MOST URGENT. SERIOUS… AGENTS… NEPTU OLIDATE… ALTEMARK MINOS HARM… ALL MUST REPORT TO EMBASSY.
This peculiar message, transmitted in June 1914, may have turned the course of the First World War – before it even started.
The discovery of the secret archive of the Comptrollerate-General for Scrutiny and Survey, under the Ministry of Defence in London, has transformed our understanding of more than one drama in British history. (A garbled version of the research and the continuing revelations reached the press in May 2013.) From Elizabethan manuscript to Edwardian typeface, its pages reveal the darkest aspects of national policy and manoeuvring, at the moments when Britain and her empire were at their most vulnerable. The records from the Napoleonic period, which formed the foundation for Treason’s Tide, showed the desperate gambits attempted when the country was hours from invasion and defeat. Those from the mid-seventeenth century – published in semi-fictional form as Traitor’s Field – show how this extraordinary organization survived and controlled the transition from divine-right monarchy to republic.
This new episode from the Comptrollerate-General archives focuses on another crisis for Britain and British Intelligence: when Europe waltzed to the edge of the precipice, looked, thought about it, then leaped gleefully over. Most schoolchildren know that the assassination, on the 28th of June 1914, of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire sparked the First World War. The month that followed, before armed conflict actually began in the first days of August, is one of the most minutely analysed in all historical writing – but also the most predictable. The Great Powers of Europe had spent ten years or more establishing rival defensive alliances. A series of squabbles had cemented those alliances. Each government had justified inflating military budgets by inflating the threat and the cause of national honour. Competing general staffs had wound up their political leaders to the imperatives of pre-emptive action. In the space of a generation, a Europe in which the shared interests of peace were protected by collective diplomacy had been replaced by one in which individual national interests were protected by bravado and defiance. ‘War’ had ceased to be a threat, and become instead a solution.
Once the Archduke Franz-Ferdinand had been murdered in Sarajevo, by Serbs with links to Military Intelligence in Belgrade, it was surely unavoidable that the Austro-Hungarian Empire, insecure and weakening, should take the opportunity to punish Serbia, the most troublesome threat to imperial stability. After a series of embarrassments, Russia could not but defend Serbia, her one remaining client in a region she wanted to influence. Germany felt the need to prove her international credentials and distract her population, had no reason to stop Austria teaching Serbia a lesson, and knew that if the inevitable war against Russia was to be fought, it was better fought when Russia was also trying to fight Austria. France was obliged to support Russia, and knew that if the inevitable war against Germany was to be fought, it was better fought when Germany was also trying to fight in the east. Great Britain, typically, was looking the other way and trying to deal with her own imperial troubles, but realized that after a decade of defensive posturing she couldn’t afford to let Germany defeat France and dominate western Europe.
Such was the clockwork of July 1914 – and of innumerable student essays since. Less studied and less known is the background in the months before July, particularly the secret intelligence activity. The papers reproduced in this volume, never before published, reveal that background. In passing, they throw new light on more than one overlooked but significant incident of those mad months, and on one of the most remarkable careers in the history of the British Army and British Intelligence.*
The most significant developments in the evolution of British Intelligence machinery took place in the decade before the First World War. Alongside the existing Naval and Military Intelligence offices, and the police Special Branch and Criminal Investigation Department, in 1909 the Secret Intelligence Bureau was formed. Its home department would become Military Intelligence (M.I.) 5, today’s Security Service; the Secret Service Bureau was born in the same year, and merged with the S.I.B. in 1911, its foreign department the beginning of M.I.6, the Secret Intelligence Service. But they were still in their infancy in those critical years of European politics, and in many respects behind their counterparts in the other Great Power capitals. What follows in these pages helps to explain how they survived that infancy, and also explains the great coup achieved by British Intelligence at the start of the war, which did so much for the reputations of the institutions involved and for the British war effort.
The usual debts and caveats apply. The Spider of Sarajevo has benefited from the wise guidance of Angus MacKinnon and Clare Conville, guardians of a greater age of British publishing, and that of Sara O’Keeffe and Anna Hogarty, heralds of a greater future. The strategic framework of events for this account is common knowledge. The detail is drawn directly from the archives of the Comptrollerate-General for Scrutiny and Survey, along with other relevant sources currently available (specific documents are referenced with the SS prefix, or equivalent; references are not given here for the many other documents that have contributed colour and background). The exact play of dialogue and emotion is of course my conjecture, consistent with the data and tending, I hope, to illuminate rather than distort what happened. If my fictionalization of these incidental elements inspires the reader to their own investigation of the facts, so much the better.
R. J. W., May 2013
*See also the introduction to Treason’s Tide.