“In the event of nuclear war, West Cork was considered the safest place in Europe, on account of the prevailing winds.”

Charles McCarthy is explaining why Albert Bachmann – declared  “Switzerland’s least effective spymaster” by The New York Times when he died in 2011 – bought the Liss Ard estate just outside Skibbereen in the early 1970s.

“There was always a certain aura of mystery surrounding him,” says former Cork South-West TD Jim O’Keeffe who knew Bachmann at that time through his role as a local solicitor. “But he was a lovely fella,” he added.

The aura of mystery attached itself to Bachmann’s plans for the Liss Ard Estate, as well as who was aware of them. “After I met him, I couldn’t remember what was up and what was down,” says Swiss journalist, Urs Engeler.

Bachmann – “an unguided missile” according to another Swiss journalist – was planning for a future he considered inevitable: global thermonuclear war. When that future came, the Swiss government would be ready. The Liss Ard Estate would be their retreat and – to that end, according to local stories – the cellars at Liss Ard were hollowed out to make room for the gold reserves this administration in exile would bring with them.

What the Swiss government – or the Irish government – knew about these plans is unclear. Bachmann’s role within Swiss intelligence would end with early retirement and exile.

In West Cork they still tell stories about Colonel Albert Bachmann. “He was a very popular man,” says Charles McCarthy of Charles McCarthy Auctioneers who worked on Bachmann’s purchase of Liss Ard in the 1970s. “It was Good Friday, 1971”. McCarthy recalls the day he sold Liss Ard and, fifty years later, the firm was involved in its sale in 2021 when the Sterns, a Swiss family who had owned it for 25 years, sold the property to US investors.

Bachmann bought the property himself in the 1970s, but whether he was doing so on behalf of the Swiss government or not was unclear. “Bachmann intentionally evaded control. His superiors tried to control him better,” Swiss historian Titus Meier says.

A complicated man

Bachmann is remembered as a charming, friendly man in West Cork but his reputation in Swiss intelligence was more complicated.

Colonel Bachmann had risen high in Swiss intelligence and his methods were unusual and, in time, would be viewed as problematic in Switzerland.

In their obituary when he died in 2011, the Telegraph noted harshly:

“Mustachioed, pipe-smoking and blessed with an ability to wreak havoc within his own organisation, Bachmann’s resemblance to Inspector Clouseau was striking; by the time his plots and schemes were uncovered by an astonished commission of inquiry, he had reduced the Swiss military intelligence agency, in which he had mysteriously managed to rise to a senior role, to a state bordering on chaos, not to mention bankruptcy”.

The London Independent recorded at the time of his death that he had made Swiss intelligence a “laughing stock” but there were loyalists, the paper noted, who regarded him as a “fearless visionary”.

In West Cork, he was looked upon differently by a community used to accommodating eccentricities.

“It was a time of high tension in the world,” says O’Keeffe, who would serve as a Minister of State at the Department of Foreign Affairs in later years. “The Swiss were prepared to defend their neutrality which is the only way you can really be neutral.”

Bachmann saw the threat coming from one source and in defending his country against the Soviet Union, the mark he made on Swiss intelligence was profound.

In 1976, he was put in charge of two sections of Swiss intelligence – not head of intelligence as is often reported. His elevation was due to an absence of alternatives, according to a 2018 Swiss newspaper report.

The two areas under his control fed into Bachmann’s own feelings about the world. Switzerland was neutral but feared a Soviet invasion, something Bachmann was paranoid about too.

Afraid of shadows and the internal red menace

Bert Bachmann was born in a Zurich suburb in 1929. As a youth, he became a member of Freie Jugund, the youth wing of the communist Swiss Party of Labour.

But the coup in Czechoslovakia in 1948 turned him away from communism and he joined the Swiss army, rising to the rank of colonel. “The highest rank you can achieve in the Swiss army,” one West Cork acquaintance says. A Swiss journalist says differently. “He was one among many in an army of 600,000”.

His anti-communist feelings were shared by many in Switzerland.

“Especially after the suppression of the Hungarian uprising in 1956, anti-communism became dominant in Switzerland. In the 1970s, this relaxed somewhat, but the majority was always anti-communist,” Titus Meier says.

Bachmann did not relax. In 1968, the Soviets supressed the Prague Spring and Bachmann’s anti-communism developed a new urgency. “He was a communist in his youth and then he had the zeal of a convert,” Swiss journalist Marcel Gyr tells me.

According to his New York Times obituary, Bachmann regarded the Soviet tanks rolling into Prague as “the dress rehearsal for a full-scale invasion of Western Europe”.

He prepared accordingly. In 1969, he was the main author of a booklet, ‘Civil Defence’. 2.6 million copies were printed and it was distributed across Switzerland. As might be expected, it warned of the internal red menace from leftists, intellectuals and pacifists and encouraged the Swiss people to spy on each other. It was claimed to be the most read Swiss publication in history. The Swiss army was said to have refused a request from General Franco’s Spanish government to republish it.

Its publication caused something of a furore which Bachmann escaped by heading to Biafra, although by this time he was also making regular trips to Skibbereen.

In Biafra, if not in Cork, he styled himself – for unknown reasons- as an upper class Englishman called Henry Peel which would have aided in the air of mystery he cultivated wherever he went.

“Colonel Bachmann was involved in the development of some holiday cottages near Skibbereen,” Jim O’Keeffe recalls. “There wouldn’t have been too many of those developments at the time.”

These developments included the Skibbereen Eagle pub in Tragumna. “He was ahead of the time in terms of that kind of development.”

Jim O’Keeffe says he was under the impression that Colonel Bachmann was working with the Swiss reserve army but also knew he had a role in intelligence.

On his return from Biafra, Bachmann had been promoted and was put in charge of two aspects of Swiss intelligence: the development of intelligence and the creation of a resistance movement in case of invasion. It was from this position he unveiled his plans for Ireland but also seeded his own downfall.

“Switzerland was officially neutral of course,” says Marcel Gyr, “but obviously they feared not an American invasion but a Soviet invasion.”

They now had a man in place who believed those fears weren’t simply justified, but could happen at any moment.

One of his roles was overseeing Bureau Ha, an intelligence service, while another Special Service D, which required the building of a resistance force that would become active in the event of occupation. Bachmann embraced these roles enthusiastically. “With his forward thrusting imagination, he constantly created security risks,” said an official Swiss report from 1980.

“With energy and imagination — perhaps too much of the latter — Colonel Bachmann trained his special agents in the arts of bomb-making, sharpshooting, encryption, assassination and, in a nod to his onetime profession, the printing of pamphlets,” the New York Times obituary recorded in 2011. “Mountain guides were entrusted with the task of shepherding important officials across the Alps.”

Bachmann and his most trusted confederate Rudolph Moser worked with a fanatical devotion.

“Moser was Bachmann’s closest collaborator in setting up a secret army and a secret intelligence service,” Urs Engeler says.

“Moser and Bachmann were both extremely suspicious and solitary outsiders who slipped in the 70s into these functions almost by random. They gradually established a small state within the state that could no longer be precisely controlled by Official Switzerland. Both considered themselves defence strategists in large international contexts.”

Special Service D was the precursor to one of the great post war scandals in Switzerland, Projekt-26, a stay at home army whose existence led to a public inquiry in Switzerland in 1990.

Downfall, and layers of mystery

The end of Albert Bachmann’s intelligence career ten years earlier providing a foreshadowing of that event.

 “There was a problem with a Lieutenant Schilling as I recall, who may have been one of Bachmann’s agents, “ Jim O’Keeffe says.

Kurt Schilling was indeed one of his agents and through him, Bachmann’s time in Swiss intelligence would come to an end.

One early morning in 1979, Austrian police knocked on the window of a car close to the town of St Polten in Austria. They had noticed the man taking pictures the day before and observed his “extremely conspiratorial behaviour”.

When the window was rolled down they were greeted by time and motion expert Kurt Schilling.

At the time, the Austrian army were engaged in their biggest military drill since World War II. 32,000 troops were involved in the operation. They hadn’t attempted to hide it and had invited observers from the eastern bloc to witness them. Bachmann wanted to know how long the Austrians could resist the Red Army and to that end he sent Kurt Schilling along.

Schilling was a 58-year-old businessman who had been spotted by the Austrians in his rental car carrying the tell tale signs for a spy of a notebook, maps, camera and binoculars. Initially he was suspected of being a spy from behind the Iron Curtain but when it became clear who he was, he was dubbed ‘The Spy Who Came In from the Emmentaler’.

Schilling was charged with espionage by Austria and, having received a suspended sentence by a judge who appeared to deem him something of an inept fool, he was charged upon his return to Switzerland with having divulged classified information.

The furore brought an end to Bachmann’s time running these aspects of military intelligence and such was the consternation that some wonder briefly if he wasn’t a double agent.

His anti-communism was too sincere for that but at his retreat in West Cork, these matters were never a subject of conversation.

Instead Liss Ard was said to be a technological paradise with computers ready for the government in exile.

Bachmann had became known in West Cork in the early 1970s. Bachmann’s approach and the fact that everyone knew him as Colonel Bachmann added some more layers of mystery.

“He was trying to take a traditional approach,” Jim O’Keeffe remembers of his developments. “He wanted all the cottages to be thatched which may have been normal at one point, but it wasn’t in the early 1970s.”

The money trail

Liss Ard dates from the 1840s and was built by HW O’Donovan who succeeded his brother as The O’Donovan in 1870. It left the O’Donovan family in 1924 and it had been owned by Captain and Mrs Ansdell before Albert Bachmann did a deal to buy it from Mrs Ansdell in the early 70s.

But who bought it? Charles McCarthy recalls that the Union Bank of Switzerland provided the money and the assumption was that the Swiss government was behind it, In Switzerland, it is said that Bachmann bought it as a private citizen with funding from Swiss Banks but, as a Cold Warrior, albeit for neutral Switzerland, ideas on how to survive a nuclear winter were never far from Bachmann’s thoughts. Specifically he was concerned, according to Titus Meier, with the “evacuation of people of risk”.

“The [Swiss] government knew nothing about the preparations for exile in Ireland,” Titus Meier tell me. “Although the administration had a mandate to make appropriate preparations, there was never any approval of Ireland. The government did not want to commit itself there.”

‘Y’ was Bachmann’s codename for Ireland and despite close contacts with British intelligence, Bachmann felt Ireland was the perfect retreat.

Meier, who wrote a book called “Preparation for Resistance of Occupation”, in which Bachmann featured, says the Swiss government never owned Liss Ard and only paid rent to Bachmann on a few occasions.

“Bachmann had the gift of winning people over to his ideas and motivating them,” Meier says. “The ones who bought the hotel were private donors from Switzerland (including a bank). On the one hand, they were convinced of the concept – vacations for Swiss in Ireland. On the other hand, the hotel was also to serve as a safe house for special intelligence and, in the event of an occupation of Switzerland, as a possible government exile site. Bachmann arranged for the Swiss government to pay an annual rent – but without informing his superiors.”

“Liss Ard was never in the possession of the Swiss government,” Swiss journalist and author Marcel Gyr says.

That didn’t matter. Bachmann continued to work on his plan for exile which included installing an oversized kitchen in the Skibbereen Eagle pub in Tragumna which would then feed the Swiss government when they fled a post-apocalyptic central Europe.

Jim O’Keeffe, in his role as local TD, opened the hotel with Bachmann as owner. At the time, it was seen as simply a hotel. The knowledge that it was being repurposed as a bolthole for the Swiss government came later. O’Keeffe can’t recall the Liss Ard plan becoming an issue for government, especially as it only became known subsequently, by which time the Swiss government had distanced themselves from Bachmann and the Liss Ard.

“He turned Liss Ard into a hotel and he asked me to formally open the hotel. I did that and subsequently I hadn’t a whole lot to do with him as I was involved in active politics,” he said.

“I wasn’t aware at the time that there was any further background use intended for Liss Ard. That story emerged subsequently and I don’t know if it was true or not to be honest. But there was a ring of truth to it because of his position in Swiss intelligence and because there was this air of mystery about him. He was different.”

There were those who said the story came out because Bachmann talked about in a pub one night. “I think he might have talked about it publicly at one stage,” Jim O’Keeffe suggests.

This tallies with the Swiss view. The fallout from Lieutenant Schilling’s adventure in Austria led to early retirement for Colonel Bachmann.

 “Once Bachmann and Moser were disciplined, they took their exile in different ways,” Urs Engeler says. “Bachmann and Moser never really accepted the dismissal. They considered themselves to be the only ones competent to set up and run a Swiss stay-behind [resistance] organisation. Both were bitterly disappointed. Moser retaliated by severely criticising the Swiss authorities in his book, which he considered incompetent and narrow-minded. Bachmann went public by repeatedly posting individual details about his grand plans and ideas in the media.” These included, Engeler says, the details of the West Cork escape, a government in exile and the transfer of gold reserves to the cellars of the Liss Ard Estate.

With, as Charles McCarthy puts it,  “the threat of nuclear war receding”, the decision was taken by Bachmann, the Swiss government or the banks to sell Liss Ard.

It was owned subsequently by a German art dealer Veith Turske and then it passed into the ownership of the Stern family – also from Switzerland but who had no connection with Bachmann – who held it until its sale this week.

Colonel Bachmann is fondly remembered in Cork. Some say he lived in Union Hall after the Liss Ard sold, while Charles McCarthy said he moved to Schull where he would see him occasionally and exchange a greeting and a wave.  Colonel Bachmann remains, too, an object of fascination in Switzerland.

“It would be wrong to reduce Bachmann only to his role as an anti-communist,” Titus Meier says.  “This side of him receded into the background in the 1970s. Rather, he saw himself as an intelligence man and cultivated the air of a parvenu. In private, he was charming and sociable. People who had dealings with him held him in high esteem for this.  He was creative, but not a good leader and organizer. He needed people who could implement his ideas. »

In 1980, a secret Swiss government report concluded that he was not a security risk as long as “his honour was not unduly wounded and he wasn’t in a hole financially.”

A man of mystery

In West Cork, his honour was never wounded. Urs Engeler this week recalled in an email his encounter with Bachmann in a Zurich restaurant in 1991.

“The conversation lasted about two hours, and afterwards I couldn’t remember what was up and what was down. Bachmann’s explanations were so extensive and labyrinthine that nothing was tangible or verifiable. He told about secret meetings with French, British, American and also Eastern European military and intelligence officials in Switzerland as well as halfway around the world until I no longer knew whether it was all true, or only half of it, or nothing at all.”

Engeler had hoped to write an article based on the meeting, but he came away feeling less enlightened than he’d hoped.

“What remained for me: Bachmann was only concerned with himself, with his great and unique contacts and opportunities. In response to specific inquiries, he served new adventurous stories. What he actually achieved and in which areas he was still active could not be determined. Bachmann, a man with ideas, adventurous, politically sensitive and dangerous plans, was never transparent. His character was as mysterious as it was opaque. But he had a talent to portray himself as an enigmatic and important person and Swiss key player, who seemed to know everything and to have exclusive global contacts.”

In West Cork, they would agree with the depiction of the man of mystery. But they may not surrender the idea that Liss Ard Estate would have served as home for the Swiss government if the curious local resident Colonel Bachmann’s plan had been enacted in the event of global thermonuclear war.