Operation Seagull II
German military mission planned in June 1942
Operation Seagull II ("Unternehmen Möve II" in German) was an Abwehr II. sanctioned mission planned in June 1942 as a refinement of Operation Seagull I. The plan envisioned in Seagull II was to use an Irish Abwehr agent ("V-Manner"), who would parachute into the area of south-east of Ballycastle in Northern Ireland, recruit a sabotage team from any willing IRA personnel in the area, and attack important "targets of opportunity" in the immediate vicinity. Both operations were to be controlled by radio and with each sabotage team in Ireland and Scotland liaising with each other via radio contact.
Agents involved and failure of mission
The agent selected for Seagull II was James Brady aka. "Agent Metzger". Brady was a native of Strokestown in Roscommon, Ireland who had been stationed in Norway with the British Army. He had been captured by the German Army after they occupied the Channel Islands on 30 June 1940. At the time of the invasion he had been in jail on Guernsey convicted of the attempted murder of a British police officer. Following his capture he was detained in Stalag XX A (301) where he came into contact with fellow Irishmen, possibly including IRA member Frank Ryan under his pseudonym "Mr. Richards". Brady was recruited by the Abwehr around mid 1941 and subsequently issued a South American passport under the identity of "de Lacy." In preparation for the Seagull II mission Brady underwent a series of intensive Abwehr supervised training courses including a radio course at the Abwehr school at Stettin.
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This entry incorporates text from “Operation Seagull II” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.