the official view has been gaining ground. Irish people, up until quite recently believed that the Diaries were forgeries. It was taken for granted that the Irish patriot was above reproach. In 1965 the State was proud to reclaim the remains of Casement from Britain and re-inter them in Glasnevin Cemetery.
However, in recent years there has been a rapprochement between Ireland and Britain. The perfidy of Albion is no longer taken as read.
A second factor is that Ireland has changed. From being a conservative Christian country, it has been transformed into a society which appears in the vanguard of liberalism. For many the idea of Casement as being a homosexual does not seem repugnant. Indeed, to some it appears attractive in this modern country of ours. The National Library of Ireland categorises him as a Gay historical figure.
The problem with this is that the only source for this view of Casement’s sexuality comes from the Black Diaries. But these documents don’t just portray Casement as a homosexual: they also portray him as a pederast who indulged himself in a country whose civil rights he claimed to protect. It could be said that the Diaries reinforce homophobic stereotypes of a correlation between homosexuality and pederasty.
If it is accepted that Casement was a homosexual on the basis of the evidence of the Black Diaries, it is difficult to see how the other characteristics portrayed by the Diary can be denied.
But are the Diaries authentic?
An important element in any crime is the motive. If Lee Harvey Oswald did not kill the President (or didn’t act alone), who were the other conspirators and what were their motives? The weakness of the counter-narrative in the JFK assassination is that it is not clear who the perpetrators were and what were their motives. Why for example would the mafia have killed the President?
Certainly, the level of law enforcement was more vigorous under Kennedy, but what guarantee was there that the successor to Kennedy would not be even more vigorous in pursuing organised crime? Also, the American Mafia was not in the habit of killing politicians. It tended to avoid all direct confrontation with the State.
The other suspect is the CIA—or some rogue element within it. But there is no evidence of any particular antagonism between Kennedy and that organisation. Both the Kennedy brothers were actively involved in the plot to kill Fidel Castro. Also, while the CIA—like the Mafia—was not averse to murder, it does not seem plausible that it would plot against its own President.
Whatever about the JFK assassination, there are no such difficulties in finding a motive for the British State’s character assassination of Roger Casement.
Roger Casement was famous throughout the world for his exposure of Belgian atrocities in the rubber industry in the Congo in 1904. In 1910 and 1911 he exposed the exploitation of natives in South America. The exploitation in South America was even worse than the Belgian Congo and the perpetrators were financed by British capital.
Notwithstanding this, he was awarded a British knighthood. Jack Lane in his speech at Glasnevin Cemetery on 7th September 2025 compared his prestige to that of Nelson Mandela.
Roger Casement was not the type of person to be swayed by fame and fortune. He was becoming disillusioned with the British Empire; an empire which he had served with such distinction.
He became aware that Britain was plotting to provoke a war with Germany in order to preserve its economic dominance and wrote a book about this called the “Crime against Europe”.
He was one of two Irish patriots who had a truly international perspective on the conflict. The other was James Connolly, who supported Germany on socialist grounds.
But Casement (like Connolly) was not just a theoretician, he was a man of action. He attempted to recruit Irish prisoners of war in Germany to fight against Britain. He also imported arms from Germany to support the 1916 Rising.
There is no doubt that the British Establishment had a visceral hatred of Casement. They had awarded him their highest honours and yet he had turned against them during their life and death struggle against Germany.
It was not enough for the British to hang him, his reputation had to be destroyed. As soon as his conviction was announced, there was a campaign for his reprieve on both sides of the Atlantic. The famous novelist Arthur Conan Doyle initiated the campaign in Britain. In America the Senate passed resolutions calling for Casement’s reprieve.
In 1916 the War was not going well for Britain. Downing Street was hoping that the United States—to which they had become seriously indebted—would abandon its neutrality and enter the War to save the day. But the groundswell of sympathy for Roger Casement was in danger of preventing American’s participation in the War.
There is no doubt that the British embarked on a campaign of character assassination against Roger Casement. The only question is: did they forge the Black Diaries to achieve this objective?
It is not as if the idea of forgery was unknown to the British. A few years after 1916 they were forging ‘black’ issues of the Republican Irish Bulletin newspaper to discredit the Irish Freedom struggle.
To borrow a phrase from Voltaire: if the Black Diaries did not exist they would have had to have been invented!
But a strong motive is not proof. For that we must look at the evidence.
Within a few hours of the JFK assassination, the Dallas police had located the murder weapon. They had Oswald’s palm print on the rifle. They were able to establish that it had been bought by Oswald from a mail order company called Klein’s Sporting Goods Company in March 1963. Ballistics evidence showed that that fatal shots had come from Oswald’s rifle “to the exclusion of all other weapons”. At an early stage in the investigation it looked like it was an ‘open and shut’ case.
In the case of the character assassination of Roger Casement, the weapon was the ‘Black Diaries’. These consisted of the following items.
a) an army notebook
b) a pocket diary covering 1903
c) an office diary covering 1910
d) an office diary for the period 1911
e) a Cash ledger for 1911
Casement was a voluminous writer. The vast bulk of his writings have no sexual content whatsoever. There is no question about the authenticity of these writings which can be called the “White Diaries”. So, for long periods of his life, he had no inclination to express any sexual content. We are asked to believe that the obsessional character portrayed in the Black Diaries was able to switch off these urges in the last five years of his life!
Paul Hyde in his ground breaking book Anatomy of a Lie: Decoding Casement makes the astonishing claim that there is no evidence that the so-called Black Diaries even existed before Roger Casement’s death! Unlike the Dallas police in 1963, the British could not even produce a murder weapon!
The British showed typescripts of what they claimed to be the content of the Black Diaries to the distinguished people they wished to influence. They were asking the recipients of the typescripts to trust them.
But why not show the original diaries and avoid the risk of being doubted? Or, if the British Authorities did not wish to release the originals, why not show photographs of the diaries? This would have saved them the laborious task of typing them up, as well as giving proof of their existence.
One of the arguments to support their authenticity is the sheer volume of the Black Diaries. But, as Hyde points out, the famous ‘Hitler Diaries’ consisted of 62 volumes. They took only two years to forge. Before they were exposed as being a forgery, handwriting experts. along with the distinguished historian Sir Hugh Trevor Roper, had declared them to be genuine!
If we cannot be sure if the Black Diaries even existed in 1916, this leaves plenty of time for a putative forger or forgers to complete their work. It is perfectly possible that the Black Diaries were only completed years after 1916.
In this respect the author notes that Basil Thompson on at least four occasions noted that only one ‘incriminating’ diary was found. He repeated this statement in 1921 and in subsequent years. Thompson was the Head of the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) of the London Metropolitan Police and was intimately involved in the case.
There are also inconsistencies in the official narrative concerning when the Black Diaries were found; where they were found; and by whom.
Thompson says that the diary (singular) was discovered in a trunk belonging to Casement. The trunk had been in possession of the police for an unspecified time but was only opened following Casement’s arrest in 1916.
Other believers of the authenticity of the diaries think the British knew about them long before then.
Hyde accepts that, while the diaries may not have existed before 1916, the typescripts did. Someone had to have typed up those typescripts. Hyde’s thesis is that the gestation period for destroying Casement’s reputation may have begun in October 1914 when Casement arrived in Norway from the United Staes en route to Germany with his man servant, Adler Christensen.
The Minister to the British Legation in Norway (Mansfeldt de Cardonnel Findlay) speculated without any evidence that Casement might be having an “improper” relationship with Christensen. He relayed this idea to the British Foreign Office.
Findlay’s task was to use Christensen to kidnap Casement and bring him from neutral Norway to Britain. But, despite what some biographers such as Brian Inglis suggest, there is no evidence that Christensen betrayed his boss. On the contrary. It appears that Casement and Christensen outwitted Findlay.
Christensen obtained an official written document from Findlay, offering him on behalf of the British State a bribe of £5,000 (worth about three quarters of a million pounds in today’s money). This failed attempt at a bribe was a big embarrassment to the British and must have been very damaging to Findlay’s career.
Thereafter Findlay seems to have conceived a hatred of Casement and made various lurid allegations about Casement’s relationship with Christensen. The point about these allegations is that Findlay only made them after his attempted bribe was exposed. He had kept the allegations to himself for months after they had allegedly occurred. This does not seem credible since he did not hesitate to make a relatively trivial observation at the time the more lurid events were supposed to have happened.
So, the work on the typescripts may have begun in early 1915. These, along with the actual authentic “White Diaries”, provided the source material for the production of the Black Diaries.
An example of the approach is the 1910 “black diary”. This consists of about 14,000 words. Most of it is innocuous. Hyde says only about 4% is compromising material. So, the reader is asked to believe that, because 96% of the diary is innocuous, this gives credibility to the compromising bits! The information in the innocuous part of the diary corresponds closely with an authentic diary of Casement’s covering the same ground.
The authentic diary consists of about 140,000 words: ten times the length of the disputed “black” diary.
So, the logic appears to be that, if the authentic diary corroborates 96% of the disputed “black diary”, then the black diary—including the 4% of compromising material—must be authentic. But there is an obvious problem with this logic. Why in the name of basic common sense would Casement want to repeat in a separate diary information he had already covered in more detail before. The idea is absurd!
Hyde thinks that, in the 1910 diary, the personality is a voyeur and is passive—whereas the 1911 diary shows a completely different, more active, erotic personality. So, it is likely that these forgeries were written by different people—neither of whom were Casement.
Brian Inglis, in his biography of Casement, suggests that the Black Diaries must be authentic since they are so detailed. The greater the detail, the more likely mistakes would be discovered. But Hyde has discovered numerous mistakes (some quite comical) in the 1911 diaries.
One of the many weaknesses in the portrayal of Casement in the ‘Black Diaries’ is that no one in the real world came forward to corroborate the allegations of Casement’s sexual proclivities. And most of the allegations relate to South America where it would be difficult to prove or disprove the allegations.
Perhaps in an attempt to rectify this, one of the diaries relates to a purchase of a motorbike for a young man in Northern Ireland. The suggestion is that Casement financed the purchase. Since this involved a substantial amount of money, the implication is that the relationship was more than one of mere friendship.
There are a number of peculiar aspects to this transaction. Why would Casement record the transaction at all, given the transaction had no tax implications and was not a business expense? Would a note on a cheque stub not suffice? The other peculiar aspect of the journal entry is that Casement is able to name the vendor as well as the purchaser in the transaction.
It would be understandable that he would mention the purchaser if he knew him, but why would he mention the vendor? In most cases, the purchaser would not know the vendor because the purchase would be done through an intermediary—such as a trading company. It would only be when the log book was transferred to the new owner that the identity of the vendor would be known.
But the identity of the vendor is precisely the kind of information a policeman would know from accessing vehicle registration records.
If Casement had anything to do with the transaction, there is a very easy way to verify this. A copy of Casement’s bank statements would be evidence of his involvement. But no such “proof” was ever forthcoming!
There are numerous other inconsistencies which Hyde identifies in the Black Diaries.
There will be supporters of Casement who will say that we should concentrate on Casement’s political writings and ignore the Black Diaries. But why should we accept the allegations made against Casement if they are untrue? And why should the British State be immune from criticism of its squalid propaganda campaign.
For this reason, Paul Hyde’s book is an antidote to the lies that have been perpetrated against this great Irish patriot. It also provides an insight into the modus operandi of the British State. It is essential reading for an understanding of the issues surrounding this long running controversy.
John Martin
Athol Books Publications
* Roger Casement: The Crime Against Europe. With The Crime Against Ireland Introduction by B. Clifford. 184pp. Index. ISBN 0 85034 101 9. AB, 2003. €18, £15
*Roger Casement: A Reassessment Of The Diaries Controversies by Mairead Wilson.ISBN 0 85034 112 4. 32pp, AB. October 2005. €6, £5
* England’s Care For The Truth: by one who knows both by Roger Casement. (238 pp). ISBN 9-0-85034-136-2. Athol Books, May 2018. €21, £17.50
* Casement: Decoding False History. Recent Research by Paul R. Hyde. (120pp).
* The Casement Diary Dogmatists. by Brendan Clifford. 68pp. ABM No 22. ISBN 1 874157 09 X. October 2004. €8, £6
978 1 903497 95 1. 2021 €15, £12
*Alsace-Lorraine & The Great Irredentist War by Brendan Clifford, Roger Casement, Rene Bazin, Coleman Phillipson, Nicholas Mansergh. 48pp. ISBN 978-1-903497-42-5.
Six * Days Of The Irish Republic (eyewitness account of 1916), by L.G. Redmond-Howard. Contains a profile of Roger Casement, written during his trial; the Irish Case for the League of Nations; and a play written jointly with Harry Carson (the Ulster leader’s son). Intro. by Brendan Clifford. Index. 256pp ISBN 1 903497 27 2. AHS, March 2006. €21, £17.50
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