M (35 page)

Homeland security and military and naval intelligence abroad were fast becoming a huge, sprawling series of slightly differing fields of responsibility employing thousands of people, from military personnel to clerks and typists; keeping the security services secure must have been problematic, despite the obligatory signature of a declaration under the Official Secrets Act.

The natural division between Kell's counter-espionage, counter-insurgency people, and the interests of Cumming's SIS which lay largely overseas, was finally rectified when MI1(C) and MI5 opened for business as separate arms of a new Directorate of Military Intelligence in January 1916. Melville was still based in Temple with his Detective Section or ‘Special Staff ', but it was from then onwards part of MI5.
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Detective work arose from mail interceptions; mail interceptions arose from suspicion; suspicion arose from the Port Police. And the public. Within months of the war's beginning the British public, if Sidney Felstead is to be believed, were suffering from ‘spy mania':

Where is the man or woman who did not know a German who had a concrete gun platform built in his back garden?… And who… did not know of a fashionable restaurant patronised by naval and military staff officers where German spies disguised as harmless waiters were always found to be standing at the back of officers' chairs, carefully gleaning the conversation which was taking place?… The number of people who were reported to the police as signalling to Zeppelins ran into thousands: in practically every instance the culprit was either a careless servant girl or a blind flapping in the breeze… There was an unfortunate individual from whose house a light had been seen on the night of a particular raid, reported to the authorities as having been seen signalling to the enemy, who was raided first by the Competent Military Authority, then by the police, and lastly by the naval authorities, who drew a cordon round the house and then sent a bluejacket to swarm up the balcony and seize the culprit in the act.
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Felstead obtained his information from Basil Thomson of Scotland Yard and, fortunately for Melville, these panicky reports were normally rejected by the police at an early stage, long before they reached the detective branch of G Section.

Melville – Mr M – had another job to do, besides detection.

In 1911 the British spies Brandon and Trench had been caught because they went about their business as stupidly as Lody did. They had gone into Germany without vetting by Kell, Melville or Cumming, but with the blessing of at least one Admiralty official who was as arrogant as any Prussian and should have known better than to send them. This must not happen again. The British had been getting valuable information from Byzewski, Bywater, Tinsley and others for some time before the war. None of importance except Max Schultz (a British Max Schultz working in Germany) had been caught and none but Rué had been turned. British spies vetted by Melville were skilled operators, usually resident, with good cover in the way of a job so that they fitted seamlessly into life abroad.

Now, in wartime Germany, anyone interested in Germany's conduct of the war would be automatically suspect and if they could not account for themselves they would be shot. Lody had been caught because he made the elementary mistake of underestimating his enemy. The same must not be true of anyone Cumming sent abroad, or of anyone Kell sent to infiltrate groups such as the Neutrality League at home. The right people must be picked, and they must be properly trained. Bernard Porter gives an account of a man who got into MI5 in December 1914, and

….was a medical doctor, taken in because MI5 reasoned that a doctor was ‘the last person to be suspected of intrigue'. Together with him in that class of 1914 he later remembered ‘ex-policemen, journalists, actors, ex-officers, university dons, bank clerks, several clergy, and to my knowledge at least two titled persons'.

That was at what he described as a Spy School, started up then to teach them all what today is called tradecraft. The training included lectures from ex-Detective Superintendent Melville on how to pick locks and burgle houses, followed by practical exercises; others on the Technique of Lying, the Technique of Being Innocent, the Will to Kill, and Sex as a Weapon in Intelligence; and (finally) Dr McWhirter's Butchery Class, which gave advice on how to top yourself if you were caught… If we can credit this account Spy School clearly gave these new wartime recruits an excellent grounding, especially in practical subjects.
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It must have been quietly amusing for Melville, who knew his audience of university dons and titled persons would be goggle-eyed at the sight of a real, live criminal, to introduce the safe-cracking expert as ‘a very experienced assistant who is out on a kind of compassionate leave from Parkhurst so he can put his shoulder to the war effort for a few days'.
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He was probably a master locksmith from around the corner, but Melville was at pains to remind his class how foolish they would be to attempt an exercise of their new skills in peacetime. (Indeed, there was a – no doubt purely coincidental – rash of country-house jewel heists in the 1920s.) Melville was adept at getting in and out of locked rooms and had been much impressed, on meeting Houdini at the Yard in 1900, when this genius of escapology freed himself in a twinkling from some handcuffs.
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The fascinated student also recalled Melville's advice that doors squeaked more in daytime, usually on the upper hinge.

Spy School took place every Tuesday and Friday at 5.00 p.m.
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Melville was not the only lecturer. Others were Ewart, Cumming and possibly, interestingly, Douglas Hogg, the barrister James Melville worked for.
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On a day in January 1915, a small shivering crowd of refugees from Belgium landed somewhere on the North Sea coast of England. All of them were fleeing from the Germans who had overrun their country. They arrived unnoticed and scattered as soon as they reached dry land. One of them, a tall Russian who spoke many languages, had a respectable identity as a businessman and, unusually for a refugee, life insurance to protect his wife and children should anything happen to him.

Within a month, a letter to a Rotterdam address caught the attention of an officer of the special section. This Rotterdam address was known to be used by German intelligence and the letter, from L. Cohen at 22 High Street, Deptford, was incongruously inconsequential yet so affectionate; there were lots of kisses. Invisible ink technology being in its infancy, a hot flat-iron would reveal most messages written between the lines in, for instance, lemon juice:

An iron was heated and, hey, presto! Out came as pretty a mass of information as any enemy could desire to possess. There were certain divisions of the New Armies training at Aldershot which would cross the Channel before long, certain ships building in the Clyde which would be a grave menace to the German submarines, and remarks to the effect that the Moral of the people was poor, and that the recruiting for Lord Kitchener's armies had died away to nothing.
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Melville and his detectives investigated. There was no L. Cohen at 22 High Street, Deptford. More flirtatious letters were read on their way to Rotterdam. They proved, when pressed by the flatiron, to be demands for money. Finally one arrived which had a postscript: ‘C has gone to Newcastle so I am writing this from 111 instead.' There was a 111 Deptford High Street, and it was occupied by a baker and confectioner called Peter Hahn. He was arrested.

While waiting to take him away some of the police made a search of the back room where, much as they expected, they found a complete kit for writing in secret ink. There was the ink, special paper, wool and ammonia, neatly stowed away in a cardboard box. But of the actual spy himself no trace could be found.
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Local inhabitants provided a lead to a Russian who often visited Hahn; he lived somewhere in Russell Square. This tall, dark, middleaged fellow was traced to Bloomsbury, and thence to Newcastle, where he was arrested. His accommodation was searched and his belongings confiscated, and he was taken to London.

Under interrogation he denied knowing any Germans; he said he hated them. He spoke English well with the slightest of accents. He had arrived on the refugee boat, but records showed that he had visited England at least once since August 1914 and the authorities were convinced that he had lived in Britain as a spy before the war and escaped detection. The place on the refugee boat had been bought for him.

He was identified as Karl Muller. He was a resourceful man who had bought and sold different commodities for different companies, who had run this enterprise and that, and served in the Turkish army; he was not well off, but he had made a passably good living. He could, in fact, claim to be Russian, for he had been born in Russian Poland. He said he had been living in Antwerp when the Germans invaded, and they picked him up as a likely spy.

The German Admiralty, since the Lody disaster, had improved their own spy school, and Muller had been trained to recognise ships by their silhouette. ‘There are well-defined architectural lines to every group of ships in the British Navy, and these silhouettes I learned to know by heart before I was permitted to leave Berlin', boasted the liar Karl Armgaard Graves, and in this respect he seems to have known what he was talking about even if it didn't apply to him. Muller knew how to recognise battleships and use invisible ink. He was set afloat, and landed safely, and it was only through the vigilance and diligence of G Section that he was ever caught.

He was a tragic man, who wept bitterly for his wife and children the night before he met his end. (The life insurance provided by the German authorities, while no compensation at all, was nonetheless an improvement on the cold comfort offered to Gottlieb Goerner years before.) Muller and his baker accomplice had been found guilty in a civil court, for Hahn, born of German parents in Battersea, was a British subject and therefore qualified for a civil trial. Muller was defended, unsuccessfully, by Henry Curtis-Bennett, a barrister friend of James Melville from Middle Temple.

Hahn, the younger man who had written only once to Rotterdam at Muller's instigation, got five years. Muller was condemned to death. An appeal was lodged and rejected. When his time came he is said to have walked along the line of men who were about to kill him, solemnly shaking each one by the hand, before his eyes were bound and he bravely faced the firing squad on 23 June 1915.

Shortly after Muller's detection it was suggested to Kell, by the Special Section, that since the trial had not been reported, the Germans would be none the wiser if they kept on getting intelligence from their correspondent. Special Section officers therefore imitated his codes, his invisible ink and his handwriting:

Among the falsified items sent was a faked description of the results of the Battle of Jutland, one bogus photograph which would later appear in a German newspaper indicating that it had been accepted as genuine. Another item successfully enticed a German U boat into the open in a bid to sink an important British steamer, only to be met by the guns of a Royal navy destroyer... money sent from Rotterdam for Muller enabled [MI5] to purchase a second, much-needed motor-car – promptly christened ‘The Muller'.
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The war was grim and earnest now. The newspapers did not say how bad it was, but everybody could tell from the men who came back. There was no more false optimism. As the casualty lists lengthened, there was some bitterness, but also resignation; Germany was an aggressor, that much was proven; to most people the war must be right, and the ‘top brass' must know what they were doing, and good would prevail. But when, exactly? Unsure of their future, people put their affairs in order. In this spirit Major James Melville, who would shortly be posted to Gallipoli, and Miss Sarah Tugander of Abingdon Mansions, Kensington, cast their cares aside and quietly married at Kensington Registry Office on 1 July 1915.

Sarah was part of the family, left behind in England to hope that James would return unharmed. She had been secretary to Mr Bonar Law, now leader of the Conservatives, for ten years, but as was usual even in wartime, quit her job upon marriage.

Melville had his occupation to distract him. He had dealt with the loss of a wife and three children by working, and with war raging and two sons at the front he would work still. From late May onwards, dogged detection followed up a series of cable and letter interceptions and revealed what the newspapers would call a gang, but which was really more of a loose espionage network. Fortunately, the load was spread over two extra men: Burrell joined early in May and Hailstone at the beginning of June.

Discovering spies like Lody before they had had time to do much damage was merely encouraging; finding that others had been getting away with it, and that their information could already have sent men to their death, was frankly worrying. Between 24 and 25 May, routine checks on telegrams out of Southampton had alerted the section to messages destined for Dierks & Co., cigar merchants of the Hague. They were orders for items such as ‘3000 cabanas AGK; 1000 Rothschilds K; 4000 coronas USB'. Scrutiny of these cables by a German speaker suggested
alte grosse Kreuzer
(big old cruisers) for AGK,
Kriegsschiffe
(battleships) for K and
Unterseebotten
(submarines) for USB. That was enough. When the order of 25 May was checked against ships in port, three cruisers (3000 AGK) had just
arrived
(caba-nos), one battleship (1000 K) had just
departed
(Rothschild) and four submarines (4000 USB) were
stationed there
(coronas). Every recent telegram from ports up and down the country was now being urgently reviewed and Dierks & Co. in the Hague investigated; they were not the ‘cigar and provision merchants' they were supposed to be. And more telegrams were still being sent out of Southampton.
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On 27 May a £25 money order came from Dierks & Co. payable to the man who had sent the cables, Haicke Marinus Petrus Janssen. His location could now be discovered and the damaging cables stopped.