by Andrew Cook
A Cabinet photograph on the back of which the words London, February 1913 were written in ink.
The fact that this photograph represented a man in police uniform and was signed ‘G. Steinhauer’ was not reported.
On 4th April 1914 the Continental Daily Mail, also reporting the trial of Gould, referred to the search made by the British Secret Service to establish the identity of the agent who signed himself Schmidt, RH or CF, Peterssen, P, and Richard, aliases used by Steinhauer in the Gould, Grosse and Parrott correspondence.34
Steinhauer was being told in no uncertain terms via the Continental Daily Mail that SSB existed, was onto him, and had evidence to bring a case against him. On 26 March Steinhauer’s photograph was circulated to Dover, Folkestone, Queenborough and Harwich and evidence submitted to the DPP. A solid case would also require proof that he had actually procured Gould to obtain information which might be useful to an enemy, and in support of this telegrams were produced in which Gould had asked for money for his services in 1912 and Steinhauer had sent it by registered post. There were also letters to Holstein. On 27 March an arrest warrant was issued.
Three months later, on 28 June, the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand was shot at Sarajevo and, thanks to the network of protective agreements now in place, war between the superpowers was imminent: but when? Steinhauer was ordered back to England.
At the end of June, 1914… I found myself on the Belgian coast anxiously asking how I should get into England, in what guise, and more important still, how I could trick my old foe at the War Office in Whitehall.
I knew him, oh yes, and he knew me. Would he, or some of his men armed with my photograph, be waiting for me at Dover?
Well, yes. His book claims that he put the British off the scent with fake postcards to be sent via the Caledonian Road. Whatever he did, it worked; he did at least get to London unnoticed. There, he claims that he went to Becker’s Hotel in Finsbury Square where a jumpy waiter called Albrecht wanted him gone because Scotland Yard men were hanging around. Steinhauer moved on. He visited Mrs Hentschel at Chatham but she
…was anxious only that I should be gone, for, as she said bitterly, the English people had given her a terrible time ever since the exposure of Parrott.
Another spy, a Sittingbourne photographer called Losel, was also ‘very uncomfortable and anxious to get rid of me’.35 It seems that by this time fear was overtaking the network. Most of these minor players recognised that war was coming and when it did, they could risk long jail sentences or worse. They were sorry they had ever got involved.
All this time,
It would have taken more than my old friend, Melville of Scotland Yard – he had ostensibly retired from the police but still carried on his Secret Service activities – to have recognised me in Hendryk Fritsches, the Dutch manager of a Hamburg coffee merchant.
Even Melville, whose cleverness in the case of Parrott I readily admit, might have looked more than twice before he discovered in the elegant Dutchman with the mutton-chop whiskers and the monocle his formidable adversary, Steinhauer.36
The facial hair, hats and bulky, ill-fitting tailoring of the period must have assisted disguise. But was Steinhauer such a formidable adversary? His vanity was colossal. It is impossible to imagine Melville presenting an agent with a signed photograph. And as the British file on Steinhauer laconically comments,
In July 1914 it became known that a man named Fritsches, a traveller in jute, was in this country. This name was already known to the Security Service and was suspected of being an alias of Steinhauer. Every effort was made to identify him and effect his arrest, but without success.37
Again he eluded Melville, yet narrowly. He headed north, visiting a series of nervous agents and telling them to leave for Germany, and spent a week in the east of Scotland on a ‘fishing trip’ taking depth soundings and hearing about troop movements. He got out by the skin of his teeth, having aroused suspicion, at the end of July.
The agents were less fortunate. On 4 August 1914 with the declaration of war only hours away, twenty-one of the twenty-two names on the MI5 list are said to have been rounded up in towns and cities all over Britain. In fact, on 5 August, the Home Secretary Reginald McKenna stood up in the House of Commons and made a statement to the House that the operation had been a great success and that twenty-one German spies had been arrested. However, much is still unclear in terms of who the twenty-one spies actually were. The fact that three separate lists were subsequently published by Kell’s Bureau has somewhat compounded the confusion.38 While a list of twenty-two targets was initially drawn up, it would seem that when the Home Secretary made his statement, only nine (as opposed to twenty-one) suspected spies on Kell’s list had in actual fact been arrested. However, the Director of Public Prosecutions reported the following year that, ‘24 German spies were arrested at the outbreak of war under the Official Secrets Act 1911’. Intriguingly, not all the names on this list appeared on Kell’s target list of twenty-two. When, in 1921, the Bureau was writing its own internal history of the war years, the list of twenty-one that appeared did not correspond entirely with either the 1914 target list or the DPP’s report.
The solution to this conundrum seems to lie in the fact that the 1914 list was very much a ‘wish list’, while the DPP list reflected actual arrests. By 1921, few in the Bureau had worked for it a decade earlier, and those responsible for writing the internal history had little or no direct knowledge of what did or did not happen in 1914. It would seem that their 1921 list was actually based on a July 1915 press report from the Daily Chronicle which summarised the DPP’s report and listed twenty-four names – however, unknown to the internal historians, the Chronicle’s article actually contained a number of factual errors, due in part to inaccurately copying down extracts from the DPP report.
Most of those arrested in August 1914 were interned (held in custody without charge or trial) for the duration of the war. Karl Gustav Ernst, having been arrested with the rest, petitioned the Home Secretary on grounds that he was a British subject, and therefore could not legitimately be interned as an alien. As a result he was charged with treason and espionage: a capital offence. He was tried in November 1914 and imprisoned for seven years.
As the rolling-up of the network was handled by Special Branch, and there was now plenty of time to interrogate the internees, life at MI5 proceeded undisturbed. An unsigned internal memo dated the first day of the war, 5 August, advises that ‘it is desirable to find out a little more about’ a Mr Robertson, resident of the Salisbury Hotel and Secretary of the Neutrality League of 12 St Bride Street, who
…has been publishing articles in various newspapers calling upon Englishmen to do their duty! (This consists in stopping the war.)
Typed below is:
Mr M to enquire.
On 7 August Mr M submitted the following:
I have made enquiries and learned that the Neutrality League no longer exists at 12 St Bride Street. It was only at this address for a few days and got into an office there while the tenant was away. The people who came there respecting the league were a nondescript crowd of cranks, male and female – not at all numerous.
Dr Robertson the supposed Secretary is a fictitious name. The real name of the man was Mr Langdon Davis, of whom however nothing seems to be known at present.
The Salisbury Hotel people would have nothing to do with the League. The Neutrality League was really got up by Mr Norman Angell, 4 King’s Bench Walk, and the defunct remnants have now gone to that address.
The raison d’être of the League was that some unknown person gave £200 for the purpose. It is not unlikely the German Ambassador knew something about it. This was the money which enabled the League to advertise, but the cash was soon spent. The persons frequenting the office were a needy-looking lot. A Mr C.E. Fayle was also connected with it.
This is pretty good detective work in two days, even allowing for the convenient proximity of the ‘defunct remnants’ right behind Te
mple Chambers in King’s Bench Walk.
Melville’s work proved that he knew what he was doing and his superior officers listened to him. Thanks to this, and Kell’s meticulous inventory of facts about who was doing what and where, SSB was pretty much on top of home security when war began. Cumming too knew about the disposition and movements of the German navy thanks to sub-agents recruited on the Baltic and North Sea coasts. Further, his men abroad were technically adept as Steinhauer’s were not. Bywater, for instance sent back reports such as this, describing his own memorisation of defences both existing and planned at Sylt…
In rear of the second coast battery was an armoured fire-control station with a very large range-finder; the base I estimated at 25 feet.
Here I may interpolate that the calibre of the guns in the batteries was ascertained, not by a direct inspection of the guns, but by observing ammunition being unloaded from railway trucks at Emden for shipment to the island. Howitzer shells of 11 inches and gun projectiles of 9.4 inches were definitely identified...39
The Admiralty was concerned that von Tirpitz was working with Krupp to provide superior armaments. The arms race was on and the Germans were suspicious of snooping Englishmen. Yet Cumming was able to receive from Borkum items such as a sketch-map which
…showed the site of each battery with the number and calibre of its guns; the location of all magazines, bomb-proof shelters, and observation posts; the positions prepared amidst the sand dunes for the mobile 4.1 inch high-velocity guns which were to supplement the fixed defences and the narrow-gauge railway and paved roads that had been made for the transport of troops and material. Other details indicated were the main and emergency wireless stations, the secret telegraph and telephone cables leading from garrison HQ to the mainland – as distinct from the ocean cable lines which traverse Borkum – and indeed every feature of the entire defensive system.40
The British took pains to find out about the ‘weaker’ German navy; the Germans, over-confident in their own military superiority, had no up-to-date intelligence from the British army. Steinhauer lacked Melville’s credibility with superior officers. Steinhauer also made mistakes which played in MI5’s favour. He should have wound up the letter-drop network at the first suspicion that it was intercepted. He left it in place and played into British hands. When war began, German informants in England were detained and Berlin’s flow of news stopped.
As a result, as late as 21 August the Germans did not know that the British Expeditionary Force was on its way. In concentrating on their enemy’s maritime force, they had lost sight of their own weakest point: the vulnerability in the Schlieffen Plan that left them open to attack from the west as their mighty army wheeled south and east through Belgium and northern France.
TWELVE
G MEN
Karl Hans Lody was the first German spy arrested, tried and sentenced during the First World War. He was a former naval officer who, too impecunious to maintain the social expense of a position in the navy, had quit in his twenties to become a tour guide overseas. Now in his late thirties, he had travelled widely, spoke English with an American accent, and had lost nothing of his patriotic fervour. But as a spy, he was hopelessly unwary, trusting and untrained.1
Some writers have sought to explain away Germany’s use of such a man with the excuse that, their English spy network having been silenced, they were desperate. In fact, in July of 1914 when Lody volunteered his services, the network was still in place.
He was provided with a genuine American passport in the name of Charles A. Inglis by the German authorities in Berlin less than twenty-four hours before a state of war was declared. A couple of weeks later he returned to Norway, where he had been working, in his new identity. From there he entered Britain (probably via Hull) as an American tourist. So far he had not incited suspicion. The war was, after all, not yet the Great War. It was a long-overdue trouncing of the belligerent Hun that would be over by Christmas. American visitors were routine enough.
From the time of his arrival in Edinburgh on 27 August things began to go wrong; not only because he lacked sense, but because nobody had prepared or trained him for the job. He hired a bicycle, and pedalled around naval installations taking notes and asking questions. He sent an uncoded telegram to someone with a German name in Stockholm. He sent another, and another. He left forwarding addresses and travelled to London, whence he sent news of the defences of public buildings. He went to Liverpool, and wrote letters about the refitting of cruise liners that was going on in the docks. Nothing was encoded or written in invisible ink. Then he went to Dublin, and it was decided that the evidence already intercepted was enough to detain him. In Killarney he was arrested by officers of the Royal Irish Constabulary.
Trotter, now a Major, sat on the Court Martial that tried him at the Middlesex Guildhall at the end of October, Captain ‘Blinker’ Hall, from naval intelligence, was among the witnesses, and Mr Bodkin prosecuted. The case against him rested more on mail interceptions than anything else. Patriotism was his motive. This was counted in his favour, but did not save him because it was necessary to make an example of him. Lody was duly removed from the court to the Tower of London where his deportment was brave and courteous to the end. ‘May my life be honoured as a humble offering on the altar of the Fatherland’, he wrote to his relations in Stuttgart. Patriotism of this mystic, quasi-religious type was normal in the officer class at the time, and led Germany into a lot of trouble later. He was led into a room at the Tower, seated in a chair and shot by an eight-man firing squad on 6 November 1914.2
Under the Aliens Restriction Act, which was rushed through on the first day of the war, ‘enemy aliens’ – Germans who had settled in England and had English children, for instance – must register with the police and were usually restricted in their movements and activities. The Defence of the Realm Act of 8 August 1914 – ‘Dora’ – went further and pretty well imposed martial law on everyone, including aliens from neutral countries. Thomson of Scotland Yard insisted that ‘It is necessary in the interests of public safety that the police should be almost unreasonably circumspect in dealing even with [aliens] against whom nothing specific may be known.’ The powers of the State to ‘defend the realm’ from the people by preventing them from moving or communicating were wider than ever before.
MI5’s anti-espionage section understood perfectly well that Germans were not necessarily spies and spies were not necessarily German. On the other hand, Berlin was more inclined to trust people of ‘German blood’ or neutrals, suspecting British agents of playing a double game. So suspicion fell particularly on foreigners communicating with the continent.
Lody was the first of many wartime spies whose arrests arose out of mail interception. Once war began, systematic examination of the mail could be acknowledged in court. This had been a more delicate matter before mobilisation, not least because it put the enemy on their guard. In wartime accused aliens were usually tried by courts martial, detailed evidence being unavailable to the press. Captain Lawrence’s special section had been intercepting mail to and from the addresses of known spies abroad for some time, and during the war teams of postal censors were put in place. There were well over a thousand of them by 1918. Through them, the special section of MI5 fed Melville’s detective section with a stream of names and addresses to investigate. By 1916 he had seven full-time ‘shadowing staff ’ all believed to have been ex-Metropolitan Police officers. 3
Kell’s outfit was also re-designated – at least twice. From 17 August, a fortnight after war began, Melville and Regan and Fitzgerald, his first two detectives, became part of ‘G Section’ of MI5. A chart of October 1915 shows Lt-Col Vernon Kell (working to Cockerill who works to the DMO, Major-General Callwell) in joint charge of other MI departments, but in sole charge of MI5 E, F, G and H. MI5 G under Major Drake is responsible for ‘Detection of Espionage’. Other specific tasks covered by E, F and H include administration of counter-espionage, military policy regarding aliens, organis
ation of counter-espionage at ports, and so on.4
Homeland security and military and naval intelligence abroad were fast becoming a huge, sprawling series of slightly differing fields of responsibility employing thousands of people, from military personnel to clerks and typists; keeping the security services secure must have been problematic, despite the obligatory signature of a declaration under the Official Secrets Act.
The natural division between Kell’s counter-espionage, counter-insurgency people, and the interests of Cumming’s SIS which lay largely overseas, was finally rectified when MI1(C) and MI5 opened for business as separate arms of a new Directorate of Military Intelligence in January 1916. Melville was still based in Temple with his Detective Section or ‘Special Staff ’, but it was from then onwards part of MI5.5
Detective work arose from mail interceptions; mail interceptions arose from suspicion; suspicion arose from the Port Police. And the public. Within months of the war’s beginning the British public, if Sidney Felstead is to be believed, were suffering from ‘spy mania’:
Where is the man or woman who did not know a German who had a concrete gun platform built in his back garden?… And who… did not know of a fashionable restaurant patronised by naval and military staff officers where German spies disguised as harmless waiters were always found to be standing at the back of officers’ chairs, carefully gleaning the conversation which was taking place?… The number of people who were reported to the police as signalling to Zeppelins ran into thousands: in practically every instance the culprit was either a careless servant girl or a blind flapping in the breeze… There was an unfortunate individual from whose house a light had been seen on the night of a particular raid, reported to the authorities as having been seen signalling to the enemy, who was raided first by the Competent Military Authority, then by the police, and lastly by the naval authorities, who drew a cordon round the house and then sent a bluejacket to swarm up the balcony and seize the culprit in the act.6
