Strange Intelligence: Memoirs of Naval Secret Service (3 page)

That incident served to show how useful it can be for an intelligence man to build up a certain reputation.

There were plenty of men willing to do secret service work, of course. There was, from the outside point of view, a glamour, an air of romance and adventure about the whole idea, which led dozens of young men to think they would like to try their hand at it. Dozens of them were rejected simply because they had not the necessary technical knowledge to enable them to pick up useful information, or to check what they did gather for accuracy and reliability. Dozens more were rejected because they had not the right temperament.

Secret service work before the war was not romantic to the men who were doing it. No doubt, looking back after the lapse of years, those who survive may find food for laughter in some incidents they recall. There were hair-raising moments, which are better regarded from a distance than from the storm centre. There was the continuous stimulus of pitting one’s wits single-handed against a great organisation.

But in actual practice the work was often dull enough and discouraging enough. There were plenty of failures. Months of hard slogging and patient research would suddenly be found to be wasted. Many an absolutely blank wall was encountered, through which no wits could find a way.

And it was a lonely life. More than one intelligence man was separated from his family for two or three years at a time. Most of the volunteers imagined that it was a job for a week or two, a sort of raid into ‘enemy territory’ and a dash back to safety. It was not. The good intelligence man had to dig himself in and stick it, bearing loneliness and fear and excitement and triumph in complete silence. There was not a soul he could talk to about the work, not a soul to whom he could go for advice if he was doubtful. He might, perhaps, know the name of one or two other men who were doing the work also, but he did not foregather with them, or indeed get into direct touch with them in any way. His whole life had to be self-contained. He had to cover his own tracks and take the utmost care not to uncover anyone else’s.

Strong nerves were needed to stand the strain. ‘The strong silent man’ of the lady novelists was the right type, and even he cracked occasionally and had to be rested.

B
EFORE THE WAR
the secret service budget of Great Britain was very considerably smaller than that of any other of the great powers. Precise figures are not available, but, roughly speaking, Germany was spending six times as much money as this country on that branch of intelligence work that was concerned with the discovery of the military secrets of neighbouring states.

Without proposing to discuss at length the ethics of such activities when conducted in time of peace, we feel it necessary to attempt to differentiate between secret service or intelligence operations on the one hand, and downright espionage on the other. The intelligence agent is in much the same position as a newspaper reporter, in that he is generally trying to procure information that the other side in unwilling to divulge. In both
cases the work involves not merely the collection of basic facts, but also their analysis and logical amplification by methods of deduction. In intelligence as in newspaper work, some of the most brilliant coups have been achieved by the shrewd appreciation and collation of isolated facts, which, taken by themselves, appeared at first sight to possess only minor significance.

There can be no question as to the moral right of the state to keep a vigilant eye on the military preparations of any foreign power for which there are reasonable grounds to suspect them to be a potential enemy.

In pre-war days Germany ranked first in that category. In her case, indeed, it was a matter of certainty rather than suspicion. Apart from her intensive naval activities, the object of which was unmistakable, German agents swarmed into this country for the sole purpose of prying into our maritime defences.

During the period from 1908 to the outbreak of war, for every agent we had in central Europe there were five or six German emissaries in Great Britain. These figures apply only to professionals. Were amateurs to be included, the ratio of German to British would be ten to one.

The German methods were on the whole unimaginative, clumsy, and ineffective, involving a great deal of pseudo-espionage and very little analysis or deduction. As related in a subsequent chapter, German secret service reports sent out from England were intercepted and read by our security service over a long period preceding the war, and it was to us a constant source of amazement that the Berlin authorities should be wasting large sums of money on information that was mainly worthless. Many of these reports were so patently inaccurate that only a modicum of technical knowledge was needed to expose their spurious
character. Yet the fact that those who composed them remained on the ID pay roll of the German Navy Office is proof that either the reports or, at any rate, the senders were taken seriously in that quarter.

So far as can be ascertained, Germany appointed her secret agents without setting much store by their qualifications for the work. The spies whom she planted in our naval ports and military centres were a nondescript crowd – small tradesmen, commercial travellers, ‘commission agents’, and so forth, whose knowledge of the highly technical matters they were expected to probe was rudimentary to a degree. Herr Steinhauer – self-styled ‘the Kaiser’s master spy’ – who claims to have been responsible for the recruitment of this Falstaffian regiment, himself betrays in his book a very superficial knowledge of naval technicalities.

Most, if not all, of his men were professionals only in the sense that they were drawing pay. They were unskilled hands, engaged on a task that demanded highly skilled workers. Small wonder, then, that the German naval attaché in London once declared, almost publicly, that for sound intelligence work one Englishman was worth ten of his own compatriots. Others would seem to have shared this opinion long before his time, for we find Herr Lüdecke writing in his book on espionage: ‘Among the secret agents of Richelieu and his successor, Mazarin, the best were generally Englishmen, whose task it was to unravel the dark intrigues of foreign courts and cabinets.’

Distinct from Steinhauer’s band of permanent agents, and much more dangerous, were the numerous German naval officers who were granted special leave for intelligence work in Great Britain.

Before the war there was practically no control over visitors
to the royal dockyards. Anyone could walk in, either alone or with the usual crowd of sightseers, and, once inside, it was a perfectly simple matter to ‘get lost.’ To enter with the crowd had this advantage, that it enabled one to go on board ships without risk of challenge, and both in the yard itself and on board any new man-of-war the skilled observer could always pick up valuable information. We are personally acquainted with several officers of the old German Navy who were familiar with every hole and corner of every royal dockyard in the United Kingdom, and who also made periodical visits to the Tyne, the Clyde, and other districts where naval construction was in hand.

A walking stick notched with inches or centimetres was useful in determining the thickness of armour plates that lay about the wharves, each plate bearing the name of the new ship for which it was intended.

The capacity of coal dumps and oil tanks could be readily estimated by the trained eye. New ships and details thereof, instruments, gun sights, gun-breech mechanisms, and a hundred other items of which a pictorial record was desired, could be snapped by a miniature camera, small enough to be hidden in the palm of the hand.

Even warships under construction and not yet launched could be, and often were, inspected and photographed. The
Queen Elizabeth
, our first 15-inch gun, oil-burning battleship, was built at Portsmouth under conditions of elaborate secrecy, the admiralty being particularly anxious to conceal the hull lines of this high-speed vessel. As a precautionary measure, taken on the eve of the launching ceremony in October 1913, the old battleship
Zealandia
was moored athwart the slipway on which the
Queen Elizabeth
was lying, thus shutting out any view of the shapely
hull from boats passing up or down the harbour. Yet this did not prevent a German naval officer from obtaining a close-up view and several snapshots of the
Queen Elizabeth
by the simple expedient of going on board the
Zealandia
and asking for one of her officers whom he knew to be ashore.

As a sidelight on the futility of the ‘hush’ methods practised in this country may be mentioned the fact that in
Nauticus
, the semi-official German naval yearbook for 1914, there appeared drawings and a description of the
Queen Elizabeth
that were correct almost to the smallest detail, the distribution and thickness of the armour plating being shown with great accuracy. Yet this book was published only two months after the launch of the ship.

Again, while the belt-armour thickness of HMS
Invincible
and her sister battlecruisers was always given as 7 inches in British textbooks,
Nauticus
, the
Taschenbuch der Kriegsflotten
, and other German annuals gave from the first the correct figure, viz. 6 inches.

It is a safe assumption that most of the really useful information reaching the Berlin Navy Office came from its own officers, who had been on furlough in Great Britain.

This, however, does not alter the fact that reliance was placed chiefly on the permanent espionage system that had been established in this country. When we, on our side, set up a naval intelligence organisation in Germany, we were only following her example, though belatedly, and on a smaller scale.

We, too, had amateur helpers, but they received little official encouragement. From time to time officers who had been on leave in Germany brought back scraps of news that proved to be valuable, and, in one case, a British civilian visiting Hamburg picked
up a clue that, on being followed up by one of our professional agents, brought us some very useful data of the arrangements for equipping and supplying German commerce raiders in wartime.

These, however, were exceptional instances. In direct contrast to German experience, nine-tenths of the really sound and helpful information that came to intelligence department (ID) headquarters in London was gathered by our permanent agents, whose reports, collated in chronological order, would give a very complete and detailed record of all German naval developments during the four years preceding the war.

Credit for this remarkable achievement must be awarded to the high officials of the ID who selected our secret service agents for duty in central Europe. The latter were few, very few, in number, but each was a specialist at his work, though none had actually served in the naval profession. They had taken up the task unwillingly, and only in response to an appeal to their patriotism. Needless to say, it entailed constant and serious personal risk. In the pursuit of his avocation the secret agent hazarded his liberty, and not seldom his life. Day and night he lived under a nerve strain that never relaxed.

Here is the personal testimony of one of these agents:

These are the words of a former agent of the naval secret service who, while harbouring no personal grievance, was indignant at the studied official neglect of colleagues who had abandoned promising careers at the dictates of patriotism.

Of recent years a number of books have appeared in which intelligence work is held up to derision.

Several of the authors are literary men who for some obscure reason were appointed to the secret service during the war. The original intention, no doubt, was to make use of their abilities for propaganda purposes, but under the topsy-turvy conditions then prevailing they eventually found themselves engaged in pseudo-intelligence work, principally in the Near East. As the proceedings in which they took part were futile and often farcical, it is not surprising that they should have formed a low opinion of all secret service activities and caricatured them in their subsequent writings.

Thus, Mr Compton Mackenzie, in his
First Athenian Memories
, casts doubt on the value of any intelligence work except
that conducted by an army in the field. But as Mr Mackenzie’s experiences, so far as he has recorded them, were confined to Greece – where the conflicting policies of the Allied powers, coupled with the ill-controlled activities of their secret agents, brought about a situation that was at once Gilbertian and tragic – his sweeping condemnation of all secret service is based on inadequate knowledge.

Mr Mackenzie, in common with several other authors, obviously knows little of what this service accomplished by less theatrical methods before and during the war.

Sir Basil Thomson, in his book
The Allied Secret Service in Greece
, is also contemptuous of the secret agent and his work. True, he is magnanimous enough to admit that ‘intelligence officers are as necessary to governments as they are to banks and business houses, and as long as they are under efficient and wise control they are no more dangerous to a state than a daily newspaper is dangerous to a household.’

But Sir Basil, like Mr Mackenzie, though with less excuse, is particularising on the
opera bouffe
antics of certain so-called intelligence agents in Greece, in which country the wartime atmosphere seems to have had a devastating effect on the mental balance and judgement of rulers, statesmen, diplomats, and lesser functionaries, irrespective of nationality.

Whatever the blunders and futilities of its political counterpart may have been, there is no doubt that the British naval intelligence service played an indispensable part in the winning of the war. Not only was it a prime factor in the defeat of the U-boat campaign, but by penetrating Germany’s naval secrets before and after the outbreak of war it guaranteed us against surprises, which, if unsuspected, might have been sprung upon us with
disastrous results. We can assert without fear of contradiction that had the admiralty acted without delay on the information supplied by British agents in central Europe from 1910 onward, we should have achieved a greater measure of success in the war at sea, and especially at the Battle of Jutland. This point will be elaborated in due course.

Throughout the pre-war period now under review our intelligence work abroad was handicapped by shortage of funds. Had more money been available it is certain that better results would have been attained. The marvel is that so much was done with such exiguous means.

In very exceptional circumstances our agents would, no doubt, have received adequate financial hacking, but in the course of their routine work they were expected to keep within the narrowest limits of expenditure. It follows, therefore, that bribery was but rarely resorted to as a means of procuring information. Nearly every valuable item of news had to be excavated by personal effort and at personal risk.

Thanks to the technical knowledge possessed by our agents, in striking contrast to those employed by Germany, they seldom wasted time, and never money, in pursuing a false trail. It is difficult for anyone who is conversant with the work done by these men between the autumn of 1910 and August 1914, to read with patience the burlesque accounts of ‘intelligence’ operations recently given to the world by more than one distinguished writer.