MY READERS MAY now be asking themselves how soon I am going to write about German spies. There are obvious reasons why it is impossible to divulge secrets. I shall tell, therefore, as much as the military authorities have already allowed to be divulged and nothing more, but I shall tell most of it at first hand.

There is much confused thinking about the ethics of spying on movements of an enemy. The very word ‘spy’ has acquired so ugly a significance that we prefer to disguise our own spies as ‘Intelligence’ or ‘Secret Service Officers’ and to regard them as necessary evils; but any government that accepted the standards set up by certain censorious newspapers and declined to ask Parliament for a vote for Secret Service on the grounds that it was dishonourable would be guilty of treason against its own countrymen. To be forewarned about the intentions of an enemy, whether internal or external, may be to save the lives and property of many hundreds and to allow the enemy to make all his preparations unheeded would be criminal negligence of the worst kind. The cost of a good system of intelligence is like the premium paid for insurance against fire.

Whether an individual degrades himself by engaging in espionage depends on how and why he does it. If his motives are purely patriotic and he performs this dangerous duty at the risk of his life, without thought of personal gain; if in carrying out the duty he does not stoop to form friendships in order to betray them, but comes out with clean hands, what is there degrading in his service? But if he spies upon a nation with which his country is not at war merely for the money he can make and lives riotously, as nearly all such hirelings do, he should be treated like the vermin that he is and nailed to the barn-door as a warning to others. Nevertheless, there is something pitiful even about such men when they have played their stake and lost and they feel the cold hand laid upon them and all their profitless debaucheries sour upon the palate. It is as if they ran unheeding round a corner and came suddenly upon Death standing in the path. Then all honour to them if they can meet him with a smile, for not all of us, feeling that cold breath on our cheek and the grip of the bony fingers closing on us, can be sure that we should pass through the ordeal with credit.

During the first few days of the war I remember a staff officer remarking that we should repeat the experience of the Napoleonic Wars: we should begin the war with the worst Intelligence Service in Europe and end with the best. I was inclined to think that he was right about the first part of his prediction and I now think that he was right about the second. But then if he had gone on to say that the Germans started the war with the most elaborate Secret Service organisation in Europe and ended it with the worst he would have been equally right. I have already related how at the vital moment of mobilisation the whole of the German organisation in the United Kingdom was broken up; how it was possible for us to dispatch our Expeditionary Force to France without the loss of a single man or a single horse and without the knowledge of the Germans. It was, of course, not long before they attempted to make good. They had established espionage centres at Antwerp and Brussels, they had branch offices in connection with the German Consulate at Rotterdam. Unfortunately for them, there was great jealousy between the navy and the army and each had been entrusted with a certain amount of Secret Service money, on which they entered into a sort of civil war of competition. Anything reported by a spy employed by the German naval authorities was at once ridiculed by the military Intelligence and vice versa. This keen competition made them very easy prey. On one occasion an adventurous Englishman actually passed into Belgium to take service in one of these intelligence offices and came back with useful information. They were prone also to engage quite unsuitable people – the sort of people who in wartime at once become what the French call agents doubles; that is to say, they attempt to serve both sides, either with the object of obtaining double pay or of making their lives safe in the event of detection. What these men do for a living in peace time is hard to guess. I can imagine them running cheap gambling-hells, frequenting the docks to pick up some dishonest profit, resorting to a little blackmail and performing the humbler offices for the white slave trafficker. In wartime you will find them swarming in every capital, for war is their brief summer. The money they get by their complicated villainies is spent with both hands. They live like princes and dress like bookmakers’ touts. The Germans were so easy to manipulate that quite early in the war some of these men came over and offered their services to us. They felt sure that any story, however improbable, would be swallowed. Certainly the Germans got more interesting information from the agents doubles than they ever got from their own spies in England. Sometimes they acted upon it and they paid quite liberally. When you come to think of it, not many private Englishmen were in a position to give naval or military information of importance and still less a foreigner who dared not ask questions.

There was in my office an armchair in which every spy, real or fancied, sat while he was accounting for his movements. It was realised during the first weeks of the war by the judges and the law officers, as well as by the laity, that the ordinary criminal procedure was of no avail against spies. If no questions could be asked of a person under arrest, how were you to piece together the documents in his possession – marked dictionaries, memoranda of addresses, code telegrams and the like. The only way and, to the innocent, the fairest way was to adopt something like the French criminal procedure. As I have said, there was never anything approaching what is called in America ‘the Third Degree’. The suspects were cautioned that they need not answer any questions, but that what they said might be used in evidence against them, a caution which almost invariably induced loquacity and questions and answers were recorded in shorthand. I suppose that on the average four persons a day sat in that chair throughout the war. At the least, nine out of every ten who might otherwise have been detained under suspicion for an indefinite period were entirely cleared by the examination. It used to be a joke among my staff that no single person, however angry he was when he came in, left the room without thanking me profusely, though one, and he was a Mexican, did afterwards make a claim of £10,000 for moral and intellectual damages. One man was so grateful that he asked leave to make a contribution to the fund of the Police Orphanage. This I had not the face to allow, perhaps because his arrest had been the result of a mistake and I felt that, if money had to pass, it should be going the other way.

I made a discovery about that low armchair. For some time I had noticed that whenever a particularly disconcerting question was put the suspect instinctively raised himself by the arms to reply to it. My assistant, in peace time an eminent KC, suggested one day that I should sit in it and be interrogated by him. I felt at once an irresistible impulse to raise my face to the level of his. The fact is that if you want to get the truth out of a witness the worst way is to put him in a box above the level of the cross-examining counsel; if our law courts were intelligently constructed the cross-examiner should take his stand in a kind of lift and be suddenly elevated to the proper position just before his cross-examination begins. Primitive races have found this out, for their chiefs stand erect while their inferiors squat on the ground when they are being questioned.

During the first few days of the war I detained a curious person who arrived in the country on an American passport and who claimed to be a major in the Mexican Army. He was a typical international spy – mysterious, wheedling and apprehensive. He pretended to be eager to enter our service. I told him that we would make use of his services – as a prisoner of war in Brixton Prison. It was not until early in 1916 that the capture of von Papen’s chequebooks disclosed his real activities. He had been engaged in the United States in sabotage and probably he had come to this country for the same purpose, but he took alarm, imagining that his every movement was being watched and he came to us with offers of service to save his own skin. When we found his name among the cheques I sent for him from prison to ask him to explain. He then made a statement about his activities in America, which was considered so important that on 18 March 1916 he was sent over to the United States to give evidence against two of the German Consuls, one of whom was Krupps’s agent, for attempted outrage and breach of neutrality. The American government was quite ready to send us back our prisoner at the end of the case, but I assured them that we were altruistic and had no desire to deprive them of so interesting a personality. Afterwards he published in America his own version of his adventures.

The first serious spy to be arrested was Lody. Carl Lody was a good example of the patriotic spy. He had been one of those Germans who had lived long enough in the United States to acquire what he believed to be fluent English with an American accent. He had held a commission in the German Navy and was a Reserve officer. He then entered the employment of the Hamburg-America Steamship Line as a guide for tourists. In that capacity he had travelled all over England and had even attempted, though unsuccessfully, to obtain employment under Messrs Thomas Cook & Son. A few days before 4 August 1914 Lody returned to Berlin from Norway and got into touch with the German Intelligence. It happened that there was staying in Berlin at that time an American named Charles A. Inglis, who had applied to the American embassy for a visa to his passport, enabling him to continue his travels in Europe. His passport was passed by the embassy to the German Foreign Office for the visa, but there it was ‘mislaid’ and the Foreign Office promised an exhaustive search. This passport was used by Lody. Mr Inglis’s photograph was removed from it and Lody’s substituted. Mr Inglis obtained a new American passport from his embassy.

As Mr Charles Inglis, Lody presented himself at the North British Station Hotel in Edinburgh and from Edinburgh he sent a telegram to one Adolf Burchard, in Stockholm. Telegrams had to pass the Censor and there were matters in Inglis’s telegram that called for close scrutiny. Meanwhile, Lody took private lodgings, realising, no doubt, that hotels are not very safe places for spies. He hired a bicycle and spent a fortnight in exploring the neighbourhood of Edinburgh, looking into Rosyth Harbour and asking too many questions for the ordinary sightseer. From Edinburgh he came to London and put up at a hotel in Bloomsbury. Here he interested himself in our anti-aircraft defences. He was back in Edinburgh two days later and on 26 September he went to Liverpool, where ocean liners were being fitted out as auxiliary cruisers. From Liverpool he went to Holyhead and thence to Ireland and here his nerve was a little shaken by the close questioning that he underwent. From the Gresham Hotel in Dublin, where other Americans were staying, he wrote to his Swedish correspondent that he was becoming nervous. He wrote all his letters both in English and German in ordinary ink, without any disguise. His information would have been of comparatively little value even if it had reached the Germans, which it did not. The only report that was allowed to go through was the famous story of the Russian troops passing through England.

From Dublin Lody travelled to Killarney, no doubt on his way to Queenstown, but on 2 October he was detained by the Royal Irish Constabulary to await the arrival of the detectives from Scotland Yard. They found among his luggage the forged passport, about £175 in English notes and gold, a notebook with particulars of the naval fight in the North Sea of a few weeks earlier, addresses in Berlin, Stockholm, Bergen and Hamburg and copies of the four letters that he had written to Stockholm. He was tried by court-martial at the Guildhall, Westminster, on 30 and 31 October. His counsel made no defence except that Lody was a man who, having done his duty, left the consequences in the hands of the court. His grandfather had a military reputation; he had held a fortress against Napoleon and the grandson wished to stand before his judges in that spirit. He was not ashamed of anything that he had done, he would not cringe for mercy, he would accept the decision of righteous men. He was found guilty and sentenced to death and was executed in the Tower five days later. A letter that he wrote to his relations in Stuttgart before his execution was as follows:

He wrote a letter also to the officer commanding at Wellington Barracks:

He left a ring to be forwarded to a lady in America and this was done. It was believed that the German government had insured his life for £3,000 in favour of his relations and that when, after some months, his death became known in Germany, the people of his native village planted an oak to be known evermore by his name. He met his death unflinchingly and on the morning of his execution it is related that he said to the Assistant Provost Marshal, ‘I suppose you will not shake hands with a spy?’ and that the officer replied, ‘No, but I will shake hands with a brave man.’ Lody made a favourable impression on all who came into contact with him. In the quiet heroism with which he faced his trial and his death there was no suspicion of histrionic effect. He never flinched, he never cringed, but he died as one would wish all Englishmen to die – quietly and undramatically, supported in his courage by the proud consciousness of having done his duty.

In those early days there was some difference of opinion as to whether it was sound policy to execute spies and to begin with a patriotic spy like Lody. We came to wish later on that a distinction could have been made between the patriotic spy and the hireling who pestered us through the ensuing years, but on the whole I think that the military authorities were right. It is an international tradition that spies in time of war must die and if we had departed from the tradition the Germans would not. While the risk of death may appeal to the courageous national, it was certainly a deterrent to the scum of neutral spies who were ready to offer their services to either belligerent.

On 14 February 1915 there arrived in Liverpool another spy not less courageous and patriotic than Lody, but grotesque in his inefficiency and forbidding in his personal appearance. This was Anton Kuppferle, who was believed to have been a non-commissioned officer in the German Army. How von Papen, who had financed him, could have sent a man so obviously German, so ignorant of the English language and the American accent, into an enemy country is incomprehensible. He pretended to be a commercial traveller in woollen goods, of Dutch extraction and there was some slight colour for this in the fact that he had once traded as a woollen merchant in Brooklyn under the name of Kuppferle & Co. On the voyage over he was profuse in his conversations with strangers, to whom he represented himself as an American citizen with business in England. From Liverpool he wrote a letter to a certain address in Holland, which was probably the first letter that contained writing in invisible ink. In this he conveyed information about the war vessels he had seen when crossing the Atlantic. From Liverpool he went to Dublin and from Dublin to London, where he was arrested with all his belongings and brought to New Scotland Yard. In his luggage was found letter paper corresponding with that which contained the invisible writing, together with the materials for communications in secret ink.

He proved to be a typical German non-commissioned officer, stiff, abrupt and uncouth. He made little attempt to explain his movements and fell back upon monosyllables. By this time the machinery for substituting civil trials for the military courts-martial was complete and when the case was ready he was arraigned at the Old Bailey before the Lord Chief Justice of England and two other judges, with all the trappings that belong to that historic court, even to the herbs that are scattered about the court in the ancient belief that they averted the infection of jail fever, though modern science knows that there is now no jail fever to avert and that herbs would not avert it if there were. Sir John Simon, the Attorney-General, prosecuted and Sir Ernest Wild defended. The evidence produced on the first day left little doubt of the result of the trial and the court rose with the practical certainty that it would meet again the following morning. But it never met. During the night in Brixton Prison the chief warder heard a muffled rapping from Kuppferle’s cell. He dressed himself hastily and came out into the passage, where he was met by the night warder, who announced that he could not see Kuppferle in his cell. With the aid of the master key the door was thrown open and there they found the man hanging dead from the cell ventilator. He had tied his silk handkerchief tightly round his neck and, taking his stand on a heavy book, had kicked it away from under him. Every effort was made to restore life by artificial respiration, but in vain. On his cell slate was found the following message:

On the back of the slate was written: ‘My age is thirty-one and I am born 11 June 1883.’

While in Brixton Prison he wrote a letter to another spy awaiting trial which was confiscated by the authorities:

This letter shows Kuppferle in a less amiable light. He had the true Prussian mentality. It was believed that in the early days of the war he had fought on the Western Front: he bore on his face the marks of a blow which may have been caused by the butt end of a rifle. He was buried in Streatham Park Cemetery.