Web of Spies

by Colin Smith

  Every drawer from the desk facing the window where he had seen Maeltzer working by the flare of his home-made lamps had been removed and emptied onto the floor. The sardine-tin lamps were still on the desk, as was the open spectacle case that had contained Maeltzer’s new reading-glasses. But now all the case contained was the optician’s receipt. What remained of the spectacles was on the floor where they had been crunched under a boot.

  Krag pocketed the receipt and cursed them for their stupidity, for their vandalism, and for the poverty that would drive a man to risk the bastinado if there was as much as an extra waistcoat to be had against the encroaching winter. It appeared that nothing was too trivial to steal, especially if it was edible.

  For at first glance he could not see a single lemon in the room. The Widow Shemsi, in her account of Maeltzer’s spontaneous juggling display, had drawn his attention to the journalist’s regular supply – which had set Maeltzer to thinking that a man could be partial to lemons for all sorts of reasons. For although most intelligence officers knew that a solution made from bird shit was the best and most durable invisible ink, lemon juice was effective enough if the recipient held the page to a candle flame before too many days had elapsed. An agent whose regular means of communication had been cut off might well resort to such tricks.

  Eventually he located a broken glass lying under the sheets with a segment of half-chewed lemon at the bottom. Well, it was a lemon. And lemons were difficult to obtain even for a serving officer, let alone a neutral civilian. Not that he really needed any more proof. He already had enough evidence to convince any doubters – he was sure of that but, like the policeman’s son he was, he wished to produce everything, however trivial or circumstantial, to show how diligent he had been.

  Krag tidied the place up a bit, put the bed back on its four legs and picked up the blankets and sheets, which he noticed could do with changing. After that he went over to the trunk, removed a pile of papers and sat on the bed while he read through them.

  They usually turned out to be rather short, hand-written notes from Maeltzer’s editor. On a couple of occasions he was asked to keep expenses down and reminded of the ever-increasing cost of newsprint at home. But to Krag’s surprise, for it had never occurred to him that Maeltzer might be a man of some standing among his own, the tone was often laudatory, praising him for the perception displayed in his latest article, urging him to look after his health, and generally reassuring.

  ‘Be certain,’ said one of the previous year, that any criticism that your despatches are too partisan must be balanced, at least for our fairer-minded readers, by the decidedly pro-Allied columns we publish from both Reuter’s and some of your colleagues in France. Verdun has excited a lot of admiration for the French and even the English are having to learn how to die (you may have gathered the affair on the Somme did not go well for them) because they are fast running out of agile Frenchmen to fight the Kaiser for them and the Americans still hesitate to enter the fray despite the U-boat sinkings.

  Then at the bottom of the trunk, right beneath the pile of letters, Krag saw something different. It was a piece of maroon velvet. He picked it up and thought for a moment there were two pieces of the material before he realised that what he had in his hand was the kind of skullcap worn by observant Jews.

  Krag turned it inside out. There was a dirty grey label sewn to its black cotton lining that might once have been white. Somebody, years ago, had inked a name onto this label. Krag walked over to the window and held it up to the light. The name was ‘Jacob Gonen’.

  It was a very old yarmoulka, the velvet almost bald in places. What did it mean to Maeltzer? The intelligence officer sat there on the bed, running the cap through his fingers as if it were worry beads.

  The idea came slowly and he hardly realised it had arrived until he found himself standing up and slapping his outstretched left palm with the hat. It would fit, he thought. It would fit very well. Anybody seeing the look of triumph on Krag’s face at that moment might have thought he had just been presented with Allenby’s complete order of battle.

  A search through the desk drawers revealed a couple of full cardboard packets of revolver ammunition; there was no sign of the pistol, and he assumed that it must have been stolen. Maeltzer’s possession of a gun did not surprise him. Civilian or not, wartime or peacetime, it was customary for male Europeans to be armed in the Levant. Almost everybody else was. Even so, he pocketed the cartridges which, he noticed, were of American manufacture.

  Krag almost overlooked the diary.

  The green-covered notebook had been kicked under the desk and he did not spot it until he knelt to replace a drawer and saw it lying there in an age of dust, open and face-down and as beckoning as a ripe fruit. It was open at 14 August 1916:

  I have discovered that the mysterious Widow Shemsi is the mistress of Kress’s chief intelligence officer, a certain Major Erwin Krag. The way a woman will exercise her choice in these matters never ceases to amaze me. He is a man of about forty, perhaps older, not very prepossessing to look at being painfully thin, gaunt-featured with permanently yellowed skin stretched over high cheekbones like old parchment. I have met this officer a few times around Fast’s and an extremely unpleasant, misanthropic character he appears to be, curt to the point of offensiveness if you greet him. Nor is it that this behaviour is confined to ‘neutral civilians’.

  Krag paused to light up a cheroot. His face betrayed no emotion. He might have been reading about somebody else.

  My young friend Weidinger informs me that the man is as unpleasant to everyone else he encounters, particularly the rank-and-file Germans and Austrians at headquarters, but sometimes cultivates a most unctuous manner towards Kress and other senior officers. Weidinger puts this down to the man’s own lowly social origins which make him feel the need to constantly demonstrate his authority, behaviour which would be inconceivable in a true Junker.

  He has been attached to the German Military Mission to the Turks for almost his entire military career and speaks both Turkish and Arabic. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, he has the reputation of being just as Turkophobe as the rest of the German officers here who often give the impression that they would like to sack the entire Turkish officer corps (with the possible exception of that fellow Mustafa Kemal who is holding the British off at Gallipoli) and replace them all with Prussian NCOs.

  Krag allowed himself a faint smile at this. There was a bit about the killing of Lieutenant Buchan.

  28 April 1917.

  Utterly distraught. I have no wish to leave this room. I am responsible, albeit unwittingly, for the death of another human being, a young British officer.

  Maeltzer went on to describe the circumstances. ‘Worst of all,’ he concluded, ‘I felt that Krag somehow held me personally responsible for it. He acted as if he was my moral superior and this added to my self-disgust, for I felt he was right.’

  ‘Good,’ said Krag out loud and then looked around to see if anybody had heard, quite astonished at himself. He continued to flick through more descriptions of people and places evidently intended to provide the raw material for the Maeltzer memoirs.

  ***

  16 October 1917.

  To the station to give the good sister my despatch. Found her easily enough in one of the Red Cross wagons marked for the wounded. Her patient was obviously horribly burned and in great pain although the poor boy seemed stoical enough about it. I suppose the last warriors to bear these sort of wounds were the Crusaders when their foes poured boiling oil over them.

  ***

  11 October 1917.

  Met W. in Beersheba. He was in a great state of excitement having picked up some important enemy papers from an English officer he chased when he went on a reconnaissance patrol with some Turkish lancers. He allowed me to examine them (swearing me to secrecy in his usual fashion) because his English is not very good. The papers appear to show that the English have no intention whatsoever of attacking on the Beersheba
flank and that all their demonstrations in this sector are no more than feints and diversions designed to lure units away from the Gaza front, where the main thrust will undoubtedly come. I must say the more I’ve got to know the English through this campaign the more I have become aware of their reliance on tricks and treachery even when the numbers are very much in their favour. So much for their famous sportsmanship and sense of fair play.

  The captured documents were in the haversack of a certain Colonel Bertram Coxhead. (When we were back in Jerusalem W. checked through the British Army list and saw that a Coxhead with that initial had been commissioned into the Royal Engineers in 1899.) They consisted of a letter from his wife containing twenty pounds in notes and two typewritten sheets marked SECRET. These appear to be a report made a few weeks ago by Allenby’s staff concluding that the water resources in this sector were dismal and it would be impossible to make any large-scale cavalry manoeuvres. On the top right hand corner of this report was a pencilled note – easy to miss at first – which appeared to come from a friend of Coxhead’s, perhaps of senior rank, at the British GHQ. ‘Bertie, I don’t believe a word of this,’ it read, ‘but the Bull does and it now appears that it’s definitely going to be Gaza again. You know what I think of this. Why don’t you take a look.’ The signature was illegible.

  Whoever he was he must have been disappointed when Bertie got back for the few jottings he had made in his notebook seemed to confirm the report. ‘It is difficult to believe that even the camels survive,’ he wrote.

  Krag was in the room for over an hour. He left it considerably tidier than he found it, having replaced the drawers and most of their contents in the bureau. He took the diary and the optician’s receipt with him and left strict instructions with the manager that no one was to be admitted until his men had removed all Herr Maeltzer’s belongings to a safe place.

  Then he strode up the road to Fast’s, brow furrowed in concentration. He was thinking of how best to conduct the interrogation of Maeltzer and how the fat Swiss would react when he saw the weight of the evidence against him. Weidinger was not going to come out of it unscathed either. And all from a man of, what was it? Ah yes. ‘Lowly social origins’.

  12

  REPORT TO COLONEL KRESS VON KRESSENSTEIN, COMMANDER EIGHTH TURKISH ARMY CORPS.

  SUBJECT: THE JOURNALIST KARL MAELTZER AND THE BRITISH DANIEL NETWORK.

  FROM MAJOR ERWIN KRAG. GENERAL STAFF OFFICER INTELLIGENCE, EIGHTH TURKISH ARMY CORPS. 21 OCTOBER 1917.

  There can now be no doubt that the Swiss journalist Karl Maeltzer is the British spy codenamed Daniel whose message was intercepted on the pigeon released by the Jewish agent Sarah Aaronsohn. It appears that one of his main unwitting informants was Oberleutnant Weidinger, who in many ways fell under the spell of this ‘neutral civilian’ and was not as discreet as he should have been. However, it is possible that Maeltzer had other sources both in Jerusalem headquarters and elsewhere. He is certainly connected with Aaronsohn who used the code name Nili for the group her brother Aaron set up among Zionists disillusioned with Ottoman rule. Attached is a despatch to Maeltzer’s newspaper that was to be taken to Vienna by a nursing sister. From there it was to be mailed to Zürich.

  It is written on lined paper with an unusual amount of space, three lines in some cases, between each paragraph. When I held page two to a candle flame a message written in ‘invisible ink’ appeared between paragraphs three and two. It reads: ‘SA dead. My last pigeon signal intercepted. Smolenskin arrested. Magnus disappeared. German officer found your assessment BS water resources. Daniel.’

  On the 16 October last Maeltzer had submitted this despatch for censorship after he had recently returned from an escorted tour of the Beersheba sector of the line. His article was mostly speculation about the likelihood of an imminent British offensive before the rains and whether the water problem would permit Allenby to push his cavalry through Beersheba instead of Gaza. In my opinion it contained nothing which was detrimental to our cause. On the contrary, as is often the case with Herr Maeltzer’s despatches, our enemies could only conclude by reading it that our forces would be able to repulse an attack now as easily as they did a few months ago.

  But I was struck (and not for the first time, for I have examined his despatches before) by these odd spaces between paragraphs. Then I recall that an informant had told me that Herr Maeltzer was particularly fond of lemons and would go to some lengths to obtain them despite the shortage. My suspicions were aroused and I decided to intercept the newspaper report at the station and make some tests to discover whether it had been tampered with after it had received the approval of my censor’s stamp. It was then that the message quoted above emerged.

  Before I saw Maeltzer in the citadel I also ordered the arrest of Smolenskin and Magnus. I had interrogated the Swede once before. He was arrested by the Turks a little over a year ago and would, I think, have been hanged had I not questioned him and concluded that he was, if anything, even madder than he appears. At that time I had asked Mrs Vester of the American Colony to see whether he could be repatriated to Sweden but there does not seem to have been any progress. On this occasion he could not be found in any of his usual haunts and remains missing.

  Smolenskin is decidedly not mad. He is, however, very scared and I think he is almost certainly telling the truth when he says that Magnus approached him and offered him money (English sovereigns, but of prewar mint) to put the prayer scrolls the Jews call kvitals into the wall. I must add that I am greatly indebted to Oberleutnant Weidinger, who first drew my attention to the fact that Magnus seemed so amply funded, and thanks to the Oberleutnant’s alertness in this matter I was able to have the Swede under surveillance for some time. This established the link between Smolenskin and Magnus although I was quite unable to prove any clandestine contact between Maeltzer and our speaker-of-tongues. This puzzled me and I began to wonder whether I was making a bad mistake.

  Then it occurred to me. There was no clandestine contact. There did not need to be. It was well known around this headquarters that Maeltzer was a generous fellow and that when they met on the street he regularly gave Magnus small sums of money and exchanged a few words with him, sometimes I have observed more than a few words. During these ‘chance meetings’ it was easy for Maeltzer to slip Magnus some of his private prayers; prayers he had sworn him to secrecy about.

  Smolenskin said that he thought that Magnus was mad, but in such hard times who was he to question divine providence? He told me that he had sometimes examined ‘the gibberish’ written on the kvitals and this had only confirmed his belief that Magnus was quite insane. He insisted, of course, that it had never occurred to him that this ‘gibberish’ might possibly be a cipher. Smolenskin is a clever old man and I find this difficult to believe. However, I am willing to accept that he was no more than a go-between for Magnus and the Nili group, for it is my belief that these messages were picked up by the fugitive Joseph Lishansky and passed to Sarah Aaronsohn, since no female could visit that section of the wall without causing a riot. I think in the case of both Smolenskin and Magnus we might try to persuade the Turks to show a little mercy.

  When I first saw Maeltzer after his arrest he maintained an indignant attitude and generally acted, I thought, like a well-trained agent who was more than comfortable with the role he had chosen for his camouflage. He made repeated demands to telegraph his newspaper, to see you, to be visited by the Swiss consul. I said it might be better if he answered some questions first.

  I did not confront him immediately with the secret message I had discovered in his despatch but rather concentrated on the more circumstantial evidence against him. There was, for instance, the matter of the reading spectacles that had fallen through the machicolation at the Damascus Gate when you were engaged in a conversation with Major von Papen. I showed him the spectacle frames that had been given to me by Major von Papen and asked if they were his? He said they were not. I then produced the receipt (attached) for new reading sp
ectacles I had found in his room and asked him why he had felt it necessary to buy a new pair.

  For the first time he began to lose some of his composure. We were sitting at a camp table I had asked to be brought into his cell and he began to mumble and then asked me if he could have some water and something to smoke. I ordered him the water and said that I might be able to find him a cheroot after he had told me what I wanted to know. I put aside, for the moment, the matter of the spectacles and asked him why he had felt it necessary to acquire the Turkish laissez-passer I had discovered in his room.

  He replied that, as a journalist, such documents were necessary for the pursuit of his craft. He said he had obtained the pass by bribing a Turkish officer with the gift of an American revolver. Ammunition I found in his room would fit a pistol of this type.

  Would the document, I asked, enable him to walk along the walls of the Old City, an area forbidden to civilians by the Turkish authorities since the start of hostilities?

  ‘Look,’ he replied, ‘I admit the spectacles are mine. It was silly of me to lie to you. I supposed I panicked – just as I did when they dropped through the hole. I was out for a walk along the parapet and I heard these voices but couldn’t see where they were coming from. You know how that place is at dusk, Major, it’s quite ghostly. I was curious to confirm that the voices came from the gate below me, that’s all. When the spectacles fell out of my pocket and through the hole I was embarrassed and ran off. Nobody likes to be caught eavesdropping. But if you think I was listening because I am a spy you’re crazy. I thought the idea that spies listened in at key holes belonged strictly to Molière.’

  This sounded reasonable enough so I permitted him one of my cigarettes and he seemed to relax. I then produced the despatch he had submitted for censorship. He obviously had not expected to see it again and he began to look very alarmed. I turned to the second page and showed him the scorched brown writing that had come through when I held a candle to it.