Chapter Two
Milieu

Spy fiction between the wars was never as good as fact. No one wrote stories that match the ones in the archives. Looking back from the late twentieth century, one is startled at how authentic the stereotypes are. In mood, setting, action, and stock characters, the period need concede nothing to the spy novels and spy movies. For rendezvous in the 1920s Soviet intelligence agents met at the Closerie des Lilas in Paris, German agents at the Café Gambrinus in Barcelona. There was a Café Central in Tangier where spies and gunrunners gathered and a Hotel Morandi in Cairo frequented by men suspected of working for Italian intelligence. Shortly before the Rif war a German fluent in French, Spanish, and Arabic traveled from Larache to Rabat disguised as a Jew. He called himself Chemnaoun Benzakour, but he also carried on his person a passport made out to Manuel Barrero. At Rabat he visited a Swiss who resided in the city, then he moved on to Casablanca. The man for whom he traveled was Langenheim, a German engineer who had come to North Africa in 1907, was listed in the twenties as "one of the most important German agents in Morocco," and in 1940 was identified as a central figure in a comprehensive German program of espionage, propaganda, insurrection, gunrunning, and sabotage. Langenheim's description in French counterespionage files might have come out of a dime novel: "Settled long ago in Morocco, obliged by his mining explorations to wander on foot throughout the territory, living the life of a native, he knows every stone, every person, every caïd. . . . In native matters it seems that he controls the agents, ensures

suspect transports toward the French frontier, sustains liaisons with nationalist Moroccan chiefs." At El Ksar there was another German agent named Heinrich R. who had converted to Islam and taken the name Abdallah, although others knew him as Moumen el Islami and El Alemani. He traded in skins, but he was also an intriguer.^[1]

We have created images of this interwar shadow world that are not belied by the facts. Espionage in the twenties and thirties was about spy rings, kidnappings, hijackings, and murders. Its milieu was inhabited by a host of dubious figures who were sucked into intrigues or who swooped down like great filthy carrion eaters when the pickings were ripe. Victims commingled with double agents, informants, gangsters, and professional spies. The aura was that of great battles to be won, of tense, pressing, high stakes affairs. Underneath lay brutality, deceit, and an exceptionally high quotient of slime. But beyond the atmosphere were other dimensions, steeped in historical meaning as well as in ambiance and remindful of how the description of a milieu forces one to think about a particular period in time.

Organization is a place to begin. Espionage in the interwar years was considerably more organized, more elaborate, and more methodically professional than it had been before 1914. Intelligence services had laboratories, they equipped their agents with technologically sophisticated instruments, and they developed international, even worldwide, circuits. The Soviets recalled agents to Moscow for instruction, the French broadened their networks and systematized operations. Organization characterized ways of proceeding, but also ways of perceiving. French counterespionage identified Berlin and Vienna centers, described central pan-Islamic committees pulling strings all over the globe. There were always exceptions. British intelligence could be remarkably dilettantish (although less so than it had been before the war).^[2] Proliferation of agencies led to jurisdictional disputes and inefficiencies within national intelligence communities. There remained plenty of amateurs on the loose, and the gaffes were so frequent and occasionally so extravagant that it is possible to write endlessly about the preposterous side to espionage in these years. Still the flow was toward more refined method and professionalism, and the description holds when compared with the past.

The question is why this change came about. One is tempted to turn back to the wartime experience, where method and technological inventiveness became matters of necessity so that the postwar apparatus, even when pared back, was substantially more elaborate and geared for re-

finement than it had been before the First World War. The war also tightened the world, spread intrigues and counterintelligence across oceans and continents, and this change too demanded more system and control. Such explanations provide credible answers, as would a focus on the rise of new political systems after the war and the creation of international organs like the Comintern that built sophisticated circuits and support networks and forced more sophisticated countermeasures in return.

Yet the history of intrigue also reveals affairs like the case of the Eisenberg-Shilmayer gang. Its members ran a traffic in false passports in the thirties that preyed upon foreigners, especially refugee Jews, desperate for papers. Police called them "a veritable enterprise" and "an international organization," and when the cops cracked the ring, along with two others that may or not have been related, they netted altogether thirty-one people. About a year later the Sûreté broke another gang that extended from Poland to France with ring members active in Belgium and Germany.^[3]

Thus all sides to intrigue after the war, even those on the margins and independent of political infrastructures, exhibited a certain measure of organization. Cases like the Eisenberg-Shilmayer affair point to the wider rule of system and method throughout the interwar years of which trends in espionage were only one sampling. Again the same factors—war, technology, revolutionary politics and their combinations—were often at play. In addition there was a sheer, irresistible surrender to organization propelled by the war that spread to all forms of activity. Fordism or government planning were, of course, its most obvious representations. Even in France, where neither was particularly strong, the state, no matter how reluctant, could be a powerful force in the economy, extending its reach to railroads, steamship lines, oil, and eventually the aircraft industry. Business performance, if generally disappointing, witnessed a marked increase in mergers in the 1920s and greater methodization—revision of procedures, introduction of advisory boards, more flexible control structures—in the 1930s. Department stores, for instance, that had rationalized operations before the First World War now self-consciously discussed organization and brought in efficiency experts. Mass production, standardization, and the creation of extensive marketing networks—business techniques pioneered in the nineteenth century—spread to popular culture in the twentieth, particularly through the medium of American cinema. The advent of new, national forms of entertainment, combined with the radical politics of the Left

and the Right, led to more orchestration and control of leisure than ever before.

No realm, in fact, seemed exempt from the relentless compulsion to methodize. In France before the war immigration had been largely spontaneous. During and after the war it was characterized by government regulation and organized business recruitment with agencies or representatives operating abroad. The paperwork and preparation preceding the Croisière jaune expedition across central Asia in 1931-1932 predated the caravan by several years, filled files in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and required advance trips to reconnoiter and set up supply depots. Crime, too, displayed all the signs. Drug traffickers built organizations on an international, even global, scale. A man like Elie Eliopolus got his start as a supplier to the Greek army during the war. By the end of the twenties he had moved into narcotics with his own network of suppliers, couriers, laboratories, and factories. Another trafficker, Louis-Théodore Lyon, reportedly controlled morphine laboratories in Istanbul and Sofia, several heroin labs in France, and a band of intermediaries tying one phase of operations to another. In this respect Eisenberg and Shilmayer, who recall to a degree earlier white slaving traditions, were on a wider level merely symptomatic of the patterns of their day. The world was becoming a tightly knit, highly managed place in which to live, and if business and revolutionary governments led the way, nearly everyone and everything fell into line. So the size and system of espionage after the war not only marked it off from earlier forms. More completely they set spying within the structures and inclinations of the age.^[4]

Opportunities for intrigue grew after the war, flourishing in the twenties and thirties with a lushness that prewar espionage had not enjoyed. Interwar intrigues were protean, multidimensional. They occurred everywhere, poured into interstices, flowed in a steady stream as espionage wound beyond the traditional objectives of military intelligence. The postwar presence of communists and fascists introduced an intensity and multifariousness to espionage that was greatly responsible for this luxuriating character and that made spying quite different from what it had been before 1914. Because the war opened the way to revolution and fascism, and because it left behind a fragile international balance, the levels of intrigue experienced in wartime did not diminish significantly after 1918.

Still other reasons for this pervasiveness reached deeper into the legacies of the war in ways that certain personal histories reveal. Richard Sorge, perhaps the most celebrated spy of the thirties and forties, was

to remark that "the World War of 1914-1918 had the most profound influence on my entire life. Even if I had never been motivated by other considerations, the World War alone would have been enough to make me a Communist. I was eighteen-and-a-half years old when the war broke out, a high school student living in the Lichterfelde district of Berlin." The son of a wall-to-do petroleum engineer, he was an eager volunteer in the summer of 1914. Four years of war, three wounds, disheartening leaves home, and encounters with socialists changed his outlook forever. Invalided out of the war by 1918 he turned toward radical politics while pursuing a doctorate in political science. By 1920 he had deeply immersed himself in Communist party activities in Hamburg. Eventually he was to serve in Comintern and Red Army intelligence, first in Europe, then in Shanghai, and then in Tokyo where he ran a spy ring that was fabulously successful. A complex man of storied proportions—he was a scholar, womanizer, boozer, and mesmerizing raconteur, a secret agent operating in Japan as a Nazi party member and the foreign correspondent of the Frankfurter Zeitung , using his cover to gain access to the inner sanctums of the German embassy to the point that he occasionally served as its courier of secret messages abroad—he nevertheless remained a committed Communist. If his life merged with the intrigues of the twentieth century it was a life that had been shaped by the war, caught up in its powerful, transforming whorl. The war, as he acknowledged, metamorphosed him into a conscious agent for change, and the war as well created both the movement and the conspiratorial apparatus through which the new Sorge could carry out these desires. In this he was not unlike the other idealists who flocked to communism following the war, equally committed to changing the world and providing the revolution with its army of activists. Some would become organizers, some would drop out, and others—the Richard Sorges, the Walter Krivitskys, and the Ignace Reisses—would pass from political work to the more clandestine networks of spies. Communist intrigue was their medium, but they were its motor, and it was the trajectory of their lives that in good part contributed to making espionage what it was between the wars.^[5]

Different lives on less lofty planes shared as well in the making of that history. The case of Captain Gardiner is instructive here because it shows how easy was the slide from adventure or fortune hunting into international intrigue in the entre-deux-guerres . Charles Alfred Percy Gardiner was a British seaman and salvager before the war. Perhaps he also commanded a ship in the Chilean revolution, laid mines in the wa-

ters of Port Arthur, and led a unit of Australian Bushmen in the Boer War, as he claimed during his trial for fraud in 1925 (charges on which he was eventually acquitted). In the Great War—and this comes from more credible witnesses—he was called up as a salvage expert and then commissioned by the navy to captain a Q-boat, the deadly submarine hunters camouflaged as tramp steamers that were yet another side to the covert war of demolition and sabotage carried out by special units under civilian cover. By 1918, if not earlier, he had thus stepped across into the realms of the shadow dwellers, although how far so at first is not altogether certain. From reports of his trial it would seem he followed his high sea deceptions with a foray into the shipbuilding business, wooing backers, they would claim, with fraudulent promises. By 1921 the company was out of business, and in 1923, ordered to appear before bankruptcy court, Gardiner skipped the country, returning only in spring of 1925 when he was arrested and brought up on charges.^[6]

Yet a French police report emanating from a source who in the past had proven worthy of attention tells a far more interesting story. Gardiner, the source claimed, had shifted gears only slightly after the war, falling in with a Glasgow bootlegger to North America. By 1923 the Glasgow patron had joined a British syndicate holding the rights to Mannesmann mining concessions in the Rif. The concessions were potentially valuable, but, spread across the Spanish Moroccan mountains, they lay within a region engulfed in a war of rebellion. The plan of the syndicate was to ship arms to the rebels, a strategy they believed would win rebel friendship and guarantee their mastery over the area. What the syndicate needed was a man to smuggle the weapons through, someone daring, resourceful, and experienced in covert operations; and for this they turned to Captain Gardiner. Gardiner, in turn, took as his accomplices men like himself, adventurers and former officers in the war with postwar experience in illicit activities. Mostly he recruited among gun-runners to Ireland (it is possible that Gardiner too had been engaged in this contraband), and he utilized the same sources and organization as this traffic had employed, diverting guns and ammunition from war surplus depots in northern France with the collusion of insiders in the firm charged with liquidating the stocks. In 1925 the scheme ran aground as one of Gardiner's confederates, operating on his own and in alliance with German secret agents, encouraged Abd-el-Krim to attack French forces in northern Morocco, a move that initiated war with the French and doomed the rebellion to failure. On this score the French police informant was almost certainly wrong. Still Gardiner was clearly mixed

up in the Rif in some way or another. That he, the syndicate, and clandestine German emissaries should cohabit the same French police report was indicative of how easily adventure and rapacious enterprises shaded into murkier affairs in the twenties and thirties.^[7]

Europe ran over with Captain Gardiners after the war. Adventurers and mercenaries there had always been, but wartime buccaneers cut loose by the peace now made such types a dime a dozen. Lured on by easy opportunities like gunrunning to Morocco and China and then to Spain, they drifted in and out of espionage affairs. The Gardiner case had all the ingredients—former Q-boat commander, ex-army officers, war surplus weapons, peripheral war caught up in great power politics, the mix of easy money with spies, adventure turned counterespionage matter—that made the world ripe for intrigue following the armistice.^[8] Postwar intrigues were largely a product of this availability of personnel joined to this excess of occasions, this abundance of Gardiners and syndicates and adventures swept up in the great swings of history.

Subsequent soldiers of fortune would follow a similar glide path from adventure to espionage, passing through the great international affairs of the moment. H. D. provides yet another good example. Born too late to have fought in the war, he made a certain reputation for himself in the postwar years as a pilot and stunt flier. He flew reconnaissance and bombing missions for the negus against the Italians and then fought as a fighter pilot in Spain on the side of the Second Republic. Idealism may have inspired him initially, but he was later to remark that both wars had remunerated him handsomely. By the late thirties he was headed east, steering toward the fog of less honorable adventures. In Asia he offered his services to the Chinese air force but received no bids in return. He then—on the rebound? victim to the viperous spells of Shanghai?—fell in with an American named Wagner who ran something called the American Asiatic Trading Company and was suspected by police of working for Japanese intelligence. In 1938 Wagner and H. D. were embarked on highly suspicious travels concerning Chinese air bases and the location of Chinese military aircraft and by spring of that year the Shanghai municipal police were identifying H. D. as a Japanese agent. By the end of the decade the man was hopelessly mired in unsavory circles. With the coming of the Second World War he was living in Shanghai with a woman named Evelyn O., herself no slouch when it came to a past. Born of British parents, she married a partner in a firm associated with the Soviet enterprise Exporthleb and financed by Moscow as a conduit into Britain. After her husband's suicide in

1933 she traveled to Manila, where she met and married Paco O. He was listed as "a trusted employee of the Manila branch of Elizalde and Company," but undoubtedly that designation changed when his departure from the firm was followed by the disclosure that bonds worth forty thousand pesos could not be accounted for. A year after her liaison with H. D., she was keeping time with an Italian "commander." H. D., at the time he was living with O., was reportedly without funds and hatching plans to establish a male brothel for rich women on the avenue Joffre with the intention of blackmailing its clientele. In the summer of 1940 he broke into the hotel room of a German captain to steal some papers but was caught in the act (there is no indication who had hired him). Volunteering for the British army, he was, "needless to say"—the language is that of the police—turned away. Thus the personal journey of an adventurer and mercenary between one world war and another.^[9]

Like the Captain Gardiners of the world, here too was a type, the pilot soldier of fortune whose call to action and pursuit of lucre sucked him into the great events of the era and then into the intrigues spun off on their margins. After 1918 they were common enough figures. Toughs or glamour seekers, they inhabited an age when adventure was hinged to war and revolution, a volatile mix of inclination and circumstance that pitched them into the vortex of politics and the sinister, more dubious spheres where life stories unraveled with an all too recognizable fatalism. The pull of fliers toward espionage eluded not even the comic-strip writers who captured, ironically for H. D., the ineluctable connection in the tale of Captain Easy who engages as a spy for the Chinese air force.^[10]

Still other creatures of the times dogged the spy files, their life histories illustrating no less vividly how intrigue could swell and distend in our period. None of these were more prominent than the refugees of the century, and among them the White Russians who perhaps more than anyone lent intrigue its flourish after the war. Castoffs from the great cataclysm, they introduced yet another type, the adventurer through circumstance or misfortune rather than personal disposition. Take the émigré W., for example. Like Battiti he was one of those persons who surface momentarily in the archives and then slip completely from sight. Extravagant, he followed a life course repeated by hundreds or thousands. Before the Russian revolution he had been a prominent jurist. Following 1917 he was a refugee, arms broker, intriguer, and crook. As a seam artist he swindled investors with flashy connections and promises of quick money. His operations extended to gunrunning

and his acquaintances to White Russian revanchists; French agents on the trail of a vast shipment of Mausers tied him to secret arms depots in Germany, Chinese warlords, assorted notorious characters, and wild schemes for a counterrevolutionary march back into Russia.^[11] Like others he was thus the refugee-on-the-make, a man cut off from his past and set loose in a world awash with opportunity for those who cared only about the color of money. Berlin, Paris, Istanbul, Shanghai all knew their W.'s after the war. They were familiar figures in the landscape, some operating on a grand scale, others scraping by with any dirty business that might come their way, men and women with international connections, set off on the margins, global scramblers, and available.

If they descended so effortlessly into intrigue it was because their milieu was riddled with secret agents, spies, and private espionage organizations. Much of the spice to interwar intrigue came from these White Russians and their endless (almost always futile) battles in a clandestine war with Soviet security forces. Again circumstances, in the shape of the political collisions of their day, molded their lives, although here too they remained simply a type. To their clandestine labyrinths one could add other intrigues, those, for example, of anti-fascist Italians in the 1920s or Balkan terrorists dissatisfied with postwar border arrangements and abetted by the revisionist powers of Hungary and Italy. Refugees and spies thus went hand in hand during the interwar years. In this there was a whiff of prewar intrigues among refugee circles, but not one that was particularly sharp. In the scope and organization of their groups and cabals, and their secret police nemesis, they far outdistanced those who had preceded them. Moreover refugee circles now were easily swept up, as they had not been before, in international politics and espionage. Indeed to a considerable extent it was the refugees and their politics that made interwar espionage different from what had come before.

The wealth of spies in these years thus leads back to the Sorges, the Gardiners, the H. D.'s, and the W.'s. The history of espionage between the two wars was in large measure their history, a story of people and groups who came out of the war and who gravitated toward intrigue as if this were now their natural habitat. For some it was force of circumstances, for others it was opportunity; but for all it was the consequence of a war and an afterwar that rearranged their lives and cast espionage into an inviting, familiar setting that drove them to conspire or spy. There was an almost inexorable process of fusion between wartime experiences, postwar milieus, and espionage. That made espionage and

intrigue not only a series of events or episodes but a medium through which certain characteristics of the interwar years came to be expressed. Availability of personnel was one side to this process. The intrusiveness of history was another. As in the cases of Gardiner, W., and the wider spectrum of émigré politics, crime and the fate of refugees point to what that too could represent.

It is not possible to write about espionage and intrigue without bringing in crime. Sensationalist spy stories and sensationalist crime stories took rums crowding each other off the front pages of the mass Paris dailies, as if the one were interchangeable with the other. Some people, like the authors of The Army of Crime, Cocaine, Espionage After the War , saw no difference at all between the milieus.^[12] Every intelligence service had its crooks and outer circles of rogues, villains, and sleazy characters. British intelligence worked with Belgian smugglers during the war and counted some dubious figures among a number of its agents.^[13] The Gestapo and Sicherheitsdienst (security service, or SD) employed confidence men, sometimes to their later chagrin.

No agency shied away from these kinds of characters, least of all the French secret service (or SR). At Riga in the late thirties and in early 1940 the SR was running a collection of pirates and reprobates as key agents in their Baltic operations. One of these was a man named Paschkowski, who recruited operatives for the French among German nationals returning from Estonia. Since 1937 Paschkowski had owned the Marelu restaurant on the Majorenstrasse in Riga, an establishment with an international clientele. Money to purchase the restaurant came from the wife of a former Russian cavalry officer, whom German counterespionage suspected of working for French and Latvian intelligence. In 1939 the officer was traced to a French casino in Cannes. Paschkowski's wife worked for a business firm in Riga from which she had embezzled money, although no formal complaint had been filed since the firm itself had been keeping false books. As German counterintelligence noted, "The Paschkowski family is not held in high repute in Riga." Among Paschkowski's contacts was Karl Kuschkewicz, who had been dismissed as Latvian consul in Danzig in 1924 for trafficking in false passports. From Danzig Kuschkewicz had traveled to Switzerland, where he offered his services simultaneously to French and German intelligence while Latvian officials demanded his extradition on charges of corruption and cocaine smuggling. Yet another Riga agent was an important Estonian figure known to be trafficking in weapons on the side.^[14]

There was also Alexander Wasmus-Swirles, alias Fred Swirles and En-

glish Fred, whose origins were obscure—either Scottish or German—and who had led a checkered past living off Tipstergeschaften and other shadowy activities. He had emigrated to France, probably to put greater distance between himself and the German police. He was recruited by the SR, traveled to Switzerland and Holland on his English passport (although reportedly he spoke almost no English), and seems to have had special contacts with German émigrés desperate for money and whose services he employed or whose information he bought. He also worked with Rudolph Stallmann, known to various people as Lemoine, von Konig, and Rex. Like Swirles, Stallmann was a man whose past was a mystery. He too had left Germany for Paris where he immersed himself in a number of enterprises best described by the French word louche . The SR protected him from the French police, and in return he placed his multiple talents at their disposal, supplying false or authentic passports from practically any country, committing burglaries, infiltrating microphones into hotel rooms, and traveling abroad on special missions. Among his contacts was a man named Bauer-Mengelberg who procured travel papers to Argentina and Paraguay for Jewish refugees (Bauer-Mengelberg was especially well connected with the Paraguay consul in Paris) and whom the Germans equally suspected of working for French intelligence. According to a German list of French spy bureaus compiled during the occupation, Stallmann was running nine different offices in Paris, the two principal ones appearing to have been located at 27 rue de Madrid and 5 rue de Lisbonne. He was arrested by the Germans in 1942 but saved his neck by feeding his captors information, including the names of French agents. After the liberation the SR looked after him a bit—in that strange mélange of honor and moral squalor that comes with the profession—but he died of illness while still under detention.^[15]

People like Stallmann or Kuschkewicz had their uses. Others, like W. or Gardiner, the police and professional spies could do without, but these kinds of schemers and confidence men kept cropping up with disturbing frequency in intelligence reports between the wars. Some were sharks out for a killing who found themselves inexorably entangled in espionage nets, and some were simply small fish hauled up with the others, because by the 1930s police either were coming to presume that spies and criminals might be the same thing or found that as they investigated the one they kept turning up the other. That is what happened to Alice L., whom the Prague police arrested in 1935 on charges of circulating counterfeit currency and stolen securities. Asked to investi-

gate from the French end, the Sûreté produced a thick dossier that tied L. to swindlers and also to men who may have been arms traffickers and spies; its conclusion was that nearly all of this gang of foreigners, L. included, were in some way or another agents of a foreign power.^[16]

Within the archives are many such tales, in which criminals and spies cohabited or were seen as the same. The stories are interesting in themselves, and they remind one of the difficulty in reading the fries when often the source of information was habitual tricksters; this is a problem that will be taken up shortly. The constant overlapping of milieus also suggests how intrusive international politics could be in the interwar years. This intrusiveness came from more than the familiar forced choices of the Popular Front era when people were obliged to declare their commitments. Rather it entailed the inescapability of the present after the war, a difficulty of detaching oneself from the events of the moment. One form of this was a present-mindedness that hung over the period and intruded endlessly upon people's consciousness. The literature of the twenties and thirties betrays an acute sense of living in a world shaped by the facts of the century: war, revolution, and global reordering. This present-mindedness could lead to alarmist thoughts about the next war or share the immediacy of Popular Front politics, but it did not have to be only that. There was always a looser, even amused or self-assured side to present-mindedness that future chapters will explore, for example, in storytelling or travel.

The present impinged on people's lives as well by catching them up in contemporary events and international politics. Adventure exhibited this feature between the wars; so too did intrigue. The fluidity of interwar intrigues, their protean, nearly ubiquitous quality was representative of the intrusive, inescapable character of the period. People crossed the line into intrigue almost unawares, fell into intrigues, or were swept up within them through sheer force of circumstances. Like availability, the opportunities that drove criminals to take advantage of international crises readily entangled them with spies and secret agents. Gunrunning was the most obvious example and Spain would be the consummate moment. Yet this kind of entanglement proceeded at a varying pace all through the period. It is not incongruous to come across an adventurer like Gardiner in counterespionage reports on the Rif war, but he might have wondered what he was doing there, or how his pursuit of fast money had embroiled him with (presumed) spies and foreign agents. Alice L. may have been a secret agent, but quite likely she too was simply an adventuress living on the shady side of the law

and suddenly caught in an affair of espionage that took her unawares. Intrigue kept spreading out after the war, drawing in more and more people. A crook like Israel Meyerowitz, who before the war ran white-slave traffic between Poland and Argentina and employed the services of smugglers to get his women across borders,^[17] operated nevertheless within a clearly defined milieu; such types in the twenties and thirties turned up as traffickers in false papers or guns and then found themselves rubbing shoulders with spies. Criminals, therefore, were the easiest catch. But Jewish refugees who sought nothing more than personal security also found themselves sucked into intrigues either because they had nothing else to offer as collateral or because the scramble for passports and visas ensnared them in a sleazy milieu operating on the edges of espionage, or at times deep within it. This is why one cannot write the history of interwar espionage simply as the story of intelligence services. Too many other people found their lives intertwined with spies or spooks. The intersections or crossovers came easily in an era of blurred distinctions between private life and the great events of one's times.

The multidimensionality and pervasiveness of espionage, then, derived largely from the availability of people and the intrusiveness of events in the years after the war. It was also a consequence of flux. There was a certain kaleidoscopic character to interwar intrigues. Combinations were always forming, then changing. Associations tended to run together, producing ultimately an effect of confusion and impermanence. Ustasha terrorists, for example, could be identified with Rome and Berlin, the kidnappers of White Russian generals with Moscow and Germany. White Russian intrigues had feeder lines into practically all camps. At the beginning of the twenties converging tracks led back to Bolsheviks, Germans, and pan-Islamists, at the end of the thirties to Bolsheviks and Nazis. The convergence of intrigues and their shifting quality echoed in the number of double agents who appear in the files. Spies and intriguers shifted quarters as if they were playing musical chairs. Betrayals and sellouts approached epidemic proportions. Nothing was immutable.

In this too espionage shared in the character of its times. Like espionage and intrigue, the interwar years tended toward flux and unsettlement. Their mutability and confusion showed up in French writing about the Soviet Union or the Pacific; the urge to travel and report; the traveling personality of literary characters who drifted, lacked moorings, were always on the move; the fascination with movement in the air or in automobile caravans; as well as the shifting political combina-

tions and the unsettlement of international conditions. These were difficult years to sort out, when the sense of movement was so palpable but when final destinations or outcomes were not at all clear. The very open-endedness of the period contributed to the flourishing of espionage. Flux generated intrigues, a side to the twenties and thirties that secret-war imagery captured so well in its vision of prolonged, unsettled battles fought out in the shadows by clandestine means. And flux shaped intrigues, made their confusions a repetition of wider circumstances. From its era espionage took its combinations and its multiple possibilities. If there were so few fixed points to interwar espionage it was because there were scarcely any at all in the interwar world.

Rarely did espionage cast off this odor of the age. There were the conventional, nearly timeless moments, for instance, the pursuit and arrests of German agents in the military regions of eastern France. Most of those caught were small fry with few credentials other than access to secrets and a willingness to sell these for cash, although occasionally the odd sensational affair erupted from these spy wars.^[18] Yet the real history of espionage between the two world wars seemed to lie elsewhere, in the toughness and violence of secret service marauders and in a global subversive reach that arose against a background of war and revolution and the brittleness of empire. Wherever secret agents trod in the twenties and the thirties they left behind the imprint of their century. Their double dealings, their abductions, their networks, and their terror carried with them the smell of politics, civil strife, and the behind-the-lines battles that came with realignments after the war. In that dank air one senses once again the ineffable quality of atmosphere that hung over the spies and intriguers and that sealed their connections with a set moment in time. Atmosphere, availability, intrusiveness, and flux were the defining characteristics of interwar espionage. From the conjunction of the four emerged its milieu.

But what, if anything, can we know for certain of that milieu? Consider, for example, the following case whose documentation can still be found in Archives nationales box 14754.^[19] An editor at the time of the Marseilles assassinations of the king of Yugoslavia and the French foreign minister meets a man in Brussels who claims to be an orchestra conductor and a secret agent for Belgian counterintelligence. The spy tells the editor that he has just returned from Cologne where he has learned that an "international mafia" in the pay of the Germans is preparing to knock

off the president of the Third French Republic, the commander-in-chief of the French army, and Benito Mussolini. Upon his return to Paris the editor repeats the conversation to a local official and a report works its way to a desk in the Sûreté and eventually into the dossiers of box 14754. The historian who comes across this paper will smile, perhaps shake his head, and then flip to the following pages in the stack. But the fact that the document has made its way there, preserved for posterity, is in itself troubling and raises the question of what to make of everything else in all those boxes on all those shelves that dérogations spring loose from the guardians of state secrets. "Truth" in the archives admittedly is at all times elusive, but the historian who sloshes into the files on espionage can wonder whether there is anything solid to grab hold of in those cartons. Before writing the history of espionage in this period, therefore, one does well to begin with the problem of the sources. A review of certain cases or reports will illustrate the bedevilment of these dossiers. It will also show that through the fog of indeterminacy and deceit a certain reality can emerge, and that judgments can be made that are not always a leap into the dark.

The sources are, frankly, perplexing—most clearly so in regard to credibility. Authorities themselves questioned or complained about the information that came in, an indication of how confounding these documents can be. For instance, in 1922 the minister of colonies received a report from the French representative in Riga that detailed the activities of communist agents in French Indochina. The minister forwarded the report to the governor general in Hanoi, but he prefaced it with a note of skepticism. The language of the report, the minister indicated, suggested that the original source was a Russian, probably an individual selling information for profit, and perhaps the man was exaggerating the facts "in order to magnify, simultaneously, the importance of the service rendered and that of the reward."^[20] In 1937 an inspector of the Police mobile expressed his exasperation with efforts to get to the bottom of terrorist attacks in the south of France. He said there was no question that the attacks were related to the civil war in Spain. The problem was determining who was responsible:

It is a tricky matter . . . to establish the origins of these bombs and the reasons why they were placed. Our information comes only from partisans, agitators, spies, and traffickers who abound throughout the Midi and who are mostly foreigners, more precisely, Italians, Spaniards, and Germans. The information is often vague, contradictory, or concocted because it is furnished by secret agents serving one or even several causes, themselves immersed in that whole atmo-

sphere, deceiving one another, and gathering intelligence that they accept without any control.^[21]

This milieu was always a problem for contemporaries, as it remains one for the historian today. Too many crooks or shady figures inhabited the spy world or hung about its fringes, furnishing tips for money or for protection or working directly for French counterintelligence. Their access to information was often indisputable, but their credibility was not. One wonders how many reports came from people like Kuschkewicz or Paschkowski or the White Russian Zavadskii-Krasnopol'skii who mucked around in sleazy affairs and whom Inspector Faux-Pas-Bidet used as an informant. These were easy targets for suspicion and control. Yet nearly all information carried with it a certain dubious quality. Everyone in this milieu deceived and dissembled, including the professionals whose efficiency or survival depended on their mastering the art of subterfuge. Le Carré was right to make his perfect spy a chameleon-like figure, a compulsive liar, and the son of a confidence man.^[22]

Thus even reports with a semblance of accuracy could be the product of prestidigitation or quackery. A case from the years right before the First World War suggests the complexity of the problem. In the early 1900s French intelligence stationed a man in Antwerp, Europe's principal port of arms shipments, to monitor arms smuggling to Morocco. Over the next several years this "correspondent in Antwerp" filed a steady stream of communiqués signaling contraband weapons concealed in crates labeled "locks," "candles," "matches," "cement," or simply "mixed cargo." The shippers, the correspondent argued, were Germans working with the complicity of their government and the captains of lines plying the waters between Europe and Africa. Antwerp, where customs inspections were lax, was the nodal point for charging the cargo.^[23]

The reports were short, detailed, and precise. They were also fabricated, according to another informant reporting to the Ministry of the Interior. No identity was given for the second correspondent. One suspects the sort of seasoned detective who would make the weary journey up the stairs in the 1930s, a gumshoe who knew the twenty kilometers of docks at Antwerp, drank coffee with customs officials, occasionally bought dinner for maritime agents, told them good stories, got along, offered last cigarettes, and had a good ear for distinguishing rumor from fact. His report on the matter, written in 1907, merits consideration in

detail for what it suggests about the correspondent in Antwerp's reporting techniques.

The report begins with a series of bulletins recently filed by the correspondent in Antwerp. In every instance the SR agent has got the facts wrong. According to the correspondent, the Woermann Line has suspended departures for Morocco because of "Moroccan difficulties (read: the presence of French ships)." But, the second informant reports, the Woermann Line has no regular service to Morocco (the service was in fact suspended four years earlier).^[24] The correspondent writes that the German freighter Ascania left Antwerp on the twelfth, having embarked eighteen crates of guns labeled as "locks." The second informant reports that the Ascania departed Antwerp on the tenth. Its cargo was phosphates and the customs men are certain of this. They saw no crate that looked as if it might contain rifles, not even under the denomination of "locks." Again the correspondent writes that the Mogodor of the OPDR loaded two boxes of matches that looked suspicious and that he forced one box open, discovering that the merchandise has been concealed within a second box of zinc sheets. His suspicions aroused, the correspondent gives the freighter's itinerary; the authorities should watch this boat. The second informant reports that matches are always packed in zinc boxes placed within a crate of wood. This protects them from humidity. "There is nothing in all this that would surprise the initiated." And so it goes. The second informant matter-of-factly corrects one error after another, like a man who realizes he is dealing with an idiot but must, for professional reasons, contain his temper.

Continuing, the detective acknowledges that Antwerp is the center of clandestine arms shipments. Nonetheless he doubts that the correspondent in Antwerp is capable of ferreting out the information he has been forwarding to Paris. Step by step the detective reviews the procedure of shipping illegal arms. The customs officials, he notes, are sharp and knowledgeable, but they are instructed not to intervene and limit themselves to verifying markings and numbers of boxes.^[25] Once a box has been sealed and labeled no one, not even maritime agents or douaniers , know or care what is inside. Consequently it is easy to get suspicious, to go to the quai, for example a quai where a ship is loading cargo for Morocco, to identify boxes that might contain arms, to write down their markings and their numbers, to check the ship's manifesto posted with the central customs office to identify what is officially within, and then to write reports where suspicions become facts, and where a veneer

of data passes for insider information. The detective is careful not to say outright that this is what the correspondent in Antwerp is doing. But he admits that such a method of operation is possible and that this correspondent seems better informed than the detective believes any one individual can be. Indeed this correspondent knows everything in Antwerp, except for the facts that he almost never gets straight. The detective ends with a demonstration of how easy it is to fabricate provocative information out of nothing substantial. "All that [ship itineraries] I have read in the Lloyd Anversois . You can see how easy it would be to embroider upon it. One has discovered this, one has learned that; one is going to check at Lillo, and so forth, and so forth."^[26]

The report is arresting, a virtuoso performance that points to how fraudulent and misleading these files can be. Its follow-up is equally disturbing. Despite the second informant's devastating critique the correspondent in Antwerp continued to forward his reports and the authorities continued to take these seriously, sending them on to various ministries and to appropriate officials in Morocco. Whether there were reasons to dismiss the second informant's reservations, or whether the correspondent was replaced by another, or whether there was a bias in favor of the correspondent's intelligence—these are questions without any answers. Reports in the Ministry of the Navy indicate that not a single bulletin from Antwerp ever led to confiscation of an arms shipment to Morocco—largely for lack of machinery to do anything about them—and that in 1910 the authorities gave thought to ending the SR position in that city.^[27] Still the reports continued, illustrating the difficulty of distinguishing fact from fantasy in the espionage files.

Little, then, is certain about the sources, and to the puzzles of professional sharpsters and confounders can be added the familiar problem of working in espionage files: the rumors and innuendoes passed on by suggestible agents; the agents predisposed to find evidence of foreign intrigue under certain villainous beds. Myriads of paper in the archives bear an official stamp yet simply do not ring true, or convey information counter to what other historians have found. Other kinds of reports fall into a middle ground, taxing credibility, but only to a point, and lying beyond the means to confirm. Reliability is at a premium in these files, and the problem is compounded by the fragmentariness or lack of resolution to a large part of the espionage record.

The Second World War has done more than its share to thin out the archives. Whole files and (worse) half files have completely disappeared, and the continued process of secrecy compounds the difficulties. The

result is a partial record that stymies the historian's ability to verify or to follow suspicions to their conclusion. War loss, however, only explains part of the problem. Lack of resolution was also a contemporary bugbear, so that the record that remains is often incomplete because authorities themselves frequently never got to the bottom of affairs. At times suspects were tipped off or were exceptionally cautious or reports had no substance in the first place. At other times investigations went nowhere because police ran into roadblocks.

For example, when police missions went abroad in 1934 to learn more about the Ustasha terrorists who had planned and executed the Marseilles assassinations and who had close ties to Hungary and Italy, they met with nothing but frustration. One Sûreté inspector, Charles Chennevier, traveled to Rome and to Janka Puszta (the Hungarian farm where the terrorists had trained) for naught. Italian and Hungarian authorities stalled him and threatened him, and a friend in the Italian police who had promised information sent word by a prostitute that he was leaving Rome immediately. This melodramatic tale, recounted in Chennevier's memoirs,^[28] is borne out by the reports of two other detectives dispatched abroad: Inspector Royre who went to Turin to question Ante Pavelic, the leader of the Ustashi, and Eugen Kvaternik, the coordinator for the assassination squad, who had been arrested; and Commissaire Barthelet who stopped in Budapest. Royère's stay in Turin was an exercise in futility. He was not permitted to see the two men and he was told that the address at which Pavelic had been living could not be divulged in order to protect his wife and two children from the vengeance of the Yugoslav government. Royère sat in the office of Questor Stracca and listened to lies, half-lies, and omissions so conspicuously incredible that if they had been true must have testified to the thorough incompetence of the Italian police. On Questor Stracca's desk sat a fat dossier from which a few pieces of information, "only what was difficult to refuse me," floated Royère's way. Stracca told the detective that Pavelic had arrived in Turin in October 1933 under the name of Giovanni Suicbenk, but that he had come to the attention of the Italian police only after the assassinations when officials drew up a list of all foreigners in the city. Once arrested, Stracca boasted, Pavelic had been submitted to a "searching interrogation," words Royère could not resist following with sic in his report. Royère's visit was reduced to a formality. He returned home having learned nothing substantially new.^[29]

Barthelet's experience in Hungary was similar. In Budapest he ran up against a stone wall of official silence and defiance. The director of the

political police, Hetenyi, told him that an independent investigation into the case was out of the question and that only if Barthelet accepted this condition would his stay in Budapest be "without difficulties," a scarcely veiled threat that Barthelet comprehended perfectly. The French detective had no difficulty identifying the two plainclothesmen who tailed him wherever he went. On the evening of 3 December Barthelet met briefly with Hetenyi. They fixed an interview for the following day when Hetenyi would provide an official response to questions concerning Hungarian connections with the Ustashi. Hetenyi failed to show up for the meeting. Barthelet ran into him as he was leaving the building, much to the Hungarian's embarrassment. Hetenyi said to come back at six in the evening of the fifth and then rushed away. The next day Barthelet gained entry to Hetenyi's office, but the Hungarian said he was absorbed with important affairs and could talk only for a moment. Barthelet, who by this time was coming to the end of his tether, made some remarks about the cavalier manner in which the Hungarian police were investigating the affair. Hetenyi handed over some papers in Hungarian and said others would follow right away. Eventually Hetenyi did give Barthelet a written response, but it merely skirted the issues. When Barthelet complained that the answers were insufficient, he received another runaround and another note that was no more satisfactory than the first. Like Royère, he returned to Paris with little to show for his efforts.^[30]

In different ways the frustrations that Royère and Barthelet met recurred time and again in the interwar years. The police were not without resources and sometimes cracked big cases, for example, the Switz-Stahl affair that led to the arrest of dozens of people. Other times their investigations turned up no incriminating evidence and petered out into an unsatisfactory conclusion of plausible suspicions and exasperating dead ends. One classic instance was the investigation of the kidnapping of General Kutepov in 1930. The police had every reason, and many indications, to suspect a Soviet secret police operation. But they never could prove their case and there were alternative interpretations as to just what had happened, so in the end they called off the hunt and acknowledged their inability to resolve the affair. The kidnapping of Kutepov's successor, General Miller, seven years later produced nearly identical suspicions and results.

Cases like these represent the archives' dominant side. The record on espionage and intrigue is pitted with doubts, false leads, and unresolved episodes. There is always the question of whether a report is believable

or whether authorities who identified suspects and circulated information were caught up in a self-created milieu of fantasy and paranoia.

Still, the historian who travels through this bog will find the occasional terra firma. For example, the authorities vetted reports and evaluated many sources, so that frequently one has some idea where officials stood with the raw material they received. There was no strict rating system, but indications that the informant was a beginner or "an absolutely sure source," or one of a number of designations in between, have left a charting of sorts for the sea of paper that washed across desks in the Sûreté or Deuxième Bureau and then on, after sorting, to ministries all over Paris.

Among the very best sources were agents who had penetrated foreign intelligence services or foreign agents who had gone over to the French or been turned by counterintelligence. One of these was a counterespionage official named Doudot who infiltrated the German Abwehr station in Münster so successfully that he could identify more than thirty German agents working in France. There was also a man named Gessmann who worked for the German intelligence post at Lindau. An Austrian national and an opponent of the Nazis, Gessmann offered his services to the Sûreté. Like Doudot, Gessmann signaled German agents working in France. The French watched him carefully and tested him; they were certain he was not a German plant.^[31]

Agents like Doudot and Gessmann were exceptions, but they represent what a good or reliable source could be and consequently the credibility of certain intelligence sent up the ladder. According to one intelligence officer from the thirties, the French possessed "a very thorough knowledge of the German secret services."^[32] Agents in the field often duplicated assignments to provide further control over incoming intelligence, and the SR's central bureaus carefully scrutinized raw data.^[33] Moreover the evaluation system was complemented by verification or follow-up reports by the police. The archives are filled with these. Many led nowhere, revealing once again the murkiness of information or a frustrating inability to uncover hard evidence. Yet these too attest to the controls the French placed on the intelligence they received and circulated. Nor did an inconclusive follow-up necessarily mean that suspicions were unfounded. In this respect the case of Samuel I. is useful.

In the fall of 1932 a baggage handler who worked the sleeping cars on the Paris-Bucharest express brought the following story to the police. He said that in June he had been approached by a man who he thought was a German. The man had told him that he represented American

companies with patent rights in Europe and that he would pay the baggage handler to carry their secret correspondence from Vienna to Paris. If the baggage handler agreed, a woman would board his train in Vienna, hand him the correspondence, and then leave the train at Linz. Once in Paris the baggage handler would go to a meeting place designated in advance and hand over the correspondence to a man carrying a copy of L'Auto magazine. The baggage handler agreed and on 19 October he met a man at the Temple métro station in Paris. They took a short walk and the baggage handler slipped him an envelope. The man was the same one who had approached the baggage handler in June. It was apparently at this point that the baggage handler went to the police.

The police identified the man as Samuel I., an Austrian, and they placed him under surveillance. At the time Samuel I. was living at a hotel on the rue de l'Exchiquier. Later he moved into a room on the avenue Mozart where he stayed, departing and then returning periodically, for at least another year. He played his business affairs dose to the vest, although he claimed to be a commercial representative selling typewriters. He received little mail and no visitors, and he came and went at regular hours. The police uncovered little more except that Samuel I. was in contact with a man named John T., a naturalized Nicaraguan of Russian origins. John T. ran a photojournalism agency called Globe Photo out of an office on the Champs-Elysées. The police placed this man too under surveillance and turned up nothing but suspicious details. They learned that John T. had come to Paris in 1930, presenting himself as an importer and a forwarding agent for foreign firms that he declined to identify. Then he had traded in cutlery and porcelain before turning to photojournalism. From its inception Globe Photo received considerable mail from abroad, particularly from Vienna and Berlin. Before moving to the Champs-Elysées, John T. had shifted his office to the premises of an Austrian national who sold calendars and calendar books made in Germany. The Austrian's shop was on the boulevard du Temple, and Globe Photo was still located there at the time that the baggage handler made his drop with Samuel I. in the vicinity. John T. frequented the German embassy, the race track, and gambling houses. His acquaintances included a trader in semiprecious stones and the director of a White Russian newspaper. Nothing about John T. seemed ordinary. Yet there were no clear connections to espionage and police could not determine the nature of his relationship with Samuel I. or discover anything incriminating about the initial target of surveillance. By early 1934 both Samuel I. and John T. had left Paris, and the investi-

gation was shelved. Then in December 1935 the Yugoslav police uncovered a Comintern operation in Belgrade, and in January they arrested more people. One of these was Samuel I., whom the Belgrade authorities held on charges of espionage. Under interrogation, Samuel I. admitted that he was a Communist agent and that he had first come to Paris in 1931 as a courier for Soviet intelligence. The Yugoslavs passed this information on to the French.^[34]

So suspicions were not always fabricated out of thin air, nor were the character-types that one might pack into the spy novels without real-life counterparts. The case of Samuel I. is illuminating because it shows how often the difference between confirmation or inconclusiveness in reporting was merely a lucky break. Some spies, particularly amateurs who had one particular piece of knowledge to sell and who were small fry in an enemy's operation, could be easy catches for the police. Others, professionals or people with expertise and connections, were slippery characters who slithered in and out of police files. Occasionally they aroused suspicions, set off an alarm, but then they were gone or were so smooth that police could never get a hold on them. Their only trace was the original unauthenticated warning, one of the hundreds or more that came in every year from cranks, meddlers, and suggestible informants as well as from agents with access to knowledge and the occasional poor slob who fell into something that, as the baggage handler did, he took to the authorities. The police learned that many of these were without substance, but they also learned that some accusations eventually proved true. They took their investigations seriously when there was some plausibility to the case, and the matter of Samuel I. suggests a reason for historians to do the same. Occasionally the police were right about the suspects they identified, even if their investigations went down blind alleys.

The question, of course, remains: how many of these cases were true, or, put otherwise, how many Samuel I.'s were there on the loose? The revelations of sensationalist spy affairs provide a few answers here. Some were breathtakingly outlandish, exposing how intrigue-ridden these decades could be. Other answers come from the German archives, although haltingly so because war damage and willful destruction have erased many of the interwar records. The German Foreign Ministry file on agents and espionage in Spain, 1920-1935, gives some indication of what the researcher will find in these papers. A large portion of this dossier concerns the lost baggage of a Frau von Popowitsch, who claimed to have worked once for German intelligence in the Iberian

peninsula during the First World War. Perhaps some history lies embedded in this affair—light directed momentarily on the daily life of bureaucracies or on the petty obsessions of one-night-stand agents. Espionage, however, cannot be counted among the tales it has to tell.^[35]

At their best, the German archives disclose how easy it was to pass on misleading material since the Germans themselves often had little control over their agents or were beset by impostors posing as Vertrauensmänner , confidential agents. Counter to instructions Gestapo branch offices dispatched agents abroad on their own initiative, while interagency competition created its own jumble of intelligence operations, so bad, for instance, in Yugoslavia in October 1939 that the military attaché stationed in Belgrade protested against an SD organization that, he said, was out of control.^[36] There was also the unending problem of fraud. Throughout the thirties Foreign Ministry representatives abroad complained of people who dropped in from the blue, without accreditation, claiming to work for the Gestapo or the SD or the Abwehr and asking for money or special assistance. Some turned out to be genuine, others were fake. The problem appears to have been pandemic, sparing no agency. In the Rome office of the Mittel-Europäischen Reisebüro a man named Hermann Krebs approached a travel agent with a request to exchange German currency. Krebs said he was an SS agent and that he never had difficulty converting German credits into foreign exchange. The travel agent was an SD plant whose curiosity was piqued. He asked Krebs what he was doing in Rome. Krebs replied that he was on an intelligence mission. The SD man reported the matter and received the response that Krebs was no SS agent but a con man with a record.^[37]

The situation was complicated by the fact that German agencies had a record of employing dubious characters whose talents were better geared to swindling and defrauding than they were to gathering intelligence. The Gestapo was burned by a man named Schneekloth whose police record was as long as his arm. During the war Schneekloth had rented out part of his house in Amsterdam to German intelligence and had worked for the Germans as an agent, but there had also been strong indications that he had been selling them out to the French. Nevertheless, in the thirties Schneekloth was back in German employ, this time as an informant on the activities of German political refugees in the Netherlands. He appears to have conned a Gestapo official mercilessly, dishing up any piece of information that would sell, until another official uncovered the racket. There were other cases of people like this who

had cheated the authorities once and were attempting to do so again, given the warnings to beware of such characters that emerged from agencies like the Abwehr or the Foreign Ministry. Indeed, even once the Germans were on to Schneekloth they had reason to fear that he would continue to represent himself as one of their agents.^[38] For the Germans, as for the French, the spy world was filled with impostors, and matters were complicated still further because not all of these were crooks. In the fall of 1938 the Gestapo arrested a Czech agent masquerading as a Gestapo official and carrying false identity papers to this effect. The man had infiltrated Sudeten German circles as an agent provocateur and had sought to encourage acts of sabotage or terrorism that could be blamed on German secret agents. During his interrogation he admitted to seeing a whole stack of false German papers in Prague.^[39]

For the French this state of affairs could only be confusing. Tramping through Europe were bogus V.-Männer , con artists, swindlers, impostors talking up their missions or intimating of operations they knew about, either because they scented profit in the story or sought self-aggrandizement or because once having put on the identity they were content to wear it forever. It is not difficult to imagine the consequences: their inevitable encounters with French counterintelligence agents who would see through some but not through all the practiced bamboozlers nor through the men and women who at one time had worked for German intelligence and had once, perhaps, been known to the French as the genuine article. Add to this the freelancers who were secret agents but who were out of control and one can begin to account for some of the wilder reports that strain credibility yet nevertheless were filed and circulated by authorities who had reason to believe them. None of this welter of identities and individuals clarifies the question of which reports were true, and which ones were not. But it does show another side to the coin of deception and credulity. The French could be mistaken not because they deluded themselves or gave way to panic but because, at times, they were simply taken in. Paradoxically, these sets of files can confirm one's faith in the reporting process.

There are, however, better morsels to chew on. The records of the Bremen Abwehr station—only a branch of one Abwehr post—turn up a number of agents working in France and North Africa. One of these was Kurt Wertheim, who was born in Duisburg in 1901, spoke French, Arabic, and Dutch, served in the French Foreign Legion, and was an active agent for Bremen from 1937. Another was Paul Kuehner, a powerfully built man with graying hair and gray-green eyes, who was quick,

intelligent, and spoke French, English, Spanish, and a little Arabic. For years he represented Krupp interests in Morocco. From 1936-1939 the Stuttgart station ran him as a secret agent in France. Later he transferred to Bremen operations and worked in occupied France until he was arrested for embezzlement in 1943. German security files contain the biography—irritatingly sketchy—of Marcel Tsunke who worked for party foreign intelligence and traveled to France, Spain, and Spanish Morocco in this capacity in the late thirties. He turns up in another report from March 1940, planning sabotage missions in France and Latin America. The SD agent planted in the Rome travel bureau acknowledged an earlier mission in Morocco. The Foreign Office records disclose a man named Sparwasser who in May 1939 appeared on the doorstep of the German consul in Tetouan proclaiming himself a Saharan scholar and an agent for the Abwehr. Sparwasser said he had come to North Africa to devise ways of interfering with French troop transports through the desert. The consul wrote Berlin for instructions and received a coded telegram that suggests Sparwasser may have been what he claimed. Shortly after war was declared the Tangier police arrested Sparwasser as he was attempting to cross over into Spanish Morocco in Arab clothing. He fed them a story that was not very credible, but several months later he was free and returning to Germany under the auspices of the Madrid Abwehr station. Once home he was to undergo training to determine his fitness for "special work" with Abwehr II (sabotage and subversion). There is also the report of Captain Xylander who traveled officially—evidently at French invitation—to North Africa in the first months of 1939. Xylander supplied what military intelligence he could, discounted subversion possibilities in Algeria and Tunisia, said they were more promising in Morocco, and recommended, among other things, clandestine arms shipments to all three colonies and the preparation of sabotage action that would be carried out in coastal areas once war was at hand. When war did come, German intelligence dispatched sabotage missions abroad to destroy French and British shipping. Traces of these can be found in files concerning covert operations in the Mediterranean. In early spring 1940 an agent named Rühle went to Fiume, Trieste, and Sušak to investigate possibilities for wrecking Allied boats in these ports and to establish the contacts that would enable him, or others, to execute these missions. At the same time codes were developed so that telegrams reading, "Send in x days x kg. mackerel in y crates," would specify quantities of fuses and explosives to be forwarded. Meanwhile security officials were discussing infiltrating radio transmitters and sabo-

tage materials into France via Italy.^[40] None of this is surprising but nevertheless helps explain the warnings that came in to the French from spring 1939 on regarding sabotage of their ships and other sensitive targets. Altogether, the German archives, like their French counterparts, possess remarkable powers to exasperate and confound, yet they too offer reason, at times, to believe that French counterintelligence was on the right track.

Finally, there are the reports that panned out. Investigations from 1937 show how even the most dire material forwarded by counterintelligence agents could indeed be fact. In the spring of that year there was a wave of terrorist attacks across Mediterranean France. Among these was a bomb explosion that ripped through the Bordeaux-Marseilles express, killing one person and injuring five others. The first break police had in the case came with the arrest of a man named Cantelli just after he had placed a time bomb above the international tunnel running from Cerbère to Port-Bou. Another lead followed the preliminary interrogation of an Italian named Tamborini living in Perpignan. When the police brought Tamborini in for questioning an Italian vice-consul, Giardini, swooped down on the station and insisted on speaking to Tamborini at once. The police told Giardini that this was not possible, but that they would pass on whatever he had to say to his man. Giardini then said that he had confided a pair of pants to Tamborini for cleaning and that he needed these back fight away. Tamborini, upon communication of this rather weird message, replied that he had left the pants at the Bar des Halles, a local hangout known for its Italian Fascist clientele. Not satisfied with this news, Giardini persisted, with Visible anger, in his demand to see Tamborini personally to the point that the police had to restrain him. At one moment he managed to get close enough to Tamborini to blurt out before the stunned assembly of police functionaries, "You've gotten yourself caught, you imbecile!" Then Giardini left and picked up his package at the Bar des Halles, although to police it seemed too small to contain a pair of pants. Several months later, further investigations and depositions by Cantelli and Tamborini made clear the reasons for this extraordinary performance.

Tamborini, according to a report put together by Sûreté Inspector Delrieu in October 1937, had known Giardini since the days just after the war and had worked for Italian "political espionage" since 1921. Using the cover of a bicycle racer and mechanic he had traveled throughout Europe, arriving in Spain in late 1935. Following the outbreak of the Spanish civil war, he had worked his way into the FAI

(the Federación anarquista ibérica, a militant anarchist movement) in Barcelona. Later he left the FAI and joined the independent Marxist party, the POUM (Partido obrero de unificación marxista). Apparently unmasked as a spy, he moved across the border to Perpignan, where he renewed contact with Giardini and ran a spy ring of Italians and Spaniards. His work seems to have divided evenly between political and military espionage. Of fifty reports he forwarded to Italy, twenty-three concerned the activities of anti-Fascist Italians in France and twenty-seven contained intelligence on military matters. Some military information, including details on Republican formations, he passed on to Franco.

Tamborini told Delrieu that he was not responsible for the bombings, and Delrieu, to a point, was willing to believe him. But he argued in his report that the interrogations of Tamborini and Cantelli and information supplied by a Loyalist double agent who had infiltrated Tamborini's organization pointed toward Fascist Italy as the source of the bombings. Delrieu concluded that the Italians, with the cooperation of Spanish Nationalists, were financing and conducting a major terrorist operation in France "with the intention of destroying supplies destined for Republican Spain . . . and, for political reasons easy to understand, of creating a malaise in France, even troubles to be exploited by anti-French propaganda services working abroad."^[41] He was, in fact, not very far off the mark. The arrest and interrogation of former Italian intelligence officials following the Second Word War revealed that Italian military intelligence (the Servizio informazioni militari, or SIM) had indeed concocted a broad project of orchestrated terror to disrupt the passage of goods to Republican Spain and to disseminate uncertainty and disarray within France. The schemers had gone so far as to contemplate diffusing the germs of epidemic diseases, although they had never implemented these grotesque proposals. Some of the strikes that were carried out were the work of the right-wing French extremists known as the Cagoule. Others were executed by an Italian squad operating out of Imperia near the French border.^[42]

If, then, uncertainty reigns in the archives on spies and skepticism must supersede faith, these files are not the product of a system run amok. The dossiers may tease and frustrate, but it is possible to pick one's way through the minefields and to acquire a sense for what can be discarded and what might be credible. These are not easy archives to work with. But they describe a milieu that reached beyond imagination and fear.

The First World War demanded of intelligence and counterintelligence organizations a scale and method and a professional expertise that they had not known before 1914 and that they would relinquish only reluctantly and partially once the war came to an end and the inevitable pruning occurred. The rise of Soviet networks of considerable magnitude, the unsettled climate in international affairs, the flow of refugees, and the bent toward rationalization, system, and technological innovation in these years assured that neither demobilization nor treaty restrictions would return intelligence battles to their prewar levels. Foreign agents and secret police crisscrossed the world between the wars. They were better equipped, more professional, more obtrusive, and more numerous than they had been before 1914. This difference in size, scope, and method, bequeathed by wartime experience and confirmed by postwar circumstances, marked one distinction between interwar espionage and the intrigues of the past.

Nothing typified the changes more than the international circuits of Soviet espionage. From almost the inception of Soviet rule, French counterintelligence chronicled the exploits of an intelligence system that had no counterpart in the years preceding the First World War. Nothing rational that the French compiled on espionage before 1914 compared with their description of Soviet courier networks, or international transit systems, or Soviet operational centers, or the global scope of Soviet intrigues, or even the details that surfaced when a single case was cracked.

The Switz-Stahl ring, which the French broke in the mid-1930s, provides a good illustration. Ring members ranged across Europe, they utilized cameras or were trained in radio transmission, and they concentrated on military intelligence of a scientific or experimental nature. Operatives included paid agents with access to secrets, but also the kinds of individuals one would encounter in the spy world of the interwar years: party militants, ideological fellow travelers willing to serve the cause and who sometimes were exploited and sucked in over their head; foreigners; agent controllers; and the professional impresario in the background, in this case a man named Boris Rschezki whom the French police never caught. The ring was huge, organizing into a single operation sources, photographers, instructors, runners, and a network of couriers and intermediaries to tie things together. There were thirty-two indictments in the case, indicating the scale that separates this affair from those of the past.^[43]

Nearly everything about Soviet espionage bore this hallmark of or-

ganization and planning. The same intricacy characterized communist circuits designed to infiltrate agents into France in the 1920s. At higher levels of operations the Soviets worked through regional headquarters or centers. Germany, especially Berlin, whose criminal sweatshops made the city into an entrepôt of forged papers and "special services" after the war, was the most important staging point down to 1933. Another center operated in Vienna, running agents and couriers throughout Eastern Europe and the Balkans. Again, what distinguished this system from prewar ones was not only its structured networks for control, transit, and communications, but also its worldwide extension. Soviet centers were in Berlin and Vienna, but they operated as well in central Asia and Shanghai.^[44]

There were several factors militating toward the scale and systematization of Soviet espionage after the war. One was the multiplication of both agencies and functions. Soviet organs of espionage included Red Army intelligence (the Glavnoe razvedyvatel'noe upravlenie, or GRU), the secret police (the Gosudarstvennoe politicheskoe upravlenie, or GPU),^[45] the Comintern, and, to a certain extent, Communist parties that the GRU and GPU shied away from as insecure for covert operations but viewed as a reservoir of contacts, couriers, and potential agents.^[46] All of these agencies gathered military intelligence, but traditional espionage characterized only a part of their clandestine activities. Surveillance of refugees, dissemination of propaganda, kidnapping, murder, subversion, and ultimately the preparation of world revolution escalated the number of agents and, correspondingly, required the elaboration of support systems that swelled agent ranks still further. Because enterprises were so broad in scope and because they struck at the internal security of nations and empires, evoking considerable vigilance and police repression in response, Soviet agencies were obliged to systematize their methods of operation. The war, in which the scale of intrigue had been comparable, provided certain lessons here, as did failed insurrections like the one in Germany in 1923.^[47] The result was the centers, underground circuits, false passport workshops, courier networks, and covers that turned up in police and counterintelligence reports in the twenties and thirties. Moreover, the global expanse of Soviet operations was powered not only by ambitions for world revolution or the perception that the easiest pickings were to be found in the empires, but also by the fear of a capitalist counterrevolutionary onslaught on all geographical fronts and by the dispersion of considerable numbers of White Russian refugees to East Asia, especially Manchuria.

For nearly all nations, however, there was an inexorable drive toward the creation or maintenance of large organized intelligence services after the war, because the war experience or the dangers and opportunities of the interwar years magnified the value of formal intelligence gathering and special operations. For the Germans, defeat and treaty restrictions only temporarily delayed the construction of such networks. Initially German intelligence may have reconstituted itself through quasi-private or loosely assimilated official structures. Nonetheless it was active almost immediately following the war, and although major expansion came only after the Nazi seizure of power, French documentation—for instance the reports on Impex—suggests the possibility of persistently ambitious German operations dating back to the early 1920s.^[48] Under the Nazis intelligence capacity spread prodigiously and exorbitantly among a number of agencies. The central organ for espionage was the Abwehr (created under Weimar), but it was quickly rivaled by party operations, especially the SD. In 1939, the RSHA (Reichssicherheitshauptamt), an SS mélange of party and government bureaus that included SD foreign intelligence (now Section VI) and the Gestapo, represented another large (and aggressive) intelligence establishment. Whether any of these branches were running kidnapping specialists or foreign assassination squads (as The Brown Network asserted) is doubtful. But the Gestapo did engineer a number of abductions, including the filching and removal of an activist anti-Nazi émigré, Berthold Jacob, across the Swiss-German border in 1935.^[49]

Such methods were part of an extensive surveillance net the Gestapo established over émigrés in Europe. The German police infiltrated, tracked, extorted, kidnapped, and apparently even murdered some of their prey, abetted in the less dirty jobs by official cooperation from the German Foreign Office.^[50] The methods smacked of earlier police operations dating back to Bismarck's time, yet their scale, organization, and ruthless pursuit paralleled broader strategies of covert activities that fit with Nazi perceptions of the avenues to power and that the war had rendered all but conventional.

Again it is the structured, schematic quality that captures one's attention. From as early as 1934 technicians were working to devise and perfect firebombs for sabotage.^[51] The Abwehr devoted one of its departments to sabotage and uprisings, although one should be careful not to exaggerate either its reach or its accomplishments in this area. Nevertheless, in 1936 the Abwehr began recruitment and training of special action units, including paratroopers, to operate behind the lines in

Czechoslovakia, Poland, and the Soviet Union in the event of a conflict. Ukrainians and German minorities from the designated territories provided the manpower.^[52] Similar plans had existed before the First World War but only in the most rudimentary form and almost totally lacking in the formal preparation of operational squads. In keeping With Nazi practice other agencies forced their way into the picture. The SD established its own covert liaisons in the east and there were subversive broadcasts over Radio Vienna following the Anschluss in 1938.^[53] When the Germans moved into Poland in 1939 Abwehr commando units blew up bridges, train stations, telephone and telegraph lines. Other units, assisted by Volksdeutsche , seized key transportation and industrial points to prevent their destruction by Polish dynamiters. Precise, systematic details, including diagrams, laid out methods of procedure and the exact demolition materials to be used. Eight months later similar operations would be employed in the invasion of the Benelux countries and France.^[54] Meanwhile the SD was organizing its own sabotage enterprises; the Rühle mission to Yugoslavia in early 1940, for example, was RSHA inspired.

Competition between the Abwehr and SD was replicated at other levels by still other agencies. Further intelligence streamed in through the Foreign Office; the War Economics branch of the OKW (the armed forces' high command, the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht) which was responsible for most, but not all, economic data; the Forschungsamt, a communications intelligence office that intercepted and decoded radio and telephone messages; and other radio intercept agencies attached to the military services. Independent institutes and the information-gathering services of German business firms contributed additional information, although the latter often did so reluctantly and under pressure. Business branch offices abroad occasionally provided cover for agents in the field. The sprawl of intelligence bureaucracies and the irrationality of the political system as a whole meant that German espionage was fragmented and chaotic at the upper levels of intelligence assessment. Historians have not been impressed by its record. At other levels, however, German espionage displayed a tendency toward rationalized structuring and even excessive orderliness. Formal procedures for the exchange of information^[55] and the precise definition of jurisdictions and responsibilities within agencies gave an organized complexion to the networks, at least on the surface.

The offensive posture of the new political systems and their obsession with political or ideological enemies abroad conferred a certain edge in

the building of large espionage systems. Italian spies, but also OVRA (Opera vigilanza repressione antifascista) agents, terrorist circuits, or the subversive mobilization of Italian nationals abroad, especially in North Africa, clutter French interwar files. Yet even a traditional service like French intelligence ran a considerably larger and more methodical operation than it had before the First World War.^[56] The principal conduit of information was the army's SR, which fed raw intelligence to the Deuxième Bureau. Staffing the central SR office were twenty-five army officers, twenty noncommissioned officers and thirty civil servants. The numbers were modest, but they represented more than a fivefold increase over the figures for the prewar years. Because postings shifted over time, it is difficult to establish the full range of SR activity at a single point in the interwar years. In general there appears to have been a rapid increase in stations in the 1920s, then some curtailment—probably with the depression—and then greater expansion as war drew near. The major intelligence posts were located on French soil, and these ran annexes and antennes abroad. Three of the main stations focused on Germany, a fourth directed its operations toward Italy, another worked out of Algiers, and a sixth—the Bureau d'études Pyrénéenes—was established at the time of the Spanish civil war. At some point during the interwar years, the SR maintained smaller stations—sometimes only a single central agent—in Prague, Warsaw (1920-1926), Bucharest, the Hague, Riga, Vienna (until 1938), Budapest, Belgrade, Sofia, Copenhagen, Moscow, Berlin (until 1926), Madrid, Rome, Amsterdam, Beirut, Istanbul, Rabat, Tangier, Djibouti (opened in 1933), Tientsin, and Singapore (only temporarily). On the eve of the war and at last with the Quai d'Orsay's acquiescence, the SR rushed agents into a series of consulates including those in Munich, Leipzig, Milan, and Zagreb. Altogether the number of SR agents directed against Germany in the late 1930s totaled fifteen hundred. A slightly smaller number operated against Italy. Most of these were drones, but among them were some exceptional finds that any intelligence service would have sold its soul for (or, more appropriately, taken out a second mortgage on). The SR had come a long way since the days of Captain Andlauer's sad little station in Belfort.

Operations in the Balkans in the late 1930s give some indication of the difference. Beginning in the spring of 1939 German intelligence uncovered several French spy rings in Yugoslavia. One of these seems to have been clumsily conducted, but another, although equally betrayed, appears to have operated with considerable range and dexterity. It ran

through a man named George Hartwig, who had served as an officer in Casablanca and Djibouti and since June 1938 was working out of the passport section of the French consulate in Zagreb. The Hartwig of Zagreb took on the airs of a man about town, dispensing money with calculated abandon all the while building a circle of tipsters among hotel doormen, waiters, and demimondaines. Other contacts included an alleged editor with German citizenship; the French director of the Peugeot works in Zagreb ("tall, thin, sporty, salt and pepper hair, travels frequently to Germany"); several White Russians, including one who worked officially for the Zagreb police; a traveling salad oil representative from Vienna; an Albanian medical student; and a Greek jazz band singer whose orchestra appears to have toured Europe (in April 1939 he was playing the Hotel Metropol in Kaunas). Some of these were more agents than informants, assuring Hartwig's liaisons with his contacts in Germany. The organization seems to have worked with a certain success. By spring 1939 Hartwig possessed details on troop movements in the Ostmark, German shell fillings, and other technical matters that he forwarded to Paris via the Orient Express. In January 1940 the RSHA was reporting that French intelligence, driven from Vienna, Prague, and Warsaw, was concentrating a major effort in Yugoslavia and, for this purpose, had sent twelve intelligence officers to Belgrade to liaise with Yugoslav authorities and to expand espionage operations against Germany, Italy, and Hungary. Hartwig's networks were now tied into this wider campaign. The numbers of individuals identified as possible French agents in Yugoslavia by this report totaled thirty-seven, including an operative for sabotage action and a growing contingent of White Russian émigrés.^[57]

The SR was only the largest intelligence agency run by the French between the wars. The navy controlled its own, much smaller, SR with stations in Metz, Dunkirk, Nice, and North Africa. This too expanded over time, establishing stations or antennes at the Hague, Hendaye, Tangier, Gibraltar, Dakar, and Shanghai, and infiltrating agents into embassies in London, Madrid, Berlin, Warsaw, and Istanbul. All through the period the Colonial Ministry operated a highly effective colonial police that channeled information from disparate parts of the world, particularly in regard to Comintern activities. In 1937 a separate colonial SR emerged. It assumed control of the SR posts in Djibouti and Tientsin and established main stations in Shanghai, Hanoi, Nouméa, Djibouti, Tananarive, Dakar, Brazzaville, and Fort-de-France. Counterintelligence divided between the police (especially the Sûreté nationale),

responsible for counterespionage surveillance within France, and the SR, which gathered similar information abroad and stationed counterintelligence people in all its principal postings. Again in 1937, as the international situation deteriorated, the Ministry of the Interior introduced special counterespionage brigades called the Surveillance du territoire. Meanwhile each service SR maintained a cryptography and telecommunications intercept unit (earlier attached to the general staffs), whose intelligence rivaled that of the best informants abroad. Captain Bertrand, who commanded SR cryptography, was a key participant in the breaking of the Wehrmacht's Enigma code. Additional intelligence came from military attachés, although these reported directly to the Deuxième Bureau.

With expansion came greater method, or a more systematic way of proceeding and assessing. One can see this in the charts and circulars that mapped the range of intelligence operations and defined jurisdictional boundaries or in the monthly reports like the bulletins de renseignements des questions musulmanes , or BRQMs, that the overseas section of the army general staff circulated on Muslim affairs or in the sheer amount of paper generated by these services. By the late 1930s the Ministry of Interior was printing annual directories—menées terroristes lists—that included mug shots, brief descriptions, and updates on terrorist suspects. When the French evacuated Paris in June 1940, the Préfecture de police loaded the 2,500,000 cards of its general card index, the card indexes of Austrian and Spanish refugees, 692,618 dossiers, and boxes of other documents onto a barge in the Seine and packed the archives of the Fourth Department (concerned with wartime restrictions on foreigners and staffed by over eighty employees) into trucks. All of this represented only a part of police archives. SR stations like the Bureau régional d'études militaires at Metz exhibited in their camouflaged identification the same compulsion toward self-proclaimed bureaucratic professionalism that typified this organization after the wan.^[58]

Much of the systematization or professionalization of intelligence work in these years derived from a growing dependency on gadgetry and electronic paraphernalia that rendered all phases of espionage—penetration, communication, eavesdropping, and sabotage—more sophisticated and consequently more effective than they had been before. The French, Germans, and Soviets bugged telephones, intercepted messages, and maintained laboratories or workshops that fabricated what were coming to be the indispensable accoutrements of the well-equipped secret service: false papers, false-bottomed suitcases, miniature

cameras, and, for the Germans, poison capsules that could fit within an artificial tooth and be used to escape interrogation. Thus support networks or technical units complemented the work in the field. They analyzed, squeezed down, camouflaged, or counterfeited whatever was necessary to combat the surveillance of counterespionage police. Microdots and two-inch-long cameras were some of their products. So too were scaled-down wireless transmitters, which all three services utilized abroad and which relegated parrot stories to the repertoire of nightclub comedians and historians.^[59]

Radio transmissions, whose interception had come to constitute an essential share of counterintelligence operations before the war, now assumed more aggressive functions. They substituted modern technology not only for carrier pigeons but also, as one German expert believed, for the more colorful yet less reliable system of sleeping car attendants and travel agency couriers.^[60] Although neither was doomed to extinction—wagon-lit agents remained a fixture in counterespionage files and couriers an indispensable component of any intelligence network—the ability to work a radio or access to someone who could became more and more a professional requirement. Ironically the greater turning toward covert warfare held out at the open level of mass communications even more tantalizing, and explosive, possibilities. By the late thirties all sides were engaging in the guerre des ondes . North Africa was an intensely contested battleground, but the subversion wars of the airwaves spread around the globe. The British, Soviets, Italians, Germans, and eventually the French vied for the most powerful and persuasive system of communications. Even the Hungarians built a network of relay stations along their frontiers to broadcast irredentist messages across borders. In the evenings there would be temporary interruptions in programming from Budapest followed by local news bulletins describing disorders between Croats and Serbs, or comparable clashes in Romania and Czechoslovakia. The stories, in their choice of subject and of language—prewar geographic and ethnic identifications—aimed to inflame tension and sow uncertainty, while the medium itself—intrusive, popular, and authoritative in tone—offered propaganda opportunities far in excess of more commonplace methods.^[61]

Method, technology, and sophisticated networks in turn produced a more professional agent than those who had worked in earlier times. Only a number truly fit this category. The spy world continued to run over with swashbuckling types who crashed their way through into espionage work and left a mess wherever they went, and with hopeless ama-

teurs whom counterespionage police mopped up right and left with increasing regularity. There were bunglers, dupes, and gushing enthusiasts like the SD plant in the Rome travel bureau who wrote his report as if he had sailed across uncharted oceans and then set foot upon terra cognita . Surprisingly the intelligence service that commanded the greatest awe and respect—the British—was often the shoddiest in its preparation of agents.^[62] But there were also certain imperatives that drove professionalization forward. One of these was the growing technical cast to intelligence work. Another was the war, whose pumped-up spy scene actuated levels of prowess that had not been necessary before 1914. All through the war years intelligence services improvised and experimented, ruining lives and reputations but leaving behind a fount of experience in building large covert spy rings or working with false papers and covers. After the war there were people who went permanently underground as professional intriguers. A few were refugees and others were communist agents who spent careers living abroad under counterfeit cover and building clandestine networks that could function across borders and elude police nets cast with increasing rigor and adroitness. It was particularly among these Soviet career agents that one finds the professional spy of the era—less an individual trained in espionage technique than an accomplished operator who through experience and skill and commitment to a cause ran sophisticated circuits and survived where others went under.

Take the Soviet agent Ignace Reiss. Through revolutionary service in Germany he was drawn into intelligence work for the GRU, organizing spy networks in Vienna, Prague, and Holland. Later the purges and their ravaging spread to Red Army intelligence drove him into the GPU, but in 1937 he broke formally with Stalin and went on the run. The GPU's mobile assassination squads for liquidating enemies or recalcitrant agents abroad tracked him down and killed him outside Lausanne. Richard Sorge and Walter Krivitsky, Reiss's boyhood friend, fit a similar pattern of spies who honed their skills through years of agitation and revolutionary intrigue.^[63]

There was also Leopold Trepper, who may well have been the most professional agent operating for any service in the 1930s and early 1940s. Trepper was born in Galicia in 1904. In the years right after the war he was active in Jewish and communist youth organizations. His militant involvement in Polish workers' politics and subsequent scrapes with police forced his emigration to Palestine in 1924. There he joined the Communist party, became the secretary of its Haifa section, and

continued his life as an organizer and agitator. Police repression again forced him to emigrate, this time to France at the end of the decade. In Paris Trepper worked at odd jobs, loading freight trains or scrubbing floors at night at, of all places, the Bon Marché department store. He remained a party militant, already by his midtwenties a veteran of left-wing politics and clandestine activities. In the early 1930s he left Paris in the wake of a Soviet espionage affair, heading for Moscow and, eventually, secret agent work for Red Army intelligence. According to one account, Trepper trained as an intelligence officer and was a seasoned Soviet operative by the outbreak of the Second World War. Trepper, in his memoirs, has debunked this as myth, and has written a withering portrait of Soviet espionage abroad. The problem is that Trepper had good reason to provide an alternative accounting of his life—he has been accused of betraying associates following his capture by the Nazis during the war, and when he returned to the Soviet Union in 1945 Stalin's secret police clapped him in jail. Whichever version is correct, Trepper's activities in Belgium and then in occupied France betrayed all the professionalism of a man who had spent the better part of his life in conspiratorial or covert operations.

In early 1939 Trepper turned up in Brussels as Adam Mikler, a Canadian investor in the Foreign Excellent Raincoat Company. The company was a deep cover for an espionage network that Trepper was assembling for spying on Great Britain. Running the affair was an old Trepper acquaintance from Palestine, Leon Grossvogel. The firm was legally registered and its commercial employees sold raincoats, as far as they knew. Trepper's plan was to let the company build its markets and then to infiltrate it slowly with intelligence personnel in the positions of shareholders, business managers, and department heads. The war caught him short, and by July 1940 he was back in Paris. There he camouflaged himself as Jean Gilbert, manager of another dummy firm called Simex. For the next two years Trepper ran several separate networks and was a leading figure in the Rote Kapelle group spread over Europe. The Germans finally caught up with Trepper in December 1942. He agreed to collaborate as a double agent, although he may well have simply carried through an elaborate scheme prearranged in the case of arrest. Whether he betrayed a number of his agents, Grossvogel among them, we can only conjecture. In September 1943 Trepper escaped and went into hiding. He flew back to Moscow in 1945 and was imprisoned until the death of Stalin.

Trepper was a born conspirator, although, paradoxically, that was why he could be so representative. Before he was twenty he had begun to live under counterfeit identities and devote his life to underground work. Communism gave him his purpose but also the apparatus for assembling his clandestine networks. In this sense Soviet espionage, even if it did not formally train him, did make Trepper the consummate professional. People like Trepper had existed in the past; agents like Trepper were possible only in the political and espionage climate of the postwar years. His expertise fitted the covert worlds within which he moved so that a man who in earlier times might have been a political organizer was in the thirties a secret agent and spy master. No one knew the private Trepper; no one caught him up in conversation. He was a domineering personality who devised his own set of rules for every aspect of intelligence work. Agents were to transmit their reports to couriers only through intermediaries. The intermediary was to wait twenty-four hours before passing the report on to determine if the agent was under surveillance. After a meeting, couriers and intermediaries should keep on the go for at least six to seven hours to cut back the possibility of being shadowed. This kind of deliberation characterized all Trepper's moves. Only through the mistakes of others, and through accident, did the Germans ultimately trap him. Even then, he survived easily. A creature of his times, Leopold Trepper was a model of the emerging twentieth-century spy: committed and daring, yet cold-blooded, methodical, and businesslike in his ways. Personally unfathomable yet historically recognizable, he was a chilling example of what these years could produce. He was, in short, one of those extraordinary individuals you hope you never meet.^[64]

For some agents some formal training developed in these years. French counterintelligence repeatedly cited programs for agitators and propagandists in schools in the Soviet Union and, occasionally, in Soviet schools established abroad. A 1926 communiqué from Vienna, for example, reported instruction at Berggasse 26 where twenty-eight students from the Balkans received training in revolutionary tactics.^[65] If such a school existed, it was probably a slipshod affair, but Victor Sukolov, a GRU agent, appears to have undergone rigorous training in the late thirties, including instruction in photography, chemistry, and the use of technical equipment, before going abroad on espionage missions (although Trepper in his memoirs says that Sukolov often behaved like an amateur). Marie Josefovna Poliakova, who laid the groundwork for

the Soviet intelligence ring operating in Switzerland in World War II, spent nine to ten months at an intelligence school in Moscow at the beginning of the thirties. Red Army intelligence's eastern, political, and code sections all briefed Sorge prior to his departure for China. Other Soviet agents were trained for particular functions, particularly as radio operators at the Moscow Radio School, before assignments abroad. The professional, however, was not entirely a Soviet monopoly. Czech intelligence in the thirties trained certain agents in radio work, secret writing, encoding, and decoding.^[66] German intelligence ran its special camps for instruction in sabotage work and guerrilla warfare and one historian has described the specialization and "technocratic professionalism" that marked German espionage at agency level.^[67] Other services produced agents capable of running sophisticated networks—Hartwig seems one of these—while the Poles may have mounted some of the most successful intelligence operations of all between the wars.^[68]

A turn toward sweep, method, and professionalism thus characterized nearly all intelligence activity in these decades. Behind this trend were developments peculiar to each nation's circumstances. The conspiratorial nature of Soviet espionage, as well as the pool of devoted agents it could draw upon, resulted in spy networks like the Switz-Stahl ring or in the development of talents like Trepper or the equally remarkable Richard Sorge. Nazi politics, revisionism, and fear of refugees abroad explain certain dimensions of the spy agencies that Germans built, as do German technical skill and bureaucratic traditions. A comparable picture could be drawn of Italian espionage between the wars, if, admittedly, certain sectors operated at less sophisticated levels. The French were vulnerable after the war and, for a time, they occupied a forward position in Europe. Their empire was large and in certain places shaky. These, among other things, account for changes in the French SRs.

Yet there were factors common to all. These ranged from the war experience to technological change to the flux in borders and settlements to the sheer compulsion toward organization in the twenties and thirties that reached out and engulfed all walks of life. Under any circumstances intelligence agencies would have grown and become more systematic because that was in the nature of things after the war. Most of all, however, the organizations developed as they did because these were rich years for espionage—full, ripe, intrigue-ridden years—and the various services and their agents responded accordingly.

Richness—the incontinent side to clandestine affairs in the twentieth century—distinguished interwar intrigues most from the espionage of the past. Spy wars were real, fought by professional agents in extensive secret networks, but also by combatants who were as likely to be refugees, terrorists, secret police, ideologues, and an infestation of swindlers, hustlers, and traffickers. Beyond institutional history there was the sheer pervasiveness of interwar intrigue that explains in large part why the secret agent was for the French a formidable and evocative figure between the two world wars.

That tangled, verdant side, for example, turns one to gunrunning, a useful place to begin, because it shows the spongelike nature of espionage in these years, the ease with which it absorbed a widening array of individuals into the clandestine enterprises of secret agents. The Gardiners and W.'s were part of a tradition of exploiting regional conflict for personal gain, but their adventures were also symptomatic of the proliferation in arms dealing and the obscuring of the lines between trafficking and espionage that characterized gunrunning in the interwar decades. Well before the First World War traffickers and fortune hunters had shipped arms across frontiers or smuggled contraband weapons into contested areas. The traffic to Morocco and Henri de Monfreid's Red Sea exploits were two examples of this trade.^[69] After the war the traffic seems to have broadened as wartime conditions and postwar circumstances expanded the opportunities for illicit arms shipments. How much of this expansion derived from wartime smuggling is difficult to say, but almost certainly there were connections between illicit traffickers in drugs, liquor, and arms following the war and the development of wartime networks in contraband trade to circumvent the Allied blockade. The experience of counterintelligence agents in the Netherlands alone during the war and the creation of Allied control agencies like the Nederlandische Overzee Trust (or NOT) suggest that this traffic was enormous.^[70] There was also a vast surplus of weapons available after 1918, some of these dumped legally on the market, others hidden away in clandestine depots. Gardiner made use of the latter as did W. and his White Russian associates. From the war, then, came abundant reserves of arms and munitions and, most likely, the experience and fortunes with which to exploit these. From the postwar years came the adventurers and drifters, men and women on the make and, as important, new markets in contraband weapons. Wars in China and Spain soaked up a huge weapons trade while smaller conflicts like the Rif war in North Africa offered comparable profits.

At the same time trafficking in liquor and especially in narcotics created new infrastructures and knowledge that could be applied to gunrunning when the opportunities were ripe. The pattern of drug dealer or white slaver or both turned arms merchant was a frequent one, particularly in East Asia.^[71] The commodity changed with the circumstances, but the technique and contacts remained the same. Indeed the very definition of gunrunning enlarged after the war with article 170 of the Versailles Treaty forbidding the import of arms into Germany or the export of weapons by German manufacturers. Through the early 1930s the French Deuxime Bureau traced a brazen disregard of this provision, identifying imports of arms from Sweden, Holland, and Switzerland and German arms sales to European, East Asian, and Latin American countries.^[72]

There is no one phrase to describe the array of arms traffickers in the twenties and thirties. A few were major dealers like Benny Spiro of Hamburg. Spiro built his business shipping arms to Latin America and Africa before the First World War. By the mid-1920s he was closely associated with a large freight forwarding firm in Hamburg, and then a consortium for, as one French agent who was tracking him put it, "the delivery of arms and war materials of all kinds to all possible countries." When war broke out in the Rif, he shipped two thousand rifles (apparently acquired from a hidden depot in Bavaria), a million rounds of ammunition, and medical supplies to the north Moroccan rebels. All of these were World War I surplus and of inferior quality, although the Riffian representatives were permitted a tryout behind Hagenbeck's zoo on the outskirts of Hamburg. Three years later he turned up again in a counterintelligence report as the principal intermediary of two Hamburg houses shipping arms to China via ships flying the Norwegian flag.^[73] The French arms firm, Edgar Brandt, did a similar kind of business. Brandt dealt with Ireland, Poland, China, Greece, Latin America, and later with both sides in Spain. In 1935 the firm generated one of its periodic scandals when 310 cases of arms recalled from Argentina were opened and found to be full of stones and sand. There was speculation that the substitution had been arranged in France and the arms diverted to extremist political groups. The mayor of Le Havre announced that the stones resembled the paving blocks of Paris and that the sand came from the Paris region. The truth, in fact, was no less unsavory. Brandt had exported the arms fraudulently to the government of Paraguay, circumventing a French embargo on arms shipments to

this nation by listing Argentina as the ultimate destination. A tip to the Quai d'Orsay had forced the recall of the shipment, but Brandt had stalled hoping to find some middle way between reimbursing the Paraguayans or paying a fine that was liable to exceed the value of the cargo. Then the Paraguayans had seized sixty of the crates and someone "by accident" had forwarded the rest. Brandt was left in the dilemma of owning up to these facts or sending back rocks and sand and hoping somehow they would dear their way through customs. For an arms trafficker, the choice was practically foreordained.^[74]

With firms like Spiro and Brandt representing the more licit side to the trade, it is not surprising that other, viperlike elements crowded in on gunrunning after the war. Some were adventurers like W., and others were professional traffickers, usually in narcotics, like Mario F., who was also known to police as Joret, Lorenzetti, and Visconti. He was a convicted drug trafficker who in 1938 was running a Franco-Chinese trading agency out of an apartment on the avenue d'Orsay for the purpose of purchasing arms for the Chinese republic. In February 1939, following a police search for narcotics, the affair was shut down, but not before it had "swallowed up" (the words are the Sûreté's) half a million francs of Chinese government funds without delivering one piece of merchandise.^[75]

Still others were simply experienced crooks who were lured to the arms trade by the big money to be made in China and Spain. Michael Dennis Corrigan was an example of the kind of confidence man who saw in the political struggles of the period one more scam to be worked for his own venal ends. He was also typical of the way that gunrunning, even on its edges, tended to alloy with secret service matters. Corrigan came to arms trafficking with a lifetime of swindles under his belt. He was Canadian or Irish, depending on which version of his past (and which name) he was handing out. He liked to boast that he had commanded an army of ten thousand rebels in Mexico in the early 1920s and that this adventure had brought him silver mines and oil fields in the Yucatan peninsula. The story fit well with his tendency to pass himself off as a highly placed official with major oil companies, a favorite confidence game that netted substantial amounts of money from a number of victims. One of his marks was a Romanian named Ionescu, whom Corrigan swindled out of half a million francs. When Corrigan later ran into Ionescu by chance in Nice he was forced to hand over money in bank drafts to get him off his back; but the next morning Corrigan,

back in high form, conned another fifty thousand francs from Ionescu and then skipped town, leaving behind forty thousand francs in debts to a Cannes luxury hotel.

To a crook like Corrigan the fat pickings to be gleaned from arms deals to China by the late 1930s were all but irresistible, and toward fall 1937 he was developing an elaborate scheme to defraud several arms dealers and, possibly, the Chinese government. The con, however, did not go as smoothly as Corrigan had planned, and in 1938 he was in trouble with British and French authorities, neither of them unfamiliar with Corrigan's practices. The facts of the case were difficult to untangle, largely because all parties involved were equally mired in shadowy activities and no one was prepared to tell the full story. Essentially Corrigan swindled two arms dealers, one British and one French, by posing as an agent of the Chinese embassy in London. The Chinese government, he told them, was having difficulties exporting arms out of Britain but restrictions could be bypassed and profits could be made if the two arms dealers could arrange a series of intermediary sales passing through France. To authenticate his representation, Corrigan was seconded by an embassy official named Mr. Chou, whose receipts and bills of sales were written on official embassy stationery.

The scheme fell apart when several crates broke open on the docks of Marseilles, disclosing not antitank guns or munitions as promised, but plenty of rocks. The French trafficker, who had paid off the British one, immediately created a row, and when the latter, who had paid off Corrigan and Chou, complained to Corrigan, he was told that acting on the counsel of MI5 the real shipment had followed a different routing to Marseilles but that four thousand pounds were still necessary to complete the deal. Meanwhile a police investigation had been triggered by the broken crates and a bill of lading listing "hardware, machine tools, and spare parts." When British detectives questioned Mr. Chou on the matter he told them that he had first met Corrigan at a surprise party and that Corrigan had later approached him with a list of arms that he could supply to the Chinese government. Corrigan, Chou said, had confided at that time that he was working for Colonel Kell, director of MI5, and that Kell was favorably disposed to facilitating arms purchases to China. On these grounds Chou had gone along with Corrigan's representations to the two arms dealers. Police, however, found this story difficult to swallow, particularly once they discovered that Mr. Chou held no official position at the Chinese embassy. More likely, they concluded, Chou was in on the swindle from the beginning. None of

the injured parties, however, was planning to sue, and no one was telling all to the authorities for obvious reasons.^[76]

People like Corrigan were colorful figures, but they were also indicative of how easily the milieus of criminality and espionage blended during the interwar years. Gunrunning, an undertaking shared by traffickers and secret agents, was one of the nexus points, so that Corrigan's masquerade as an agent of British intelligence, if ludicrous in the circumstances, was scarcely ill-chosen. Alongside the Spiros, Gardiners, and W.'s in files on arms trafficking between the wars, the police and Deuxième Bureau were gathering material on clandestine German arms shipments to the Soviet Union and Italian arms deals with the Ustashi. Later there were reports on the Cagoule as well as on intriguers like Battiti, whose shadowy projects bridged both milieus.^[77] This association of gunrunning with espionage was not unusual; it certainly had predated 1914. What was characteristic of the postwar years, however, was how readily the mercenary enterprises of the one spilled over into the intrigues of the other, so that crooks and traffickers and adventurers were increasingly drawn into the world of spies. Gardiner and W., but also Benny Spiro, whose freight forwarding partner, according to a "very good source" for the French SR, was trying to recruit ex-German officers to fight with the Riffians, fit this pattern.^[78] By the 1930s crooks like Corrigan took it as a matter of form to pass themselves off as secret service operatives.

War and revolution in China had much to do with encouraging these combinations. The arms traffic to China in the twenties alone was enormous. According to one set of statistics recorded in two French ministerial archives, from summer 1922 to May 1926 various Chinese armies and warlords had clandestinely imported 246,086 rifles, 18,654 pistols, 645 machine guns, 69,117,041 rounds of ammunition, 73 cannons, 69,548 shells, and 72 airplanes. Many of the dealers were career arms merchants, among whom figured a large number of Germans. But the Comintern was also supporting Kuomintang armies in the south, and forwarding military advisers, and thus Soviet or Comintern agents also figured among the middlemen and traffickers, or conspired with the professional traders and contrabanders to ship arms into China. In general the global ideological stakes attached to civil wars in China shrouded all arms deals to that country in the cloak of international intrigue, as would the Pacific war of the thirties when China once again became a mecca for gunrunners who, like it or not, found themselves smack in the middle of great power politics.^[79]

Spain sealed the connection. Nowhere did the crossovers come so easily and fully as they did during the Spanish civil war when gunrunning all but blurred the lines between spies, desperadoes, and run-of-the-mill bandits. War in Spain—long, large-scale, on the rim of Europe, and embargoed, in theory, from official arms shipments—was the arms trafficker's paradise, an "El Dorado" as one newspaper put it.^[80] Spain had all the virtues to satisfy the greed of the dealers. It was near at hand, it was accessible by land and by sea, and it was voracious in its appetite for arms and munitions. Moreover, the coincidence of war in East Asia inflated the incentives to move into gunrunning while the money flowed freely and indiscriminately. Networks and supply organizations developed for China could easily be shifted to shipments to Spain—exports to the two countries by the same dealers were not uncommon—while the existence of a competitive market on the other side of the world only intensified the bidding by the Spanish combatants.

In these circumstances hustlers and hoodlums of all stripes came running, scrambling to get in on their share of the plunder. Reading through the dossiers on gunrunners to Spain reminds one of certain scenes from literature, the shark feeding by the Pequod in Moby Dick , for example, or Willa Cather's tale of the wolves and the wedding party in My Antonia . Certainly the civil war in Spain was like a bad winter in Russia. The Spanish themselves played into the hands of the traffickers, especially the republic, which was desperate for arms and naive in its business dealings. In one instance the Madrid government paid eight million crowns for Finnish stocks that were totally obsolete. The head of the Finnish volunteer units was heard to remark, "We would have paid someone to take them off our hands."^[81] To facilitate purchases the Republicans established, under minimal cover, a central purchasing office in Paris located first on the avenue George V and then transferred to 61 avenue Victor Emmanuel III. Every day a familiar crowd haunted its corridors.^[82] Repeatedly the Republicans were cheated, so frequently in fact that one suspects word got around that they were just asking to be taken. Roger Maugras, the French representative to Stockholm and well positioned to observe a certain portion of the trade, wrote that there were so many shady businessmen of all nationalities turning to gunrunning that one could now speak of "a fourth international, that of the traffickers in contraband weapons."^[83]

Boats underwent name changes several times, picked up arms cargoes in Europe, transshipped these to French ports, carried invoices assuring the French that the destination was Greece or some distant land, and

then proceeded on to Spain in an illegal run for profit. In one hotel in Luxembourg an arms trafficker sold weapons to the Republicans while down the hallway or up the stairs another sold arms to the Nationalists. The police were not certain if the two were acquainted, although it is not difficult to imagine appointments later that evening or the following day with the clients from the opposite side. Among the flotsam and jetsam riding the fast money current to Spain were people like the former bootlegger Jean A. A failure in North America following the war, he returned to France to escape criminal proceedings only to eke out a difficult existence until the generals' revolt offered him new opportunities trafficking in arms. Then, forming a syndicate and cultivating connections with the Spanish embassy, Jean A. scraped together the means to arrange a delivery of one hundred thousand rifles to the republic. The Spanish government agreed and paid out a quarter of a million dollars in advance. But when a government representative was dispatched to oversee the shipment, he discovered that only seven thousand rifles had thus far been purchased and that only four thousand of these had been loaded on board the ship that was to carry them to Spain. The ship's tonnage, moreover, was inadequate for a cargo of the size promised by A. The contract was canceled, but Jean A. kept the advance and sold off his rifles, mostly to Palestine and Morocco, which was one of the reasons the French police were tracking the arms traffickers whenever they could. With the money he had swindled from the Spanish Republicans, Jean A. and his associates thus were launched on a career of trafficking in arms. They used the Spanish advance to purchase a boat called the Jaron that in September 1937 was preparing to sail from the Latvian harbor of Liepaja to Bordeaux with a hold full of munitions and several artillery pieces until Latvian officials inspected the cargo. The appearance in their harbor of a ship painted gray on one side, black on the other, and with a hasty name change so shoddily done that the old markings were still observable, had aroused suspicions. Despite these setbacks, police noted in August 1938 that Jean A. was living in a luxury apartment on the Champs-Elysées. His gang controlled a fleet of ships and trafficked in narcotics as well as weapons, fabricating whatever false papers they needed to carry out their affairs. The Spanish civil war wasted hundreds of thousands of lives and crippled a nation, but for some it was a most profitable enterprise.^[84]

Pouring into the trade, however, were also secret agents, clandestine organizations, and fellow travelers, driven by the conflicts international dimensions and ideological overtones. By 1937 the Soviet agent Ignace

Reiss was committing the greater part of his efforts to procuring weapons for Loyalist Spain.^[85] His boyhood friend and fellow agent, Walter Krivitsky, pulled operatives from England, Sweden, and Switzerland to organize arms smuggling networks to the republic. They established import-export firms in Paris, London, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Zurich, Warsaw, Prague, and Brussels, and procured forged clearance papers from the GPU passport section. In each agency a GPU agent, masked as a silent partner, oversaw financing and monitored transactions.^[86] With ease then, almost irresistibly, the two milieus—private trafficking and international intrigue—slid together. Maugras reported from Stockholm on the Swedish ship Lola , which a man named Ericsson had purchased from the Clyde Shipping Company in 1937. The ship had been refitted for speed and equipped with a modern radio system, and was being used to carry munitions to the Republicans in Valence. According to Maugras, whose sources were probably the Swedish police, Ericsson, who was making considerable money from this business, was also the director of the Nafta-Syndicat, a "former Soviet business operation."^[87] Two Greeks who were notorious traffickers worked through the Banque commerciale pour l'Europe du nord, a Soviet financial instrument located in Paris.^[88] On the other side, agents of the Spanish Nationalists kept a careful watch on Republican purchases. "It should be noted," wrote one police reporter in 1937, "that Franco's supporters abroad have built a complete spy network to prevent the transport of material to the gouvernementaux , especially by sea."^[89] Some of the agents were right-wing sympathizers whose devotion to the Nationalist cause ineluctably drew them to espionage and to the traffic in contraband weapons.^[90] Other agents were the arms traffickers themselves, who played both ends against the middle to squeeze what extra lucre they could from the cash cow in Spain. The Yorbrook and Allegro affairs were examples of how this was done.

The Yorbrook was an Estonian freighter commissioned to carry thirty million francs' worth of armaments from Helsinki to Loyalist Spain. The man arranging the sale was Josef Veltjens, a sinister figure whose full role in the Spanish civil war has yet to be disclosed. An air ace in the First World War and a former freebooter and Nazi party member until Hitler forced him out in 1931 on charges of corruption, Veltjens was an arms trafficker when the Germans turned to him to run weapons and high explosives to the Nationalists in Spain. Veltjens exported arms at the behest of the Naval High Command but he operated on the margins of official channels. By 1937 Hermann Göring, an old comrade

from the war and a personal patron and protector, was using Veltjens to run guns to the Republican side with the intention of harvesting some of the free-flowing Spanish gold for the Reich and, at a more perfidious level, of supplying defective or sabotaged arms to the Loyalists.^[91] The Yorbrook shipment was one of these shabby, subversive deals.

Because of the size of the shipment, and probably for camouflage, Veltjens recruited other traffickers to assemble the front money to complete the transaction. He turned in particular to a German émigré named Goldberg who had quit Germany for Paris in the early 1930s. Since his arrival in France, Goldberg had amassed a considerable fortune, supposedly through commercial and industrial investments but, in reality, through trading in weapons. Together with Veltjens Goldberg brought three other men in on the deal, although one of these was eliminated from the affair (and from his cut of the traffickers' 30 percent commission) when a crane boom fell on him on the docks in Helsinki. There was also a sixth confederate, a German named G. G. who was reported to have worked for German intelligence during the First World War and who had come to France in 1933 claiming to be a political refugee. The police, however, suspected that G. G.'s commitment to less honorable enterprises, especially fraud, had provided the decisive inducement to flee Germany. Goldberg introduced G. G. into the deal "to appraise the merchandise" and brought him to Stockholm where G. G. was to await a telegram summoning him to Helsinki. G. G. never made it. To cut him out of the deal, Veltjens denounced him to the Finnish authorities and then let it be known to G. G. that he would be arrested if he tried to cross the border. As a police official noted, the affair from the beginning was shot through with the maneuvers of adventurers deceiving and duping one another, even though each man knew that he could not sell out his associates without injuring himself in the process. Veltjens, of course, had other reasons for keeping G. G. out of Finland, although these were just as sordid as the desire to appropriate his share of the commission. Nearly all the arms in this shipment were in some way unusable, a matter Veltjens had kept not only from the Spanish, but, at least at the beginning, from his associate Goldberg. His plan was to complete the deal in Helsinki to collect his money, then to cover his tracks by seeing that the Yorbrook never made it to Spain. He planted a grenade in the coal stores of the freighter (warning Goldberg, who was to accompany the ship, not to go on board); when this attempt somehow failed, he informed Franco's secret service of the shipment and the Yorbrook's course, hoping the Nationalist navy would intercept

the freighter on its passage south. Neither scheme worked, the "vast swindle," as the police called it, coming to the attention of the Republicans who initiated criminal proceedings against Veltjens while informing Goldberg that his presence at 61 avenue Victor Emmanuel III was no longer welcome.^[92]

In the Yorbrook affair traffickers, one turned quasi secret agent, had colluded with Spanish intelligence. The pattern repeated itself in the Allegro affair, although here the connections were drawn even tighten The Allegro was a Swedish ship carrying another of Josef Veltjens's bogus arms cargoes to the republic. In February 1937 Nationalist boats intercepted the steamer five miles west of the cape of Villano and commandeered the shipment. Swedish police investigations into the affair revealed that the Allegro had departed Stockholm in mid-January 1937 for the port of Ornsköldsvik, where it was to take on a cargo of paper. Scarcely out of Stockholm, however, the ship had changed course for Warnemünde, where a man named Rosenberg, representing Veltjens's firm, had come on board; then the Allegro steamed on to Lübeck, the captain by this point admitting openly that the ship had been "'leased for two months' for special purposes." To mollify the crew for the dangers they would run in Spanish waters, he promised a special cash settlement (which he never paid; it was the crews complaint they had been cheated that triggered the investigation by the Swedish police). At Lübeck more than thirteen thousand cases of munitions "for Yemen" were loaded on board, although the real destination was the Spanish peninsula. All but one thousand of these crates were filled with bricks. At Lübeck two more of Veltjens's venomous associates came on board, and then the Allegro proceeded to Gdynia, where a representative from the Loyalist government embarked to inspect the cargo. Veltjens's men took care that he opened only the cases at the top of the hold, while the captain let slip, once the inspection was concluded, that it really did not matter because the run was a dangerous one and very likely the boat would be captured by the Nationalists. This astounding prophecy proved true, the captain having received instructions to steer a course for cape of Villano where the rebel forces would be waiting. Thanks to Veltjens's swindle and betrayal, Franco's army picked up an easy thousand cases of munitions, while the traffickers pocketed the Republican payment for the full load, interception by the enemy being a risk incurred by the purchaser. Without the grievance of the crew, the true facts of the case might never have surfaced.^[93]

Perhaps the only uncertainty in the affair was whether Veltjens (and

his protectors) had sold the cargo twice over—the second time to the Nationalists—or whether he was content to cede the shipment to Franco for an out with the Republicans. Both procedures were known to be practiced by a number of traffickers. French police had a list of several arms dealers whom they suspected of contacts with agents of the Nationalist secret service. Indeed Veltjens's collaboration with foreign agents was merely a blatant example of the liaisons that developed between gunrunners and spies in the era of the Spanish civil war. Goldberg was known to be closely connected with a man named B—zkii, who was officially posted to the Soviet commercial mission in France but suspected by French authorities of being a GPU operative. An arms manufacturer and merchant who sold to both sides was suspected of ties to German intelligence. A man named R., who had squandered a fortune in a dissipated life and had then, police believed, trafficked in drugs, was also suspected of running guns over the border to the Spanish Republicans. In late 1937 he turned up in Fez under very dubious circumstances, passing himself off as a French SR agent and carrying a questionnaire pertaining to French defenses in Morocco. French counterintelligence noted a liaison between an English trafficker named H. and "agents of a foreign political police" and had reasons to believe he was also in touch with Franco's secret service. One of his associates, another trafficker named V., was, in the opinion of an untried informant, an agent in the service of an unidentified foreign power.^[94]

Gunrunners, intriguers, and spies ran as a pack between the wars, particularly in the thirties when the Spanish civil war all but turned traffickers into the casual agents of intelligence services. To an extent the relation between gunrunners and espionage was representative of the way crime and intrigue fed on each other after the war. It is likely that a history of criminal organization in the interwar years would reveal a strong connection between the opportunities for illegal profit opened by the secret wars of the twenties and thirties—for example, the traffic in arms or in false papers—and the growth of illicit networks in other criminal activities. Criminals had contacts, knowledge, and combines they could place in the service of intrigue and espionage when the profits were tempting and the conditions were right. But the intrigues of the period also funneled money into illegal operations, providing the funds and generating the organizations and experience that could be turned to illicit enterprises like drug trafficking that were equally profitable and no more dangerous. One senses that criminals moved in and out of espionage in these years, dabbling, initiating, and aggrandizing

and then shifting strategies and capital back to their more habitual haunts.

Once in, however, they tended to reproduce the attributes of the milieu. The betrayals of gunrunners like Josef Veltjens or Jean A. were not much different from the spy baffles that were fought in the Spanish civil war. The use of double agents, sabotage, and behind-the-lines infiltration were standard methods of operation in civil war intrigues. They turn up again and again in the reports on terrorist activities in the south of France in 1937 or on incidents like the attempted hijacking of a Republican submarine, the C-2, in Brest harbor. Nearly all dimensions of espionage related to Spain—the tendency of its intrigues to spread to foreign soil or the involvement of ideological sympathizers—can be found in the files on gunrunners in the late 1930s. Perhaps it was the simple presence of gunrunners in the intrigues of the professionals that was the most telling replication. Gunrunners had little or nothing to do with the ferreting out of military secrets yet were deep into intrigue and thick with the spies because espionage after the war spread well beyond its conventional forms. There was to postwar espionage an imperial quality that reached out and encompassed more and more people and pursuits within the range of its clandestine activity. Much of this was conditioned by general factors, for instance, the lessons and experiences of the First Word War or the multifarious role of secret agents in the new political orders like communism. Yet it was tempered also by the nature of the conflicts that drew in the spies. In Spain, the professionals enlarged the scope of their mission. Agents like Reiss or B—zkii arranged money flows, procured weapons and volunteers, assured the shipment of cargoes. Others monitored arms purchases and ship itineraries in order to intercept or interrupt the stream of supplies to the enemy. Just as the military struggles in the peninsula were caught in ideological infighting, so that secret police crawled over the country and into bordering areas like the south of France, so too was gunrunning drawn into the intrigues of the international politics that hung over Spain. The result was a growing ubiquity to espionage, a tendency for spying to intrude itself into the lives of amateurs. Volunteers came to Spain to fight for a cause but found themselves implicated in the spy wars of others. The same consequences confronted the gunrunners. They exploited opportunities in Spain as ruthlessly as they could. However in so doing they too fell into the nets of the intriguers, enmeshing themselves in espionage affairs.

This sprawl of the milieu was one of its defining characteristics after

the war Spy catchers found themselves preoccupied not only with the professionals and their agents but with the adventures of marginal groups like gunrunners who, through the force of circumstances, were coming to occupy a more central place in the reports of counterintelligence agencies. Closer still to the heart of these files were refugee groups whose politics consumed far more police time and paper and whose advance to center stage in the international intrigues of the twentieth century was one measure of the distinction between the espionage of the present and that of the past.

In part the distinction lay in the fact that the refugees came out of the war and the politics that followed. It was the conditions of international life after 1918, the ideological divisions generated by the rise of communism and fascism and the fluidity or lack of finality to postwar settlements, that spawned the refugees and defined their politics. Causes, battles, enemies were, like the refugees, products of their century.

This did not mean that there was no repetition of refugee politics from the prewar years. Each period produced its sensational revelations about foreigners and the secret police who invariably followed. But before the war refugees were a police matter primarily because they were identified with radical political groups. After the war these concerns, if not diminished, were superseded by the tendency of refugee intrigues to get swept up in international politics and espionage affairs, which made the postwar refugees a very different security concern. The transformation conformed to the way nearly everyone after the war lived with the great events of their times, just as the spectacular stories created by the refugees became themselves a vehicle by which international affairs intruded on French consciousness between the wars. What the content of that intrusion turned out to be occupies the subsequent chapter. But here it should be noted that to a degree refugee plights and dramas in the twenties and thirties were simply a mirroring of a wider internationalization of life that followed the First World War.

A similar distinction, up to a point, applies to the secret police who were an inseparable part of refugee politics. How far the GPU differed from the Okhrana will not be determined until the latter's archives are more closely gone over, although Russian collaboration with French police before 1914 did not characterize GPU operations in France, nor was it likely that Okhrana activities were as widespread, subversive, or as closely tied into espionage as those of the Soviet organs following the war. German police operations abroad during Bismark's era appear

rather frail by twentieth-century standards,^[95] and their monitoring of socialist opponents was not comparable to the pursuit of racial and ideological enemies by the Gestapo in the 1930s. In certain ways it was the Italian police between the wars who seemed most similar to their prewar counterparts, although they possessed an intensity or violence and an ideological component lacking in the earlier period.

Most of all, the refugees gave intrigue a texture it did not own in the past. The history of interwar espionage cannot be written apart from the conspiracies and brouhahas of these people. Some of the most extraordinary tales and certainly the most preposterous characters emanated from their circles. There was almost something novelistic about their affairs, located, to be sure, at the cheaper end of the literature scale. Yet there was also a very serious side to their politics whose consequences were bitterly felt by the last wave of refugees that came in the thirties. Refugees made for good stories, but their intrigues accounted for a good deal of antiforeigner sentiment and for the wariness of authorities who had to decide who was innocuous and who was a threat. Making that decision would not be easy, because of the immersion of the émigrés in the world of the spies and because, like the gunrunners, refugee intrigues reproduced the features that typified espionage between the two world wars.

Among those commanding French attention throughout the thirties were the Ustashi, a collection of Croatian terrorists responsible for the murders of the Yugoslav king and the French foreign minister in Marseilles in 1934. The Ustashi evolved out of the politics of Croatian nationalism and its search for a solution to the southern Slav question that would accord a measure of Croatian autonomy. There had never been unity to this movement. Croatian nationalism before the war divided between a trialist solution within the empire and separation and federation with Serbia into a greater southern Slav state. The creation of a Yugoslav nation dominated by Serbs and without a federalist structure after the war kept the issue alive, but Croatian nationalists continued to divide between federalist and separatist positions. The Ustashi were the extremists, arguing for a policy of terrorism to disaggregate the Yugoslav state. They were never very numerous, and their willingness to collaborate with Italy in exchange for money and weapons precluded the possibility of building a mass following. Their terrorist strategy and their close connections to national enemies made them, however, a serious threat to Yugoslav security.^[96] There were, in the Ustashi, echoes of earlier Balkan secret societies, for example their connection with Slavic

emigrants overseas, their subjection to secret police surveillance, their choice of terrorism as a method of action, and their goals of national self-determination. To a degree, the Ustashi recalled the nationalist struggles in the Balkans that had preceded and detonated the First World War.^[97] Yet their style and their politics, particularly their ties to the revisionist objectives of Italy and Hungary, and later the Nazis, placed them squarely within the postwar scene. In their links with foreign intelligence services or, on a grander scale, in their absorption into the power politics of post-Versailles Europe, the Ustashi were representative of the role that émigrés could play in the secret war of the twenties and thirties.

Thus their terrorism bore the same organized quality that characterized all facets of intrigue after the war. To carry out assassinations or bombings of trains, barracks, and police stations, the Ustashi organized a recruiting service and ran special training camps where they instructed their militants in terrorist tactics and the use of explosives and weapons. The most celebrated camp was Janka Puszta in Hungary, where the assassins of King Alexander had trained. In addition the French and Yugoslavs collected plenty of evidence about other camps in Hungary and Italy, including one near Brescia where the recruits wore gray uniforms and led a soldierly life.^[98]

Their assaults could be systematic affairs, like the attentat in Marseilles, which was meticulously prepared. The principal actors in the gunning down of the king were Ustasha terrorist soldiers—Pospisil, Rajtic, and Kralj—and the Macedonian triggerman Georgiev delegated by the Macedonian terrorist movement IMRO, which, like the Ustashi, had irredentist claims upon Yugoslav soil and since 1932 had agreed to coordinate terrorist activities with the Croats.^[99] Operating behind the scenes was Eugen Kvaternik, who orchestrated the movements of the assassination squad. Kvaternik arranged routings, timetables, aliases, and the necessary false papers that would place the gunmen in the designated locations at the designated times. Initially he traveled separately from the three Ustashi, who began their journey with Hungarian passports, but he and Georgiev joined them in Zurich. The five then proceeded to Lausanne where the three Ustashi purchased new clothing, Kvaternik disposing of their old clothes in a suitcase that he checked at the train station. Leaving Lausanne, the team crossed into France, now using false Czech passports in different names distributed by Kvaternik and taking two separate routes before meeting once again in Paris. In the capital they again took precautions, separating into different hotels.

Several days later, Georgiev and Kralj were dispatched south, receiving from Kvaternik yet another set of false passports in still different names. Before their departure Kvaternik showed Kralj a picture of a man he called Petar and who he said was "our leader." The two men arrived in Marseilles on 6 October, rejoined by Kvaternik on the way, and from here they took a bus to Aix-en-Provence where they checked into a hotel to sit out the three-day interval before the kings arrival in France on the ninth. In Aix Kvaternik took them to a café where Petar and a woman were seated. On the eve of the ninth, Kvaternik told Georgiev and Kralj to go to the Hotel Nègre Coste at 7:00 A.M. and to ask to see Petar, who would give them weapons and grenades. At 1:00 P.M. they were to take the bus to Marseilles and "fire on the king." Then Kvaternik took his leave of the two men. The next day they did as they were told and assassinated the Yugoslav monarch and the French foreign minister. All four terrorists were captured in France, but Kvaternik made it safely back to Italy. According to a garon who worked in the Nègre Coste restaurant and who was later shown a picture of Ante Pavelic, the Ustasha chieftain and Petar were one and the same.^[100]

The Ustashi were able to train with impunity and to act with relative efficiency because they received powerful support from the Hungarians and Italians, who had emerged from the war with equally deep resentments toward treaty arrangements and with avaricious designs on Yugoslav territory. Both saw in the Ustashi a destabilizing element they believed they could exploit to serve their own purposes. Each got burned in the process, so badly after the Marseilles murders that the Italian ambassador to Yugoslavia went so far as to suggest the possibility of buying Pavelic's silence or arranging his "disappearance."^[101] The Hungarians, who had ruled over the eastern half of the empire and whose vast territories and populations were dispersed among the successor states, including Yugoslavia, after the war, were the most complicit with Ustasha terrorism. They permitted the Ustashi to train in camps on their soil, which allowed the dispatching of missions across the Yugoslav border, and they provided the Ustashi with necessary papers, including false passports. The Italians supplied the Ustashi with money, arms, and explosives and facilitated Ustasha infiltration into Yugoslavia by way of Zara and Fiume. Ustashi hunted by the Yugoslavs found refuge in Italy. As in Hungary, according to reports following the assassinations, there were Ustasha camps in the peninsula where combat units were readied for terrorist assaults upon Yugoslavia.^[102]

Part of the Ustashi's payback was information they traded with all of

their patrons. The Croats were up to their necks in espionage work. Gustave Percec, one of Ante Pavelic's closest lieutenants, handed over Yugoslav military secrets to Hungarian officers, including contacts with Hungarian intelligence. Percec had emigrated with Pavelic at the end of the twenties and resided first in Vienna and then in Budapest and at Janka Puszta. When his secretary and mistress reproached him for mixing in dangerous business, he told her, "We work for the Hungarians and do what we are told." What they were not told was, however, another matter. Percec retailed the same information he gave to the Hungarians to other intelligence services, communicating material via the principal Ustasha agent in Vienna, Ivan Pertevic (a former colonel in the Austro-Hungarian army), and via another leading Ustasha in Graz named Duic. According to Percec's secretary who worked for Yugoslav police, Croatian émigrés in Budapest, Italy, and Austria spied for the Hungarians, Italians, and the right-wing Austrian Heimwehr. Other émigrés in Berlin provided the Nazis with intelligence on Austria and Hungary. They received their information from Percec and Pertevic, sending back to Vienna what they knew about conditions in Germany.^[103]

Ustasha relations with their enemies were no less tangled or intricate. There was, for example, the controversy that arose over the role of Simonovic, the Yugoslav liaison with the French investigation into the Marseilles murders. Pospisil, one of the terrorists awaiting trial in Marseilles, complained about visits Simonovic had made to his cell. Simonovic said he had merely acted as an interpreter for French police investigators, and French police confirmed that Simonovic had seen the defendants only in their presence. A Ministry of Foreign Affairs note acknowledged that Simonovic had authorization to attend interrogations. But Georges Desbons, the lawyer for Pospisil, Rajtic, and Kralj, persisted in the protests against Simonovic. He said that Simonovic and one of his assistants, a man named Militchevic, had made earlier visits to the three Ustashi at Annemasse, where they had been held before their transfer to the prison in Marseilles. According to Desbons, Militchevic had gained entry to Pospisil's cell on 12 October, three days after the assassination. There he sought to extort from Pospisil a signed confession admitting that he was a communist and that the Ustashi were a communist front. He also proposed that Pospisil assassinate Ante Pavelic, in exchange for which Militchevic would guarantee his freedom. Pospisil refused, Militchevic slugged him, and Pospisil kicked Militchevic in the gut. The next day, Desbons continued, Militchevic re-

turned with Simonovic, who spoke soothingly to Pospisil and urged him to sign the confession. Militchevic played the bad cop in the routine, speaking roughly to Pospisil, saying he was a bandit, and threatening to beat him until he bled all oven Then he made a number of remarks regarding the private parts of Pospisil's mother, told him that he would "stick it up Pavelic's ass sans Vaseline," and boasted that he had killed Duic. When Simonovic left the cell, he told Pospisil, "Go ahead to prison. We will come back when you are more supple." This, insisted Desbons, explained the later visits in Marseilles.^[104]

Desbons does not come across in these files as a man of substantial credibility, and one is tempted to dismiss this story as a stab at bolstering a sorry defense. But the incident was typical of the conspiratorial labyrinths that developed when police closed in on their quarry. Double agents working for the Yugoslavs riddled the Ustasha organization. The most celebrated of these was Jelka Pogorelec, a bar dancer of considerable beauty who became the secretary and confidante of Gustave Percec. For eighteen months she communicated what she knew to the Yugoslav police until, sensing that her position was becoming untenable, she fled back to Yugoslavia where she wrote her memoirs of her adventures. Another police spy was the man named Kralj, or Malny, who had worked as a chauffeur for the director of the Sûreté générale in Belgrade and who was later to turn up as a member of the assassination squad. Kralj had been ordered to infiltrate the Ustashi as an agent provocateur, a task he carried off successfully until he recanted and went over entirely to the Croats.^[105]

With agents like these one wonders just how far Yugoslav penetration went with the Ustashi and whether police motives ended with the monitoring, deception, and containment of the terrorists. There is no answer to this question, just as the issue of Italian complicity in the assassinations remains a mystery. There was plenty of evidence that rolled in after the murders to implicate Mussolini and his government, but most was circumstantial, none was conclusive, and the largest bundle of documents came from the Yugoslavs who had reason to be tendentious under the circumstances. No incontrovertible evidence of Italian guilt will be found in the French archives. The presence of Ustashi in Berlin and past contacts with Nazi officials led to similar charges regarding the Germans, but these accusations were more easily discounted.^[106]

After 1934 the French continued to compile data on fascist intrigues and Balkan terrorism. In early 1935 the Yugoslav general staff passed on to the French military attaché in Belgrade information detailing the

persistence of Ustasha training camps on Italian soil. Croatian émigrés in uniform, according to the Yugoslavs, were still carrying out military exercises in camps in the Abruzzi, on the Lipari Islands, and elsewhere in the peninsula. Periodically over the next several years the French received warnings about Ustasha terrorism. Balkan nationals of all kinds—Ustasha, IMRO, communist—comprised a substantial portion of the people who turned up on the menées terroristes mug sheets that the Sûreté printed after 1937. Their number included people like Stephan J., who was reported to have left an Ustasha camp in Italy with the intention of entering France, or N., who was of Croat or Slovene origins and was "identified as a terrorist and is a member of the 'Special Soviet Service' created within the Italian police; his present address is unknown." At the very end of the decade there was a flurry of reports about Nazi and OVRA connections with the terrorists, particularly the tightening relations between Germans and the IMRO.^[107] The subsequent bloody role of Pavelic during the war is well known and does not need repeating.

Closer to home than the Ustashi, and considerably more numerous, were the thousands of Italian refugees who had fled Mussolini's regime and whose presence in France created difficulties for the police since the beginning of their emigration in the early 1920s. With the refugees came the Italian secret police. They infiltrated the fuorusciti with spies and informants, planted agents provocateurs who augmented the potential for violence on French soil, and, in the Italian police tradition reaching back before the First World War, joined the Italian SR in the pursuit of French military secrets.^[108]

From the clandestine battles of Italian refugee politics came a series of revelations, including some extraordinary ones, about émigrés in the service of the secret police. The most celebrated affair concerned Ricciotti Garibaldi (whose name echoes that of his illustrious grandfather), a leading figure in the émigré community who was also a paid agent of the Fascists. Sûreté investigations into the intrigues of Garibaldi led as well to Guido M., a police spy and agent provocateur who had penetrated Italian refugee circles in France. Like Garibaldi, M. was entangled with a Catalan revolutionary conspiracy that sought Italian refugee collaboration, indeed so thoroughly entangled that he was murdered by Fascist agents ignorant of his role as one of their colleagues. There was also the case of Claudio B., who had come to France in 1926 for his "anti-Fascist beliefs" and who spied on refugees living in Marseilles.^[109] Cases like these, and the more general identification of the OVRA with

military intelligence, represented an unfortunate legacy for refugees as police attention shifted, by the late 1930s, to a new wave of émigrés from the Third Reich.

But Italians and Croats were next to nothing in the secret worlds they created alongside those omnipresent conspirators, the White Russians. The debris of one era they were a model of another with their armies, their "defense center[s]," their foreign agents, and their spy networks. It was White Russian intrigues that in large part accounted for the persistently high levels of espionage after 1918 as well as for much of the tone that separates interwar intrigues from those that preceded the First World War. A note from the time of the Kutepov kidnapping (1930) remarks that Madame Pepita Reilly, widow of the notorious British agent Sidney, has entertained the general on the eve of his disappearance and that she is prepared to reveal the true facts of the case. The note goes on to state that Kutepov has organized a White Russian army in Yugoslavia to march against Italy should the occasion arise, and that the Italians have engineered his removal and murder. Kutepov's cadaver, it is added, can be produced.^[110] This was the sort of extravagance that enveloped the White Russians wherever they went, and it was typical of associations easily drawn between refugee intrigues and international politics following the war. As with the Ustashi, White Russians hitched their wagons to larger political stars so that reports on the Whites were sprinkled with references to the Nazis, the Japanese, Franco, and the Soviets.

With the latter, the connections were all but symbiotic. The revolution of the one had produced the exile of the other, and so intertwined were the two with each other's affairs that one could scarcely distinguish where White intrigues ended and GPU machinations began. Indeed the refugee milieu was so riddled with double agents and agents provocateurs that one might be tempted to believe that the White Russians were nothing more than a hoax perpetrated by the Reds. Again in such matters there were overtones of earlier battles when the tables had been turned and the revolutionaries were refugees, the Okhrana the hunters. Yet the difference lay not only in the episodes but in the milieus that produced them. In their execution and planning, Soviet sting operations and kidnappings bore all the markings of the well-oiled espionage organization for which there was no precedent before 1914. The Whites themselves had little in common with prewar revolutionaries aside from their exile and their conspiratorial politics. The revolutionaries lacked

the organized, military, and global character of the Whites, and they did not possess the international political connections that came with the postwar upheavals and territorial settlements. Prewar refugees conspired with one another, but that was not the same as espionage on an international scale. The antibolshevik emigration, however, was mired in espionage and international intrigues. From gunrunning to descriptions of intelligence services, the White Russian presence marks nearly every archival run. Out of this human wreckage, whose very existence symbolized the ending of one age and the coming of another, flowed nearly all aspects of international espionage after the war: its global dispersion; its confusion of perpetrators; its ideological content; its organizational tendencies; its fifth-column associations; and its storylike richness. White Russians alone did not make up the interwar spy word. But one cannot imagine it without them.

At its peak the Russian emigration numbered about one million worldwide. From southern Russia the battered remains of Wrangel's army, and anyone who could join them, evacuated by ship as Red armies broke through the gates of Sebastopol, Batum, and Odessa. Over one hundred and fifty thousand exiles fled in this way, their first port of call Istanbul or islands in the Sea of Marmara or the Gallipoli peninsula, although later most moved on to southeastern Europe, or Berlin, or Paris. Others crossed west into Poland or Germany, or were already there at war's end as prisoners of war, and elected to remain. To the east large numbers of refugees poured into Manchuria or straggled south to Shanghai, particularly after the collapse of the Far Eastern Autonomous Republic in 1922, while others, often small military detachments, fought their way out, living fabulous adventures but enduring unbelievable hardships as they descended south into Mongolia and the Gobi Desert and as far as Chinese Turkestan. Thus White Russians scattered throughout the world and could be found in any remote outpost of the globe in the twenties or thirties. Mostly, however, they concentrated in several well-defined colonies. Istanbul was the first such collection point, but for many the city was merely a way station until passage could be arranged west into Europe. Germany, especially Berlin, was a center early on, because it was close to home, because many prisoners of war simply crossed over from barbed wire encampments to German residence, because visas came easily, and—most of all—because life was cheaper there than practically anywhere else in Europe until the restructuring of the mark after 1923 changed all that and forced the steady

decline of the Berlin and German White Russian communities. The great rival to Berlin was Paris, but other major Russian colonies gathered in Prague and Yugoslavia, or in Harbin in the Far East.

Like all refugees the Russians regarded their exile as a temporary state of affairs. That is why few went on to the western hemisphere until the deterioration of conditions in the 1930s, especially in China, forced migration beyond the oceans in any significant numbers. United States immigration restrictions kept many out, and those who proceeded to Latin America in the twenties returned with such horror tales that other would-be adventurers remained put and endured life as it was. Kussian reluctance to migrate to distant continents stemmed even more from a desire to remain close to the motherland and from a denial that this emigration had anything in common with the mass emigrations out of Europe in the previous century: Conscious of their role as Russia-in-exile, they awaited their day of triumphant return and, in the interim, set about preserving what they could of their worlds from the past. They founded relief organizations, churches, newspapers, and schools, including a university in Prague funded by monies provided by the Czech government. There were Russian restaurants, hairdressers, shops, and bookstores. Between 1918 and 1928 over 180 Russian publishers established themselves abroad, about half of these in Berlin alone during the heyday of the emigration serried in Schöneberg, Friedenau, Wilmersdorf, and Charlottenburg and gathered in literary cafés, especially the Café Léon on the Nollendorfplatz. With the passage of time, however, came the sad dawning upon many that exile was a condition from which there was no escape other than surrender, assimilation, or death, and, steeped in memories, bitterness, and old age, they fought rearguard actions in the thirties to retain their sense of identity and to hold onto their young. Their story, therefore, was far from a happy one. Marring the emigration were all the political divisions and squabbles and the flights from reality that had brought on revolution and defeat in civil war and had flung them into exile by the beginning of the twenties. The one inescapable reality of their lives was their ruin and their struggle for survival. Amidst the samovars and icons was a terrible penury and the insecurities that came with a juridicial condition of statelessness. Many crawled their way out, but many others did not, the basic fact that, along with their craving to go back the winners, made their milieu such a breeding ground of intrigue and every clandestine activity imaginable.^[111]

Approximately one hundred and twenty thousand of these refugees

eventually found their way to France, which became the undisputed capital of the White Russian exile by the mid-1920s. Some went to work in the mines in the north and others settled along the Riviera, but the largest number congregated in Paris, in the suburbs of Boulogne-Billancourt and Vincennes, in the fifteenth arrondissement along the rue de Vaugirard, or in the seventeenth around the St. Alexander Nevsky Cathedral on the rue Dam.^[112] Most White Russians were poor and hardworking, finding employment in automobile factories or other semiskilled work. But there were also the taxicab generals and men's room attendants or practically every other stereotype that titillated French imaginations between the wars.

The Russians were birds of paradise, as one observer has called them,^[113] exotic and mysterious figures in a nation seeking color and release after four years of gloom. Ballets, restaurants, and tzigane music played to these needs, although for police the mysteries verged on the sinister side of things and the colors turned to raucous, discordant shades. Their White world was people like Eugne P., who was born in Russia in 1902 and emigrated to France in 1923. He sold bananas and shellfish on the street, then worked as an artiste at a place called La Bohème in the impasse Blanche. Later he found employment as a maître d'hôel at a series of nightclubs: the Caveau Caucasien, Eros, La Roulotte, the Enfants de la Chance (whose director had pioneered car solicitation by prostitutes and was known as an individual of basse moralité ), and finally El Monico on the rue Pigalle. At the last club he swindled the owner, suppliers, employees, and customers until the owner found him out and gave him the boot. Without resources he moved in with his mistress, a woman from Rhodes who worked as a bar gift at Chez les Nudistes. By 1938 Eugène P. was nearly back where he had started, the subject of expulsion requests by the Paris police.^[114]

There were worse types still, like the gunrunner W. or Eugène H., who came to France in 1924, living for a time an existence très mouvementée . He was, in many ways, the flip side to the balalaikas, a frequenter of the pleasure haunts of the capital and, in police words, one of those "foreigners of questionable morality capable of any job bringing in money" He was suspected of trafficking in narcotics and of selling arms to both sides in the Spanish civil war. His brother, who lived in Germany but remained in close touch with Eugène H., reportedly worked for the Gestapo. Or there was Paul D., another of those buccaneers cut loose by the war who pirated whatever profits came floating their way until, eventually, they drifted into espionage. His life followed

a certain epic pattern of the times, from civil war veteran to high roller to bust in the depression years of the thirties as a number of his enterprises went belly-up, not always under the most reputable circumstances. By the mid-1930s he was living off frauds, bad checks, and arms sales to Spain. As early as 1925 there were reports tying him to German intelligence. A decade later he was turning up in the reports on Jean A., Goldberg, and Veltjens, and there were suspicions he might be a GPU agent.^[115]

Indeed whenever police poked their heads into these clammy caverns they found no end to subterranean creatures. Few caught their gaze more than Zavadskii-Krasnopol'skii, or ZK., as he was known to contemporaries. A former czarist captain, he appears to have kept afloat in the postrevolutionary exile by playing the information markets for whatever they were worth. Within White Russian circles his reputation was appalling. One of the few complimentary remarks I have seen on him was Marina Grey's conclusion that he was probably not a Soviet agent.^[116] A police report from 1934 said he had tried to sell information on Russian exiles to the Soviet embassy and to unidentified Frenchmen. A later report, culled mostly from the muddy waters of White Russian correspondence, called him a louche individu and said he was "one of the GPU's most energetic, crafty, and dangerous agents" His White Russian accusers claimed he had been expelled from Yugoslavia because of his collusion with the Soviet center in Vienna. Someone, possibly Kutepov, who headed the White Russian veterans organizations in Paris, wrote that "Captain ZK. constitutes the leading figure in the 'mafia' . . . which has succeeded in embedding itself within the Russian emigration." For the French he was dangerous enough to figure on the menées terroristes list from 1937. Yet everyone who disparaged ZK. was willing to use him. With the support of Kutepov he set up an independent intelligence service that he called the RIS. Some of the money for this came as well from Commissaire Faux-Pas-Bidet, for whom ZK. worked as a police spy. Another backer was a man named Bogomoletz, who police believed was a former British intelligence agent and an operative for the Romanian secret police. The RIS itself was clouded in mystery. Kutepov's intention was to use it against Soviet secret agents masquerading as refugees, although some said it functioned mostly as a Soviet disinformation agency. Others said it was primarily a private intelligence bureau selling what it knew to the highest bidder, a description that probably came closest to the mark. For the police it was a "shady business:"^[117]

Nothing about ZK. was beyond suspicion and controversy. His role during the investigations of the Kutepov and Miller kidnappings was questionable at best. Moreover he was closely connected with an official but secret White Russian intelligence network that was run by General Skoblin, himself a Red agent and complicit in the disappearance of General Miller in 1937. ZK. and Skoblin met frequently at night in the small cafés that bordered the Gare Saint-Lazare. Whether ZK. was actively involved in the kidnappings was never disclosed, but few would have been surprised if this had been so. His associations did nothing to dispel the unrelieved distrust that clung to him wherever he went. One RIS collaborator was linked to suspects in the Ignace Reiss murder. Another RIS parasite was a man named Koltypin, who was described in these unforgettable terms:

Koltypin is essentially a contemptible individual, but he should not be taken for an important GPU agent. He's simply barefaced trash, openly selling all information and news that falls into his hands. He sells the Bolsheviks and the émigrés to the prefecture, the émigrés and the prefecture to the Bolsheviks, the Bolsheviks to Burtsev, Burtsev to the Bolsheviks, and so on. In a word, everyone and everything to whoever pays him. He has no hesitation even to sell his own overworked fabrications. Provocation is his life, his element, his sickness, and his sensual pleasure. When he is drank (and he drinks a lot) he says that he dreams only of outstripping Azef . . . and revealing "the true art of provocation." In a word, Koltypin represents a despicable human type.^[118]

Such are the samples to be scraped from the muck of police files on the White Russians. What they all held in common was their insatiable appetite for scheming and the way survival after the war so often steered one into world politics, albeit its seamier side. The war was the starting point, the source of their miseries as it drove them through the maelstrom of history. Then came the opportunities of the twenties and thirties, growth years for intelligence agencies whose never-ending scrounging for information and agents created postings and payoffs for men on the margins. Or there were the vast markets in contraband weapons that offered lucrative returns for people with little or nothing to lose and that led them, if somewhat circuitously, to the camps of the professional conspirers and back into the historical storms from whence they had come. Most of all it was their Russian origins, and hence their clanlike ties to the forces of world revolution, that made spies of the schemers between the wars.

The focus of White Russian intrigues was the Soviet Union. The counterrevolutionaries among the exiles kept their forces in order as

best they could, grouping civil war veterans in associations based on former military units. These associations then combined into national unions, for example, the General Union of Associations of Veterans in France or Bulgaria and these national unions in turn affiliated with an umbrella federation in Paris known as the ROVS (Rossiiskii obshchev-oennyi soiuz). Most unions were in Europe, but others were established in Asia and America. The French union in the 1930s claimed ten thousand members. The veterans represented only a part of the postrevolutionary emigration and for most ex-officers or soldiers these organizations functioned as friendly societies. Their leaders, however, had more grandiose intentions. They saw in the federation and the unions a means of retaining an army in readiness by preserving contacts among former officers and soldiers, even when these had dispersed to the four corners of the world. The leaders maintained an air of ranks and discipline in the unions, and they offered courses in military strategy.^[119] Their plan was to march back into Russia and overturn the revolution, but in the eternal wait for that day they engaged in a clandestine war of terrorism and sedition, sending sabotage squads into the Soviet Union and seeking contact with counterrevolutionary groups behind Soviet lines. In this they plotted and schemed as if they were masters at the game, but they were in over their heads and the Soviets played them for fools. The GPU struck back with sting operations and double agents that it infiltrated into every White Russian organization. In the 1920s the GPU mounted an undertaking known as "the trust" which lured a number of people to their deaths—including Boris Savinkov and Sidney Reilly—and badly compromised White intrigues from abroad.^[120] In the 1930s the GPU hit more deeply at the heart of their opposition by kidnapping and murdering Generals Kutepov and Miller, the successive leaders of the ROVS.

Kutepov disappeared on a Sunday morning in 1930. He was forced into an automobile at the corner of the rues Rousselet and Oudinot in Paris, and that was one of the few certain facts that police ever learned about the affair. Their best guess was that the car had driven to the Normandy coast where Kutepov or his corpse had been loaded onto a Soviet freighter; but neither weather conditions nor coastal terrain seemed to justify this conclusion and conflicting information disturbingly continued to filter in. Eventually the pursuit of Kutepov's kidnappers was abandoned, the full facts of the case remaining shrouded in mystery. Few people at the time doubted that Kutepov had been the victim of the Soviets, but no one could prove it. In 1965 a Red Army

publication acknowledged that Soviet agents had eliminated the general, an admission that was probably true.^[121]

Kutepov's successor, General Miller, met the same fate seven years later when he went alone to a meeting and vanished forever. Miller, remembering what had happened to Kutepov, had not been so foolish as to set out without leaving others the means to trace his whereabouts. He left behind a note, in which he confided to his aide, Kusonskii, where he had gone and that the rendezvous had been arranged through General Skoblin, another White Russian émigré. Kusonskii was to open the letter if Miller did not return by a predetermined time, but Kusonskii forgot and only when Miller's family reported his absence did Kusonskii remember the note written by the general. Kusonskii and another refugee officer summoned Skoblin to explain what had happened, a summons Skoblin complied with since he was unaware that Miller had identified his role in the fatal rendezvous. But once he discovered the cause of his summons, Skoblin managed to escape from Kusonskii and also disappeared into oblivion.

As the story broke, it was learned that on the day of the kidnapping a Soviet embassy van had made a hurried journey to Le Havre and had unloaded a box that was carried aboard a Soviet freighter, the ship then departing abruptly under irregular circumstances. French authorities disputed this version of events, but the matter was never completely cleared up. Because there were divisions in the émigré camp over Miller's style of leadership some people believed that he had been carried away by militant Whites with pro-Nazi leanings who doubted Miller's capacity for vigorous action and resented his caution over open support for the antibolshevik Nationalists in the Spanish civil war. Others suspected that Skoblin had removed Miller in order to secure command of the ROVS. Since Skoblin had lines out to the Soviets and the Nazis, any interpretation seemed possible. The truth was that the GPU, abetted by Skoblin, had abducted the general, an explanation that carried the greatest authority at the time. No one ever saw Skoblin again, but his wife, a celebrated Russian folksinger known as La Plevitzkaïa, was equally implicated and in 1938 the French brought her to trial. Convicted, she was sentenced to twenty years' hard labor, a punishment that stunned people by its severity.^[122]

These affairs were the most sensational ones produced by any refugee milieu, and they emerged from a cabalistic world both risible and lurid. Undeniably an element of burlesque adhered to these exiles. No one expressed it better than the pathetic figure of Kusonskii. Miller left be-

hind a note but Kusonskii forgot it. Later, when Skoblin was taken into custody, Kusonskii and his colleague retired to a room to discuss matters in private, allowing the culprit to slip through their fingers. When asked at Plevitzkaïa's trial to account for his actions, Kusonskii answered, "We thought he [Skoblin] had only stepped out for a moment (laughter)." According to one police witness, Kusonskii was a drunkard who during the war had been nicknamed Zakusonskii, a play on the Russian word zakuski for cocktail snacks. Some thought his actions suspicious and he was later deported. But police commissaire Roches, who had investigated the case, discounted these charges, saying Kusonskii was simply "victim to his incompetency."^[123] So were most other White Russian intriguers. Their ambitions were preposterous, their enterprises bizarre, their execution inept. They oscillated from supreme naïveté to supreme distrust, all the time accomplishing nothing except embarrassing themselves.

Some of their closest collaborators were Soviet agents, and their headquarters on the rue du Colisée were bugged with GPU microphones.^[124] Just how many GPU moles dug their way into the White movements in France was anyone's guess, especially since the urge to conspire was exceeded only by the compulsion to denounce. At some point in the interwar years probably every person who had once lived in Russia or whose name ended in certain three letter combinations had likely been denounced as a GPU spy by another person with the same attributes. The milieu was constantly disgorging weird, extravagant figures like ZK. and Koltypin or like Patti Gorgulov, who in 1932 assassinated the president of France. His fascist tendencies led some to suspect a Nazi connection in the murder, while the White Russian community insisted he was a Soviet agent sent to bring discredit on them. The man gave every impression of mental disturbance, and this was the authorities' conclusion, although the court judged Gorgulov sane enough to hang. Double agents, endless denunciation, grotesque characters, and the hopeless amateurism of people who sent secret messages about "traveling salesmen" through the mails was the White face of intrigue in the twenties and thirties. Even the police were provoked to contempt. There was no reason, noted one official, to believe that restless subordinates had done away with Miller:

given the complexity of events, the Machiavellian polish to the execution, the kidnapping of General Miller can only be the work of an occult group perfectly disciplined and organized and possessing powerful financial means. This is not the case with the Russian émigrés, lacking cohesion, self-devouring, scraping by

from day to day, and ethnically incapable, unless they have leaders, of conceiving and especially of executing a plot of this scope.^[125]

If nothing else, the White Russians in exile explained Red victory in the Russian civil war.

Yet one cannot dismiss the cold, hard, conspiratorial side to the milieu. Both the Miller and Kutepov affairs exposed one suspicious character after another, a horde of potential GPU spies, and the technical proficiency with which Communist covert operations were carried out abroad. Moreover, papers seized in the wake of the later kidnapping revealed how steeped the Whites were in conspiracy and intrigue. These papers were full of the workings of ZK. and his assorted camp followers. They also disclosed that Miller and Skoblin had been running agents into Russia largely via a conduit through Finland and in 1932 had made additional plans to send twenty agents by boat into the south of Russia. The agents were to stir up a peasant uprising, but the scheme never came off, money for the boat failing to materialize and Miller growing suspicious of his representative in Romania. Those emissaries who did make it through were almost always betrayed, costing the Whites dearly in dedicated personnel and in cash. The financial cost of infiltrating one agent ran to 5,200 francs in expenses. These included 1,000 francs for a guide, 1,000 for two weeks' preparation, 300 for shooting lessons, 150 for a passport, 850 for transportation, and so on.^[126]

Bridging GPU successes and White Russian failures was the figure of Skoblin. To this day he remains a controversial character. Everyone who has written on the Tukhachevskii purge has advanced a theory on the role of Skoblin as a liaison between the Soviets and the Germans in this affair, and there is no need to add one more unsubstantiated scenario to those currently floating about.^[127] No one knows the full truth about Nicholas Skoblin, although there is good reason to believe that he was a triple agent working for the Whites, Reds, and the Nazis and that he was ultimately loyal only to himself. Before the Miller disappearance he was already suspect in White Russian circles. In the early 1930s a refugee colonel named Fedosenko claimed that he had gone underground as a GPU agent and that he had consequently learned that Skoblin was a traitor. These charges had prompted an inquest by a White Russian court of honor (the preposterous side to these people always finds its way through), but the court had found Skoblin innocent of all accusations. Yet even for some time after this matter Skoblin was entrusted with the direction of a White counterintelligence network known as the

inner line. Kutepov had established the network in the late twenties to root out GPU police spies camouflaged as exiles. Its first director was a White officer in Bulgaria. Later Skoblin came to run it, apparently using the organization and its agents to spy on White Russians in France and abroad for his own nefarious purposes.

Since Skoblin was also working with Miller to infiltrate counterrevolutionary agents into Russia, it is not clear whether the inner line doubled as an espionage and sabotage organization or whether these were separate operations; police files on the line are often confusing in this regard. Nor is it clear where the inner line broke off and agencies like the RIS began. Obviously Skoblin and ZK. were using each other, but just how remains open to conjecture. Equally tantalizing are Skoblin's connections with what may have been a special murder squad made up of renegade White officers and utilized by the Soviets for special missions abroad. Elizabeth Poretsky, Ignace Reiss's widow, has argued that such a squad existed and was known to certain GPU agents in Europe. Skoblin was of course tied to Miller's disappearance. He also was in relations with Kudratiev, another White Russian who was among those identified as Reiss's executioners. Whether Skoblin was an organizer or merely an intermediary in these operations is one more unresolved matter. He was not, however, the only White Russian who worked both the Soviet and German sides of the fence. Another was a man named Von Petrov who served in Red Army intelligence but also spied for the Nazis.^[128]

Similarly the inner line was only one of a number of covert organizations run by the Whites. Wherever the French turned they seemed to unearth one more White Russian secret agent network. Grand Duke Kirill, they noted, had representatives spread all over the world and a "tightly knit network in Russia of connections and spies with codes, go-betweens, etc." This was almost certainly an enlargement upon the truth, but it was illustrative of the image Russian refugee circles tended to convey. Semenov in the Far East reportedly disposed "of agents not only in Asia but also in Europe." A general Monkevits, who had worked in Russian counterintelligence during the war, was placed by Wrangel and Kutepov "at the head of a network of secret antibolshevik agents." Later he defected to the Soviets. Some suspected him of complicity in Kutepov's kidnapping, particularly because he was "an excellent 'technical' organizer of the most difficult enterprises." Police were constantly struck by the resemblance between White Russian operations and the workings of intelligence agencies. Reviewing Miller's covert activities,

especially in the Baltic, one reporter remarked that the general "had established an entire espionage network in different countries in Europe." Another wrote:

In effect, if in appearance Russian veterans' groups, formed into friendly associations, pursue honorable goals of mutual assistance, their leaders are playing out a mysterious part, displaying all the characteristics of a Deuxième Bureau with its intelligence and surveillance services and operating in agreement with certain foreign powers.^[129]

The White Russians were the ubiquitous intriguers. Nearly every intelligence agency had its White Russian spies. They worked for the Germans, the British, and the Nationalists in Spain. The French used them in the Balkans in the early 1920s and then again in the late 1930s. The GPU employed them by the handful and, if French police suspicions were correct, so did Red Army intelligence.^[130] Nearly every battleground between the wars, clandestine or overt, turned up its White Russians. The Whites fought with warlords in China. At the time of the Rif rebellion in Morocco Wrangel proposed a White Russian expeditionary force at the service of Spain, an overture declined by the Spanish (perhaps they wanted to win). There were reports that Abd-el-Krim was recruiting White Russian mercenaries—typical of what one had come to expect of these people—but the reports were never confirmed and probably were without foundation.^[131]

In the 1930s White volunteers headed to Spain to fight with the Nationalists in the civil war. Just how many made it through has never been clear. Most likely the number of émigré ideological warriors was far from substantial. The Nationalists seem to have been reluctant to commission White refugees in their regular forces, in part because they knew that the White emigration was perforated with GPU spies. But Franco also placed agents among the Russian exiles to recruit still more volunteers. Among these was Elisbar V., who went to fight against Bolsheviks in Spain in 1936 and returned several months later when he failed promotion to the rank of second lieutenant. A former taxi cab driver, by 1938 he was living off subsidies provided by the rebels in Spain. There was also Dmitri D., who had come to France in 1927, plying his dancing skills in the tea salons of fashionable establishments and living as a gigolo through the extravagances of well-heeled women. In the thirties he too was identified by the police as a Franco agent, primarily recruiting volunteers to fight against the republic. At more exalted levels Miller, despite charges of caution, negotiated with Franco

for the admission of Russian volunteers in the Nationalist armies and sent an envoy, General Shatilov, to Spain to work out the details. Miller's disappearance in the fall of 1937 appears to have cut these liaisons short.^[132]

White intrigues thus spread across the political landscape, embroiling the exiles in every contestation or force of the day. The dispersal of the émigrés and postwar power politics made such connections inevitable. For the French, White Russian conspirators were most of all a plague because they brought Soviet agents onto French soil, but no less menacing was the fact that the two foreign powers with whom the Whites were most closely associated were, by the 1930s, Germany and Japan. From the early years of the emigration Germanophile elements among the refugees gravitated toward the most reactionary and radical counterrevolutionary circles in Germany, particularly those based in Bavaria. They penetrated the Ludendorff-Max Bauer group and through a prewar Baltic émigré—Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter—they developed early ties to the Nazis. The central figure in their intrigues was General Biskupskii, an adventurer and inveterate schemer. Throughout the twenties Biskupskii plotted to launch counterrevolutionary attacks into Russia. His contacts reached back to Bauer and the Nazis and later, in the thirties, the latter elevated him to the leadership of the Russian colony in Germany. He was a man distrusted by his own kind and held in contempt by the Germans, but in the 1930s his appointment to head of the émigré Vertrauensstelle , powerless though he was, reflected the coming to power in Germany of militant antibolsheviks.^[133] This change in German leadership and politics, combined with émigré fears after 1935 that the French were moving too dose to the Soviets, led increasing numbers of White Russians scattered over the continent to look to Germany for direction, an inclination the Nazis were not loath to exploit.

At the same time prospects of war in East Asia and Japanese overtures to refugees who had crossed into China exerted a comparable pull on the far side of the globe. In 1936 French naval intelligence estimated the Russian population in Manchuria to number at least one hundred thousand. Yet that was roughly the estimate Gabrielle Bertrand gave for the Harbin colony alone in 1932, and several years later when she visited the city she found it preserved the inimitable grouillement slave . And in 1938 French military intelligence placed the number of Russians in China at approximately a million and a half, although that figure encompassed practically the entire East Asian emigration from northern China

to Shanghai and Hong Kong and included Russians long settled in the region as well as those who had fled bolshevism since 1917. Whatever the actual numbers, the White Russians of the Far East were a sizable, motley, and potentially mobilizable mass. They were notorious for their fallen women and for their legions of soldiers and officers who fought for warlords from the Pacific to Turkestan or rode guard on the railroads that rolled through bandit-infested territory. Their ranks extended from rich industrialists and merchants to men and women who had rebuilt ruined lives after years of hardship and struggle to weary survivors—these last making up a vast reservoir of the wretched and poor whom military intelligence summed up as follows:

These have lost everything: country, fortune, dignity, hope in the future. They constitute a pitiful herd, one part of which, living off charity or the poorest of trades, is ruled by the sole question of where its next day's bread will come from, while the other shows no hesitation to resort to the most shameful expedients—even prostituting the women of their family—to hold onto at any price the poor remnants of comfort they are unwilling to lose. The youth of these outcast milieus must furnish, to whoever wishes to buy them, a recruiting base of agitators, tough guys, or secret agents ready for any shady job that one hesitates to entrust to regular organizations.

With Japanese penetration into Manchuria, purchase of the Chinese Eastern Railway in 1935 from the USSR, and then invasion of China proper in 1937, came efforts to enroll these exiles into a Japanese allied (and manipulated) anti-Soviet force. Many of the refugees despised the Japanese, especially those who fell under their overlordship in the north, but there were also dreamy hints of carving out a White Russian province in the Far East, prospects of revanche against the Reds, and, as the French were quick to observe, the sheer lure of giving the White Russians what they had not: "To this people of proscripts they offer recognition of civic rights and property, to powerless chieftains they offer subsidies and armaments, to former officers commissions, to their sons uniforms and military prestige, to the starving bread, and to the ambitious unhoped for positions" The Japanese, moreover, were not without collaborators among the military cadres or leaders of the émigrés. At Tientsin they worked through Pastuchin, attaching to him a major on the general staff of the Japanese SR. Most of all they resurrected the controversial figure of Semenov. Of Cossack-Buriat origins he had made his fortune in the Russian civil war in the east, rising mercurially through the ranks, fighting alongside Baron Ungern-Sternberg, and organizing a renegade White force in Siberia that had slaughtered count-

less victims from their armored trains aptly named the Merciless , the Terrible , the Master , the Horrible , the Ataman , and the Destroyer . His reputation among many Russians was of the worst, as a crook, a brute, and a man completely sold to Japan. By the 1930s, however, he loomed once again as a White military presence in the Far East, headquartered in Dairen and thoroughly backed by the Japanese, a fact obscure to no one. He too had his watchdog, a certain Colonel Onda.^[134]

In fact neither the Nazis nor the Japanese took the White Russians seriously. Neither gave a whit about a White counterrevolution and each had its designs on Russian national territory. For both, the Whites were a card to play, either to expand influence in areas where there was a considerable White presence or, ultimately, as a force to deploy against the Soviet Union. Each proved a difficult partner for the Russians. The Nazis played with Ukrainian separatists the same game as they did with White exiles, and their relations with the latter could blow hot and cold. Japanese rule in Manchuria could be brutal and merciless. The Russian refugees were not oblivious to these problems and especially in France they displayed reservations. But for militants there were no better alternatives, and, in each case, leaders had come forth as advocates of the German or Japanese option.

Particularly from 1935 on (1935 being the year of a Franco-Soviet pact), the French observed the drift of White Russian communities into the German and Japanese orbits. In the most garish reports there were rumors of White Russian brigades forming in Germany or of White Russian sabotage and subversion units operating in Russia in the event of a Japanese-Soviet conflict. The mission for each would be to cut communication and rail lines and to incite a general anti-Communist uprising.^[135] At a more down-to-earth level, the French tracked White generals who had thrown in their lot with the Germans or who demonstrated pro-German sympathies—Biskupskii, Turkul, and Glazenap among the former, Miller's successor Abramov (in Sofia) among the latter—and they watched for signs that the alignment with anti-Comintern powers, discernible among Russian exiles elsewhere, was working its effect among émigrés in France. There were times when they sensed that their own exile community was impervious to the emissaries coming from Berlin.^[136] But there was also a string of reports running throughout the thirties that pointed to dangers.^[137] Thus whatever the conclusion of informants or analyzers, the White Russians were people to watch. They might be sympathetic to the nation that had given them refuge, but they were also connivers and plotters and among these were elements that

were thick as thieves with the fascists. Altogether, the French did not know what to expect of Russian exiles in the event of war. However the impression left by the documents, and by practically everything else they discovered about these refugees, is that they looked upon that prospect with neither comfort nor complacency.

What is to be remarked, ultimately, about this milieu, is how cleanly it fit the patterns of espionage after the war and how thoroughly postwar conditions shaped it and gave it its tone. The Russian emigration was a seedbed of conspiracies and clandestine figures, a vast shadowland of grand ambitions and shabby realities. All this was so because of postwar unsettlement, because of the circumstances of the exile and an unrelenting commitment to counterrevolution, and because in a world awash with opportunities from gunrunning to selling information to tracking down spies, ex-czarist officers on-the-make were available and were most often the people to turn to. Their political adventurism fit into the wider pattern of intrusiveness by which the great events of the period pressed in on people and became an inescapable presence or fact in their lives. For White Russians who emerged out of war and revolution this intrusiveness was simply a norm; but it showed up as well in the way their politics were absorbed into the politics of others—Soviet politics, German politics, Spanish politics, Japanese politics—that is, into the greater power struggles of their day. Likewise White Russians revealed the flux of the period in their desire to reverse historical change but also in the range of possibilities open to individuals within their milieu. Before the war the riddle was, who worked for the Okhrana and who did not. A similar question plagued exile circles after the war, although now the riddle was compounded by combinations that took one to Sofia, Burgos, Tokyo, and Berlin. Skoblin's multiple connections, the varied speculation regarding Miller's disappearance, as well as the confusion over Gorgulov, issued from the mutability and interconnectedness of things after the war. As spies and conspirators, White Russians were forever building networks of secret agents and endowing their intrigues with an organized character that mimicked the postwar intelligence agencies. Their intrigues spread over the world, assuming like the international affairs of the period a truly global dimension. Their ideological politics ranged them alongside the Nazis and Falangists, just as their tactics of terror, disruption, and sedition reflected the turn to covert strategies during and after the war. They were, in certain ways, quintessential representatives of the civil war climate in which secret wars were fought in the twenties and thirties, and the suggestion that

they might form an organized strike force within the Soviet Union to wreck transportation and incite insurrection placed them squarely within fifth-column projections. For the authorities they were a possible danger at home, one more reason to regard all refugees with suspicion. Yet they were also a source of unending carnival and this too, as we will see, made them representative of moods and attractions and of the fascination espionage could hold for the French. They were, in short, anything and everything intrigue had to offer in the interwar years, typifying a wider milieu that in turn encouraged and explained them.

There were still other refugees without whose story no account of espionage between the wars would be complete. These were the Jewish and political refugees who fled Hitler's Reich in the 1930s. They came to France, and wherever else they could get in, under the worst of conditions, a decade of economic depression and intense politicization, that made them unwelcome at best and at worst the objects of hatred and fear. Few exiles would be victimized more by the century, not even the White Russians, whose stories of degradation and the profoundest of miseries must have run into the tens of thousands. Their worst fate would be reserved for the forties, but in the thirties these refugees were battered about, increasingly excluded from jobs and then from the most basic requisite of exile in contemporary times: access to papers and assurance of refuge. They were often the target of charges of espionage, and in fact the very conditions of their emigration drove them inadvertently to cohabit with spies. That in itself forces their entry into this history. Yet like White Russians, Italians, Ustashi, and gunrunners, they belonged to an age whose intrigues—real or imagined—direct us to larger historical matters. Thus far we have dwelt on the broadest of connections, the relation between the character of the intriguers and the character of Europe after the war. But there is also the history of interwar France, and how it is revealed through the history of spies. The German refugees provide answers to that question, and nowhere is that clearer than in the fact of their internments at the outbreak of war and what this says about the late Third Republic.

All the great democracies, it should be noted right away, interned individuals during the Second World War. The French interned enemy nationals; the British interned Germans, Austrians, and Italians; and when the war spread to North America, the United States government

rounded up Japanese residents and citizens. Yet the patterns were not quite the same. Unlike in France, internments in Britain did not come en masse until the 1940 spring offensives. Less than two hundred foreigners (out of a total of more than sixty thousand enemy aliens) were interned in Britain with the outbreak of war in the fall of 1939. Only after the first rash of German victories in the west and the circulation of fifth-column stories, now collected into a systematic explanation of Nazi success, did the British (and later the Americans) proceed to large-scale confinements.^[138]

The French did otherwise. In September 1939 French authorities rounded up and interned some fifteen thousand German and Austrian nationals, many of whom were refugees. These are the official figures although some historians have suggested that the numbers ran closer to twenty thousand. By mid-November the French had released twenty-five hundred internees, and thereafter the numbers declined still further as internees were liberated, organized into work battalions, or recruited into the Foreign Legion. Nevertheless the following May, when the German invasion began, many who had been set free were reinterned, now joined by large numbers of German and Austrian women.^[139] Thus between French internments and the others lay a critical difference in timing, a difference accentuated by the fact that French internments seemed to bridge harsh policies mounted against foreigners in the thirties and the persecutions of the forties when the Vichy government rounded up, interned, and then at German behest deported Jews to the Nazi killing camps in Poland. It is for these reasons that the initial internments in France have borne a heavier historical freight than their counterparts in Britain and North America. Set as they can be within a wider picture of crisis and retreat in the last years before the coming of war, they force the question of the extent to which the republic was sliding toward Vichy even before the first Panzer units broke across the Meuse.^[140] But the internments, even if influenced by anti-Semitism and a growing will to impose tough, exclusionary measures upon the foreign-born, were also conditioned by thoughts about security; indeed it is not irrational to argue that security is what they were mostly about, and as such they throw us back on spies and milieus and in turn on official reactions to each. Buried within the security records compiled out of the history of espionage since the First World War are reasons aplenty to explain the decision to intern. What these tell us, moreover, is that internments under the republic, if terribly, tragically wrong, were

grounded in experience and the administrative difficulties of police work as much as in prejudice and panic, and that they proceeded from ways of perceiving that were neither those of decay nor of Vichy.

The internments culminated nearly a decade of restrictive measures taken against immigrants. Unlike earlier emigrations, this one was greeted with reluctance, uncertainty, and even hostility almost from the beginning. The French record on taking in refugees was as good as that of nearly any other country, yet even in this land that prided itself on its traditions of refuge, the welcome extended in the very first months progressively ceded to grudging admissions and then restrictive measures taken against those allowed in. The Popular Front of the mid-1930s relaxed certain controls imposed by earlier governments. But the right-leaning Daladier government that followed in 1938 introduced new stringent measures (usually in the form of decree laws) that tightened border surveillance, subjected illegal entry to harsh penalties followed by expulsion, intensified the hunt for clandestine aliens, and provided for forced residence (and later the prospect of camps) for those illegal refugees who had no place to go.^[141] In early 1939 the collapse of the Spanish republic and the flood of hundreds of thousands of Spanish refugees across the Pyrenees resulted in the creation of concentration camps; although the numbers were so great and the concentration in a particular area so focused that the internments of the Spanish can only in a limited sense be seen as a prelude to the internments of Germans and Austrians half a year later. Indeed at times French authorities found it convenient to separate Spanish refugee issues into a case all their own.^[142]

Whatever the political variations over the course of the thirties, the collision of Nazi repression with closed borders elsewhere (and joining the French in this measure were all customary havens of refuge) had a devastating effect upon refugees. Those who could get across came anyway, only to find that their fate in republican France was no less precarious under the severe restrictions and penalties imposed by successive regimes, especially the tough decree laws of the last Daladier government. Suicides were one measure of the sense of entrapment that haunted anti-Nazi refugees. Already in the first year of the emigration, police noted a sad progression of suicides among prominent German émigrés. In 1933 suicides carried with them the note of despair. By 1938 they rang of fear and the impact of French official policy. There was the case of Emile Schwaetzer, an Austrian doctor who had fled to France in the latter year. Upon his entry Schwaetzer had received an

identity card good for thirty days and an exit and reentry visa valid for the same duration. He had then gone on to London hoping to arrange a right to residence and medical practice there (the latter would have been almost certainly unattainable in France). In England Schwaetzer encountered delays and could not obtain an extension of his visa. Terrified by the prospect of imprisonment in France should he return after the expiration of his visa, and learning that two relatives had been denied residence permits in France, he took his own life. Left behind in France were two young children and his wife, who entered a clinic for nervous disorders. One day after Schwaetzer committed suicide, another refugee, sentenced to six months' imprisonment for failure to leave the country, slit his wrists.^[143] These were only some of the suicides, and suicides were only the most extreme response to conditions of refuge in France. There are hundreds, probably thousands, of depressing stories to be found in the archives and memoirs from these times.

How far espionage and security concerns shaped the refugee policies of the thirties is difficult to measure. Certainly the overriding factor throughout the decade was the depression and the fear that refugees would compete for a scarce and shrinking allotment of jobs. Moreover, French authorities were beset by all sorts of anxieties regarding refugees from Central and Eastern Europe. They worried that anti-Nazi refugees could endanger Franco-German relations. They feared that the Germans and Poles were dumping their "undesirables" upon them, a term that ranged in its shadings of meanings from criminal elements to communists and Jews.^[144] And tormenting French imaginations in the late 1930s was the specter of millions of Jews in Poland, Hungary, and Romania who were under jeopardy of forcible expulsion should liberal nations like the French display a willingness to take in all of the oppressed.^[145] The problem is how to separate one factor from another. There were always deep reservoirs of anti-Semitism and xenophobia in France, rising or dropping roughly in concordance with the country's economic fortunes. Certain of the security provisions that came with the decree laws—for example, forced residence and surveillance—were introduced to compensate for the fact that not all refugees could be deported. The 2 May decree law sought to root out clandestines, yet it can also be read as a series of tough measures to keep new refugees out by demonstrating that illegal entries would be prosecuted. Any of the above anxieties can explain its motivations.

But it is also clear that the discussion of what to do about refugees never strayed very far from the issue of spies. Spy novelists, spy "ex-

perts," mass dailies and weeklies all played up the theme of the fake refugee spy.^[146] There is no reason to assume that state policy was swayed by these allegations, nor is it necessary—even if the means were available—to show a cause and effect relation between public opinion and administrative practice. From the first months of the anti-Nazi emigration, security officials raised on their own the possibility that secret agents disguised as refugees figured among the genuine émigrés. lean Belin, a commissioner with the Sûreté, later wrote:

We had to look on every German in the country as a potential spy or at least agent of the Nazi party. It did not matter how insistent he was in his anti-Hitler sentiments. We soon found out that some of the seemingly innocent refugees were the most dangerous. There was the additional complication that even those who did not wish to work with the Nazi warlords at home were forced to do so through fear of retaliation on their relatives if they persisted in refusal to collaborate.

These sentiments appear to have been fairly widespread within the police and security ministries. They can be plotted from a memo as early as June 1933 through official reasons given for refugee internments. So ingrained was the fear that refugees could be foreign agents that even those internees permitted to depart for North America in the late fall of 1939 were kept under military guard until their embarkation and were allowed to sail only on French or English ships "to prevent . . . these foreigners, once they have left our territory, from making their way to another continent from where they will more easily be able to return to Germany."^[147]

It is not difficult, therefore, to trace throughout government records persistent fears of refugee or fake refugee spies, nor even to show that refugees were interned for security reasons. The more puzzling matter is why officials of the Third Republic came to identify men and women who had fled persecution as potential or real security threats and why thousands were corralled on the presumption that some might be enemy agents.^[148] The answers surrendered by the security files are wide ranging and surprisingly complex.

For one thing the police were not decidedly unsympathetic to the plight of refugees, nor was there an unambiguous determination that German refugees constituted a threat to the state. There were people within the police who accepted at face value the anti-Nazi sentiments of the émigrés and who placed these thoughts in written notes in the early stages of the emigration in 1933 and toward its dose in February

1939.^[149] The police could side with émigrés when describing incidents of provocation and violence, and they could pierce beyond their mission of control to the personal tragedies of people cast adrift in an inhospitable world. There is, for example, the following report, written in March 1939 by an unidentified official with the Paris police, describing the predatory circles descending upon helpless refugees. Touts and canvassers, he notes, sweep through train stations and cafés and hang about consulates looking for émigrés with no place to go. When they hit upon a mark they direct him to their contacts who, for a fee, promise papers and transit visas for foreign lands. In cahoots with both are tourist and emigration agencies, some of these legitimate businesses, that can arrange transportation for the émigrés the touts and contact men steer their way. All three collaborate in this veritable industry of emigration and each extracts what money they can from the hapless refugees. None loses a moment of sleep over whether they will ever deliver the goods. It is, for the writer of the report, a sad and almost scandalous story where refugees figure as innocent victims. "The serious political and religious persecutions to which nationals of several neighboring countries have been subjected, has enabled numerous intermediaries of a sorry morality to reap a profit." That is the note on which the report begins. Organizations, the official goes on, have appeared for the express purpose of exploiting the refugees. As for the latter, "one can only with difficulty blame the refugees for accepting the services of these unscrupulous intermediaries, because for them the only thing that counts is the possibility of flight and life. And it is well-known that these shady contacts succeed where individuals and international conferences fail."^[150]

There are, of course, other reports with very different sentiments, but what matters is the mix of reporting, or the mitigating edge, that turns up in these files. The French police in the thirties demonstrated no clear-cut, unqualified prejudice against refugees. What they did express clearly was a frustration with the inconsistency and confusion that accompanied administrative edicts and impromptu decisions. From an executive point of view, French refugee policy in the thirties was a mess. Under the regime of the decree laws, police resources were taxed to the limit. Worse, every new measure handed down from above created gray areas or unenforceable conditions that placed police in exasperating and, at times, ridiculous positions. Aggravating the situation were the frequent interventions in individual cases that provided short-term reprieves from prosecution or expulsion or that requested counterenquiries be-

fore imposing penalties, all of which, incidentally, were an indication that republican legal protections, if bruised, were not withered or dead. Compounding matters further were the deep stalls that certain Eastern European consulates went into when asked to process passport renewals for their Jewish nationals, the intervening delay in turn triggering still more reprieves. Thus police found that they were operating in a welter of incoherence and that they were arresting the same people over and over again, a misery for refugee and police alike. Some refugees were arrested by police as many as half a dozen times, all on the same infraction, and still had their cases pending in the spring of 1939.^[151]

Even when authorities toed a rigorous line and insisted upon the expulsion of clandestine émigrés, they could be asking the impossible. The Sûreté's special commissioner at Pontarlier near the Swiss border, fed up with escorting expellees out of French territory only to have the Swiss drive them back on his doorstep—the Swiss would accept only their nationals—told the following story of an expelled Hungarian. Try as he might the commissioner could not push the man across into Switzerland. Three or four times he and his Swiss opposite batted the Hungarian back and forth across the frontier. The only way he was able at last to get the Hungarian off French soil was to get him a job with a wild animal act that was passing through Pontarlier on a special train headed for Sweden. The lion tamer agreed to hire the Hungarian to clean up after the animals. They placed the man in a cage with eight lion cubs as the train rolled over the border and dared the Swiss gendarmes to inspect his papers. The Swiss this time looked the other way. Pouring out his frustrations with a policy so muddled that he was forced to resort to this kind of charade, the commissioner noted that such an improvisation could scarcely constitute a general rule of action and, in any case, was, in that trenchantly dismissive French phrase, inadmissible . In the future, he advised, if the authorities were earnest about expelling foreigners not in possession of Swiss citizenship, they would do well to direct them to some frontier post other than Pontarlier.^[152]

But then what commissioner would want them? This was a tone of exasperation that rang through police reports on refugee policies. Faced with discharging unpleasant and unenforceable duties, the police pleaded for clarity and simplicity in their administrative instructions. Reading through these reports one senses that there was always an element of the Gordian knot about the internments, combined with an Alexandrian desire to slice through the tangle of confusion and hypocrisy and create clear, easy solutions to the refugee issue. Treating people

as categories and giving absolute priority to national security was one way out, especially in times of emergency. For the refugees this was scarcely an improvement in their lot, but if it gave the police what they wanted, it did so on grounds of administrative expediency and not those of bias and hateful revenge.

Nor were internments or crackdowns against foreigners new. The search for clandestines, the descents into hotels, the verification of papers, and the push back across borders that characterized immigration policy in the thirties had all occurred in the presumably more tolerant twenties. On the night of 24 April 1925 the Paris police checked five hundred foreigners in various hotels and cafés in the nineteenth arrondissement. Over several nights in late April and mid-May of that year they returned to the same quarter, sweeping through thirty-five hotels and six bars and verifying the papers of two thousand foreigners and five hundred Algerians. On 10 February 1927 they descended upon the hotels of the rue des Rosiers, the rue Quincampoix, and the rue Simon-le-Franc. Dragnet operations like these appear to have been fairly common in the mid-to-late 1920s. Between 1 January 1927 and 28 February 1928 the Paris police initiated expulsion and refoulement proceedings against 1,808 individuals. During the years 1920-1933 deportation cases averaged 566 per month.^[153] In the following decade the numbers would grow, and the personal tragedies would magnify, particularly as refugees who would have formerly been welcome were now among those hiding without papers. But police actions against immigrants and the vigorous pursuit of clandestines preceded the restrictive policies of the thirties.

Moreover, projects for the internment of foreigners in the event of war were nearly as old as the republic. In the late 1880s officers on the general staff and in the Ministry of War contemplated concentrating tens of thousands of enemy nationals in camps in the first days of wartime. Over the next twenty-five years a series of blueprints, drafts, and instructions refined and revised these proposals, primarily in two ways. First more thought was devoted to the logistical difficulties of moving and controlling large numbers of civilians in a period of general mobilization. Pragmatism and methodical planning forced modifications in the perception of what could be done. Second, a ruling by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1906, contested unsuccessfully by the Ministry of War, accorded enemy nationals the option of leaving French territory following the outbreak of war. Those who could make it across the border in the first day of mobilization were free to go. Others who wished

to leave would be concentrated in grouping centers and then evacuated to the interior until sufficient transport could be spared to take them abroad. In certain parts of France, enemy nationals who did not wish to leave would be permitted to remain where they lived. Others in the east and in Paris and Lyons were to be evacuated to designated areas, although not interned. The trend therefore was toward more practical, less Draconian measures. The assumption, nevertheless, that foreign nationals would be "excellent enemy intelligence agents" and that "over the entire compass of France it is essential to prevent foreigners from causing harm, provoking disorders, or hindering mobilization" remained the basic impulse behind the drafts and directions, and even within a more tolerant framework the French were still contemplating on the eve of the First World War the movement, surveillance, and control of large numbers of foreigners resident in France.^[154]

With the reality of war came the end of restraints. Nearly all the machinery that was to be set in motion in the fall of 1939—internments, concentration camps, sorting commissions—was pioneered in the First World War. By mid-September 1914 the government ordered the incarceration in concentration camps of all German and Austrian civilians in France. Temporizing measures followed as the authorities worked their way through the exceptions. Among those liberated were enemy nationals with a son or husband in the French army and Austrian subjects of Czech, Serb, Croat, or Bosnian origin. Alsatians posed a special problem. There were Alsatians who had resided in France before 1914, others who had crossed over from Germany following the declaration of war, and others living in territory the French reoccupied in the first days of fighting. The French evacuated all three groups in the summer of 1914. Some—those of longstanding Francophile sentiments or with a family member under arms—went free, but many ended up in special depots and not infrequently were interned with the Austrians and Germans. In November the government appointed a commission to visit the depots and camps and to sort out those Alsatians loyal to France.^[155]

Later, reviews of foreigners excluded from general internment orders and a 1915 law authorizing denaturalizations of citizens of Austrian and German origins led to further internments. The records of a commission on foreigners that deliberated throughout 1916 on who was entitled to a permis de séjour (or residence permit) and who should be interned extend for nearly two hundred pages, usually with several cases to a page. Among the cases the commission heard were those of Charles E. and a man named Lerche. Charles E. had been born in Hamburg of

a German father and a French mother. For thirty-six years he had lived in France. He had married a Frenchwoman, had renounced his German citizenship, and shortly before the war had applied for naturalization. Nevertheless, on the basis of a letter written by the mayor of his town, he had been interned in a concentration camp. Lerche, of Austrian origins, had lived in France since 1887. He had become a naturalized citizen on 30 August 1914 but was then denaturalized the following year and sent to a camp. With two sons serving in the French army he had managed to gain his release; the question for the commission was whether he was entitled to retain his permis de séjour . In another case a seventy-two-year-old German, born in France, married to a Frenchwoman and with a nephew in the army, was the subject of an evacuation order (it is not clear whether it had yet been carried out). The Ministry of Justice was not even certain that the man was not a French citizen.

The commission, whose members included representatives of the Ministry of War and the police, as well as prominent individuals like Emile Durkheim, found this case regrettable, as it did those of Charles E. and Lerche. In general it made a sincere effort to winnow out from the list of suspects individuals who had demonstrated their fidelity to France. Even a person like Marie K., a German by origin but the common-law wife of a French soldier, was, in its eyes, entitled to a permis de séjour . But for all its judiciousness the commission could not prevent internments nor did it question their legitimacy. Its deliberations reflected the basic contradiction of mass confinements under any republican regime: the inability to mediate between democratic traditions and emergency security measures whose very adoption generated a momentum all their own and yet the persistent effort to do so with reviews and exclusions predicated on standards of rationality and fairness.^[156] In 1939 the Third Republic would fail just as miserably in its attempts to find a way between exaggerated security needs and respect for individual liberties. To a large extent it would follow the same pattern it applied in the First World War, rounding up categories of people and then processing the exceptions and exclusions.^[157]

Thus the internments of 1939-1940 had a long history behind them. When the Great War came to a close, republican governments picked up where they had left off in 1914, turning out contingency plans for the surveillance, repatriation, and internment of foreigners in the event of a war. By 1926 the blueprints called for the internment of male enemy nationals between the ages of seventeen and fifty upon the outbreak of hostilities, and the evacuation of the remaining men, women, and chil-

dren to concentration camps pending repatriation (this latter measure was later revised to residence under surveillance). Thirteen years later officials produced an elaborate chart outlining measures to be taken against enemy nationals, political refugees, and stateless persons in "a period of tension or mobilization," most of the first two categories destined for some form of incarceration or surveillance.^[158] On the one hand it was a chilling foreshadowing of the persecutions that would come in the succeeding five years. On the other, it was only the most up-to-date version of a long line of projects that extended back to the late 1880s and whose instructions had been executed twenty-five years earlier. Under these circumstances perhaps what mattered most about the internments was the purpose for which they were intended and used. In the Third Republic they represented a more fragile side to civil liberties in France, but their design and application in the late 1930s was no more a step into Vichy than they had been in the First World War or at any time since republican authorities had begun toying with the prospect of mass confinements.

To police frustrations and the history of internments must be added the security climate on the eve of the war. Not astonishingly the roundups occurred amidst a mounting disposition to ferret out spies. Visions of the ubiquitous spy gripped officials throughout civil and military service. Jean Dobler's frantic appeals to keep German priests out of Ecuador^[159] were only the extreme version of the Quai d'Orsay's more diplomatic requests that the Vatican clear missionary expeditions in advance. Elsewhere the Quai was obliged to clean up the mess left behind by navy commanders who were grabbing people right and left off passenger ships. Any German on the high seas—refugee, priest, negotiated repatriate—was a target of naval vigilance. In February 1940 the colonial authorities in Oran arrested and interned eleven Germans who had arrived on the Duchessa d'Aostia bound for Genoa. Eight came from Tanganyika, three from Nigeria, and all traveled with a British safe passage as part of an exchange agreement with the Germans. Again the Ministry of Foreign Affairs had to intervene to set the men free.

In France civil authorities were obsessed with defeatists and subversives. There is a fat dossier in the F60 series of the Archives nationales filled with cases of people investigated or imprisoned for running off at the mouth. Some were communists and some made truly inflammatory remarks. Others simply let loose after too much to drink (the débit de boissons or public house figures frequently in this file), denouncing the war and calling Daladier a salop, an enculé , a con , or other choice phrases.

The penalty for this kind of talk could be eighteen months in prison and several thousand francs in fines. Foreigners not subject to internment were wise to keep their mouths shut, no matter what the provocation. Jacques R., an Italian traveling between two factories on 26 May, learned this the hard way. Forced off the road after his bike had a flat, he blew his top at a French passerby who loaned him his pump but then, intrigued by R.'s accent, asked for his name and country of origin. "I've descended by parachute" R. shouted back. "We are very numerous. We are going to blow up the arms factory and destroy Châtelle-rault. . . . Long live Hitler! Germany over all." God only knows what the Italian had endured down to that point before going off the deep end, but such talk was idiotic under the circumstances. The Frenchman alerted the authorities, who arrested Jacques R. What sentence he received—and almost certainly he received one—is not recorded.^[160]

It is perhaps in this light that one must contemplate the run of bulletins that began to pour in as war tensions heated up in 1939 and then carried over into the following spring: terrorist agents sent into France with explosive and incendiary devices concealed within thermos bottles, gas cans, fountain pens, Faber brand pencils, or false briquettes; two men and a Hungarian dancer traveling under false papers from Argentina to Europe for the purpose of sabotaging French ships; thirty Czech nationals recruited by the Gestapo for missions abroad, especially in France; Italian spies and saboteurs carrying small Gillette shaving kits fitted with coding instructions hidden among razor blades (this from the arrest and interrogation of several Italian agents); terrorist attacks to demoralize and cripple mobilization (accompanied with details on timetables); army counterintelligence assertions that the Gestapo and OVRA "have organized in our country and in French possessions a network of agents of unparalleled breadth"; a man named Lambert recruited by the Comintern in conjunction with the Gestapo to sabotage Allied shipping; Romanian Iron Guard agents trained in Germany for missions of sabotage and terror (this forwarded with accompanying pictures by the Romanian Sûreté in December and again with detailed reports on nineteen Romanian terrorists the following April); enemy sabotage plans targeting French gasoline depots; communist saboteurs, "motivated by ideology and unaware that Germany controls the stakes," run by German spy masters working out of Trier, Aachen, and Freiburg; and then in March 1940 the Polish high command report on "sabotage and parachutist descents."^[161]

How many of these bulletins can be taken on face value is difficult to

say. Almost certainly many were fabrications or rumors, the product of the same impulses that later drove peasants with pitchforks to surround French airmen who descended from the sky or incited a series of sightings of priests and nuns in hobnailed boots. Some were unsubstantiated by subsequent police checks and some were probably the result of confusion; for example, the reports on Iron Guard saboteurs may have simply scrambled intelligence on Volksdeutsch Romanians whom the Abwehr had recruited for special operations along the Danube.^[162] Still, given what we know about French penetration of German intelligence or French rating procedures of their informants, there is no reason to assume that French counterintelligence had gone completely haywire or that all of these alerts were false alarms. Some of the reporting was highly detailed and in at least one case was based on intelligence from captured agents. The one thing that does seem clear is that the French authorities on the eve of the war were primed for a new secret service offensive, although interpretation of even that perspective is clouded by uncertainty as to whether this reflected a surrender to spy mania or a coolheaded retrospective on what had accumulated in the files over the past twenty-five years.

Under any circumstances a spy alert would have placed refugees in a difficult position, and it is here that the history of espionage since the First World War is most revealing about why men and women who had fled from the Nazis were identified nevertheless as a security threat. A hunt for secret agents would, by its very nature, bode ill for people whose foreignness was all too apparent. But counterespionage officials had other reasons beyond atavistic instincts for dwelling on refugees as potential suspects. It has been noted by one historian that foreigners represented the overwhelming majority of persons listed on the Carnet B by 1936.^[163] Following the record that police had been collecting on foreigners and refugees since the First World War, one finds nothing surprising in this statistic.

Foreigners, for instance, constituted the principal subjects of the menées terroristes mug sheets first printed in 1937.^[164] The genesis of these lists is not known, but there is no indication of a general administrative call for the naming of suspects. Most of those who appeared on the sheets seem to have been identified by foreign police or to have crossed over from earlier files on individual cases. State visits elicited some lists and others were general annual musters, but there was also a list on Ukrainian émigrés to be watched, particularly those with German connections.^[165] The multiplication of lists and sheets typified the problem

that the interwar spy milieu posed for refugees from Hitler's Third Reich: more than its organizational expansiveness or even its turn toward covert operations, the milieu's uncontained sprawl directed suspicions toward German refugees. For twenty years the police and SR had compiled dossiers on refugees tainted by espionage or by dubious liaisons with foreign powers. Sensational events like the Marseilles assassinations or the Kutepov-Miller kidnappings had led them to refugee milieus so mired in intrigue that at times it was difficult to tell who was a secret agent and who was not. Refugees had plotted and conspired and built secret networks. They had raised the specter of cooperation with national enemies and they had joined their enterprises to those of foreign secret services.

Two decades of refugee affairs like these had the power to cast suspicion over all émigrés. The most prominent intriguers, the White Russians, were under close surveillance throughout the thirties. The French expelled some White Russians in the late 1930s and in 1939 they interned others in Le Vernet, the concentration camp reserved for the most dangerous cases.^[166] If, however, they refrained from mass roundups of Russians, it was likely to have been for the same reasons that they did not touch the Italians: France was not at war with their homelands, their numbers were too great, and their communities had been well established in France for many years.^[167] To a certain extent the misfortune of Jewish and German political refugees was that they suffered not only from their association with other refugees but from their vulnerability. Few had developed roots in France, they were too many to sort out before hostilities but not too many to intern, and they came from the wrong country.

Milieu and vulnerability combined in still other ways. The recurring fear of the French throughout the 1930s was that the Germans were exploiting the anti-Nazi emigration as a means of infiltrating secret agents into France. There were, in fact, German operatives among the refugees. Some were fake refugees, others were bona fide émigrés who offered information in exchange for papers, money, or the right to return. Others the Germans pressed into service through blackmail or comparable forms of persuasion. At least one refugee sold the Germans information on the French intelligence agent known as Fred Swirles or English Fred. Most refugee agents, however, spied on other refugees for the Gestapo and the Auswärtiges Amt.^[168] In general they represented a small portion of the Jewish and political émigrés who fled abroad, and it is not clear how actively the Germans recruited them. German For-

eign Office records suggest that refugees themselves often took the first steps and that they encountered, initially, a wall of suspicion. An SD official in July 1937 was enthusiastic about the prospect of recruiting émigré agents, but his memo suggests how little had been done by this late date.^[169] Altogether the refugee agent, if a reality and a plague to other refugees, was not a serious menace to French security. Yet the French refused to let the matter drop.

One reason for this was the stunning revelations of refugees playing a double, even a triple, game. The unmasking of Ricciotti Garibaldi in the twenties and Skoblin in the thirties clouded the presumed innocence of all other refugees. Berthold Jacob had been lured to his kidnapping by a man who had left Germany in 1933 and had then offered his services to the Gestapo. Less dramatic, but no less unsettling, were the files on Guido M. and Claudio B., both Italian agents who had penetrated anti-Fascist circles. Police traced the Ignace Reiss murder in part to White Russians in Paris; they deported an Italian named Lorenzi who had tried to infiltrate anti-Fascist organizations and was suspected by the SR of working for Italian intelligence; and they learned through captured agents that Italian saboteurs and spies, if stopped by the French, were to claim to be anti-Fascist refugees.^[170] Refugee double agents, they knew, were not a fabrication nor was there a neat distinction between those who informed and those who spied. Occasionally police turned up suspected intelligence agents among the German refugees, for example, the dubious figures in the Alice L. affair or a gang of German émigré gunrunners in Antwerp whom the Sûreté suspected of working for the Gestapo.^[171] Moreover, the French themselves were recruiting German refugees for intelligence work. Swirles ran Jewish émigré agents and so did Hartwig in Yugoslavia. All of this was to the refugees' credit, but the more deeply they immersed themselves in intrigue, the more they reinforced the tendency to associate their world with that of the spies. There was, as well, the nagging question of why certain refugees had returned to Germany during the early years of the emigration. Some officials saw no reason for Jewish refugees to help the Nazis, but not all were unsure that émigrés could shed their German identity so easily. A colonial SR report from December 1939 remarked that German Jews in Siam had offered their services to the "Nazi community, which treats them with less distrust than they do in Germany"^[172]

All of these things undercut refugee credibility, but perhaps the most insidious force at work was simply the intrusive, spongelike character of interwar espionage, as it spread out and absorbed more and more

people until lines blurred between one shadowy activity and another. So many crooks, con-men, charlatans, arms dealers, traffickers glided into espionage in the interwar years that in the twenties and thirties, it can be argued, clear divisions between criminal and secret agent underworlds dissolved, giving way to a single, amorphous milieu in which people moved easily among clandestine activities. Those who were drawn into that milieu, even only to its edges and by the force of circumstance, thus risked absorption into the world of the spies, or at least, identification with them. This, in effect, is what happened to refugees.

In no respect was this predicament more gripping than in regard to false papers.^[173] Papers—passports, visas, identity cards, residence permits—were the refugees' lifeline, and around that vital need grew a vast, grasping, plunderous underground market in counterfeit documents. Even in the liberal climate of the twenties there were people without the essential documentation and others who stepped forward to sell what they needed. Records on the traffic in false papers extend well back into the years right after the war.^[174] The thirties, with its economic crisis, its political and racial persecutions, its mass production of stateless people, and its immigration barriers, occasioned a boom in the trade. Jews in Germany, Austria after 1938, and Poland were determined to get out however they could. They took their papers where they could get them. Black markets ballooned, fed by desperation and greed.

Those who trafficked in papers shared two traits. They were generally, if not exclusively, foreigners. And they gouged their clients for whatever they could get. Prices for false passports ranged from one thousand francs upward, with most generally going for somewhere between five thousand and ten thousand francs. But there was no outer limit. Some passports commanded a thirty-thousand-franc fee. A Hungarian named Steiner, who sat at the Café de la Paix every Wednesday, charged seventy thousand francs for naturalization papers and the same for a Canadian passport, although he also sold Hungarian passports for three thousand francs each. Passport merchants in Vienna, to sweeten their deals, told Jews who were frantic to leave that 25 percent of their costs went to state taxes and that they gave another 10 percent to the poor Jews of the city. Others struck directly at the raw nerves of terror. An Austrian refugee who had made it to France but needed a certificate of refugee status for himself and papers for his wife still in Vienna, was directed to a trafficker named Reich. Reich said he could do it for 150 dollars but the refugee balked at the price. Reich then told the man he ought to think things over but on no account to announce his arrival to

the police (the alternative to going the false-paper route) because if word leaked back to the Germans they would lock his wife away in a concentration camp.

Traffickers varied in their scope and their method. Some built international organizations with a clear division of labor between counterfeiters, touts who scoured refugee hangouts—usually cafés—or canvassed in home countries, and middlemen who cut the deals and distributed the papers. Others had special contact men in consulates, and spread out from there. In general anyone desperate with money to spend could always find someone with false papers for sale. The doorman at the Palace Hotel in Zagreb was one go-between. A Viennese Nazi, Dr. P., operated through an insider in the French consulate in Cologne and through a front man in Vienna, an old Persian tout named Goldstein available en permanence at the Card Atlashoff. Word of the Cologne connection became an open secret in Vienna, to the point that Jews traveled there on their own to secure a visa firsthand. A Jewish woman named Stein made a scouting expedition in September 1938, then returned in October, grabbing a taxi at the train station and heading straight for the consulate at Woringerstrasse 11. Going directly to a ground-floor office she presented her passport and her husband's, asking for the precious, life-giving stamp. She was told that she would first need a change of residence for Cologne, but that this was no problem and that all she need do was to go to a particular office at the police station and say that she had come from the French consulate (the police bureaucrat was in on the scam). Following these instructions, she then proceeded to a meeting with the consulate employee at the coffee room of the Hotel Marienhoff, where she handed over the passports and four hundred marks. Three hours later she returned to the café and picked up the visaed documents.

There were traffickers who specialized in visas and passports of Latin American countries. Some of these documents were outright fabrications, others were for sale by the consular officials. In a more ingenious scheme, some consuls on the take sold certificates attesting to birth in their country, which the buyers could use to obtain legitimate papers. Alfred U., whom the police arrested and threw into the Santé in 1939, peddled Bolivian visas and Costa Rican passports, procuring the latter from the Costa Rican consul at Palma (Majorca) for four thousand francs each. He also ran a traffic with fake visas from the French consulate in Bari, but his Italian contacts kept the German passports he had

forwarded and he had to send a special emissary to get the passports back. No one in this business was clean except for the refugees.

This fact, however, was not so easily discernible to police and army counterintelligence. Refugees on the run carried false passports, but so too did spies, saboteurs, and terrorists. The Ustasha hitmen had journeyed on two sets of counterfeit papers in their passage from Janka Puszta to France. The Imperia gang responsible for the 1937 bombings in the Midi had utilized false papers, as had the men Miller and Skoblin sought to infiltrate into the Soviet Union. The 1939 menées terroristes sheets carried an alert for a man named K., alias Peter Von Medem of St. Petersburg, alias Franz Landgraf of Vienna, alias Peter Bertens of Prague, alias Arthur Denier of Lausanne and so on—the list of phony identities ran on for ten lines and included twenty names (K. was fluent in Russian, German, French, Italian, several Balkan languages, and spoke some Polish). He was wanted for espionage and the counterfeiting of documents, and police suspected him of collusion with terrorist groups.^[175]

For secret services, false papers were an indispensable tool of the trade. The Germans photographed and systematically studied border crossing stamps of different countries, manufactured special paper, and established a special laboratory for the fabrication of their counterfeit documents.^[176] Until 1934 the Soviets ran an unparalleled series of underground counterfeiting shops in Berlin. With thirty thousand rubber stamps on file, a stash of several thousand passports at any one time, and a core of a half-dozen expert photographers, printers, and typesetters supported by an international staff of nearly one hundred and seventy, this Pass-Zentrale literally mass-produced bogus documents for Soviet agents passing to the West or western Communists heading East. Following the Nazi takeover it exported its operations to the Saar and then, after 1935, divided its personnel and goods between Paris and Moscow. When possible the Soviets preferred to use authentic documents, which they altered to fir the secret agents who used them. Volunteers in the International Brigades who surrendered their passports for "safekeeping"—an apparently obligatory procedure—were a fabulous source of supply. Occasionally expert forgers were assigned to Soviet intelligence units, or intelligence officers recruited their own. Often Soviet agents traveled on more than one set of documents, picking up new papers in special rendezvous or drops along the way. Richard Sorge's radioman, Clausen, left Russia on an Austrian passport, flushed it down a toilet in

Paris, and proceeded on to the United States with a Canadian passport he had carried in the false bottom of his suitcase. Once in North America he managed with a hard-luck story to update at a German consulate his own, genuine passport, which a colleague had passed back to him in a Viennese movie theater detour between Paris and New York. When Leopold Trepper traveled to Paris in 1936 and then back to Moscow the following year, he used three passports, each in a different name. Throughout his career he had about twenty aliases bolstered by bogus Austrian, Polish, French, Luxembourg, and Canadian papers.^[177]

The French SR seems to have had a predilection for fake Luxembourg and Scandinavian passports, although their agents traveled on those of other nationalities as well. Among their sources of documents was the shadow man Stallmann. Swirles procured papers for his agents from a Pole named Ochwed.^[178] Meanwhile French counterintelligence learned quite a bit of the techniques of others through the arrest of foreign agents carrying bogus papers or through police busts of counterfeiting operations. In 1931 the Viennese police broke into a secret Communist workshop on the Wasserburgerstrasse. There they found a modern printing works and a cache of passport forms, licenses, and baptismal certificates. In another apartment they hit on a large file cabinet containing all sorts of identity papers, facsimiles of stamps and signatures used by foreign consular services, and letterheads of business firms. This was not the first bust of its kind, and throughout the period reports kept coming in on counterfeit operations. In 1927 there was a warning about Soviet fabrication of false papers in a trading office in Berlin. A report from 1933 said that the Soviets were shopping for Persian passports for their agents in the Orient. In December 1939 there was an alert on a German shop in Zurich that was buying up Swiss passports and doctoring them for intelligence use.^[179]

Set against this background, refugees, many of whom had fake stamps in their passports or fraudulent papers altogether, were obvious targets for lurid suspicions. The very pattern of the market in sham papers, for example, the wide trade in Latin American passports, merely accentuated the problem. False papers from Costa Rica, Guatemala, Bolivia, and the like were among the best sources of personal documents for refugees, but they also served spies. As far back as the First World War there were warnings of German agents traveling on fake Costa Rican papers. GRU intelligence officers crossed borders with Uruguayan passports. The suspicious John T. of the Samuel I. affair carried Nicaraguan papers. Japanese agents operating in France used dummy Nicara-

guan passports. Bauer-Mengelberg in Paris, who fostered German Jewish refugee emigration to Latin America, maintained close ties with the Paraguayan consulate but also with Stallmann of the French SR; the Germans suspected him of working for French intelligence. In the first days of 1940 the Sûreté issued a bulletin warning of Chilean and Argentine diplomats in the Netherlands working for German intelligence and capable of issuing fake passports for German secret agents.^[180] At the most direct level, therefore, French authorities by 1939 were faced with the problem, very much of their own making, of having to distinguish between clandestines of one sort—refugees—and clandestines of another—spies, each of whom possessed false papers, very often of a similar kind.

Making that distinction was not eased by reports that German "Aryans" were carrying passports "just like those established for Jews (J) so as not to arouse suspicions" and that bearers of these passports had recently turned up in Barcelona.^[181] Nor was it eased by the kinds of people the refugees turned to for their credentials. Traffickers, police knew, were a rapacious, shadowy lot who slunk about in the company of ominous figures. The Cuban passport affair of the late 1930s was one example of the unsavory and sinister lower strata that police unearthed when they investigated this corner of the milieu.

The affair began in 1937 with the arrival of a new representative to the Cuban legation in Brussels and his decision to set aside the blank passports left behind by his predecessor. He should have destroyed them, but he did not, and an enterprising employee within the legation sold fifty of the blank forms to another Cuban, a man named Valdès. Valdès paid five hundred francs each for the passports and then unloaded them at triple and quadruple that price to foreigners in need of papers. The profit was too great for Valdès to retire once he had exhausted his original stock. He expanded his operations, bought up expired passports, apparently of Latin American and Spanish origin, doctored them, and then sold these too on the black market. Many of the people who worked for Valdès had FAI (Spanish Anarchist) connections, and a certain portion of Valdès's passports found their way to people belonging to Spanish left-wing extremist groups.

To run his traffic Valdès built a sizable ring of associates and touts, recruiting among those petty hustlers who cluttered then, as they still do today, the underworld's fringes much like the dingy outskirts thrown up about a fathomless and profoundly corrupt great city. There was El Chiléno, a flamenco dancer and Sûreté stool pigeon, a suspected arms

trafficker named Ricardo D., and a Spaniard called Delgado who, according to Spanish rumor mills in the capital, had committed the most heinous crimes in FAI-dominated parts of Catalonia. Ricardo D.'s mistress, Gertrude V., was the sister of Dolores V., known also as Lolita V., a woman with close links to Spanish anarchist circles. Delgado was closely linked to Maria B., a dancer at the Lido on the Champs-Elysées and at the Cabaret Eve in the place Pigalle. She was suspected of working for the OVRA. In the inner circle were two Spaniards, Luis E and Joseph P., who took over the organization when Valdès saw the writing on the wall and fled to Cuba to evade arrest in spring 1938. Several months later police picked up both men and cracked the ring.^[182]

Another of Valdès's touts was a Spaniard named Flores, an impostor and thief. Flores passed himself off as a former intelligence officer for the Spanish republic, which was a lie, but both he and Luis E were operating as spies and informants for an Italian named Giacoma, and unlike any of the petty hoods involved in the affair, Giacoma was a very big fish. On the surface a legitimate and highly successful businessman, Giacoma was in fact running a major OVRA network in France, and from what can be reconstructed out of police files, he was also engaged in military intelligence. For a secret agent like Giacoma, the Cuban affair was obviously only a side venture, but police suspected that he was using Luis E and Flores as a source of false passports for political refugees he ran to spy on anti-Fascist émigré activities.^[183]

These, then, were the kinds of people who sold "to foreigners in search of papers:"^[184] Few of the traffickers, in fact, were beyond wider suspicions. Some, like Alfred U., had been accused of espionage. Others had clear Nazi connections, like the Nazi dealer Dr. P. in Vienna or a man Winter who trafficked in passports and reportedly had traveled to Paris in the company of German intelligence officers.^[185] For the police the traffickers were the scum that floats on the surface of all people's misfortunes, but in a world where criminality, intrigue, and espionage blended so readily into one and another, they were also potentially much more. What the police were coming to think of them all by the end of the thirties can be seen in a cross-referenced dossier the prefecture compiled in 1938 on a hundred foreigners to be expelled from France. The dossier was occasioned by the British state visit that summer, although one can only suspect that the police used their security preparations as an argument to get rid of people they wanted as far away from France as possible. Among those who figured on the list were the White Russians Eugène P., Elisbar V., and Dmitri D., which gives some idea

of the kinds of people the police wanted out. Also on the list was the Italian C., a former Comintern militant until the late 1920s, when he had turned one hundred and eighty degrees right and announced his adherence to the Fascist regime. A lawyer with a practice in Paris and Cannes and an apartment on the Champs-Elysées, C. had been abandoned by his wife because of his loose living, his brutish behavior, and, as the report read, because of obscene gestures he had forced his stepson to make in front of his mother. In 1935 this paragon of virtue had offered his services as a Fascist propagandist in exchange for five thousand francs' compensation per month and, according to an informant within his entourage, the Italian secret service had sounded him out about a special assignment to stir up trouble in North Africa. Mostly the people in the dossier divided into several look-alike categories: agents for Franco, agents for the Italian secret services, GPU agents, anarchists, left-wing and right-wing Yugoslav terrorists (including some who had rallied to Italy and Nazi Germany), or generally dangerous figures like the Czech Joseph B., a racketeer locked away in the Santé who had taken up with the ex-mistress of the international crook and counterfeiter Radu Dragulinescu and whose close associates included an automatic weapons specialist (and notorious gun trafficker) who had sold arms to the Spanish Nationalists. Lumped in as well were a half-dozen individuals who trafficked in false papers or in some other way facilitated clandestine immigration into France and who apparently, in police eyes, were indistinguishable from the terrorists, intriguers, revolutionaries, and secret agents who composed the bulk of the file.^[186] One senses that by this date the cops were not far off from adding in their clientele too.

In the end there existed multiple reasons for the internment of refugees in 1939-1940. There were precedents for the concentration of foreigners in wartime, and a government leaning toward the right was likely to cede more readily to exaggerated exigencies of national security, especially with official and public moods running in favor of getting tough with "aliens." There was also something of the better-safe-than-sorry approach to the internments, rationalized or tempered by the expectation that sorting-out commissions would correct injustices as they had (theoretically) done so in the First World War. By spring 1939 the French had drafted plans for rounding up refugees along with other enemy nationals, but the blueprints also specified exclusions for certain categories (important people; those with a son in the French army) and set up screening commissions that would liberate others after an initial

assemblage.^[187] To pressures for a clear-cut and decisive policy toward refugees, internments offered one solution. But the milieu of espionage between the two wars—extensive, multiform, overlapping, and intrusive—itself prompted the decision to intern. Twenty years of reports and experience provided reason enough to be on the lookout for spies, saboteurs, or some vague fifth-column-like threat in the opening days of a war and to wonder whether refugees might serve these purposes. Neither spy fear nor suspicion of foreigners was plucked solely out of thin air or out of a miasma of xenophobia and panic.

In particular, those who fled Hitler appear to have been trapped and condemned by the broad, inclusive nature of that milieu. To the police it was a milieu without edges or regular borders, one that seeped and absorbed like a vast spill of oil, spreading, encompassing, and dirtying everything it touched with the same blackening, indelible stain. Police were familiar with its run-on, drifting patterns and consequently with the mélange of people tarred by its reach. Gunrunning accustomed authorities to its encroaching and congealing properties, particularly the ties between traffickers and spies or the convergence of criminality and international intrigue. Refugees who tumbled into that milieu either because of their clandestinity or their pursuit of the vital passport to safety thus, in a manner of speaking, fell all the way in. Through their use of false papers, or merely through their identification with traffickers, they too crossed unwittingly into the lands of the spies. Increasingly one has the feeling that the authorities decided to intern because they witnessed the descent of the refugees into the nether realms and because they had lost the means of distinguishing between one subworld and another.

That decision bestowed no credit upon the republic. It was scarcely humane or politically intelligent, and it was arguably ineffectual as an emergency security measure. In blunt terms it was crude, stupid, and condemnable. Still it had more to do with ways of perceiving built out of a seemingly rational view of the times than with any presumed republican death rattle or the persecutions of the regime to come. Perhaps its comprehensibility and republican fallibility were articulated best in an exchange between the Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs regarding two protected Austrian refugees. Each, a man named B. and his lover M., worked for an officially sanctioned Austrian émigré organization and for this reason had been exempted from previous internment. In late May 1940 the police arrested the pair and placed them into a concentration camp. Did the Quai wish to object? For the

Foreign Ministry's information, the Sûreté was forwarding police reports on the suspects.

B., according to the reports, had belonged to the Austrian Communist party since its inception. He had worked with a section that had come under GPU control and in 1925 had traveled to Moscow, where he remained for some time before leaving on Soviet missions abroad. He had entered France in March 1938 claiming refugee status. Despite his official connections, his behavior had attracted suspicion. At the outbreak of the war he had received a large number of registered letters from Austria and frequent morning telephone calls. At M.'s, where he went every night, he had often been visited by foreigners who, the concierge had reported, "concealed themselves as much as possible and sometimes carried suitcases and all sorts of bundles." Each night he typed letters until early in the morning. Some Austrian émigré officials believed they were under surveillance by Gestapo and GPU agents. Investigations had led them to suspect that B. was the spy. The police noted that B. was a "notorious Communist and was moreover suspected of being a secret GPU agent."

M.'s record was largely the same. She had Communist sympathies and had lived for some time in Moscow, where she had met B. She had worked for the Soviet Film Institute and then for the Café Métropole, which the Soviet government had established to spy on foreigners suspected of anti-Communist tendencies. During this period several foreign specialists in the state metallurgical industry, none of them Communists, had accused her of being a secret agent for the GPU and the Comintern. In France as a refugee she too indulged in fishy behavior. She went out in the mornings, never returning until late in the evenings and then accompanied by B. and carrying suitcases that, word had it, belonged to foreigners interned at Colombes. Other foreigners visited her at her apartment, most of them arousing suspicions because "they returned to her place without announcing themselves." Like B., M. typed into the night, much to the distress of her neighbors. The concierge reported that M. always used German when she spoke on the phone, which was frequent. She too was suspected of spying on other Austrian refugees in Paris. On these grounds the two had been locked away.

The affair revealed some of the worst sides to the police sweeps. The authorities showed no sensitivity, nor even understanding, of internal Communist politics in the thirties, never asking why B. and M. had sought refuge in France instead of returning to the Soviet Union. The

police evidence was wholly circumstantial, the better part of it innuendo and gossip of the most disreputable sort. Yet the affair also illustrated how the very conditions of refugee status could arouse police suspicion, particularly under a restrictive immigration regime. Many refugees did meet late at night, carried suitcases or papers for others, received mail from Axis countries, spoke German, and dissembled to avoid calling attention to themselves. Such was the behavior of foreigners abroad, many of whom were without regular papers or were helping others who had entered clandestinely. Often, through the force of circumstances, much that refugees did could give the appearance of questionable activity. Moreover there was a good deal in the background of B. and M. that warranted suspicion. Indeed what is most striking about the affair is not their interment but that they had eluded incarceration so long. If these were the protected ones, the refugees who had been identified as loyal and beyond uncertainty, then what were police to think of the rest for whom no official was personally intervening? People like B. and M. were a danger for the entire emigration because they had the power to jade police sensibilities and to confirm other, far-reaching suspicions. The refugees who streamed out of Nazi Germany and Austria should never have been put behind barbed wire, but it is possible to comprehend why the authorities thought otherwise. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, incidentally, which was inclined to advocate the liberation of others, wrote back that it did not believe this was a case that merited une mesure exceptionelle de bienveillance .^[188]

In their decision to intern, the French brought together experience and perception to form a particular vision of their world between the two wars. In similar ways, all of the espionage files from the period may be said to represent a certain way of perceiving or a mental construct of things after the war. Within that construct was always considerable room for imagination and fantasy. The story of the Belgian conductor-secret agent pops immediately to mind, as does a bulletin on a false Daladier traveling through military zones during the "phony war"^[189] (or a dozen or so other examples one can dredge from the files, undoubtedly stuffed there by routine-minded bureaucrats or by individuals with a keen sense of humor and an appreciation of the bizarre). Yet one should also point out that the wildest alerts rarely received official accreditation; nothing in the archives suggests that these records constitute a mere conjuring of imagery. Even the most fantastic reporting re-

tained a certain connection with its times. Sources who pointed at German terrorist conspiracies to explain the Marseilles murders revealed through their language and their vision—"the psychology of the afterwar"; methods "inspired by the actions of the Communist International"—a clear fixation with the peculiarities of the age.^[190] Certain obsessions might become fixed over time. Those officials who feared that White Russian forces would subvert from within while German armies struck from without were, whether they realized it or not, merely replaying scenarios from the First World War, when the conviction had held that the Germans were employing the Bolsheviks toward the very same ends.^[191] Yet here too was a mentality behind such reports that sprang directly from the war and the events that had followed. No matter how warped the reporting process became, certain simple truths were always embedded within.

At a saner level, officials too brought to their reporting a certain way of viewing their moment in history, although this represented less a creating of material than a way of selecting, ordering, categorizing, and patterning. The expectations and priorities are revealing. It is interesting that only rarely did these men look back beyond the war. A prewar construct had also existed: that spies were an ever-present force to reckon with and that every German in France was potentially a spy. That perspective never disappeared entirely, but superseding it was a more protean one anchored to contemporary experiences and realities and thus more aligned to its times. The postwar vision constructed its reports from what the World War and postwar intrigues had taught it to expect. It dwelt on international circuits, agent centers, training schools, organization and method. It presumed a global dimension to espionage threats. It forwarded material on Impex because that did not seem chimerical when set against German intelligence during the war, and it came to write about White Russians as intriguers and double agents because that is what it found when it investigated their milieu.

In particular it incorporated the belief that totalitarian secret services had distinctive features in common and that all operated in peculiar ways consistent with their ideologies. Points of reference became forcibly contemporary. Hence Mussolini's secret police became "a sort of Fascist Cheka," while in fall 1933 army counterintelligence reported that the Nazis were planning to set up operations in Europe "analogous to those that the GPU has organized."^[192] Likewise there was an inclination to anticipate subversion and confusion—whether Moscow or Berlin or Rome was the source of specific acts of terror. Ideological method-

ology now became a distinguishing factor. Gone was the born German spy, espionage a national characteristic transmitted by birth. In his stead was the Nazi, Fascist, or Comintern agent, a professional and ideologically committed operative building networks among sympathizers abroad or among fellow nationals susceptible to blandishments or threats.^[193] All of this, to an extent, came out of casework, but it also reflected a manner of interpretation, an implicit set of expectations, and an isolation of the present from the past.

At times the French carried matters to extremes, assigning to the Comintern or to fascists a methodology and design that neither possessed. In this there remained a certain surrender to alarmism or to an innate compulsion to embellish. Yet alarmist tendencies in these years should not be exaggerated. German counterintelligence records are instructive here. The Gestapo worried about French penetration in the same ways French police or the SR fretted about the Germans. From the other side of the Rhine the picture was that of a powerful and aggressive French intelligence offensive infiltrating agents, building networks, stealing secrets, and identifying targets for sabotage. The Germans were just as keen to believe in a refugee spy threat as were the French. They feared (correctly) that the French were deploying refugees against them and in December 1939 the RSHA warned that returning Germans who claimed to have escaped from internment might be turned foreign agents or foreign spies in disguise, using papers lifted from nationals still held in camps.^[194] It is difficult to set the two groups of files side by side and to see anything exclusively French in the alerts or alarms issued by the Deuxième Bureau or by the Sûreté. The perception and identification of threats in an unending stream was probably a characteristic of all intelligence services. Each had something to be edgy about or simply gathered material from an intrigue-ridden world in the day-to-day practice of their trade. Placed in comparative perspective these records say little about French vulnerability as a national trait in the interwar years.

What is arresting about the documents on espionage is less the instances of alarm than those of mastery and control. Perhaps these were largely a function of bureaucratic forms of expression. Anonymity and the summary nature of reporting, particularly in long reports like those on Muslim affairs, encouraged an orderly and dispassionate presentation of material. Certainly the greater professionalism and familiarity with milieus, alongside the absence of any further need to explain away defeat, account for differences in the tone of reporting from what had

preceded the war. The inventions of the eighties and nineties would have seemed embarrassingly amateurish to the agents of the thirties who had seen plenty in their day to set storytellers afire but who also had years of experience and broken cases behind them and thus operated with a better grasp of the dimensions of the forces and networks arrayed against them. Still, the structure and regularity that characterized counterintelligence files seems also to have reflected a perception that situations were in hand or that the alerts of today would become the cracked or shelved cases of tomorrow. It is not difficult to find moments of alarm or outright spy panic in the interwar period. Yet they cannot be said to have represented a pervasive feeling in these years. For every instance of concern or paranoia there was an affirmation of command or simply the processing of material that was the bureaucratic equivalent of detective journeys up and down the stairs and that suggested an official cast of mind convinced that it would always muddle through.^[195] Compared to prewar documentation there was almost a settled quality to reporting between the wars.

Radio wars in North Africa provide a good illustration of this mood. The French knew that they were losing this war. Side by side with the files on Italy's Radio Bari, Germany's Radio Zeesen, and Franco's Radio-Seville were lengthy dossiers on the inadequacy of their own broadcasting in Arabic. Officials noted that their signals were weak and that scheduling was poor. They pointed to difficulties in finding announcers with the proper accents for targeted areas. Compared to Radio Bari in particular their own programming, they argued, was too short and too dull. One person drew up an elaborate chart that showed France trailing its competitors in all forms of propaganda directed at Muslims. Even the Spanish received better marks than the French who were berated in every category and whose ultimate rating was a lowly "deficient."^[196] At first glance the radio war files appear to confirm many of the images we hold of the French in these years: their lack of energy; their failure to adapt and compete where new technology and new methods were involved; and their own perception of relative decline.

Yet the authorities, if acknowledging the seriousness of the matter, never worried themselves overly about their Arabic programming. Like the tortoise of the fable they set their own pace, strengthening their signals and lengthening their broadcasts, assured that over time distances would be narrowed and that eventually they would overtake their adversaries. Perhaps they merely played the bureaucratic game of dismissing failure by claiming success (and along the way, of course, they

were squashed by a tank). Still, if it was attitudes or outlooks that mattered, then the French expressed no abiding sense of disarray or alarm. Instead they were proud of the progress they were making and of their Italian and German broadcasts that they beamed into Mussolini's and Hitler's backyard. Moreover their ultimate conclusion was that Radios Bari and Zeesen had failed in their mission. In the end, for all their paper "noise" about radio wars, French records exuded a quiet confidence that the situation was under control.^[197]

One of the themes of this book is that French moods and perceptions between the wars were more complex and more assured than those painted by a picture of vulnerability, division, and decline. The following chapters will develop this argument further. For the moment it is appropriate to conclude with one of those documents we occasionally stumble upon in the archives and that force us to rethink our presumptions about the subjects we study. I am referring to a note sent by the Radical party of Algiers to the premier of France. It was dated 2 June 1940, approximately at the moment when the last British troops were evacuating from Dunkirk. The note called for a vigorous offensive that would throw the Germans out of the French lands they had "sullied." It requested that the French air force bomb Munich and reduce the city to ashes (as a symbolic gesture), and that it also target other German cities, far from the border, to drive home to the Germans "that their Führer is not the God that he would like to seem." The Radicals of Algiers went on to request measures to forestall a surprise attack by Italy and that in the event of Italian strikes at North African cities the French air force retaliate with bombing runs over the peninsula. They ended their proposals with the reminder that "the best defense remains a good offense" and the assertion that they trusted the army would retake the initiative.^[198]

Apparently not all Frenchmen and Frenchwomen had entered the war without the spunk to fight the baffle through to the finish.

Figure 3.
Renate Steiner. (Courtesy National Archives)