The selection of the higher class of spy, in these days, is very largely
a matter of chance. Almost in every case the man selected must be
bi-lingual, while, if he has three languages at his command, so much the
better for him--and for his employers. In purely military espionage,
that which concerns plans of fortifications, estimates of strength and
movements, topographical surveying, ascertaining the character of
officers, and the possibility of influencing them either by bribery or
blackmail, and general secret-service work likely to be of service to
the Great German General Staff, capable and clever men must be selected.
The "German waiter" of melodramatic fancy has little part in this class
of work; for one thing, a waiter has to perform stated work at stated
times, and he is liable to suspicion being cast on him if he is a man of
irregular habits or is in any way unable to account naturally for his
spare time. The clerk in an office is subject to the same disabilities,
and as a whole it may be said that the clerk and waiter class, if they
are engaged in espionage at all, are the small fry of minor
supernumeraries, agents acting on behalf of the spies who pay them,
instead of spies in the direct employ of the German Government. They
are not given such work as would involve their possessing enough
knowledge to make them dangerous in themselves, and are not the class
whose work need cause uneasiness. The real spy needs all his time and
all his freedom of movement, and he is placed in such a position that he
has these to the full.
His training is a hard schooling of months. To be efficient for his
work, he must be a qualified surveyor, able to make plans of areas of
ground from observation and often without instruments; he must, at the
same time, be a capable photographer, for obvious reasons. He must be
able to judge distances under all conditions of weather and light--as an
instance of this may be mentioned the fully authenticated case of the
spy who was set to study the Forth Bridge, and who was expected to
supply his Government with full details of the bridge, of how men could
be placed with a view to its instant destruction at a given signal, of
the geological nature of the land into which the foundations of the
bridge were built, and of the quantities of explosive required to reduce
the structure. The man selected to obtain this information had to
accomplish his task without arousing suspicion; he had to judge his
distances solely by pacing, observing angles, and subsequent
triangulation, and in this respect his work was perfectly accurate, for
he judged the distances to a matter of yards and heights to the foot.
Though these coincided with information at the disposal of any member of
the public, apparently the Great German General Staff placed no faith in
published information, or at least wanted it confirmed.
Further, the military spy must know units of the British Army at sight,
and must have at hand if not actually in his mind the code-word by which
each unit is tabulated at Berlin. He must know the code-words, also,
for various patterns of gun, must be conversant with classes of
explosive and patterns of shell, and must be able, if luck and his own
ingenuity should favour him, to carry in his mind sufficient of the
nature and plan of a fortification to be able to draw a map of the work
to scale, as nearly as possible, from memory.
In all purely technical details of his work the military spy is trained
in matters military before he sets out on the smallest piece of work,
and he passes examinations just as a member of the military service
would, except that his examinations are stiffer than those of the
officer, and he is required to know all where the officer is only asked
to acquire a part. For, in technical matters, the military spy must
never be at a loss; he must be able to place guns and men, works and
engineering details, with accuracy, since misinformation is worse than
none.
In the actual method employed in obtaining information much is left to
the judgment of the spy. It is a platitude that no two battles are ever
identical in character, and thus the plans of military commanders must
vary with the line of country, the strength of the forces engaged, and
many other points: in the same way the spies who pave the way for
Germany's soldiers are never confronted by the same conditions twice,
and they must adapt their methods to fit the circumstances of each case.
In this, the more delicate and difficult part of their work, no amount
of training can avail them, but all depends on their natural ability to
make use of men and circumstances, a quality which is more to be classed
as work than as training, since it is either part of the composition of
a man, or is definitely lacking and not to be imparted by any training.
Naval spying is practically analogous with military work in character,
except that all the training must be devoted to familiarity with the
details of naval work and construction--in the matter of coast
fortifications, the work of naval and military spies overlaps to a
certain extent. But, in addition to coast defence works and dockyards,
which call for the activities of both naval and military spies, there
are the details of every class of battleship to be learned. Topography
is the first point, common to both branches, and trigonometry is an
accessory to this, practically. But naval construction and drawing are
peculiar to the naval spy, who is handed on to the care of an expert
officer of the German Naval Intelligence Department, as a rule, and so
familiarised with the details of various classes of torpedoes, mines,
submarines, and guns, that he is able to recognise any one of these
things at a glance, and tell the particular class and power which it
represents.
Further, the naval spy is made acquainted with the build and outline of
every class of naval vessel in the world. He is first schooled in the
details of the various battleships, cruisers, and smaller craft
belonging to the Great Powers, and, later, is taught to recognise these
vessels by silhouettes, from which he gains sufficient knowledge to
recognise any ship either by day or night--assuming that the night is of
such a character that the ship is at all visible. He studies uniforms
and insignia of rank, signals and codes, and at the end of his training
is a fully qualified naval officer so far as the theory of naval matters
goes. In the yards of Wilhelmshaven and Kiel is opportunity of putting
his knowledge to the test, and he has to satisfy his examiners on all
the points on which he has been coached.
With regard to diplomatic espionage, the coaching bestowed on the two
branches already mentioned is not undertaken, for the diplomatic spy--in
the narrower sense of the phrase, since all spies must be extremely
diplomatic--is chosen, as a rule, from among the ranks of naval and
military spies. In order to undertake diplomatic missions, and
supplement the work of the German embassies in the various European
centres, a spy must be a very good man indeed, as far as his work is
concerned. He must be as was Stieber, absolutely ruthless and without
scruple; he must be a good linguist, a man of good presence and address,
and a tactful man as well. The corps of diplomatic spies is a small
one, for this work is the best paid of all, the most delicate and
intimate of all, and it is not a class of work of which there could ever
be enough for a large staff, even in the state of European politics that
existed at the outbreak of this last German war, since the diplomats of
Germany are themselves sufficient, as a rule, for all needs of this
kind. The diplomatic spy is called in for services which a diplomat is
unable to undertake, and also as a check on the work of diplomats--he
is, as it were, a member of a system which assures the efficiency of the
diplomatic system.
His training lies in the commissions entrusted to him in military and
naval capacities: by super-excellence in the performance of his duties
in these departments, he shows himself sufficiently able and efficient
to warrant his being trusted with less obvious and more confidential
tasks. He works, as do all the members of the German spy system,
independently of all other workers for the good of the State. For in
every case the spy works alone, lest in compassing his own downfall he
should bring about that of others as well. This was a principle
inaugurated by Stieber, who believed in trusting no man more than was
absolutely unavoidable.
It must not be thought, from these few details of the training given to
the official spies of the German system, that every member of the
espionage corps is thus trained. Training such as is detailed here is
only for the chief spies, the picked men who accomplish great things;
few men could come out satisfactorily from the examinations set to these
military and naval spies--few men, that is, of the class from which
spies are recruited. The spies at "fixed posts," for instance, get very
little training, since their duties do not involve nearly as much
technical work as do those of the travelling members of the fraternity.
Since much of the total of about 780,000 pounds per annum known to be
distributed among the members of the German secret service (in addition
to the probably larger sum of which no records are available) goes to
the occupants of these fixed posts, it is obvious that the highly
trained spy is in the minority. The highly trained spy, however, forms
the nucleus and head of the system--he is a superior officer to the
fixed post man or German tutor in a foreign family.
The military and naval branches of the service are controlled by the
Great German General Staff, while the diplomatic branch is controlled
direct by the German Foreign Office, and, although recruited from among
the military and naval branches, is independent of General Staff
control.
These divisions of the system must be taken as only approximate, for
they interlink and work in and out each other to such an extent that no
definite line can be drawn between them as regards actual work. They
are all extensions of the plans that Stieber planned, and in all that
pertains to the work of German espionage his hand is evident, his work
persists, more than twenty years after his death.
Here a word on the influence of Prussian militarism may well be spoken,
for the influence of that cast-iron administration is evident even in
the organisation of the secret service of Germany. It is now twenty-two
years since Stieber passed out from the system, but so unimaginative is
the militarist rule of German statecraft that Stieber's ways have not
been improved on. They have been altered in minor details, but the plan
has been retained, and, though it may be urged that since Stieber's
system was the most perfect known there was no need to change it, yet
the passing of years has revealed many of the details of that system,
and it would have been better for Germany if the espionage system had
been more flexible, more experimental. Though the very inner workings
of Stieber's system are secrets from ordinary people to this day, they
are no secrets from other Governments; the German methods have been
copied and improved on by more than one Government, and in some things
Germany, which had the only perfect system of espionage in 1870, is
actually behind the rest of the world now. For craft has been met with
craft, and while the protective measures of other nations have advanced,
Germany has stood still.
With regard to matters military, Beyerling emphasises this fully in his
book, "Jena or Sedan?" but, of course, no emphasis has been possible in
the case of the spy system. Yet evidence is afforded in the trial of
Karl Gustav Ernst at Bow Street, to which further reference will be made
later, and in many other cases which prove that German spies are known
and their methods known to the Governments of other countries, where
ample protective measures have been taken. The character of the spy
himself is such that changes in the system which controls him are
necessary--constant changes--but the mould in which the German mind is
shaped is such that this fact has never been sufficiently appreciated,
even by the Great German General Staff. The German spy system is still
a dangerous organisation, but there are others equally well planned and
equally efficient. Had there been another Stieber to take control,
Germany might still have had the only perfect system of espionage; but
such genius as he displayed only comes once to a people in a century,
and a second Stieber has yet to be found in Germany to make its secret
service as efficient as in the days when Stieber maintained control.