M (26 page)

In the early months of 1906 he discovered an entire cadre of German spies going about their business quite openly from a furnished house in Epping. It was near a pub kept by a local fellow called Spiegelhalter. Melville had responded to a letter to the War Office about a foreigner seen photographing a disused fort nearby. He found that the complement of men varied between seven and thirteen, and

They all had either cycles or motor-cycles and invariably carried cameras. They also carried field glasses. They had apparently plenty of money… They left home regularly every morning at 9 o'clock, irrespective of the weather, on their bicycles or motor-cycles and armed with cameras. All took different routes.
³

None of the locals (with the probable exception of Mr Spiegelhalter, who wasn't asked) knew where they went, since they'd never thought to enquire, but with Melville's encouragement they got into conversation and found that these Germans were all ‘on holiday'. Each man was ‘on holiday' for exactly three months and then went back to Germany ‘to join his regiment'. After a while they melted away to different parts of England, but not before Melville had despaired of trying to convince the local police that these men were engaged upon espionage. They were deaf to his warnings. ‘Argument was useless.' As for the spies,

Their business, I should say, was to become thoroughly conversant with the routes from the sea coast to London, and thus to be able to guide a German army landed in this country. These Germans frequently, to the surprise of some Epping people, told the number of miles even to very remote places on the sea coast. They knew the geography of the country by heart.
⁴

Later, in the years leading up to the War, popular novels would inspire widespread nervousness about invasion by Germany. But invasion was not the aim of German pre-war espionage. Nor was sabotage, at least not immediately. The German Government simply wanted facts about British naval defences, armaments and shipping. Armgaard Karl Graves, who was a wild fantasist, describes how he was trained to recognise other nations' ships in silhouette, flag signals and uniforms, besides ‘topography, trigonometry, naval construction and drawing':

A Secret Service agent sent out to investigate and report on the condition, situation, and armament of a fort like Verdun in France must be able to make correct estimates of distances, height, angles, conditions of the ground etc... he must be able to make quick and accurate calculations using trigonometry, as well as possessing skill as a draftsman.
⁵

If German intelligence was not all it might have been, this was at least in part because few if any spies were trained as thoroughly as Graves claims he was, certainly before 1909. And no disaffected Englishmen were recruited. The spies warned off by Melville's snooping in these years were either young soldiers on routine exercises unlikely to yield much of value, or immigrant or travelling Germans without technical knowledge who probably seemed more suspicious than they were. Steinhauer, who like Melville had shifted his professional attention to espionage and counter-espionage, wrote

A spy is a man – or woman – whose business it is to obtain information of naval, military or political value. Such people must naturally possess infinitely greater technical knowledge and daring than the ordinary Secret Service agent, the individuals whose work is confined to opening letters they have received from their employers, taking out the enclosures they contain – chiefly sealed letters – stamping them, and putting them into pillar-boxes to reach the spies for whom they were intended.

These agents were seldom used – at any rate by me – for anything else. Occasionally I might have utilized them to ascertain whether a certain person lived at some particular address, but that was about as far as I would trust them.

The work of the agents outside London, say those living in naval localities, was a trifle more difficult. Questions were put to them, mainly dealing with changes that had taken place in naval or military matters, but even then there was nothing especially secret about the whole business.
⁶

Part of the trouble was money. Steinhauer never had a budget adequate for the purchase of principles or imagination or expertise. Yet if he got no results at all and the German Chief of Admiralty Intelligence happened to be replaced by somebody unsympathetic to ‘the anti-English party', his work would falter to a complete halt. In his budgetary problems he was not alone.

Back in Victoria Street, Melville had cause to feel rather glum. A Liberal Government had taken over at the turn of the year and the new regime was scrutinising expenses. He had been right to assure himself of compensation in case of redundancy. Hely Claeys, his Brussels agent, was the first to find himself surplus to requirements. His story indicates how precarious, and risky, a spy's job could be.

He was a man in middle age, Belgian by birth, a naturalised British subject, and had been reporting, through Melville, to Colonel Davies. Now he visited London and appealed to Colonel Charles A'Court Repington, ex-Military Attaché in Brussels and presently military correspondent of
The Times,
to save him from penury. In the six weeks since Intelligence dispensed with his services Claeys had struggled to support himself, his wife and teenage daughter on a meagre income from journalism. All he wanted, he said, was a small retainer and he would go anywhere and do anything, with or without his family. He spoke three languages and his wife eight, but in view of his career history it had proved impossible to find work. His wife and daughter did not even know he was anything but a journalist. He must go back to Belgium on Saturday; he needed an answer.

Repington was sympathetic and asked him to put something on paper that he could show to his superiors. That afternoon Claeys sat down at his boarding house near the British Museum and put his case in a letter. He had originally been hired – by Repington – in 1898, to assist with enquiries around the Fashoda incident. In those days Claeys was stationed at Cherbourg. Fashoda was a Nile port under Anglo-Egyptian rule which was seized by the French General Marchand. Kitchener was able to seize it back, but diplomatic relations between England and France were sour for a few months. Claeys provided good information at Cherbourg but was unfortunately over-zealous, as a result of which he was arrested, fined 1,000 francs and jailed for two years. Upon his release he was deployed at the Cape, and his family accompanied him there. (‘Sir E. Bradford saw after his being sent off to South Africa though I found the money', noted Repington.)
⁷
He was there from June 1901 until June 1904, around the time when the young ‘commercial traveller' Henry Long was despatched to work in South Africa. Claeys had since been employed in Brussels by the Intelligence Division, reporting to ‘W. Morgan' at 25 Victoria Street, until 2 February 1906. And here he was, with a prison record, cast upon the labour market in his fifties.

It is not economy cancelling my work on the continent in time of trouble. Double and treble is to be paid for bad work as an agent just arrived does not feel at home. Economy consists in paying not too much but a fair salary… I tried my best, as they told me to do, to get another situation. I did not succeed. If the Admiralty, the War Office or the Foreign Office cannot employ me now I beg to ask for a waiting salary of £10 a month with residence in Brussels as being the cheapest place to live in. If you cannot help me I do not know what will become of me. I am without means.
⁸

Claeys was paid out of the ‘Secret Account', funds that came from the Foreign Office, so Sir Charles Hardinge had to make the decision. The new masters were still figuring out exactly what the Secret Account was for. Hardinge asked Sanderson, his predecessor, for advice, and received the following:

He is, I believe, a good man for his particular business but whether he is worth retaining at a sinecure salary of £120 a year is another question. In any case I strongly advise you to have nothing whatever to do with him directly. I think that if you answer A'Court Repington at all, it would be prudent to tell him that you never have any dealings with agents of this kind. Perhaps you might add that that was also my rule.

There are some papers in the safe or in the press about the man of which I can point out the whereabouts next time I look in at the FO…
⁹

Sir Charles took the advice about maintaining a lofty distance, and wrote to Repington in the manner suggested. Repington would have known exactly what was going on: no one in Government dared leave a trail of evidence that he had ever been in contact with espionage agents. In 1919 Repington admitted in his own published memoir to having been in the Secret Service at the time of Fashoda, but certainly not when he was in Brussels; heaven forbid he would have known such a person as Claeys there. He wrote primly

My view is that the Military Attaché is the guest of the country to which he is accredited, and must only see and learn that which is permissible for a guest to investigate. Certainly he must keep his eyes and ears open and miss nothing, but Secret Service is not his business, and he should always refuse to take a hand in it.
¹⁰

Repington was being economical with the truth. He probably knew Claeys in a Secret Service capacity in Brussels. They worked for the same War Office and he seems to have felt to some extent responsible for him.

Undoubtedly, as Steinhauer sagely remarked, ‘A discarded spy – like a discarded mistress – is dangerous for any man'.
¹¹
There was a happy ending for Mr Cleays. Sir Charles's assistant dropped a line to Major G.K. Cockerill, who worked safely below the parapet at the War Office, forwarding the correspondence ‘in case you should think it desirable to do anything about it'.

Gun-running had been a preoccupation from the start. During the Knox D'Arcy enquiry, Melville had known about the smuggling of arms into Persia, which was of particular concern. He also kept an eye on guns entering ports mainly in Africa and South America. In his memoir he names Rudolph de Paula and Carling and Co., both based in the City of London, as arms dealers he investigated. ‘Colonel Davies's Separate Account', the secret Foreign Office fund from which Melville and Long were paid, provided one-off sums to diplomats and agents in ports all over the world to facilitate enquiries about this kind of thing. Davies' accounts for the spring of 1906 include receipts from Cairo:

I, Mansfeldt de Cardonnel Findlay, acknowledge to have received from Sir Edward Grey, Baronet, His Majesty's Principal Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, the sum of twenty-five pounds (£25) for the purposes of His Majesty's Foreign Secret Service, and I do hereby solemnly declare that the said sum has been disbursed faithfully and according to my best judgment for those purposes...

while from Malta, payable to the agent in Genoa of the
Navigaziione Generale d'Italia,
came:

For one first class passage to Benghazi and return, via Canea (25% reduction), £9 14s 1d

and
Señor don Arturo Peel,
Chargé d'Affaires in Montevideo, submitted quite a little pile of receipts in February and March. They included a large one listing ‘
Champagne, Vino, Whisky, Licor
' and another from the

Confitería y Café Jockey-Club

CASA ESPECIAL

Para el Servicio de Banquetes, Soirées y Lunch

Arthur Peel seems to have refurbished the Legation with new carpets and sofas and potted palms and held quite a few
banquêtes
and
soirées
at Secret Service expense but no doubt it was all to some long-forgotten purpose. The bills are filed with Davies's accounts. In a tight, neat, little hand are monthly listings such as ‘Major Thwaites (journey to Brussels: £6 9s 1d)' and ‘Pay of agents at Overburg, Baku, Petrovsk and Kimel for January, £156' and ‘Capt. B-S for HDL (paid into Parr's Bank) £150'. Henry Dale Long was still in Africa, about to leave. ‘Kimel' was Samara. B – Byzewski, an Austrian, the third permanent agent besides HDL and M – transferred funds to agents in the Central Asian cities from his base in Berlin. RBT (Richard Tinsley, who later became a permanent agent in Rotterdam) received £19 4s 0d for ‘plans of Dutch forts'.

The Secret Service account also paid for repatriation of ‘unprotected British subjects' such as, in 1906, ‘Miss Ashe and Miss Stegwell' (‘on the recommendation of the Chaplain'), and ‘the Freed family'. What with the potted plants and the unprotected spinsters vying for funds with Byzewski, Long and Melville, full-time operatives who produced useful intelligence, it was rather a catch-all arrangement. But there was no other way of accounting for these mostly
ad-hoc
items which were better kept out of the public eye. In November of 1906 Major Cockerill wrote to Sir Charles Hardinge at the Foreign Office:

I have lately been enquiring into every item of Secret Service expenditure with a view to possible reductions. We do not think it is any longer necessary to keep an agent at Samara, and I have accordingly arranged that he shall not be retained after the 1st January next. This will effect a saving of £380 a year commencing from that date. I have searched in vain for any further means of reducing expenditure. All our other expenses seem not only justified but indispensably necessary.
¹²

Among the justified and indispensably necessary items, Melville notes:

During the early part of 1906 I succeeded in obtaining in London particulars of the system prevailing in Germany re mobilisation of the army in peace or war. Also the various punishments meted out to deserters in peace and war; the conditions under which reservists are allowed to leave Germany and their action in foreign countries; and how they keep in touch with their authorities. Also the same information re members of the Landwehr.
¹³

The War Office needed to know this but there was no point in hoping the War Office could pay for it; it was all too awkward to be absorbed by a department whose expenditure often came under close parliamentary scrutiny. The Foreign Office had been paying since 1886, and must continue to do so. By 1908 Mr Byzewski had his contact in Samara back on the books.