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<A HREF="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
srv/style/longterm/books/chap1/a_centur.htm">WashingtonPost.com: A Century of
Spies </A>
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A Century of Spies
By Jeffrey T. Richelson
Chapter One: A Shady Profession
In 1800 a Londoner had the distinction of living in the most populous
city in Europe, as one of 900,000 residents. London and Paris, with
600,000 residents, were the only European cities with more than a half
million inhabitants. By 1900 they had grown to metropolises of 4.7 and
3.6 million citizens respectively, and sixteen additional cities had
populations of a half million or more. Berlin, Glasgow, Moscow, St.
Petersburg, and Vienna all had over a million residents.
The urbanization that changed the face of Europe was the product of two
factors, the overall population explosion and industrialization. Between
1821 and 1871 the population of Britain nearly doubled, from 14 to 26
million. From 1900 to 1913, the German population grew by the rate of 1
million per year. The wealth and employment generated by industrial
enterprise drew men from the countryside to the cities. They manned the
factories which produced consumer and capital goods, worked in the steel
mills, and were employed by service industries.
The nineteenth century also saw dramatic developments in the means of
transportation and communications, developments which contributed to
urbanization and industrialization. The telegraph first appeared in the
1840s. Steam-driven railways and ships came into service in growing
numbers after 1860, driving down transportation costs. In 18 76
Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone.
The telegraph and telephone had dramatically changed the nature of
communications. Until the middle of the nineteenth century, couriers,
postal services, and diplomatic bags represented the major means of
communication. Visual signals could be sent by semaphore flags or
heliograph mirrors. The introduction of the telegraph (at midcentury)
and the telephone (during the later part of the century) made it
possible to communicate over great distances in short periods of time.
By 1900 urbanization, industrialization, and technological advances had
already had a dramatic impact on the way people lived. These forces
would also have a dramatic impact on how nations fought wars and how
they spied on each other.
Marconi and the Wright Brothers
Telegraphs and telephones had their limitations. Telegraphy required
specially laid land lines to carry the Morse signals, while telephone
systems required wires to carry voice communications. This precluded
communications with ships out of sight of land or each other, except
through scouting vessels. It also limited communications to points with
already established telegraph or telephone connections. Guglielmo
Marconi would remove those limitations.
During an 1895 vacation in the Italian Alps Marconi read a scientific
paper which suggested to him that it might be possible to transmit
signals through the air, rather than through wires. His enthusiasm for
the idea led him to cut short his holiday and return to his top-floor
laboratory--a spare room--at the Villa Griffone.
Initial experiments seemed to indicate that while communication was
possible, the range was limited to 100 yards or so at most. But Marconi
discovered that raising the antenna to new heights resulted in a
dramatic extension of range. On June 2, 1896, Marconi applied for the
world's first patent for wireless telegraphy, which was quickly granted.
On March 2, 1897, he filed the complete specifications and less than
five months later the Wireless Telegraph and Signal Company opened, with
the objective of developing the Marconi device commercially. A
successful demonstration in August, witnessed by the king and queen of
Italy, led to the Italian navy's adoption of Marconi's system. In
October, he was able to establish communications between Salisbury and
Bath, thirty-four miles apart.
Just as Marconi would have a dramatic impact on the new century, so
would two brothers born in Ohio in the second half of nineteenth the
century. Whereas Marconi sought to send voices and signals through the
air, Wilbur and Orville Wright sought to send men through the air.
As a result of their research and discussions Orville and Wilbur became
convinced that human flight was possible--and they wanted to play some
role in achieving it. They began by exploring the problems involved in
controlling a vehicle in the air. Based on wind current data they chose
Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, as their testing ground.
After more than three years of effort, at 10:35 a.m. on December 17,
1903, the historic first flight took place. With Orville Wright on
board, the Flyer rose by its own power into the air and, for about 12
seconds and 120 feet, engaged in full flight. The brothers made three
more flights that day. The final flight, with Wilbur on board, lasted 59
seconds and traveled 852 feet.
In the Beginning
When Marconi and the Wright brothers began their scientific work few, if
any, in the intelligence world took notice. Indeed, in 1900 the world of
intelligence was a very small world. While the governments of Europe
maintained organizations to gather political and military intelligence
about their enemies and potential enemies, those organizations generally
existed on the periphery of government, understaffed and underfunded.
They did not regularly brief their prime ministers or chancellors on
world events, and their work did not often affect the day-to-day foreign
and defense policies of their governments.
Although Great Britain was reputed to have a wide network of spies
operating across the continent, the truth was far different. In 1873 the
War Office had established an Intelligence Branch, staffed by
twenty-seven military and civilian personnel. By that time the increased
technological sophistication of armies and navies had become evident,
with their use of breech-loading rifles, rifled breech-loading
artillery, and armored ships. The scope of military intelligence
encompassed not only weapons, tactics, and troop numbers, but technical
information.
In 1882 the Admiralty followed suit, organizing a Foreign Intelligence
Committee (renamed the Naval Intelligence Department in 1887). The
committee received reports from the Royal Navy on the dispositions and
activities of foreign warships and merchant vessels on the high seas.
Port visits produced useful economic intelligence on the destinations
and cargoes of foreign merchant ships.
British military attaches in Berlin, Vienna, and St. Petersburg reported
on military developments in their host countries. But they did so in a
gentlemanly and honorable fashion. They were not expected to engage in
"secret service" and were discouraged from even the slightest
involvement in such activities. One attache remarked:
I would never do any secret service work. My view is that the Military
Attache 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 a hand
in it.
Nor did France have much in the way of an intelligence establishment.
After France's disastrous 1870 war with Germany, which resulted in the
loss of Alsace-Lorraine, a Statistical and Military Reconnaissance
Section was established and given the task of collecting intelligence on
the German troops occupying France's former province.
After the occupation ended in 1873 the section grew and was alternately
known as the information Service (Service de Renseignement, SR) or
Special Service. By 1880 the SR had agents in Berlin, Vienna, Dresden,
Leipzig, Frankfurt, Cologne, and Mannheim. Among their accomplishments
was the acquisition of German mobilization plans.
However, the involvement of certain members of the SR in the Dreyfus
Affair resulted in the Sr's abolition as a separate entity in 1899. Its
counterespionage functions were assigned to the Surete Generale of the
Interior Ministry, while its foreign intelligence role was reduced. The
Service de Renseignement became the Section de Renseignement,
subordinate to the Deuxieme Bureau (Second or Intelligence Department)
of the General Staff.
The most elaborate intelligence network at the turn of the century was
that of Imperial Germany. On June 23, 1866, just ten days prior to the
beginning of war with Austria, a royal decree established the Foreign
Office Political Field Police (subsequently the Secret Field Police),
run by Wilhelm Stieber, whose mission included "support of military
authorities by procuring intelligence about the enemy army." When the
war ended Stieber expanded his secret service and renamed it the Central
Nachrichtenburo (Central Intelligence Bureau). In addition to hounding
opponents of the regime, the bureau maintained agents in Paris, London,
and Vienna.
Stieber believed that a massive espionage network was necessary to
produce a complete picture of a potential enemy. He explained:
The type of isolated observation, involving only a few spies, which has
traditionally been employed to spy on other nations, has produced very
limited results.... [A] multiplicity of spies will enable us to
penetrate to the best-protected secrets.... Moreover, the importance and
accuracy of each piece of information collected by an army of agents can
be more carefully analyzed in terms of the other pieces of information
which verify or contradict it.
The chief of the Prussian General Staff, Helmuth von Moltke, considered
Stieber's successes and the inability of the army to procure its own
intelligence to be an unworthy reflection on the army. On February 11,
1867, von Moltke established a permanent competitive service, the
Intelligence Bureau.
Stieber's ill-health, which forced him to resign in the mid-1870s and
killed him in 1882, permitted the generals to seize control of military
intelligence. By the late 1880s the Intelligence Bureau possessed a
small but solid network of agents in Paris, Brussels, Luxembourg,
Belfort, and other French cities. Seventy-five agents and informants
operated in Russia. From 1889 on they furnished various details of the
mobilization plans and deployment of the czar's armies.
In 1889 a layer of deputy chiefs of staff, or Oberquartiermeisters, was
established and the Intelligence Bureau was subordinated to the IIIrd
Oberquartiermeister (0. Qu. III). From that point on it became known as
IIIb.
Over the remainder of the century its funding increased, steadily,
resulting in a budget greater than that of any other European
intelligence service, excluding Russia. As a result, what was initially
a tiny office had expanded, by 1901, to 124 officers directing agent
activities from war intelligence posts in Belgium, Switzerland, England,
Italy, Spain, Luxembourg, Denmark, Sweden, and Romania.
The primary mission of the Russian intelligence establishment was not
the collection of foreign intelligence but the monitoring of opponents
to the czarist regime--whether they operated inside or outside the
country. In 1900 the Special Department, commonly referred to as the
Okhrana, became the successor to a series of secret police
organizations. The Special Department's Foreign Agency operated mainly
in France, Switzerland, and Britain, where Russian revolutionaries and
dissidents congregated.
Military intelligence was the responsibility of the Russian Army's
General Headquarters. The Fifth Bureau of the First Department of the
Operations Directorate was entrusted with intelligence collection and
analysis. A variety of subsections studied the military forces and
capabilities of Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Balkan states,
Scandinavia, Turkey, and Persia. Military attaches reported directly to
the Fifth Bureau.
In contrast to Russia and Germany, at the turn of the century the United
States had neither an extensive domestic intelligence operation nor an
extensive foreign intelligence network. As was the case with Britain,
the first permanent intelligence organizations established in the United
States were those organized by the U.S. Army and Navy. In this case the
Navy was first, establishing the Office of Naval Intelligence in 1882.
Under the provisions of General Order No. 292, the ONI was "to collect
and record such naval information as may be useful to the Department in
wartime as well as peace." To provide intelligence for ONI the
commanding officer of every ship was ordered to appoint an intelligence
officer to report to ONI on harbors, fortifications, and foreign
vessels.
In 1885 Secretary of War William C. Endicott is said to have requested
information on the military of a European nation, possibly Germany or
Russia, from Adjutant General R. C. Drum. Endicott was surprised to
discover that Drum had neither the information nor the means of
obtaining it. The result, as the story goes, was that Drum established a
Military Information Division (MID) to collect "military data on our own
and foreign services which would be available for the use of the War
Department and the Army at large." The entire division consisted of a
single officer and a single clerk.
Subsequent years saw each organization deploy a network of attaches. ONI
representatives established themselves in Paris, Berlin, Rome, Vienna,
and St. Petersburg. In 1887 Army attaches were posted to Berlin, Paris,
London, Vienna, and St. Petersburg. The Army's attaches contributed to
the MID's ability, in 1891, to summarize the numbers and types of arms
in the arsenals of eleven European countries.
But by 1900 one of the new intelligence organizations was in disarray.
When Captain Charles D. Sigsbee became head of ONI in February 1900 he
sent a memo to his immediate superior in which he claimed that ONI was
in a shambles. According to Sigsbee's memo the forms sent to officers at
sea were outdated, and the information sought would not allow ONI to
answer broad tactical or strategic questions. In addition, the officers
themselves had received little specific intelligence training. Things
did not improve in the next few years. In 1903, near the end of
Sigsbee's tenure, the Navy reduced the number of professional naval
officers assigned to ONI-from seven to five.
His Majesty's Secret Service
Before the first decade of the new century was over the intersecting
fears of war and foreign spies would contribute to the expansion of many
nations' espionage operations. Britain's policy of "splendid isolation"
fell to the pressures of international politics. The 1900 German Navy
Law was an explicit challenge to British naval supremacy, providing for
the construction of nineteen new battleships and twenty-three cruisers
over the next twenty years. Britain settled its colonial problems with
France in 1904. The Anglo-French Entente was followed in 1907 by the
Anglo-Russian Entente, along similar lines. Meanwhile, France and
Germany confronted each other over Morocco in 1905. The alliances that
would face each other in the first world war had started to come to
gether.
February 1904 marked the beginning of a series of changes in British
intelligence. The Intelligence Department, minus its Mobilization
Division, was rechristened the Directorate of Military Operations.
Intelligence, in one form or another, was the responsibility of three of
the four sections of the new directorate. MO2 was the Foreign
Intelligence Section, MO3 the Administration and Special Duties Section,
MO4 the Topographical Section.
The Foreign Intelligence Section began expanding almost as soon as it
was formed, experiencing the largest increases in officers and total
personnel of all the sections. Before the year was out two further
subsections were added to cover the United States and the Far East.
"Special Duties" included censorship, counterintelligence, and,
apparently, clandestine intelligence collection.
The concern of many British officials with collecting foreign
intelligence was more than matched by the fear of foreign spies. From
the beginning of the century Britain was the subject of a variety of
invasion and spy scares--often promoted by novelists and journalists to
whom such scares meant good business. Whereas France was perceived as
the likely enemy in 1900, after 1904 Germany was seen as the prime
menace. Not surprisingly, in 1905 author William LeQueux "discovered" a
"great network of German espionage spread over the United Kingdom."
Fear of a Hun invasion was further exacerbated by advances in battleship
technology and the November 1907 announcement of an accelerated German
naval building program. Those fanning the flames in the autumn of 1907
included Leo Maxse, editor and owner of the influential National Review,
and Colonel Charles Repington, the military correspondent of The Times.
With support of some of the Tory leadership, they convinced the
government to establish a subcommittee of the Committee of Imperial
Defence (CID) to study the invasion threat. The result was not what
Maxse and his allies expected: the study showed surprise attack to be
impossible.
The conclusions of the CID neither convinced ardent proponents of the
invasion threat nor eliminated fears of a German espionage network
operating across Britain. Among those convinced of massive German
infiltration of Britain was a friend of LeQueux, Lieutenant-Colonel
James Edmonds, who became responsible in 1907 for counterintelligence
and the organization of an espionage network in Germany.
Edmonds took his conclusions to R. B. Haldane, the secretary of state
for war, who in March 1909 established and chaired a new CID
subcommittee to examine "the nature and extent of the foreign espionage
that is at present taking place within this country and the danger to
which it may expose us." The subcommittee membership was composed of
eleven other high-ranking officials, including the First Lord of the
Admiralty, the Home Secretary, the permanent undersecretaries of the
Treasury and the Foreign Office, the Commissioner of Metropolitan
Police, the Director of Military Operations, and the Director of Naval
Intelligence.
Edmonds presented to the subcommittee a variety of evidence concerning
German espionage in Britain, much of it misinterpreted or fabricated.
However, at the third meeting of the subcommittee Haldane suggested that
there was sufficient evidence to issue a report. The rest of the
committee agreed:
The evidence which was produced left no doubt in the minds of the
subcommittee that an extensive system of German espionage exists in this
country, and that we have no organization for keeping in touch with that
espionage and for accurately determining its extent or objectives.
The committee also concluded that Britain's foreign intelligence system
was inadequate. The Director of Military Operations, Major-General John
Ewart, admitted during the meetings of the invasion subcommittee in 1908
that "the existing machinery for obtaining information from Germany and
the Continent generally during peace or war" was seriously deficient.
General Staff assessments of probable German invasion plans were based
on "hypothetical assumptions." The Naval Intelligence Division (NID)
agreed. When Rear-Admiral Esmond Slade became Director of Naval
Intelligence in October 1907 he discovered that the naval "secret
service . . . was not organized in any way."
Attempts had been made by military and naval intelligence to develop
some agents, but they did not amount to much. At the beginning of 1907
there was not a single British agent operating in Europe. Before the end
of the year Edmonds had received approval from the Director of Military
Operations to organize an espionage network in Germany. The initial
attempts were highly amateurish. Edmonds asked friends visiting Germany
to ask the local police for the names of British residents. His first
agent was provided by Courage and Company brewers, which pressured its
Hamburg representative to gather "information as to naval and military
matters in connection with harbor works, number of ships, railway
arrangements, movement of troops, etc." Over the next two years the
reluctant spy was never given a specific assignment. After his trips in
1908 and 1909 he simply invented whatever he thought would please the
War Office.
Slade's NID was also active in the espionage arena. In March 1908 Slade
sent an NID officer into Germany to make contact with a potential spy. A
year later, he reported that there were "three or four agents in our
employ, most of whom work for the War Office and Admiralty jointly."
The War Office and Admiralty networks were not adequate in the eyes of
the foreign espionage committee. The Admiralty was suspicious that the
Germans were secretly accelerating their shipbuilding
program--stockpiling guns, turrets, and armor well in advance of
actually building the hulls. Since building the guns, gun mountings, and
armor was more time-consuming than building the hulls, such a
stockpiling effort could cut the three years required to build a ship to
two and a half or two. In addition, it was suspected that construction
was being started in advance of the dates scheduled by the German Navy
Law--in advance even of the authorization of funds by the Reichstag. The
consequence of such subterfuge could be dramatic: instead of a 16:13
battleship ratio in favor of Britain in 1912, Britain was facing the
possibility of a ratio anywhere from 17:16 to 21:16 in favor of Germany.
It was in this atmosphere that the CID's espionage committee recommended
the formation of a secret service bureau to serve three purposes: to
serve as a barrier between the military services and foreign spies; to
act as the intermediary between the military service departments and
British agents abroad; and to take charge of counterespionage.
The Secret Service Bureau began operations on October 1, 1909, under the
nominal supervision of the War Office. Originally organized into a
Military Branch and Naval Branch, within a month the Secret Service had
undergone an internal reorganization, with home and foreign sections
replacing the military and naval sections, respectively--possibly
because the Military Branch was primarily concerned with
counterespionage while Britain's foreign agents were primarily operating
in ports and dockyards and reporting naval intelligence. In 1910 its two
sections separated, with the Home Section being placed under the Home
Office and the Foreign Section under the Admiralty, then its chief
customer.
Selected to head the Secret Service's foreign section was a short,
thickset naval officer, Commander (later Captain Sir) Mansfield George
Smith-Cumming. Born on April 1, 1859, Cumming served on patrol in the
East Indies, took part in operations against the Malay pirates, and was
decorated for his role in the Egyptian campaign of 1882. According to
his naval record, he was "a clever officer with great taste for
electricity," who had "a knowledge of photography," "speaks French," and
"draws well."
However, Cumming not only had health problems, but he increasingly
suffered from severe seasickness--a rather unfortunate malady for a
sailor, In 1885 he was placed on the retired list as "unfit for
service."
Cumming established both the Secret Service Bureau foreign department
and his own London flat at the top of 2 Whitehall Court in "a regular
maze of passages and steps, and oddly shaped rooms," which could be
reached only by a private elevator. In Cumming's office was a plain work
table, a big safe, some maps and charts on the walls, a vase of flowers,
one or two seascapes, and various mechanical gadgets, including a patent
compass and a new sort of electric clock.
Cumming himself could have emerged from the pages of a novel. Known as
"C," as the chief of the secret service is still known, he wrote only in
green ink. Having lost a leg in an accident, he got around the corridors
by putting his wooden leg on a child's scooter and propelling himself
vigorously with the other. Visitors were treated to the spectacle of
Cumming stabbing his wooden leg with his paper knife to emphasize the
point of an argument. By his own admission, he considered secret service
work "capital sport."
Cumming's priorities were naval, his resources limited. As a postwar
report admitted, the Foreign Section was unable to employ full-time
agents and was forced to rely on "casual agents"--agents whose
performance was unsatisfactory.
The most productive of the part-time agents were a small group of men in
the shipping or arms industries who either regularly traveled to or
resided in Germany and combined their business travels with part-time
intelligence work. Much of that intelligence work did not involve actual
espionage. Instead, Cumming's part-timers collected a wide assortment of
newspapers and journals published in Kiel, Wilhelmshaven, Danzig, and
Berlin. They also observed the harbors and waterfronts of Hamburg and
Bremen, homes to major shipyards, and of Kiel.
The most successful of Cumming's known networks was run by Max Schultz,
a naturalized Southampton ship-dealer. During his travels in Germany in
1910-11 Schultz recruited four informants, the most important being an
engineer named Hipsich, in Bremen's Weser shipyards. In the two years
Hipsich operated before being detected he had the opportunity to inform
the British about Germany's battleship plans and apparently handed over
a large collection of drawings.
Cumming's German network provided an abundance of technical intelligence
on the German navy--on topics from fire control to range finders. While
the bulk of reports were based on published information, that
information would not have been noticed except for Cumming's network.
Agent reports proved to be of great value in keeping the Naval
Intelligence Division informed of the status of the Hochseeflotte (High
Seas Fleet) and U-boat construction programs. They often provided the
only data on the final stages of battleship construction or U-boat speed
and endurance trials. In early 1911 agents provided the Admiralty with
"a full and illustrated description" of the new heavy shell introduced a
year earlier, as well as "an account of its [impressive] performance aga
inst many varieties of armoured targets."
In addition to Germany, Rotterdam, Brussels, and St. Petersburg were
targets of Cumming's spies. Richard Tinsley, code-named T, headed
Cumming's operations in Rotterdam. Tinsley had developed a successful
shipping business, which he used as a cover for his intelligence work.
But Ivone Kirkpatrick, a future permanent undersecretary at the Foreign
Office, found T "a liar and a first-class intriguer with few scruples."
Cumming's Belgian network was both larger and more disreputable than the
Dutch network. Henry Dale Long, code-named L, served as chief of
operations in Brussels from 1910. However, the Brussels network did
business with a free-lance Brussels intelligence service that sometimes
sold fabricated intelligence, including bogus German invasion plans.
Cumming was persuaded to spend 600[pounds] to purchase an alleged German
codebook which a wartime cryptanalyst later showed to be a "pup of the
poorest class."
Sidney Reilly
While the names of Richard Tinsley and Henry Dale Long are relatively
unknown, the chief British agent in St. Petersburg became the
inspiration for numerous books and a twelve-part television series. Much
of what has been written by or about Sidney Reilly is myth. Reilly, it
has been claimed, "wielded more power, authority and influence than any
other spy," was an expert assassin "by stabbing and shooting and
throttling," and possessed "eleven passports and a wife to go with
each."
Reality was less sensational. Born Sigmund Georgievich Rosenblum in
1874, Reilly was the only son of a rich Russian Jewish father. Sometime
in the 1890s he emigrated to London, breaking off all contact with his
family in the process, and changing his name to Sidney Reilly. At the
beginning of the new century he moved to Port Arthur, headquarters of
the Russian Far Eastern Fleet, where he worked as a partner in a timber
sales company. By the time Reilly returned to London, on the eve of the
Russo-Japanese War in 1904, he had become an international adventurer,
fluent in several languages. It is possible, although by no means
certain, that Reilly provided the Naval Intelligence Division with
intelligence on the Russian Far Eastern Fleet during his years in Port A
rthur.
After completing a course in electrical engineering at the Royal School
of Mines he entered Trinity College, Cambridge, in October 1905 as an
advanced student, using a fake certificate from Roorkee University in
India. Reilly left Cambridge after two or three years and proceeded to
invent a different postgraduate career, boasting that he had a doctorate
from Heidelberg. That was only one of many personal fantasies, some of
which he began to believe. Eleanor Toye, one of his secretaries, claimed
that "Reilly used to suffer from severe mental crises amounting to
delusion. Once he thought he was Jesus Christ."
But Reilly's aptitude for intelligence work won him the admiration of
both C and Winston Churchill, undersecretary for colonies in 1905 and
subsequently Home Secretary and First Lord of the Admiralty (in 1911).
The first British diplomat to arrive in Soviet Russia, Robert Bruce
Lockhart, while not having a particularly high opinion of Reilly's
intelligence, found his courage and indifference to danger "superb." It
was probably soon after the creation of the Secret Service Bureau that
Reilly established himself as a successful commission agent for the
Hamburg shipbuilders Blohm and Voss. It is unlikely that Reilly provided
Cumming and the British Admiralty with information on every new design
or modification in the German fleet, as has been claimed, but his perf
ormance did not prevent his being rehired in the midst of the First
World War.
The Kaiser's Spies
While British agents sought to uncover German capabilities and
intentions, German agents were operating in Britain, France, and Russia.
In France, Germany had a long-standing agent whose service had begun in
1866. In June 1866 Baron August Schluga brought to Berlin the order of
battle of the Austrian army, along with the profiles of some of the more
important Austrian army commanders.
Schluga, then twenty-five was a slim, blue-eyed blond, born in Zsolna,
Hungary. He had joined the Austrian infantry and fought "very bravely"
at Magenta and Solferino in 1859. Although described as a capable
officer suited for a general staff post, he resigned in 1863, just
before taking the examination for the Austrian War School, claiming that
he would manage the estates he would acquire through marriage. His
credentials as a former officer apparently allowed him to penetrate the
Austrian army headquarters and gather the information he brought to
Berlin.
After the war of 1866 Schluga journeyed to Paris, where he delivered
information to the Prussian military attache. Designated by IIIb as
"Agent 17," he came to be regarded by the Germans as an ideal agent. He
was charming, well-educated, aristocratic, and a mystery to his German
spymasters. They never knew his sources, his other activities, or even
whether he lived in Paris under his own name or a pseudonym. He
deflected IIIb's inquiries, arguing that their only concern should be
his performance.
For the forty years between the wars of 1870 and 1914, IIIb rarely
called on Schluga, protecting him from suspicion and preserving him for
use in a crisis. IIIb's restraint paid off, for before the outbreak of
the world war, Schluga delivered a document of enormous value. It
specified how the French would deploy some of their troops on the fifth
day of their mobilization. That document alone justified IIIb's
existence and all the money it had spent, for it gave Germany the
apparent key to defeat a French counterattack in the forthcoming war.
But it would become one of many examples of intelligence not properly
used by its customers.
While the Rib networks in France and Russia were extensive, the network
in Britain was not. It included Dr. Max Schultz (not to be confused with
the naturalized Max Schultz) and Armgaard Karl Graves. Schultz operated
from a houseboat near Plymouth. He flew a German flag from the boat and
threw parties where he tried to turn the conversation to naval matters.
Graves was a con man who victimized the British and German intelligence
services. Far better at requesting money than acquiring secret
intelligence, he was subsequently fired by the head of German naval
intelligence in Britain, who described him as "a double-dyed rascal."
In addition to actual spies, Germany maintained the standard network of
military attaches, whose sources included the daily press, parliamentary
records, service journals, cartographic publications, and even
postcards. As a general rule, Germany's military and naval attaches
avoided espionage work, preferring to cultivate social contacts.
Imperial directives of 1878, 1890, and 1900 cautioned against illegal
acts of intelligence gathering. As a result attach6s sought to establish
personal relationships with foreign officers and politicians, taking
part in the social life, especiary club life, of their host country.
The Czar's Spies
Russia was also interested in the military plans of its potential
enemies and went to great lengths to acquire such information. While
most nations' attaches refrained from espionage activities, those of
Russia did not. The military attache in Denmark and Sweden from 1908 to
1912, A. A. Ignat'ev, controlled a large network of agents within
Germany. In 1914 Colonel Bazarov was declared persona non grata in
Germany after his agents had been detected. Colonel Zankevich, attache
in Vienna, was expelled when Austrian counterespionage unmasked his
network, which included a retired sergeant major, a policeman, a
lieutenant at the military academy, and other officers.
>From 1905 Russia's most productive spy in the Austro-hungarian military
establishment was Colonel Alfred Redl, who also sold information to the
French and Italian secret services. From 1900 until his exposure in May
1913 Redl served first as a deputy chief of the Evidenzburo, the
military and counterespionage organization in Vienna, and then as
intelligence chief of the Army's VIII Corps, headquartered in Prague.
Redl may have been blackmailed over his homosexuality, although the
Russians made quite substantial cash payments.
In addition to photographing secret documents for his Russian masters
Redl also disclosed the identity of Austrian agents. Redl sold Russian
intelligence Plan 3, the Austrian mobilization plan against Russia, and
betrayed details concerning a critical network of fortresses along the
Galician border with Russia. The Austrian military council concluded
that Redl's espionage activities had helped "deal a heavy blow" to
Austrial's military strength, "destroying the solid constructive work of
many years." The secrets Redl betrayed led the Austro-hungarian general
staff to change codes, railway timetables, and other plans on a massive
scale.
Redl did not live to see the damage he had done. In the early hours of
Sunday morning May 25, 1913, Colonel Alfred Redl blew his brains out in
a room at the Hotel Klomser, in the fashionable Herrengasse district of
Vienna. He was permitted to "judge himself" after interrogation, during
which he claimed to have spied only for a year or so and provided only
some manuals and the Army's VIII Corps's mobilization plan. That
evening's papers carried an official communique which announced Redl's
suicide and claimed he had suffered a nervous breakdown. But the next
day Berlin and Prague newspapers carried accounts of his espionage
activities.
The Codebreakers
In addition to the spies in the field the cryptanalysts at home could be
an important source of intelligence. Traditionally the deciphering or
decoding of the communications of a foreign government required that a
copy of the communications be obtained--by theft, by recruitment of a
foreign government source, or by obtaining copies of the cable at the
cable or telegraph office. Marconi's invention would dramatically change
that.
But that change was not anticipated. And the cryptanalysis of stolen
communications was considered of so little importance to most countries
that only France, Austria-hungary, and Russia had fully organized
central cryptanalytic bureaus before the war.
France had five cryptanalytic bureaus--in the ministries of war, navy,
foreign affairs, interior, and posts and telegraphs. The key bureau was
the Foreign Ministry's Cabinet Noir, which had functioned intermittently
since the days of Cardinal Richelieu. Revived during the 1880s, by the
early 1890s it was able to decrypt a significant number of the English,
German, and Turkish diplomatic telegrams transmitted by telegraph cable.
In 1912 the cryptographic and cryptanalytic bureaus of the Ministry of
War were merged and placed directly under the Minister of War. There
were only two codebreakers assigned to the bureau in peacetime, but they
were not the only military cryptanalysts. By the beginning of the
century a Commission de Cryptographie Militaire (Military Cryptographic
Commission) had been formed. The approximately ten members of the
commission remained in their units and were to devote themselves to
cryptology in their spare time.
Work was never lacking. Material came pouring in from a variety of
sources. The most important were the telegrams delivered by the Ministry
of Posts and Telegraphs. Other sources were the military radiograms sent
by the neighboring countries during peace maneuvers and intercepted by
special intercept stations on the eastern frontier.
Commission members spent part of their time on general theoretic studies
as well as the computation of linguistic statistics. At other times they
worked on German radio messages transmitted, and intercepted, during
peacetime maneuvers.
The commission members also devoted considerable time to the detailed
analysis of cipher systems as they were used during peacetime and might
be used during war. They relied not only on statistics concerning
frequencies but on information obtained through spies, deserters,
members of the Foreign Legion, or from German military manuals. The
resulting confidential memoranda described the systems, statistical
data, instructions for cryptanalysis, and other necessary instructions
to be distributed directly among the mobilized cryptanalysts in the
event of war.
Other nations maintained extremely primitive cryptanalytic capabilities.
The German Ministry of Foreign Affairs maintained a cryptanalytic
bureau, although to a very limited extent, apparently due to a lack of
experts. Czarist codebreakers, located in both the foreign and interior
ministries, could trace their origins back to at least the first part of
the eighteenth century. The bureau apparently had success with the
Turkish, British, Austrian, and Swedish codes.
Aerial Reconnaissance
The Wright brothers believed that the monetary rewards for their work
would be provided by governments, not the commercial sector. Their
flying machines would be of tremendous value, they believed, in time of
war. Reconnaissance was the mission they had in mind for the aircraft.
Lieutenant-Colonel David Henderson shared the Wright brothers' vision.
Henderson, who served as the third and last director of military
intelligence during the Boer War, also wrote Field Intelligence, Its
Principles and Practices (1904). In 1908 Wilbur Wright surprised Europe
with record-setting flights in a power-driven airplane and David
Henderson began thinking about the wartime use of airplanes. It was not
a coincidence that Henderson, who believed that "reconnaissance is the
method of most vital importance," became one of the founding fathers of
British military aviation.
In the years leading up to World War I, Henderson's views would be
supported by a variety of events. While the first photographs taken from
an airplane were probably taken from the plane piloted by Wilbur Wright
in the vicinity of Rome in 1909, it was the French who produced the
first high-quality stills taken from an airplane, and the Italians who
first made use of the airplane for reconnaissance. In October 1911,
during the Italo-Turkish War, a Captain Piazza of the italian army flew
a visual reconnaissance mission over Turkish troops near Tripoli in
North Africa. On February 24 and 25, 1912, he photographed Turkish
positions from his monoplane.
In the years leading up to World War I the majority of British officers,
like their French and German colleagues, viewed reconnaissance as the
primary mission of military aircraft, balloons, airships/dirigibles, and
airplanes in a future war. That airships and airplanes could be employed
to attack the enemy was appreciated to some extent, but reconnaissance
was viewed as the clear primary mission. A 1912 British War Office
memorandum recommended the establishment of a military flying school
because of the importance of aerial reconnaissance. The first-priority
mission for airplanes in support of ground forces was to be
reconnaissance (primarily visual), followed by the prevention of enemy
reconnaissance, communications, observation of artillery fire, and
attacks on the enemy.
� 1996 Jeffrey T. Richelso
-----
Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
Omnia Bona Bonis,
All My Relations.
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
Kris
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