by Ann Kramer
(Stella Rimington)
During the First World War a large number of courageous women, whose names are virtually unknown today, worked as spies for British intelligence in enemy-occupied territories obtaining and passing back valuable information that was then used to plan combat strategies. Women in Britain also worked in the newly formed British Secret Service, listening into enemy signals, helping to code and decode messages, and keeping details on suspected enemy spies and espionage activity in Britain. As Tammy Proctor has described in her excellent book Female Intelligence: Women and Espionage in the First World War, it is only very recently that their contribution has begun to be recognized. Twenty years later even more women worked in British intelligence, while others were specially trained and equipped to spy and work with resistance movements behind enemy lines, adopting false identities and risking death. While some of the women who spied during the Second World War have become fairly well known, those who worked in intelligence and espionage during the First World War are almost entirely unknown, with some notable exceptions. Obviously by its very nature espionage is a secretive profession and many women did not talk about their work once war was over. However, their invisibility may also indicate that women spies and intelligence workers, particularly during the First World War, have been overlooked or even trivialized because until recently their efforts and contribution have not been taken as seriously as those of men. It might also suggest that the use of women in these covert areas has also been regarded as somehow inappropriate.
There is nothing new about women working as spies, although the historical examples that are given, particularly by male writers, do tend to stress women’s sexuality as being the prime requisite for the task. Since Biblical times women have worked as spies – Delilah being considered by many historians to have been the earliest recorded example. More recently during the American Civil War, for instance, a number of women such as Belle Boyd and Harriet Tubman worked as spies. Belle Boyd spied for the Confederate side, operating from her father’s house and passing on information to Confederate generals. She was eventually betrayed and arrested. Harriet Tubman, the black American abolitionist who ran the so-called Underground Railroad, worked for the Union side, scouting in enemy territory and bringing back important military intelligence. Also during the seventeenth century, the writer Aphra Behn worked as a spy for the British government, although the information she obtained was disregarded.
Over the following two centuries, a number of other significant women, including Gertrude Bell, were engaged in gathering sensitive information for Britain. Gertrude Bell was in fact the first woman formally employed by British intelligence as a political officer. Born in 1868, she studied history at Oxford University and gained first-class honours, although that university did not actually award degrees to women until 1920. She went on to become one of the great Victorian women travellers, spending a great deal of time in the Middle East. She provided maps and other information to British intelligence about the Middle East and, given the political tensions of the time, her information was gratefully received. In 1916 she was formally employed by the Arab Bureau.
‘Being a spy in wartime means real hard, risky work. One is engaged in the “Secret Service”, one is always working in the dark, and one is liable at any moment to be trapped – to meet death secretly and mysteriously, or to face a firing-squad.’
(Marthe Richer)
Spying is a risky business: whether male or female, someone who adopts a false identity to obtain information from within an enemy’s territory is usually risking death, something that Marthe Richer, a First World War spy, made a point of emphasizing in her book I Spied for France. It is often said that women make very good spies, particularly during wartime because they can pass unnoticed where a man, whether in uniform or not, is more likely to arouse suspicion. Also women have neighbourhood networks, which provide useful channels for passing information, sometimes denigrated as ‘gossip’ but they still remain just as vulnerable as men. In Britain, the use of women for intelligence gathering work was fairly random until the twentieth century, operating informally and within environments such as diplomatic circles. This changed in the early part of the twentieth century with the establishment of Britain’s first Secret Service in 1909 and the coming of the First World War meant the need to obtain good intelligence was crucial and the process was put onto a far more organized and professional footing.
Aphra Behn 1640-1689
USUALLY CONSIDERED TO be one of the first English women to earn her living as a writer, Aphra Behn was also a spy but perhaps because she was a woman, the valuable information she acquired was disregarded. There is some debate about the details of her life but Aphra Behn was probably born in Wye, near Canterbury. Her mother, Elizabeth Denham, was a nurse to the wealthy and influential Culpepper family who, in around 1663, visited Surinam taking Aphra with them. Returning to England in 1664, Aphra met and married Johan Behn, a merchant of Dutch or German extraction. There is disagreement as to whether the two actually married but either way, Johan died soon afterwards. Having become part of the royal circle through her Culpepper connections, Aphra Behn was recruited as a spy in 1666. The Second Anglo-Dutch War had broken out the previous year and, using the code name Astrea, a name she later used for her published writings, Aphra Behn, who spoke Dutch fluently, was sent to Antwerp to obtain information about the Dutch military capabilities and political intentions towards Britain. This Aphra Behn did, sending back coded information that the Dutch Admiral de Ruyter planned to launch fire ships against the British fleet. For whatever reason – some have said because she was a woman – Aphra Behn’s information was ignored or dismissed. The Dutch fleet did indeed sail up the Thames and torched British man-of-wars in the Thames. To add insult to injury, Aphra Behn was blamed for this, and never paid for her work. Espionage’s loss was literature’s gain. Following this experience, Aphra Behn turned to writing to earn a living, producing some of the most important women’s writing of the seventeenth century. She died in 1689 and is buried in Poet’s Corner, Westminster Abbey.
Chapter 2
Spy Paranoia and the First World War
‘Beware of Female Spies. Women are being recruited by the enemy to secure information from Navy men, on the theory that they are less liable to be suspected than male spies. Beware of inquisitive women as well as spying men.’
WORLD WAR I POSTER
In March 1909 a sub-committee of Britain’s Committee of Imperial Defence, the government body that had been established in 1904 to organize Britain’s defence and military preparations, met to discuss the question of foreign spies in Britain, most particularly the threat to British naval ports from German spies. Seven months later, in October 1909, Britain’s first Secret Service Bureau was established. Consisting initially of a small staff, and headed by Captain Vernon G.W. Kell of the South Staffordshire Regiment and Captain Mansfield Cumming of the Royal Navy, the new Bureau’s task was to co-ordinate intelligence work, and in particular to explore the threat posed by German spies. Working on behalf of the War Office and the Admiralty, the two men worked together initially but after a while it became clear that the task was two-pronged: to investigate what was going on in Britain and stop it, and to send agents into Germany to find out what was going on there. As a result, by 1910 the Bureau had divided into two sections, one headed by Kell that was responsible for counter-espionage, investigating and catching foreign spies in Britain, and the other, headed by Cumming, who became known as ‘C’, which was responsible for gathering information abroad. The first eventually became MI5 and the second became MI6.
Spy paranoia
The new Secret Service Bureau came into being at a time of intense spy paranoia. The years leading up to the First World War saw an increasing rivalry and escalating arms race between Britain and Germany that found expression in a growing anxiety about the presence of German spies in Britain and the possibility of a German invasion. British newspapers printed sen
sational accounts of German spies living and working in Britain, which were fuelled by an outpouring of colourful pre-war spy literature and novels that either depicted German plans to invade Britain or presented the existence of an established German intelligence network. One of the earliest was The Battle of Dorking (1871), a short story by George Tomkyns Chesney, which described the invasion of England by Germans. Another very influential novel was The Riddle of the Sands (1903) by Erskine Childers. Often considered to be the first true spy novel, it featured two patriotic young men – Davies and Carruthers – who, sailing around the tidal waters and sandbanks of the German Frisian islands, uncover a German plan to invade England.
The most prolific spy writer however was the Anglo-French journalist William Le Queux, whose best-known works included The Invasion of 1910 (1906), which was initially serialized in the Daily Mail and then subsequently published as a novel, selling over a million copies. Presenting himself as involved in counter-espionage work, Le Queux went on to publish Spies of the Kaiser: Plotting the Downfall of England (1915), which, although described as a novel, he claimed was the result of 12 months travelling around Britain during which time he claimed to have uncovered the presence of 5,000 German spies. His claims were massively exaggerated: the German navy did employ a small number of spies before the war but not nearly as many as Le Queux claimed. Between August 1911 and July 1914 only ten suspects were actually arrested by the War Office’s counter-espionage department. Even so writings such as those of Le Queux had an enormous impact, stimulating the establishment of the British Secret Service, and helping to promote spy fever and the anti-German feeling which swept the country before the war.
Once war began in 1914 spy mania intensified in Britain, fostering widespread anti-German feeling and xenophobia. In Britain the Aliens Act of 1905 had begun to limit immigration and in 1911 the Official Secrets Act was passed, which gave intelligence services extraordinary powers to investigate and prosecute anyone suspected of espionage, and anyone suspected of harbouring a spy. The Defence of the Realm Act (DORA) was passed in 1914 for securing public safety and extended the 1911 Official Secrets Act to give the British government sweeping powers to requisition property, control labour, apply censorship and to move not just against spies and traitors but also anyone suspected of speaking against the government or British war aims. A day later the Aliens Restriction Act (ARA) was passed, which extended the State’s right to monitor and control foreigners in Britain, imposing permits and no-go areas for aliens. All aliens had to register with their local police. By 9 September 1914 more than 50,000 Germans and some 16,000 Austro-Hungarians had registered; thousands of them would be interned during the war.
Nicholas Everitt, who worked with the British Secret Service during the First World War, claimed there were more than 14,000 German, Austrian and ‘foreign’ spies actively at work in Britain at the outbreak of war. Given their new and draconian powers, police and security services moved against suspected spies with impunity, and there were constant references in the British newspapers to German spies, or suspected spies being discovered, investigated, rounded up and imprisoned. On 6 August 1914, for instance, under a dramatic headline ‘The Danger From Spies’, The Times reported that during the preceding 24 hours, some twenty-one spies had been arrested ‘chiefly in important naval centres’. The article also referred to another dozen arrests that had taken place in London, one of those arrested including an ‘alleged spy who was staying at a fashionable hotel in the vicinity of Hyde Park’. Numerous similar reports of arrests and investigations followed on an almost daily basis. On 11 August 1914 The Times reported that ‘several cases of espionage or attempted outrage by supposed spies’ had been reported from various parts of Britain, including Aldershot where a military picket had arrested two men cutting telephone wires, Dunoon where a woman suspected of being a German spy had been arrested at the Millhouse gunpowder works, and at Nottingham, where one Max Kuhner, formerly of the German Army, had been remanded ‘on the charge of obtaining information calculated to be to be useful to the enemy.’ Apparently plans of Nottingham, Brussels and places in Germany had been found in his lodgings, together with a loaded revolver.
The frenzy did not stop at suspected spies: as time passed paranoia extended to all foreigners living in Britain, but particularly Germans, who were usually described as enemy aliens. Despite on the one hand suggesting that the public should not regard all foreigners as spies, the public were nevertheless urged to be on their guard and to report anything suspicious to the authorities, so effectively whipping up anti-German feeling. On 25 August 1914, while announcing new measures to be introduced for ‘stamping out spying and sabotage by alien enemies’, The Times reminded its readers that there were at that time 50,000 ‘alien enemies, subjects of the German and Australian Empires’ in the United Kingdom and went on to say that thousands of ‘resident Germans – waiters, barbers and the like’ had lost their jobs since the war began and that ‘the adage concerning work for idle hands naturally occurs to the mind’ going on to describe many of the resident Germans as ‘suspicious characters’ and to make the point that while the ‘danger is not one to cause a panic… it should certainly not be underestimated…’, an approach unlikely to calm the public’s nerves. Merely a day later, on 26 August, The Times commented that the ‘spy danger… is still with us…. The duty of the public is a simple one. It is to report to the police whenever they think there is justification for such a step’. The following day The Times stated that ‘while it is unnecessary and foolish to assume that every German in this country is a spy, it should be remembered that the Germans have probably the most complete espionage system of all the European Powers and we may assume that our own country has received the attention of not the least able of the German emissaries’.
Given such an approach it is hardly surprising that rumours and false stories about spies were rife; foreigners, even long-term residents, were automatically regarded with suspicion, as was virtually anyone who was considered to be behaving oddly. It was no time to be German or to seem in any way foreign. Anonymous letters poured into police offices drawing attention to anyone who was acting suspiciously and making wild accusations. Not surprisingly there were many false arrests, including the Mayor of Deal who was arrested on Dover cliffs on suspicion of espionage and taken under armed guard in front of the military authorities. In an attempt to reduce any communication channels that might be used by potential spies, people who kept homing pigeons were also rounded up. More significantly though, the government used its sweeping powers to round up hundreds of foreigners, either deporting them or interning them for the duration of the war.
Spy frenzy was not confined to Britain; it also raged through Northern France, Belgium and Germany. Refugees were rounded up, there were reports of German soldiers in plain clothes or French uniforms signalling to their troops with coloured lights at night and puffs of smoke during the day, and it was believed that thousands of people around Antwerp were spying for Germany. Unwary British travellers in Germany also found themselves being detained as suspected spies, something of course that the British press reported with horror and outrage: it was perfectly acceptable to round up foreigners in England but quite unacceptable for British travellers to be inconvenienced.
According to police records, spies could be found in a wide variety of occupations and activities. No one was above suspicion. On 26 August 1914, The Times published the list of the occupations of foreigners recently arrested on charges of espionage. The list included: ‘Hairdressers (3), German naval pensioner, bookkeeper, music-hall artist, German consul, engineer, waiter, pastor of German seamen’s museum, subaltern, student, cook, mariner, cabinet-maker, photographer, director of margarine works, director of oil company, professor of languages, and ship’s chandler.’ Other occupations also regarded as suspect were foreign governesses and domestic servants.
During the course of the war thousands of aliens were interned or deported. On 2 September 19
15 within an article entitled ‘The Alien Enemy’, The Times reported that 500 Germans and Austrians – ‘alien enemies’ – had been interned during the previous five or six days. The article went on to state that the methods adopted by German spies to obtain and send information showed ‘considerable ingenuity’ and including tapping telephone wires and using pigeon post. Interestingly, the article also stated that ‘Women as well as men are engaged in the work [of spying]. Recently a German governess in a London family departed, leaving some of her possessions behind. The house was visited by the police, who found among some papers in a locked trunk careful and detailed sketches of railway bridges and their environs.’
Images of women spies
By and large spying was considered to be a distasteful profession. Winston Churchill, for instance, in his foreword to I Was a Spy! by Marthe McKenna, who spied for the British Secret Service during the First World War, described it as a ‘terrible profession’, and certainly spies, particularly those spying for the enemy, were seen as people of low moral fibre and ‘degenerates’.
Female spies were seen as particularly distasteful and dangerous, reflecting some of the prevailing views of women at that time and the concern was that their very existence damaged the moral fibre of a nation. Fictional images of women spies ranged from sexually depraved individuals of the demi-monde who lured their prey into revealing state secrets, or as helpless dupes, conned into espionage by love of another – male – spy. Either way, intelligence officers had an ambivalent and sometimes contradictory view of women spies. It was generally believed that women had an advantage in that they could blend into the background and, if employed as governesses or maids, could have access to information which would be useful to the enemy. At the same time, most intelligence officers considered that in the end women could never make good spies because their emotions ruled their behaviour; they were too likely to fall in love and hence to jeopardize their work. It was also considered that women became spies for base motives: they were not capable of being patriotic, in the same way as men.
