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