Read Ebook: My Adventures as a Spy by Baden Powell Of Gilwell Robert Stephenson Smyth Baden Powell Baron

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RESIDENTIAL SPIES.

Their duty is to act as agents to receive and distribute instructions secretly to other itinerant spies, and to return their reports to headquarters. For this reason they are nicknamed in the German Intelligence Bureau "post-boxes." They also themselves pick up what information they can from all available sources and transmit it home.

One, Steinbauer, has for some years past been one of the principal "post-boxes" in England. He was attached to the Kaiser's staff during his last visit to this country, when he came as the guest of the King to the opening of Queen Victoria's memorial.

A case of espionage which was tried in London revealed his methods, one of his agents being arrested after having been watched for three years.

Karl Ernst's trial confirmed the discoveries and showed up the doings of men spies like Schroeder, Gressa, Klare, and others.

One of these letters miscarried through having the wrong initial to his name. It was returned by the Post Office to Burroughs and Wellcome, who on opening it found inside a German letter, enclosing bank-notes in return for services rendered. This raised suspicion against him. He was watched, and finally arrested.

He states that a feeling that he was being followed dawned upon him one day, when he noticed in his lodgings that the clothes which he had folded on a chair had been since refolded in a slightly different way while he was out. With some suspicion, he asked his landlady whether anyone had entered his room, and she, in evident confusion, denied that any stranger could have been there. Then he suggested that his tailor might have called, and she agreed that it was so. But when an hour or two later he interviewed his tailor, he, on his part, said he had not been near the place. Graves consequently deduced that he was being followed.

The knowledge that you are being watched, and you don't know by whom, gives, I can assure you, a very jumpy feeling--especially when you know you are guilty.

I can speak feelingly from more than one experience of it, since I have myself been employed on this form of scouting in peace time.

OFFICER AGENTS.

It is generally difficult to find ordinary spies who are also sufficiently imbued with technical knowledge to be of use in gaining naval or military details. Consequently officers are often employed to obtain such information in peace time as well as in the theatre of action in war.

But with them, and especially with those of Germany, it is not easy to find men who are sufficiently good actors, or who can disguise their appearance so well as to evade suspicion. Very many of these have visited our shores during the past few years, but they have generally been noticed, watched, and followed, and from the line taken by them in their reconnaissance it has been easy to deduce the kind of operations contemplated in their plans.

I remember the case of a party of these motoring through Kent nominally looking at old Roman ruins. When they asked a landowner for the exact position of some of these he regretted he had not a map handy on which he could point out their position. One of the "antiquarians" at once produced a large scale map; but it was not an English map: it had, for instance, details on it regarding water supply tanks which, though they existed, were not shown on any of our ordnance maps!

In addition to the various branches of spying which I have mentioned, the Germans have also practised commercial espionage on systematic lines.

COMMERCIAL SPYING.

Young Germans have been often known to serve in British business houses without salary in order to "learn the language"; they took care to learn a good deal more than the language, and picked up many other things about trade methods and secrets which were promptly utilised in their own country. The importance of commercial spying is that commercial war is all the time at the bottom of Germany's preparations for military war.

Carl Lody, a German ex-officer, was recently tried in London by court-martial and shot for "war treason"--that is, for sending information regarding our Navy to Germany during hostilities. Carl Lody's moves were watched and his correspondence opened by the counter-spy police in London, and thus all his investigations and information were known to the War Office long before he was arrested.

The enormous sums paid by Germany for many years past have brought about a sort of international spy exchange, generally formed of American-Germans, with their headquarters in Belgium, and good prices were given for information acquired by them. For instance, if the plans of a new fort, or the dimensions of a new ship, or the power of a new gun were needed, one merely had to apply and state a price to this bureau to receive fairly good information on the subject before much time had elapsed.

At the same time, by pretending to be an American, one was able to get a good deal of minor and useful information without the expenditure of a cent.

GERMANY'S INVASION PLANS.

On getting into touch with these gentry, I was informed of one of the intended plans by which the Germans proposed to invade our country, and incidentally it throws some light on their present methods of dealing with the inhabitants as apart from the actual tactical movements of the troops.

The German idea then--some six years ago--was that they could, by means of mines and submarines, at any time block the traffic in the British Channel in the space of a few hours, thus holding our home fleets in their stations at Spithead and Portland.

With the Straits of Dover so blocked, they could then rush a fleet of transports across the North Sea from Germany, to the East Coast of England, either East Anglia or, as in this plan, in Yorkshire. They had in Germany nine embarking stations, with piers and platforms, all ready made, and steel lighters for disembarkation purposes or for actual traversing of the ocean in case of fine weather.

They had taken the average of the weather for years past, and had come to the conclusion that July 13th is, on an average, the finest day in the year; but their attempt would be timed, if possible, to fall on a Bank Holiday when communications were temporarily disorganised. Therefore the nearest Bank Holiday to July 13th would probably be that at the beginning of August; it was a coincidence that the present war broke out on that day.

The spies stationed in England were to cut all telephone and telegraph wires, and, where possible, to blow down important bridges and tunnels, and thus to interrupt communications and create confusion.

Their idea of landing on the coast of Yorkshire was based on the following reasons:--

They do not look upon London as strategically the capital of England, but rather upon the great industrial centres of the north Midlands, where, instead of six millions, there are more like fourteen millions of people assembled in the numerous cities and towns, which now almost adjoin each other across that part of the country.

Their theory was that if they could rush an army of even 90,000 men into Leeds, Sheffield, Halifax, Manchester, and Liverpool without encountering great opposition in the first few hours, they could there establish themselves in such strength that it would require a powerful army to drive them out again.

Bringing a week's provisions with them, and seizing all the local provisions, they would have enough to sustain them for a considerable time, and the first step of their occupation would be to expel every inhabitant--man, woman, and child--from the neighbourhood and destroy the towns. Thus, within a few hours, some fourteen millions of people would be starving, and wandering without shelter over the face of the country--a disaster which would need a large force to deal with, and would cause entire disruption of our food supplies and of business in the country.

The East Coast of Yorkshire between the Humber and Scarborough lends itself to such an adventure, by providing a good open beach for miles, with open country in front of it, which, in its turn, is protected by a semi-circle of wolds, which could be easily held by the German covering force. Its left would be protected by the Humber and the right by the Tees, so that the landing could be carried out without interruption.

That was their plan--based on careful investigation by a small army of spies--some five or six years ago, before our naval bases had been established in the north. If they had declared war then, they, might have had no serious interference from our Navy during the passage of their transports, which, of course, would be protected on that flank by their entire fleet of warships.

At first glance, it seems too fanciful a plan to commend itself to belief, but in talking it over with German officers, I found they fully believed in it as a practical proposition. They themselves enlarged on the idea of the use that they would thus make of the civil population, and foreshadowed their present brutality by explaining that when war came, it would not be made with kid gloves. The meaning of their commands would be brought home to the people by shooting down civilians if necessary, in order to prove that they were in earnest, and to force the inhabitants through terror to comply with their requirements.

Further investigations on the subject proved that the embarkation arrangements were all planned and prepared for. At any time in the ordinary way of commerce there were numerous large mail steamers always available in their ports to transport numbers even largely in excess of those that would be assembled for such an expedition. Troops could be mobilised in the neighbourhood of the ports, ostensibly for manoeuvres, without suspicion being aroused.

It is laid down in German strategical textbooks that the time for making war is not when you have a political cause for it, but when your troops are ready and the enemy is unready; and that to strike the first blow is the best way to declare war.

I recounted all this at the time in a private lecture to officers, illustrated with lantern slides and maps, as a military problem which would be interesting to work out on the actual ground, and it was not really until the report of this leaked into the papers that I realised how nearly I had "touched the spot." For, apart from the various indignant questions with which the Secretary of State for War was badgered in the House of Commons on my account, I was assailed with letters from Germany of most violent abuse from various quarters, high and low, which showed me that I had gone nearer the truth than I had even suspected.

"You are but a brown-paper general," said one, "and if you think that by your foolish talk you are to frighten us from coming, you are not right."

FIELD SPIES.

It is difficult to say where exactly a spy's work ends in war, and that of a scout begins, except that, as a rule, the first is carried out in disguise.

The scout is looked up to as a brave man, and his expedients for gaining information are thought wonderfully clever, so long as he remains in uniform. If he goes a bit further, and finds that he can get his information better by adopting a disguise--even at the greater risk to himself through the certainty of being shot if he is found out--then he is looked down upon as a "despicable spy." I don't see the justice of it myself.

In our Army we do not make a very wide use of field spies on service, though their partial use at manoeuvres has shown what they can do.

In "Aids to Scouting" I have stated: "In the matter of spying we are behind other nations. Spying, in reality, is reconnaissance in disguise. Its effects are so far-reaching that most nations, in order to deter enemies' spies, threaten them with death if caught."

As an essential part of scouting, I gave a chapter of hints on how to spy, and how to catch other people spying.

CATCHING A SPY.

Spy-catching was once one of my duties, and is perhaps the best form of education towards successful spying. I had been lucky enough to nail three and was complimented by one of the senior officers on the Commander-in-Chief's staff. We were riding home together from a big review at the time that he was talking about it, and he remarked, "How do you set about catching a spy?" I told him of our methods and added that also luck very often came in and helped one.

Just in front of us, in the crowd of vehicles returning from the review-ground, was an open hired Victoria in which sat a foreign-looking gentleman. I remarked that as an instance this was the sort of man I should keep an eye upon, and I should quietly follow him till I found where he lodged and then put a detective on to report his moves.

From our position on horseback close behind him we were able to see that our foreigner was reading a guide book and was studying a map of the fortifications through which we were passing. Suddenly he called to the driver to stop for a moment while he lit a match for his cigarette. The driver pulled up, and so did we. The stranger glanced up to see that the man was not looking round, and then quickly slipped a camera from under the rug which was lying on the seat in front of him, and taking aim at the entrance shaft of a new ammunition store which had just been made for our Navy, he took a snapshot.

Then hurriedly covering up the camera again he proceeded to strike matches and to light his cigarette. Then he gave the word to drive on again.

We followed close behind till we came to where a policeman was regulating the traffic. I rode ahead and gave him his instructions so that the carriage was stopped, and the man was asked to show his permit to take photographs. He had none. The camera was taken into custody and the name and address of the owner taken "with a view to further proceedings."

Unfortunately at that time--it was many years ago--we were badly handicapped by our laws in the matter of arresting and punishing spies. By-laws allowed us to confiscate and smash unauthorised cameras, and that was all.

"Further proceedings," had they been possible, in this case would have been unnecessary, for the suspected gentleman took himself off to the Continent by the very next boat.

But it took a good deal to persuade my staff-officer friend that the whole episode was not one faked up for his special edification.

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