The German Spy System

I

A FEATURE of the present war in Europe has been the extraordinary perfection of the German spy system and the odium with which it has covered its authors and directors. As all nations spy, none, one might think, is entitled on that score to cast a stone at another. But the therefores of logic have little hold over the waywardness of human nature. The use of spies is as fully authorized by the rules of war as the use of explosives, and it would not be difficult to show that to indict the Germans for employing them on a larger scale and with better effect than any of the other belligerents is hardly a reasonable proceeding. None the less a great deal of the really terrible hatred which has been raised against the Prussian authorities, a hatred which neither this generation nor the next is likely to outgrow, has its roots in their consummate organization of espionage. I have talked since the war began with men of all the nations that are fighting Germany. In each case this particular arm of German militarism was fixed upon as the breeding-ground of a transcendent animosity. In the countries that have so far suffered most from it, Belgium and France, the feeling on the subject burns like vitriol; and even in easy-going England it is beginning to harden.

Yet it is very obvious that if one spy is legitimate, so also are a thousand or twenty thousand. If it is proper in time of peace to commission a single individual to ferret out information in regard to the naval and military equipment and personnel of a friendly power, on what grounds can it be said to be wrong to set up in all countries permanent encampments of disguised spies? If it is no offense against the recognized code of military ethics to corrupt the inhabitants and officials and soldiers and sailors of another nation in one’s own interests, the mere number of those who thus bribe and are bribed cannot affect the morality of the transaction. When one looks into it, the real charge against the Germans is that they have wielded with incomparable efficiency a weapon that their opponents have handled only half-heartedly. They have developed all its possibilities; they have lavished upon its construction the same method and prevision and microscopic thoroughness that they devote to all the instruments of war; in their hands it has been so extended as to seem almost a new thing. Perhaps it is just as well. There is more chance that a hateful practice will be abandoned by common consent now that the world has taken the full measure of its repulsiveness. Espionage, whether a necessary evil or not, has always been an evil; but the Germans have elaborated it into a malignant disease. There are many sports in which certain tactics, technically permissible, are recognized as against the spirit of the game. If a player or a team of players, intent only on victory, suddenly begins to concentrate on them, to exploit their utmost capacity, to elevate them to a science, and to make them an essential part of attack and defense, legislation has to step in to modify or prohibit their use, or else the pastime changes its whole character and is well on the way to ruin. It is so with the Germans and their secret-service system. They have carried it to such limits that international comity is in peril of being poisoned. If other nations were to follow their example the whole world would be a mad-house of terrors and mistrust.

Yet they have done little or nothing in this war that they did not do in the war of 1870. If we are amazed to-day it is only because we have forgotten. From the days of Frederick the Great, who went to war ‘with one cook and a hundred spies,’ espionage has always been considered in Prussia, not only a military necessity but a reputable profession. ‘One must not confine one’s self,’ said William I to Bismarck, ‘to giving money to spies. One must also know how to show them honor when they deserve it’; and it was with his approval that the intelligence branch of the General Staff was put on a modern and permanent footing, and the secret police service, organized to watch over the Poles, the Socialists, and the revolutionaries of 1848, was systematically extended to foreign countries.

A genius in espionage—‘the king of sleuth-hounds,’ as Bismarck called him — was discovered in the person of Stieber. He was still in his twenties when he became a professional agent provocateur, posing among the people as a leader of the ‘ social revolution ’ and betraying his colleagues day by day to the police. He knew every trick in the game of stirring up popular feeling to the point where, without an actual outbreak, the authorities were furnished with all the excuse that they needed for acts of oppression; and in the tumultuous forties and fifties he rendered the King many conspicuous services. But it was not until he came in touch with Bismarck and won his confidence and was deputed to pave the way for the German invasion of Austria, that he became an international figure. For two years he traveled through Bohemia and Moravia, planting out spies at the points of strategic importance. Even Moltke, the most grudging of men, acknowledged the value of his work. Wherever the German armies went they found one of Stieber’s agents primed with information as to the strength and position of the enemy’s forces, the state of local feeling, and the resources and notabilities of the neighborhood. He was asked when the war was over whether the cost of organizing his service had been very heavy. He records in his Memoirs his proud reply. ‘One cannot,’ he answered, ‘set down in thalers the value either of bloodshed which has been avoided or of victories which have been secured.’

After Sadowa he turned his attention to France. Between 1866 and 1870 he sowed in the fourteen French Departments that would be traversed by the German troops a residential army of not less than 30,000 spies. After looking over the ground, which had, of course, already been prepared, he formulated his needs in wholesale fashion. Thus he required (1) between four thousand and five thousand farmers, market-gardeners, agricultural laborers, and vine-growers, for whom employment was guaranteed in advance by his agents; (2) from seven to nine thousand female domestics for service in restaurants, cafes, and hotels, the youngest and prettiest of them to be stationed in garrison towns; (3) six or seven hundred retired non-commissioned officers for whom billets were to be found in commercial or industrial offices and factories; (4) one thousand commercial travelers; (5) as many German governesses for distribution among the French official class. Well might he exclaim when an officer of the General Staff remarked in his and Bismarck’s presence, ‘Our army is invincible,’ that the proper phrase should be ‘Our armies.’ ‘The fighting army,’ he went on, ‘which you lead, comes behind you. Now, my army is already in occupation of positions which it reached in silence many months ago.’ And well might Bismarck indorse the retort by silently clasping the hand of the master-spy.

When the Prussians got to Versailles, nine thousand of Stieber’s men were on duty in the streets; and it was to their official headquarters, where Stieber was then in residence, that the unsuspecting Jules Favre was driven when negotiating the surrender of Paris. Stieber himself waited on the French minister in the guise of a valet, brought him his cup of coffee every morning, and systematically went through his pockets, trunks, and papers.

II

All this and much else is a matter of history, recorded in half a dozen enlightening memoirs and recollections. What the present war has shown is that the system first scientifically organized by Stieber forty-five years ago has been not only maintained but expanded. For many years past Germany has been spending on her secret service between three and four million dollars annually, that is to say, about five times as much as France and from twelve to fifteen times as much as Great Britain. The purpose to which these funds are mainly devoted is the establishment and maintenance of spies at fixed posts in potentially hostile countries. In France, where this smothered warfare has been waged most persistently and can best be studied, the principal agents are rarely Germans. They are as a rule Swiss, Belgians, and Alsatians, with a sprinkling of corrupt Frenchmen. If they are Germans, then they hasten to take out naturalization papers and to make themselves conspicuous by protestations of loyalty to the land of their adoption. But in all cases they are instructed to disguise their operations under the forms of ordinary business. They take shops, land-agencies, hotels, insurance offices, and so on. They follow their calling just like everybody else in the locality. They attract no notice either by having too much money or too little. Their businesses are soundly established and are in keeping with the requirements of the neighborhood. The expenses of starting them are borne out of the secret-service funds, and from the same source the deficits, if any, in the annual balance-sheet are made good. The man in charge identifies himself with the life around him, sits on committees, makes as many friends as possible, subscribes generously to local charities, and not infrequently gets himself elected to some minor office. He is paid for his services as a spy either by an inspector who visits him in the guise of a commercial drummer and to whom he hands his reports, or by bank notes enclosed in a registered envelope and accompanied by a letter dated from Lausanne or Brussels or some equally innocuous centre, — never from any German town, — the writer of which poses as some near relative or intimate friend gratefully discharging his financial obligations. Thus the spy is able to live in respected independence, his own master, secure against suspicion, or in any event against proof, and in a position to do his duty by his employers.

It is spies of this class who have made the German name detestable throughout Europe. The spy who is dispatched either in war or in peace on a confidential mission to a foreign country has still an element of romance about him. Dr. Armgaard Karl Graves has described how, before he took service under the German Naval Intelligence Department, he was kept for five months ‘ at a steady grind of schooling in certain things.’ He had to brush up his trigonometry, study topography, and master something more than the elements of naval construction and drawing. He was taught by experts everything there was to be known in regard to the various types of warships, torpedoes, submarines, and mines; the different ranking officers of the navies of the world, their uniforms, the personnel of battleships, and the systems of flag signals and codes. Thus equipped he was sent out to penetrate the secrets of the British navy, carrying his liberty in his hand, and matching his wits and skill against those of officialdom. Such a spy is legitimate. You may call him a cur when he is on the other side, but you feel for him a sporting admiration when he is on your own. So, too, with the men and women who are detailed to study and get acquainted with the naval and military chiefs of rival countries. They play at least a dashing game from which even the novelists have not yet rubbed off quite all the glamour.

But one has, irrationally perhaps, a very different, feeling toward the German battalions of residential spies. They mingle with the people whose hospitality they are all the time abusing. They become, to all appearances, their friends, are admitted to their houses, and yet are always plotting against their safety. That is a situation which, the moment it is revealed or suspected, becomes little less than fatal to the normal confidences of civilized intercourse. Spy-mania, over which, I dare say, many Americans have made merry in the past few months, is a disease incomprehensible to those who have not themselves experienced its ravages. It is a madness of terror and suspicion vitiating the whole atmosphere, causing cities and whole nations to writhe under its snaky touch. But it is a madness not without cause.

If a German army were landed on Long Island, and New Yorkers were to discover the German manager of a Fifth Avenue hotel with a secret wireless apparatus on his roof, how, I wonder, would they feel about it. If country houses in the neighborhood were found to have concrete platforms for the support of heavy artillery under the guise of tennis courts; if leading men in the Long Island villages, whose loyalty had never for a moment been in question, were to go out to meet the enemy and act as their guides and place at their disposal all their stores of local information; if letters of the most innocent appearance — mailed, let us say, from Governor’s Island — were proved to contain military intelligence of the most vital character written under the stamps, and between harmless-looking photographs and their mounts; if a Long Island farmer recognized at the head of the advancing troops a man who had been for years in his employment, and was at once presented by him with a list of the rooms, produce, and goods that he was immediately to hand over to the invader; if respected and well-todo storekeepers, manufacturers, and residents turned out to be in communication with the enemy; if unsuspected cottages were suddenly to reveal their true character as miniature arsenals prepared in advance; if the fire of the German guns on New York were obviously being directed by signals from the city itself; if railway bridges were mysteriously blown up; if spies were caught red-handed in the City Hall and in the Brooklyn Navy Yard; and if every day, in addition to the horrors of warfare, brought fresh evidence that the advance guards of the enemy had in effect been encamped on American soil long before the actual outbreak of hostilities and as part of a methodical system — Americans, I conceive, being a very human people, would find themselves in these circumstances by no means unmoved.

Now, each of these incidents has actually occurred, either in France or in Belgium, since last August. And they have been, no doubt, the prolific parents of other incidents which might have happened but did not, and of fears which were justified but never realized. Every known case of espionage raises suspicions of a hundred that have still to be discovered. The whole air is polluted. Men who were in Brussels in the early days of the war have assured me that the infection of hatred, terror, and mistrust which spread through the city as the daring and ubiquity of the German agents began to be realized was worse than any battle. The citizens saw spies or traitors everywhere and flung them indiscriminately into jail. They were in the grip of fear, unnerved by the horribly demoralizing sense of betrayal, panic-stricken by insupportable suspicions. The Belgians will rebuild their wasted cities and cultivate anew the fields now ravaged and desolate, but I doubt whether they will either forget or forgive the cruelty and bitterness of their experience with German spies. For them it has been little less than treason against humanity.

III

But there is a nobler form of spying which the Germans have also practiced with conspicuous courage and success. They have shown themselves, indeed, absolute masters of all the ruses and stratagems of war. When the French, in the opening days of the campaign, made their initial dash into Alsace and Lorraine, it was a clever and legitimate German stroke to have them greeted by local officials and notabilities with an exuberant and disarming welcome. The French were completely taken in; it was only when they discovered that the buildings to which they were escorted amid transports of joy were in direct communication by telephone with German headquarters that they began to doubt the quality of the reception.

Time and again spies in the German service have been discovered in and behind the French, British, and Belgian lines. One such, who had been nine years in London, part of the time as a waiter at the Hotel Cecil, was found disguised as a farm-laborer in the British encampment. But a great deal of the spying behind the lines has been done, not by Germans, but by Frenchmen, Swiss, and Belgians in their pay. Magnificently as the French have fought, and high and firm as is the national spirit, the war has undoubtedly revealed a disquieting amount of treason and corruption among the French peasantry. There have been cases where even the local mayor has been proved to be in the German service. Several incidental successes stand to the credit of these agents in the field. They loiter behind the trenches and signal their position to the Germans by waving a handkerchief; they drive flocks of sheep to indicate the line of fire; they paint signs on gates and walls to inform the enemy of the strength and whereabouts of the allied forces; they have been found in church towers communicating with the Germans by means of the hands of the clock; they convey information by waving colored lights and sending up puffs of chimney smoke; in instance after instance they have been discovered with field telephones in their possession. On the eastern frontier a fisherman was noticed casting from a boat near a bridge over which the Russian forces were passing; it was found that by means of an electric bell button connected with a wire that ran through the water to an underground cable on the bank, he was signaling the number of troops crossing the bridge to the German headquarters two miles away. In another case a telephone transmitter was found in the nosebag of a horse harnessed to a cart which two peasants were filling with potatoes. The wire went round the wheel, thence through the grass to a near-by cottage equipped with a complete telephone installation.

The cleverness of these devices has been a revelation to the officers of the allied forces. But the Germans have been equally happy and daring in thinking out and experimenting with the stratagems in which civilians cannot be employed and which can be carried out only by the personal courage and sharpwittedness of the officers themselves. A favorite trick of theirs is to appear in the enemies’ lines in the uniform of Belgian, French, or British officers. They are incomparably better linguists than the men opposed to them, and time and again they have succeeded, not merely in passing themselves off as British when among the French and as French when among the British, but in assuming the nationality of the very men they are talking to. It has frequently happened that when the Allies have descried a mass of troops in the distance, the word has run through their lines, ‘Don’t shoot. They are our friends.’ Even as I write this, there comes a letter from a British officer at the front telling the same old tale. ‘Suddenly,’ he writes, ‘from the dimness in front of us there was movement,— shadowy forms four hundred yards away appearing over a rise in the ground. An infantry attack. We were ready at once and fired into the moving target as well as sleepy eyes and hands weary with digging would allow. And then there were shouts down the front, and the word was passed down our front to cease fire, that those in front were English, not Germans, that we were firing into our own men. But they lied. Our men were deceived again, as they have been a hundred times in the war. So the officers yelled and ordered fire to be continued, and the men obeyed. But meanwhile the enemy had taken advantage of the lull and had occupied cover in front from which they poured in their fire.’

One of the most dramatic incidents of the war was the capture at Amiens of a German Red Cross convoy with arms, ammunition, explosives, and forty-eight doctors. The French commander accepted the explanation offered him to account for the presence of material of war, and the German doctors and their French confreres fraternized together for an evening’s interchange of experiences. During dinner, when the talk ran naturally on ‘shop,’ — the effects of shell-fire, the treatment of gangrene and tetanus and so on, — it was noticed that some of the German doctors showed a singular unwillingness to be drawn into the conversation. Suspicions were aroused. One by one they were taken into an adjoining room and there submitted to an elementary cross-examination. Of the forty-eight there were eleven who knew nothing whatever of medicine. They were shot the next morning and the genuine doctors were sent on to Geneva.

A disguise frequently adopted by the Germans is that of a priest. In Brussels priests took to greeting one another in Latin in order to detect impostors. During the German retreat from Paris, a French battalion entered a village which had recently been held by the enemy. They found for a wonder that the church and the priest’s house adjoining it were still intact. The venerable cure welcomed them with open arms. He was invited to join the officers’ mess and to say grace before dinner. He rose and murmured a Latin prayer that would have imposed on any layman. But, as it happened, one of the French officers was not a layman but an abbe. He listened to the cure’s effort with growing astonishment and when it ended proceeded to ask him some technical questions. The man in the soutane could not answer them. He was a spy left behind by the Germans while they carried off the real cure as a hostage. At Malines Germans were discovered dressed as nuns. At Le Mans two of them, one robed as a priest and the other as a woman, were caught trying to blow up a railway bridge. At St. Die four were found in the uniforms of French officers, attempting to rush through the French lines in a motor car. Five, with Red Cross badges on their arms, were arrested when on the very point of entering Paris in a car loaded with bombs and explosives. At one place they attached contact wires and batteries to a bridge, so that any one setting foot on it sent an automatic signal to the gunners three miles away. At another, foreseeing which house the approaching French would probably choose as their headquarters, they tethered a white goat on the lawn to serve for the guidance of an aviator and his bombs.

The ingenuity and audacity of these ruses, of which I have given only such instances as I have been able to verify with tolerable completeness, are selfevident. And unquestionably, as I said before, they have proved useful on occasion and have helped the Germans to score some incidental successes. But it is very doubtful if, so far as they are part and parcel of the spy system, they bring in any military return at all equal to the expenditure of thought, energy, and money. At the headquarters of the General Staff in Berlin there have been laboriously collected the dossiers of all the generals and most of the officers in the armies of Germany’s probable enemies. They are cleverly prepared and cover not only the weak and strong points of the officer’s character and personality but his financial position, his friends of both sexes, his habits and hobbies. From time to time no doubt the material thus brought together enables a clever spy to entrap and suborn some luckless or impecunious lieutenant, and very occasionally it may prove an advantage to be well informed as to the temperament of the commander who is immediately opposed to one. But even so, the direct profits of all this elaborate pigeon-holing must be ludicrously disproportionate to the care and persistence lavished upon it.

As for the residential spies and the deception practiced on the field, their value is in inverse ratio to the duration of the war. In a brief struggle, like the wars waged by Prussia against Austria in 1866 and against France in 1870, that value may be very great; and it is scarcely open to question that in the present campaign the Germans found their spies of real assistance in their advance on Paris and their operations against the Belgians. But the longer the war lasts, the more they tend to lose their efficacy. One by one the agents are discovered and shot. One by one the stratagems are found out and prepared for. A short successful campaign of quick victories and rapid advances may owe a great deal to an intelligent system of espionage; but in a drawn-out war of entrenched positions, such as the struggle in France has become during the past four months, the value of all such accessories diminishes week by week. It is all very well once in a while for the Germans to dress up some of their men in khaki and send them toward the British lines shouting, ‘Don’t shoot; we are British prisoners,’ while the German attack develops behind their shelter. But even with an antagonist as unwary and as unsuspicious as the average British officer, you cannot repeat a trick like that very often. The French, moreover, have succeeded by now in elaborating a system of counter-espionage through which it becomes every day more difficult to break.

In general I should judge that both the spy and the scout are relics from the days of pre-aerial warfare, have been largely superseded by aviation, and now have little more influence on the issue of large operations than the cognate fetish of ‘ campaign literature’ has on the result of political elections; while it is doubtful if the colonies of planted secret-service agents bring in any military profit that at all makes up for the violent execration, the almost vulpine animosity, that is heaped upon their authors.

IV

In a mild form the reflex action of German espionage on the Continent has made itself felt in England. It was known five or six years ago that Germany was building up an extensive secret-service organization throughout Great Britain. The British government said nothing, but made a point of seeing everything. A Special Intelligence Department was established, to shadow the spies, and whenever any plans or documents were on the point of being sent abroad, the agent was arrested and convicted. So well had the department done its work that within a few hours of the outbreak of war all the known spies were thrown into prison and over two hundred who were suspected of being their accomplices were interned. Germans and Austrians were cleared out of certain districts along the east coast, their letters and telegrams were opened and read, they were forbidden to have any arms, or wireless or signaling apparatus, or any carrier or homing pigeons in their possession; they were obliged to register with the police; and some nine thousand alien enemies of military age were quickly held as prisoners of war in detention camps.

The mobilization of the British Expeditionary Force proceeded without a hitch of any kind; not a solitary act of violence has yet been brought home to any German agent in Great Britain; the many vulnerable places that exist in London — vital railway bridges, for instance, and exposed or easily damaged viaducts — have been left not merely uninjured but unattacked; and it seemed that the Home Secretary had reason on his side when early in October he declared that the German spy system had been broken up.

The public mind, however, has continued to be very far from satisfied. When the big influx of Belgian and French refugees set in, its apprehensions redoubled. The press began excitedly clamoring for the internment of all alien enemies without exception, and the authorities to some extent yielded against their better judgment to the agitation. The one party to the argument could point with telling effect to the experience of Antwerp, Brussels, and northeastern France as justifying the severest precautionary measures; the other party could reply that not a single disclosure or a single crime against the State had yet been brought home to a German spy, and that in any case it was most unlikely that a German agent four months after the war would be of German nationality. On the one side were fears, on the other, facts; and as usual the fears had rather the better of it. Perhaps only a German raid on the British coasts or a descent of Zeppelins upon London will settle which was right. Meanwhile the government has greatly increased the rigors of inspection at the chief ports, and quietly and in silence is doing far more to dam the possible sources of leakage than the public is aware. It is an extremely difficult business, and I do not think there is much doubt that signals are passing between the eastern coasts of England and Scotland and German vessels, or neutral vessels in German pay, out at sea. Nothing has yet been proved, but suspicions that seem far from baseless abound, and the anxiety and the sense of insecurity which spring from them are no greater than the situation warrants. It is there, if anywhere, that the danger lies. The mares’ nests of Zeppelin bases in the Chilt.erns, of German factories with concrete floors for the mounting of heavy guns, of mysterious quarries and borings, have all been satisfactorily exposed. But when one reflects on the surpassing value of secrecy and surprises in naval warfare, the flash-light communications which are believed on good authority to be going on between the German fleet and German agents in Great Britain have undoubtedly a sinister and disturbing importance.

It was Wellington’s opinion that ‘there is a great deal of charlatanism about what is called military intelligence.’ The present war has shown that to be true. With all the agents that she employs, Germany entered upon this struggle apparently in utter ignorance of the things it was most vital for her to know. The vastness of the German spy system has been not a bit more evident than its stupidity. It is extremely effective in collecting and classifying information. It knows to a nicety how many guns are mounted on this and that fort and everything else about them. It has all the facts and details of all the armaments, defense works, equipment, and personnel of Belgium, France, Great Britain, and Russia at its finger-ends. But just as the defect of German ‘culture’ is that it so often mistakes facts for knowledge, so the German spy system never seems to see the wood for the trees. It has a narrow military value, but no political value at all. It misses nothing and at the same time understands nothing. It ferrets out all the little things and remains totally unconscious of the big ones. If war threatened to break out between Germany and the United States, it could supply the General Staff in Berlin with a full and accurate account of all the American naval and military preparations; but it would be quite incapable of deciding whether the United States would or would not take up arms to prevent, let us say, an infraction of the Monroe Doctrine.

In the present struggle all the multitudinous resources of German spydom were unable to inform the German rulers that Belgium would fight if her territory were invaded, that Great Britain would resist to the last any violation of Belgian neutrality, that Italy would break away from the Triple Alliance, and that both France and Russia would close up all internal divisions and face the crisis as united nations. That is why one may say of the German espionage system that it is as fundamentally stupid as it is superficially clever, and that no advantages accrue from it which are at all comparable with its vicious legacy of rankling ill-will.