Karl Hans Lody was the first German spy arrested, tried and sentenced during the First World War. He was a former naval officer who, too impecunious to maintain the social expense of a position in the navy, had quit in his twenties to become a tour guide overseas. Now in his late thirties, he had travelled widely, spoke English with an American accent, and had lost nothing of his patriotic fervour. But as a spy, he was hopelessly unwary, trusting and untrained.1
Some writers have sought to explain away Germany’s use of such a man with the excuse that, their English spy network having been silenced, they were desperate. In fact, in July of 1914 when Lody volunteered his services, the network was still in place.
He was provided with a genuine American passport in the name of Charles A. Inglis by the German authorities in Berlin less than twenty-four hours before a state of war was declared. A couple of weeks later he returned to Norway, where he had been working, in his new identity. From there he entered Britain (probably via Hull) as an American tourist. So far he had not incited suspicion. The war was, after all, not yet the Great War. It was a long-overdue trouncing of the belligerent Hun that would be over by Christmas. American visitors were routine enough.
From the time of his arrival in Edinburgh on 27 August things began to go wrong; not only because he lacked sense, but because nobody had prepared or trained him for the job. He hired a bicycle, and pedalled around naval installations taking notes and asking questions. He sent an uncoded telegram to someone with a German name in Stockholm. He sent another, and another. He left forwarding addresses and travelled to London, whence he sent news of the defences of public buildings. He went to Liverpool, and wrote letters about the refitting of cruise liners that was going on in the docks. Nothing was encoded or written in invisible ink. Then he went to Dublin, and it was decided that the evidence already intercepted was enough to detain him. In Killarney he was arrested by officers of the Royal Irish Constabulary.
Trotter, now a Major, sat on the Court Martial that tried him at the Middlesex Guildhall at the end of October, Captain ‘Blinker’ Hall, from naval intelligence, was among the witnesses, and Mr Bodkin prosecuted. The case against him rested more on mail interceptions than anything else. Patriotism was his motive. This was counted in his favour, but did not save him because it was necessary to make an example of him. Lody was duly removed from the court to the Tower of London where his deportment was brave and courteous to the end. ‘May my life be honoured as a humble offering on the altar of the Fatherland’, he wrote to his relations in Stuttgart. Patriotism of this mystic, quasi-religious type was normal in the officer class at the time, and led Germany into a lot of trouble later. He was led into a room at the Tower, seated in a chair and shot by an eight-man firing squad on 6 November 1914.2
Under the Aliens Restriction Act, which was rushed through on the first day of the war, ‘enemy aliens’ – Germans who had settled in England and had English children, for instance – must register with the police and were usually restricted in their movements and activities. The Defence of the Realm Act of 8 August 1914 – ‘Dora’ – went further and pretty well imposed martial law on everyone, including aliens from neutral countries. Thomson of Scotland Yard insisted that ‘It is necessary in the interests of public safety that the police should be almost unreasonably circumspect in dealing even with [aliens] against whom nothing specific may be known.’ The powers of the State to ‘defend the realm’ from the people by preventing them from moving or communicating were wider than ever before.
MI5’s anti-espionage section understood perfectly well that Germans were not necessarily spies and spies were not necessarily German. On the other hand, Berlin was more inclined to trust people of ‘German blood’ or neutrals, suspecting British agents of playing a double game. So suspicion fell particularly on foreigners communicating with the continent.
Lody was the first of many wartime spies whose arrests arose out of mail interception. Once war began, systematic examination of the mail could be acknowledged in court. This had been a more delicate matter before mobilisation, not least because it put the enemy on their guard. In wartime accused aliens were usually tried by courts martial, detailed evidence being unavailable to the press. Captain Lawrence’s special section had been intercepting mail to and from the addresses of known spies abroad for some time, and during the war teams of postal censors were put in place. There were well over a thousand of them by 1918. Through them, the special section of MI5 fed Melville’s detective section with a stream of names and addresses to investigate. By 1916 he had seven full-time ‘shadowing staff ’ all believed to have been ex-Metropolitan Police officers. 3
Kell’s outfit was also re-designated – at least twice. From 17 August, a fortnight after war began, Melville and Regan and Fitzgerald, his first two detectives, became part of ‘G Section’ of MI5. A chart of October 1915 shows Lt-Col Vernon Kell (working to Cockerill who works to the DMO, Major-General Callwell) in joint charge of other MI departments, but in sole charge of MI5 E, F, G and H. MI5 G under Major Drake is responsible for ‘Detection of Espionage’. Other specific tasks covered by E, F and H include administration of counter-espionage, military policy regarding aliens, organisation of counter-espionage at ports, and so on.4
Homeland security and military and naval intelligence abroad were fast becoming a huge, sprawling series of slightly differing fields of responsibility employing thousands of people, from military personnel to clerks and typists; keeping the security services secure must have been problematic, despite the obligatory signature of a declaration under the Official Secrets Act.
The natural division between Kell’s counter-espionage, counter-insurgency people, and the interests of Cumming’s SIS which lay largely overseas, was finally rectified when MI1(C) and MI5 opened for business as separate arms of a new Directorate of Military Intelligence in January 1916. Melville was still based in Temple with his Detective Section or ‘Special Staff ’, but it was from then onwards part of MI5.5
Detective work arose from mail interceptions; mail interceptions arose from suspicion; suspicion arose from the Port Police. And the public. Within months of the war’s beginning the British public, if Sidney Felstead is to be believed, were suffering from ‘spy mania’:
Where is the man or woman who did not know a German who had a concrete gun platform built in his back garden?… And who… did not know of a fashionable restaurant patronised by naval and military staff officers where German spies disguised as harmless waiters were always found to be standing at the back of officers’ chairs, carefully gleaning the conversation which was taking place?… The number of people who were reported to the police as signalling to Zeppelins ran into thousands: in practically every instance the culprit was either a careless servant girl or a blind flapping in the breeze… There was an unfortunate individual from whose house a light had been seen on the night of a particular raid, reported to the authorities as having been seen signalling to the enemy, who was raided first by the Competent Military Authority, then by the police, and lastly by the naval authorities, who drew a cordon round the house and then sent a bluejacket to swarm up the balcony and seize the culprit in the act.6
Felstead obtained his information from Basil Thomson of Scotland Yard and, fortunately for Melville, these panicky reports were normally rejected by the police at an early stage, long before they reached the detective branch of G Section.
Melville – Mr M – had another job to do, besides detection.
In 1911 the British spies Brandon and Trench had been caught because they went about their business as stupidly as Lody did. They had gone into Germany without vetting by Kell, Melville or Cumming, but with the blessing of at least one Admiralty official who was as arrogant as any Prussian and should have known better than to send them. This must not happen again. The British had been getting valuable information from Byzewski, Bywater, Tinsley and others for some time before the war. None of importance except Max Schultz (a British Max Schultz working in Germany) had been caught and none but Rué had been turned. British spies vetted by Melville were skilled operators, usually resident, with good cover in the way of a job so that they fitted seamlessly into life abroad.
Now, in wartime Germany, anyone interested in Germany’s conduct of the war would be automatically suspect and if they could not account for themselves they would be shot. Lody had been caught because he made the elementary mistake of underestimating his enemy. The same must not be true of anyone Cumming sent abroad, or of anyone Kell sent to infiltrate groups such as the Neutrality League at home. The right people must be picked, and they must be properly trained. Bernard Porter gives an account of a man who got into MI5 in December 1914, and
….was a medical doctor, taken in because MI5 reasoned that a doctor was ‘the last person to be suspected of intrigue’. Together with him in that class of 1914 he later remembered ‘ex-policemen, journalists, actors, ex-officers, university dons, bank clerks, several clergy, and to my knowledge at least two titled persons’.
That was at what he described as a Spy School, started up then to teach them all what today is called tradecraft. The training included lectures from ex-Detective Superintendent Melville on how to pick locks and burgle houses, followed by practical exercises; others on the Technique of Lying, the Technique of Being Innocent, the Will to Kill, and Sex as a Weapon in Intelligence; and (finally) Dr McWhirter’s Butchery Class, which gave advice on how to top yourself if you were caught… If we can credit this account Spy School clearly gave these new wartime recruits an excellent grounding, especially in practical subjects.7
It must have been quietly amusing for Melville, who knew his audience of university dons and titled persons would be goggle-eyed at the sight of a real, live criminal, to introduce the safe-cracking expert as ‘a very experienced assistant who is out on a kind of compassionate leave from Parkhurst so he can put his shoulder to the war effort for a few days’.8 He was probably a master locksmith from around the corner, but Melville was at pains to remind his class how foolish they would be to attempt an exercise of their new skills in peacetime. (Indeed, there was a – no doubt purely coincidental – rash of country-house jewel heists in the 1920s.) Melville was adept at getting in and out of locked rooms and had been much impressed, on meeting Houdini at the Yard in 1900, when this genius of escapology freed himself in a twinkling from some handcuffs.9 The fascinated student also recalled Melville’s advice that doors squeaked more in daytime, usually on the upper hinge.
Spy School took place every Tuesday and Friday at 5.00 p.m.10 Melville was not the only lecturer. Others were Ewart, Cumming and possibly, interestingly, Douglas Hogg, the barrister James Melville worked for.11
On a day in January 1915, a small shivering crowd of refugees from Belgium landed somewhere on the North Sea coast of England. All of them were fleeing from the Germans who had overrun their country. They arrived unnoticed and scattered as soon as they reached dry land. One of them, a tall Russian who spoke many languages, had a respectable identity as a businessman and, unusually for a refugee, life insurance to protect his wife and children should anything happen to him.
Within a month, a letter to a Rotterdam address caught the attention of an officer of the special section. This Rotterdam address was known to be used by German intelligence and the letter, from L. Cohen at 22 High Street, Deptford, was incongruously inconsequential yet so affectionate; there were lots of kisses. Invisible ink technology being in its infancy, a hot flat-iron would reveal most messages written between the lines in, for instance, lemon juice:
An iron was heated and, hey, presto! Out came as pretty a mass of information as any enemy could desire to possess. There were certain divisions of the New Armies training at Aldershot which would cross the Channel before long, certain ships building in the Clyde which would be a grave menace to the German submarines, and remarks to the effect that the Moral of the people was poor, and that the recruiting for Lord Kitchener’s armies had died away to nothing.12
Melville and his detectives investigated. There was no L. Cohen at 22 High Street, Deptford. More flirtatious letters were read on their way to Rotterdam. They proved, when pressed by the flatiron, to be demands for money. Finally one arrived which had a postscript: ‘C has gone to Newcastle so I am writing this from 111 instead.’ There was a 111 Deptford High Street, and it was occupied by a baker and confectioner called Peter Hahn. He was arrested.
While waiting to take him away some of the police made a search of the back room where, much as they expected, they found a complete kit for writing in secret ink. There was the ink, special paper, wool and ammonia, neatly stowed away in a cardboard box. But of the actual spy himself no trace could be found.13
Local inhabitants provided a lead to a Russian who often visited Hahn; he lived somewhere in Russell Square. This tall, dark, middleaged fellow was traced to Bloomsbury, and thence to Newcastle, where he was arrested. His accommodation was searched and his belongings confiscated, and he was taken to London.
Under interrogation he denied knowing any Germans; he said he hated them. He spoke English well with the slightest of accents. He had arrived on the refugee boat, but records showed that he had visited England at least once since August 1914 and the authorities were convinced that he had lived in Britain as a spy before the war and escaped detection. The place on the refugee boat had been bought for him.
He was identified as Karl Muller. He was a resourceful man who had bought and sold different commodities for different companies, who had run this enterprise and that, and served in the Turkish army; he was not well off, but he had made a passably good living. He could, in fact, claim to be Russian, for he had been born in Russian Poland. He said he had been living in Antwerp when the Germans invaded, and they picked him up as a likely spy.
The German Admiralty, since the Lody disaster, had improved their own spy school, and Muller had been trained to recognise ships by their silhouette. ‘There are well-defined architectural lines to every group of ships in the British Navy, and these silhouettes I learned to know by heart before I was permitted to leave Berlin’, boasted the liar Karl Armgaard Graves, and in this respect he seems to have known what he was talking about even if it didn’t apply to him. Muller knew how to recognise battleships and use invisible ink. He was set afloat, and landed safely, and it was only through the vigilance and diligence of G Section that he was ever caught.
He was a tragic man, who wept bitterly for his wife and children the night before he met his end. (The life insurance provided by the German authorities, while no compensation at all, was nonetheless an improvement on the cold comfort offered to Gottlieb Goerner years before.) Muller and his baker accomplice had been found guilty in a civil court, for Hahn, born of German parents in Battersea, was a British subject and therefore qualified for a civil trial. Muller was defended, unsuccessfully, by Henry Curtis-Bennett, a barrister friend of James Melville from Middle Temple.
Hahn, the younger man who had written only once to Rotterdam at Muller’s instigation, got five years. Muller was condemned to death. An appeal was lodged and rejected. When his time came he is said to have walked along the line of men who were about to kill him, solemnly shaking each one by the hand, before his eyes were bound and he bravely faced the firing squad on 23 June 1915.
Shortly after Muller’s detection it was suggested to Kell, by the Special Section, that since the trial had not been reported, the Germans would be none the wiser if they kept on getting intelligence from their correspondent. Special Section officers therefore imitated his codes, his invisible ink and his handwriting:
Among the falsified items sent was a faked description of the results of the Battle of Jutland, one bogus photograph which would later appear in a German newspaper indicating that it had been accepted as genuine. Another item successfully enticed a German U boat into the open in a bid to sink an important British steamer, only to be met by the guns of a Royal navy destroyer... money sent from Rotterdam for Muller enabled [MI5] to purchase a second, much-needed motor-car – promptly christened ‘The Muller’.14
The war was grim and earnest now. The newspapers did not say how bad it was, but everybody could tell from the men who came back. There was no more false optimism. As the casualty lists lengthened, there was some bitterness, but also resignation; Germany was an aggressor, that much was proven; to most people the war must be right, and the ‘top brass’ must know what they were doing, and good would prevail. But when, exactly? Unsure of their future, people put their affairs in order. In this spirit Major James Melville, who would shortly be posted to Gallipoli, and Miss Sarah Tugander of Abingdon Mansions, Kensington, cast their cares aside and quietly married at Kensington Registry Office on 1 July 1915.
Sarah was part of the family, left behind in England to hope that James would return unharmed. She had been secretary to Mr Bonar Law, now leader of the Conservatives, for ten years, but as was usual even in wartime, quit her job upon marriage.
Melville had his occupation to distract him. He had dealt with the loss of a wife and three children by working, and with war raging and two sons at the front he would work still. From late May onwards, dogged detection followed up a series of cable and letter interceptions and revealed what the newspapers would call a gang, but which was really more of a loose espionage network. Fortunately, the load was spread over two extra men: Burrell joined early in May and Hailstone at the beginning of June.
Discovering spies like Lody before they had had time to do much damage was merely encouraging; finding that others had been getting away with it, and that their information could already have sent men to their death, was frankly worrying. Between 24 and 25 May, routine checks on telegrams out of Southampton had alerted the section to messages destined for Dierks & Co., cigar merchants of the Hague. They were orders for items such as ‘3000 cabanas AGK; 1000 Rothschilds K; 4000 coronas USB’. Scrutiny of these cables by a German speaker suggested alte grosse Kreuzer (big old cruisers) for AGK, Kriegsschiffe (battleships) for K and Unterseebotten (submarines) for USB. That was enough. When the order of 25 May was checked against ships in port, three cruisers (3000 AGK) had just arrived (caba-nos), one battleship (1000 K) had just departed (Rothschild) and four submarines (4000 USB) were stationed there (coronas). Every recent telegram from ports up and down the country was now being urgently reviewed and Dierks & Co. in the Hague investigated; they were not the ‘cigar and provision merchants’ they were supposed to be. And more telegrams were still being sent out of Southampton.15
On 27 May a £25 money order came from Dierks & Co. payable to the man who had sent the cables, Haicke Marinus Petrus Janssen. His location could now be discovered and the damaging cables stopped.
He was a thirty-two-year-old Dutchman, and he was arrested on 29 May in the presence of detectives from G Section. In his room there was evidence of communication with Dierks as far back as March, cigar samples and lists of tobacconists. But the company’s price list was somewhat odd, with inexplicable notes on it indicating a code. There was also a current copy of Jane’s Fighting Ships and a puzzling collection of items including eau-de-cologne (which he was not wearing), custard powder, liquid gum, pens, nibs and a mapping pen.
Other cables had gone to Dierks and Co. this month. There had been two from Edinburgh on 17 and 18 May and another on 25 May which was followed by a £25 remittance from Dierks. The sender in Edinburgh, another Dutchman called Willem Johannes Roos, had left the city. He was traced to Aberdeen; then to Inverness and, finally, on 2 June, to London where he was arrested by Herbert Fitch of Special Branch at a commercial hotel in Aldgate.16 When he came into the country on 14 May, he had claimed to represent Dobbelmann’s of Rotterdam, a legitimate cigar trader; but there was no evidence of that. A search of his room by G Section detectives revealed Dierks’ stationery and cigar stock lists, and recent hotel bills, which were the only indication that this man might be a commercial traveller for Dierks as he now claimed. However, he did have a magazine article about F.E. Jane of Fighting Ships fame, some notes on ships he had seen, custard powder, pens, and a letter from Janssen.
The men were held in custody and interrogated, probably by Drake and Cumming. Janssen, protesting his innocence, said he was a former merchant seaman who had even received a medal from the Board of Trade for rescuing British sailors from a sinking ship. It had been awarded to him at Liverpool in February. This was interesting, for although it was true, further investigation showed that he also travelled to Cardiff, Hull and Edinburgh on that occasion. This time he had entered the country via Hull on 13 May and immediately wired for the funds that did not arrive until 27 May at Southampton. He had been to other South Coast ports in the meantime. He had visited no tobacconists and obtained no orders. He claimed that he had never heard of Roos.
The cigar lists smelled of scent and there was secret writing on them, which a forensic expert said been made with eau-de cologne and a talc fixative. But Roos had more codes on his, respecting ports in the north and east, as might be expected. Roos had to admit that he knew Janssen, because he had a letter from him, but said that Janssen didn’t work for Dierks. Janssen insisted he knew nothing of Roos; this went on for some time even after they were brought into the same room. It was pretty tragic stuff because the more they talked the more they denied the obvious. They were not legitimate cigar traders, they knew each other, and they were communicating salient facts to the enemy.
They were tried at Westminster Guildhall and found guilty. Major Drake presented convincing evidence. At some stage both realised that the game was up, and separately wrote to their wives giving the same address to which to apply for a pension. Janssen, after the court martial, talked resignedly about spying. Information came out of England every day, he said; sometimes messages were hidden in the spines of books. He informed on a naval inspector called Hochenholz. Roos said nothing further, but is said to have tried to cut his own throat in prison.17 The two Dutch sailors were shot in the Tower on 30 July.
Thanks to the watch on mail to Dierks & Co., Melville and his detectives were already working on the next case. On 25 May a letter addressed to the firm had been sent from London by a George T. Parker, who could not be traced. Then
The Censor forwarded from Holland a telegram of 30th May 1915 announcing the despatch to Reginald Rowland, c/o Société Générale, Regent Street, London, of £30 on account of Norton B Smith & Co., New York.18
On 3 June came another letter from the mysterious Parker, this time addressed to H. Flores in Rotterdam. Both of Parker’s letters referred to a female accomplice called Lizzie. From the context investigators deduced that this might mean the liner Queen Elizabeth. In Holland, Tinsley and his agents were quietly checking all the Dutch contacts.
On the same day, Scotland Yard received a report about a woman called Mrs Wertheim who had been asked to leave her hotel at Inverness. Something about her behaviour, her general throwing around of money and nosiness and getting herself driven about the local naval installations, had alerted the hotelkeeper, who called in the Chief Constable, who visited this lady and told her to get out of town; she apparently left for London.
At least one lead could be pursued: sooner or later Mr Rowland would collect his £30 in Regent Street. He proved to be a thin, blond, young man of about twenty-eight, rather highly strung – as he would be in the circumstances. He had a German accent with an American twang and claimed that he was a naturalised American. The detectives searched his accommodation. They found hotel bills establishing part of his movements; cards of Norton B. Smith and a letter showing that he represented the firm; Jane’s Fleets of the World 1915; a phial of lemon juice; pens and a tin of talc; a code not unlike that used by Janssen and Roos; and a receipt for a registered letter, sent to L. Wertheim in Inverness. His handwriting looked just like Parker’s. Upon investigation, they found that L. Wertheim was Lizzie, that George Parker and Reginald Rowland were one and the same, and that Scotland Yard had already received a report on Mrs Wertheim.
Rowland/Parker was using an American passport in the name of Reginald Rowland which was a fake, and yet Reginald Rowland did exist; he was an older man who had deposited his documents with the authorities in Berlin for just one hour earlier in the year. So who was this man with the false passport? Rowland/Parker was saying nothing.
And now, on 4 June, the day of Rowland’s arrest, came another wire from Dierks & Co. This one was addressed to a Fernando Buschmann, and mentioned Flores. Buschmann, a young Brazilian, was picked up on 5 June. He seemed to be connected with a German naval inspector called Grund. The list of suspect names was lengthening. Postcards addressed to Flores, and to Grund c/o other suspects, were detected at once; they came from a man called Roggen.
Melville’s Special Staff were almost overwhelmed. They were still looking for Lizzie Wertheim. She had apparently been in Edinburgh before Inverness, having travelled from London in the company of an American woman called Knowles-Macy. It being wartime, Miss Knowles-Macy should have brought her passport to register with, but did not, and was turned away from the Edinburgh hotel. This had left Mrs Wertheim to continue her Scottish tour alone.
Patient detective work uncovered relations of Lizzie Wertheim in Hampstead. They did not want anything to do with her. But by 9 July enquiries led them to the house of another acquaintance, a Miss Brandes in the Hammersmith Road. She had turned Lizzie Wertheim out two days before. Finally, on 9 June, they traced her to the house of Miss Knowles-Macy at 33 Regent’s Park Road. She was arrested there. ‘When the police went to search her room, she entered the maid’s room, tore up a letter from George T. Parker and threw it out of the window.’19
Reading between the lines, she was an annoying, self-dramatising, selfish woman. Her papers were circumstantially, rather than substantially, incriminating; besides the scent and talc of the regulation spy kit were evidence that she had recently been in Berlin and had been in touch with German prisoners of war, a letter from Parker, an envelope addressed to Rowland, an Irish railway guide and Irish money, £115 in banknotes, and all sorts of correspondence and addresses linking her to suspected persons, notably one ‘Dr Brandt’ in Amsterdam. There was no technical data, no evidence that all the touring around Ireland, Fishguard, the Isle of Man, the South Coast and elsewhere looking at naval installations had provided the Germans with anything they could otherwise not have guessed. But she must have given them useful information, because she had been earning more money from them than she was used to having (she had started taking cocaine; even in 1915, nature’s way of telling her she was overpaid).
Incarcerated in Brixton on remand, and knowing that Wertheim had been arrested, Rowland decided the game was up. He told the full story. He was George Breeckow, a Russian born in 1884, whose father had lost money and taken the family to live at Stettin when George was a child. George Breeckow was brought up speaking German and at some stage was in the German army. He earned his living playing the piano for five or six years before the war in America, and although he took out naturalisation papers the process remained incomplete when he returned to Europe in 1914.
He was engaged in Antwerp in March of 1914 ‘to act as imperial courier between Germany and America’ but his first assignment was to go to England. He had £45 for Mrs Wertheim and a mission to persuade a Mr Carter of Southampton to work for the Germans; this the man declined to do. It was all downhill from there onwards. Lizzie Wertheim spent a few days with Breeckow in Southampton and proved to be a trying companion, determined to draw attention to herself. When she left for Scotland, he travelled to Ramsgate with a male friend and sent information to Germany. He then returned to London, and was arrested.
Mrs Wertheim was a Pole whose mother lived in Berlin. She had British citizenship by marriage but had been separated from her husband since about 1911. She was defiant to the end. They were tried at the Old Bailey on 20 September and Breeckow was sentenced to death. He appealed against the sentence. Wertheim got ten years’ penal servitude because she was a woman. Kell was angry, saying that this would encourage Germany to send more female spies in future.20
Fernando Buschmann, arrested shortly after his arrival in June, was convicted on the scant evidence of intercepted communication under the Defence of the Realm Act. Buschmann was a Brazilian of German descent and his motive for spying was never clear. Roggen had time to travel around a little before he was caught; like Janssen and Roos, he had arrived with a cover story that did not bear the most cursory examination. He was supposedly a Uruguayan farmer on the look-out for horses to buy, but knew nothing of Uruguay and did not buy horses but arrived in Scotland for ‘fishing and his health’ to stay just a couple of miles from a torpedo testing site. Documents and circumstantial evidence linked him with Breeckow. He, and Buschmann, were tried by court martial in September and shot in October 1915.
Not long after MO5 was renamed MI5 in 1916, James Melville’s friend from the Middle Temple, Henry Curtis-Bennett, was informally approached by Sir Archibald Bodkin and
Without further explanation, he took Curtis-Bennett by the arm and led him to offices at the corner of Charles Street, Haymarket. It was the headquarters of the Secret Service, nerve centre of the British counter-espionage system.
Curtis-Bennett joined in November 1916. His biographers say he found that
German agents who came to England were given all the rope they needed, provided eventually they hanged themselves. He took to this strange game of bluff and double bluff with enthusiasm… He was the man of the world among the soldiers, sailors and policemen with whom he was now working, and they used his supreme ability to read character and motive to great effect.21
From 1917 onwards Curtis-Bennett became part of the triumvirate who interrogated suspects. One of the three was always a military man like Drake or Kell and one was Basil Thomson; Curtis-Bennett was the other. Curtis-Bennett at least occasionally found himselfoverwhelmed with remorse when the questioning was successful, for the evidence thus produced would almost inevitably send the man to his death. There were, increasingly, exceptions. Sharing a cell with Buschmann had been a middle-aged Dutchman called Joseph Marks; he, like so many, had been let down by props (in his case a stamp collection) and a cover story that did not bear examination by a detective.22 But unlike the rest, Marks confessed and provided information about his spymaster in Holland. He received a five-year sentence and was deported after the war.
In 1916 German intelligence began to take the likelihood of detection more seriously. A man called Vieyra came under observation from May onwards because Richard Tinsley, in Rotterdam, had heard that he was a German spy. Vieyra was also known as Pickard, and lived in Acton with a woman called Mrs Fletcher. He had run a midget troupe before the war and had then got into the film distribution business, which took him to the continent and America. He came back from Holland in May, went about his business, and apart from the odd bank deposit from overseas, nothing was noticeably strange. His letters and business were ordinary. Enquiries on the continent, however, revealed some mysterious correspondents, an untrace-able ‘partner’ and a mistress whose testimony, while not exactly incriminating, was not reassuring either.
The Vieyra case is interesting for several reasons. For one thing, Tinsley according to the records had access to the services of a Dutch police sergeant; for another, some of the correspondence to and from the untraceable ‘partner’ must have travelled via the diplomatic bag of the Dutch Consulate in London. Vieyra’s letters, when they were finally developed in a three-stage process taking several days, showed not only that he was spying, but that the Germans had invented a new kind of invisible ink. Vieyra was also the first spy to be condemned to death and then have his sentence commuted to life imprisonment. In this way his testimony could continue to be of use in future cases.
Over a five-month period starting at the end of the year the British security services detected a sophisticated spy network which, if its full ramifications were to be understood, must be kept in place.23 The first suspect was a man called Denis, who in September 1916 was under observation by Richard Tinsley in Holland. On 20 September George Vaux Bacon, an American journalist newly arrived in England from New York, wrote to Denis from London. On 22 September Bacon went to Holland where he stayed throughout October; his letter, however, was not intercepted until 29 September and not read until 9 October, so its late arrival at Denis’s address in Holland naturally aroused Bacon’s suspicion. This was compounded when, in October, Tinsley’s agent Mauritz Hyman approached Bacon rather clumsily.
On 2 November Bacon returned to England. Tinsley watched him leave Rotterdam, and saw a couple of other suspected spies see him off. Mail interceptions had thrown up their names and connected them to people called Sander and Wunnenberg in New York. Instructions to the Port Police at Gravesend were that Bacon was to be ‘searched but not alarmed’.
In London, Melville’s men watched him. He deposited £200 with the American Express Company and stayed at the Coburg Hotel in Bayswater. This was new; before the war, German spies had put up at a predictable range of hotels – the Bonnington and the Ivanhoe in Bloomsbury, the Wilton at Victoria.
On 14 November there came a breakthrough in Rotterdam. Tinsley was approached by a man called Graff, a metal merchant who was on the British blacklist but wanted to be taken off it for the sake of his business. He told Tinsley that he had been approached to join the ‘imperial messenger service’ of the German admiralty and showed a couple of sheets, apparently blank but containing secret messages, which were destined for New York. This was what Breeckow would have been doing had he not been caught, but Graff had been invited to be a courier for what had obviously become a much more secure service. He described the instructions and props he had been given. He had been told to observe specific things while in transit through England, and to obtain answers to questions such as ‘What is the English end of a submarine cable from Alexandrovskii on the White Sea?’ He was also given a sock impregnated with a solution which, when dunked in lukewarm water, would yield invisible ink; a palpable advance on the old talc-and-eau-de-cologne method. Graff was told to go along with Germany’s plans for his deployment, and duly went into action.
Curtis-Bennett was with the Bureau now, and it was in the middle of collating an entire ring of spies. Many names were gathered by 23 November thanks to translation and development of Graff ’s documents and associated mail interceptions from England and Holland. A number of American journalists and some business people were linked and all communicated with Sander and Wunnenberg in New York. A week after Graff ’s visit to Tinsley, Bacon in London filed an article to America and sent a letter. Both were intercepted and read. By the time a decision had been made to call him to Scotland Yard for an interview that would frighten him off, he had left for Ireland. A message went out to all ports to review neutrals, especially those coming and going via New York.
Bacon travelled around Ireland between 25 November and 8 December, when he returned to London to find a letter from Basil Thomson awaiting him. It was an invitation to attend Scotland Yard for an interview. He was detained on admitting that he had been in touch with Denis. Meanwhile, a suspect American journalist called Hastings had landed in Rotterdam and had been spotted by Tinsley with other suspects. The ramifications of this spy ring seemed to spread almost beyond the capacity of the Bureau to deal with it. Information came from Germany to the effect that ‘reports satisfactory in the highest degree had been received from three sources in Ireland’. In December Tinsley obtained material from an anonymous informant which confirmed that Hastings, along with Rutherford and Cribben who had seen Bacon off on the boat to England, were part of the ring. Graff confirmed this with damning proof against Bacon and Rutherford in February.
It was time to wind this operation up: ‘A search of radiograms fell through owing to the labour and expense involved’ and Graff ’s proof was enough. Bacon made a full confession on 9 February. On 28 February he was tried and condemned to death.
However, he was put to better use still. On 20 February the American Senate passed an anti-espionage Bill which, once enacted, enabled the arrest of Sander and Wunnenberg. Bacon was released on licence and sent to America to testify against them. They were both jailed. Those other American spies who escaped appear to have scattered, never to be of concern to the authorities.
We do not know when Melville stopped working. There is a record of him in action in Bloomsbury in May 1917, when he was staying at an hotel in Tavistock Square and watching a young Norwegian journalist who had borrowed money from the Vice-Consul in London and was waiting for more from home:
Instructions were given to the General Post Office to forward the telegram and not to stop any reply to it but to send a copy to MI5… Meanwhile Mr Melville had made friends with Hagn at the hotel, had ascertained that the Dagblad had another correspondent in London, that Hagn did a good deal of writing in his bedroom [and] left the hotel at 11a.m. returning in time for dinner. By going out with him Mr Melville had managed to let him be seen by three members of the Special Staff and agents were watching to see whether he posted any letters. On the 12th, Mr Melville had secured from a glass-stoppered bottle in Hagn’s bedroom some white liquid which on being tested proved to be, in MI9 nomenclature, C ink.24
Information that Alfred Hagn was a German agent had come from the police at Christiania. He was jailed for life but released after the war on compassionate grounds.
The wheel had come full circle. Melville had started like that, snooping in an hotel bedroom in Bloomsbury and uncovering a shirt marked ‘Kent’. Now he fell ill. In the late summer of 1917, suffering from a kidney complaint, he had an operation and at the end of the year, in Bolingbroke Hospital, Wandsworth, he decided to retire.
Chief Inspector Heat was very positive, but cautious.
‘Well, sir’, he said, ‘we have enough to go upon. A man like that has no business to be at large, anyhow.’
‘You will want some conclusive evidence’, came the observation in a murmur.
Chief Inspector Heat raised his eyebrows at the black, narrow back, which remained obstinately presented to his intelligence and his zeal.
‘There will be no difficulty in getting up sufficient evidence against him’, he said, with virtuous complacency. ‘You may trust me for that, sir’, he added, quite unnecessarily, out of the fullness of his heart; for it seemed to him an excellent thing to have that man in hand to be thrown down to the public should it think fit to roar with any special indignation …But in any case, Chief Inspector Heat, purveyor of prisons by trade, and a man of legal instincts, did logically believe that incarceration was the proper fate for every declared enemy of the law. In the strength of that conviction he committed a fault of tact. He allowed himself a little conceited laugh, and repeated:
’Trust me for that, sir.’
Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent, 1906 25
Was Melville ‘Chief Inspector Heat’?
Was he a ‘purveyor of prisons’, who sent innocent men to jail? He had cooked up the case against Deakin and the rest.
Asked by Counsel whether he had paid Coulon any money as a police spy, Inspector Melville declined to answer and the judge over-ruled the question on grounds of public policy. Counsel for the defence remarked that his object was to show that all which was suspicious in the case was the work of Coulon; in fact that it was Coulon who had got up the supposed plot.
Would he beat a man up to get a confession? Was he intolerant?
Was he not called in court a ‘notorious liar’?
London, Jarvis, 12th December
At the Trafalgar Square meeting last Sunday Malatesta got two black eyes, and Agresti had his left cheek smashed up, by Melville’s men.
London, Jarvis, 12th December
...Melville wanted to close down the Lapie bookshop, but was dissuaded.
Would he do a deal with a criminal? Did he get
…that satisfactory sense of superiority the members of the police force get from the unofficial but intimate side of their intercourse with the criminal classes, by which the vanity of power is soothed, and the vulgar love of domination over our fellow creatures is flattered as worthily as it deserves?
He let Sidney Reilly escape arrest over the counterfeit roubles and he must have known the man was a murderer. And yet, by dealing with Reilly, who was a different class of informer altogether, he was surely placing his head in the lion’s mouth. A ‘satisfactory sense of superiority’ is not something that serves the lion-tamer well.
William Melville was not Conrad’s Chief Inspector Heat. Unlike that sly and mean-spirited character, he had a sense of humour and its necessary obverse, a sense of tragedy. The Walsall case was indefensible, and so far as we know he never did anything like it again.
He was tight with information but generous with his staff: he had the gift of inspiring respect unaccompanied by fear. In later years, at any rate, he seems to have mellowed out of his intolerance; there is much in his professional reports to indicate that he recognised human frailty, as well as human viciousness. He loved his family and they loved him. James, his younger son, was a protégé of Ramsay Macdonald and became Solicitor-General in the 1929 Labour Government. He was of a different cast of mind from his father but so far as we know they came to accommodate one another’s opinions. James died at forty-six, never having fully recovered from serious injury sustained at Salonika. William, the elder son, married and settled in New Zealand after the First World War. Kate became Mrs Clifford Rainey.
In 1913 Melville wrote his will.
I bequeath to my son William John Melville the gold ring which I usually wear the scarf pin presented to me by King George the scarf pin presented to me by Queen Alexandra the cigarette case presented to me by the German Emperor the cigarette case presented to me by his Excellency Monsieur Gorymikine Secretary of State for Russia the silver cigar case presented to me by Princess Henry of Battenberg the tantalus presented to me by my colleagues on my retirement and also the sum of two hundred pounds which bequest I make to him inasmuch as he showed no desire as a youth to enter any profession and consequently spared me the necessary expenses in connection therewith. I bequeath to my daughter Kate Mary Madelaine the ring presented to me by the Emperor of Germany and the ring presented to me by the Shah of Persia. I bequeath to my son James Benjamin the cigarette case presented to me by the Czarewitch the sleeve links presented to me by King Edward the scarf pin presented to me by the King of Spain the gold watch presented to me by the Emperor of Germany together with the gold chain and appendages thereto which I wear with the said watch. Decorations I have received from King Edward and from foreign powers the combined scarf pin and stud received from Lady Pirbright the presentation tea and coffee service received from my colleagues on my retirement. I would like my wife my daughter and my son James Benjamin to live together as long as possible and I desire that during the widowhood of my wife and while she and my said daughter and son continue to live together they shall have the joint use of my plate linen china glass books pictures prints furniture…26
On it goes, the palpable proof of a successful professional life whose prosperous, liberal-minded end arguably justified the sometimes cruel means.
Melville’s attitude to policing was revolutionary in its day and it was he who passed on this attitude to the Secret Service. He was focussed to the point of ruthlessness, discreet to the point of secrecy. He had begun work in the days of the hansom cab and the street-sweeper; he had seen the first motor cars and speaking tubes; he had come to recognise telegrams and morse code, cryptography and fingerprinting and forensic analysis, as the tools of his trade. When he lay in the Bolingbroke Hospital dictating his memoir in the latter half of 1917, Zeppelins had already dropped bombs on London. It was a new, fearful century, and his great days were behind him.
He died of kidney failure on 1 February 1918, just one month after acknowledging that he would never work again:
In leaving the Branch now, it is to me a very great personal satisfaction that I cannot remember a single enquiry or mission on which I have been engaged, which was not carried out in a satisfactory manner. Another source of satisfaction is that I have always felt I had the support and confidence of my Chiefs, and never had a wry word with any of them.
I wish the Department all good luck.
(signed)
William Melville,
31st December 1917