The Defence of the Realm (15 page)

A cartoon of November 1915 by H. S. Gladstone, highlighting the importance of letter interception to MI5's wartime operations.

Three weeks later, Browning told Hall that a censorship form had been accidentally left in a letter addressed to an MP whom he considered the ‘ruddiest of rascals'. The outraged MP protested to Reginald McKenna, who summoned Hall and Cockerill to his room at the Home Office. They found the Home Secretary standing sternly in front of the fireplace. Was it true, demanded McKenna, that Hall had dared, without his authority, to tamper with the Royal Mail? ‘Quite true, Mr Home Secretary,' replied Hall. The penalty for that, said the Home Secretary, was two years in jail. His mood softened as Cockerill argued that, under wartime censorship regulations, he had felt entitled to use what temporary help he could to prevent information reaching the enemy.
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By the end of the year the number of postal censors had grown from the original one to 170. In April 1915 the censors were formally reconstituted as a new department of the War Office, MO9 (later MI9) under a retired diplomat. By the Armistice their numbers had increased to 4,861 (threequarters of them women).
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As before the war, letter checks were crucial to MO5(g)'s wartime counter-espionage successes. The original mission of the first wartime agent despatched to Britain by the Nachrichten-Abteilung (‘N'), Carl Lody, was to gather intelligence on Royal Navy losses in what the German Admiralty wrongly expected to be an imminent battle between its own High Seas Fleet and the British Grand Fleet.
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Lody was a German naval reserve officer, who spoke excellent English with an American accent. After the
interception of his correspondence to an address in Stockholm which was known to be used by ‘N', Lody was arrested on 2 October while on his way to Queenstown, the main British naval base in Ireland.
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Kell's head of counter-espionage, Reginald Drake, asked for Lody's trial to be held in camera but was overruled, apparently because of the belief in Whitehall that a public court-martial would advertise the success of the authorities in dealing with the threat from German espionage.
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Had Lody been tried in camera, Drake planned to implement ‘an ingenious method for conveying false information to the enemy which depended on their not knowing which of their agents had been caught'.
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As was to happen in the Second World War, the first wartime espionage case might thus have led to the development of a ‘Double-Cross System' to feed disinformation to the enemy.
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The government's insistence, against MO5(g)'s wishes, on public trials and courts-martial for captured spies, however, made a First World War Double-Cross System impossible, though, as the war progressed, there were some more limited opportunities for deception.

At the end of October 1914, a public court martial at the Westminster Guildhall sentenced Lody to death by firing squad at the Tower of London – the first execution at the Tower for one and a half centuries. ‘There was', wrote Thomson later, ‘some difference of opinion as to whether it was sound policy to execute spies and to begin with a patriotic spy like Lody.' According to his wife, Kell regarded him as a ‘really fine man' and ‘felt it deeply that so brave a man should have to pay the death penalty'. The bravery with which Lody met his end strengthened his feelings of remorse. Lody wrote to the officer commanding Wellington Barracks:

Sir, I feel it my duty as a German Officer to express my sincere thanks and appreciation towards the staff of Officers and men who were in charge of my person during my confinement. Their kind and considered treatment has called my highest esteem and admiration as regards good-fellowship even towards the Enemy, and if may be permitted I would thank you for make this known to them.

I am, sir, with profound respect,

Carl Hans Lody, Senior Lieutenant, Imperial German Naval Res. II.D

On the morning of his execution, Lody said to the Assistant Provost Marshal, ‘I suppose you will not shake hands with a spy?' The officer replied, ‘No, but I will shake hands with a brave man.'
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A German destroyer in the Second World War was named in Lody's honour.

By comparison with counter-espionage, Kell initially regarded countersubversion as a low priority. Until 1916 pacifism and labour unrest seemed to MO5(g) to pose little threat to the British war effort. In August 1914
the Trades Union Congress announced an industrial truce for the duration of the war and Labour leaders joined their social superiors on recruiting platforms. Kell and his wife attended a public meeting in 1915 at which the veteran strike-leader Ben Tillett joined forces with the Duke of Rutland to appeal for warm clothing for the troops. ‘Never shall I forget', wrote Constance Kell in a somewhat patronizing passage in her memoirs, ‘the picture of Ben Tillett, very short of stature, and the Duke, very long indeed, standing together side by side, one with an amused expression, the other looking down benevolently . . .' ‘Can you picture those men', Tillett asked his audience, ‘with nothing but their bare bodies to oppose to the guns of the enemy?' Constance Kell found that ‘a telling phrase'.
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Though six of the forty Labour MPs (including the future prime minister Ramsay MacDonald) opposed the war, Arthur Henderson, the wartime leader of the parliamentary Party, joined the coalition government formed by Asquith in May 1915. Early opposition to the war centred instead on the small Independent Labour Party (ILP). Kell obtained an HOW to begin a ‘check' on the correspondence of the Stop-the-War Committee, founded by C. H. Norman, one of the most militant ILP leaders. The results were reassuring. According to a report submitted to Kell in July 1915, letters to the Committee were few and declining in number:

No letter has been seen which would appear to indicate that the writer has anti-British sentiments or that the Committee is in any way inspired or assisted from enemy sources . . . It appears therefore that the members of the Committee are obtaining very small results from their propaganda and the harm they are causing at the present time is practically negligable [
sic
].
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The most active period for German espionage in Britain was the first winter of the war.
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German agents were no longer confined to those sent by the naval Nachrichten-Abteilung. After the outbreak of war, Sektion IIIb, German military intelligence, also began to target Britain, though its main priorities remained France and Russia. From early November 1914 Sektion IIIb's principal base for operations against Britain was a ‘war intelligence centre' (the Kriegsnachrichtenstelle) in occupied Antwerp, which ran a ‘spy school' for agents despatched to France and Britain.
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Early in 1915 a Belgian refugee in Holland wrote to the War Office giving a name (Frans Leibacher) and an address in Rotterdam used by the Antwerp Kriegsnachrichtenstelle for correspondence with its agents in Britain.
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Interception of letters using the address began on 30 January, and led to three arrests within the next month. The first to be caught was the German-born Anton Küpferle, who had lived in the United States and
claimed to be a naturalized American but was believed by MO5(g) to have served in the German army. Küpferle arrived in England from America in February 1915 and sent three intercepted letters to the Kriegsnachrichtenstelle Rotterdam address which, when the censorship flat iron was heated and run over them, revealed, written in secret ink (which he was the first German spy to use) what MO5(g) considered ‘information of military and naval importance'. Küpferle simplified MO5(g)'s task by including his real name in the letters and the fact that he was staying at the Wilton Hotel, London, where he was arrested on 19 February.
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Küpferle inspired none of the sympathy extended to Lody, striking his interrogators as ‘a typical German non-commissioned officer, stiff, abrupt, and uncouth'. In the middle of his trial at the Old Bailey he was found hanging by a silk handkerchief from the ventilator in his cell. By his body was a message written on a slate:

I can say that I have had a fair trial in the U. Kingdom, but I am unable to stand the strain any longer and take the law in my own hand. I fought many battles and death is only a saviour for me . . . What I done I have done for my country. I shall express my thanks, and may the Lord bless you all.

The originals of Küpferle's correspondence do not survive, but, according to Basil Thomson, an intercepted letter written by him to another German agent showed less charity towards his captors. In it he welcomed the use of poison gas against British soldiers and the ‘stupefying death' it would cause. This letter, Thomson believed, showed that Küpferle, unlike Lody, was a typical Hun with ‘the true Prussian mentality'.
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Most subsequent captured spies, whether or not they were of German nationality, also inspired little sympathy. Kell regarded most of these later spies as ‘men ready to do any dirty work merely for gain' rather than patriots like Lody.
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While the Küpferle correspondence was being investigated by MO5(g) in February 1915, four other letters were intercepted en route to the same Rotterdam address used by the Antwerp Kriegsnachrichtenstelle, also containing military and naval intelligence reports written in invisible ink between the lines of the letters. Inquiries identified the writer of one of the letters, posted in Deptford and signed ‘Hahn' in secret ink, as John Hahn, a naturalized German-born baker living in Deptford High Street, who was arrested on 24 February. Next day his wife told Scotland Yard that she believed that a Russian named Karl Müller was involved in her husband's activities, and provided his address. Müller was arrested on 25 February, six weeks after his arrival in England. Though he had a Russian passport, MO5(g) concluded, correctly, that he was German.
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The Antwerp Kriegsnachrichtenstelle was unaware of Müller's arrest and carried on sending messages to him, thus giving MO5(g)'s head of counter-espionage, Reginald Drake, the opportunity to attempt a variant of the deception which the publicity given to Lody's trial and execution had prevented in the previous year. With the help of the bilingual Hinchley Cooke, Drake sent fabricated reports from Müller, usually written in secret ink, to the Antwerp Kriegsnachrichtenstelle, which responded by sending money and requests for further information.
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Until the end of May 1915 the fabrications were taken seriously by the Kriegsnachrichtenstelle. During April 1915 reports on a steamer allegedly leaving Bristol loaded with twenty heavy guns, the stationing of eight divisions of volunteers at Aldershot and large-scale embarkations of soldiers from Dartmouth were all rated ‘credible'. An entirely fictitious report of 30 April on British preparations for an amphibious attack on Schleswig was, remarkably, rated ‘reliable, confirmed by other reports'. The Kriegsnachrichtenstelle was particularly impressed by Müller's claim to have a reliable source in the Admiralty. It regarded as ‘credible' a fabricated report from Müller received on 10 May, which it believed was probably based on the Admiralty source, that large numbers of troops had been assembled on the Humber and Firth of Forth which might be intended for the (non-existent) Schleswig operation or another theatre away from the Western Front. Three days later another fabricated report that Müller had personally travelled to Hull and Leith and seen large numbers of soldiers ready for embarkation was assessed as ‘reliable'. On 30 May however, the Antwerp Kriegsnachrichtenstelle showed the first signs of suspicion, classifying Müller's most recent reports as ‘less credible of late', probably because his claim that 80,000 additional British troops had just been sent to France was contradicted by other intelligence.
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German intelligence had failed to notice articles which had been appearing in
The Times
since 10 April, following the lifting of an earlier press embargo, on Müller's arrest and forthcoming trial. MO5(g)'s deception, however, began to unravel on 5 June when the Kriegsnachrichtenstelle noticed a
Times
report that Müller had been sentenced to death and his accomplice John Hahn to seven years' penal servitude.
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Before his execution at the Tower on 22 June, Müller is reported to have shaken hands with the firing squad.
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Drake and Hinchley Cooke, however, continued to send fabricated communications in Müller's name to Antwerp. According to a later account by the Kriegsnachrichtenstelle:

We knew without any doubt whatsoever that one of our agents [Müller] in the UK had been arrested and shot. A short time later we received a request from this ‘dead
agent' asking for money as he was absolutely skint. A week later he wrote again complaining bitterly that we had left him in the lurch and also sent a report that didn't contain very much. The report was a good copy of the agent's style but we immediately became suspicious that the British intelligence service should take the trouble to write reports to us in compensation for the fact that our man had suffered the ultimate fate. We gave the appearance of going along with the wishes of our dead colleague and sent him money whilst urging him on to be diligent in his work. The British were truly diligent in supplying us with the information they wanted us to have.
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