HAVING FAILED WITH Germans, the enemy now turned to South America for their spies. The large German colony in Central and South America was an excellent recruiting-ground. In June 1915, a few days after the capture of Fernando Buschman, two postcards addressed to Rotterdam attracted the attention of the Postal Censor. They announced merely that the writer had arrived in England and was ready to begin work. The postmark was Edinburgh. The police in Scotland were set to work and a few days later they detained at Loch Lomond a native of Uruguay, who gave his name as Agusto Alfredo Roggin. He was a neat, dark little man, not at all like a German, though he admitted that his father was a German naturalised in Uruguay in 1885 and that he himself was married to a German woman. Unlike many of the spies, he did not pretend that his sympathies were with the Allies. His account of himself was that he had come to England to buy agricultural implements and stock; that his health was not very good and that Loch Lomond had been recommended to him as a health resort. He spoke English fluently. According to his admissions, he had been in Hamburg as lately as March 1914 and was in Switzerland just before war broke out. In May he was sent to Amsterdam and Rotterdam, probably to receive instructions in the School of Espionage. He arrived at Tilbury from Holland on 30 May and after staying for five days in London, where he asked quotations for horses and cattle, he went north. So far he had transacted no business.
As a spy he was one of the most inept that could have been chosen. Even on the journey north from King’s Cross he asked so many questions of casual acquaintances that they became suspicious and took upon themselves to warn him not to go anywhere near the coast. In fact, they were so hostile that he left the compartment at Lincoln and spent the night there. Nor was his reception in Edinburgh any more auspicious. When he came to register with the police he was put through a searching inquiry. He was very careful to tell everyone at Loch Lomond that he had come for the fishing, but it chanced at that moment that certain torpedo experiments were being carried out in the loch and the presence of foreigners at once gave rise to suspicion. The sending of the two postcards was quite in accordance with ordinary German espionage practice. In order to divert suspicion the spies were instructed to send harmless postcards in English addressed to different places. Moreover, a bottle of a certain chemical secret ink was found in his luggage. He was tried on 20 August, found guilty and executed at the Tower on 17 September. He went to his death with admirable courage and declined to have his eyes bandaged when he faced the firing-party. Some time after his execution a Dr Emilio Roggin was removed from a steamer bound from Holland to South America. He turned out to be the brother of the dead spy and was greatly distressed at the news of what had befallen him. It transpired that he was in Germany on the outbreak of war and had been compelled by the German government to serve as a medical officer with the troops in the field. It had taken nearly two years for him to obtain his release and he was now on his way back to Uruguay.
Roggin was at large in England only for eleven days and therefore he was unable to send any information of value to his employers. Nevertheless, he was a hired spy and it was at that time most necessary to make the business of espionage so dangerous that recruits would be difficult to get.
About the same time a well-educated and well-connected Swede of between fifty and sixty years of age named Ernst Waldemar Melin arrived in this country. He had been a rolling-stone all his life. At one time he had managed a Steamship Company at Gothenburg, in Sweden and then on the breakdown of his health he began to travel all over the world. He had found casual employment in London, Paris and Copenhagen and at the beginning of the war he found himself in Hamburg without any means of subsistence. He applied, without success, to his relations and then, hearing that there was plenty of remunerative work to be had in Antwerp, he went to Belgium with the genuine desire to obtain honest employment. There at a café he came into touch with one of the espionage recruiting agents, who were always on the look-out for English-speaking neutrals. At first, according to his own account, he resisted the temptation, but at last, being utterly penniless, he succumbed and was sent to the Espionage Schools in Wesel and Antwerp. At Rotterdam he received his passport and the addresses to which he was to send his communications. He put up in a boarding-house in Hampstead as a Dutchman whose business had been ruined by the German submarine campaign and who was anxious to obtain employment a shipping office. He made himself agreeable to his fellow lodgers, who fully accepted his story. He was under police suspicion from the first, but there could be no confirmation until he began to write. His first communications were written on the margin of newspapers, a method which the Germans had then begun to adopt. He took his arrest quite philosophically. Fortune had dealt him so many adverse strokes that she could not take him unaware. A search of his room brought to light the usual stock-in-trade at that time – the materials for secret writing and a number of foreign dictionaries used as codes, as well as a Baedeker. He made a clean breast of his business, protesting that he had no real intention of supplying the Germans with useful information. All he meant to do was to send some quite valueless messages that would procure for him a regular supply of funds. He was tried by court-martial on 20 and 21 August. His counsel urged that he had sent nothing to the enemy which could not have been obtained from newspapers, but he could not, of course, put forward the plea that he was not a spy. Melin took this last stroke of fortune like a gentleman. He gave no trouble and when the time came he shook hands with the guard, thanking them for their many kindnesses and died without any attempt at heroics.
One German agent was discovered through the purest accident. It was apparently the practice at that time for the Germans to make use of ex-criminals on condition that they undertook espionage in an enemy country. It chanced that some postal official in Denmark had mis-sorted a letter addressed from Copenhagen to Berlin and slipped it by mistake into the bag intended for London and this letter was written in German by a man who said he was about to start for England under the disguise of a traveller in patent gas-lighters, in order to collect military and naval information. The letter was already some weeks old and there was no clue beyond the fact that some person might be in the country attempting to sell gas-lighters. A search of the landing records was at once instituted and it was found that at Newcastle at that very moment a young man named Rosenthal was on board a steamer about to sail for Copenhagen, after making a tour with his gas-lighters in Scotland. In another hour he would have been outside the three-mile limit and out of reach of the law. He proved to be a young man of excitable temperament and a Jew. He was very glib in his denials: he had never lived in Copenhagen, he was not a German, he knew nothing about the hotel from which the letter had been written. It was growing dusk and so far the letter had not been read to him, but he had given me a specimen of his handwriting, which corresponded exactly with that of the letter. Then I produced it and read it to him. While I was reading there was a sharp movement from the chair and a click of the heels. I looked up and there was Rosenthal standing to attention like a soldier. ‘I confess everything. I am a German soldier.’ But the remarkable part of this story was that he was never a soldier at all. On a sudden impulse he had tried to wrap his mean existence in a cloak of patriotic respectability. Subsequent inquiry showed that his full name was Robert Rosenthal, a German born in Magdeburg in 1892. As a boy he had been apprenticed to a baker in Cassel. He disliked the work, returned to Magdeburg and at a quite early age was sentenced to three months’ imprisonment for forgery. After his discharge he became a rolling-stone and went to sea, but he was in Hamburg on the outbreak of war and was engaged for a time by the American Relief Commission. It is not clear whether he was actually liberated from prison for the purpose of espionage, but espionage was the kind of work for which undoubtedly he was most suited. It was not surprising that such a man should try to save his life by offering to disclose the methods of his employers.
When he found that acquittal was hopeless he tried to carry off the pretence of patriotism at his trial, but after his conviction he made two unsuccessful attempts to commit suicide. Unlike the other spies, he was sentenced to be hanged and was executed on 5 July 1915. He had some ability, for he wrote English very well and was profuse in written accounts of his adventures.
The next spy to be arrested in England was a Peruvian whose father was a Scandinavian. Ludovico Hurwitz-y-Zender was a genuine commercial traveller, though far better educated than most men of his calling. In August 1914 he went to the United States with the intention of coming to Europe on business, for he was already the representative of several European firms in Peru. Probably it was not until his arrival in Norway that he got into touch with the German Secret Service agents, who were then offering high pay for persons with the proper qualifications who would work for them in England. It happened that the Cable Censor began to notice messages addressed to Christiania ordering large quantities of sardines. Now, it was the wrong season for sardine-canning and inquiries were at once made in Norway about the bona fides of the merchant to whom the messages were addressed. He turned out to be a person with no regular business, who had frequently been seen in conversation with the German Consul. The messages were then closely examined for some indication of a code. They had been dispatched by Zender. On 2 July, Zender was arrested at Newcastle, where he had made no secret of his presence, he professed great surprise that there was any suspicion against him and freely admitted that he had been at Newcastle, Glasgow and Edinburgh. In none of these places did he appear to have transacted any real business and on account of the season the experts in sardines laughed to scorn his suggestion that his order for canned fish was genuine. When all arrangements had been made for his trial by court-martial Zender demanded that certain witnesses should be brought from South America for his defence. The proceedings were therefore postponed for eight months and it was not until 20 March 1916 that it was possible to bring him to trial. The witnesses that had been brought at great trouble and expense could really say nothing in his favour and in due course he was found guilty and executed in the Tower on 11 April, nine months after the date of his arrest. Zender was the last German spy to be executed in this country during the war. Others were tried and convicted, but for various reasons the death sentences were commuted to penal servitude for life.
It became evident throughout the war that the only form of espionage that is really worth undertaking is the gathering of intelligence just behind the enemy lines and on the lines of communication. To be of any real value in an enemy country a spy must be highly placed. The enemy must, in fact, buy someone who is in naval and military secrets, for even the ordinary citizen of the country is very rarely in a position to give useful information. As the war dragged on the Germans became increasingly concerned with the question of morale. They had based their air-raids and their submarine campaign upon false reading of the British character. They thought that they were breaking down the war spirit and that it was becoming evident that the British would be tired of the war before they were.
Perhaps the most astonishing figure that bubbled up to the surface during the war was that of Ignatius Timothy Trebitsch Lincoln. That a Hungarian Jew should succeed in being by turns a journalist, a Church of England clergyman and a Member of Parliament in England shows an astonishing combination of qualities. His original name appears to have been Trebitsch. He was born at Paks, on the Danube, about 1875. His father, a prosperous Jewish merchant, had started a shipbuilding business and Ignatius was intended to enter the Jewish Church. He made a study of languages and when he was little more than twenty he visited London. On his return to Hungary there were quarrels between father and son and in 1899 Ignatius went to Hamburg and was received into the Lutheran Church. Later he crossed to Canada to assist in a Presbyterian mission to the Jews and when that mission was transferred to the Church of England Trebitsch changed his denomination. He had a gift of oratory and made some impression in Canada. When he came back to Europe he applied for an English curacy, was ordained and appointed to the parish of Appledore in Kent. It cannot be said that he was a successful curate. Probably fiery oratory in a strong foreign accent would not have appealed to a Kentish congregation under any circumstances. He left his curacy and went to London, where for some two years he supported himself as a journalist.
About 1906 he came into touch with Mr Seebohm Rowntree, who was so much impressed with his abilities that he engaged him as his private secretary. Mr Rowntree was at that time in close touch with the leading Liberals and this brought Lincoln, as he then was, into constant communication with the organisers of the party, who at last put him up to contest the unionist constituency of Darlington in the Liberal interest. Who can fail to admire the audacity with which this election was successfully fought?
The House of Commons is no more impressed with fiery oratory in a foreign accent than a Kentish congregation and Mr Lincoln was glad to absent himself from the House in order to undertake an inquiry into economic conditions on the Continent, which would bring him into close communication with notable personages, for high politics had fired his imagination and he began to regard himself as destined to become one of the future great figures in European history.
I do not think that when the war broke out Lincoln had any idea of giving information to the enemy. He had lost his seat in the House of Commons and he was in financial straits, but his first inclination was undoubtedly to offer his services to England. The first step was to apply for a position in the Censorship for Hungarian and Romanian correspondence and for the short time of his employment he is believed to have done his work conscientiously, but he was not popular with his colleagues and their treatment of his friendly overtures must have galled him. The iron entered into his soul and from that time he was definitely anti-British in his sympathies.
His first act of disloyalty was to attempt to obtain admission into our own Intelligence organisation. He professed to be able to tempt the German Fleet out into the North Sea, where it could be destroyed and for that purpose he proposed to cross to Holland and offer his services to the German Consul. Though his application was rejected, he did succeed in obtaining a passport and on 18 December 1914 he arrived in Rotterdam. The German Consul, Gneist, was a very active espionage agent and Lincoln appears to have made some impression upon him at first, for he did entrust to him some valueless information to carry back with him to England. With this he again pestered the authorities to take him into the Intelligence Service, but he was so coldly received that he took alarm and left for New York on 9 February. Here he made a living of some kind by journalism, in ignorance of the fact that the authorities in England were investigating a certain signature to a draft for £700. It transpired that Lincoln had forged Mr Seebohm Rowntree’s name for that amount. Chief Inspector Ward, who was afterwards killed by a Zeppelin bomb, was sent over to the United States in connection with the extradition proceedings and on 4 August 1916, Lincoln was arrested. After the usual delays in such cases he was brought to England, was tried at the Old Bailey and received a sentence of three years’ penal servitude. When his sentence expired in the summer of 1919 it was intended to send him back to his own country, but at that time Bela Kun was in power and the plan had to be deferred. When the communist government fell the deportation was carried out and in September 1919 Lincoln found himself again in Buda Pesth. The atmosphere of that city, just recovering from the communist orgy of misrule, did not suit him. He went to Berlin and renewed his acquaintance there with Count Bernstorff, the former German ambassador at the United States. It is said in Germany that the extreme right will swallow anything. Their political sagacity has never been conspicuous. Kapp was at the moment secretly preparing for his putsch and it surprised no one when it was reported that Ignatius Timothy Trebitsch Lincoln had solemnly been appointed Propaganda Agent to the short-lived Kapp government. How many days the appointment lasted is not quite certain, but apparently even Colonel Bauer found him more than he could manage. The troubled waters of Central Europe are the only fishing ground in which a man such as Lincoln could hope to make a living. We may even hear of him again.