M (24 page)

Our people were getting cold on the subject, and finally I was told to drop the matter… [I] sent him a letter from the SS
St Louis
at Southampton, enclosing £10 for his propaganda fund, and informing him I was sailing for New York the following morning… I duly received the newspaper of the Party, showing a subscription of £10 from an American sympathiser. Thus the door was left open to recommence
pourparlers
for starting an insurrection in Poland, should it become necessary.

Why Karskii? Why would Melville pretend to be an American? Given that a century has passed, this is not easy to do. It is possible that he had heard about Karskii's gun-running ambitions from Sidney Reilly who had heard it from Japanese intelligence or from his old friend Nikolai Chaikovskii; it is equally possible that he had picked it up from an Okhrana contact such as D.S. Thorpe. Nikolai Chaikovskii was a veteran Socialist Revolutionary and leading light of the Society of Friends of Russian Freedom in London in the latter part of the 1890s.
²⁹
Through the Society he knew Rosenblum/Sidney Reilly who spied for the Japanese in Port Arthur prior to the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War in 1904. The following year Chaikovskii was close to, and a conduit of funds from, the Japanese Colonel Akashi, who, from his base in Stockholm, tried to undermine the Tsarist Government during that conflict. Socialist Revolutionaries were among many dissident groups, including the Polish Socialists and some of the Letts, who accepted Japanese gold from Akashi to promote a Russian revolution. (On the other hand, Chaikovskii [according to the report by Okhrana agent Rataev, which places Chaikovskii and Rosenblum/Reilly together in London] was believed by London's Polish émigrés to be an Okhrana agent. He had been seen meeting Mitzakis.)

In the summer of 1905 Akashi financed the purchase of ‘16,000 rifles and three million bullets to be sent to the Baltic regions and 8,500 rifles and 1.2 million bullets to be sent to the Black Sea'.

…It was decided that if the Socialist Revolutionaries took a leading role, the other parties would follow… They therefore set about buying arms… I decided to give the Poles money in advance and a free hand, but the other parties received money only after they had found arms for sale… Parties composed mainly of workers, such as the Socialist Revolutionaries and the Polish Socialists, did not like rifles. In contrast the Finns and Caucasians, who were mainly peasants, preferred rifles.
³⁰

Akashi also bought, through an English wine merchant called Dickenson, a 700-ton cargo vessel called the
John Grafton.
The arms were transported by train from Switzerland and loaded into it. The ship's nominal owner was an American, Morton, who was believed by Akashi to be an anarchist and somehow connected to Mrs Vernon Hull, an American woman who owned two gun-running steamers, the
Cysne
and the
Cecil
.
³¹

The
John Grafton
had offloaded only some of the arms at Baltic ports when everything went horribly quiet. The only person who could tell Akashi anything about what had happened was Konni Zilliacus, the multilingual Finn who was his go-between all over Europe.

Probably on 25th or 26th August Zilliacus came to Stockholm with a passport in the name of Long from England and said ‘I am really puzzled by the
John Grafton
business. She unloaded arms for the Lettish party to the north of Windau on 18th August. But no boat was waiting for her at the arrival point to the south of Viborg on the 19th. The crew were so apprehensive that they sailed her back to Denmark and begged me to give her new orders…'

He did so. The ship then ran aground amid uncharted sandbanks, and within days its cargo became international news, with photographs of the wreckage in the newspapers. As an afterthought Akashi adds

Prior to this, three machine guns and 15,000 bullets which the
Cysne
had on board were discovered by the English authorities, just before the ship left London. Morton from the United States, the nominal owner of these arms, was arrested and fined.

The identity of Morton raises many interesting questions. It has been speculated, by Dr Nicholas Hiley, that in light of Melville's account of his encounter with Karskii at the time of the Russo-Japanese War (in the guise of an American anarchist), Morton could well be a Japanese transliteration of Morgan, Melville's chief alias at this time.

No record as to whether Morton was in fact fined, and if so where, has so far been located. In light of Melville's own testimony, the theory that Morton and Morgan were one and the same is therefore a plausible one.

As early as 1901, Melville had begun to suspect that spies were interested in English coastal defences. A commercial traveller with the French name of Allain, who sold wines along the South Coast, ‘frequented soldiers a great deal', presumably on the pretext that they would purchase wines for the mess. He asked questions about the armaments of the forts around Portsmouth and then turned up in Dover doing much the same kind of thing. Some papers of his were found on a cross-Channel ferry and proved to contain, among other incriminating material, a questionnaire about Dover Castle: ‘calibre of guns, strength of garrison, the best approaches thereto, &c.'
³²
It was believed that at least three NCOs had taken money in exchange for information. Although they had not been able to supply much of value, it was a worrying case.

At the time, this kind of thing fell into a gap between military security and Special Branch. Later Allain, who was an American citizen, turned up in Cherbourg asking much the same questions, and from this

…it was evident he was in the pay of Germany. But no person thought of such a thing at the time. In fact Allain came in for little attention from the police although he was under notice from November 1901 to November 1903.
³³

The German
Nachrichten
Intelligence Service, had been run from Berlin by a Major Dame until 1900 and Major Dame had been perfectly happy to co-operate with Colonel Edmonds of the War Office in figuring out what the Russians and French were up to. But there was change shortly before Queen Victoria's death. Dame was out, and a Major Brose was in, and he

…was known for his anti-English views. Shortly after this Colonel Edmonds learned from several sources that a third branch of the German Secret Service had been formed to deal with England.

In 1904, despite the ‘special duties' MO3 being set up, possible spies still received no ‘attention from the police' in England and Melville, who was now on the
qui vive
at all times, was frustrated by the sheer innocence of the policemen he met up and down the country. He was working for a War Office conscious that Russia would very much like to invade India, that Germany would take on the British Navy if it thought it could, and that the French were quietly preparing for conflict against the Germans. All these nations needed information about British naval and military strength and must get it by spying. But the average policeman had no idea of this. Germans in particular were accepted without question wherever they went.

I had to travel to all parts of the country to make enquiries re suspected persons. In these duties I found the police, whether in London or the provinces, absolutely useless. Their invariable estimate of a suspect was his apparent respectability and position. Just as though only blackguards would be chosen for espionage. But the fact was the police could not understand these matters. The idea was foreign to them.
³⁴

He was aware that railway lines into London were a prime target for destruction by Germany in the event of war. At Merstham in Surrey there is a particularly long tunnel, and information reached him that a German photographer had taken up residence in the village. Off went Melville to find out more; the German had vanished. The house where he lived was directly opposite one occupied by a police constable. The constable was naturally surprised and impressed when called upon by ex-Superintendent Melville. He knew the photographer of course – very nice chap, took landscapes, not portraits, and splendid they were, too. Melville (one imagines him hunched over the teacups in the front parlour) now approached a delicate topic with a meaningful air.

It must be remembered that in those days I was absolutely forbidden to mention the word ‘spy.' All sorts of pretexts had therefore to be resorted to, even with the police… I then spoke to the officer for some time on the fact that the times were strange, and that we all should take stock of those foreigners and have our suspicions of them, &c., &c. ‘Yes, Sir', he said, ‘I am sure you are right; I believe these fellows are the authors of nearly all the burglaries we have around the country.'

Thus my eloquence was absolutely thrown away.
³⁵

The German had made a comprehensive photographic survey of the entire district. His landlord, at the house where he lodged, worked at Merstham Railway Station. Among his duties he had to inspect the tunnel at least twice a week, and Melville would soon learn that the photographer had accompanied him quite frequently ‘out of mere curiosity'.

Public awareness of the need for vigilance had not yet trickled down from readers of Erskine Childers'
Riddle of the Sands,
which had appeared the previous year and was the first sensational spy novel. The War Office had no permission at this time to intercept private mail. Melville had built up relationships with people in the GPO over the years but outside central London it was a different matter. While up and down the country foreign waiters and farmers, salesmen and language teachers, shopkeepers and ‘persons of independent means' explored the countryside and sent and received letters from abroad, among the locals ‘not to one in a thousand did the idea occur that Germans might be here on espionage'.

And it takes one to know one. Melville had no difficulty in turning his attention to Germans who might be spies. He was firmly on King Edward's side in this. He was all for an Entente and, by association, civilised tolerance of the Russians, but again like King Edward, was rather lukewarm about Germans and ready to believe they were up to no good. It was a prejudice he had.

His failure to encounter much suspicion in the populace at large was probably partly because the German of popular imagination, the stiff-necked, pompous, conceited, humourless Prussian, was not yet the butt of popular dislike that he later became. The caricature of a Frenchman, on the other hand, the duplicitous garlic-munching ladies' man, had been despised since the Napoleonic Wars. National and racial stereotypes prevailed in contemporary discourse at all levels of society and generally went unchallenged. Melville knew France, and the French, so he would not fall for that one; but the Germans were an unknown quantity and their intelligence service was certainly efficient. It was thanks to this that Paris had fallen in 1871.

Nonetheless, Melville must occasionally examine the French way of doing things, and sometimes in the context of a little spying of his own.

In 1904 we were very anxious to get the French bullet ‘D' for the Lebel rifle. I sent several agents (Frenchmen) to France. They visited the various manufacturing centres but owing to supervision, chiefly in connection with the activities of German and Italian agents, they were unsuccessful.
³⁶

In December 1904 his Brussels agent, Hely Claeys, was supposed to set up a meeting with a disaffected soldier from the supplies division of the French war office who seemed ready to hand over samples of the new Lebel cartridges. On Christmas Eve it became evident that arrangements had been bungled, and Melville had to leave London for Brussels at once, thereby missing his traditional annual Christmas party at home. Thanks to him the Brussels meeting did take place, but not until New Year's Day. As it happened the cartridges were of the old kind, although the new kind could probably be got so the meeting was not entirely fruitless. In the end they were obtained in London ‘and at a very low price'.

But Melville was disappointed at missing an annual family party that was so emotionally important and so unrepeatable. Perhaps this is what made him think he might be putting rather too much effort into this job than was merited by the reward.

He had only one yardstick to measure his salary by: Long, the other MO3 employee who generally worked abroad. But early in January while L was back in England Melville learned that the younger man was to take on an important undercover role in south-east Africa at a rate of pay twenty per cent higher than his own and with generous expenses.
³⁷
Melville considered this; and he thought about former colleagues who seemed well off since they left the police; and he asked Davies for a rise in pay to £500 p.a.

It is thanks to this request that we have an estimate of his true value according to his superiors. Colonel Davies consulted Sir Edward Henry, the police commissioner, who wrote confidentially on 21 January:

As you find him really useful might very reasonably recommend him for a rise from £400 to £500 by increments of £25 a year. I think it unlikely that for the same money you could get anyone equally serviceable, trustworthy and experienced. Littlechild no doubt makes a good living – but it has taken him many years to get together his clientèle and he started private business when he was comparatively young. I should doubt Sweeney making anything like the income stated. Whatever he may have made will be swallowed up by law expenses and damages, the outcome of his amazing indiscretion in publishing memoirs.
³⁸

The advantage of spreading the rise over a few years is that during that period he cannot well press for further concessions –
L'appétit vient en mangeant
.
³⁹

Davies considered this and wrote to Sir Thomas Sanderson at the Foreign Office, whose department was ultimately responsible for paying the bill.

M has raised the question of his salary, and asks for an increase. He says that old subordinates of his, who have also left the force, are earning better incomes than he is. He quotes ex-Inspector Littlechild whom he states to be earning £1,500, ex-Inspector Sweeney, who only left two years ago and who he says is making £850, and ex-Sergeant Thorpe, who gets £450 from the
Russian
Government for reporting the movements of anarchists, and lastly he points out that Long gets £500, that is £100 more than he, M, does. This last is an unfortunate circumstance and one which I always hoped he would not discover, to which end I have always paid Long direct. I pointed out to Melville that he must remember that L can be at any time called upon to undertake duty which may lead him into a foreign prison, and that considering the risks he has often run, and will shortly run again, his salary is not so high as it seems. M admitted that L had to run risks, but it evidently rankled that a subordinate of comparatively little experience should get more than he does. He is also anxious about the security of his tenure, and fears that a change of Government might lead to his dismissal, as he has got it into his head that a Liberal minister might disapprove of anyone being employed on such work as he is doing.