John Henry Gooding, alias Frank Digby Hardy (5 April 1868 – 28 October 1930) was an English naval writer, journalist, soldier, career criminal and would-be spy during the Irish War of Independence.

[2] Joining the Royal Navy in October 1886 as a writer, Hardy maintained an excellent service record until his desertion on 5 July 1888 after misappropriating ship funds.

Under the name Frank Hall, Gooding joined the Army Service Corps on 15 April 1891, citing his maternal grandmother, Annie Furzeland, as his next-of-kin.

After being held briefly in Holloway Gaol, he was sentenced to seven years in Dartmoor Prison for forgery and bigamy, including making false entries in the marriage register.

His account of the period makes the claim that he was attached to the staff of the Duke of Connaught and later travelled to Toronto, Ontario, Canada where he became a high-profile editor at a news agency before being falsely accused of forgery and returning to Britain.

Annie Hardy accompanied her husband to Ireland in 1918 where, under the names A. G. Saville and Frank Harling, he conducted numerous frauds and confidence tricks which led to his arrest and conviction under Justice Gordon in December 1918.

This enabled Hardy and the other 59 agents to send their intelligence reports directly back to a blind cover address in London, before being thoroughly analysed and forwarded by Denham and Tegart to Winter at Dublin Castle by means of official coded wireless messages or in locked courier pouches.

This impersonal reporting arrangement eliminated the need for Winter's Dublin Castle staff to directly handle Hardy and others in Ireland, and was intended to protect their informants from being observed by IRA operatives in street meetings with known Irish counterintelligence officers.

Hardy and Parker left for Ireland in September 1920 and stayed in the Phoenix Park Hotel in Dublin, close to the British Military General Headquarters.

Hardy promised to withhold the information until Collins was out of danger, but to still pass it on within enough time to protect his new cover as an IRA mole inside British Intelligence.

Hardy further explained that his reasons for offering to turn were anger over the harsh treatment he had suffered within the Crown's prison system and the vagrancy he had been forced to endure for the majority of his life.

Griffith then confronted Hardy with a confession he signed in 1918 to numerous confidence scams conducted across England, Wales and Ireland between 1916 and 1918, which had gained him £255 in total (the equivalent of roughly £13,000 in 2010).

The initial reports from the time in Irish newspapers portray Hardy simply as a career criminal and a rogue recruited by the British government to gain access and information on Collins and Sinn Féin.

The view was one-sided in Ireland and across the Atlantic where reports aired which portrayed the incident as a countered threat on the lives of prominent Irish Republicans which was simply motivated by Hardy's potential share in the £40,000 reward for Collins' capture.

[16] Hardy himself stated during his meeting with Griffith and the group of disguised journalists that he was an Englishman who had become disillusioned with the British government and was willing to betray it for the Republican cause as revenge for his life of incarceration.

[20] Hardy's enlistment into the British intelligence services came at a time when membership of the organisation was low and a recruitment drive had been initiated by its leadership for the purposes of action in Ireland during the Irish War of Independence.

Political cartoons of the time generally portray the incident as hugely undesirable for the Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, and the parliamentary discussion which followed led to the Chief Secretary for Ireland, Sir Hamar Greenwood, being ridiculed by Irish Nationalist MPs such as Joseph Devlin and Jeremiah McVeagh.

– T. Ryle Dwyer[26]Hardy's superior, Basil Thompson, remained as Director of Intelligence at the Home Office until 1921, when he fell out of favour with Lloyd George and was forced to resign.

[28] An account of Hardy's meeting with Arthur Griffith and actions in Ireland formed part of a CIA case study on the importance of intelligence in 1969, for the purposes of staff training.