Strange Intelligence: Memoirs of Naval Secret Service

by Hector C. Bywater

  Although neither of the accused would disclose the actual identity of ‘Reggie’, they were very frank about him in other ways, admitting that his private telegraphic address was ‘Sunburnt, London’, and that they had asked him to meet them at Delfzyl, just across the border in Holland, at the end of their visit to Borkum.

  Another mystery figure was ‘Charles’, whom Lieutenant Brandon claimed was himself, while a ‘John Birch’ mentioned in their correspondence was claimed by Captain Trench as his own alias.

  One of the disclosures that caused most sensation in Germany was a statement by the accused that the British Admiralty possessed a ‘Naval Baedeker’. This book was stated to be a private compilation, available only to naval officers, containing information about the German coast and coastal defences.

  Some idea of the class of information contained in it was disclosed in the course of the evidence.

  Thus, Lieutenant Brandon was, admittedly, a surveying officer in the British Navy, and he had with him at the time of the visit to Germany photographic and surveying instruments. Captain Taegert, IGN, the expert called for the German government, said that the notes found in the possession of the accused contained information about the length and width of landing stages and depth of water at Sylt, Amrum, and other islands. Notes made by Captain Trench were read out in court, but with certain figures and names omitted. One memorandum read as follows:

  Breakwaters, coal sheds, coal stores here. There are no cranes. Railway lines by bridge. Bridge x yards long x yards wide. Cement wall all round promenade. Wells in all villages. Indifferent roads. White reefs not visible at flood tide.

  In regard to Wangerooge there was a note in Lieutenant Brandon’s writing:

  Landing piers x high, x long, x broad. Milk and eggs come from the mainland. Only five buildings on the west side. Seen no building that can contain mines. The beacon furthest out is occupied and has telegraphs.

  An interesting point developed in regard to Wangerooge. The German expert declared that the notes on the fortifications there were a most serious matter, as they were treated with the utmost secrecy officially. Lieutenant Brandon countered this by claiming that his attention was drawn to the subject by an article in a German paper, which he had read in London.

  Captain Taegert also pointed out that at Cuxhaven the accused had taken angles from a dyke, with two churches on the mainland and the position of the fortifications entered on the map in accordance with these observations. Captain Taegert added that he had examined the measurements and found them extraordinarily accurate.

  On the sketches dealing with Heligoland, he continued, the quick-firing battery was marked, with measurements of the distances between some of the gun positions. The distances from the extremities of the batteries to the lighthouse were also measured. Further, the gun positions on the south-east and north-west were accurately sketched.

  The contention of the defence was that the soundings taken around Sylt and other Frisian Islands were intended for public admiralty charts, issued for the use of pinnaces and other small craft belonging to British warships that visited German North Sea ports in time of peace.

  Captain Trench said that his report on Cuxhaven was actually compiled in England from the ‘Naval Baedeker’, and Lieutenant Brandon stated that he had a list of questions to answer with regard to that place. It was not compulsory to answer any of the questions derived from the ‘Naval Baedeker’. Officers who travelled could answer them or not as they chose.

  To this defence the prosecution replied, through Captain Taegert, that English warships had never entered those waters in time of peace, and consequently there could be no object in compiling notes for the purpose alleged. In landing operations, he declared, Sylt would become of prime importance as a point d’appui, and the landing stage on the island had been measured and photographed in great detail by the accused. They had, moreover, noted the shallows while bathing.

  Counsel for the defence suggested that the measurements of depths made in this way could be of no importance, as the tides were not taken into account. Captain Taegert could not agree, pointing out that the measurements were not merely estimated, but were actually taken.

  From the final speeches for the prosecution it became clear that the idea that all this information was collected with a view to facilitating a sudden British naval attack on the German North Sea coast had been impressed on the court during one of the sittings held in camera. For political reasons, most of the proceedings took place in public; indeed, the imperial prosecutor had asked at the first session that this should be so. But on the morning of the second and last day of the trial there was a lengthy secret sitting, at which military and general staff experts gave evidence.

  It was noteworthy that the prosecution throughout treated the accused with marked mildness, and did not press for the full rigour of the law. Indeed, in his final address to the court, Dr Zweigert, the imperial prosecutor, said that the fact of the prisoners being foreigners who had acted in the interests of their own country, under the direct orders of the intelligence service, might be regarded as extenuating circumstances. The accused had denied the imputed connections, but counsel thought they had done so from honourable motives.

  The circumstance that they had never sought to induce Germans to assist them, and had made a partial confession, also mitigated the gravity of the charge. He therefore asked that Captain Trench and Lieutenant Brandon should each be sentenced, not to penal servitude, but to imprisonment in a fortress for six years, two and a half months of the time during which they had been in custody to be included.

  The fifteen judges – all robed in long purple gowns with velvet facings, and wearing quaint round purple velvet caps – retired, the president, Judge Menge, leading the way. He was a man of patriarchal appearance, with a flowing snow-white beard.

  They were absent for two hours considering their judgment. Dusk was falling in the crowded courthouse as they filed in again. A single chandelier suspended from the high ceiling was the only source of light in the court room as Judge Menge announced judgment and sentence.

  The verdict was guilty, and the sentence four years’ detention in a fortress.

  It is important to note the difference between penal servitude (a criminal sentence) and fortress detention (an officers’ punishment that involves no professional dishonour). The German law provides that either form of sentence may be inflicted in cases of espionage. That the Leipzig Court chose the milder way, as suggested by the imperial prosecutor, showed that diplomatic considerations had prevailed in the case.

  There was a certain significance, too, in the comments of the German papers at the time. On the day after the trial, for example, the Berliner Tageblatt said:

  The two Englishmen only committed an offence that is regularly committed by numerous officers of all countries, and apart from this their bearing in court left an extremely favourable impression on every one. Having had the misfortune to be caught, they took no trouble to deny what was evident; while at the same time they frankly refused to say anything that would compromise a third person or cause any embarrassment to their own naval authorities. Their attitude deserves all respect. We hope the two gentlemen will not be obliged to remain in a German fortress too long … and that at some suitable opportunity –certainly not later than King George’s coronation – the remainder of their sentence will be remitted.

  This prophecy, if it were not inspired, was certainly a signal instance of intelligent anticipation on the part of the editor. The actual pardon by the Kaiser was delayed until May 1913, and was then granted on the occasion of the visit of King George to Berlin to attend the wedding of the Kaiser’s only daughter.

  They had then served two years and five months of the sentence, Captain Trench at Glatz and Lieutenant Brandon first at Wesel and subsequently at Königsberg.

  Both officers were actively engaged during the war. For part of the time Major Trench was base intelligence officer at Queenstown, busily occupied
in the work of tracking German submarines at sea.

  Captain Brandon, as he came to be, was assistant director of naval intelligence at the admiralty in 1918.

  There was a world of difference between the Brandon–Trench affair and the next famous ‘espionage’ case in Germany – the Bertrand Stewart episode. In the first-named case the German authorities may be said to have stumbled quite accidentally across the accused. In the second, the alleged spy was the victim of a deliberate plot to entangle him. He was betrayed to the Germans by an agent provocateur specially detailed for the work, and, as is made evident by the published judgment of the court that tried him, no actual case was ever proved against him. Mr Bertrand Stewart himself always protested his innocence. Nevertheless, he was condemned and sentenced, remaining in confinement for rather more than a year before he, too, was pardoned by the Kaiser at the same time as Brandon and Trench.

  The Stewart case is a striking example of the perils that surrounded the intelligence agent who was working in Germany. It exposed to public gaze the network of counter-espionage that the German authorities had built up, and it showed how vitally necessary it was for the intelligence man to work almost wholly on his own. If he made any use of outside assistance, if he took information from other people at all, he had to be absolutely satisfied of their good faith before entering into any sort of negotiations with them.

  The story of the Stewart case was summarised so clearly in the court’s judgment that it cannot be better told than in these words:

  The first thing that concerns us is that he procured the exact address in a small place of a man whom he used as agent for his espionage purposes. He promised this man £100 if the latter declared himself ready to act as agent in the transmission of news, and prisoner eventually adopted a false address where his correspondence could be delivered.

  On the evening of 29 July 1911, the accused travelled from London and sought out this agent in Germany. He had a long conversation with him, in the course of which the prisoner handed over to the agent a first payment – namely, £5. On a later occasion he gave him a further sum of £10…

  After the agent had again returned to Bremen, on 31 July, about five o’clock in the morning, the prisoner held a long conversation with him in the waiting room, and the agent made him an exhaustive report. Next day the prisoner left Hamburg and visited Cuxhaven, was also in Heligoland, and then returned via Wilhelmshaven and Bremerhaven to Bremen.

  At Bremen, on the night of 1 August, he had another long conversation with the agent in a waiting room of the railway station. The agent, who likewise had been making inquiries in the meantime, submitted to the prisoner on this occasion a drawing that provided information relating to the preparedness of the German fleet in the North Sea. The prisoner took this report, read it through, and then tore it up and threw it aside.

  Shortly after this the prisoner was arrested in Bremen.

  Nothing more has been proved against the prisoner in the course of the trial. There has been, in particular, no confirmation in the trial of the rumours that suggested that the prisoner, acting under the orders of the English Information service, had collected important secrets in Germany by bribery. The prisoner’s journey and his transactions were rather the result, as he himself has submitted, of his own initiative…

  As far as the verdict is concerned, it may be left an open question whether the prisoner or his agent would in reality have succeeded in determining the disposition of the ships in the North Sea in the summer of 1911. It may also be left an open question what really were the contents of the agent’s report that the prisoner tore up.

  Stewart was found guilty of an attempt to unearth military secrets, but his patriotic motive was a circumstance that weighed in his favour, and he was sentenced to detention in a fortress for three years and six months, reduced by four months on account of the period of his detention while awaiting trial.

  The sentence roused intense indignation in Great Britain. Undoubtedly the judgment rested upon an extremely weak case, leaving a great number of pertinent questions unanswered. This trial, unlike that of Brandon and Trench, was held in camera throughout, only the judgment being made public; but later on enough information was forthcoming from various sources to make it clear that the whole case for the prosecution rested on the evidence of the agent provocateur.

  Who was this man?

  He was a Belgian, calling himself Frederic Rue, but his real name was Arsène Marie Verrue. He was born at Courtrai on 14 February 1861.

  British investigators soon got on the track of his record, when it was discovered that he had been sentenced on several occasions for robbery and for assault with violence. He had at one time run a soap factory, but had gone bankrupt, the official records of the bankruptcy in 1894 being marked by the Tribunal ‘non-excusable’. Later he was representative in Belgium for a British brewery company, which in 1905 charged him with appropriating cheques given to him for the payment of creditors and with forging the endorsements thereto.

  He disappeared, but was tried in his absence and sentenced to four terms of six months each on the various counts.

  Publication of these facts did nothing to allay feeling in Britain. Evidence from such a tainted source was felt to be inadmissible. Further investigation soon established that Verrue was certainly in the pay of the Brussels spy bureau, of which we already had some knowledge, and of which a man calling himself R. H. Peterssen was the head. He had other names – Müller, Pieters, Schmidt, and Talbot among them.

  While this bureau was partly an international exchange for the naval and military secrets of every country, it was also made use of by the German authorities for purposes of counter-espionage. There was a definite scale of charges, among them one of £4 5s. for the betrayal of an intelligence man working in Germany. It was never definitely established that the plot that led to the arrest of Stewart was fomented by the German authorities, but there was no doubt that the trap had been deliberately laid by Peterssen.

  The British intelligence department knew a great deal about Herr Peterssen. He had planted spies in Britain for Germany. Only a short time before the Stewart case his name had been mentioned in public court, in the course of the trial at Winchester Assizes of Heinrich Grosse, who was there found guilty of espionage.

  The information we had was that Peterssen was in receipt of a regular monthly salary from German sources of £50 and expenses, and was paid a bonus of £4 5s for every spy detected in Germany through his organisation.

  Peterssen was not particularly successful. His methods were so crude and blatant that much came to be known about his activities. He advertised freely in the Belgian papers, offering to buy information. He could do this with impunity, because there was at that time no law against espionage in Belgium.

  One of his advertisements was answered by a sergeant in the Belgian army who found himself in monetary difficulties. Peterssen asked him for information about certain Belgian fortresses. This the sergeant could not provide, but he offered to furnish documents relating to French mobilisation.

  Herr Peterssen rubbed his hands. This was a splendid catch. He arranged for the sergeant to get the documents and proceed to a small suburban station outside Brussels, there to meet a man who would come from Aix-la-Chapelle.

  Now, Aix is very near the frontier, and after leaving Peterssen’s office, the sergeant began to dislike the whole business. While the cold fit was still on him he went to M Victor Darsac, then editor of the great Brussels evening paper Le Soir, and told him the whole story.

  M Darsac acted promptly. He at once informed the authorities, and in agreement with them arranged to send a crowd of reporters and photographers to the suburban railway station at the appointed time, to be present at the interview.

  The German agent duly arrived to meet the sergeant.

  He met him – but he also met the local municipal authorities, who gave him a mock civic welcome, while the camera men photographed the scene and the reporters made copio
us notes.

  And in the courtyard in front of the station a Belgian military band ironically played ‘Die Wacht Am Rhein’ for his edification.

  It was a glorious comedy – with no tragic results for anybody, since there was no law against espionage. But the German agent went back to Aix-la-Chapelle and beyond in a very bad temper, doubtless feeling as much of a fool as any German secret service agent could be made to feel.

  The outcry in Britain against the condemnation of Stewart evoked, of course, an equally bitter response in Germany.

  In an interview published by the Hamburger Nachrichten, Verrue denied point blank all the allegations made against him.

  His own story was that he was paid by both the British and German governments, but that he found the British so niggardly and the Germans so generous that ‘he conceived it to be his duty to save Germany from the effects of British espionage’.

  Exactly what fees Verrue received has never been established. Mr Stewart after his release expressed the opinion that, from beginning to end, the German government paid £1,000 for the evidence that procured his sentence.

  The Bertrand Stewart case is perhaps the most dramatic instance of the agent provocateur’s part in secret service work that has ever become known outside the innermost circles. Of Stewart’s innocence, legally, there was never any question. At the most, he ventured indiscreetly into places from which any foreign visitor to Germany in the year 1911 would have been well advised to keep away unless he had business there.

  Stewart’s own story was that at Cuxhaven he walked along the public road adjoining the harbour for twenty minutes, after asking two German officers if this was permitted and being answered in the affirmative. In Heligoland he walked for eighteen minutes in the public street without speaking to anyone. In Wilhelmshaven he walked alone, quickly and without stopping, from the steamboat pier to the railway station through the public streets.