The Spy Net (17 page)

The German secret service probably obtained its most valuable information either through influential neutrals living in the Allied countries, or through traitors whom they occasionally were able to bribe by means of large sums of money. People of the type of Bolo Pasha and his accomplices in France, although comparatively rare, were the most dangerous because they were the least suspected, and often had access to information which no neutral or other agent could reach.

From Holland I naturally came more in contact with the Belgian branch of the German secret service than with any of the others, though even here it was only on rare occasions. The German counter-espionage service, whose job it was to prevent spying in Belgium and with whom I was continually crossing swords, was entirely separated from the German secret service proper, whose sole function was to send agents into the Allied countries or recruit them in the countries themselves, and collect the information they secured.

The Belgian branch of the German CE service, or Secret Police, had its headquarters at a house located in the rue Berlaimont, in Brussels. In my narrative I have already described its activities; its agents dogged us at every turn, and earned our respect and admiration. During the earlier stages of the war, it was under the direction of a man called Bergan, who was formerly at the head of the German counter-espionage service in Düsseldorf. Bergan was the guiding genius whose task it was to combat each move we made, and at the same time keep watch on several million Belgian inhabitants. Strange to say, Bergan could not speak a word of French, and so in his actual contact with the Belgians, he was very dependent on his assistant R, a former German agent, who had operated in France before the war under the guise of a butcher. Little had the Parisians known, when they bought their meat from this red-cheeked, rotund individual, that he was in German pay.

The German secret service in Belgium, distinct from the German counter-espionage organisations previously described, was under the direction of a mysterious woman, known as Fräulein Doktor, and under a dozen other names. She was said to be the daughter of a noble family whose influence had secured for her the appointment. The truth about her is that she won her appointment by merit. Her real name was Elsbeth Schragmüller. At the outbreak of the war, she had just taken her degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Freiburg. Inspired by a desire to serve her country she made repeated applications for enrolment in the German secret service. Eventually during the early weeks of the war she was sent to Brussels where she was put to work reading confiscated letters written to Belgian
civilians by relatives in the field. So brilliantly did she acquit herself in intelligence work that she won the commendation of General von Beseler, chief of staff of the corps besieging Antwerp, and shortly thereafter Colonel Nicolai, chief of Section IIIb of the general staff in charge of military intelligence, put her in charge of the German spy-training school in Antwerp. She was a good-looking, buxom woman, with the disposition of a tiger. From her headquarters in Antwerp she dispatched many an agent into England and France. It was said of her that she sent into a trap any agents who had played her false and whom she wished to get rid of. So confident of this were the British authorities in the case of one of her spies, whom they arrested immediately on his landing in England, that they merely imprisoned him for the duration of the war. Her policy was to make her agents so thoroughly afraid of her that fear of vengeance would deter them from treachery. Most of the information we had about her came from a Belgian who managed for a short while to enlist himself in her service. His report, in the form of a memorandum from C, was one of the first communications I read on entering the secret service.

In spite of Fräulein Doktor’s efforts and those of headquarters in Berlin, it was quite evident from the questionnaires issued to their agents, which fell into our hands from time to time as the war progressed, that the Germans were getting very little information out of England; the result was that they gradually concentrated their efforts on Russia, and probably on the United States, where the activities of Captain Boy-Ed and his satellites were fully unmasked.

This very deflection from their chief aim served them well,
for it revived the belief in the omnipresence and omniscience of German power, and renewed the spy hysteria which had been an indirectly useful weapon earlier in the war. In future wars new inventions will have to be reckoned with; but not to be overlooked in importance will be the extraordinary effect of the psychology of fear and its eminently useful weapon, the dread of a net of spies.

W
AR HAD BEEN
declared between Germany and England but a few hours when a group of trawlers sailed from the east coast of England in the direction of Emden, the German port at the mouth of the Ems River where the Dutch coast joins that of Germany. To any German coastal patrol boat which might have spotted them, they were just some of the many fishing boats operating in the area. A boarding party would have revealed that they were manned chiefly by cable experts. Under the cover of darkness and mist, slipping silently between the Dutch islands in the vicinity, they grappled for the German deep-sea cables. Covered with mud and seaweed these cables were eventually hauled up on deck; and one after another they were cut and allowed to sink back into the depths.

It was a brilliant coup, conceived and executed by a young naval officer who, disguised as a fisherman, had mapped out the area several months before the war and had planned every step which had now been so successfully carried out.

After fruitlessly trying to get through on their cables, the Germans at length realised what had happened. To communicate with the outside world only two channels were now left open to them: cables owned by neutral countries, and wireless communication through the air. The ether soon buzzed with German coded wireless messages, not only to their diplomatic representatives in neutral countries, but also to those of their warships cut off in distant parts of the globe by the outbreak of hostilities.

The French immediately suggested jamming the German wireless, but the British had a craftier plan. They decided instead to intercept the messages and to use them to their own advantage. The idea was excellent. But how was this to be done? It was obvious that somehow or other the German codes had to be stolen or acquired, or some master mind had to be found who, by methods of cryptography, could break the multiple and intricate ciphers which were being used. The director of naval intelligence at the admiralty, to whom the task was assigned, quickly realised that both methods had to be used.

It is true that the art of cryptography can be developed by constant practice, but it also requires a special flair. Whence, at short notice, was the British Admiralty going to recruit the necessary personnel, and above all where was the man to be found who had sufficient experience to direct such a service? Chance favoured the British. In the admiralty itself was a man who, as a hobby, had made a life study of cryptography. This man was Sir
Alfred Ewing, director of naval education, a noted scientist; and it was to him that Admiral Sir Henry Oliver, director of naval intelligence at the outbreak of the war, turned.

Sir Alfred eagerly accepted the assignment. Starting with a staff of five men, he patiently trained them and then added to their number until eventually he had a band of fifty assistants – mathematicians, linguists, and, later, secret ink chemists. Space for Sir Alfred and his staff was found in the Old Admiralty Building in Room 40, and to keep the nature of the organisation secret it was always referred to as ‘40 OB' (Old Building).

Ewing's appointment was one of the most judicious ever made at the admiralty. While battles raged at the Front and at sea, this frail, slightly-built man, with his enormous head, bushy eyebrows and dark piercing eyes, tranquilly seated in his peaceful office at the admiralty listening attentively, learned through intercepted and decoded messages what the next moves of the enemy would be. Even though the Germans constantly invented new codes or combined existing ones, he and the men working under him were always able to solve their mystery.

The existence of the British cryptographic service was one of the most jealously guarded secrets of the war. Even some of the British Cabinet ministers did not know of its existence, and many a member of the admiralty never heard of it until long afterwards. But those who were in the know realised that it contributed largely to the ultimate victory of the Allies. The public for the first time heard of it in 1925 when Sir Alfred Ewing caused a sensation by referring to it in an address which he gave at the University of Edinburgh. Shortly afterwards, Lord Balfour made the following declaration: ‘The country owes “40 OB” an immense debt of
gratitude, a debt which, for the moment at least, cannot be paid. Secrecy was an essential part of the work and never was a secret better guarded.'

There are hundreds of code and cipher systems, some of which are simple, others so complex as to tax the uttermost ingenuity of the cryptographer. Some are based on a verse or prose passage, or on an intricate combination of numbers, others are as elementary as the prearranged interchange of the letters of the alphabet. Some require the use of ponderous code books; others, in order to prevent their falling into the hands of the enemy, can be committed to memory. The skilled cryptographer must take most of these in his stride.

Cryptography alone, however, could not possibly unravel the secrets of all the German coded messages which crowded both the air and other channels of communication. In the case of a simple code, it was possible for an expert to find the key by studying the words or letters which kept repeating themselves; but in the case of the big German codes, which generally had four or five figure numbers, corresponding to a list of different words and phrases, supplemented by some fixed dictionary to supply words missing from the list, it was necessary to have a copy of the actual code.

The dictionary part was worked by slips having numbers so spaced that they fitted opposite the words on each page; the number of the page was obtained by adding it on to the front or the back of the code number. Thus, for example, if the word ‘jeopardy' occurred on page 63, and when putting the slip on this page the number 534 came opposite this word, then the code number for jeopardy would be either 63534, or 53463. This
could be made more complicated by multiplying this number by a common factor, or adding a fixed sum. As the numbers on the slip were changed continually, and as there are hundreds of dictionaries of all sizes and editions in existence, this dictionary code was undecipherable without a key.

As many of the German coded messages were based on the larger codes, ‘40 OB' could therefore never have achieved its brilliant success had not many of these codes, by some means or other, fallen into the hands of the British. The difficult task of acquiring them devolved on the British naval intelligence service.

In October 1914, Captain W. R. Hall, who later was knighted and promoted to the rank of admiral, took over from Admiral Sir Henry Oliver the direction of the naval intelligence service. Sir Reginald, or ‘Blinker' Hall, as he was affectionately known to his intimates, was splendidly endowed for this work. The following estimate of him made by Walter Hines Page, the American ambassador in London, in a confidential letter to President Wilson in 1917, was no exaggeration:

Apart from Hall's intimate experience and knowledge of everything pertaining to secret service, he was an uncanny judge of character. One glance was sufficient for him to sum a man up.
It was thus that he immediately gauged the qualities of Ewing, chosen by his predecessor, and promptly gave him
carte blanche
in the running of ‘40 OB'. The rest of his staff were chosen and handled with equal perception. He also had a remarkable ability in cross-examination, which proved the downfall of many a suspected German spy who was snared in the net he laid for him. However watertight their story, as Horst von der Goltz and others found when they had to face him in 1915, he intuitively picked out the flaws in their alibis or defences. ‘He can see through your very immortal soul. What eyes the man has got!' was the despairing remark of one of his victims. But it was the acquiring of German codes which was Sir Reginald's special vocation. Under his expert guidance and planning some were stolen by his daring agents; some were recovered from sunken German submarines and warships; others were captured by the British forces in various parts of the world. Although the British diplomatic and fighting services knew nothing about ‘40 OB' yet, as if attracted by a magnet, all information acquired by them pertaining to German codes found its way to Hall. His net was spun so finely that nothing missed him. To illustrate his methods we will tell how three of the many codes which fell into his hands were obtained.

A few hours after the German occupation of Brussels, the powerful wireless station at the Belgian capital had been converted to German use. As the intercepted messages started coming in to ‘40 OB', it became immediately evident to Sir Alfred Ewing that the Germans at the Brussels station were making extensive use of one of their large diplomatic codes. Many of the messages defied the efforts of some of his best cryptographers.

British agents, recruited from among the Belgians who remained behind in the occupied territory, were sending a steady stream of spy reports through to Holland. Here, then, was as good a field as any in which to attempt to secure possession of one of the larger German codes. H. 523, one of the best of the British agents, was charged with the mission. Careful observation and inquiry by him yielded results. He discovered that the German coding staff was located in the Kommandantur in Brussels and that it was composed of four coding clerks, one of whom was an Austrian, Alexander Soll, a brilliant young engineer, born in a suburb of London, whose father had moved with him to Brussels several years before the war. Immediately after the occupation of Belgium, the German and Austrian authorities had called to the colours all their nationals of military age residing in the territory, and young Soll had been one of them. His knowledge of the French language and of Brussels had won for him an assignment in the German counter-espionage service, and from there, in the course of time, he had been transferred as a coding clerk to the Kommandantur.

On receipt of agent H. 523's report, the British secret service was quick to seize on the point that Soll was born in London. A check-up of aliens registered in his suburb revealed that Soll had a relative still living there, that she was employed in an English family, and that, as in the case of so many Austrians, she was violently anti-German. It was not difficult, therefore, to persuade her to write a letter to her brother on fine tissue paper urging him to aid the British by securing for them the code. Her letter was handed to H. 523 on one of his periodical trips across the frontier into Holland.

To approach Soll directly was a dangerous and delicate undertaking, but H. 523 was skilled in the right methods of approach. After winning Soll's confidence by giving him news of his relative, H. 523 finally handed him her letter. At first Soll was afraid, but after considerable persuasion he eventually fell in with H. 523's plans. Soll's first thought was to steal the code, but H. 523 quickly pointed out to him that this would defeat their object, as the Germans would immediately change it. And so Soll set about the laborious task of secretly copying the code during his hours of service. This took him several months, since he could only do the copying during the odd moments he was left alone in the coding room during the luncheon hour. Finally, however, in April 1915 the task was completed. But to H. 523's dismay Soll refused to give him the code. He insisted instead on escaping across the frontier with it to Holland. In vain H. 523 pleaded with him that his flight would arouse the suspicion of the Germans that the code had been copied. But Soll was adamant; he had just received confidential information that he was about to be transferred to the Front; and from the firing line, above all, he wished to escape. Therefore, early in April 1915 on a moonless night, the two of them set out for the Belgian–Dutch frontier.

It was the period just after the Germans had completed their formidable barrier along the Belgian–Dutch border to prevent the passage of spy reports and to put a stop to the flow of refugees escaping across the border to join the Belgian Army. A high-voltage electric fence, 8 ft high, sentries every 100 yards, searchlights, police dogs, a horde of secret service Police, and mounted patrols covered the length of the frontier. Arriving near the border, Soll began to regret his decision. The danger
was as real as being in the trenches. He was now glad to get rid of the compromising copy of the code by handing it to H. 523.

Equipped with india-rubber gloves and socks to enable them to cross the high-tension electric fence, the two men crouched in the long grass, awaiting the moment when the sentry near them would reach the point on his beat farthest away from them. But their wait was cut short, a police dog started barking, the alarm was given, the searchlights were switched on, and the sentry started shooting. H. 523, experienced in crossing the high-voltage electric fence, made a dash for the border and succeeded in getting across, but Soll turned back and tried to escape. H. 523 brought the code to Colonel Oppenheim, the British military attaché at The Hague; and in due course it was forwarded to Sir Reginald Hall. What happened to Soll will ever remain one of the mysteries of the war.

Soll's father, who lived with him in Brussels, never heard of his son again. He was convinced that his son got across the frontier; and when after the Armistice he failed to return home, he accused the British of making away with him to prevent the Germans finding out that the British had a copy of the code.

After the war, while in charge of the secret service section of the British intelligence commission, whose function it was to liquidate all the British spy services which had operated behind the German Western Front in occupied Belgium and north-eastern France, I came across some evidence to show that Alexander Soll had been kept in solitary confinement in the Namur prison, that he was tried by court-martial, found guilty of being a deserter from military service, and shot. My informant was a former German soldier who had served during the war as a warder at the
prison. This man, born in Silesia, acquired Polish nationality by the Peace Treaty, and remained in Belgium after the Armistice. I am inclined to believe the warder's story – he had no reason to invent it – but Soll's father refused to accept it. To him it was just another ruse of the British to keep the truth away from him. On the other hand, if the Germans did shoot Alexander Soll, why did they not notify his father? And why after the war, when the father made inquiry in Berlin, did the German authorities inform him that they had no record of his son's execution?