The Defence of the Realm Read online

  Fear of the invading Hun was further fuelled in the autumn of 1908 by reports that Germany was secretly stepping up dreadnought construction. Though inaccurate, the reports were confirmed by the British naval attaché in Berlin and the consul in Danzig.33 The cabinet dispute which ensued began in acrimony and ended in farce. ‘In the end,’ wrote Winston Churchill, ‘a curious and characteristic solution was reached. The Admiralty had demanded 6 ships: the economists offered 4: and we finally compromised on 8.’ This remarkable decision was the result of outside pressure. The Tory Opposition, the Tory press, the Navy League and other patriotic pressure groups worked themselves into a frenzy as they denounced government hesitation in the face of the German naval menace. ‘We are not yet prepared to turn the face of every portrait of Nelson to the wall,’ thundered the Daily Telegraph, ‘and to make in time of peace the most shameful surrender recorded in the whole of our history.’ Assailed by the vociferous demand ‘We want eight, and we won’t wait!’, the Liberal cabinet surrendered to it.34

  By 1907 Major (later Major General Sir) William Thwaites, head of the German section at the War Office, was convinced that there was ‘much truth’ in newspaper reports that German intelligence officers were at work in every county. The Director of Military Operations, Major General (later Lieutenant General Sir) John Spencer Ewart, also believed that Germany was pouring ‘hosts of agents and spies’ into Britain.35 Edmonds, the head of MO5, agreed. German friends had told him of requests by the German Admiralty to report on the movement of British warships, work in dockyards and arsenals, aeroplane development and the building of munitions factories.36 Late in 1907 he began keeping a record of reports of alleged German espionage ‘which on inquiry appeared to offer some justification for suspicion’. Not a single case was reported to the War Office by the police. All the reports came from members of the public, many of them influenced by alarmist press reports. As Edmonds acknowledged, ‘it is only since certain newspapers have directed attention to the subject that many cases have come to notice.’ MO5 lacked the resources to check adequately the reports it received.37

  Though Edmonds, Melville, Thwaites, Ewart and others at the War Office were too uncritical of alarmist reports from press and public of spies and invasion plans, they had much better grounds for believing that there was a major German espionage offensive against Britain than most historians have been willing to recognize.38 Edmonds was arguably the leading army intellectual of his generation as well as a gifted linguist with a largely self-taught reading knowledge of many languages as well as fluency in German. After education as a day boy at King’s College School, Wimbledon, he passed first into the Royal Military Academy with the best marks the examiners could remember. He also passed out first, winning a number of prizes including the sword for the best gentleman cadet, and was gazetted to the Royal Engineers, where his brilliance earned him the nickname ‘Archimedes’. He later passed first once again into Staff College. In 1899 he was posted to the War Office Intelligence Department (ID), and after three years in South Africa from 1901 to 1904 returned to the ID. By the time he became head of MO5, Edmonds was an experienced intelligence officer.39

  As a nine-year-old child living in France at the end of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, Edmonds had witnessed at first hand the occupying forces of the newly united Germany. He spent much of his life thereafter studying the German army.40 Edmonds shared with others at the War Office the belief that the Franco-Prussian War, the last between major European powers, provided important insights into likely German strategy in the next war. Germany’s rapid, crushing victory in 1870–71, he believed, was due partly to the effectiveness of its intelligence services and to the ineffectiveness of French counter-espionage. The head of German field intelligence, General Lewal, had established an effective network of agents who helped to guide the invading Prusso-German regiments into France. Some of these agents were ‘mobile agents’, loyal German citizens (Reichsangehörige) in France who worked as waiters, barbers and language teachers, and sent whatever military information they could acquire back to Berlin. German intelligence in 1870 was known to have had a collecting agent in Lyons, who telegraphed all intelligence reports to Geneva, whence they were forwarded on to Germany.41 MO5 also concluded that, in the years preceding the Franco-Prussian War, German intelligence made use of German army reservists living in France as well as the German consular service.42 It studied German military publications such as the Militärwochenblatt, which included articles on the need to establish sabotage agents in enemy countries before the mobilization of troops.43 The official German Field Manual (Felddienstordnung) of 1894, of which MO5 obtained a copy, ‘stated without reticence the necessity of espionage, and ordered the use of spies in every command’.44

  During the 1890s, initially as the result of exchanging intelligence on Russia, Edmonds established friendly relations with several German military intelligence officers. Though his main contact was succeeded in 1900 by an officer of ‘anti-English proclivities’, other informants told him – correctly – that in 1901 German intelligence had set up a new department to target Britain.45 Neither Edmonds nor anyone else in the War Office, however, realized that the department was purely naval and had no involvement with Sektion IIIb, military intelligence. It was therefore assumed that Germany had begun to develop a military espionage network in Britain similar to its successful network in France before the Franco-Prussian War. Though MO5 was aware that German naval intelligence was at work in Britain, it mistook some of the operations of the Nachrichten-Abteilung (‘N’), founded in 1901, for those of the military Sektion IIIb. The ‘N’ network in Britain, directed by Melville’s old acquaintance Gustav Steinhauer, included both ‘reporters’ (Berichterstatter), who passed information on the Royal Navy back to Berlin during peacetime, and ‘confidential agents’ (Vertrauensmänner), who were to be mobilized after the outbreak of war. Though Steinhauer’s recruitment methods, which usually involved letters by him to German citizens living in Britain written under an alias from a cover address in Potsdam and asking for their services, were somewhat hit-and-miss, the ‘Kaiser’s spy’ also developed a more sophisticated system of ‘intermediaries’ (Mittelsmänner) to act as cut-outs between him and his agents in Britain. After the outbreak of war, a ‘war intelligence system’ (Kriegsnachrichtenwesen) was to be introduced, using agents travelling to Britain under false identities to conduct specific missions. Steinhauer, however, was left largely to his own devices with little active tasking by the German Admiralty.46

  Edmonds’s willingness to believe that German intelligence was actively engaged in the military reconnaissance of Britain, as well as collecting naval intelligence, was strengthened by mirror-imaging – his knowledge that the British army was secretly carrying out detailed reconnaissance on the continent. In 1907 the War Office ordered a secret survey of the area in which the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) was expected to be deployed in time of war. By 1908 the survey was so detailed that it included information on the population of villages and the locations of post offices, pipe water supply, bicycle shops and railway sidings.47 Convinced that there must be similar German military reconnaissance in Britain, Edmonds was therefore predisposed to believe reports of spies working for Sektion IIIb. In his later career as official historian of the First World War, his meticulous (if sometimes ponderous) use of both British and German military records was to earn him an honorary DLitt from Oxford University.48 The same level of critical judgement, however, was sometimes woefully lacking in his assessment of pre-war German espionage. Despite his reputation as the army’s leading intellectual, Edmonds had what Kell later called a ‘cranky’ side, which helps to explain why, despite his gifts, he never rose above the rank of honorary brigadier general.49

  Edmonds later attributed what he believed to be his success in uncovering the scale of German espionage in Britain, military as well as naval, to two remarkable ‘pieces of luck’, whose improbability he failed to grasp. One of his friends,
F. T. Jane (the founder of the naval and military annuals which bear his name), who was ‘on the lookout for spies’, found a suspicious German in Portsmouth, drove him to Woburn and, to teach him a lesson, claimed to have ‘deposited him in the Duke of Bedford’s animal park’. Immediately following this exploit, Jane received a series of letters about other suspected spies which he passed on to the War Office. Edmonds’s second apparent stroke of ‘luck’ was a flood of correspondence to William Le Queux from readers of his books and newspaper serials, convinced that they had seen suspicious-looking aliens on ‘early morning walks and drives’, correcting maps, showing ‘curiosity about railway bridges’ and making ‘enquiries about gas and water supply’. During 1908 Edmonds got in touch with ‘the most promising’ of Le Queux’s and Jane’s correspondents and made further inquiries. In February 1909 he concluded in an alarmist memorandum:

  Day in, day out, the ceaseless work of getting information and throwing dust in the eyes of others goes on, and the final result of it all, as far as we are concerned, is this: that a German General landing a force in East Anglia would know more about the country than any British General, more about each town than its own British Mayor, and would have his information so methodically arranged that he could, in a few minutes, give you the answer to any question you asked him about any town, village or position in that area.50

  Le Queux’s own fantasies scaled new heights in 1909 with the publication of another best-seller, Spies of the Kaiser: Plotting the Downfall of England, which claimed that England was awash with ‘a vast army of German spies’:

  I have no desire to create undue alarm. I am an Englishman and, I hope, a patriot. What I have written in this present volume in the form of fiction is based upon serious facts within my own personal knowledge . . . During the last twelve months, aided by a well-known detective officer, I have made personal inquiry into the presence and work of these spies, an inquiry which has entailed a great amount of travelling, much watchfulness, and often considerable discomfort.

  In the last chapter of the book, the heroes, John ‘Jack’ Jacox and his friend Ray Raymond, almost pay with their lives for their fearless investigations. In December 1908 they are presented with Christmas crackers by a group of apparently good-natured Germans, but are alerted just in time by a detective-inspector to the Germans’ real intentions:

  ‘They intended to wreak upon both of you a terrible revenge for your recent exposures of the German system of espionage in England and your constant prosecution of these spies.’

  ‘Revenge?’ [Jacox] gasped. ‘What revenge?’

  ‘Well,’ replied the detective-inspector, ‘both these [crackers] contain powerful bombs, and had you pulled either of them you’d both have been blown to atoms. That was their dastardly intention.’51

  Edmonds was well aware that this and other episodes in Spies of the Kaiser had been produced by Le Queux ‘out of his imagination’, and probably regarded the claim that the book was ‘based upon serious facts within [Le Queux’s] own personal knowledge’ as the kind of artistic licence indulged in by writers of popular thrillers. But he took seriously the ‘dozens of letters telling . . . of the suspicious behaviour of Germans’ sent to Le Queux by excitable readers of Spies of the Kaiser. Edmonds also continued to take Le Queux himself seriously. In his unpublished reminiscences written many years later after Le Queux’s death, Edmonds refers to him as his ‘friend’.52 Le Queux was more plausible in person than in print. He appears to have persuaded Edmonds, as he persuaded Sir Robert Gower MP, who wrote the foreword to his official biography, that his ‘interest was directed solely to the welfare of his country’.53

  R. B. Haldane, the Secretary of State for War in the Asquith government, was at first bemused by the extraordinary reports of German espionage which Edmonds presented to him. Unlike Edmonds, Haldane remained anxious to build bridges to Berlin. After the outbreak of war he was to be hounded from office for his alleged pro-German sympathies. His initial reaction, when confronted with Edmonds’s evidence, was to conclude that the alleged spies were really ‘the apparatus of the white slave traffic’.54 Some of Edmonds’s evidence, for example that concerning suspicious Germans with photographic equipment in Epping ‘occasionally visited by women from London for weekends’,55 did indeed lend itself to this interpretation. Edmonds, however, ‘persisted’, though – as he admitted later – ‘I was very nearly thrown out of my job for my pains.’ Finally, Haldane yielded to Edmonds’s persistence and allowed himself to be convinced of the spy menace. ‘What turned the scale’, in Edmonds’s view, was a letter from the Mayor of Canterbury, Francis Bennett-Goldney (soon to become Conservative MP for Canterbury), who reported that he ‘had found two Germans wandering in his park, had talked to them and invited them in to dinner’. After dinner, the two men had revealed to a stunned Bennett-Goldney the sinister purpose of their apparently harmless excursions: ‘Their tongues loosened by port, they told him they were reconnoitring the country for an advance on London from the ports of Folkestone, Dover, Ramsgate and Margate.’ Even when recounting this remarkable episode many years later, Edmonds seemed unaware of its unusual irony.56 Germans and Britons had reversed their national stereotypes. Two funloving German tourists had played a British practical joke on their British host who had reacted with the incomprehension commonly associated by the British with the humourless Hun.

  At a deeper level Haldane’s readiness to believe such remarkable tales of German espionage reflected his enormous respect for the ability and professionalism of the German General Staff. He impressed on Vernon Kell ‘the excellence and precision of their planning’,57 and considered them fully capable of creating a dangerous and extensive spy network in Britain. In March 1909 Haldane set up, with cabinet approval, a high-powered sub-committee of the Committee of Imperial Defence to consider ‘the nature and extent of the foreign espionage that is at present taking place within this country and the danger to which it may expose us’. The chair was taken by Haldane himself.58

  Edmonds told the first meeting of the sub-committee on 30 March of a rapid rise in ‘cases of alleged German espionage’ reported to the War Office by the public. Five cases had been reported in 1907, forty-seven in 1908 and twenty-four in the first three months of 1909. Edmonds gave some particulars of thirty of these cases. Following Haldane’s advice to ‘lay stress on the anarchist (demolitions) motive’, Edmonds emphasized the ‘aggressive’ nature of German espionage, claiming that it aimed not merely at intelligence-gathering but also at preparing the destruction of docks, bridges, ammunition stores, railways and telegraph lines ‘on or before the outbreak of war’.59 There was, however, nothing personally eccentric in the belief held by Haldane and Edmonds that German agents would be used for sabotage. In the decade before 1914 the influential Journal of the Royal United Services Institution, which was read widely throughout the British armed forces, included several articles on the possibility of a German invasion of Britain, and sabotage operations being conducted in Britain prior to mobilization.60

  Spy scares in the Edwardian media: the Graphic uncovers a non-existent lair of German spies in Essex in 1908.

  When presenting the evidence of German espionage to the Committee of Imperial Defence sub-committee in 1909, Edmonds acknowledged, ‘We have . . . no regular system or organisation to detect and report suspicious cases, and are entirely dependent on casual information.’ Counterespionage at the Admiralty was in an even sorrier state. Captain R. C. Temple of the Naval Intelligence Department told the sub-committee that his department, which did little more than collate information on foreign navies, was unable to carry out any ‘investigations into espionage’ at all, and therefore passed on reports that came its way to Colonel Edmonds. In presenting his evidence to the sub-committee Edmonds ‘laid great stress on the fact that none of these cases were reported by the police authorities, and that he was indebted for information regarding them to private individuals’.61 He seems, at the very least, to have been insufficiently
surprised by the failure of the police to detect a single suspicious German as well as insufficiently sceptical of the information supplied by ‘private individuals’.

  An unknown number of the reports of suspicious Germans presented by Edmonds to the sub-committee had been investigated by Melville. Among them was a report of Germans taking photographs in the West Hartlepool area who Melville was convinced were spies.62 Shortly before the first meeting of the sub-committee, Melville sent his assistant, Herbert Dale Long, to investigate German spies said to be living in East Anglia. In his reports Long referred to the Germans by the codename ‘tariff reformers’ or ‘tr’. (The issue of tariff reform had split the Conservative government in the years before 1906 and was still a live issue in Liberal Free Trade Britain.)63 The same acronym, also used by Edmonds, was later employed (capitalized as ‘TR’) by the first Chief of SIS, Mansfield Cumming, who sometimes referred to Germany as ‘Tiaria’.64 On 23 March 1909, a week before the first meeting of the sub-committee, Long reported that the alleged German agents at various East Anglian locations had disappeared by the time he arrived:

  [I] have failed to discover tr agents at any of these places and I believe it can be taken for granted that none are residing there at the present time.

  There can be little doubt, however, that the party’s [German intelligence] emissaries here worked the district; the proprietor of the Ship Hotel at ‘Reedham’ – H. Carter – vigorously denounces the conduct of two agents who he observed were particularly active making notes and drawings in favour of the movement last summer.65

  The evidence of German espionage presented by Edmonds to the subcommittee now appears flimsy. His first twelve cases concerned ‘alleged reconnaissance work by Germans’. In half these cases the suspicious persons were not even clearly identified as Germans. The most farcical ‘reconnaissance’ report seems to have come, appropriately, from Le Queux (though, like other informants, he is not identified by name and is referred to only as a ‘well-known author’):