by Nigel West
Heinrich Grund became known to MO5G through his connection with Fernando Buschman and Augusto Roggen, and through John de Heer’s confession, Grund’s connection with the Admiralstab Zweigstelle in Antwerp, became known. Grund, who had lived in Antwerp before the war, was entered on the Antwerp roll as A-1, with the note that he was a very reliable, successful and clever worker. His special mission was to place his agents on ships coming to England and to examine them as to what they had seen on the journey. He also kept watch on the shipping in Rotterdam harbour and reported the movements of shipping off the Dutch coast by wireless to Hamburg. He is said by this means to have brought about the capture of the SS Brussels. In 1916, Grund moved to Utrecht and opened a motor business there.
Hochenholz was also was interested in shipping. He was known to Janssen and van Zwolj. His name does not appear on the Antwerp roll but possibly he may be identical with A-31, Emil Gleichmann, described as engaged in an enquiry service in Rotterdam, and captain in the Mercantile Marine, educated, reliable and very capable.
Jan van Brandwijk was entered as A-51, and was a Dutch casual labourer who had met with an accident and had been compensated by the Dutch government. His entry on the roll gives the following note: enquiry service at Rotterdam. Uneducated but very diligent. Good connections in shipping circles, mostly among the employees. Very pro-German.
The Dierks-Hochenholz gang was broken up by the Dutch Government in the autumn of 1915. Sanderson, alias Dierks, who in August had been acquitted of the charge of endangering Dutch neutrality by inciting young men to do espionage and other services for the German Army and Navy was in October found guilty by the Court of Appeal at The Hague and sentenced to one year’s imprisonment, but in the meantime he had disappeared from Holland. In June 1917, it was reported that he was coming regularly to the United Kingdom on behalf of Germany, and he was signaled to the ports for arrest, but nothing further was heard of him.
Dierks was succeeded by de Snoek (alias Patent, alias Schwaebsch) who had been in partnership with Haasbroeck in the business of German counter-espionage and Haasbroeck, an underling of Dierks, engaged the spies Schell and Pierre Verdun, one of whom was said to have had a share in the Lusitania outrage, the other in the torpedoing of the cruisers HMS Aboukir, Cressy and Hogue by the U-9 on 22 September 1914. Haasbroeck betrayed the Belgian spy Pierre Rotheudt, an agent of the Germans, to the French and lost the confidence of the Germans about July 1915.
Hans Eils states that the Antwerp branch directed the work of spies coming to England from America and Holland, and it is quite possible that the agents who communicated with Norway were also Dierks’ men, as they certainly used his methods. It is worth noting the method of approach of these spies: Anton Küpferle from America, although he had been fighting in the German Army; Fernando Buschman via Spain and France but coming from Germany; Haicke Janssen, who was to spy in the south, landed at Hull; Willem Roos who went north, landed in London. It is elementary that care was taken to replace passports which contained inconvenient records and no doubt a spy avoided encountering the same port officers more than was necessary.
Another point which was carefully dealt with in a report on the Dierks agents is that of the arrangement of the spies’ itineraries, so as to ensure that spies should pass through important places in regular succession. Willem Roos, Lizzie Wertheim and Roggen passed through Edinburgh between 15 May and 8 June 1915, and were possibly to be succeeded by Reginald Rowland who was to leave town when Wertheim returned. Buschman, Rowland, and Janssen passed through Southampton between 13 April and 29 May. Between the visits of Buschman and Rowland other agents must have gone there.
On arrival in England the spy wired to his base giving his address and asking for funds. Wherever possible a spy tried to get into some private house. Carl Muller, Wertheim and Roos either scraped an acquaintance or used a pre-war acquaintance as cover, the obvious reason being to avoid hotel registration. As regards the Aliens Registration Order all the spies conformed. Other spies tried to settle down with a companion in a flat or furnished rooms: Buschman forced a rapid friendship with Emile Franco; Georg Breckow meant to establish himself with Wertheim; Albert Meyer, who had a companion, married her no doubt for greater convenience. The fixed quarters and companion, whether accomplice or not, enabled a person to escape notice, to get their letters regularly, and if need be to have a companion for their excursions. This, it is clear from Breckow’s letters, the agent considered important but the employer sometimes objected on the score of expense.
As regards Breckow, it seems clear that he was to occupy an outstanding position; he brought money and orders to Mrs Wertheim, he was to work with her and to forward her reports, he was to recruit a fixed agent at Southampton and probably he was to keep touch with Roggen.
As regards payment, Dierks seems to have sent it by telegraphic money order and by telegraphic orders on banks. Berlin seems to have paid by cheque or to have supplied funds to the spy before his departure.
The regular paraphernalia for a German agent’s equipment consisted in two kinds of materials for secret writing: lemon-juice, and scent used with powder as a fixative, and very fine pens; a book to help them identify types of warships; and business documents purporting to establish their bona-fides. In connection with these it is worth noting the progress made in passing from bogus names of firms through names closely resembling those of genuine businesses to genuine businesses and addresses as in the case of Albert Meyer and finally to the completion of genuine business as in the case of Frank Greite.
In the use of their business cover the spies were remarkably ineffective. Haicke Janssen and Irving Ries collected names of firms to call on here but Janssen went no further and Ries merely wrote to the firms. Fernando Buschman also collected names of firms at Liverpool but never went there. In no case was any business concluded, and it was often a simple matter to prove by means of experts that the travellers had no understanding of the business they were engaged upon. Breckow (alias Rowland), indeed, was so sensible of this that he proposed to drop his agency and revert to his own profession as a pianist under cover of which he could visit the places he needed to see. Kenneth de Rysbach was a music-hall artist and in this struck a fresh note.
Towards the end of the period the spies seem to have adopted confession of being in German pay as cover to their practices, or possibly as a mode of getting into the United Kingdom. Josef Marks may have been a forerunner of the double agents of 1916. John de Heer, Marius Hoogendyk and Charles van Ekeren were willing to assume that role in 1915.
Generally speaking, the spy adapted his communication to his supposed business but in some cases there were alternative codes. It is noticeable that the monthly report for April 1915 mentions only fifteen unimportant cases of the use of code and ciphers. By the end of the summer the codes had multiplied. In addition to the four codes known to have been used by German agents before the war, the following codes seem to have been in use at various dates between November 1914 and December 1915:
A German agent in Copenhagen wiring to a centre in the United Kingdom a message to be forwarded to the Minister of Marine in Berlin used surnames or Christian names to indicate the names of countries, towns, bays, channels, etc., mention of illness, etc. to indicate operations, and prices to indicate dates.
In February, a German communicating with Rotterdam and the German consul at Rotterdam were using family codes: relationships indicated military or naval units (eg. Father = Dreadnought); names of towns indicated harbours; numbers of ships were indicated by terms of endearment or by alphabetical Christian name code; latitude and longitude by names of Dutch towns; a nation by some special Christian name.
In the corset code supplied by German Headquarters at Antwerp to an agent in England, places in the United Kingdom were indicated by prices; places on the Continent by business terms; countries by colours; military and naval terms by descriptive words.
A man named Pearson cabled from Holland to New York orders for
ammunition for Germany. He used a typewriting code which passed our Censor.
Writing daily from the United Kingdom to Christiania, a German agent used a code in which any letter out of the line counted.
In April Dutchmen sent to England communicated with Rotterdam in commercial telegraphic cipher and code; a three figure group indicated warships of different tonnage; a two figure group merchant vessels; one figure indicated transports. The place mentioned in the telegram indicated the port of departure, the date was ascertained by deducting two days from the date mentioned in the body of the telegram.
Robert Rosenthal used a telegraphic code which the Germans thought could not be paraphrased and also a postal stamp code; Abdon Jappe’s book-code used the Testament and also a letter code; the cigar code of Willem Roos and Haicke Janssen used names of foreign ports and brands of cigars indicated vessels and ports of the United Kingdom.
Reginald Rowland (the alias adopted by Georg Breckow) used a musical code in which ships and ports were indicated by the name of some selection or piece, the two first letters or else some punning meaning indicating the word intended.
Secret signs were also in use in letters sent through the Esperanto Association and on maps of microscopic dimensions carried by spies. Augusto Roggen used a fruit code in which the words ‘potatoes’ and ‘bananas’ were supposed to indicate various types of ship. Ludovico Hurwitz y Zender used terms which would appear to relate to business in butter, cheese and goods. Another code consisted of pin-holes, dots, spots and tears on printed documents. Communications were also made by means of advertisements in the public press.
Charles van Ekeren supplied further particulars about methods in use at Antwerp. He mentioned two codes somewhat resembling some already known and a cipher. This was founded on a combination of letters to indicate military units and numbers. Messages were written in lemon juice on the inside of envelopes or between the lines of satirical postcards about the Kaiser; letter-groups would be marked in an en clair message, but so faintly as not to damage the fibre of the paper.
Copies of the code were sent to the Chief Censor with the request that all such telegrams should be forwarded to MO5G without previous reference to the sender.
To communicate with Antwerp and Wesel, Ernest Melin used a banking code in which classes of ships were indicated by the names of well-known Dutch banks; the number of ships by a sum of money in pounds, which sum had to be divided by five; the names of ports by the names of Dutch hotels; the dates and nature of movement by commercial phrases. The Wesel bureau would occasionally vary the names of the firms and hotels. The increase in the use or detection of code appears in the fact that whereas fifteen cases, mostly harmless, were reported in April, seventy-three were reported in August 1915.
To sum up, use was made, in turn or in combination, of Christian names, surnames, terms of relationship, names of countries, cities and firms, dates, prices, figures, and every kind of merchandise, coupled with ordinary words and word combinations to which a conventional meaning was attached. The examples given below illustrate the methods.
On 10 June 1915 DRR 22A prohibiting the use, unlawful possession of, or refusal to disclose the key of any cipher or code or other means adapted for secretly communicating naval, military or air-force information was issued.
On 28 June 1915 Ernest Maxse supplied a copy of the German translation code on which Haicke Janssen was subsequently detected, and a copy was passed to the Telegraphic Censorship and to the GPO.
*
It was known as early as November 1914 that secret writing was being used by German agents. In February 1915, Carl Muller and John Hahn were using lemon juice, while Anton Küpferle had a mixture of lemon juice and formalin for secret writing, and German Secret Service agents were overheard agreeing that interlinear writing in secret ink passed the Censor.
Reginald Rowland and Lizzie Wertheim used lemon juice and also probably colourless scent, such as eau de Cologne, with talc powder to fix it. Willem Roos and Haicke Janssen used scent and wrote in a microscopic hand on the margins of newspapers and books. They despatched from six to ten newspapers or books daily and always sent a postcard to notify that a message was on the way. The frequent use of music for recording information should also be noted. Besides the mediums used by arrested spies others were discovered in the course of the summer.
Medicines containing essential oils were sent to PoWs who used them together with code, such as a dot to indicate a place, or a corner slightly turned down or a tear in the margin. Preparations of powders, pomades, soap, hair-lotion, dentifrice, labelled with the genuine labels of Parisian firms, were also pressed into service. Soap and ferro-cyanide of potassium was another mixture used on slightly tinted paper. Agents in Switzerland used Oja-paste, a yellowish paste diluted with water and scented with rose, on unglazed yellow paper. Ten parts of acetate of lead to fifty of water; alum, milk, thin well-boiled starch water are also mentioned as mediums. When soap was used it required much dilution with water or a faint trace was noticeable on the paper.
Augusto Roggen used oil of peppermint and talc powder, and Fernando Buschman used scent, writing minute figures on old bills, letters, pages of a Spanish newspaper, railway time tables, envelopes, Censor’s labels and music. Our chemist reported that a message written in a scent like eau de Cologne when used with talc powder should last for three weeks to a month.
The Rotterdam Post Office called attention to the use of secret writing along the gummed edges of the flaps of envelopes; one such envelope had passed sealed with five seals. After the arrest of Küpferle, Muller and Hahn, DRR 24A prohibiting the use of secret means of communication was issued.
From the point of view of investigation the source of information leading to detection is of primary importance. Analysis of these sources, with regard to the spy cases from November 1914 to early September 1916, gives the following results:
Check on spy addresses 10
Scrutiny of telegrams to the Continent 3
Scrutiny of telegraphic money orders from the Continent 1
Postal Censorship acting freely 3
Intelligence officers 3
Information from British agent in Holland 4
Information given by American Minister to British consul-general, Rotterdam 1
Belgian Counter-espionage Service (on one denunciation) 9
Belgian (private, on one denunciation) 3
American (private) 1
Dutch (editor of Telegraaf) 1
TOTAL 39
Certain of these cases, Irving Ries and Josef Marks for instance, might be grouped under two categories and a third case might be credited to the Postal Censorship if their discovery of George T. Parker (Georg Breckow) were treated as an independent case.
It is obvious that the check on a spy address is not in the first instance an ultimate cause, but it becomes one when established by a case. Of the main sources for such checks, the principal four were the reports of agents abroad; communications to and from German agents here; addresses found in their possession; and Postal Censorship.
The first and second were by far the most important. The skill of the branch in handling such information needs no comment: experience, imagination, resourcefulness and patience were all brought to bear on turning it to the proper use and in choosing out of the treasury of old methods and new protective measures those most apt for the purpose in view. The general search of telegrams sent from certain ports is an instance of an enlargement and fresh adaptation of an old method – and it led to the detection of three spies each in a different port. The tracking down of Muller and Wertheim furnish brilliant examples of intuition correcting false deductions. The first also illustrates the need for patience in awaiting the right moment to strike. Had a search been made of Muller’s rooms when the police visited him first the chances are that he could never have been connected with Hahn and proof of his guilt obtained. Some of the cases demanded a long watchfulness but, in general, arrest followed with
amazing rapidity on the first alarm, a rapidity which demonstrates the officers’ skill in handling detective methods. Incidentally, too, the value of the new measures, the aliens restriction orders, the hotels registration order, the prohibited areas, the watch at the ports, the Postal Censorship was amply proved.
After arrest, proof was built up by verification of the spy’s contacts, movements, business, information. This involved much labour and correspondence, and in certain cases it became necessary for the officers to cajole, of course after the necessary warnings, the victim into admitting the genuineness of documents proving his own guilt – a very disagreeable task.
As regards the preparation of a case, the principle was strictly adhered to, to bring forward only such evidence as was strictly necessary to obtain a conviction – thus economising labour, time and money. The benefit of legal advice in each case enabled the officers to concentrate on useful points and to avoid technical errors. During the course of these investigations the officers tested the weak points of the DRR. In June 1915 DRR 18 was made absolute by forbidding the collection etc. of any information for communication to the enemy. Experience showed that not only in the filiation of cases but also as a means of obtaining proof against agents, their ‘contacts’ were of immense value in the earlier cases. Much effort was expended upon proving the truth and value of the information sent and in verifying the nature and business of the persons with whom the spy was in communication abroad, and during June and July it was established by direct enquiry that Dierks and his gang had no genuine business, or concurrently that they were in direct contact with Germans.
But then arose cases, such as those of Robert Rosenthal, Josef Marks, David Stad and Cornolis den Braben where no overt act in this country could be proved against the agent, although it was certain he had come to spy – and either the agent had to be convicted on his own confession, or sentence of a much lighter nature than the offence warranted was passed upon him. At the request of MI5G therefore, Regulation 18A was passed making it an offence to communicate or attempt to communicate with a spy, and defining the terms ‘communication’, ‘spy’ and ‘spy address’.