In July 1920 an Anglo-Irish intelligence officer named Charles Tegart made the long sea journey from India to London. The son of a Church of Ireland minister, Tegart was born in County Derry, spent much of his childhood in Dunboyne, Co. Meath, and studied briefly at Trinity College Dublin, before joining the Indian police force in 1901. Over the next two decades he established a reputation as a resourceful and ruthless opponent of Indian nationalist revolutionaries. He was particularly famous for his disguises – a colleague once saw him dressed as a Bengali gentleman talking with pimps and prostitutes in the redlight district of Calcutta. At the personal request of the British Prime Minister, Tegart was released from the Indian police in 1920, so that he could deploy his counter-revolutionary skills in Ireland. His task was to design a new intelligence system that would be capable of defeating the separatist campaign of Sinn Féin and the Irish Republican Army (IRA), then at its most intense. Twenty years later, after a spell in Palestine fighting Arab rebels, Tegart returned to the vexing Irish problem. With Europe falling to Hitler's advancing armies, British intelligence chiefs worried that neutral Ireland might be the next country to face German attack. At their request, Tegart travelled to Dublin in May 1940 to investigate conditions. His reports were disturbing. He claimed that 2,000 IRA leaders and German agents had been landed in Ireland by U-boat since the outbreak of the war. Together with members of the German legation in Dublin, they were ‘buying up estates’ on the west and south coasts, ‘rooting up hedges’ and ‘leveling suitable fields’ to make landing grounds for German aircraft. These ‘Quislings’ were ‘awaiting the signal to declare a revolution at the moment that German troops land’. A German force of no more than 2,000 troops ‘could probably capture the whole country’ in days. Tegart's reports were transmitted to the new Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, in London. Convinced that his picture was ‘a true one’, British ministers made a desperate offer of Irish unity in an effort to persuade the Dublin government to join the war, while British military chiefs planned a pre-emptive invasion of southern Ireland.