M

by Andrew Cook

  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.7

  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’.8 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.9 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.10 Melville was not the only lecturer. Others were Ewart, Cumming and possibly, interestingly, Douglas Hogg, the barrister James Melville worked for.11

  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.12

  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.13

  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 a
bout 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’.14

  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.15

  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.

  He was a thirty-two-year-old Dutchman, and he was arrested on 29 May in the presence of detectives from G Section. In his room there was evidence of communication with Dierks as far back as March, cigar samples and lists of tobacconists. But the company’s price list was somewhat odd, with inexplicable notes on it indicating a code. There was also a current copy of Jane’s Fighting Ships and a puzzling collection of items including eau-de-cologne (which he was not wearing), custard powder, liquid gum, pens, nibs and a mapping pen.

  Other cables had gone to Dierks and Co. this month. There had been two from Edinburgh on 17 and 18 May and another on 25 May which was followed by a £25 remittance from Dierks. The sender in Edinburgh, another Dutchman called Willem Johannes Roos, had left the city. He was traced to Aberdeen; then to Inverness and, finally, on 2 June, to London where he was arrested by Herbert Fitch of Special Branch at a commercial hotel in Aldgate.16 When he came into the country on 14 May, he had claimed to represent Dobbelmann’s of Rotterdam, a legitimate cigar trader; but there was no evidence of that. A search of his room by G Section detectives revealed Dierks’ stationery and cigar stock lists, and recent hotel bills, which were the only indication that this man might be a commercial traveller for Dierks as he now claimed. However, he did have a magazine article about F.E. Jane of Fighting Ships fame, some notes on ships he had seen, custard powder, pens, and a letter from Janssen.

  The men were held in custody and interrogated, probably by Drake and Cumming. Janssen, protesting his innocence, said he was a former merchant seaman who had even received a medal from the Board of Trade for rescuing British sailors from a sinking ship. It had been awarded to him at Liverpool in February. This was interesting, for although it was true, further investigation showed that he also travelled to Cardiff, Hull and Edinburgh on that occasion. This time he had entered the country via Hull on 13 May and immediately wired for the funds that did not arrive until 27 May at Southampton. He had been to other South Coast ports in the meantime. He had visited no tobacconists and obtained no orders. He claimed that he had never heard of Roos.

  The cigar lists smelled of scent and there was secret writing on them, which a forensic expert said been made with eau-de cologne and a talc fixative. But Roos had more codes on his, respecting ports in the north and east, as might be expected. Roos had to admit that he knew Janssen, because he had a letter from him, but said that Janssen didn’t work for Dierks. Janssen insisted he knew nothing of Roos; this went on for some time even after they were brought into the same room. It was pretty tragic stuff because the more they talked the more they denied the obvious. They were not legitimate cigar traders, they knew each other, and they were communicating salient facts to the enemy.

  They were tried at Westminster Guildhall and found guilty. Major Drake presented convincing evidence. At some stage both realised that the game was up, and separately wrote to their wives giving the same address to which to apply for a pension. Janssen, after the court martial, talked resignedly about spying. Information came out of England every day, he said; sometimes messages were hidden in the spines of books. He informed on a naval inspector called Hochenholz. Roos said nothing further, but is said to have tried to cut his own throat in prison.17 The two Dutch sailors were shot in the Tower on 30 July.

  Thanks to the watch on mail to Dierks & Co., Melville and his detectives were already working on the next case. On 25 May a letter addressed to the firm had been sent from London by a George T. Parker, who could not be traced. Then

  The Censor forwarded from Holland a telegram of 30th May 1915 announcing the despatch to Reginald Rowland, c/o Société Générale, Regent Street, London, of £30 on account of Norton B Smith & Co., New York.18

  On 3 June came another letter from the mysterious Parker, this time addressed to H. Flores in Rotterdam. Both of Parker’s letters referred to a female accomplice called Lizzie. From the context investigators deduced that this might mean the liner Queen Elizabeth. In Holland, Tinsley and his agents were quietly checking all the Dutch contacts.

  On the same day, Scotland Yard received a report about a woman called Mrs Wertheim who had been asked to leave her hotel at Inverness. Something about her behaviour, her general throwing around of money and nosiness and getting herself driven about the local naval installations, had alerted the hotelkeeper, who called in the Chief Constable, who visited this lady and told her to get out of town; she apparently left for London.

  At least one lead
could be pursued: sooner or later Mr Rowland would collect his £30 in Regent Street. He proved to be a thin, blond, young man of about twenty-eight, rather highly strung – as he would be in the circumstances. He had a German accent with an American twang and claimed that he was a naturalised American. The detectives searched his accommodation. They found hotel bills establishing part of his movements; cards of Norton B. Smith and a letter showing that he represented the firm; Jane’s Fleets of the World 1915; a phial of lemon juice; pens and a tin of talc; a code not unlike that used by Janssen and Roos; and a receipt for a registered letter, sent to L. Wertheim in Inverness. His handwriting looked just like Parker’s. Upon investigation, they found that L. Wertheim was Lizzie, that George Parker and Reginald Rowland were one and the same, and that Scotland Yard had already received a report on Mrs Wertheim.

  Rowland/Parker was using an American passport in the name of Reginald Rowland which was a fake, and yet Reginald Rowland did exist; he was an older man who had deposited his documents with the authorities in Berlin for just one hour earlier in the year. So who was this man with the false passport? Rowland/Parker was saying nothing.

  And now, on 4 June, the day of Rowland’s arrest, came another wire from Dierks & Co. This one was addressed to a Fernando Buschmann, and mentioned Flores. Buschmann, a young Brazilian, was picked up on 5 June. He seemed to be connected with a German naval inspector called Grund. The list of suspect names was lengthening. Postcards addressed to Flores, and to Grund c/o other suspects, were detected at once; they came from a man called Roggen.

  Melville’s Special Staff were almost overwhelmed. They were still looking for Lizzie Wertheim. She had apparently been in Edinburgh before Inverness, having travelled from London in the company of an American woman called Knowles-Macy. It being wartime, Miss Knowles-Macy should have brought her passport to register with, but did not, and was turned away from the Edinburgh hotel. This had left Mrs Wertheim to continue her Scottish tour alone.