Cairo Gang

The Cairo Gang, officially the Dublin District Special Branch (DDSB) or D Branch, was a group of British military intelligence agents who were sent to Dublin in 1920 during the Irish War of Independence to identify prominent members of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) with, according to information gathered by the IRA Intelligence Department (IRAID), the intention of disrupting the IRA by assassination. It was originally commanded by British Army General Gerald Boyd. Twelve D-Branch members, including British Army officers, Royal Irish Constabulary officers and a civilian informer (although some victims' links to the British establishment have been contested), were simultaneously assassinated in Dublin on the early morning of Sunday 21 November 1920 by the IRA assassination unit known as The Squad. The operation was a meticulously planned decapitation strike masterminded by Michael Collins. The 14 deaths were the first killings of what was later dubbed Bloody Sunday. Tim Pat Coogan's biography of Michael Collins asserts that the "nom de guerre" of the British unit derived from a common history of service in the Middle East, but that is disputed by some Irish historians, such as Conor Cruise O'Brien, and it has been suggested that they received the name because they often held meetings at Cafe Cairo, at 59 Grafton Street in Dublin. Earlier books on the 1919–1923 period do not refer to the Cairo Gang by that name. By 1920, the IRA's Dublin headquarters, under the direction of Michael Collins, had, through assassination and intelligence penetration, eliminated the G Division of the Dublin Metropolitan Police, previously the mainstay of the Crown's intelligence operations against Irish Republicans. The Dublin Castle administration, the headquarters of the British government in Ireland, were forced to look for external intelligence support. In January 1920, the British Army Intelligence Centre in Ireland formed a special plain-clothes unit of 18 to 20 demobilised ex-army officers, and some officers still on active duty, to conduct clandestine operations against the IRA.