BY THE END of the nineteenth century, Germany had developed from a small group of loosely joined states into a nation dominated by Prussian militarism. Britain regarded Germany’s intentions with mistrust and suspicion, especially when it started to expand its navy with large battleships.
Stimulated by fictional works such as The Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers and William Le Queux’s The Invasion of 1910, the public shared the government’s misgivings and a spy fever developed. There was, nevertheless, a small number of genuine cases of espionage which were dealt with in the courts, and the Committee for Imperial Defence began to question whether Britain was adequately defended against espionage.
In fact, two tiny departments of the War Office with responsibilities for foreign intelligence (MO2 – later MI6) and counter-espionage (MO3 – later MI5) did exist. They were run discreetly from premises in Victoria Street, Westminster, under the cover name of W. Morgan, General Agent. Their investigations were carried out clandestinely by William Melville, who had quietly resigned as head of Special Branch in 1903 to be recruited by the War Department. Over the next few years he created a small investigative group of former police officers which, in 1909, was formally established as the Secret Service Bureau; however, they were given no statutory powers of arrest or search, and had to rely on the police for any executive action that was necessary.
Between August 1911 and July 1914, MO3, now headed by Vernon Kell, provided Special Branch with information gathered from a number of technical and human resources, which led to the arrest of some ten suspected spies, most of whom were inept amateurs. During the following period of hostilities, thirty-one spies were arrested, nineteen of whom were sentenced to death and ten imprisoned.
The principal target of German espionage was the Royal Navy, so it followed that the German Intelligence Service should seek potential spies in naval bases such as Devonport, Portsmouth and Chatham. Prior to the war they recruited people of German origin but, later, nationals of neutral countries were frequently chosen as persons whom they believed would loyally assist the Fatherland.
In 1910, a Special Branch operation discovered what turned out to be an invaluable asset in the struggle to combat German espionage. When the Kaiser came to England for the funeral of King Edward VII, MPSB mounted a surveillance operation on one of his staff, Captain von Rebeur-Paschwitz, known to them as a naval officer attached to the Nachrichten Abteilung (Naval Intelligence Department).1 One evening after the funeral he was followed by DIs Drury and Seal to a barber’s shop at 402a Caledonian Road, Islington. This was the business address of Karl Gustav Ernst, a British subject of German descent. A Home Office warrant was obtained by MO5 which revealed that it was a ‘cutout’ address through which the Nachrichten Abteilung received information from other agents in the United Kingdom and passed it on to Germany. For the next four years MO5 shared the product with Special Branch, examined and recorded it. The monitoring of suspect addresses, as in the Ernst case, was extremely productive and resulted in the identification of a number of agents and the addresses they used. Special Branch played a major part in bringing the spies to justice, making arrests, carrying out interrogations and giving evidence in court. At every stage there was excellent cooperation between the Special Branch and MI5, although in his history of MI5 Christopher Andrew makes no mention of the not insignificant part played by the Branch.
One of those using the Caledonian Road address was Gustav Steinhauer, the head of the Nachrichten Abteilung. In 1909 he recruited an agent called Karl Hentschel and sent him to Chatham, where he taught German to Royal Navy officers. Hentschel recruited a Royal Navy Warrant Officer, George Parrott, an expert in naval gunnery, who was stationed at Sheerness. The two worked successfully together until Parrott decided to deal directly with the Nachrichten Abteilung and retain all the profits for himself. Hentschel denounced Parrott to the British authorities and, in June 1912, the monitoring of Ernst’s ‘drop address’ revealed that he (Parrott) was travelling to Ostend to meet a German contact. He was followed by Special Branch and, on his return, questioned. He was dismissed from the service for a disciplinary offence, ‘travelling abroad without permission’, but continued to receive correspondence from Ernst addressed to a ‘Mr G. Couch, 136 King’s Road, Chelsea’. He was arrested there by DIs Riley and Parker from Special Branch when he collected an intercepted letter which contained a £5 note and an intelligence questionnaire signed ‘Richard’. Parrott’s bank account showed a large number of deposits of £5; he was sentenced to four years’ penal servitude. Hentschel was given immunity from prosecution and an assisted passage to Australia.2
In 1911, William Salter, a former naval rating, advertised his services as a private detective in Portsmouth and was contacted by a German agent, Heinrich Grosse, posing as Captain Hugh Grant. Salter was not convinced of his cover story and informed the Admiral Superintendent of the Dockyard, who passed the case to Special Branch. Grosse was found in possession of compromising documents, arrested and sentenced to three years’ imprisonment. On completion of his sentence he was interned and died while still in custody.
In 1911, DI Fitch liaised with local police in Plymouth who had received information from a solicitor, Samuel Duff, indicating that one of his clients was a spy. Fitch described how a German named Max Schultz, posing as a journalist, attempted to obtain information about the Royal Navy’s state of readiness. He set himself up in a houseboat on the River Yealm just outside Plymouth, where he entertained British naval officers. Duff reported the matter and Fitch, with the aid of Vernon Kell, arranged for false information to be supplied to Schultz and his mail monitored. His controller was identified as an officer of the Nachrichten Abteilung. Schultz was prosecuted under the newly passed Official Secrets Act and sentenced at Exeter Assizes to twenty-one months’ imprisonment on 4 November 1911.3
Some spies were trapped through their own carelessness; Frederick Adolphus Schroeder, alias Gould, was a case in point. He had been a successful German agent for ten years when he retired as landlord of the Queen’s Head public house in Rochester in 1913. When he vacated the pub, the new landlord discovered two Admiralty charts and a letter indicating that he had worked for the German Secret Service since 1903. These were passed to Special Branch. Gould and his wife Maud, who had moved to Wandsworth, were kept under observation and their mail was intercepted. When it was learned that Mrs Schroeder was to travel to Brussels to hand over some documents to one ‘Schmidt’, she was followed to Charing Cross Station, where DI Hester arrested her in a railway carriage. She endeavoured to conceal three sealed envelopes, which were recovered by DS Passmore; they were found to contain a number of Admiralty documents, some marked ‘restricted’. She was taken to Bow Street Police Station, where she was detained.
Once Mrs Schroeder was in custody, the officers arrested her husband at the Wandsworth address, where they found further incriminating documents. The couple was charged with offences against the Official Secrets Act 1911 and appeared before the Central Criminal Court on 3 April 1914. Mrs Schroeder was acquitted, as the police were unable to prove that she knew what the sealed envelopes contained, but Frederick Schroeder was convicted and sentenced to six years’ penal servitude.
The addresses of Steinhauer’s agents in Britain and on the Continent were carefully recorded in a suspect index. Steinhauer claimed in his memoirs that the Germans were aware that the mail was being read by the British but this seems unlikely, as so many of his agents were detained before they could leave the country when war was declared. Kitchener described the rounding up of espionage suspects:
Most of the German agents were known, and marked down for action should war be declared. When the actual moment came, therefore, the word was given for immediate action. All available Special Branch officers were called together, and when ‘P.Q.’ (Detective Superintendent Patrick Quinn) walked into the general office, we saw a most unusual sight, for with him, he had not one warrant but a whole handful which were for the arrest of all the known German agents within the district. The efficiency of the steps which had been taken previously could scarcely have been improved upon, for out of the thirty known German agents not more than two or three escaped through the net.4
Karl Gustav Ernst was arrested by DCI Ward and charged under the Official Secrets Act with illegally communicating information to Steinhauer. On conviction he was sentenced to seven years’ penal servitude. In the initial round up of spies who were identified through Ernst’s postal service, a total of twenty-one were arrested and interned. A twenty-second, Otto Weigals, avoided arrest and returned to Germany.5
Once war commenced in August 1914, espionage in Britain proved fatal for those German agents who were caught in the act. The Defence of the Realm Act carried the death penalty for communication with the enemy. Although espionage remained primarily the responsibility of MO5, Special Branch also played a major part in bringing spies to justice. Questioning of suspects was often carried out by Basil Thomson, the Assistant Commissioner in charge of Special Branch, at his office in New Scotland Yard.
The censorship of letters and cables to neutral countries bordering Germany continued to be a most valuable tool in uncovering cases of espionage. Techniques evolved within the Post Office facilitated the detection of letters containing secret messages written between the lines in invisible ink. Special Branch instituted the enquiries to identify the enemy agents responsible for this correspondence and arrests were made.
The first German agent to be arrested in the United Kingdom after the war commenced was Carl Hans Lody, a reserve officer in the German Navy who volunteered to spy in England. He travelled to Edinburgh on a United States passport and sent reports to Germany about the Royal Navy’s strength there. As a result, a British cruiser, HMS Pathfinder, was sunk by a German submarine. He continued to send reports to Germany written in German, which brought him under the notice of the British censors. He was identified and followed by a Special Branch officer, Jeremiah Lynch, to Killarney, where he was arrested by the Royal Irish Constabulary and brought back to England. He was tried, convicted and executed by firing squad in the Tower of London on 6 November 1914.6
Over the next year ten more individuals were convicted of espionage and executed by shooting at the Tower of London. They were: Carl Frederick Muller, Haicke Petrus Marinus Janssen, Willem Johannes Roos, Augusto Alfredo Roggen, Ernest Waldemar Melin, Fernando Buschman, George Traugott Breeckhow, Irving Guy Ries, Ludovico Hurwitz-y-Zender and Albert Meyer. The eleventh spy, Peter Hahn, was sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment.7 Lizzie Wertheim, a confederate of Breeckhow, was also convicted and sentenced at the Central Criminal Court to ten years’ imprisonment, but she died in Broadmoor of pulmonary tuberculosis on 29 June 1920. In every case it was the interception of letters, parcels or telegrams that led to their downfall. Special Branch officers were involved in the arrest and prosecution of all the enemy agents.
A case of a totally different complexion was that of Sir Roger Casement, a former British Consul who was executed for his part in a failed insurrection in Ireland. The plot was discovered due to the interception by the Royal Navy of German signals and the work of ‘Room 40’ at the Admiralty, where German diplomatic codes were broken. After the outbreak of war, Casement offered his services to the German ambassador in the United States and his Irish-American allies. He then made his way to Berlin, where he had conversations with German intelligence officials and addressed Irish prisoners of war at a camp at Lossen, but his attempt to recruit them to fight in Ireland against Britain succeeded in enlisting only fifty-six.
The uprising in Ireland was fixed for Easter Saturday 1916. The Germans had agreed to disembark weapons shortly beforehand, followed by an aerial raid to distract the attention of the British on the night preceding the landing; Casement and two companions were to be landed by submarine. As the supply ship, carrying the arms and flying the Norwegian flag, approached the coast, it was stopped by HMS Bluebell and ordered to follow it to Queenstown. The crew, however, scuttled the ship with its compromising cargo. The same week, Casement was arrested and sent to London to be interrogated by Basil Thomson. Thomson commented on the affair:
The rising was a failure; instead of the 5,000 men promised by the Irish, only some 500 arrived in Dublin; […] One or two public buildings were captured and were held for some hours, but, long before nightfall, the rising was over and many of the participants in jail. Casement was tried for high treason and was executed; the danger had passed for the moment but the harm had been done. From that moment, the movement that hoped to take advantage of the war in order to stab Britain in the back engaged continually in secret political activities involving subversion and murder. Loyal Irishmen who had fought for the Allied cause were often the victims.8
Casement was charged with treason, convicted at the Central Criminal Court and hanged. His supporters alleged that diaries recording his homosexual activities, which were found during a search of his property, had been forged in order to discredit him. This was untrue. Photographic plates of disputed entries were retained in Special Branch for many years.
Less successful was Thomson’s interrogation, in November 1916, of Margaretha MacLeod, alias Mata Hari, a Dutch ‘exotic dancer’ suspected of espionage.9 She was arrested by DS George Grant, of MPSB, when the ship on which she was travelling to Holland put into Falmouth. It seems that when Thomson interrogated her, she ‘spun him a yarn’ about being a French double agent and Thomson lodged her in a room at the Savoy Hotel then let her go.10 She returned to Spain, where she was arrested by French Deuxième Bureau officers, tried, and executed on the indisputable evidence contained in intercepted German signals that she was a German double agent, ‘H21’.11
During the war some revolutionary and pacifist groups caused concern to the government because of their extreme anti-war views. In 1917, Thomson submitted a report to the Cabinet on such groups revealing that a number had been the subject of surveillance by Special Branch, but of all the groups he mentioned, only the Union of Democratic Control and the Independent Labour Party could be described as remotely subversive.
Included in Thomson’s report were the names of a number of minor agents in whom Special Branch showed some interest but only one gave any real cause for alarm. This was Baron Louis von Horst, whom Thomson claimed was a German. He was in correspondence with the socialist trade unionist Ben Tillett,12 and, at the time of the transport workers’ strike in 1912, gave free meals to the strikers’ children and attended their meetings on Tower Hill. In 1913 von Horst stood bail for the suffragette Flora Drummond, and in 1914 he was in touch with Jim Larkin (misspelt Larking), an IRA member in Dublin. Thomson claimed that the Baron had also enquired about the cost of purchasing 500 Mauser rifles and ammunition from a gunsmith in the Strand, the implication being that they were intended for Irish nationalists, and that he had also been in touch with Sir Roger Casement.13
During the early weeks of the war, von Horst proposed to the Home Office the setting up of a Committee for the Relief of Distressed Germans who had been left in Britain without any means of subsistence. Shortly afterwards he was interned and remained in custody until 1919, when he was expelled from Britain. Since the discovery of von Horst’s papers, doubt has been cast on Thomson’s interpretation of his behaviour; undoubtedly there were grounds for suspicion about his activities and his associates but there is no evidence to confirm that he was ever a German agent. Special Branch officers spent a lot of time in establishing organisations’ real raisons d’être; frequently, as in this case, there were found to be no ulterior motives in their activities.
1 German Naval Intelligence, known in security circles as ‘N’
2 James Morton, Spies of the First World War (London: National Archives, 2010), p. 51; Christopher Andrew, The Defence of the Realm, pp. 44–6
3 Fitch, Traitors Within, pp. 106–11
4 Kitchener, The Memoirs of an Old Detective, p. 39
5 Leonard Sellers, Shot in the Tower: The Story of the Spies Executed in the Tower of London During the First World War (London: Leo Cooper, 1997), p. 6
6 TNA WO 71/1236
7 TNA WO141/2/2
8 Preface by Sir Basil Thomson in Edward M. Brady’s The Irish Secret Service in England, 1919–21 (Paris: Payot, 1933)
9 TNA MEPO 3/2444
10 Bernard Porter, Plots and Paranoia (London: Unwin, 1986), p. 140
11 Morton, Spies of the First World War, p. 160–61
12 Ben Tillett was a socialist Member of Parliament and trade union leader
13 Memorandum entitled Pacifism by Basil Thomson, dated 24 November 1917. TNA CAB 24/34/9