Therefore, immediately after Great Britain had declared war, he drafted with his own hand the notorious ‘Operations-Befehl’, which doomed the German fleet to inactivity at the very moment when a prompt and resolute offensive might well have yielded the most fruitful results.
There is no question that even a partial German success in the North Sea would have delayed indefinitely the passage of the British Expeditionary Force to France, and vitally affected the whole war situation to the detriment of the Allied cause. Without the presence of the BEF, the Battle of the Marne might never have been fought, or, if it had been fought, the result would probably have been very different. Even a mass attack by German submarines in the southern area of the North Sea would have seriously embarrassed and retarded our military dispositions. Moreover, a bold offensive by the navy would have evoked intense enthusiasm in Germany and, by enhancing the popularity and prestige of what was, after all, a new and untried arm, might have so raised the morale of the sea service as to render impossible the humiliating events of November 1918.
But the Kaiser thought of none of these things. ‘My ships must not be risked’ was the purport of his ‘operational orders’.
These forbade the High Seas Fleet to leave its sheltered anchorages except in the remote contingency of a British attack on the German coast. No ships of any importance were permitted to move without the express sanction of the Supreme War Lord, who arrogated to himself full executive control of the fleet. Thus, save for an abortive reconnaissance by a submarine flotilla and the despatch of a single minelayer towards the Thames Estuary, the entire German fleet lay idle at its moorings during the first crucial weeks of the war.
In vain did von Tirpitz plead for the Entscheidungs-Schlacht, the decisive battle, which at the very outset might have impeached Great Britain’s command of the home seas and thus altered the subsequent course of the war.
The Kaiser’s obstinate timidity where his ships were concerned found support from the Chancellor, Bethmann-Hollweg – who wanted the fleet to be kept as a bargaining asset at the peace table – and also from admirals who were jealous of von Tirpitz. Even before the war he had had contend with the enmity and intrigues of high officers who resented his unique position in the councils of the state. Between him and the chief of the Marinekabinett there existed a bitter feud, and as the department in question was empowered to make all naval appointments, subject only to the Kaiser’s approval, it followed that von Tirpitz’s recommendations were usually ignored and his protégés left out in the cold. Nor were his relations with the naval staff by any means cordial. Consequently, despite his virtual dictatorship of naval policy in regard to shipbuilding and equipment, he exercised only a very limited control over questions of personnel or strategy.
In this lack of coordination among the heads of the naval high command, coupled with the Kaiser’s morbid dread of losing ships, we find the clue to the otherwise inexplicable management of German naval affairs during the first eighteen months of the war.
While the dissensions prevailing at the Berlin Navy Office were known to our secret service agents, they could not possibly forecast the effect on the operations of the German fleet in time of war.
The British Admiralty wisely prepared for all eventualities, including an immediate offensive by the High Seas Fleet, this latter being regarded as most probable. When, therefore, the long-expected conflict did eventuate, the absolute quiescence and the lack of initiative displayed by the German naval command caused much perplexity at Whitehall.
The first fruits of our intelligence work in Germany were garnered almost at once. Thanks to our foreknowledge of the arrangements made, not only for despatching armed liners from Germany to attack the trade routes, but also for arming and equipping for the same purpose a large number of selected German merchantmen at sea or in neutral ports on the outbreak of war, we were able to take prompt counter-measures that had the effect of nipping these plans in the bud. The fact that only one armed liner (Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse) left Germany in the first month of hostilities, instead of the fleet of such ships that had been earmarked for the purpose, was due in large part to the swift action taken by the British Admiralty ‘from information received’.
This one among many concrete examples of the benefit we derived from our pre-war intelligence system in central Europe. Compared with the huge organisation built up subsequently, and presided over with conspicuous ability by Admiral Sir Reginald Hall, it was almost insignificant in personnel and resources. Yet its labours were singularly fruitful, as this book will show. That their full value has never been appreciated is no doubt due to the secrecy in which they were necessarily shrouded. But to those who knew the perils and anxieties of the service it is discouraging to find genuine intelligence work bracketed and pilloried with the comic-opera performances of amateur ‘secret service’ agents in neutral capitals during the war. It would be just as rational to introduce the pantomime policeman as a typical member of the Metropolitan Force.
CHAPTER 4
‘SELLING THE DUMMY’
ONE OF THE by-products of the intense activity in naval intelligence work all over Europe during the years between 1911 and 1914 was the planting of ‘faked’ news in the way of known agents.
This was an entirely different thing, of course, from the attempts on the part of the purely mercenary spy bureaux to dispose of ‘information’ to any gullible customer. Any number of amusing stories can be told of that aspect of the work.
For example, very shortly after the war began a plausible individual wormed his way into the confidence of a prominent British naval authority and offered him (for a price) plans of the latest German submarines.
He produced a printed folding diagram, large enough to occupy a complete spread of a daily newspaper, and closely annotated in German.
The authority was rather impressed. It looked like a real find. Fortunately he had at hand a colleague who knew Germany well. This man was called into consultation. And he pointed out, with as much gravity as he could muster, that the plan was a print produced by a well-known Berlin publisher as an extra illustration to a boys’ magazine, and that it had been sold on the bookstalls in thousands, at a shilling a time, for months before the war. It contained no information of any sort about German submarine construction that could not be found in the most elementary textbooks!
That same plausible gentleman, however, scored a minor triumph when he sold to the editor of a certain English review a ridiculous article on the German naval defences. The editor was unlucky. He had no colleague with first-hand German knowledge whom he could consult, and the article duly appeared, to the intense amusement of all those who knew the facts.
An attempt to ‘sell the dummy’, which may have been inspired from German sources or may have been a commercial effort on the part of a spy, led to very careful investigation of the admiralty a year or two before the war.
The would-be vendor, a German, offered a large-scale map of Borkum, which we regarded as the key of the German coastal defences in the Bight, and about which, as everyone knew, we had a quite legitimate curiosity. It was an enormous map, and it bore the imprint of the naval hydrographic bureau in Berlin.
It showed in full detail the batteries and other defensive works on the island, and at first sight was decidedly impressive. The German asked a very big price for it, something far beyond the means of our intelligence service to pay for out of its normal budget. But the offer was too promising to reject out of hand.
In order to present the case for it as strongly as possible in the right quarter, the head of the department decided to check it up with the information our own men had obtained about Borkum. And he found that the map was wrong in every important point!
The probability is that the attempt to plant it with us was officially inspired in Berlin. When the German called for his money he was politely shown the door but the map was retained by us as a souvenir, and thereafter adorned one of the walls at ID headquarters.
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br /> Lord Fisher always claimed to have achieved the outstanding success of ‘selling the dummy’ when he caused bogus plans of our first battlecruisers to be passed through to Berlin, as narrated in a previous chapter.
Lord Fisher made the story public in his memoirs, and since then it has been categorically repudiated by more than one German authority, notably Dr Bürkner, but there is nothing inherently improbable in the Fisher version, and the very fact that the Germans built the Blücher after we had laid down the first battlecruisers indicates strongly that they did not suspect the real nature of the ‘armoured cruisers’ included in the British programme for 1905.
Nevertheless, towards the end of 1908 it became privately known in British shipbuilding circles that plans, generally believed to be a complete set, of our first battlecruisers had vanished in transit between a shipyard and the admiralty. The boxes that should have contained them were intact and sealed, but from each box some of the plans were missing, and, collectively, the missing parts provided a definite guide to the design of the ships.
The first German battlecruiser, the Von der Tann, was laid down in 1909.
We know that the German intelligence department did purchase a considerable number of ‘dummies’. For some psychological reason the Russians were uncommonly good at planting spurious documents with the intelligence departments of other powers. The German Admiralty was as much interested in the Russian coastline and the fortifications of Riga, Libau and Reval as we were in the Heligoland Bight defences. It will be remembered that the German Baltic forces launched several attacks in the Moon Sound area of the Baltic during the war, and that on the first two occasions their efforts were remarkably unsuccessful.
One reason for this was that before the war the Russian counter-espionage bureau had planted with the German Admiralty (for a very large sum of money) wholly misleading plans of the defences in that area. British intelligence men who were in close touch with the Russians in the early months of the war were assured that the Germans had paid hundreds of thousands of marks for the plans, which were very skilfully prepared and full of the most detailed information – all of it wrong.
British intelligence agents working in Germany were either more shrewd or more fortunate than their opponents. Numberless efforts were made to palm off spurious plans on them, but rarely, very rarely, with success. At the admiralty it was well understood that material that came from our agents had been thoroughly sifted before being sent home, and that consequently there was good reason to credit it.
Our agents abroad dodged most of the spurious material, partly because they were so very careful about the men with whom they dealt. As will be made clear in the course of this volume, most of them depended for their facts almost entirely on personal observation. This in itself would have prevented them from falling into the traps laid for them. They were well aware of the danger of negotiating with any stranger who offered to furnish secret information. Agents provocateurs were ubiquitous and unwearying in their efforts to lay snares for our men. For that reason the latter refused time and again even to look at material that was offered to them, on the very simple plea that as they were not interested in naval or military secrets there was no point in inspecting the plans or other documents that the obliging agent provocateur might propose to show them.
Even so, a good deal of spurious matter did come their way. Early in 1912 one of their number was offered by a man, whom he knew to be trustworthy, diagrams revealing the secrets of the latest German dreadnoughts, the Nassau, Helgoland and Kaiser classes. In view of the source from which they were proffered, our agent felt justified in examining the plans; but as he had already placed with the home intelligence department complete details of all the ships in question, he did not expect to be able to do much more than verify his own report by the new material.
When the plans were laid before him it did not take five minutes for him to discover that they were spurious. What is more, he realised that he himself was probably in a position of grave danger. The sequel is best told in his own words:
The man I got them from had never tricked me before, but here, as plain as a pikestaff, was a set of faked plans. So far as I could see, there could only be one reason for their existence. The German counter-espionage had laid a trap for me.
For about half an hour I really knew what fear was.
I got those diagrams out of my possession in a few minutes, but even then I could not be sure that I had not left finger-prints on them that might be fatal to me.
I was in my own rooms, and every sound in the house made me quake. I expected to see the door open any moment and a couple of security police come in.
And, looking back on the incident, I see how inevitably a man in a panic does the foolish thing. I know that I did, and yet at the time it seemed to be the only possible course.
Slipping round the post office, I sent a telegram to myself, calling me to England to see my family.
In a cold sweat, I sat in a café for half an hour or so, to allow time for the telegram to reach my rooms and for my landlady to take it in. I wanted my alibi to be as complete as possible. And all the time I overlooked the very obvious point that the place of origin of the telegram was not London, but the German town I was living in! Months afterwards, when I was talking to ‘C’ about the adventure, he showed me the folly of this move.
Eventually I strolled back to my rooms, outwardly as calm and normal as usual, and was handed the telegram. Having told my landlady the message it contained, I went out to buy railway tickets and reserve a sleeper.
There were several hours to wait before the train was due.
Only those who have expected to be arrested at any moment can realise what I went through during that time. As far as possible I had to keep to my ordinary routine, in case I was being watched. The fact that I had got rid of the diagrams relieved my mind to some extent, though I was uncomfortably aware that the chance of doing so might only have occurred because the security police had blundered as to the time at which they were to visit my rooms and make the capture.
During those few hours, my imagination ran riot. As I walked along the platform to my coach on the train I expected every instant to feel a hand on my shoulder. It did not seem possible that I could get clear away. I went into the sleeper, and shut myself in, though what good that could do I cannot imagine, since the names of all those occupying coupés are on the list in the possession of the conductor.
The train started, and so far nothing had happened.
But that did not end my ordeal. We had several hours of travel through German territory before we reached the frontier, and there were a number of stopping places. Assuming the raid on my rooms to have been planned for after dark, there was still plenty of time for telegraphic instructions to hold me up.
As we approached the frontier I lay on my berth, fully dressed, in an agony of apprehension. I confess quite frankly that my nerve had temporarily gone. After living for several years in daily peril of detection, this collapse was not, perhaps, surprising.
At the frontier station we stopped as usual. I had given my passport to the conductor for him to show in order that I should not be disturbed, and there I lay in the darkness and the silence – waiting. Most of us associate railway stations with noise, but a frontier post in the small hours is silent as the grave, except for the occasional sound of the shunter’s horn or the footsteps of some official along the platform.
I could hear my heart beating, so profound was the silence in that coupé. My breath was coming in gasps. Frankly, I was just about at the end of my strength.
All at once the train began to move. It gathered speed.
I sat up. And the next minute was violently sick.
It isn’t romantic, but that’s how things are in real life. And once we were across the frontier, I got a grip on myself. I saw what an utter fool I had been to clear out so abruptly.
It wouldn’t do to go back at once, however. So I stopped off in Brussels, c
alled on some friends, and stayed a day or two with them. Then, fully master of my nerves once more, I went boldly back to my old headquarters in Germany and resumed my work, both pretended and real.
I had been the victim of a false alarm. As I found out afterwards, my man had got hold of some spurious diagrams from somewhere, but they had not been deliberately planted on him, and to this day I don’t believe the German security service ever had the slightest idea of what my real mission was during the years I worked under their noses.
Another man who was present when this story was told had also worked for our intelligence service in Germany.
‘I once had a bad fright,’ he said, ‘but mine went a bit further than yours. I was actually detained on suspicion – and then got away with it.’
He paused, and his listeners sat in expectant silence.
‘It does turn your stomach over, doesn’t it?’ he added after a moment, and then went on:
I had been up in one of the German naval bases, with a perfectly legitimate business to cloak me, and had gathered quite a lot of good information. I naturally did not send in a report from there, but waited till I was in an inland city. Then I wrote out a pretty full despatch in code, and put it into an envelope, with the address typewritten. I wrote another letter, just a chatty note, to a friend in Leeds, addressed the envelope in my own handwriting, choosing an envelope of a different shape and colour from that containing the report, and went out to post them both.
I had just dropped them into the pillar-box when I felt a touch on my arm. A German policeman and a man in plain clothes were standing by me.
‘Are you Herr So-and-so?’ asked the man in plain clothes.
I admitted it.
‘Would you mind coming with us to the town hall to show your papers?’
It was a most polite way of putting the request, and anyway I couldn’t refuse. So I accompanied them in a cab, though I did not enjoy the ride. It really looked as if the game was up.
Strange Intelligence: Memoirs of Naval Secret Service Page 5