The German methods were on the whole unimaginative, clumsy, and ineffective, involving a great deal of pseudo-espionage and very little analysis or deduction. As related in a subsequent chapter, German secret service reports sent out from England were intercepted and read by our security service over a long period preceding the war, and it was to us a constant source of amazement that the Berlin authorities should be wasting large sums of money on information that was mainly worthless. Many of these reports were so patently inaccurate that only a modicum of technical knowledge was needed to expose their spurious character. Yet the fact that those who composed them remained on the ID pay roll of the German Navy Office is proof that either the reports or, at any rate, the senders were taken seriously in that quarter.
So far as can be ascertained, Germany appointed her secret agents without setting much store by their qualifications for the work. The spies whom she planted in our naval ports and military centres were a nondescript crowd – small tradesmen, commercial travellers, ‘commission agents’, and so forth, whose knowledge of the highly technical matters they were expected to probe was rudimentary to a degree. Herr Steinhauer – self-styled ‘the Kaiser’s master spy’ – who claims to have been responsible for the recruitment of this Falstaffian regiment, himself betrays in his book a very superficial knowledge of naval technicalities.
Most, if not all, of his men were professionals only in the sense that they were drawing pay. They were unskilled hands, engaged on a task that demanded highly skilled workers. Small wonder, then, that the German naval attaché in London once declared, almost publicly, that for sound intelligence work one Englishman was worth ten of his own compatriots. Others would seem to have shared this opinion long before his time, for we find Herr Lüdecke writing in his book on espionage: ‘Among the secret agents of Richelieu and his successor, Mazarin, the best were generally Englishmen, whose task it was to unravel the dark intrigues of foreign courts and cabinets.’
Distinct from Steinhauer’s band of permanent agents, and much more dangerous, were the numerous German naval officers who were granted special leave for intelligence work in Great Britain.
Before the war there was practically no control over visitors to the royal dockyards. Anyone could walk in, either alone or with the usual crowd of sightseers, and, once inside, it was a perfectly simple matter to ‘get lost.’ To enter with the crowd had this advantage, that it enabled one to go on board ships without risk of challenge, and both in the yard itself and on board any new man-of-war the skilled observer could always pick up valuable information. We are personally acquainted with several officers of the old German Navy who were familiar with every hole and corner of every royal dockyard in the United Kingdom, and who also made periodical visits to the Tyne, the Clyde, and other districts where naval construction was in hand.
A walking stick notched with inches or centimetres was useful in determining the thickness of armour plates that lay about the wharves, each plate bearing the name of the new ship for which it was intended.
The capacity of coal dumps and oil tanks could be readily estimated by the trained eye. New ships and details thereof, instruments, gun sights, gun-breech mechanisms, and a hundred other items of which a pictorial record was desired, could be snapped by a miniature camera, small enough to be hidden in the palm of the hand.
Even warships under construction and not yet launched could be, and often were, inspected and photographed. The Queen Elizabeth, our first 15-inch gun, oil-burning battleship, was built at Portsmouth under conditions of elaborate secrecy, the admiralty being particularly anxious to conceal the hull lines of this high-speed vessel. As a precautionary measure, taken on the eve of the launching ceremony in October 1913, the old battleship Zealandia was moored athwart the slipway on which the Queen Elizabeth was lying, thus shutting out any view of the shapely hull from boats passing up or down the harbour. Yet this did not prevent a German naval officer from obtaining a close-up view and several snapshots of the Queen Elizabeth by the simple expedient of going on board the Zealandia and asking for one of her officers whom he knew to be ashore.
As a sidelight on the futility of the ‘hush’ methods practised in this country may be mentioned the fact that in Nauticus, the semi-official German naval yearbook for 1914, there appeared drawings and a description of the Queen Elizabeth that were correct almost to the smallest detail, the distribution and thickness of the armour plating being shown with great accuracy. Yet this book was published only two months after the launch of the ship.
Again, while the belt-armour thickness of HMS Invincible and her sister battlecruisers was always given as 7 inches in British textbooks, Nauticus, the Taschenbuch der Kriegsflotten, and other German annuals gave from the first the correct figure, viz. 6 inches.
It is a safe assumption that most of the really useful information reaching the Berlin Navy Office came from its own officers, who had been on furlough in Great Britain.
This, however, does not alter the fact that reliance was placed chiefly on the permanent espionage system that had been established in this country. When we, on our side, set up a naval intelligence organisation in Germany, we were only following her example, though belatedly, and on a smaller scale.
We, too, had amateur helpers, but they received little official encouragement. From time to time officers who had been on leave in Germany brought back scraps of news that proved to be valuable, and, in one case, a British civilian visiting Hamburg picked up a clue that, on being followed up by one of our professional agents, brought us some very useful data of the arrangements for equipping and supplying German commerce raiders in wartime.
These, however, were exceptional instances. In direct contrast to German experience, nine-tenths of the really sound and helpful information that came to intelligence department (ID) headquarters in London was gathered by our permanent agents, whose reports, collated in chronological order, would give a very complete and detailed record of all German naval developments during the four years preceding the war.
Credit for this remarkable achievement must be awarded to the high officials of the ID who selected our secret service agents for duty in central Europe. The latter were few, very few, in number, but each was a specialist at his work, though none had actually served in the naval profession. They had taken up the task unwillingly, and only in response to an appeal to their patriotism. Needless to say, it entailed constant and serious personal risk. In the pursuit of his avocation the secret agent hazarded his liberty, and not seldom his life. Day and night he lived under a nerve strain that never relaxed.
Here is the personal testimony of one of these agents:
The work itself was thankless, perilous, and distinctly unremunerative, and those engaged in it too often found themselves caught in a web of intrigue and misunderstanding that has outlasted the war, and from which some may never hope to escape. It is safe to say that none of the survivors would ever dream of taking up intelligence work again, under any consideration whatsoever. The romantic associations of secret service exist largely in the imagination of writers who have had no experience of the real thing.
For reasons that to me are inexplicable, intelligence work, however hazardous it might be, and however valuable the results, was never sufficiently recognised by our home authorities as deserving of reward. It may be that this pointed neglect is due to an inherent prejudice against the whole business of espionage. If that be the attitude of the authorities, it is both illogical and unfair, in view of the fact, already stated, that every British member of the intelligence service abroad with whom I was acquainted took up the work, not in the hope of pecuniary reward, but from motives of patriotism, and in most cases only after repeated and urgent appeals by the ID chiefs in London.
These are the words of a former agent of the naval secret service who, while harbouring no personal grievance, was indignant at the studied official neglect of colleagues who had abandoned promising careers at the dictates of patriotism.
Of recent years a number of books have appeared in which intelligence work is held up to derision.
Several of the authors are literary men who for some obscure reason were appointed to the secret service during the war. The original intention, no doubt, was to make use of their abilities for propaganda purposes, but under the topsy-turvy conditions then prevailing they eventually found themselves engaged in pseudo-intelligence work, principally in the Near East. As the proceedings in which they took part were futile and often farcical, it is not surprising that they should have formed a low opinion of all secret service activities and caricatured them in their subsequent writings.
Thus, Mr Compton Mackenzie, in his First Athenian Memories, casts doubt on the value of any intelligence work except that conducted by an army in the field. But as Mr Mackenzie’s experiences, so far as he has recorded them, were confined to Greece – where the conflicting policies of the Allied powers, coupled with the ill-controlled activities of their secret agents, brought about a situation that was at once Gilbertian and tragic – his sweeping condemnation of all secret service is based on inadequate knowledge.
Mr Mackenzie, in common with several other authors, obviously knows little of what this service accomplished by less theatrical methods before and during the war.
Sir Basil Thomson, in his book The Allied Secret Service in Greece, is also contemptuous of the secret agent and his work. True, he is magnanimous enough to admit that ‘intelligence officers are as necessary to governments as they are to banks and business houses, and as long as they are under efficient and wise control they are no more dangerous to a state than a daily newspaper is dangerous to a household.’
But Sir Basil, like Mr Mackenzie, though with less excuse, is particularising on the opera bouffe antics of certain so-called intelligence agents in Greece, in which country the wartime atmosphere seems to have had a devastating effect on the mental balance and judgement of rulers, statesmen, diplomats, and lesser functionaries, irrespective of nationality.
Whatever the blunders and futilities of its political counterpart may have been, there is no doubt that the British naval intelligence service played an indispensable part in the winning of the war. Not only was it a prime factor in the defeat of the U-boat campaign, but by penetrating Germany’s naval secrets before and after the outbreak of war it guaranteed us against surprises, which, if unsuspected, might have been sprung upon us with disastrous results. We can assert without fear of contradiction that had the admiralty acted without delay on the information supplied by British agents in central Europe from 1910 onward, we should have achieved a greater measure of success in the war at sea, and especially at the Battle of Jutland. This point will be elaborated in due course.
Throughout the pre-war period now under review our intelligence work abroad was handicapped by shortage of funds. Had more money been available it is certain that better results would have been attained. The marvel is that so much was done with such exiguous means.
In very exceptional circumstances our agents would, no doubt, have received adequate financial hacking, but in the course of their routine work they were expected to keep within the narrowest limits of expenditure. It follows, therefore, that bribery was but rarely resorted to as a means of procuring information. Nearly every valuable item of news had to be excavated by personal effort and at personal risk.
Thanks to the technical knowledge possessed by our agents, in striking contrast to those employed by Germany, they seldom wasted time, and never money, in pursuing a false trail. It is difficult for anyone who is conversant with the work done by these men between the autumn of 1910 and August 1914, to read with patience the burlesque accounts of ‘intelligence’ operations recently given to the world by more than one distinguished writer.
Here, in brief, are some of the results we owed to the unremitting vigilance, enterprise, skill, and courage of our secret service naval agents, who worked silently and patiently during those critical pre-war years.
The gist of the epoch-making German fleet Law Amendment Act of 1912, which foreshadowed a huge increase in the combative strength of the High Seas Fleet, was communicated to Whitehall weeks before the bill itself was tabled in the Reichstag.
The admiralty was supplied with ample information about:
The German mobilisation plans;
The emergency war measures that were to take effect as soon as the ‘Mobilmachung’ signal was flashed to Kiel and Wilhelmshaven;
The war stations of the High Seas Fleet and the special arrangements made for passing heavy ships through the Kiel Canal in a much shorter time than we had been led to believe was possible;
The distribution of light squadrons, destroyers and submarines immediately after the declaration of war;
The plans for reinforcing minesweeping flotillas and coastal patrols, afloat and ashore;
The worldwide network of intelligence and coaling facilities that German consuls and other agents abroad had established in anticipation of operations by German commerce raiders.
Readers of Lord Jellicoe’s volume, The Grand Fleet, will recall many passages that suggest we were utterly surprised by the abnormal powers of resistance displayed by German battleships and cruisers at Jutland and in earlier encounters, and not less by the high quality of their gunnery, ammunition, optical instruments, torpedoes, mines, and other equipment. Yet the archives of the naval intelligence division must contain documentary evidence to prove that all these German ‘secrets’ had been uncovered and reported by British agents long before the war.
The massive armour and extensive underwater protection of the German dreadnoughts were well known to the British Admiralty, which had received particulars and diagrams of practically every ship that Admiral Scheer commanded at Jutland. These had been secured by our agents years beforehand, and it was not their fault if the admiralty had neglected to produce armour-piercing shells capable of piercing the sides and decks of the German ships and detonating with full force inside.
An accurate description of the shell that the Germans used with deadly effect at Jutland was in the hands of the admiralty as far back as 1911, together with an account of its performance against armoured targets on the Krupp proving-ground at Meppen and specially constructed target ships at sea.
At or about the same date, drawings and details were furnished of the latest torpedoes in production at the government factory of Friedrichsort, near Kiel – these being the weapons by which the U-boats were destined to sink millions of tonnes of shipping.
All essential particulars of the German naval mine, which, though simple, was extraordinarily reliable and destructive, were contained in our pre-war ID files, yet in spite of this information we ourselves clung to an obsolete and inefficient type of mine for nearly two years after the outbreak of war.
Almost the only vital secret our agents failed to unearth was the manner in which the German Navy would be employed in a war with Great Britain. It is just as well that this remained hidden from us, for had it been otherwise we should have been completely deceived.
To elucidate this seeming paradox it is necessary to recall the singular state of affairs that existed in the German naval administration in August 1914.
Grand Admiral von Tirpitz had then served seventeen years as Secretary of State for the Navy. The High Seas Fleet was virtually his own creation. It had been built and organised in strict conformity with his own strategical theories, and, as we know from his own writing, he never doubted for a moment that when ‘Der Tag’ dawned his imperial master would order him to forsake his desk in the Navy Office for the bridge of the flagship Friedrich der Grosse as Commander-in-Chief of the entire fleet.
All his plans were based upon that assumption. It was to be the apotheosis of those long years of single-minded and devoted service to the fatherland. And when the opportunity came he was determined to make the most of it. Not for him the timid, cautious strategy of keeping the fleet intact behind the shoals, minefields, and batteries of �
��the wet triangle’, preserving it as an asset for securing favourable peace terms. To him it was as a mighty sword for the striking of deadly blows at British sea power, which he had always recognised as the most formidable obstacle to the realisation of Germany’s soaring ambitions.
Tirpitz, therefore, intended to seek a decisive battle with the British fleet at the earliest possible moment. He had a well-founded faith in the weapon he had forged, tempered and tested repeatedly in manoeuvres. If he exaggerated the power of the surface torpedo boat and under-estimated that of the submarine, he erred in the company of nearly all the senior naval officers of his day. The soundness of his policy in regard to capital ship construction and armament was brilliantly vindicated at Jutland. The German battlecruisers, especially, were magnificent fighting machines. That he was not personally responsible for the inadequate armament of the German light cruisers is conclusively proved by his memoirs.
But the declaration of hostilities brought him the bitterest disappointment of his life.
The Kaiser ignored his urgent request to be granted a free hand in directing the operations of the fleet, and retained in the chief command Admiral von Ingenohl, an officer of mediocre abilities who owed his advancement to the personal friendship of the Supreme War Lord and to prolonged service in the imperial yacht.
Nor was this all.
King Edward, many years before, had enraged his nephew by referring to the German fleet as ‘Willie’s toy’. This jest contained a profound truth. It soon became evident that Wilhelm II regarded the fleet as his personal property, to be cherished and conserved at all costs. The prospect of exposing his precious ships to the rude blasts of war filled him with dismay. He could view with equanimity the sacrifice of whole army corps on the battlefield, but he shrank from risking a single one of the dreadnoughts, which were, to him, majestic symbols of the aggrandisement and prestige of the Hohenzollern dynasty.
Strange Intelligence: Memoirs of Naval Secret Service Page 4