Odd People

by Basil Thomson

  ‘I see how it is,’ she said at last. ‘You suspect me. Can I speak to you alone?’ The room was cleared of all but one officer and myself. She looked at him interrogatively.

  ‘I said “alone”.’

  ‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘This gentleman and I may be regarded as one person.’

  ‘Very well,’ she said. ‘Then I am going to make a confession to you. I am a spy, but not, as you think, for the Germans, but for one of your allies – the French.’

  I do not know to this moment whether she thought we would believe her, but she plunged then into a sea of reminiscence, telling us of the adventures she had undergone in pursuit of the objects of her employers. I wondered how many of them were true.

  We had altogether two long interviews with Mata Hari and I am sure that she thought she had had the best of it. We were convinced now that she was acting for the Germans and that she was then on her way to Germany with information which she had committed to memory. On the other hand, she had no intention of landing on British soil or of committing any act of espionage in British jurisdiction and with nothing to support our view we could not very well detain her in England; so at the end of the second interview I said to her, ‘Madame,’ (she spoke no English) ‘we are going to send you back to Spain and if you will take the advice of someone nearly twice your age, give up what you have been doing.’ She said, ‘Sir, I thank you from my heart. I shall not forget your advice. What I have been doing I will do no more. You may trust me implicitly,’ and within a month of her return to Spain she was at it again.

  This time she was captured on the French side of the frontier and, as I heard at the time, with compromising documents upon her. I should have thought that so astute a lady would have avoided documents at all hazards. They carried her to Paris, put her on her trial and on 25 July 1916 condemned her to death, but there was, as there is usually in such cases, an interminable delay and it was not until 15 October that she was taken from Saint Lazare Prison to Vincennes for execution. A French officer who was present described to me what happened. She was awakened at five o’clock in the morning and she dressed herself in a dark dress trimmed with fur, with a large felt hat and lavender kid gloves. With an escort of two soldiers, her counsel and a padre, she was driven to Vincennes. When she came into sight of the troops she gently put aside the ministrations of the padre and waved a salute to the soldiers. She refused to be blindfolded and she was in the act of smiling and greeting the firing-party when the volley sent her pagan spirit on its journey.

  Another lady who was taken off a ship in transit from Rotterdam to Barcelona was the cause of diplomatic remonstrances. She was a German named Lisa Blume and she was accompanied by an aged German duenna who had been a governess in her earlier years. Attention was first called to Fräulein Blume by the enormous quantity of baggage she was carrying. She had no fewer than seventeen trunks filled, for the most part, with expensive clothes, which hardly seemed to fit in with her story that she was housekeeper to a member of the German embassy in Madrid. She was most indignant at her treatment and she refused to answer any questions at all. Her duenna, however, was more communicative. Fräulein Blume, she said, was the daughter of a railway official in Germany and though undoubtedly housekeeper, she was also in confidential relations with the Counsellor of the embassy. When we came to search her baggage we discovered a ration of nine iron crosses, which she appeared to be conveying to the personnel of the German embassy. There was reason to believe, moreover, that she was the bearer of messages probably committed to memory, from the German government to their representatives. Under these circumstances we interned her and retained the decorations, but the duenna was allowed to proceed upon her journey. We thought it likely that the incident would not be allowed to pass without comment and in due course representations were received from two neutral Powers who, when the true relations of Fräulein Blume with her employer were explained, appear to have dropped the question rather hurriedly.

  Towards the end of 1915 some very remarkable telegrams were handed in at Malta. They were a meaningless jumble of words and evidently a code and it was decided that the sender was a woman who called herself Madame Marie Edvige de Popowitch, a Serb, who had come to Malta for the state of her health. She looked astonishingly well for an invalid. Her flow of eloquence was reported to be extraordinary. Among her effects was found a Dutch dictionary in which certain words were underscored and some of these words occurred in the telegrams. On probing the possibility of this dictionary providing a code, it was found that the messages that were to have been dispatched to a certain port in the Mediterranean detailed the sailing of steamers from Malta. It was decided to send her to England to be dealt with and she was put on board HMS Terrible, together with two canaries, from which she refused to be separated. The voyage was stormy in more than one sense and the captain did his best to placate his prisoner, but it was whispered that on one occasion when he went to listen to her complaints about her rations she flung a beef-steak full in his face.

  It was with this reputation that she came before us. On that occasion three officers were present besides myself. The lady entered my room calm but determined. She was one of the shortest women I have ever seen and certainly the broadest. Sitting in the low armchair, her head scarcely reached to the top of the table, but it would have been a mistake, I saw at once, to treat her as negligible in any other respect. She spoke French. In the earlier stages of our interview I was ‘ce monsieur’, at a later stage I was ‘ce maudit policeman’. It was my rather searching inquiry into her reasons for possessing an ancient Dutch dictionary that provoked the change. The difficulty was that when any question was put to her she never stopped talking even to take breath. Her voice rose and rose until the very walls reverberated with it. I do not know what a welkin is, but I am quite sure that if we had had one over our heads that morning it would have been rung. Her excitement rose with her voice and, finding herself at the usual disadvantage in sitting in a low chair, she got up from it and came nearer and nearer until her gesticulations began narrowly to miss our faces. There was a point at which one of the officers with me began unostentatiously to remove the paper-knives, pens, rulers and other lethal weapons that lay at my right hand and to push them out of her reach, but she became at last so violent and her hands were so nearly at the level of our faces that we rose too and as she advanced upon us, still talking, we gave way, until she was at the table and we were half way to the door. As nothing would stem the torrent of her eloquence it was suggested in a whisper that we should all bow gravely to her and leave the room, sending in the proper people to get her into a taxi. I do not suppose that those silent and dignified vaulted corridors have ever re-echoed such language as the lady used on her way to the taxi. I was told afterwards that the storm would have been far more severe if it had not occurred to the wily inspector who had to deal with her to talk to her soothingly about her canaries.

  Madame Popowitch was medically examined as to the state of her mind and we were advised that it would not be wise to try her on the capital charge. It was therefore decided to keep her in internment until the end of the war. She was removed to Aylesbury, where she bombarded the authorities with a myriad complaints. Nobody seemed to have pleased her except the captain of HMS Terrible, who, she said, never failed to inquire after the health of her canaries. All this time these canaries were being looked after by the police, but at the suggestion of the prison authorities they were sent to Aylesbury, where it was reported they had a calming effect upon their mistress. In the end Madame Popowitch was certified insane and removed to an asylum.

  Eva de Bournonville was probably the most incompetent woman spy ever recruited by the Germans. She was a Swede, of French extraction, well educated and a linguist. Life had not prospered with her. She had been a governess in the Baltic Provinces, an actress (I should think a very bad one) and a secretary and typist employed occasionally at foreign legations. In the autumn of 1915 she was out of work, when she was approac
hed by one of the spy-recruiting agents in Scandinavia. It chanced that she had an acquaintance in Scotland whom she had met in Sweden. To this lady she wrote that she was coming to England for the sake of her health and proposed to pay her a visit. Provided with a Swedish passport, she had no difficulty in entering the country: she was, moreover, a lady by birth and her manners were perfect.

  On her arrival in London she put up at a cheap hotel in Bloomsbury and wrote to her friend in Dunbartonshire, saying that after a good rest she proposed to apply for a post in the Censorship, for which her friend might give her a recommendation. The Scottish lady sent her the address of some acquaintances in Hackney and advised her to call upon them. She did so and, finding that they were not at home, she left a card on which she had given the Danish Legation at Pont Street as her address, for it appears that she had made arrangements to have remittances sent to her through the Danish Legation. On this she received an invitation to Hackney where, however, she soon began to excite uneasiness in the minds of her new acquaintances. With all her education she was remarkably stupid at the business of espionage. She called again and again and went out walking with the family. There were a good many Zeppelin raids in those days and she was continually plying her host with questions about the anti-aircraft defences. Could she be taken to see the nearest gun? How many guns were there in London? How far could they shoot up in the air? And once, when she accompanied the family to Finsbury Park, she said, ‘Oh, this is Finsbury Park. Where are the Zeppelin guns placed here?’

  At last she asked her host to recommend her to the Postal Censorship and here he put down his foot and said, ‘You see, if anything went wrong we should get into serious trouble.’

  On this she dropped the family in Hackney, who remembered afterwards that she had said on one occasion, ‘The Germans know everything that passes here. You cannot hide anything from them.’

  She failed in her application to join the Censorship, chiefly on account of the lack of satisfactory English references. She told the lady who interviewed her how her father had been a general in the Danish Army and her grandfather a music-teacher to Queen Alexandra, while an aunt was still acting in that capacity to the Danish royal family.

  She left Bloomsbury for lodgings in South Kensington and later for a certain ladies’ club. Then she returned to Bloomsbury and put up at a private hotel in Upper Bedford Place, where army officers were wont to spend their leave. She was unremitting in her questions to subalterns.

  For some time afterwards, letters proved to be in her handwriting, containing information that would not have been of much use to the enemy had he received it, had been intercepted, but beyond the handwriting there was nothing that would give the identity of the writer. At last certain observations in one of the letters pointed to a particular hotel in Upper Bedford Place, but in that hotel there were more than thirty guests and it was impossible to determine which of them was the spy. A certain officer who was employed on the case determined to test the matter in the simplest possible way. He selected one or two of the most likely of the guests and whispered to them incredible stories about secret engines of war that were in preparation. The most incredible of all was told to Eva de Bournonville and on the following day a letter was intercepted containing this very information which, if it had reached the German spy agent, ought to have caused his remaining hairs to rise in their places. De Bournonville was arrested on 15 November 1915. She expressed great surprise and made no admissions. In my room on the following day she made a brave show of innocence until I produced her letter and showed it to her, with the messages in secret ink between the lines developed. She opened her eyes very wide and said, ‘Yes, it is my handwriting, but how did you get it?’ I told her that I had got a good deal more. She then asked to be allowed to see me alone and the room was cleared of all but a military officer.

  ‘You may think it curious,’ she said,

  but I always wanted to work for you and not for the Germans. I am very fond of the English and the Belgians and I do not like the Germans at all. Never have I forgotten their behaviour to Denmark in 1864. My idea was to make the Germans believe I was working for them until I was fully in their confidence and then offer my services to you. I only did this for adventure.

  It then appeared that the German military attaché in Sweden, acting with an agent of the Secret Service, had induced this wretched woman to imperil her life for £30 a month. A cheque for that amount was actually found in her possession on her arrest and she claimed to be allowed to keep it. She was tried before Mr Justice Darling at the Old Bailey on 12 January 1916 and was sentenced to death by hanging. Following our universal practice of not executing women, the King commuted the sentence to one of penal servitude for life. She was sent to Aylesbury to serve her sentence and was repatriated in February 1922. It transpired in the course of this case that the Germans were instructing their spies to address their letters to non-existent Belgian prisoners of war.

  Towards the end of 1917 the Germans had ceased to employ agents in England for obtaining naval and military information. What they were then concerned about was the public morale, I suppose because their own was giving premonitory symptoms of crumbling. We first became aware of this through the letters written by a Mrs Smith to her relations in Germany. Mrs Smith proved to be a working housekeeper.

  Originally she had been a German nurse in Switzerland, where she had married one of her patients, an English doctor, not long before his death. Having thus acquired British nationality, she came to England, where she found herself obliged to eke out the slender provision her husband had made for her by taking work as a housekeeper. Her letters, written in German, contained gems like the following:

  Tell Uncle Franz that Fritz is perturbed at seeing so many of the trout in his fish-pond eaten by the pike. If more pike get into the pond there will soon be none of his trout left. It makes him very angry and frightened.

  And in another letter she writes:

  On Sunday I went out to see the place where the big birds roost. It was full of birds and some of them are very big indeed. It is said that they will soon take longer flights. I do not think that the great eagles that fly over us are frightening these birds; they only make them angry.

  Mrs Smith made a brave attempt to explain these letters away. She had, she said, an uncle named Franz who bred trout in a fish-pond and who had written to her about the depredations of pike. And about the great birds she ventured the suggestion that they were herons; but when we put before her our own interpretation of this simple code she became silent and resigned and she retired into internment at Aylesbury with a philosophic heart.

  CHAPTER 16

  CURIOUS VISITORS

  ON 6 JANUARY 1916 a Dutch liner called in territorial waters at Falmouth and was boarded by naval officers. On the steamer were Colonel von Papen and Captain Boy-Ed, the German military and naval attachés from Washington. The boarding officer was quite polite, but he declared his intention of looking through their papers. On this von Papen protested vigorously that his papers were covered by the ‘safe-conduct’ that had been given by the British government. It was pointed out to him that the ‘safe-conduct’ applied to his personal liberty but not to his baggage or papers and without further ado the officer took possession of these and, among them, of all his used cheques, chequebooks and paying-in slips, which proved to be a mine of information. There were payments to a man who was known in the United States as a wrecker of bridges and to others who were known to have been guilty of sabotage. There were payments to Kuppferle, who committed suicide in Brixton Prison and to von der Goltz, as well as to other suspects. It is said to be the fashion in Germany to lay much of the blame for defeat upon the ineptitude of the German diplomatic agents abroad and certainly Colonel von Papen, either by bad luck or bad management, had helped us not a little, for not long before this date Bernstorff had made a solemn declaration that no member of the embassy had had anything to do with sabotage or with espionage.

&nb
sp; Bernstorff was not the first to use the diplomatic machinery for espionage. The foreign ambassadors at the Tudor and Stuart courts made considerable use of secret agents. In 1745 Monsieur Tiquet, the French diplomatic agent at Brussels, obtained from Grieling, a Brussels shopkeeper, plans of the fortresses of Nieuport and Dunkirk, in which, following German methods in our own day, he had worked as a labourer.

  In the war of the Austrian Succession Count de Tilly, the French minister at Mannheim, got from an Italian named Pasetti, who was actually serving as an officer in the Austrian Army, information that determined the choice between the Rhenish and Flemish theatres of war. Belgium and Holland were then, as they have been in our own time, hotbeds of espionage against England, but one may read between the lines that even during the Seven Years’ War the British Intelligence Service was more than a match for the French and that Louis XV spent very large sums to little purpose. In those days the agent double seems to have been as common as he is now.

  Louis had scruples that would have seemed curious to the German General Staff in the late war. He would not listen to a scheme for causing a run upon the Bank of England by means of forged notes, or to employing Ivan Golofskin, the friend of the secretary to the Duke of Cumberland, who was exceptionally placed for obtaining information, but he was not above using duplicates of the Russian ambassador’s dispatches addressed to his own government, or to arranging with the Czarina Elizabeth to pay her new ambassador £100,000 a year to send to the French government information about military plans of the British and especially the plans of the projected invasion of the low countries.