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by Andrew Cook

  Patient detective work uncovered relations of Lizzie Wertheim in Hampstead. They did not want anything to do with her. But by 9 July enquiries led them to the house of another acquaintance, a Miss Brandes in the Hammersmith Road. She had turned Lizzie Wertheim out two days before. Finally, on 9 June, they traced her to the house of Miss Knowles-Macy at 33 Regent’s Park Road. She was arrested there. ‘When the police went to search her room, she entered the maid’s room, tore up a letter from George T. Parker and threw it out of the window.’19

  Reading between the lines, she was an annoying, self-dramatising, selfish woman. Her papers were circumstantially, rather than substantially, incriminating; besides the scent and talc of the regulation spy kit were evidence that she had recently been in Berlin and had been in touch with German prisoners of war, a letter from Parker, an envelope addressed to Rowland, an Irish railway guide and Irish money, £115 in banknotes, and all sorts of correspondence and addresses linking her to suspected persons, notably one ‘Dr Brandt’ in Amsterdam. There was no technical data, no evidence that all the touring around Ireland, Fishguard, the Isle of Man, the South Coast and elsewhere looking at naval installations had provided the Germans with anything they could otherwise not have guessed. But she must have given them useful information, because she had been earning more money from them than she was used to having (she had started taking cocaine; even in 1915, nature’s way of telling her she was overpaid).

  Incarcerated in Brixton on remand, and knowing that Wertheim had been arrested, Rowland decided the game was up. He told the full story. He was George Breeckow, a Russian born in 1884, whose father had lost money and taken the family to live at Stettin when George was a child. George Breeckow was brought up speaking German and at some stage was in the German army. He earned his living playing the piano for five or six years before the war in America, and although he took out naturalisation papers the process remained incomplete when he returned to Europe in 1914.

  He was engaged in Antwerp in March of 1914 ‘to act as imperial courier between Germany and America’ but his first assignment was to go to England. He had £45 for Mrs Wertheim and a mission to persuade a Mr Carter of Southampton to work for the Germans; this the man declined to do. It was all downhill from there onwards. Lizzie Wertheim spent a few days with Breeckow in Southampton and proved to be a trying companion, determined to draw attention to herself. When she left for Scotland, he travelled to Ramsgate with a male friend and sent information to Germany. He then returned to London, and was arrested.

  Mrs Wertheim was a Pole whose mother lived in Berlin. She had British citizenship by marriage but had been separated from her husband since about 1911. She was defiant to the end. They were tried at the Old Bailey on 20 September and Breeckow was sentenced to death. He appealed against the sentence. Wertheim got ten years’ penal servitude because she was a woman. Kell was angry, saying that this would encourage Germany to send more female spies in future.20

  Fernando Buschmann, arrested shortly after his arrival in June, was convicted on the scant evidence of intercepted communication under the Defence of the Realm Act. Buschmann was a Brazilian of German descent and his motive for spying was never clear. Roggen had time to travel around a little before he was caught; like Janssen and Roos, he had arrived with a cover story that did not bear the most cursory examination. He was supposedly a Uruguayan farmer on the look-out for horses to buy, but knew nothing of Uruguay and did not buy horses but arrived in Scotland for ‘fishing and his health’ to stay just a couple of miles from a torpedo testing site. Documents and circumstantial evidence linked him with Breeckow. He, and Buschmann, were tried by court martial in September and shot in October 1915.

  Not long after MO5 was renamed MI5 in 1916, James Melville’s friend from the Middle Temple, Henry Curtis-Bennett, was informally approached by Sir Archibald Bodkin and

  Without further explanation, he took Curtis-Bennett by the arm and led him to offices at the corner of Charles Street, Haymarket. It was the headquarters of the Secret Service, nerve centre of the British counter-espionage system.

  Curtis-Bennett joined in November 1916. His biographers say he found that

  German agents who came to England were given all the rope they needed, provided eventually they hanged themselves. He took to this strange game of bluff and double bluff with enthusiasm… He was the man of the world among the soldiers, sailors and policemen with whom he was now working, and they used his supreme ability to read character and motive to great effect.21

  From 1917 onwards Curtis-Bennett became part of the triumvirate who interrogated suspects. One of the three was always a military man like Drake or Kell and one was Basil Thomson; Curtis-Bennett was the other. Curtis-Bennett at least occasionally found himselfoverwhelmed with remorse when the questioning was successful, for the evidence thus produced would almost inevitably send the man to his death. There were, increasingly, exceptions. Sharing a cell with Buschmann had been a middle-aged Dutchman called Joseph Marks; he, like so many, had been let down by props (in his case a stamp collection) and a cover story that did not bear examination by a detective.22 But unlike the rest, Marks confessed and provided information about his spymaster in Holland. He received a five-year sentence and was deported after the war.

  In 1916 German intelligence began to take the likelihood of detection more seriously. A man called Vieyra came under observation from May onwards because Richard Tinsley, in Rotterdam, had heard that he was a German spy. Vieyra was also known as Pickard, and lived in Acton with a woman called Mrs Fletcher. He had run a midget troupe before the war and had then got into the film distribution business, which took him to the continent and America. He came back from Holland in May, went about his business, and apart from the odd bank deposit from overseas, nothing was noticeably strange. His letters and business were ordinary. Enquiries on the continent, however, revealed some mysterious correspondents, an untrace-able ‘partner’ and a mistress whose testimony, while not exactly incriminating, was not reassuring either.

  The Vieyra case is interesting for several reasons. For one thing, Tinsley according to the records had access to the services of a Dutch police sergeant; for another, some of the correspondence to and from the untraceable ‘partner’ must have travelled via the diplomatic bag of the Dutch Consulate in London. Vieyra’s letters, when they were finally developed in a three-stage process taking several days, showed not only that he was spying, but that the Germans had invented a new kind of invisible ink. Vieyra was also the first spy to be condemned to death and then have his sentence commuted to life imprisonment. In this way his testimony could continue to be of use in future cases.

  Over a five-month period starting at the end of the year the British security services detected a sophisticated spy network which, if its full ramifications were to be understood, must be kept in place.23 The first suspect was a man called Denis, who in September 1916 was under observation by Richard Tinsley in Holland. On 20 September George Vaux Bacon, an American journalist newly arrived in England from New York, wrote to Denis from London. On 22 September Bacon went to Holland where he stayed throughout October; his letter, however, was not intercepted until 29 September and not read until 9 October, so its late arrival at Denis’s address in Holland naturally aroused Bacon’s suspicion. This was compounded when, in October, Tinsley’s agent Mauritz Hyman approached Bacon rather clumsily.

  On 2 November Bacon returned to England. Tinsley watched him leave Rotterdam, and saw a couple of other suspected spies see him off. Mail interceptions had thrown up their names and connected them to people called Sander and Wunnenberg in New York. Instructions to the Port Police at Gravesend were that Bacon was to be ‘searched but not alarmed’.

  In London, Melville’s men watched him. He deposited £200 with the American Express Company and stayed at the Coburg Hotel in Bayswater. This was new; before the war, German spies had put up at a predictable range of hotels – the Bonnington and the Ivanhoe in Bloomsbury, the Wilton at Victoria
.

  On 14 November there came a breakthrough in Rotterdam. Tinsley was approached by a man called Graff, a metal merchant who was on the British blacklist but wanted to be taken off it for the sake of his business. He told Tinsley that he had been approached to join the ‘imperial messenger service’ of the German admiralty and showed a couple of sheets, apparently blank but containing secret messages, which were destined for New York. This was what Breeckow would have been doing had he not been caught, but Graff had been invited to be a courier for what had obviously become a much more secure service. He described the instructions and props he had been given. He had been told to observe specific things while in transit through England, and to obtain answers to questions such as ‘What is the English end of a submarine cable from Alexandrovskii on the White Sea?’ He was also given a sock impregnated with a solution which, when dunked in lukewarm water, would yield invisible ink; a palpable advance on the old talc-and-eau-de-cologne method. Graff was told to go along with Germany’s plans for his deployment, and duly went into action.

  Curtis-Bennett was with the Bureau now, and it was in the middle of collating an entire ring of spies. Many names were gathered by 23 November thanks to translation and development of Graff ’s documents and associated mail interceptions from England and Holland. A number of American journalists and some business people were linked and all communicated with Sander and Wunnenberg in New York. A week after Graff ’s visit to Tinsley, Bacon in London filed an article to America and sent a letter. Both were intercepted and read. By the time a decision had been made to call him to Scotland Yard for an interview that would frighten him off, he had left for Ireland. A message went out to all ports to review neutrals, especially those coming and going via New York.

  Bacon travelled around Ireland between 25 November and 8 December, when he returned to London to find a letter from Basil Thomson awaiting him. It was an invitation to attend Scotland Yard for an interview. He was detained on admitting that he had been in touch with Denis. Meanwhile, a suspect American journalist called Hastings had landed in Rotterdam and had been spotted by Tinsley with other suspects. The ramifications of this spy ring seemed to spread almost beyond the capacity of the Bureau to deal with it. Information came from Germany to the effect that ‘reports satisfactory in the highest degree had been received from three sources in Ireland’. In December Tinsley obtained material from an anonymous informant which confirmed that Hastings, along with Rutherford and Cribben who had seen Bacon off on the boat to England, were part of the ring. Graff confirmed this with damning proof against Bacon and Rutherford in February.

  It was time to wind this operation up: ‘A search of radiograms fell through owing to the labour and expense involved’ and Graff ’s proof was enough. Bacon made a full confession on 9 February. On 28 February he was tried and condemned to death.

  However, he was put to better use still. On 20 February the American Senate passed an anti-espionage Bill which, once enacted, enabled the arrest of Sander and Wunnenberg. Bacon was released on licence and sent to America to testify against them. They were both jailed. Those other American spies who escaped appear to have scattered, never to be of concern to the authorities.

  We do not know when Melville stopped working. There is a record of him in action in Bloomsbury in May 1917, when he was staying at an hotel in Tavistock Square and watching a young Norwegian journalist who had borrowed money from the Vice-Consul in London and was waiting for more from home:

  Instructions were given to the General Post Office to forward the telegram and not to stop any reply to it but to send a copy to MI5… Meanwhile Mr Melville had made friends with Hagn at the hotel, had ascertained that the Dagblad had another correspondent in London, that Hagn did a good deal of writing in his bedroom [and] left the hotel at 11a.m. returning in time for dinner. By going out with him Mr Melville had managed to let him be seen by three members of the Special Staff and agents were watching to see whether he posted any letters. On the 12th, Mr Melville had secured from a glass-stoppered bottle in Hagn’s bedroom some white liquid which on being tested proved to be, in MI9 nomenclature, C ink.24

  Information that Alfred Hagn was a German agent had come from the police at Christiania. He was jailed for life but released after the war on compassionate grounds.

  The wheel had come full circle. Melville had started like that, snooping in an hotel bedroom in Bloomsbury and uncovering a shirt marked ‘Kent’. Now he fell ill. In the late summer of 1917, suffering from a kidney complaint, he had an operation and at the end of the year, in Bolingbroke Hospital, Wandsworth, he decided to retire.

  Chief Inspector Heat was very positive, but cautious.

  ‘Well, sir’, he said, ‘we have enough to go upon. A man like that has no business to be at large, anyhow.’

  ‘You will want some conclusive evidence’, came the observation in a murmur.

  Chief Inspector Heat raised his eyebrows at the black, narrow back, which remained obstinately presented to his intelligence and his zeal.

  ‘There will be no difficulty in getting up sufficient evidence against him’, he said, with virtuous complacency. ‘You may trust me for that, sir’, he added, quite unnecessarily, out of the fullness of his heart; for it seemed to him an excellent thing to have that man in hand to be thrown down to the public should it think fit to roar with any special indignation …But in any case, Chief Inspector Heat, purveyor of prisons by trade, and a man of legal instincts, did logically believe that incarceration was the proper fate for every declared enemy of the law. In the strength of that conviction he committed a fault of tact. He allowed himself a little conceited laugh, and repeated:

  ’Trust me for that, sir.’

  Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent, 1906 25

  Was Melville ‘Chief Inspector Heat’?

  Was he a ‘purveyor of prisons’, who sent innocent men to jail? He had cooked up the case against Deakin and the rest.

  Asked by Counsel whether he had paid Coulon any money as a police spy, Inspector Melville declined to answer and the judge over-ruled the question on grounds of public policy. Counsel for the defence remarked that his object was to show that all which was suspicious in the case was the work of Coulon; in fact that it was Coulon who had got up the supposed plot.

  Would he beat a man up to get a confession? Was he intolerant?

  Was he not called in court a ‘notorious liar’?

  London, Jarvis, 12th December

  At the Trafalgar Square meeting last Sunday Malatesta got two black eyes, and Agresti had his left cheek smashed up, by Melville’s men.

  London, Jarvis, 12th December

  ...Melville wanted to close down the Lapie bookshop, but was dissuaded.

  Would he do a deal with a criminal? Did he get

  …that satisfactory sense of superiority the members of the police force get from the unofficial but intimate side of their intercourse with the criminal classes, by which the vanity of power is soothed, and the vulgar love of domination over our fellow creatures is flattered as worthily as it deserves?

  He let Sidney Reilly escape arrest over the counterfeit roubles and he must have known the man was a murderer. And yet, by dealing with Reilly, who was a different class of informer altogether, he was surely placing his head in the lion’s mouth. A ‘satisfactory sense of superiority’ is not something that serves the lion-tamer well.

  William Melville was not Conrad’s Chief Inspector Heat. Unlike that sly and mean-spirited character, he had a sense of humour and its necessary obverse, a sense of tragedy. The Walsall case was indefensible, and so far as we know he never did anything like it again.

  He was tight with information but generous with his staff: he had the gift of inspiring respect unaccompanied by fear. In later years, at any rate, he seems to have mellowed out of his intolerance; there is much in his professional reports to indicate that he recognised human frailty, as well as human viciousness. He loved his family and they loved him. James, his younger son, was a
protégé of Ramsay Macdonald and became Solicitor-General in the 1929 Labour Government. He was of a different cast of mind from his father but so far as we know they came to accommodate one another’s opinions. James died at forty-six, never having fully recovered from serious injury sustained at Salonika. William, the elder son, married and settled in New Zealand after the First World War. Kate became Mrs Clifford Rainey.

  In 1913 Melville wrote his will.

  I bequeath to my son William John Melville the gold ring which I usually wear the scarf pin presented to me by King George the scarf pin presented to me by Queen Alexandra the cigarette case presented to me by the German Emperor the cigarette case presented to me by his Excellency Monsieur Gorymikine Secretary of State for Russia the silver cigar case presented to me by Princess Henry of Battenberg the tantalus presented to me by my colleagues on my retirement and also the sum of two hundred pounds which bequest I make to him inasmuch as he showed no desire as a youth to enter any profession and consequently spared me the necessary expenses in connection therewith. I bequeath to my daughter Kate Mary Madelaine the ring presented to me by the Emperor of Germany and the ring presented to me by the Shah of Persia. I bequeath to my son James Benjamin the cigarette case presented to me by the Czarewitch the sleeve links presented to me by King Edward the scarf pin presented to me by the King of Spain the gold watch presented to me by the Emperor of Germany together with the gold chain and appendages thereto which I wear with the said watch. Decorations I have received from King Edward and from foreign powers the combined scarf pin and stud received from Lady Pirbright the presentation tea and coffee service received from my colleagues on my retirement. I would like my wife my daughter and my son James Benjamin to live together as long as possible and I desire that during the widowhood of my wife and while she and my said daughter and son continue to live together they shall have the joint use of my plate linen china glass books pictures prints furniture…26