My Adventures as a German Secret Service Agent

by Horst Von Goltz

  Someone was to be assassinated! And that someone? It was a guess, of course, but the name and the accent of the speaker were more than enough to lead me to believe that the proposed victim must be King Alfonso of Spain.

  I sat there, undecided for the moment. It jvas really no affair of mine. I was on another mission, and, after all, my theory was merely a supposition. On the other hand, the situation presented interesting possibilities and, as I happened to know, Alfonso's seemingly pro- German leanings had made him an object of friendly interest at that time to my Government.

  I decided to look into the matter.

  It had been difficult to keep from stealing a glance at my talkative neighbours, but I restrained myself. I must not turn around, and yet it was vitally necessary to see their faces. All I could do was to hope that they would leave before I finished my vermouth; for I had no mind to risk my clearheadedness with more than the glass I had already had.

  They did leave shortly afterwards. As they passed my table I took care to study their faces, and my intention to keep them in sight was immensely strengthened. The Spaniard I did not know, but his companion I recognised as a Russian and one of the very men I was after.

  I had been in Geneva long enough to know where I could get information when I needed it. It was only a day or two, therefore, before I had in my hands sufficient facts to justify me in reporting the matter to my Government.

  Alfonso was in England at the time and presumably safe; for I had gathered that no attempt would be made upon his life until he returned to Spain. So I wrote to Berlin mentioning what I had learned.

  A telegram reached me next day. I was ordered to Brussels to communicate my information to the Spanish Minister there.

  Mark that! I was ordered to Brussels, although there was a Spanish Minister in Switzerland. But my Government knew that there were many, factions in Spain, and it had strong reasons to believe that the Spanish Minister to Belgium .was absolutely loyal to Alfonso. And in a situation such as this, one takes as few risks as possible.

  I followed my instructions. The Spanish Minister thanked me. He was more than interested; and he begged me, since I had no other direct orders, to do him the personal favour of staying a few days longer in the Belgian capital. I did so, of course, and a day or so later received from my Government instructions to hold myself at the Spaniard's disposal for the time being.

  One night, at the Minister's request, I met him and we discussed matters fully. He wished me, he said, to undertake a more thorough investigation of the plot. I was already involved in it, and would be working less in the dark than another. Besides, he hinted, he could not very well employ an agent of his own Government. Who knew how far the conspiracy extended?

  I was not displeased to abandon my chase of the Russian revolutionaries, for whom I felt some sympathy. So, as a preliminary step, I went to Paris, where, through the good offices of one Carlos da Silva a young Brazilian freethinker who was there ostensibly as a student I succeeded in gaining admission into one of the fighting organisations of Radicals there. They were not so communicative as I could have wished, but by judicious pumping I soon learned that there was an organised conspiracy against the life of Alfonso, and that the details of the plot were in the hands of a committee in Geneva.

  Geneva, then, was my objective point. But what to do if I went there? I knew very well that conspirators do not confide their plans to strangers. And I dared not be too inquisitive. Obviously the only course to follow was to employ an agent.

  Now "Cherchez la femme "is as excellent a principle to work on when you are choosing an accomplice, as it is jvhen you are seeking the solution of a crime. I therefore proceeded to seek a lady and found her in the person of a pretty little black-eyed "revolutionist, "who called herself Mira Descartes, and with whom I had already had some dealings.

  It is here that accident crosses the trail again. For if a certain official of the Okrana had not been murdered in Moscow three years before, his daughter would never have conceived an intense hatred of all revolutionary movements and I should have been without her invaluable assistance in the adventure I am describing.

  Mira Descartes! She was the kind of woman of whom people like to say that she would have made a great actress. Actress? I do not know. But she was an artist at dissembling. And she had beauty that turned the heads of more than the "Reds" upon whom she spied; and a genius for hatred: a cold hatred that cleared the brain and enabled her to give even her body to men she despised in order the better to betray them.

  I was fortunate in securing her aid, I told myself; and I did not hesitate to use her services. (For in my profession, as must have been apparent to you, scrupulousness must be reserved for use "in one's private capacity as a gentleman.")

  So Mile. Descartes went to Geneva and, armed with my previously acquired information and her own charms, she contrived to get into the good graces of the committee there, and surprised me a week later by writing to Paris that she had already contracted a liaison with the Spaniard whom I had overheard speaking that night in the Cafe de PEurope.

  Soon I had full information about the entire plot. It was planned, I learned, to blow up King Alfonso with a bomb upon the day of his return to Madrid. The work was in the hands of two South Americans who were then in Geneva.

  But far more important than this was the information which Mile. Descartes had obtained that a high official of Spain a member of the Cabinet was cognizant of the plot and had kept silent about it.

  Why, I asked myself, should this official a man who surely had no sympathy with the aims of the revolutionists lend his aid to them in this plot? The reason was not hard to discover. Alfonso's position at the time was far from secure. His Government was unpopular at home; and the pro-Teutonic leanings of many officials had lost him the moral and political support of the English Government and Press facts of considerable importance.

  So it seemed possible that Alfonso's reign might not be of long duration. And the new Government? It might be Radical or Conservative; pro-English or pro-German. A man with a career did vell to keep on friendly terms with all factions. Thus, I fancied, the Cabinet Minister must have reasoned. At any rate he said nothing of the plot.

  But I went to Brussels and reported all I had learned and did not forget to mention the Cabinet Minister's rumoured share in the plot.

  There my connection with the affair ceased. But not long afterwards a little tragi-comedy occurred which was a direct result of my activities. Let me recall it to you.

  On the evening of May 24, 1910, those of the people of Madrid who were in the neighbourhood of the monument which had been raised in memory of the victims of the attempted assassination of Alfonso, four years before, were horrified by a tragedy which they witnessed.

  There was a sudden commotion in the streets, an explosion, and the confused sound of a crowd in excitement.

  What had happened? Rumour ran wild throughout the crowd. The King was expected home that day he had been assassinated. There had been an attempted revolution. Nobody knew any details.

  But the next day everybody knew. A bomb had burst opposite the monument a bomb that had been intended for the King. One man had been killed; the man who carried the bomb. But the King had not arrived in Madrid that day, after all.

  The police set to work upon the case and presently identified the dead man as Jose Tasozelli, who recently arrived in Spain from Buenos Ay res. It was not certain whether he had any accomplices.

  And while the police worked, the King following a secret arrangement which had been made by the Spanish Minister at Brussels, and of which not even the Cabinet had been informed arrived safely and quietly in Madrid; a day late, but alive.

  What became of the Cabinet Minister? There are no autocracies now, and not even a King may prosecute without proof. So the Minister escaped for the time being. But it is interesting to remember that this same Minister was assassinated not a great while afterwards.

  Now there are more ways of gettin
g rid of a king than by blowing him up with dynamite. Foreign Offices are none too squeamish in their methods, but they do balk at assassination, even if the proposed victim is a particularly objectionable opponent of their plans. There is another method which, if correctly followed, is every bit as efficacious. Again I must refer you to that excellent French maxim: "Cherchez la femme."

  It would be difficult to estimate properly the part that women have played in the game of foreign politics. As spies they are invaluable: for amorous men are always garrulous. But as enslavers of Kings they are of even greater service to men who are interested in effecting a change of dynasty. Even the most loyal of subjects dislikes seeing his King made ridiculous; and in countries where the line is not too strictly drawn between the public exchequer and the private resources of the monarch, a discontented faction may see some connection between excessive taxes and the jewels that a demi-mondaine wears. Revolutions have occurred for less than that as every Foreign Office knows.

  I am not insinuating that all royal scandals are to be laid at the door of international politics. I merely suggest that, given a king who is to be made ridiculous in the eyes of his subjects, it is a simple matter for an interested Government to see that he is introduced to a lady who will produce the desired effect. But no diplomat will admit this, of course. Not, that is, until after he has "retired."

  This brings me to the second act of my comedy.

  If I were drawing a map of Europe a diplomatic map as it was in the years of 1908 to 1910, I should use only two colours. Germany should be, let us say, black; England red. But the black of Germany should extend over the surfaces of Austria, Italy and Turkey; while France and Russia should be crimson. The rest of the Continent would be of various tints, ranging from a discordant combination of red and black, through a pinkish grey, to an innocuous and neutral white.

  In the race to secure protective alliances against the inevitable conflict, both Germany and England were diligently attempting to colour these indeterminate territories with their own particular hue. Not least important among the courted nations were Spain and Portugal. Both were traditionally English in sympathy; both had shown unmistakable signs, at least so far as the ruling classes were concerned, of transferring their friendship to Germany. It was inevitable, therefore, that these two countries should be the scene of a diplomatic conflict which, if not apparent to the outsider, was fought with the utmost bitterness by both sides.

  Somehow, by good fortune rather than any other agency, Spain had managed to avoid a positive alliance with either nation. Alfonso was inclined to be pro-German at that time; but an adroit juggling of the factions in his kingdom had prevented him from using his influence to the advantage of Germany.

  Portugal was in a different situation. Poorer in resources than her neighbour, and hampered by the necessity of keeping up a colonial empire which in size was second only to England's, she had greater need of the protection of one of the Powers. Traditionally and rightly from a standpoint of self-interest that Power should have been England. There were but three obstacles to the continuance of the friendship that had existed since the Peninsular War King Manoel, the Queen Mother and the Church.

  Germany seemed all-powerful in the Peninsula in 1908. Alfonso's friendship was secured, and the boy king of Portugal was completely under the thumb of a pro-German mother and a Church which, as between Germany and England, disliked Germany the less. England realised the situation, and in approved diplomatic fashion set about regaining her ascendancy.

  But diplomacy failed. At the end of two years Berlin was more strongly entrenched in Portugal than ever; and England knew that only heroic measures could save her from a serious diplomatic defeat.

  Then Manoel did a foolish thing. He kept a diary.

  It was a commonplace diary, as you will remember if you read the parts of it which were published some time after the revolution which dethroned its author. But there were portions of it many of them never published which expressed beyond doubt Manoel's anti-English feeling and his affection for Germany.

  Somehow England obtained possession of the diary. In October, 1910, Manoel fled to England, where he hoped against hope that the Government would live up to that provision of the treaty of 1908 which pledged England to aid the Portuguese throne in the event of a revolution.

  But England remembering the diary wisely forgot its pledge. And a Republican Government in Portugal looked with suspicion upon the diplomatic advances of a nation which had been too friendly towards the exiled king and became pro-English, as you know.

  There ends my comedy. But there is an amusing epilogue to the affair, which was not without its importance to the Wilhelmstrasse, and in which I had a small part. To tell it I must pass over several months of work of one sort or another, until I come to the following winter that of 1911.

  I was on a real vacation this time and had selected Nice as an excellent place in which to spend a few idle but enlivening weeks. The choice was not a highly original one, but as it turned out, Chance seemed to have had a hand in it, after all. Almost the first person I met there was a man with whom I had been acquainted for several years, and who was destined to have his share in the events which followed.

  People who have travelled in Europe much can hardly have avoided seeing upon one occasion or another a, famous riding troupe who called themselves "the Bishops." They were five in number Old Bishop, his daughter and her husband, a man named Merrill, and two others and their act, which was variously known as "An Afternoon on the Bois de Boulogne," "An Afternoon in the Tiergarten," etc. (according to the city in which they played), was a feature of many of the noted circuses of seven or eight years ago. At this time they were helping to pay their expenses in the winter by playing in a small circus which was one of the current attractions of Nice.

  I had bought horses from old Bishop in the past and knew him for a man of unusual shrewdness who, besides being the father of a charming and beautiful daughter, was in himself excellent company; and I was consequently pleased to run across him and his family at a time when all my friends seemed to be in some other quarter of the earth. We talked of horses together, and it was suggested that I might care to inspect an Arab mare, a recent acquisition, of which the old man was immensely proud.

  That evening I heard of the arrival in Nice of a young British diplomat whom, I remembered, I had once met at a hotel in Vienna. I called upon him the following day but I did so, not so much to renew our old acquaintance, as because that very morning I had received a rambling letter from my chief commenting upon the imminent arrival of the Englishman, and suggesting that I might find him a pleasant companion during my stay on the Riviera.

  More work, in other words. My chief did not waste time in encouraging purposeless friendships. As I read the letter, it was a hint that the Englishman had something which Berlin wanted and I was to get it.

  It was not difficult to recall myself to the Under-Secretary. We became friendly, and proceeded to "do "Nice together; and in the course of our excursions we became occasional visitors at the villa of an Eastern Potentate.

  The Potentate in question was an engaging and eccentric old gentleman, who had been an uncompromising opponent of the English during his youth in India, and was now practically an exile, spending most of his time in planning futile conspiracies against the British Government, which he hated, and making friends with Englishmen, against whom he had no animosity whatever. He was especially well disposed towards my diplomatic friend, and the two spent many a riotous evening together over the chess board, at which the Potentate was invariably successful.

  Meanwhile I made various plans and cultivated the acquaintance of the latter's secretary. He was a Bengali, who might well have stepped out of Kipling, so far as his manner went. In character the resemblance was not so close. I happened to know that he was paid a comfortable amount yearly by the British Government, to keep them informed of his master's movements; and I also happened to know that the German Government pai
d him a more comfortable amount for the privilege of deciding just what the British Government should learn. (I have often wondered whether he shared the proceeds with the Potentate, and whether even he knew for whom he was really working.) The secretary, I decided, might be of use to me.

  As it happened, it was the secretary who unwittingly suggested the method by which I finally gained my object. It was he who commented upon the diplomat's intense interest in the Potentate's seraglio, giving me a clue to the character of the Englishman which was of distinct service. And it was he who suggested one evening that the three of us for the Potentate was ill at the time should attend a performance of the circus in which my friends, the Bishops, were playing.

  You foresee the end, no doubt. The too susceptible diplomat was infatuated by Mile. Bishop's beauty and skill. He wished to meet her, and I, who obligingly confessed that I had had some transactions with her father, undertook to secure the lady's permission to present him to her.

  I did secure it, of course, although not without considerable opposition on the part of all three of the family; for circus people are very straightlaced. However, by severely straining my purse and my imagination, I convinced them that they would be doing both a friendly and a profitable act by participating in the little drama that I had planned. Eventually they consented to aid me in discomfiting the diplomat, whom I represented as having in his possession some legal papers that really belonged to me, although I could not prove my claim to them.