Strange Intelligence: Memoirs of Naval Secret Service

by Hector C. Bywater

  It is to be feared that they also dealt in the same unceremonious way with the body of the German who was travelling in charge of the gear. When the need arose, secret service work was not conducted in kid gloves by either of the opposing parties.

  That much is made evident by another story, this time from the United States.

  Before America came into the war it was, of course, the business of her authorities to see that none of the interned German ships got away to act as a commerce destroyer. But we were able to give them a good deal of help in the work, owing to our specialised knowledge of the personnel and methods of the Teutonic war organisation ‘behind the lines’ in the United States.

  Of the score or more of German liners that had voluntarily interned themselves in New York Harbour on the outbreak of the war, at least six proposed to get away if they could. Arrangements had been made by German agents for these vessels to meet, at a rendezvous off Virginia Capes; a camouflaged German ship would supply them with guns, ammunition and other requisites for their mission as commerce raiders.

  In point of fact, none of those German ships ever did leave the Hudson River until they were impounded by the United States in 1917.

  It is popularly supposed that the reason why this great fleet of German liners lay quiescent in American harbours for more than two and a half years was the presence of British cruisers off the North American coast. That those ‘distant, storm-battered ships’ of the King’s Navy were partly responsible for the immobilisation of Germany’s large potential fleet of commerce destroyers is indubitably a fact; but while the outer seas were held by our cruisers, there was an inner guard, invisible but unsleeping, which kept the imprisoned ships under constant observation.

  It would have been perfectly easy for any one of those liners to get to sea at night or during foggy weather, but for several inhibitive factors.

  In the first place, the amount of fuel in the bunkers of each vessel was known to the British intelligence service, and had any German ship attempted to replenish its fuel supply, the news would have reached our headquarters within a few hours.

  The disclosure may now be made that persons in the employ of the British intelligence service were stationed at every port on the Atlantic coast of the United States, from Portland, Maine, to the Gulf, and that, in consequence, no enemy ship could even prepare for a move without a warning being almost instantly conveyed to British headquarters.

  Many of the people who kept watch and ward at those ports were humble individuals who performed a very dangerous duty from purely patriotic motives. One person who was responsible for observing enemy shipping at a port not a hundred miles from New York was a working man. His despatches and memoranda sent to headquarters were models of terse English, reflecting the keenest powers of observation. For two and a half years he performed his duties admirably, though in constant danger from the machinations of the central European agents who swarmed in the eastern states.

  Then, one morning, his body was found floating in the dock, riddled with bullets.

  CHAPTER 15

  THE LIGHTER SIDE OF ID WORK

  AMIDST ALL THE hazards and vicissitudes of intelligence work there is a redeeming element of comedy. Perhaps the greatest source of amusement for members of the ID during the war was the desperate solemnity of amateur spy-hunters. One and all meant to be most helpful. They were quite convinced that our security service was utterly incompetent. At times, indeed, some of them went so far as to declare that it must be staffed by enemy agents, so impervious did it remain to the ‘information’ laid before it by patriotic British citizens.

  It was amusing, but it was also annoying, because, in the early days at least, information received had to be examined in case there was anything in it. The number of mares’ nests that the security agents were invited to probe was almost past belief. Here is a typical case, every word of which is vouched for.

  A certain person developed a craze for deciphering ‘personal’ advertisements in the daily papers. (And here it is but just to pay tribute to the patriotism of the daily papers, which went to the greatest possible pains to ensure that the advertisements accepted by them were genuine and harmless. Time and again they refused advertisements because they were not satisfied.)

  The person in question used to bombard the naval intelligence department with cuttings from the personal column, with his own decoded version of what he thought the message really meant – and that was always, of course, some naval or military secret.

  It was useless for us to write and tell him, as we did a dozen times or more, that we had made inquiries, and found that the message would not bear the interpretation he put on it, the advertisement being a perfectly genuine one. He simply did not believe us, and bombarded us with more.

  At last the officer in charge of that department determined to see the man himself, and wrote, fixing an appointment.

  When the visitor arrived he was so excited that he could hardly wait to get into the room before blurting out his latest discovery.

  ‘Did you see this advertisement yesterday?’ he demanded, thrusting a marked copy of the previous day’s paper under the officer’s nose. His thumb pointed to a small two-line notice, that ran, as far as memory recalls the exact wording, as follows: ‘Ethel. Sorry I cannot meet you under the limes at five o’clock. – Sally.’

  The head of the department solemnly read it through.

  ‘Yes, I saw that,’ he admitted.

  ‘I have decoded it!’ exclaimed his visitor, quivering with excitement. ‘There is no doubt about it being a communication to the enemy. See, here is the real meaning of the message,’ and he thrust a sheet of paper into the officer’s hand.

  On it was written: ‘To all Channel U-boats. Two transports with troops leave Southampton eight o’clock tonight.’

  The officer read through the decoding with a perfectly grave face.

  ‘That is most interesting,’ he said solemnly.

  ‘I knew it! I knew it!’ cried his visitor, almost dancing with joy. ‘What have I always told you? Those messages are put in by German spies.’

  The officer looked up at him with just a glimmer of a smile in his eye.

  ‘Do you know…’ he said, and paused dramatically, ‘I inserted that advertisement myself, just to see what you would make of it?’

  It was perfectly true, but the ingenious cryptographer refused to credit it, and probably believes to this day that the head of the department was trying to ‘save face’.

  But a moment’s reflection will expose the absurdity of the visitor’s theory. Let us assume that such a message had been inserted by an enemy agent, and that, when decoded, it did bear the meaning ascribed to it by the enthusiast for decoding. Of what value could it be to the enemy?

  A paper published in London on, say, Monday morning, could not reach an enemy country for several days, and would not even get to any neutral country until Tuesday, at the earliest. Then the information had to be conveyed to the German naval command and relayed to the U-boats in the Channel – and by that time the transports would be either in a French harbour or well out in the Bay of Biscay.

  In any case, the personal column was so obvious an object of suspicion that no astute enemy agent was ever likely to use it.

  Far more probable was a code message hidden in an advertisement relating to a flat to be let or a cook-general wanted.

  We soon found that out for ourselves, and quickly had under lock and key the only enemy agent, so far as is known, who had the wit to use this method of getting into touch with confederates. He wanted to communicate with a man in Glasgow to whom he dared not write, as he suspected (quite rightly) that the man’s correspondence was being watched.

  A really valuable source of information, during wartime, is the enemy prisoner, if he can be persuaded to talk. Very properly, all officers and men were warned by their own authorities not to answer any questions if they were captured. They must know nothing.

  Most of the Germ
an naval prisoners we interrogated were taciturn. But sometimes they were more talkative, and on one occasion we wrung a most vital admission from a German officer by the suavest methods. The story is hardly known outside the ID, but it deserves a wider public.

  It concerns a certain Lieutenant-Commander the Freiherr Spiegel von und zu Peckelsheim – which really is his name, and not one invented to heighten the humour of the story.

  Now and again even our own naval intelligence department found some plausible piece of fiction a useful instrument for its purpose. This happened whenever we found the right kind of enemy agent on whom to plant a terminological inexactitude.

  The Freiherr Spiegel, however, was unlucky. His lie came home to roost.

  He was a U-boat commander who, in the early days of the war, made a series of successful cruises, reaching the Atlantic by the north-about route, and the Channel through the Straits of Dover. Then he wrote a book on his exploits under the title U-202. Taken for all in all it was quite a good book, and in the main as accurate as it could be, considering that he had to avoid the disclosure of secrets. But in one chapter he went sadly astray. It was headed ‘England’s Respect for the Red Cross’, and in it he described, with much virtuous indignation, how he had seen one of our hospital ships ‘laden with guns right fore and aft, and an army of soldiers and horses was packed between the guns and their mountings’.

  Both he and his second-in-command, he declared, saw all this through the periscope, and he had stamped his feet on the steel plating of the conning-tower until it rattled, in his rage at being unable, on account of the ship’s distance and speed, to cut her off, and so to punish the ‘mean hypocritical brutes’. That book appeared before the United States entered the war, and a translation of it was published serially in a number of American papers. Now, a statement of that sort was bound to do us harm. We knew it to be untrue. Never once did we use hospital ships for any purpose but the legitimate one of carrying sick and wounded. But a neutral could, if he liked, say that he had as much right to believe the word of a German as that of an Englishman.

  It was the business of the naval intelligence department (NID) to nail Baron Spiegel’s lie to the counter.

  There were the intelligence men in the admiralty chained to their desks. There was the Baron still roaming the seas, or possibly transferred to training duty in a shore establishment where it was too much to hope that we could reach him. And yet we wanted him badly. A chat with him would probably put a very different complexion on that chapter in his book.

  We had to get into touch with him somehow.

  What we needed was a link, and since, as in most intelligence work, the forging of that link depended three parts on patience and one part on luck, the ID men did not fret.

  They mentally pigeon-holed the name of the Freiherr Spiegel von und zu Peckelsheim, and addressed themselves to other tasks until such time as a turn of fortune’s wheel brought him to the forefront again.

  And all the time the link was quietly forging itself. It took the shape of a little 800-tonne topsail schooner, inoffensive and unpretentious. Our anti-submarine people took a fancy to her. She looked so harmless – and could so easily conceal a menace. In appearance she resembled a score of other small sailing ships that German submarines used as targets for their 4-inch guns when they met them in the Atlantic, off the Irish coast.

  So this little schooner, the Prize, went into a dockyard for two or three weeks. She emerged outwardly the same, but actually a very different ship. She was still a sailing ship, but she now carried a hidden 4-inch gun, and her crew were ratings of the Royal Navy, while her captain was a Colonial fighter, Lieutenant William Edward Sanders, RNR, a man of whom New Zealand has reason to be proud.

  The Prize, in short, had been converted into a Q-ship, one of the U-boat traps that caused much anxiety in German naval circles for some time.

  She sailed into the Atlantic, steering on a course that conformed to the trade on which she was supposed to be engaged.

  On the morning of 30 April 1917, she was attacked with gunfire by a large German submarine. The Prize was shelled for twenty minutes before the right moment came for her to throw off her disguise and retaliate. Her ‘panic party’ left her in the lifeboat, thus giving the impression that the ship had been abandoned. Those left hidden on board to work the concealed gun lay very still until the submarine, now on the surface, came quite near and offered a good mark. Then the screens went down and the gun was fired.

  One shell demolished the U-boat’s forward gun, and killed the crew. Another smashed the conning-tower, and three people were seen to fall into the water.

  In four minutes the U-boat, shorn of her conning tower and with her deck buckled by shell fire, went under water.

  Then the ‘panic party’ from the Prize pulled to the spot in their boat and picked up the three men who had been blown overboard.

  Here let us, in the manner of the cinema, switch off quickly and throw another picture on the screen – an office in the admiralty, a senior officer busy at his desk. To him there enters another officer, with a naval telegraph form. We will throw it on the screen thus:

  HMS Prize engaged and believed sank

  U-93, latitude-longitude-yesterday.

  Three survivors.

  The two officers look at each other quickly and both utter the same words simultaneously: ‘Spiegel von Peckelsheim.’

  For they knew the names of practically all the officers in command of U-boats.

  Was the Baron one of the three survivors?

  And the cinema switches back to the deck of the Prize, where Lieut Sanders is receiving his prisoners.

  One is an ordinary seaman.

  One is a warrant officer.

  And the third, from his uniform, is an officer of the rank of lieutenant-commander. He presents himself and gives his name. Sanders is no linguist, and the guttural noises mean little to him. He merely asks his prisoners if they will give their parole not to interfere with the working of the ship.

  The German officer goes further than this. He sees that the Prize is in a sinking condition. His gunnery had been pretty effective in those hectic twenty minutes.

  He offers to help in plugging the holes and manning the pumps.

  So victors and vanquished, 120 miles from land, with never a ship in sight, set to work together to encompass their earthly salvation. They sailed that water-logged colander of a ship 115 miles before they were picked up and towed into harbour by a patrol ship.

  Meanwhile the NID waited patiently for further news. A telegram had been sent to the base requesting the full names of the survivors, and in due course these came to hand. The first was Lieutenant-Commander Freiherr Spiegel von und zu Peckelsheim.

  So the officer who was particularly interested in the Baron took from a drawer in his desk a copy of the book U-202 and, with red ink, underlined certain phrases in the chapter about the hospital ships. Then he gave the necessary orders for the disposal of the prisoners – and quietly returned to his other work. In two days he would confront his man.

  It was a large room, hung with charts and a few naval pictures. The big fireplace was enclosed by a club fender, and on the mantelpiece stood a box of cigars. There was in one corner of the room a large pedestal desk; behind it were two great safes in which were locked half the secrets of the war at sea.

  Under the desk on most days there lay a big, handsome black chow, the officer’s inseparable companion. In another corner there stood, of all queer objects, a motor scooter. The indefatigable officer used this in order to get quickly from his home to the office in the middle of the night if he happened to be wanted. It saved the five minutes necessary for getting the car out of the garage.

  Two high windows looked out over the wide open space of the Horse Guards Parade. A few easy chairs and a deep sofa stood here and there about the room.

  It was into this setting that the Baron was introduced.

  His host – and captor – was standing by the c
lub fender. The German officer clicked his heels and gave a stiff, embarrassed bow. The host pulled a chair towards the fireplace.

  ‘Won’t you sit down?’ he said silkily. He was as smooth as a kid glove.

  The Baron obeyed. He even took the cigar that was offered to him. No doubt he saw in these preliminaries an attempt to bring him into the right mood for giving away German naval secrets, and, quite naturally, he determined to be especially discreet. He was very much on his guard against everything except that which really happened.

  The British officer suddenly held up in front of him a copy of U-202.

  ‘You know that book, I think,’ he said.

  The German stammered an affirmative. He was palpably disconcerted.

  ‘I was very much interested in it,’ the British officer continued quietly. ‘Of course, you were very discreet in writing it. It doesn’t tell us much that we didn’t know – except in one chapter, and it was about that one that I wanted to see you.’

  Smiling amiably at his victim, he looked a very harmless and incompetent elderly gentleman. The German relaxed his tension somewhat.

  The British officer turned over the pages, gazing at them through a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles.

  ‘Ah, yes! Here it is!’ he said at last. ‘This chapter about the hospital ship with guns and troops on board. Now, do you know, we cannot trace that particular occasion. I wonder if you could help us?’

  The German remained silent.

  ‘You say you saw the incident yourself?’

  The German nodded.

  ‘When did you see it?’ There was a shade more authority in the voice.

  Silence.

  ‘When and where did you see it? What was the date?’

  There was something inexorable in the voice. The questions were hammered at the prisoner with an iron determination. The mild, elderly gentleman had been transformed into the stern mentor.