During World War II the attempts of Germany's intelligence agencies to use Ireland as a base for wartime intelligence against Great Britain failed. The failure was a result of incompetence and poor preparation at all levels of the German operation and of the effectiveness of Irish and British counterintelligence systems. While Ireland was of primary concern to Germany only through the summer of 1940, the German failure there was in many ways a microcosm of the general failure of Germany's whole wartime intelligence effort.