Chapter One
War

Few images are more evocative of the interwar years than that of the secret agent. After the First World War there was no escaping the figure of the spy. Celebrated, notorious, unheard of secret operatives recorded their wartime adventures with a shameless reach for posterity or fortune. For really the first time the French wrote spy novels. Almost all were dreadful—and this assessment is charitable—yet the writers cranked them out for an eager and faithful market. Charles Lucieto wrote nearly a dozen episodes for his series, La guerre des cerveaux . Covers proclaimed sales as high as one hundred and twenty thousand, although these figures were about as credible as the stories within. But Charles Robert-Dumas's tales of the French Deuxième Bureau did sell from twenty-four thousand to forty thousand copies, and these were high numbers for the 1930s. The publisher Baudinière edited a series it called "The Secret War," printing some sixty-odd volumes with sales figures estimated at fifteen thousand to twenty thousand copies each. Translations of Fu Manchu novels appeared in the thirties. The French gobbled these up; printings of thirty-five thousand copies apiece almost always sold out by the end of the decade.^[1] Alongside the novelists were reporters and spy experts, although it was often difficult to distinguish either from the fiction writers. Newspapers dredged up old spy stories or piled on new ones to promote sales. The publicity was scarcely necessary. The interwar years seemed to glide, with hardly a pause, from one spy sensation to the next: the breaking of spy rings, spy trials, assassinations, kidnappings of White Russian generals, submarine hijackings, ter-

rorist plots. In the twenties, and especially in the thirties, the mysterious spy surfaced as a familiar figure. Secret agents invaded all kinds of literature. They were in travel accounts. They were in playful novels, for example, Maurice Dekobra's immensely successful Madonna of the Sleeping Cars . Serious writers like Malraux wrote about spies.^[2]

Why this was so and what it represents is largely the story this book has to tell. Certainly the place to begin is the political context or atmosphere of the times, for the era seemed to conspire in favor of the secret agent. The defining attributes of these years—international insecurity, totalitarian politics, refugee floods, civil war, and political polarization—militated toward thinking about spies. The Russian revolution triggered a fetish with internationals, the image of a Europe of international camps that permeated and divided nations from within and whose operatives were identified as spies and saboteurs. There was, to be sure, a Red International, but also a White International, a Green International, a Fascist International, and even something called a Cagoule International, after the group of right-wing French extremists popularly known as the hooded ones (or cagoulards ). In 1938 one author was writing of The International of Spies, Assassins, Cagoulards, and Provokers in the Service of Fascism ,^[3] a sign of how readily ideological politics induced sightings of enemy combines after the war. With the rise of fascism came an unrestrained disposition to believe in vast and powerful espionage organizations and a Europe swarming with larva-like goons in leather trench coats. The basic text on German espionage in the thirties was a Communist refugee publication called The Brown Network . It recounted how the Gestapo, with its 2,450 foreign agents and its 20,000 informants, was prepared to murder, torture, sabotage, blackmail, threaten, and spy throughout the world, and how behind this organization existed a formidable support apparatus that transferred money through travel and steamship bureaus, infiltrated operatives into the Central European train system, ran espionage schools, sent and received coded messages, and maintained vast files on all enemy agents, émigrés, and enemies of the Führer.^[4] By the 1930s, therefore, the air crackled with talk of spies. Caught on the wrong side in Spain, George Orwell discovered how easily in these years political differences translated into accusations of espionage.^[5] From the Soviet purges came a demonstration of how an era of revolution and counterrevolution redirected politics to behind-the-lines baffles and rendered the secret agent a stereotype. After 1917, and certainly after 1933, the word spy became all but an automatic indictment of someone on the other side.

Refugees played no small role in the identification of secret agents with totalitarian threats. Refugees, first from bolshevism, then from fascism, imported stories of terror and conspiracy, while their own murky worlds of politics cum intrigue provided occasion for still more lurid narrations. Consistently one will find, if one pages through the published accounts of spies and terrorists between the wars, that the source is a refugee. "The Gestapo . . . is everywhere. . . . No Frenchman can imagine the power of this organism," a refugee tells a journalist with the first reports of Nazi terrorism in Europe.^[6] When White Russian generals are kidnapped off the streets of Paris it is refugees who all but issue the press communiqués. For fabricated accounts there are fabricated refugees, cicerones to unravel the mysteries that no one can solve. And fifth-column imagery, the most celebrated spy vision of the century, is, to a considerable extent, a refugee story.

Properly speaking the fifth-column image came out of the forties as much as the thirties. The term can be traced to 1936 when General Emilio Mola boasted that he had four columns marching on Madrid, but that the decisive blow would be dealt by a fifth from within. But there was no rush to appropriate the phrase, and the few references that appeared over the rest of the decade were nearly always associated with Spain. The image never did infiltrate official language. I have located only a handful of references to "fifth column" in the archives, one in 1937 in regard to Spain, two others in May 1940 after the term was already becoming fashionable in the press.^[7]

What turned the image into a commonplace was first the Nazi takeover in Norway and then the German victory in the west. In the miserable days of spring 1940, as the Germans marched or dropped from the air, the fifth column took on its familiar shape: German minorities and ideological fellow travelers forming secret armies from within; fifth-column parachutists descending in Dutch or French uniform, often with wireless sets, perhaps dressed as priests or in other civilian disguise; one hundred thousand Nazi soldiers, camouflaged in Holland, preparing "Hitler's hour"; Weygand secreting the army to his command in Syria—in short, German clandestine operations, systematically readied in advance and supported by treachery in high places, leading to defeat.

Today we know that there was little substance to these rumors, but for those who managed to get out of France it was a message of urgency they carried across the Atlantic, repeating and embellishing the stories until, together, the stories formed a mythology. The myth served many purposes. It provided the Left with a powerful hammer to beat against

the Right, and it struck as well a blow for national honor by denying defeat upon the field of battle. At the most basic level it offered a means of exorcising shock, of explaining, as one person has written, the seemingly inexplicable. Then, after war's end, what had worked for national honor could also work for personal reputations, and by 1945 the tarnish here was especially thick. So again one dipped into the fifth-column well. General Maurice Gamelin, who had lost the Battle of France, lowered the bucket several times, reeling up the discovery that German victory had been the result not only of everyone else's mistakes, but of fifth-column intrigues too. Few were willing to let the myth drop because it was such an easy way to write off the last five years.^[8]

Yet etymologies do not tell us everything, and in this case they do not reveal much at all. If the articulation of fifth-column imagery came only with the forties, the basic concept borrowed heavily from the twenties and thirties, leaning considerably on the refugee texts The Brown Network and its sequel, The Nazi Conspiracy in Spain .^[9] Nearly everyone who wrote about fifth columns in the forties was to steal copiously from the 1935 edition. In fact nearly all the paraphernalia of the myth—card indexes, spy schools, terrorist camps, radio wars and clandestine radio transmissions—had worked their way into the official reports and printed literature of the interwar years. Imagery of war was also a part of the background, explaining again why the secret agent preyed upon imaginations after 1918.

In the interwar years thoughts about espionage were another means for thinking about war in the twentieth century. No one who has traveled in France and seen the war memorials in every town or village or has studied the interwar years and witnessed the forced memory of the war—the books and memoirs, the pilgrimages to Verdun, the monuments to everything imaginable (even the carrier pigeons, "their wounded and their heroes," got a monument in 1936)^[10] —can ignore the powerful hold the First World War held over French minds after 1918. This was a war that everyone would have preferred to forget, but it was also one that the French loved to recall, and in those memories spies played a not inconsiderable role. Stories of famous spies and memoirs of secret agents formed part of the vast literature that issued from the war. Even more, when espionage writers told of "the secret war," "the white war" "the silent war," "the spy war," "an underground war without mercy," "a permanent war, underhanded, secret . . . [a] war in broad peace," they were expressing fundamental thoughts about how war was waged in their century.^[11] Secret-war imagery, like fifth-column

imagery (and like the steady flow of reports into counterespionage files), spoke to the feeling of living between a war that had passed and a war that was coming, and that espionage was the bridge between the one and the other. The image captured the sense of war as a permanent condition of life in the twentieth century, an experience prolonged in people's minds no less than it was prolonged beyond armistices and treaties on different fronts by different means. Despite official endings the war invaded people's lives, penetrated civilian society, finding the most visible embodiment of that sensation in the behind-the-lines figure of the spy. Lurking, like the Great War, the spy was a projection of the awareness that the presence of war would not go away.

Indeed between the wars French absorption with spies paralleled more haunting ruminations on war in the future. Speculation about a next war invariably dwelt on the role of the bomber, a breakthrough weapon that could visit the horrors of war—conventional, gas, germ; all options were possible—upon civilian populations. Unlike the last war, the next war would avoid stalemate because armies would possess the means for striking behind fronts and breaking both the capacity to supply and the will to persist. There is a rather large literature from the twenties and thirties on the more ghastly side to these visions.^[12] It ranges from expert figures on how many planes plus how many gas bombs were required to liquidate a city to novels like Florian-Parmentier's Abyss , in which a gas and germ war in 1960 kills two hundred and twenty million people or Victor Méric's War to End All Wars , which compellingly catches the central image of all of this writing: that when the slaughter comes again, it will fall not on the troops at the front, but on the civilians back home.^[13]

None of this speculation was very far removed from thinking about spies who operated behind lines in wartime to cripple civilian morale and the ability to fight. In their modern guise as terrorists and subversives, spies provoked the same kinds of perceptions as those envisaged by the future-war writers: the vulnerability of civilian populations to mass death and destruction, the realization that through new technology this result could come at the hands of a small number of people, and the expectation that terror, panic, and demoralization were now the key weapons of attack. Consequently secret agents, like gas bombs and germ bombs, came to penetrate future-war writing. Florian-Parmentier's account of mass annihilation in 1960 included the landing of special detachments behind enemy lines, dressed in enemy uniforms and armed with machine guns. Their mission was to disorganize ser-

vices, to cut communications, and above all to spread confusion and terror among the civilian population. Elsewhere there were discussions of spies who pinpointed targets for bombers or who, as enemy pilots, traveled to Paris on one pretext or another to learn the best places to drop their fire bombs and gas the city's population. "The war of the future," predicted the German Ludwig Bauer, "will be a war of perfected technique, with a manpower reduced and rationalized. A few thousand chemists, engineers, pilots, mechanics, filmmakers, and spies will do for a start"^[14]

In turn spy novels and spy reportage were littered with material about biological and chemical warfare. War and Bacteria , a 1937 spy novel, related German plans to launch a first strike of microbes. Pierre Yrondy's From Cocaine . . . to Gas!!! fantasized about German plans to destroy the French with drugs, bacilli, and gas. In the next war, Yrondy insisted in his preface, "the most important battles will be the work of various espionage agents. They will be—and are already—charged With sowing death in the great centers and thus exterminating civilian populations." Charles Lucieto wrote about gas in Delivered to the Enemy , as did Charles Robert-Dumas in The Lead Idol and Jean Bommart in Helen and the Chinese Fish . Commandant Georges Ladoux, who headed military counterintelligence during the First World War, introduced gas and germ warfare into a spy novel he wrote in the 1930s. Marcel Nadaud and André Fage's 1926 reportage on crime and espionage argued that the Germans were preparing for chemical and bacteriological warfare in the future. Perhaps what made the association instinctual, or irresistible, was the frequency with which the two paraded together in real life, surfacing with the Moscow purge trials, Cagoule revelations, and a host of sensational Parisian affairs.^[15]

At base there remained the inevitable exchange: contemplating wars of terror and disorganization in an era that anticipated a next war led to thinking about espionage, sabotage, and subversion. The presumption spread to government authorities who, responsible for forestalling covert action, took their charge seriously. Much of the next chapter will examine their record. Still, an item scooped from the archives illustrates once more the close connections that were drawn between waging modern war and the role of secret agents, particularly because it returns us to the foundations of fifth-column thinking.

Of all the permutations in military tactics after the First World War, none straddled better the parallel tracks to espionage and future war imagery than the formation of paratroop units. In the spring of 1940,

the parachutist descended upon the scene as a stock figure in fifth-column mania. Few accounts from these days are complete without the familiar stories of parachute sightings of epidemic proportions or of near lynchings of French pilots who had parachuted from burning planes only to be mistaken for German agents. Civilians readily connected expectations of how the next war would be fought with soldier-operatives who dropped from the sky, behind enemy lines, on missions of disruption and terror. The same connections were drawn by police and military men who throughout the thirties had observed developments in paratroop tactics, especially in the Soviet Union, the recognized pioneer in paratroop deployment. Later the focus would shift to Germany; one cannot help but notice how closely leadership in paratroop tactics conformed to French targeting of espionage threats. The reports from the thirties make for interesting reading with their communications about thousands of trained Soviet parachutists, the prospects for total surprise and disruption of mobilization, the debates on the effectiveness of large airborne units in the densely populated areas of Western Europe, and the damage that could be done by small detachments, scattered by parachute on assigned intelligence or sabotage missions.^[16]

Reports out of Poland following the Nazi invasion particularly command one's attention because they represent the official equivalent of the peasants with pitchforks who hunted for parachutists the following May. Their tales of German intelligence agents and sabotage teams dropping behind Polish lines, "setting machines on fire, sowing confusion in the rear, sabotaging telephone and railway lines, and then disappearing into the civilian population," and their conclusions that here were sabotage operations unprecedented in military history, "unquestionably play[ing] a leading role in the German offensive," preview almost to a word the fifth-column stories that would circulate with abandon in the years to come. Later we will see how the Germans had in fact trained and dispatched such sabotage teams, although with substantially more limited intentions and consequences than these communiqués would have one believe. What matters here is less the truth than the reaction to these exceptional findings, especially those of a later, longer report dating from March 1940. It had been drawn up not by French observers or agents but by the Polish high command, who then communicated it to the French government. Admittedly, Polish armed forces officers had been in a position to know about German subversion, yet they also had reasons to fob off their very real military collapse, and this

fact should not have escaped the authorities in Paris. Nevertheless, the director general of the Sûreté nationale circulated the report to prefects and police under the label Top Secret, and without comment. As combat in the west drew near, the French were primed for a war of espionage and sabotage as well as a war of the continual front.^[17]

So the secret agent was a constant if troubling companion to the French between the two wars. That case, whether one looks at political imagery or thoughts about war, can be made with little difficulty. Still, one needs to probe deeper to discover just what this represented historically. Consider, for example, two episodes, one from the 1930s, the other from the late nineteenth century. In early 1934 the police received a tip that at 4, square Gabriel-Fauré in Paris a number of Germans were telephoning daily to Berlin. The informant suggested these could be Nazi agents, paid by Hitler to spy on the French or to foment revolution. The inevitable investigation followed, with the inevitable conclusion. The Germans were wealthy men with families or businesses in Germany.^[18] One can almost sense in the dossier left behind the detective's vexation and lassitude as he made one more senseless trip, climbed the inevitable stairs, interviewed the necessary witnesses, and then wasted more time typing his report with his cold, nubby fingers.

One is reminded of the Schreiber matter from the late 1880s. Hermann Conrad Schreiber was a German national who had lived most of his life in France. In 1889 officials in the Ministry of Interior were trying to expel him. Their case against Schreiber was based upon accusations they had received from his neighbors. According to the townspeople of Villeneuve-la-Guyard, Schreiber had had too much good fortune recently to have come by it honestly. Almost inexplicably, and despite his natural sloth, he had built a prosperous trade in jewelry. His personal expenses were so exaggerated, his shop's range of wares so beyond the needs of his clients, that one could conclude only that the business was a pretext for Schreiber's residence in town. Moreover, Schreiber had acquired a horse and carriage and traveled on what he called commercial trips but what were obviously voyages of a more suspicious nature. He even went to Paris. Then he discontinued his trips, preferring to receive commercial travelers at home. The townspeople were certain these men were spies. The more the citizens of Villeneuve-la-Guyard thought about Schreiber, the more they dredged up suspicious memories of the man and his family. It was said that he had welcomed the German invasion of 1870 and had interpreted for the enemy. He had raised his son to hate France and the boy had once declared in public that when the

next war came the Schreibers would go to Germany, only to return soon after in the wake of the German army. It was a known fact that Schreiber's brothers and sisters lived across the border, and that one of the brothers was a German officer. The townspeople took their tale to the authorities who placed Schreiber on the "list of suspects B" and considered him a threat in the event of mobilization. Now they were seeking to deport him, but the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was obstructing their efforts. The Interior Ministry wanted to know why.

The Quai d'Orsay's response was scorching. The Ministry of Interior had no certain proof against Schreiber, only presumptions. Perhaps the Sûreté would discover proof if it bothered to place him under surveillance. Thus far this had not been done. The charges against Schreiber rested on the fact that he had bought a horse and carriage and traveled without telling his neighbors where he was going and on the remarks of a child who had probably been sorely treated by the other children in town. Schreiber's neighbors said he had spied for the Germans in 1870, but nineteen years earlier, when spies were seen everywhere, they had left him alone and had spread no such rumors. Schreiber had lived in France for forty years. If he was going to be expelled, then one should have against him "not suspicions, but certitudes. " Thus the storm over a matter that, like the telephone calls half a century later, rang of the same spy fright, the same baseless accusations, the same stereotypes and absurdities, and the same wearied disgust from at least part of officialdom.^[19]

The problem for the historian of the interwar years is that these kinds of resemblances turn up with an almost rhythmic frequency. There is a set of dossiers in the BB18 series in the archives of the Ministry of Justice reviewing the cases of individuals accused of espionage for foreign powers. Most are mundane affairs—individuals caught outside fortresses or near military installations. From the point of spy literature they do not make for particularly interesting reading, except for the fact that in bulk and detail the pre-World War I dossiers do not appear substantially different from those of the twenties or thirties.

Elsewhere certain motifs are repeated as if spy stories could not exist without them. Take for example the figure of the spy in priest's clothing. Rumors of parachuting priests and nuns in hobnailed boots were a familiar feature of fifth-column rumors sweeping over France in 1940. Even the authorities were on the lookout for secret agents disguised as priests. Throughout the heated days of April and May the Vatican took the precaution of notifying the French Foreign Office of the travels of

German priests, so likely was it that any German passengers, including German missionaries, would be hauled off ships and interned as suspects. The Quai d'Orsay hastened to oblige the Holy See, but it was no less quick to request that names and destinations be submitted at least eight days before departure to run the necessary checks on the individuals in question. Some diplomats thought even this was too obliging. The minister plenipotentiary to Ecuador, Jean Dobler, worried himself into a dither over the pending arrival of the Reverend Father Fisher because Fisher was a secular ecclesiastic and no French missionary to the country was secular clergy. Fisher, moreover, had requested this assignment and had been supported by the directors of Pio Latino College in Rome "who," Dobler added "are German Jesuits." Dobler suggested that since Father Fisher was young, one ought to inquire about his military status. "If Monsieur Fisher is in physical condition to bear arms, we must acknowledge that he is officially or unofficially on German military reserve; and in this case I advise against according him favorable treatment and allotting him to pass our blockade." Just what a German priest's contribution in Ecuador would have been to the German war effort was never quite spelled out by the French minister plenipotentiary. But he did urge an immediate investigation of the man.^[20]

One wonders, however, how far back the spy-priest image can be traced, especially in anticlerical France. It certainly did not originate in 1939-40. Paul and Suzanne Lanoir, precursors of interwar spy "experts," argued during the First World War that German agents were infiltrating French lines in clerical garb. Colonel Walter Nicolai, who ran German intelligence during the First World War, described how his men had discovered a French officer dressed as a priest. Undoubtedly real-life clergy who served in Allied intelligence networks in occupied territory during the war conferred upon the image a certain verisimilitude. Yet even before the war Captain Raoult Rudeval had included priests' robes in his discussion of secret agent disguises.^[21]

One could be tempted to argue that fifth-column imagery was possible only after the experience of the twenties and thirties; yet this will not hold either. British invasion literature from the turn of the century, equally replete with visions of mass infiltration by spies and saboteurs, has been well documented. Germany had a comparable fright before the war and so did France, as we shall. soon see.^[22] Once war broke out spy mania gripped all countries. Lights at night, wash hung out to dry, accents, any unusual behavior were cause for suspicion. The same stupidities of 1940 pervaded the earlier war. The Lanoirs, whose own con-

tribution to the asininity level of spy-talk was disproportionately high, recalled how an angry Parisian crowd in 1915 nearly cut to pieces "spies" signaling to Zeppelin raiders overhead. Their prey, so it turned out, were a policeman on a counterespionage mission and a representative of an Allied embassy, meeting in an upper-story room and failing to turn out their light immediately after the warning had sounded. Only the intervention of the concierge saved their lives. lean Tillet, who worked with French security in the First World War, tells an even better story of an old man, sick and living alone near army headquarters during the second battle of the Marne. Every evening, near ten o'clock, the man takes to the nearby bushes and woods, returning to his house a half-hour later. The amateur detectives of the village begin to suspect a spy in their midst. After all they are only six kilometers from the front and most evenings the old man disappears just when enemy planes pass overhead. They try to follow him, but never successfully, so they go to the authorities. The next night counterespionage agents are hidden along the old man's path. The woods are guarded:

Ten o'clock at night. In the woods. The dry rasping sound of leaves, then a human form stops near a thicket. An agent is nearby, well placed to see and hear what happens. After some fumbling about the belt, the man squats. One can guess what wafts the lookout's way. . . . Without hurrying, the "suspect" straightens up, tidies up, and goes home. The performance is repeated over several consecutive nights. At mathematically the same hour, the old newsvendor returns to the woods to satisfy a natural need, without worrying about the planes and their bombs.^[23]

Like spy-crazy letters and tips or alarms of spies in priest's clothing, the fifth-column scare often repeated what the French had experienced once before. Not even the theme of espionage, war, and remembrance was without antecedents; indeed espionage literature before World War I was largely a variation on thinking about defeat a quarter century earlier.

It will not do, then, to write about interwar espionage in isolation. One must turn back, first to the years before the war, then to the war experience itself, to consider what changed with the war and what did not, and how the milieu and literature of espionage between the two wars shared the distinctive features of their times.

Spies have probably existed at all times in all places. A recent book on espionage called it the second oldest profession, although many have wondered how it differs from the first. Spies appear in the Bible, and

Homer has told us of the Trojan horse. Walsingham, Mendoza, and Parma had their networks of informants. Richelieu used spies, as did Frederick the Great. Both the revolutionary governments and particularly Napoleon had their improvised contingents of agents. Later in the century, as the French reflected on their failures—the very lack of an intelligence system in the Franco-Prussian War—they liked to recall these earlier successes. Throughout the nineteenth century the spy remained a dubious figure in France, but Napoleon's operative, Charles Schulmeister, was clearly an exception.^[24] Espionage may have been dirty work, but victory could serve as a powerful detergent.

Institutionalization of intelligence gathering and prolonged thinking about spies are, however, relatively new and have their roots in remembrance of and preparation for modern warfare. For the French (as for the Germans) that war came in 1870, as did the impression that followed, and lasted, that mass armies fought modern wars, but perhaps secret agents won them. For forty years after the Franco-Prussian War German phantoms would populate French literature on espionage while counterespionage sleuths would stalk covert agents who never existed. Two generations would repeat the weedy legends that flowered out of the ashes of defeat, particularly those told of William Stieber, Bismarck's master spy, who had paved the way for German invasion and flooded eastern France with thirty thousand secret agents. As time wore on there would be new versions or reports of German conspiracies, including accusations against Jews as German spies that reached a crescendo during the debates over Dreyfus, although the image of the Jewish German agent had predated the affair and would continue after the anti-Semitism of the Dreyfus years abated. Léon Daudet's Avant-guerre , published in 1913 and asserting that Jews in command of commerce and industry were going to betray France in the next war, would sell eleven thousand copies within the course of the year.^[25] Meanwhile French officials would conduct relentless dragnets for spies, and would proceed, haltingly and sketchily, toward the creation of a professional intelligence network. All of this in reaction to a German spy threat that was perceived to have made the difference in the Franco-Prussian War and to have remained a presence in the years that followed.

The reality, as might be supposed, was considerably different. The Prussian army possessed no intelligence service at the time of the Austro-Prussian War and only sought to create one following the poor intelligence it obtained during that campaign. By the Franco-Prussian War some progress had been made. A report from November 1870

identified agents in Lyons, Rouen, Lille, Amiens, Antwerp, Switzerland, Denmark, Italy, and Austria. Moreover valuable information arrived, as it had in 1866, from Baron yon Schluga, a renegade Austrian officer living in Paris. (Von Schluga, Agent 17, was transmitting first-rate intelligence out of Paris as late as 1914. One serious historian of espionage calls him the greatest spy in German history.) But even by 1870 the Nachtrichtendienst was but a jerry-built organization, a far cry from the puffery of the Stieber legend. The best source we have on German espionage before 1918—an official study undertaken by Generalmajor Fritz Gempp in 1927—concludes that German intelligence in 1870 was a small, primitive, poorly prepared operation that occasionally got lucky. Stieber, who later received much attention, was only a police official, responsible for the security of Bismarck and the king and for counterespionage in the field. There is no reason to believe he made a serious contribution to spying on the French, let alone to German victory.^[26]

Well after 1870 German intelligence remained a less than formidable force. Little money and apparently even less status were accorded the service, so that IIIb, as German intelligence came to be known, grew only slowly and rather painfully. Both Gempp and Nicolai have argued that German intelligence in these years was markedly inferior to that of its rivals, especially French espionage and counterespionage which were larger, better coordinated, and repeatedly successful in the operations they mounted against the German empire and her agents. One wonders. Sources from the French side do not confirm this picture, and Christopher Andrew's recent study of the British Secret Service has revealed how amateurish and embryonic British intelligence was down to 1939, despite the assumption of the rest of the world that the English were congenital spy masters. There appears to be a pattern, repeated on all sides and throughout contemporary history, of ascribing to the other side the prowess one would like to claim for one's own. Most likely Gempp and Nicolai were right only in their assessment of their own organizations and that all intelligence services shared in the inadequacies that characterized IIIb in the late nineteenth century.^[27]

Later documentation does suggest that as the war approached, a serious effort was made to increase the operational strength and efficiency of German intelligence. When then Major Nicolai assumed command of IIIb in 1913 he found, in Gempp's words, "a well organized and well led team corresponding to modern requirements." The decision to appoint Nicolai, who had directed espionage operations against Russia with some success, was probably a wise one, despite Nicolai's own dis-

claimer that he was far too junior to run IIIb and that his selection merely demonstrated the army's indifference to intelligence matters. The number of agents abroad substantially increased in the last years before the war. A chart drawn up in spring of 1914 indicates preparation for wartime intelligence stations in thirty cities, including New York, Buenos Aires, and Tokyo, as well as major posts in Geneva, Copenhagen, Antwerp, and Basel. In the last days of July 1914, the Koblenz station was receiving reports from agents in Nancy, Paris, Lille, Sedan, and Laon. The real test came that summer, when the government and high command depended on intelligence reports to determine how far preparations for war were proceeding in France and Russia. In general, the information was good. "The system works!" judged the Koblenz station chief on 28 July. Still, it did not work all that well. Once war was declared and borders scaled, IIIb virtually lost contact with its agents in France. Information dribbled in from other sources, but not enough to prevent serious deficiencies in what was known about French troop deployment following mobilization. Similar breakdowns occurred elsewhere. Despite the dispatch or recruitment of agents in Istanbul, Sofia, and Romania, and the arrangement for money drops, after war was declared information from the Balkans was embarrassingly thin. There had also been plans for sabotage. Projections called for the destruction of bridges in the east along the Russian army's line of advance. As of August 1914, IIIb was still looking for agents to take on this assignment. In the west there were plans to disrupt French rail traffic, and here agents had been found. But there is no evidence that these missions were undertaken, let alone accomplished.^[28]

Such was the German record as we know it. Still the French remained haunted by visions of spies in these years, and what is necessary is to trace how widespread their spy mania could be between defeat in 1870 and the First World War, and the forms it could take, before then considering what lay behind it. There is no better place to begin than with the myth of William Stieber because the stories that grew up about this less than extraordinary man effectively captured and contributed to the speculation about espionage. He was, in the literature of the nineteenth century, the premier master spy, the architect of victory in 1866, and then again in 1870. He was said to be a man of a thousand faces who traveled with a suitcase stuffed with wigs, a supply of false beards, a pocketbook full of cash, and carte blanche from Bismarck. On his own he scouted out the land, listened to the people, and then dotted the countryside with his agents, most notably in eastern France, which he

inundated with thirty thousand spies camouflaged as farmers, farm workers, serving girls, maids, office employees, and the proverbial commercial travelers. He was shrewd, devious, and ruthless, and because of him German armies overwhelmed their enemies with ease.

The story, as we know, was a grand fabrication, but it circulated through France—probably well before the publication of Stieber's memoirs in the early 1880s—and remained a staple of beliefs throughout the prewar period because like fifth-column mythology some seventy years later it offered a convenient means of writing off a humiliating defeat. Self-anointed spy authorities like the Lanoirs picked the story up and retailed it as God's truth,^[29] but more striking is how the legend, or some variation upon it, crept into more serious literature. Perhaps the most respected treatise on intelligence in the late nineteenth century, a two-volume methodical study by General Jules-Louis Lewal on the tactics of intelligence gathering in time of war, noted that German officers had "flooded" into eastern France before 1870, traveling as tourists or as legitimate citizens. Two doctoral theses written by military men echoed this theme. One spun out the whole story—the extraordinary Mr. Stieber; thirty thousand spies—citing the Lanoirs as his source. Not even the Grande encyclopédie knew how to define espionage without referring to the large numbers of secret agents that had infiltrated France before 1870.^[30]

With the passage of time the myth was embellished and reformulated, especially by the Lanoirs who insisted that tens of thousands of German agents remained in France, observing, charting, living as honest citizens, and ready for the sabotage of French rail lines at the outbreak of war. If all of the Lanoir writings were put together, they would probably run the gamut of indispensable motifs in the repertoire of spydom: agent-priests, bordello stings, and traveling circuses identified as "spy nests." Again what catches the eye is not only the vision but how more respectable types like Captain Fernand Routier, who swallowed a big gulp of Lanoir in his dissertation, went on to regurgitate their "facts" as well.^[31]

A very similar picture appeared in the press, most frequently in the eighties and nineties, but with an edgy consistency that continued down to the war. The Petit Parisien in 1896 recalled the army of German spies that had swarmed over France in 1870. The Aurore the following year wrote of the incalculable number of German spies in Paris. The Petit Journal a decade later described a massive and methodical German penetration of Belgium not unlike what a future generation would describe

as a German fifth column. These are but a sampling of clippings that still cram dossiers in the archives of the Sûreté and the Prefecture of Police. Their specifics can be readily discounted, but what matters is their number, and the way the stories of the spy peddlers received a public hearing. It cannot be said that the French were less concerned with German espionage before the war than they were after 1918.^[32]

There were also some spy novels from these years, although not very many and even more forgettable than those written later. Only one author—Captain Danrit—can be called in any way interesting. Shortly before the war, Danrit wrote a book which he called The Alert . It is about the mission of the French engineer, Patti Vigy, and his team of three saboteurs to blow up a railroad bridge in German-held Lorraine immediately upon the outbreak of war. Vigy is told that if he succeeds, he will stall the advance of two German army corps by at least several days and that German morale will suffer a stunning blow. The novel begins with German invasion imminent. For the mission to work, the team must proceed to the bridge immediately and await a prearranged signal that war has begun. The team moves at night to the bridge, receives its signal, and plants its charges. But the blowing up of the bridge will also destroy the house of the semaphore guard along the railway line and one member of the team is in love with his daughter. Thus he warns the daughter who tells her father who alerts the people in the nearest village, and the team is forced to flee before planting all their explosives. They do detonate their charges and damage the bridge, but not enough to prevent the movement of troops for more than a few hours. Vigy perceives, however, that structural damage has been substantial, and that should a locomotive and its tender be driven over the bridge before repairs have been made, the bridge will collapse. So the team works its way to Thionville, steals a locomotive, drives it over the bridge—jumping off at the approach to save themselves—and the bridge collapses. Now begins the getaway. Vigy's goal is to reach Luxembourg. One of the team, however, has suffered a bad sprain in the jump, and they cannot go on foot. They stop a car on the road and discover it belongs to a Dane who fled the Germans forty years earlier and now lives a rich life in Argentina. The Dane hears their story and then tells them incredible news: at the very last moment, under threat of Russian intervention, the Germans held back. There was no invasion. There is no war. The team has committed an international crime. They are outlaws. The Dane is sympathetic, however, drives them to his yacht in Antwerp and takes them to Argentina where they will be safe.^[33]

Two things make this book remarkable. First, there is a distinctly twentieth-century quality to it. The Alert reads like a spy movie: the reconnaissance of the target, the assembling of the team, the advance at night, the success-failure-success progression of the mission, the getaway, the suspense are all there. Second, there is nothing else like this novel from these years. Dan fit was a prolific writer, but the standard Danrit story was a far different animal. It is not easy to type, although the words turgid and racist will do for a start. Most are multivolume affairs that make for laborious days on the hard chairs of the Bibliothèque nationale. The rifles are revealing: War in the Twentieth Century: The Black Invasion , followed inevitably by The Yellow Invasion . They are filled with the worst racist stereotypes, and, as one might expect, the stereotypes extend to Jews. As the black (really Muslim) invasion rolls toward Jerusalem, the Jews hire mercenaries to do their fighting, but are massacred anyway. There are Jewish traitors in the novel, and when it is over, and Europe reapportioned along lines favorable to France, "what remained of Semitism was relegated to Syria." In Danrit's hands the apocalyptic framework becomes less a means of telling a good story than a vehicle for expressing his loathing of all things socialist, capitalist, republican, and English. The black invasion advances relentlessly, using not only its vast numbers but also the weapons of cholera and yellow fever (did Danrit know that the latter was also called "black vomit"?). Its forces place sick troops in the front lines to infect their enemies and drop infected bodies from a stolen European airship. The French counter with a military dictatorship, the end of a money economy, public prayers, theaters that put on only classical plays, a serum against cholera, and poison gas dropped by "aérostats." France saves Europe and England is invaded, demoted to Little Britain, and put under the rule of a Danish prince. But in the sequel a divided, antimilitaristic France has no such luck against the yellow invasion that overruns Europe with bestial ferocity. The British aid the Asians but lose their empire nevertheless in a weak stab at a happy ending. The Inevitable War , yet another three-volume work, is Danrit's dream come true. England attacks France, French submarines erase British naval superiority, France invades Britain, parades through the country, and leaves Britain a secondrate power.^[34]

None of these books can be called spy novels proper. They are hate books, adventure books, travel books, science fiction books. But Danrit also writes about spies. In The Inevitable War , the British fight with a worldwide espionage network. The yellow invasion advances through

its sheer force of numbers; but it too utilizes secret agents throughout the world. The books as spy books, however, are difficult to place. They are like British invasion literature from these years, yet they are grounded far more in one man's prejudices and fantasies than in the historical context we associate with the former. In certain ways they share some of the future war imagery of the twenties and thirties that would stir thinking about spies, yet their apocalyptic vision is again idiosyncratic, approximating more the yellow-peril fears roused by Japanese victories in the Russo-Japanese War^[35] or later anti-Bolshevik literature than the visceral fears of a war that would strike behind lines and exterminate millions. As a genre they extend well beyond prewar spy concerns, yet they also anticipate little in the format of postwar spy novels; their combination of adventure and espionage differs from the connection between the two that would follow the war.

They are, in effect, largely identifiable for their strands of late-nineteenth-century right-wing imagery about imperial rivals and dangers and enemies at home. Yet it can be said that in this respect they conform in one way to the essentials about prewar spy writing: they situate the spy almost entirely in a context of alarmism and political demonology, particularly that of the nationalist right. The xenophobia of Danrit runs like a thread through the literature on espionage before the war. Daudet's anti-Semitism and novels like The Yellow Invasion were its most blatant form, but it appeared as well in the constant references to German agents lurking among German nationals in France. The conjecture of Schreiber's neighbors, the inner demons that eructed a letter on a million spies outside Toulouse, were simply another manifestation of these sentiments.^[36]

Foreign revolutionaries, foreign terrorists, and the agents of foreign secret police invited further concerns. Their intrigues resulted in a series of "affairs," including discoveries of German police spies among socialist circles in Geneva and Zurich (the Haupt affair of late 1888); disclosures and arrests of Russian terrorists in Paris following bombing experiments in woods outside the capital (the Russian bomb affair of spring 1890); the assassination of a Russian general in his hotel room in Paris (the Padlevskii-Seliverstov affair of late 1890); the identification of the Russian terrorist and police agent Azef in 1909; and then the unmasking of a high Okhrana (or Russian secret police) official as a former agent provocateur working in Paris (the Landesen-Harting affair of 1909). The Haupt affair produced lists of secret agents in London and Paris, revelations of cases of dynamite to be planted on revolutionaries,

and speculation that the Berlin police director, Krüger, had conspired with Russian revolutionaries in Switzerland to assassinate the czar, although there is no hard evidence to confirm this last charge. Out of the Padlevskii and Azef affairs came stories of dramatic escapes and multiple personalities. With the unmasking of Landesen came the startling revelation that the Russian bomb affair of nearly twenty years earlier had been, in part, a Russian secret police sting mounted by the then Okhrana police chief in Paris, Rachkovskii.^[37]

Not surprisingly the affairs were turned into Paris press sensations, previewing in certain ways the splashy coverage of refugee intrigues in the 1930s.^[38] But they also focused attention on foreign revolutionaries as troublemakers or on the penetration of repressive secret police organizations into France and thus became a subject for attacks from both Right and Left, again elevating discussion of spies and secret agents to the level of foreign threat and political nemesis. They were also troubling matters for the French police to whom the presence of foreign police agents on French soil was neither unknown nor entirely unwelcome. The menace of anarchist attacks, inflated fears of revolution, and the concern that terrorism might jeopardize Franco-Russian relations all provided the authorities with reason enough to keep tabs on militants from abroad. Their tracking was extensive, yet it consistently revealed international liaisons—anarchists and other revolutionaries on the move from one city to another; relations between militants in France and militants in London, Barcelona, Milan, Switzerland—that required international cooperation among police officials and reciprocity for foreign police missions.^[39] Moreover the police had no illusions about their ability to penetrate Italian and Spanish anarchist circles or the community of Russian émigrés. Foreign police operating in France with a stable of agents (preferably a small stable) could do things French police simply could not do on their own. An international conference held in Rome in 1898 to address the wave of anarchist terror paved the way for formal international police cooperation, although in reality this conference simply ratified and encouraged expansion of police liaisons already underway.^[40]

With these ties came serious liabilities. Relations with the Russian police appear to have been especially close,^[41] but required tolerance of the counterterrorism of Rachkovskii and his successors (which included a bombing at an anti-czarist rally in 1905 that French police traced to the Okhrana). The Harting revelations of 1909 were an embarrassment for French and Russians alike. The press follow-up and then a parlia-

mentary inquest forced the government to shut down its quasi-official (if not all unofficial) connections with the Russian police, while the latter in turn was obliged to shift its operation to a private detective agency, albeit one directed by an old Okhrana agent.^[42] One wonders just how extensive the Okhrana operation was abroad. A police report from 1901 refers to a "great number of agents," and at the time of the Harting disclosures an ex-agent provided the press with a list of fifteen Paris operatives. These included former French, German, and Scotland Yard policemen. After the revolution, former Okhrana officials reduced to writing their memoirs argued that only a handful of agents had been stationed abroad, occasionally supplemented by flying squads out of Moscow and St. Petersburg. And yet the files of the Paris Okhrana office, which was the hub of Russian police operations in Europe, fill 216 boxes. These currently reside at the Hoover Institution and await their historian.^[43]

A still greater liability was espionage. The Italian police were so brazen in this regard that the flabbergasted French turned to words like "bizarre" and "enigma" to describe their persistent and contemptuously open assault on French secrets. Italian commissars came across the border, presented credentials, talked of coordination in the war on anarchism, and then proceeded to travel to Toulon or along the Alpine frontier. They recruited spies from among the Italian community and placed French intelligence agents under surveillance. More often than not the anarchists they claimed to be tracking were their own secret agents. The French kept forcing their recall and the Italians obliged, dispatching replacements who differed only in their skill or their discretion in carrying out the same old assignment. Some were quite good at their work and lasted a long time. Others were imbeciles like the Ventimiglia policeman who began and ended his career with the arrest and twenty-seven-day sequestration of an innocent Frenchman on charges of espionage. Compounding the problem was the presence of irredentist societies working the Italian community in the Alpes-Maritimes. Consular support of these activities was no less flagrant than the intrigues of the Italian police.^[44]

These episodes with foreigners and foreign police anticipated the large role refugees and secret police would play in the intrigues of the twenties and thirties, but they also remind one that espionage was occasionally a very real matter for French security officials before the war. The latter point would be superfluous were it not for the fact that French authorities were no less prone than the Lanoirs or Captain Rou-

tier to look for spies under nearly every foreigner's bed. Foreign governments admittedly were running agents in France, and at times the French found them out. The names that surfaced With the Haupt disclosures were already known to the French police and were linked to a ring of press correspondents suspected by the French of spying for the Germans. The ringleader was a man named Beckmann who had had a long and jaded career in France and whom the police identified as Bismarck's personal operative. In report after report from 1887 to 1890 the police traced lines that led back to Beckmann. They were convinced that he recruited his agents among indigent Germans in Paris who were given his name by the German embassy. They also traced agent recruitment to Consul General Beckmann in Geneva, the elder brother of the Beckmann in Paris. How much truth lay in these reports we can only guess, but it is likely the French were on the fight track.^[45]

They may also have had a good hunch about Commandant de Mendigorria, the Spanish military attaché who associated with the von Schwarzkoppen from the Dreyfus affair and whose fortune was too small to place him beyond suspicion. The spy rumors that swirled about his mistress, an Australian adventuress, may have only been rough-minded conjecture. But there was reason to question a voyage her lover was making to Switzerland. De Mendigorria said he was going simply to conduct an official study. The French suspected, however, an errand for Schwarzkoppen that would take the Spaniard on a tour of their border defenses between Toul and Pontarlier or, as a report on the case read: "At the Spanish embassy it is said that his absence will last three months, and none of the military or civilian attachés believe that Commandant de Mendigorria is going to study the Swiss army. They all put on a sniggering smile when they speak of this mission."^[46] The police were also probably fight about a man named Kannengieser who was constantly seen around French military installations or talking to French soldiers. His expenses were high, his income was low, and he frequently was paid in German currency. A number of incriminating photographs were found in his possession. The French slapped Kannengieser into prison for a year, fined him a thousand francs, and banned him from France for ten years.^[47]

There are still other cases that the French police cracked. But the tone of their records lies elsewhere, in the extravagance and spy mania we have seen in the spy writers. The police too accepted the Stieber myth—"We are convinced that among the personnel constituting family messengers, valets, la haute domesticité can be found the same German espio-

nage as before the war"—and they accepted its embellishments—"In every tiny village along the Franco-Belgian border, there was [after 1873] on the Belgian side an agent, artisan, rentier, or policeman who received information from similar agents in France."^[48] A report from 1882 in this regard is instructive. Information comes in that the German government has recently dispatched a large number of secret agents to Paris to scrutinize public opinion and governmental policy in France. A police report is requested. The official who responds says that he cannot confirm this intelligence and quite sensibly proceeds to elucidate the difficulties in uncovering German agents among the large German population in Paris: there simply are not enough police to put every German in the capital under surveillance. For once the reader of these files appears to have tapped a vein of rationality in the bedrock of hyperbole. But the official continues. There is no need, he reports, for the Germans to dispatch agents. There are already in Paris nearly a hundred thousand Germans, well placed in industry, in commerce, and all devoted to their country and government. Their correspondence home certainly provides the German authorities with all the information they can use on public opinion in France. Moreover, he notes, all these Germans, like their fellow countrymen in eastern France, are in the army reserve and, in the event of war, will serve as scouts for their troops "just as happened in 1870." "Our eastern region," he concludes, "is, in a manner of speaking, occupied by the German army."^[49] The vein crumbles, revealing more bedrock underneath.

To the authorities' credit, they did exonerate a good number of suspects. Not everyone shared the fate of Schreiber. Throughout the seventies and eighties and into the nineties, however, a large number of people were placed under surveillance or investigated as accusations rolled in from tipsters or police informants who seemed as disposed to spy hunting as the popular writers were.^[50] Practically every German traveling in France fell under suspicion. One wonders how any private messages ever got through, so thick were the telegrams tracking the movements by rail of possible enemy agents. The commissioners on watch in the train stations displayed extraordinary talents for spotting German officers simply by looking at passengers. Thus, for example: "Signal for surveillance four German tourists claiming to be professors coming from Stuttgart via the Alps. . . . Three are thirty years old, the fourth older, wears glasses, bald, expansive forehead, officer's countenance"; or, "Signal the departure by the noon train from Bourg to Paris of a suspicious foreigner named Franz G. . . . He claims to be a com-

mercial traveler, has as baggage a big black trunk with straw hat samples and he carries a suitcase in his hand."^[51]

The same mentality that produced all this paper led to the creation of the notorious Carnet B: the lists of suspects or dangerous people who were to be arrested immediately upon a declaration of war. At the time of its inception in the late 1880s, the French authorities had in mind primarily German spies. One historian has shown how spy fright in the late eighties and early nineties was so intense among the officers in the statistical section of the Deuxième Bureau that plans were drawn up for the internment of nearly one hundred thousand foreigners at the outbreak of hostilities.^[52]

There is a strange thinning in the documentation on espionage following the turn of the century, surprisingly so since these were the years when German intelligence was funneling more agents into France and when war clouds grew darker and darker. One explanation for this narrowing of the paper trail would be the growing attention devoted to socialism. We know, for example, that the Carnet B underwent a radical transformation in the last years before the war, shifting its focus to anti-militarist French workers who, authorities feared, would sabotage mobilization. Yet the listing of espionage suspects remained heavy in the eastern departments and the total number of "spies" to be arrested in 1914 was 710, certainly far greater than the number of enemy agents operating in France.^[53] Military authorities continued to plan for the forced movement and even the internment of foreigners^[54] but did not believe they could list every secret agent. Obsession with spies followed from suspicions of who might be out there as well as the identification of known suspects. Spies who could be listed were less dangerous than spies who could not. More likely there are fewer records on espionage from these years because many no longer exist or are hidden away, a straightforward answer to a curious problem, but one that experience in working with espionage files suggests is correct.

Whatever the reason, public and authorities alike were bedeviled by visions of spies in the years after the Franco-Prussian War. No study of espionage in the twentieth century can neglect this fact. Inevitably to understand why this was so one turns back to the war itself, to French defeat but also to the coming of modern warfare fought with mass armies between two nations. It is the latter as much as the former that explains the enduring popularity of the Stieber legend and its permutations over time. Clearly the Franco-Prussian War inflicted deep wounds on French honor and an unabating sense of vulnerability that forced an

exorcism through stories of spies. But the Franco-Prussian War, misleading as certain of its signals turned out to be for the character of war in the twentieth century, nevertheless introduced Europeans to a new level of warfare where complex maneuvering of great armies by rail, a collision of nations, and the prospect that defeat would beget revolution became the dominant factors. The war demonstrated the critical importance of mobilization and hence the necessity of unhindered rail traffic in the first days of fighting between two vast military machines. As it evolved into a fight between French and Germans, it ushered in an era of national competitiveness and assured that the next war would again be a war of peoples and nations. And with defeat for the French came revolution and the bloody civil war of the commune.

Harbored within such modern-war verities were multifarious compartments for secret-agent phantoms and all sorts of reasons for conjuring up spies. As warfare became more technologically complex, weak spots multiplied and vulnerability intensified. Secret agents who blew bridges or sabotaged switching stations could have a crippling impact on every stage of the fighting. Moreover national identities and fears of revolution now raised the stakes of war considerably, producing a comparable escalation in the fear that a single turning point—a secret plan stolen, a railroad delayed, an army corps steered through enemy territory—could decide everything. Spies now held in their hands not only the fate of armies, but also of nations and, worse, social classes.

Such fears projected well beyond 1870 primarily for three reasons. First, nationally conscripted armies enlarged the size of fighting forces and the need to coordinate their deployment through sophisticated command of vital rail and communication networks. Second, the Third Republic, for political and economic reasons, created through its schooling and road building programs a more tightly knit national community than ever before and thus, despite the persistence of deep ideological differences, magnified or reinforced national identities. Third, the rise of organized socialist parties, allied to beliefs that war could be the midwife of revolution,^[55] focused energies, particularly on the Right, on internal subversive forces with international connections. Fear of spies blended in with fears of revolutionaries who could destroy France from within. Both had transnational loyalties, both were effective in time of war, and both operated behind military lines.

In combination the latter two factors—national identities and preoccupation with subversives—could be especially potent for imagining spies. One consequence was that older strains of conspiratorial thinking,

the plot mentality of revolutionary politics or the nightmare of guillotines stashed away in cellars,^[56] projected into international conspiracies of the Stieber variety or took the form of German manipulation of the workers' movement.^[57] At a more nefarious level it could lead to the conflation of alien identifies with potential secret agents. A spy, of course, in the thinking of certain polemical minds, could be anything at all—a sign of republican corruption or Semitic perfidy—because the figure of the spy remained the symbol of treachery. Here too the evolution of warfare into a collision of nations turned people to thinking about spies as a way of expressing their hatred of a people who had defeated them once, against whom they sought vengeance, and yet whom they continued to fear.

This element of hatred cannot be minimized. It seeps through in the images of a France infested and betrayed by a people who fought without honor, or perhaps even more, in the desire to reduce to underhanded advantages the very real strength possessed by the Germans. This hatred took many shapes: the anti-Semitism of Daudet and of many participants in the Dreyfus affair, the omnipresent racism of Danrit, the general public's readiness to espy German agents within the workers' movement; but most often it was simply hatred of the enemy and especially of Germans. In this the French had no monopoly. Hatred and vulnerability could be close companions in the decades leading up to the First World War, spy mania one of their waste products. British jitters produced yet another scare literature in these years as fear of German invasion by sea combined with a hunt for spies from within. What stands out, again, is how closely allied the secret agent had become with the perception of how wars would be fought by the turn of the century.

It is possible to discern something rise in the repeated return to 1870 and the fantastic tales of German espionage. The Franco-Prussian War may not, in reality, have been a war of spies, but it was, on the German side, a war of methodical staff work and planning, a lesson lost on few people. After 1870 the French acknowledged that war in the future would be more systematized than before, and this turn to method and organization implied a wider role for intelligence gathering and an institutionalization of intelligence services. The next war, in 1904, continued to drive home both perception and fact. From the Russo-Japanese War have come sources suggesting that the Japanese organized espionage and sabotage rings behind Russian lines in Manchuria and that they opened liaisons with Russian revolutionary parties and nationalist movements, having laid the groundwork for these ties several years in

advance.^[58] We will probably never know the extent to which espionage figured in the Russo-Japanese War, whether it was widespread or simply insignificant, nor even how much real knowledge of operations filtered through to the European public. But the war served up another full plate of spy stories and another vision of powerful espionage services even if, in the French version, these depicted the Japanese mastery of German spy methods.^[59] Again the identification between planning, intelligence, and victory in contemporary war found affirmation.

Such an identification could be one more stimulus for frenzied spy hunting, but it could also, in expert hands, be an argument for building up France's intelligence apparatus, which had been virtually nonexistent in 1870. For some professionals Stieber was undoubtedly a useful symbol, his legend a gift to be worked and kept alive in order to promote methodical development of a French espionage system. The fine line between credulity and manipulation is difficult to draw and perhaps never existed. Both dimensions to spy thinking could inhabit a single psyche. Still the argument for greater French planning, predicated on the mythical German example, exists in prewar literature on espionage, particularly in those works written by military men. Lewal repeated the 1870 mythology, yet his two volumes were a serious manual on intelligence gathering in time of war. If by intelligence he meant principally tactical reconnaissance in the field, he also argued that effective action by a modern army required satisfactory information that derived only from methodical, systematic preparation in peacetime. "To receive information, it is necessary to know in advance how to obtain it, which procedures to use, which agents to resort to, what their training should be. What matters is to have a method, and especially a well organized service," Agents abroad, Lewal insisted, must be implanted well ahead of hostilities. This the Germans had understood before 1870, and it had given them an edge. Writing his own manual some twenty-five years later, a lieutenant colonel who had served in French intelligence returned to the same critical point. Functional espionage networks in wartime were established in peacetime. They could not be improvised in a moment of need, "as one tried to do, on the French side, in July 18707."^[60]

After 1870 the French army did take measures to improve military intelligence, which was not a difficult task to carry out since on the eve of the Franco-Prussian War the army maintained not a single agent in Germany.^[61] Shortly following the war a statistical and reconnaissance section in the War Ministry was created for espionage purposes, eventu-

ally to evolve into the intelligence section (section de renseignement , or SR) of the Deuxième Bureau. Meanwhile intelligence work, especially counterespionage, was assigned to the Préfecture de police in Paris and the Sûreté générale, although jurisdictions were never clearly defined. Even the Quai d'Orsay occasionally ran its own agents on an ad hoc or part-time footing.^[62] We have already discussed the zeal with which the police discharged their duties. Documentation from the Deuxime Bureau is unfortunately sparser.^[63] One historian records that by 1880 the SR was stationing agents in Leipzig, Frankfurt, Cologne, Berlin, Vienna, Dresden, and Mannheim, and obtaining good information from them. Another describes chaos within the SR, a service so encrusted in intrigue and so slovenly in its practice that it could not distinguish real evidence from the false reports it itself was manufacturing. Whichever was true, the Dreyfus affair of the 1890s represented a nadir in French intelligence history, the failures of 1870 notwithstanding. When the dust cleared, the SR was reorganized and counterespionage made the preserve of the Sûreté.^[64]

In the decades before the war French intelligence turned in a creditable, if mixed, record. There were substantial French leads in cryptography, although these were squandered in interservice rivalries and political squabbles. There were occasional coups such as the Vengeur documents that outlined the von Schlieffen plan and fell into French hands, although some historians question this story and in any event French intelligence had little to do with obtaining the material. If analysis of German intentions was occasionally cloudy and even contradictory, the SR produced sufficient information to foresee both the use of reserves and the strike through Belgium. Failure to plan accordingly must be allocated to Joseph Joffre and his generals, not to the Deuxième Bureau.^[65]

At an operational level the SR displayed occasional sophistication, but its shoestring organization belied the claims of Nicolai and Gempp. Through Danzas and Co., a freight forwarding firm headquartered in Basel with a branch in Mannheim, the SR ran a courier service to its agents in Germany. Later it sent correspondence via a firm located on rue Bréa and through small business clients in Germany. Some of the latter provided cover addresses for information sources in Munich, Cologne, Frankfurt, and Berlin. The German police eventually closed in on each letter network, only to discover among the French correspondents a district commander on the western border, two noncommissioned officers in Stuttgart and Mannheim, and an artillery sergeant in

Koblenz.^[66] Just before the First Word War French intelligence maintained stations in Belfort, Nancy, and Mézires directed against Germany and stations in Nice and Grenoble directed against Italy.^[67] The central office in Paris was manned by four officers assisted by a civilian clerk and a retired Republican guard who doubled as photographer and orderly. When Captain Andlauer was posted to the Belfort station in spring of 1913, his assistants numbered two: a lieutenant and a retired gendarme. There was no secretary. The mission was quartered in a single room so obviously situated that no agent could visit without the risk of exposure (by the following year Andlauer had moved to more favorable accommodations). Special commissioners in the Sûreté were to collaborate with Andlauer, but most concentrated their efforts on political intelligence for their prefects. The local military commander regarded the captain as a thirty-sixth-rate chargé d'affaires. The embassy in Switzerland was no help at all. Andlauer's monthly budget was twenty-five hundred francs. Despite these constraints Andlauer managed to organize a respectable network that could operate in wartime and assure communications. As of July 1914 he had also recruited and equipped several "destructions, " although it is not clear whether this referred to the blowing up of bridges in case of retreat or the dispatch of saboteurs behind enemy lines.^[68] Thus by war's eve French intelligence had come some distance from the sorry days of 1870. Greater method, but also spy fright, nurtured the build-up of an espionage service, as they did elsewhere.^[69] But progress was spotty and financial support chintzy, and people like Lewal and Rollin had had reason to push for all they could get.

This, then, was the espionage world for the French before the Great War. Looking back from the interwar years one is struck by the antecedents, the prefiguring of what would come later, and yet the sense of being still a spy world away. Practically everything one stumbles across in the interwar period—sabotage and subversion, refugee intrigues, foreign police operations, espionage in Africa and Asia, an ominous spy presence, even gas and germ warfare^[70] —turns up in the files or literature on espionage before 1914. But it is rudimentary and single-dimensional compared to espionage after the war. Thus in 1908 Lieutenant Colonel Rollin writes that espionage techniques of the past are outdated, that railroads, wirelesses, telephones, automobiles, balloons, dirigibles, "perhaps television tomorrow," have revolutionized the way intelligence services will operate in the future.^[71] Yet the methods and practices he describes say little about these revolutionary techniques, almost nothing about the real changes to come, and read curiously like espionage in the

past. One writes about sabotage but only occasionally, plans sabotage missions but only in the most preliminary way. There are colorful characters, some lively espionage rings, particularly in Eastern Europe where minority populations and disputed frontiers create special opportunities and incentives for intrigue.^[72] But there are no Battitis, nothing of the cast that will haunt counterespionage files after the war. Abroad there are flashes of global concerns. Moroccan intrigues produce a fair amount of paper. The Russo-Japanese War gives way to visions of Japanese spies throughout Asia. Just before the First World War the governor general in Indochina reports on an Asian-wide revolutionary movement. A few years earlier, the police report on the terrorist Safranskii and his ties to Hindu nationalists. There is the German chart from 1914 that plans wartime intelligence stations in New York, Buenos Aires, and Tokyo. An undated but post-1914 French colonial report traces German financing of Indochinese nationalists back to 1912. There is also the Great Game on the frontiers of India and indications of comparable stratagems spreading to the Middle East in the years right before the war. But all this activity forms a paltry record when likened to postwar global intrigues. Even the international content is muted alongside the postwar European circuits.^[73]

Most of all, in thinking comparatively, one recognizes the hard edge to the earlier literature. It is alarmist and mean spirited and concentrates in the figure of the spy, who before the war was repeatedly characterized as evil and dishonorable. The imagery was inseparable from the wider belief that Germany was the superior spy nation because her people were natural spies, untroubled by the dirty, criminal side to espionage whereas France contained a people of standards and honor. French spies were neither unknown nor uncelebrated, but a character in a novel who was French and a spy owed the combination to reasons that were accidental, temporary, or excused by exigencies. Despite the advocation of peacetime intelligence there remained an ambivalence about spying or the impression of arguing a minority case, facts of life imprinted on the Andlauers from personal experience.^[74] That imagery would not disappear after 1918, but it would no longer dominate either. After the war the spy would be a more absorbing, multidimensional figure and the literature of espionage would draw on far more than fear and hatred. Here especially is where the divide can be charted. Before the war there was alarmism aplenty, but, with the exception of a few sensational affairs, practically nothing else to the espionage scene. Following the war this would change, as espionage became a more complex, more

sophisticated subject for the French. For spying, as for nearly everything else, the Great War separated one era from another.

Where the prewar years contemplated, projected, the war years created, acted. The result was a very different spy world in the twenties and thirties from what the spy masters and spy writers had known before 1914. Changing context in part explained those differences. The intrigues of Communists, fascists, or refugees like the White Russians introduced an ideological context, a method, and a scale that were absent from espionage before the war. The richness of postwar espionage derived largely from the opportunities for intrigue—war in Spain or in China, for instance, or the transient quality to postwar settlements—and from the assortment of individuals that floated about after the war. Because the postwar actors, organizations, and occasions that defined interwar espionage were themselves largely creations of this war, the war experience could be seen to account for what changed with the twenties and thirties.

Yet it was also the war's power to propel imagination into action and reality that explains the shifts in espionage after 1918. Those shifts toward greater professionalism, greater globalism, and deeper perceptions of a behind-the-lines threat, or toward an interweaving of heroism, romanticism, adventure, and espionage that prevailed in the interwar years, all drew on the experience and facts of wartime intrigue. How the secret war was fought between 1914 and 1918 determined the grounds upon which it would be waged and perceived in the era that followed. It is necessary, therefore, to examine the wartime intelligence record, looking at how wartime espionage was conducted, what it attempted, what it achieved, and what was beyond its reach. Throughout the following account two themes will predominate. First, the scale of the war led to a prodigious broadening of the size and scope of wartime espionage organizations, operations, and methodology. Second, the total and global character of the war generated a covert war that extended beyond intelligence gathering to sabotage and subversion and spread its operations all over the world. Once set in motion, these features would not disappear when the war itself came to a close.

All intelligence services grew substantially with the war. Three dozen officers worked in Austrian intelligence in 1914, several hundred by the war's end. Altogether several thousand men passed through the service in the course of four years.^[75] Even these numbers did not encompass

the full range of intelligence gathering on the Austrian front. In 1916 an Austrian station operating out of Bucharest with agents in Iasi and Galati and individual observers along the Prut kept a careful watch upon Romanian troop deployments and Russian reinforcements. Their information was good, yet more complete intelligence required radio intercepts and intelligence exchanges with the Germans and Bulgarians. Counterespionage broke cases with comparable coordination, for example, the Jorga-Firmian affair, which involved the Romanian military attaché, a Romanian student (Jorga), a count (Lattenzio Firmian) and his accomplices Benuzzi and Rensi, Benuzzi's mistress, the Spanish ambassador and the Italian admiralty, and which was cracked only with the help of the German IIIb, the Austrian attachés in Madrid and Berne, and the consul general in Zurich.^[76]

The size and complexity of Austrian operations were the rule rather than the exception. Thousands of people worked in German intelligence during the war. One IIIb station, Antwerp, was running over a hundred agents in early 1916. MI5, British counterespionage, began the war with a staff of nineteen. By war's end the staff numbered nearly eight hundred fifty. Dozens decoded radio intercepts. The number of British agents on the continent, if one includes Belgians and Dutch, ran into the thousands.^[77] There are no statistics for the French, but there is no reason to assume that the numbers varied significantly from those for the Austrians, Germans, or British. Shortly into the war French intelligence subdivided into six sections: the SR, centralization, postal and telegraphic control, economics, an interallied bureau (for coordination among the British, French, and Belgians), and aerial propaganda. The Sûreté continued to conduct counterespionage operations, although now in liaison with the military's own counterespionage service. Intelligence operations were replicated in the field. Everywhere in Europe there was considerable expansion. Even the reports inflated numbers, like the 1917 wire from the attaché in Petrograd that 170 Greek spies had departed Berlin for the Macedonian front.^[78]

The SR men on the spot must have felt as if they had rolled through a time warp. Before the war Andlauer had painfully scraped together a network of informants. Slowly, cautiously, as he told it, he would collect a name. Slowly, cautiously, he would negotiate a rendezvous, generally in Switzerland. Once face to face with the informant he would put his cards on the table, receive a sardonic smile along with a refusal, or perhaps a request for several days' reflection, but then no sign of life. Only one out of ten accepted an assignment, a poor success rate for so much

trouble and time. With the coming of war, Andlauer had more volunteers—primarily Alsatians—than he could use. His station expanded in functions as well as in numbers. A separate bureau d'exploitation , housed in a separate building, sifted through mountains of information about German military movements. When material was verified it was coordinated with the British to compile an enemy order of battle.^[79]

To get information the spy masters turned to every human and mechanical means they could think of. The key was to identify how and where the enemy was deploying its divisions. All sides used radio intercepts with varying degrees of effectiveness. The Germans and Austrians planned tactical, even strategical, moves with the information they culled from Russian transmissions. Tannenberg was the classic example of what could be accomplished when an army was stupid enough to broadcast en clair , but even when the Russians resorted to code their enemies could determine certain troop movements. The French, who had developed considerable mastery in cryptography before the war, broke German codes with greater success than the Germans experienced in deciphering French ones. Room 40 in the British admiralty was celebrated for its cracking of German naval transmissions, but a large team of military code breakers on the continent made only limited contributions.^[80] More directly the spies took to the air to reconnoiter behind enemy lines. Pilots became famous for their gladiatorial combats in a war that crunched human beings in the millions, but the real role of the fighters was to clear the skies for the scouts.^[81]

On the ground, methods ranged from mundane to daring. Thc thousands of interrogations of prisoners of war were tedious, although they could yield valuable information on the positioning of troops. Andlauer's exploitation bureau meticulously scanned official German publications for details on promotions or courts-martial, for example, where a recent court-martial had been held, from what division its officers were drawn, or what unit the accused had belonged to. lean Tillet, who worked with French intelligence, said there was really nothing difficult about getting information. All a spy had to do was to sit down in a café behind the front and watch and listen to the men who passed by.^[82] The problem was how to get agents behind the lines. The best way was to recruit people who were already there, a technique that favored the Allies since the Germans fought the war on occupied territory. Both the French and British organized networks of civilians to watch German train movements. Like most espionage, the work required high levels of discretion and diligence. At one post a family

watched trains day and night through a curtain, alternating shifts and keeping count with various kinds of food, for example, beans for soldiers and coffee for guns. The work was monotonous and terribly risky. A French network based in Liège was betrayed to the Germans in 1915, and two years later treachery and chain arrests all but erased a Britishrun operation. Altogether, several thousand civilians watched trains for the British and the French, the majority of the agents working for the British in occupied Belgium. One British network, the Dame blanche, numbered over nine hundred agents by the end of the war.^[83] At Belfort Andlauer had great success recruiting Alsatians. Perhaps his best find was the agent Carlos, who supervised alcohol shipments to German headquarters on the western front. The position ideally situated Carlos for identifying troop emplacements at any given moment. Using his mistress as his courier, Carlos sent messages to a pharmacist named Zugmeyer in Basel who communicated the intelligence to Belfort station.^[84]

How many agents were landed by air behind enemy lines remains a mystery. As early as 1915 French intelligence reported on sending in agents by airplane, but there is no way to tell if these were proposals or summaries of landings actually carried out. Colonel Nicolai of IIIb insisted that French agents, including Alsatian deserters, came in by air. The Alsatians wore German uniforms under their clothing, discarded their outer garments upon landing, and blended in among German army formations. The French wore civilian clothes and French uniforms underneath in the event they were threatened with capture. The difficulty in reading Nicolai's memoirs is knowing when he is telling the truth. Some tall tales are easy to spot, some stories are credible. The above seems borderline. The Englishman George Hill claimed to have landed agents behind lines on the Balkan front. His adventures suggest this was not a routine operation. One Serbian agent took him to a landing site covered with boulders. Another, a Greek, was so terrified once they took to the air that he collapsed in the plane upon landing and had to be flown directly back to base. Hill's greatest fear was that his propeller would stop turning as he brought the plane to a halt and that he would have to get out and restart it in a hurry, perhaps slicing himself into human julienne. Once he was forced to perform this maneuver and deftly turned it over to the man he was trying to land. The man, trying and trying to no avail, succeeded in getting the engine going just as a patrol appeared upon the scene. Unfortunately Hill too was known to stretch the truth on occasion.^[85]

Another problem surfaces here. Spies were accustomed to lying through their teeth, and heads of intelligence services could bamboozle with the best of them. Colonel Paul Ignatiev, a Russian intelligence liaison stationed in Paris, said he purchased the services of an Italian "commercial" organization that fed him data on troop movements in Austria-Hungary and Germany. Ignatiev's contact was a man called Frantchesko, but the real boss was a little old man in Milan. Once Ignatiev met the old man who said he had people all over the world, none of whom would dare to betray him. "As he said these words a flash of cold cruelty passed over the old man's face, and I avoided his glance so as not to show him that I had understood."^[86] Perhaps this was true, but it has the feel of the storytelling that pervaded espionage literature in the interwar years. Very little that these men said could be taken at face value, a difficulty not only for future historians but for the spy masters themselves as they sought to weed out the true from the false. Counts of trains could probably render accurate information if the agents were meticulous, but intelligence from other sources might just as easily be disinformation. The French constantly attempted to plant phony intelligence on the Germans. They fed false reports into Switzerland knowing these would be picked up by Swiss intelligence and probably passed on to the German military attaché who had a close working relationship with the Swiss general staff. They also baited known German operatives with counterfeit intelligence that was carefully coordinated with details the French were feeding in elsewhere. German military attachés appear to have been easy marks. The one in Bucharest recruited an employee in the Russian embassy to identify Russian disinformation, unaware that his man worked for Russian intelligence. Overall none of this activity seems to have made any difference. More often than not Russian efforts to mislead the Germans merely betrayed their real intention. Still all sides kept trying. All used double agents, and all funneled in false information through prisoners of war.^[87] The spy world was enshrouded in a mist of half-truths and deception that remained with it once the shooting was over.

To get information out agents concealed data in fountain pens, shoe polish tins, cakes of soap, overcoat buttons, coins, oranges, or behind postage stamps. They corresponded via classifieds in the newspapers or used the spy's old standby, invisible ink. IIIb's agents carried with them a handkerchief or a pair of socks soaked in special liquid. When the time came to send a message they immersed the handkerchief in water (preferably rainwater), let it sit three to four minutes to form the ink,

and then squeezed the contents into a receptacle. Then they ran a moistened sponge over glossed paper to remove the glaze and waited for it to dry naturally. Once ready to write, they transcribed their message, using regular ink on the first and third pages, invisible ink on pages two and four. The French, however, were on to this method by the end of 1915. British scientists discovered that the least detectable kind of invisible ink could be made from semen, which, one might assume, would solve the problem of carrying incriminating evidence on one's person, with certain age and gender limitations. Another advantage was that an inexhaustible supply was always at hand. But the technique was not recommended to agents in the field.^[88]

There was the other ageless standby, the code, so multifarious in its possibilities that one example will suffice. In 1915 von Krohn, the German naval attaché in Madrid and a man much given to playing at espionage (one cannot credit his projects with a more mature verb), dispatched Carlos de Heredia Bentabol to Marseilles and Toulon to identify targets for German torpedoes. Heredia was to correspond via telegram or the post, identifying destination with letters—for instance, T for Turkey, E for Egypt—and boats by proper names beginning with vowels—for instance, Edward signified two English ships, Emile two French ships. There were also codes for cargoes, for example, a proper name beginning with a consonant signaled numbers of troops on board. Thus a telegram reading "Otto sick requests Hamilton to join him at Toledo. He will leave the 27th. Heredia" translated into "Four English ships (O tto) carrying six thousand men (H amilton), cannons and munitions (H eredia) leaves the 27th for the Dardanelles (T oledo)." This not terribly ingenious code was known to the French by October 1915.^[89]

Perhaps the most widely used means of communication was the carrier pigeon, which performed the same function as the portable radio in the Second World War. Pigeons were used on all fronts because they could return messages ten to twenty times faster than humans stealing across guarded frontiers. It was dangerous to be caught behind lines with pigeons, and even more dangerous to attempt to smuggle them in to train watchers and agents. The Allies overcame the latter difficulty by devising contraptions for infiltrating the birds via parachute. There was always a tinge of the farcical connected with the pigeons. For some reason pigeon folklore tended to degenerate into stories about parrots. It was said that one spy had painted a pigeon in bright colors to resemble a parrot on the premise that troops who fired at carrier pigeons would pay less attention to a parrot flying across Belgium. Christopher An-

drew recounts how a British general was informed that carrier pigeons had been crossbred with parrots to produce a super-pigeon capable of delivering oral reports. The French tended toward bathos, bestowing the croix de guerre upon one pigeon and building a monument to other pigeon heroes. There was, however, something universal in that sentiment. General John Pershing awarded a Distinguished Service Cross to a carrier pigeon named Cher Ami who flew through heavy enemy fire and suffered severe wounds yet nonetheless made it home with word of an American battalion cut off by the Germans. In the 1930s the Japanese proclaimed pigeon 4237 "a model soldier" and buried it in a military cemetery with full honors for completing its mission despite a killer attack by a falcon. And from the Gulf War comes this news release:

Brits Cite Parakeets for War Bravery

Gibraltar (AP)—Six parakeets pressed into service aboard a British destroyer during the Gulf War received citations Monday for bravery.

British Forces spokesman Capt. Leo Callow said the six birds were received with honors at Shell Jetty by children from St. Georges School, who had lent them to the navy to detect chemical gas.

The birds, belonging to the Melopsittacus undulatus group, were recruited to serve on board the HMS Manchester as part of the ship's chemical detection system when it headed toward the Persian Gulf last January.

Actually the pigeons were worth the attention. Quick and reliable, they were indispensable to some of the train-watching circuits and saved courier fives in the process.^[90]

Still some agents had to cross borders, and this was tricky business with wartime passport controls. Whereas the French had required passports only of Russians before the war, they now introduced strict, formal conditions for all foreigners wishing to enter French territory. Passports with officially stamped visas became mandatory as of August 1914.^[91] Throughout Europe border controls tightened as lax procedures gave way to demands for formal papers in order. The spies countered with false papers fabricated by their intelligence services or procured through other means. Turkish agents traveled to Morocco with Greek and Italian passports. German agents posing as Greeks or Romanians acquired papers from the French representative in Buenos Aires. Neutral papers, clearly, were the most desirable. At Rotterdam the Germans purchased passports from a contact in the town hall for the price of one hundred pounds sterling each, and they replicated the stamp and signature of the Dutch consul in Barcelona to manufacture their own

sham papers from Holland. In China they organized an operation to supply their agents with the necessary documents. Germans and Austrians stranded in the United States at the outbreak of war bought papers from unemployed seamen or drifters to make it back through the British blockade. Sometimes the Germans simply stole papers from neutrals traveling through their country. In Switzerland a Jewish gang sold bogus identity papers to all comers.^[92]

As with codes, invisible ink, and carrier pigeons there was nothing new in the fabrication of false papers. Nonetheless, there was a stepping up of intensity whose tone and feel previewed the intrigues of the interwar years. The scale and technical proficiency with which bogus documents were manufactured in the First World War rang of the traffic in the twenties and thirties and had no precedents before 1914. After the war the controls remained, as did the use of counterfeit passports and visas whose demand was forced up by the appearance of large numbers of stateless people and the descent of still more frontier barriers. In the menacing, sinister quality to border crossings between the two wars ran undercurrents of intrigue not unlike those introduced by the wartime passage of clandestine agents.^[93]

Thus one facet to espionage in the First World War was the sheer quantitative vault to a new level of action that all but mass-produced spies and tricks of the trade just as the war churned out men and material in every other theater of fighting. Yet another was the conversion of sabotage and subversion into routine forms of intelligence work. Very quickly the secret war turned into a war of covert operations. Demolition teams swung into action in Galicia, blew up bridges in the Balkans, worked their way up rail lines in the Carpathians, infiltrated behind lines in Belgium and France. Factories were dynamited, ships and depots set on fire. Agents traveled with incendiary bombs in the shape of pencils, or with the more sinister weapons of disease. The French warned against German plans to poison their horses, but they were scarcely lily-white. They too experimented with germ warfare or submitted plans to destroy the harvest in Hungary. Andlauer tells of an SR conference where his chief flourished anthrax and glanders tablets, prepared by the Pasteur Institute, before the assembled officers. A promised conference on typhoid never took place, but Andlauer found uses for the first series of germs. "Without boasting of extraordinary results, I can admit to having on my conscience several hundred piglets in the Frankfurt region and also some cattle that left Switzerland for Germany in perfect health but abruptly departed this life once over the border."^[94]

Nothing, however, seems to compare with the sabotage organization—the S-Service—that the Germans operated out of Spain.^[95] The direction was confided to the three principal agents in the Iberian peninsula—the ambassador Ratibor, the military attaché von Kalle, and the naval attaché von Krohn (replaced by Steffan in 1918)—but eventually the service was run through the cover of a brokerage firm based in Bilbao with branches in the major Spanish cities. The S-Service's schemes bordered on the fantastic, the products of fertile imaginations running feverish and sick. Von Krohn proposed dumping cholera germs into Portuguese rivers to force a border closing with Spain and to undermine Portuguese ties with the Allies. A Professor Kleine from the Cameroons said the plan could be easily executed with two glass tubes and gelatinized cultures (this same Kleine, incidentally, appears in a report from 1921 referring to a wartime project under his direction at the German hospital in Madrid to manufacture typhus bacilli for export to Salonika, Africa, and southern France; whether the report is true cannot be verified).^[96] The scheme sounds typical of von Krohn, whose judgment ranged from poor to plain stupid and who compromised himself badly in a personal affair with a French double agent.^[97] Berlin nixed the cholera proposal, but it gave the go-ahead for sabotage missions in France and Portugal including the destruction of ships, factories, and livestock. Cultures for contamination initially arrived from Berlin, but soon the S-Service was cultivating its own. An agent from Switzerland delivered explosive materials camouflaged in pencils and thermos bottles, while other materials traveled from Zurich via Italy hidden in toy chalets. Some factories were blown up in Lisbon, but the results in France were paltry compared to preparations and ambitions. Faulty materials thwarted one agent's efforts. Another reported great successes to Ratibor, but these were all fairy tales; the agent worked for French counter-intelligence.

These adventures (and travesties) point to yet another facet of First World War intrigue: the importance of the periphery. The targets, of course, were the warring nations, but for obvious reasons the spies fought their war largely in places like Spain, Holland, Norway, and Switzerland. Spies could not operate with impunity in neutral countries, but they had far more room for maneuver there than behind enemy lines, and the presence of one nation's spies invited the dispatch of another's until intelligence and counterintelligence whorled into an elaborate, incestuous, self-sustaining enterprise. Moreover neutral countries were sources of supply or staging areas for transshipment, and these too

drew spies as sugar draws flies. Much of the intrigue in Holland centered on German efforts to circumvent the blockade by importing blacklisted materials via Dutch middlemen operatives. German intelligence in Scandinavia worked behind fronts such as the International Agency (wholesalers) in Sweden and through agents like the industrialist S. and the merchant A., both based in Copenhagen, and Gertrude L., who worked as a typist for North Sea Packing in Stavanger. German saboteurs planted bombs in Narvik and were suspected of setting fires in factories and warehouses, including one in Trondheim that destroyed a considerable quantity of goods destined for Russia. In Spain, Ratibor and Co. worked the embassies and ministries for tidbits of military intelligence, and von Kalle built an espionage network centered on Bordeaux with agents operating in Paris, Le Havre, Cherbourg, Brest, Marseilles, and Toulon. His principal informer brought all sorts of interesting information fed him by French counterintelligence; he too was a French double agent.

As in Holland and Norway, the secret war in Spain focused on shipping. The Germans wanted information on the quantifies and kinds of supplies coming in and particularly intelligence on shipping routes and patterns that they could send to their submarine commanders. The German admiralty instructed von Krohn to gather information on maritime traffic and cargoes throughout the Atlantic, and von Krohn responded by establishing a network of informers from Barcelona to Cádiz to Bilbao who reported ship cargoes and itineraries, convoy assembly points, and other data necessary for submarine warfare. In turn the French and British filtered agents into Spain to fight against the spies and to watch the submarines.^[98]

The greatest of spy playgrounds was Switzerland. In the 1940s the Swiss liked to refer to themselves as a lifeboat. For the First World War the appropriate analogy would have been a luxury liner on a secret agent cruise. One can imagine how easily the simile could be extended: the public room encounters; nods in the corridors; exchanges at dinner or in the casino; intrigues—petty and grand—in the staterooms; a constant, underhanded flow of news, gossip, innuendo, and assignation; dirty work down below; a crew that steered, serviced, and supervised but intervened only in moments of exception. Such was Switzerland between 1914 and 1918. Shift the analogy slightly to one vast resort—suspects in reports are nearly always identified with the hotel they are staying in—and the picture is practically complete. The Italians called Lugano "Spyopolis," a city of Swiss, Slav, German, Russian, Italian,

Spanish, Dutch, Brazilian, and French spies. Ladoux of French counter-espionage, in one of his few credible passages, told a man he was sending into Switzerland:

There is where people the Allies consider undesirable, outlaw, [or] suspect take refuge. Some have always been traffickers. Others are only spectators at first. Or they are fine fellows with nothing to do. Now, the cost of living is high over there. Room costs are always going up. After several weeks refugees bereft of means are forced to earn money. The spy trade is there, it's tempting, just about the only job they can get except for another obvious one. Moreover the two trades go together. Charming and spying, that's what three out of ten—let's be modest—suspicious neutrals turn to.^[99]

The assessment was not far off the mark. Mata Hari was the most celebrated of these kinds of spies (despite the fact that she did almost nothing in the war). But there were plenty of other femmes galantes whom French intelligence identified as suspects or prospects and who traveled or worked at some point in Switzerland. A sampling from one file produces Marguerite S., German-born, a singer calling herself Radhjah, a sometime French agent when she worked the Corso Theatre in Zurich; Marie M., who traveled to Switzerland to see her Austrian lover; Frida M., born in Hamburg but a French national, a dancer in several Geneva establishments, "signaled as a spy"; and Juliette T., a Swiss national, an artiste , who made suspicious trips across the border into France.^[100]

A neutral country bordering on four belligerent states, a haven for exiles and draft dodgers, a spa for the rich and a retreat for the invalided, an exchange point for prisoners of war, a land of business and transshipment, a tryst for international lovers, Switzerland offered an unparalleled setting for wartime intrigue. The country was a contact point for information, a nexus from which spies were dispatched and to which spies returned with reports. It was a locale where nationals from belligerent states had legitimate reasons for congregating, thus making it a round-the-clock rumor mill and an ideal milieu for picking up stray pieces of intelligence. Spies all but tripped over one another in train compartments, in lobbies, or at dinner engagements. The scene has probably been fixed for all time in Somerset Maugham's Ashenden stories about a British spy in Switzerland during the war (Maugham himself worked in Switzerland for British intelligence):

While he waited for his dinner to be served, Ashenden cast his eyes over the company. Most of the persons gathered were old friends by sight. At that time

Geneva was a hot-bed of intrigue and its home was the hotel at which Ashenden was staying. There were Frenchmen there, Italians and Russians, Turks, Rumanians, Greeks, and Egyptians. Some had fled their country, some doubtless represented it. There was a Bulgarian, an agent of Ashenden, whom for greater safety he had never even spoken to in Geneva; he was dining that night with two fellow-countrymen and in a day or so, if he was not killed in the interval, might have a very interesting communication to make. Then there was a little German prostitute, with china-blue eyes and a doll-like face, who made frequent journeys along the lake and up to Berne, and in the exercise of her profession got little tidbits of information over which doubtless they pondered with deliberation in Berlin. She was of course of a different class from the baroness and hunted much easier game. But Ashenden was surprised to catch sight of Count von Holzminden and wondered what on earth he was doing there. This was the German agent in Vevey and he came over to Geneva only on occasion.^[101]

The archives bear out the ambiance of the literature. French intelligence in Switzerland turned up people like the Greek Athanassiades who had run guns for the Turks in the Italo-Turk war and then an espionage service between Greece and Egypt for the German military attaché in Athens. Now he was in Geneva where he associated with a shady assortment of individuals. He was not, the SR noted, to be confused with another Athanassiades who resided in Lausanne and was equally suspected of espionage. The French also stumbled onto a German spy in Zurich named Willer and his associate, another German agent named Brigfeld, who had been born in Patras but was now living in Zurich where he was mixed up in Greek affairs. There was Alexandroff, a questionable Bulgarian, and a Colonel Bratsaloff, whose espionage organization sounds suspiciously like a private operation. Another report identified forty-two Turkish agents stationed in Switzerland in 1918.^[102]

At a more prosaic level French agents tracked the movement of goods, watching for contraband imports to Germany via Switzerland.^[103] Away from the hotels agents like Lacaze ran low-level yet dangerous operations that seeded informers throughout Switzerland and on into Germany. Relying largely on Alsatians like himself, Lacaze was able to set up a listening post in a modest hotel in Basel. Another operative, code-named Hubert, traveled to Germany on business trips. On his journeys Hubert jotted down a meticulous record of his affairs and expenses. Orders totaling 580 marks from Schmidt and Co., or room costs and tips at the Hotel Metropole in Stuttgart, were just that. But numbers regarding stamps, cards, and beer referred to troop units and their movement by train. Lacaze never gave his name or his address to his agents. He told them the time of day and the place for their next meet-

ing and that he would send them a postcard reading simply, "Best wishes, Louise," whose date would be the day of the rendezvous. The agent was to arrive no sooner than five minutes before and no later than five minutes after the prescribed time. If the agent needed to see him in the interim, the agent was to take out an advertisement in a Swiss newspaper, for example, listing a kitchen stove for sale. Either Lacaze would come the next day or he would send his postcard with the date.^[104]

As in Spain, the espionage war in Switzerland turned toward a war of covert operations. It was from Switzerland that explosives made their way to the peninsula and it was through Switzerland that Andlauer's agents struck at livestock for Germany. In the last year of the war authorities discovered a cache of munitions, grenades, and propaganda that had been brought in from Germany and transferred via the German consulate in Zurich to an Italian deserter. The conclusion of French counterespionage was that the German general staff was planning terrorist attacks in France and Italy through a secret terrorist operation it was organizing in Switzerland.^[105] In the wake of German sabotage adventures in Spain and elsewhere, this was not that farfetched a perception.

In the end almost all the secret war on the periphery turned into a war of sabotage and subversion because that, ultimately, was what all peripheral strategy in the First World War was about: striking where the enemy was weakest, diverting his attention and forces, undermining his cohesion, and undercutting his sources of supply. As the conflict escalated into a global war expeditionary forces sailed to faraway places like Iraq, Egypt, and the Dardanelles, and fought sideshows in East Asia and eastern and southern Africa. However the weapons of choice in global strategy remained sabotage and subversion because these dangled before the eyes of the war makers the hope that a very few hands might yet pluck great ripe fruits from the tree of victory.

All sides fought a covert global war. The Allies produced the most celebrated subversive—T. E. Lawrence—so celebrated that other adventurer-spies would be reduced to the generic Lawrence epithet: the German Lawrence, the Japanese Lawrence.^[106] Yet the easiest territory for the Allies to exploit was central and southern Europe, whereas they themselves, as the holders of empire, were most vulnerable to the subversive intrigues of their enemies. It was the Germans who had the greatest field of play and the wildest visions to match, although in the end they had precious little to show for their efforts.

In the Americas, German agents, often fighting competing covert

wars with one another, occasionally operating on orders from Berlin (via the intermediary of Madrid station), more often than not marauders on the loose and running amok, hatched an unending series of grandiose schemes. They were going to sabotage American munitions factories and harbor facilities. They would place explosives on ships carrying supplies to Europe. Strikes would be fomented, the Panama Canal Zone would be sabotaged, the Tampico oil wells would be destroyed. They intrigued with Mexican generals to strike north against the Yankees and thus embroil the United States in a Mexican war, or they schemed to overthrow Venustiano Carranza and to replace him with generals or a dictator more compliant with the war needs of Germany. The Zimmermann telegram was merely one variation on a steady stream of German proposals to make use of Mexico in the global strategy of war. Still further south they planned to sabotage mining operations in Chile or to destroy livestock destined for Europe.

Some of these projects were actually executed. In 1916 German agents set fire to the Black Tom shipyard in New York and a factory in New Jersey. Another German agent named Jahnke, who had been a private detective and presumably an arms and drug trafficker in San Francisco before the war and who was one of the few German spies with the wits and skills to match his imagination, claimed to have destroyed several ships and a factory in Tacoma, Washington. Other agents smuggled bacteriological gelatins to a man named Arnold working in Latin America as a spy, propagandist, saboteur, and, apparently, specialist in germ warfare. In early 1918 Arnold reported that mule shipments to Mesopotamia had been "copiously worked," and that his sabotage of Argentine horse shipments to France had met with success. But these were mere drops in the bucket compared with what had been anticipated. Most projects never got off the ground either because the authorities in Berlin refused to send money or scrapped schemes as unfeasible or because most of the German agents were an incredible collection of blockheads who played right into the hands of their enemies. The Allies too, especially the Americans, ran their own covert war in Mexico. Practically all German agents were constantly under surveillance, and there is reason to believe that the British sabotaged a German radio station in Ixtapalapa, although the source, as usual, was anything but credible. Everyone, including Carranza, seems to have been running a network of agents.^[107]

Elsewhere the Germans sought to raise North Africa against the French and British, Persia against the British and Russians, India against

the British, and Indochina against the French. They and their Turkish allies promulgated a jihad, or Muslim holy war, as money, arms, and agents poured into Morocco. In Libya Turkish and German agents goaded the Senoussi to strike at Egypt's western border. A Turkish expeditionary force marched toward Suez, preceded by Turkish secret service guerrillas and supported by Turkish agents in Cairo, while German agents planned the sabotage of the canal and the raising of Egypt. On Christmas day 1914 the German explorer Leo Frobenius left Damascus for Abyssinia to fan an insurrection in the Sudan. Indian revolutionaries were wooed, promised support. As far away as Madrid von Kalle contemplated the dispatch of agitators to India. Two expeditions, under von Hentig and Niedermayer, set off across Persia to incite the Afghans to rush upon India's northwestern frontier. Another German agent, Wassmus, headed toward southern Persia to organize tribal harassment of the British. Still other agents, including members of the Afghanistan expeditions, prodded Persia toward war against the British and Russians, offering money, munitions, and officers as support for the enterprise. A sabotage team temporarily cut the oil pipeline in Persia and stood ready to seize or destroy the installation at Abadan. Meanwhile agents in Latin America dreamed of covert operations in China and provoking Japan against Britain, some indication of the way the war gulled imaginations into fantasizing strategies of worldwide subversion. More materially German intrigues and money came together with nationalist movements to stir up troubles in French Indochina.

As in the Americas, none of these projects amounted to much. There was to these vast enterprises a whimsical and improvised character that too often outstripped German resources. In the end the Germans had little more to offer than resourceful agents and vague promises of money, arms, and postwar restraint. Personal rivalries and shoddy planning supplanted method and organization. Quarrels rent the Afghanistan expeditions while authorities forwarded Niedermayer's baggage through the Balkans with the label Traveling Circus attached to the cases. They might as well have plastered the boxes with red stickers reading Espionage. The consignment was confiscated in Romania after a customs official opened a case and found a machine gun and bullet packets within. Bribes lubricated the passage of a second baggage shipment. The men on the spot like von Hentig and Niedermayer were capable of extraordinary exploits (and on the level of maneuver, if not that of grand politics, they consistently outwitted their adversaries and then their pursuers).^[108] At the very least, however, the subversion of empires required

a stronger military presence than either a handful of Germans or their Turkish ally could muster and greater coordination between German and Turkish policy in Asia. French, British, and Russian countermeasures were vigorous, a lesson not lost on the shah of Persia and the emir of Afghanistan who might have had little liking for the English but who understood power and the consequences that come with lost causes. In Indochina the nationalist movement was too weak and divided to be more than an annoyance. Ultimately German global intrigues mattered more for what they signified than for what they accomplished. They were ambitious, even at times ingenious; but they produced practically nothing in the way of concrete results.^[109]

This could be the epitaph for all the spies who perished in the First World War. The secret war was fought in great numbers, all over the world, yet it cannot be said to have altered in any way the outcome of the conflict. No doubt the mountains of tactical intelligence—troop and ship movements, orders of battle—helped prevent blunders and save lives. But all sides compiled this kind of intelligence and plenty of lives were wasted nonetheless. It is difficult to see how the basic facts of the war—Allied victory in the west, Russian defeat in the east, a war of stalemate and attrition—were in any way the result of intrigue and espionage or could in any way have been changed by them. Even bold strokes like the interception of the Zimmermann telegram did not have the strategic consequences some have attributed to them. There were no secrets whose discovery would divert the course of the war, and raw intelligence itself was only as good as the staff's evaluation of it and then the decisions the generals made as to whether to use it. There was something insular, almost bubblelike about much of the spy war: spies pitted against other spies, tracking and neutralizing one another. It was a fascinating, dangerous game played by all sides, but one wonders whether the risks were any more vindicable than those for the men who went over the top or whether the successes meant any more than a trench captured here or a freighter sunk there. One is reminded of Paul Allard's 1936 debunking of Basil Thomson, the fabled head of British counterespionage in the First World War, who, summoned by Paris-Soir to solve the sensational Prince murder in the mid-1930s, "collapsed in his seat at a famous Dijon restaurant following libations and gastronomic excesses that seem to have been the principal concern of 'the man of a hundred faces.'"^[110] A bit cruel and certainly unfair, but also an exposé of the inflation of spy reputations and the role of the spy from a man who made a living passing on every espionage story he heard.

Intrigue, then, did not shape the First World War, but the war did shape intrigue and in this relation the historian can find something significant. More than the bloated accomplishments of spies it was espionage's ability to capture styles and moods that came with the war and to replicate in its symbolic presence the changes introduced by that cataclysm that make it worthy of our attention. Those characteristics of interwar espionage that would bind it to its times—its copiousness, its scale and subversive orientation, its global reach, its methodical proficiency, and its more diverse or sophisticated motifs and imagery—emanated from the far-reaching consequences of the Great War, but also from the war experience itself and the way war made real what previously had been only imagined or conjured. Postwar espionage never lost what it acquired with the dramatic expansion of intelligence opera-dons during the conflict, nor did the French forget the lessons the war taught them about the vital importance of rear lines and imperial security that would feed postwar obsessions with spies. Invariably as this study progresses it will retrace its steps to that conflagration, whether in discussing spy fears of the late 1930s and memories of wartime subversion and sabotage, or in reviewing the interwar spy literature that grew out of the war, or in recounting the ties between espionage and adventure on the one hand and the wartime exploits of a von Hentig on the other. War in 1870 began one era in espionage; but a wider, deeper, far more bountiful one surfaced with the spy wars fought out from 1914 to 1918.

Perhaps it is Impex that tells us best how sharp the break was between one era and another. We are talking about a German import-export firm (hence its name Impex), in reality an intelligence front, based in Barcelona but with branches that the French unearthed in other Spanish cities in the early twenties, or so they believed. The firm traded in a variety of goods—machines, mining equipment, automobiles, dyes, pharmaceuticals—imported from Germany and then reexported to Spanish Morocco. But mostly its exports were guns and munitions and French agents backed these charges up with a litany of others against the house. Impex claimed to be a branch of a central business in Madrid, but there was no foundation to this declaration. Impex's trade was lively, but rarely was it conducted under the firm's own name. A Spanish freight-forwarding company that had collaborated with German espionage in the war and reputedly held to those arrangements shared a ground floor

Map 1.
Spain and the Moroccos.

and interior staircase with Impex, covering the latter's "shady and suspect" traffic to Morocco. Running Impex's warehousing was a waterfront tough, Luciano A., who had spied on Allied shipping during the war for the Germans and had attempted to plant time bombs on boats. Across the Mediterranean at Melilla and Ceuta Impex had connections with the B. brothers, importers and exporters suspected of shipping arms to Arabs in both Spanish and French Morocco. The director of Impex was a man who had worked for the Mannesmann brothers (a name we will return to) before the war, and his two associates were German agents. All three took their orders from Pablo S., the German intelligence agent in charge of operations in Morocco or from the Rüggeberg brothers, who ran German intelligence in Spain after the war (and reports from French files suggest the continued presence of a sizable German operation in the Iberian peninsula).

Tales about Impex passed onto the French were charged with mystifications and dense atmospherics. The house was frequented "by every-

one Barcelona numbers among former and current German agents or Spaniards notoriously Germanophile. Impex receives numerous cases that it mysteriously dispatches to southern ports; it sends agents to Melilla who meet there with Moroccan dissidents." There were communiqués on Max W., who appears to have been running Impex by December 1922, describing his voyages to Spanish and French Morocco ("without papers , he claims") in the course of which he held long conversations with a Jewish banker and shipper. In August 1922 a secret bulletin to the Ministry of Colonies related the arrival of Karl G. and Friedrich L. from Madrid and Málaga, Impex agents recalled to headquarters for days of close quartering with the bosses before setting out for Andalusia, and who blabbed at the Gambrinus Bar prior to departure that they were on an urgent mission to Ceuta, Melilla, Tetouan, and Tangier. Such reports were heaviest from the fall of 1921 through the course of the following year. Then the reports faded, although Impex died a slow death in French consciousness. Late 1925 produced still more references to Impex, this time recounting the questionable conduct of Walter R., a former German policeman who had lived for some time in Barcelona, traveled frequently to Morocco, had his mail addressed to a Dutch company care of a post-office box in Santander, and whose principal occupation seemed to be recruiting secret agents for Germany. R. was closely associated with Impex, as well as with a man suspected of infiltrating narcotics into France. Several years later the Battiti affair once again (appropriately) resurrected mention of Impex.^[111]

For Morocco, where international intrigue was endemic from the end of the century, all but writ into the resonance of the place-name, Impex was a likely phenomenon. Before the war the pattern of resentment, defiance, and outright revolt upon which the French had built their command of the country^[112] had set the stage for foreign intrigues against the conquering nation. Pan-Islamic conspiracies, aimed at fomenting tribal risings and launched out of Cairo, had created moments of discomfort before they sputtered out rather ingloriously, the few men who made it to Morocco falling easily into French clutches.^[113] Germans had run guns on the freighters of the Atlas, OPDR, and possibly Woermann lines, all three shipping companies out of Hamburg, the latter two operating a scheduled service to Morocco or the west coast of Africa by the turn of the century. Heinrich Ficke, the German vice-consul, had watched benignly as the Atlas's Zeus unloaded its contraband cargoes at Tangier and Casablanca, although he was also the com-

pany's local representative, and rogue diplomacy and commercial imperatives (both the Arias and OPDR lines were running more ships than their routes warranted; Arias went into liquidation shortly after its founding) more than official scheming may well have explained this trafficking in arms.^[114]

There were also the Mannesmanns, six brothers in all, who owned a successful seamless pipe company in Germany and who had come to Morocco in pursuit of mining concessions. Mavericks and adventurers, they were German robber barons whose enterprise radiated great force and energy, but they could also be malevolently serf-destructive and inclined to plot when they could not get their way. Thwarted at obtaining French government approval for the extensive mining concessions they had won from Moroccans, the Mannesmanns turned to intrigues. They incited separatist movements in the south of the country and worked with gunrunners. They maintained an arms depot on one of their farms, and their geological expeditions into the Arias distributed guns and anti-French propaganda. During the Agadir crisis in 1911 Mannesmann agents sought, unsuccessfully, to create an incident that would force a German troop landing. Their wide connections with the German community in Morocco, their contingent of engineers, mining assessors, and protected nationals who traveled all over the country, and their success in wrapping themselves in the cloak of German national interests to the point that pan-Germans looked upon the Mannesmanns as the principal tacticians of an imperial strategy, appalled the French, who had every reason to regard the brothers as German secret agents, although it is not certain that German authorities who negotiated Mannesmann claims did not grow to despise the brothers as much as the occupiers did. Nonetheless Mannesmann was a name the French would not forget easily, as report after report from the war, and the Impex file, attest.^[115]

But the background to Impex was really the First World War and Germany's effort to raise the tribes against the protectorate. There, overseas, amidst the casbahs and the desert, no less than on the trailways of Europe, the war propelled the French into a word of spies they scarcely knew before the firing began. Wartime in Morocco cultivated the same assortment of ninety-day spooks and inflated support networks, the same grandiose projects and spy-counterspy battles that it produced on the continent. Under the banner of a jihad German agents, money, arms, and propaganda flowed toward the country.^[116] First came a German officer named Lang, traveling with an American passport and probably calling himself Francisco Farr, although a number of reports includ-

ing one as late as 1918 refer to him as Francisco Fart.^[117] Then when Lang took ill and died in 1915, German contact with Abd-el-Malek in the north continued through Albert Bartels, a former tradesman who had come to Morocco in 1903, had learned to speak Arabic, had been interned in 1914 but had escaped, and who had, at least for some time before 1914, worked for the Mannesmanns—exactly the sort of connection that the French were apt to seize upon.^[118] Later the Germans sent out a Dr. Kuhnel, who took on the identity of José Maury from Colombia and who carried a credit for a considerable sum of money to organize more rebel resistance.^[119]

To finance and arm a full-scale war of Moroccan resistance (even if this never came about) required the creation of a considerable infrastructure of support and supply and this the Germans established only after 1914. They operated agent networks in the towns of Spanish Morocco—Ceuta, Tetouan, Melilla—and transit bases on the Canaries. In neutral Spain German intelligence easily recruited agents among the thousands of German nationals who had arrived since the beginning of the war from West Africa, Morocco, Latin America, and Portugal. Ratibor, yon Kalle, and von Krohn in Madrid provided central direction for Moroccan affairs, although operations spread throughout the country. In Barcelona the Germans established their propaganda center. Contraband arms shipments passed through Seville and Cádiz. Melilla's staging base was in Málaga. There at a small brasserie in the calle Marques de Larrios the gathering often included a Mannesmann brother, the engineer Langenheim, whose name would reappear in French intelligence reports in the twenties and thirties, and a man named Stalwinger.^[120]

None of this made any difference at all, despite the fact that Lyautey's wartime correspondence paints a picture of unrelieved alarm about the danger of pan-Islamic propaganda and "Germano-Islamic" intrigues.^[121] Germans and Moroccans could agree on common enemies but on little else. Coordination between rival Moroccan factions was tenuous at best, while relations between Abd-el-Malek and his German liaison, Albert Bartels, were horrid, bordering on the mutually contemptuous and recriminatory. Realizing that their anti-imperialist clothing was full of holes, the Germans sought Turkish cover, but that garb proved tawdry and frayed. Turkish agents dispatched to Madrid in late 1915 squabbled with their ally, demanded more money, and threatened to tell all to the French if the Germans did not pay their way to America. Spanish police arrested another Turkish agent, posing as Manuel Rodriguez from Peru, for sexually abusing a little boy.^[122] As for Stalwinger of Málaga, he was

little more than a brute, an ex-legionnaire who went under the names Pfeffer, petit doseur, and Fulenkampf, notable mostly as a type of gorilla that would overcrowd the spy worlds in the interwar years. The Germans kept him around because he would do anything. His contribution to the war was probably less than nil: money sent from Madrid was wasted on his private debaucheries, and a mission to Algeria ran aground when in an alcoholic stupor he announced that he was planning to encourage desertions among French legionnaires. By mid-1915 he was confiding in a man who was a French counterespionage agent.^[123] Then there was the captured informant Georg Regenratz. Under interrogation he refused on his honor as a German officer to confide a German code, at other times offered if set free to go to Berlin and bring back important documents, spoke of his needy mother and his personal finances, which were a mess, and, in the end, spilled the beans about circuits for infiltrating agents into North Africa.^[124] Even without these clowns the French had little to fear. They countered the German offensive with vigorous counterintelligence measures and their own contingents of tribesmen, retained a monopoly of firepower and control of the sea, and introduced smart policies regarding the indigenous population, such as the creation of jobs. These, more than German failures, held Morocco for France.^[125]

Yet the Bartels, the Langenheims, the von Krohns, and the Rcgenratzes, as well as the Mannesmanns, when taken together, represent the distance intrigue had traveled since 1914. Their enterprises produced no results but stirred up plenty of noise and a thorough air of mystery, and that was the kind of clandestine war the Germans brought to Morocco: submarines that surfaced in the night with money and armaments; false passport ateliers in Italian port cities; thugs gone to seed with too much drink and amateur adventurers who took on names like Si Hermann (Bartels) and blew up railway bridges in the back country; a mysterious German woman who appeared in Melilla, called herself English, proclaimed her engagement to a typewriter salesman out of the Transvaal, and promenaded at night with a Spanish captain of police.^[126] The postwar years would offer no better, but also no worse.

The memories were themselves a legacy, because what the war left behind was the almost unerring tendency to reproduce the details and imagery of First World War espionage. Nearly every report carried with it something from the wartime experience, although not always in the same way. Occasionally it was conditioning, the inclination to think about subversion following a war of insurrection or the far-flung dimen-

sion to interwar reporting after a war that had witnessed German arms shipments to Morocco, sabotage plans at Suez, and expeditions to Afghanistan. At other times it was a sense that the intrigues of wartime were continuing, as in the reports of German/pan-Islamic combines, now with Comintern imagery cooked in, that piled up in the years immediately following the armistice and repeated the basic facts—conspiracy, systematic coordination, global connections—of the First World War in Morocco. Or there was simply the discovery of spy rings and operations strikingly similar to those of the war.^[127]

And that is where Impex fits in, because in this shadowy company we can see how nearly all these strands could come together. As a covert operation Impex emerged from the war and the events that had followed. For some of its operatives like Luciano A., the war with its gluttony for agents had been the initiating experience. For others, like the Communist agitator Fernando V., who hung out at the edges of Impex reports, it was postwar milieus that created openings and reasons for action. Still others stepped out of the war, like freight-forwarding accomplices or Friedrich Rüggeberg who had worked for German intelligence in Spain during the fighting.^[128] In the references to Mannesmanns as directors behind the scenes there remained the nagging inclination to identify a chameleonlike consistency to German intrigues carried over from earlier times. Yet mostly there was to Impex a subversive, far-reaching quality—reports on the firm extended its operations to the Cameroons or converged with warnings of insurrections throughout the Muslim world—that carried with it the aroma of intrigue since 1914.

Above all else Impex projected the fullness that came with the war. It recalled the German wartime organization assembled in Spain to run arms and money and agents to Morocco, although not any organization that had preceded those years. In that respect even the question of veracity placed Impex squarely within the postwar scene. Whether Impex, as the files reconstruct it for us, was fiction or reality is not at all certain. The reporting was extensive and the details specific. Everything tempts us to believe that the operation, in some form, existed. But if Impex was a fabrication it was of postwar construction, a vision of German espionage in Spain and Morocco concocted out of the wartime experience and the focus of intrigue in the après-guerre world: subversion, communism, colonial security, and global surveillance. In its details and its internal coherence, Impex could be imagined only after the war. Such was the case of nearly all interwar intrigues in Morocco. Whether fact or

fiction, their building materials were those of the war and of the conditions that followed.

Thus over the years the differences with the past grew more pronounced. By the 1930s espionage in Morocco reflected the organizational and global designs characteristic of the interwar age. Gone were the reports of rogue settler intrigues or the fastidious details on individual arms shipments. In their stead materialized broad schemes of infiltration and espionage launched from European centers with method and operational sophistication and matched by extensive and systematic accounts on the French end.^[129] Seditious techniques now included movies, records,^[130] or the beaming of subversive radio messages across vast expanses of the world—the radio wars, as they came to be called toward the end of the decade.^[131] Characters and networks were those that only the postwar period would know. As before, Germans predominated, but the heady brews of the thirties encompassed all the bogeys: Italian Fascists (who initiated the radio wars and whose infiltration of the Moroccan Italian community was carefully watched), Spanish Nationalists once the civil war began, and in other extensive communiqués, agents of the Comintern.^[132]

Spanning nearly all of these was the overarching presence of Shakib Arslan. William Cleveland, in his authoritative biography of this influential yet relatively powerless pan-Islamist, has exposed the mythic dimensions to French and British images of the man as the ultimate string puller in the Arab Middle East. In reality Arslan led a ragged, if heated, existence. He was a mentor and a spokesman, but rarely a conspirator. The mysterious powers bestowed upon him by imperial officials were, however, symptomatic of an era in which nationalist agitation coincided with systematic subversive activity from abroad. Arslan spurred on the myth with his close ties to Germany and his apologies for Mussolini. Essentially he would turn to anyone who he thought would support the Arab cause, and if French documents are to be believed—and on Arslan they are suspect—he was also in league with the Communists. In this he too, like Impex, was a product of his times. He had been won over by the kaiser's proclamation of support for the Arabs at the end of the century, but the truly formative years for the man were those of the German-Ottoman alliance in the First World War and the active pursuit of Islamic independence. Forever after he was a creature of his own personal memories and missions in that war. But then so, too, were the French who never forgot the pan-Islamic experience of 1914-1918, nor the intrigues that followed, and who, caught in crosscurrents of the

age, turned him into the formidable force that he almost certainly would have liked to be.^[133]

All of which recalls the problems with which this chapter began: exactly what changed with the war? In a sense espionage has always been about war. In the twenties and thirties it was about many wars: the Rif war in the northern mountains of Morocco, the Spanish civil war, the erupting war in the Pacific, the war people expected to come. But above all it was about the war that had been fought between 1914 and 1918. Out of this war came the people and the imagery that made up the espionage worlds of the interwar years. Bolshevism, fascism, and future-war literature channeled interwar espionage down avenues of subversion and sabotage or of covert networks of global dimensions. Yet it was the First World War that turned these into the conventions of espionage just as, in effect, the new ideological systems and next-war speculation were themselves products of that war. After the war, espionage in its themes and motifs was always, in some way, a reflection back on the years of fighting and the world that had followed, whether through secret-war imagery or secret-agent memoirs or the constructs and visions of how espionage was conducted.

In this it drew on the network of materials that had developed from espionage and war in the late nineteenth century. At times the parallels could be striking, particularly when the imagery gravitated toward spy mania or when espionage was incorporated into the literature of military defeat. The Franco-Prussian War set people thinking about spies and protracted the consciousness of espionage deep into peacetime. It led to the creation or expansion of intelligence services on a permanent footing and to intrigues not always dissimilar from those that preoccupied authorities in the interwar years. The institutionalization of espionage operations made possible the spy battles of the First World War, and in certain ways anticipated those battles just as prewar espionage themes often previewed those of the postwar.

But rarely were the themes exactly the same. There was, for example, no equivalent to secret-war imagery before 1914. After 1870 French thinking on espionage often turned back to the Franco-Prussian War, but it did so as a disquisition on defeat, German danger, and German iniquity, or as an argument for constructing an intelligence service before the next conflict. Secret-war imagery after 1918 was different. It issued from sentiments made possible by four years of a war that seemed as if it never would end and by the sense of fluidity and unsettlement

unleashed by this war that carried clear through the armistice and the treaties. Secret-war imagery was about extension and permanence. It was an expression of unending war, a description, more than a warning, of a war continuing on clandestine fronts where spy masters were the generals and secret agents the combatants. "'Making war in peacetime,'" wrote Colonel Nicolai in his memoirs in the twenties, "that is the best definition of the present role of the secret service."^[134]

Comparable distinctions could be found in fifth-column imagery. There was something timeless, universal to fifth-column projections. No age nor place could call them all their own. The late nineteenth century spawned a genre of literature and reporting about the covert threat from within. Spy panics erupted everywhere with the outbreak of war in 1914. Attached to fifth-column imagery in the thirties and forties was a tradition trailing back into time. Yet fifth-column thinking in these years was also different from any that had preceded it, possessing identifications peculiar to its age. Partly this was a matter of perceptions. When people wrote or spoke of the fifth column they had in mind a specific conspiracy without antecedents. Fifth column described a fascist mode of operations first witnessed in the Spanish civil war and then deployed on a grander scale by the Nazis. It connoted modern espionage techniques—propaganda, sabotage, subversion, and terror—practiced by twentieth-century political systems. For contemporaries fifth column was a custom-fitted concept. The very perception of newness, the conferring of a name—fifth column—made it novel, separate, distinct from the past.

Likewise the fifth-column image that crystallized in spring 1940 was a sum greater than its parts, but one whose equations were sturdy and whose calculations faltered only at the end. The power of the First World War to make real what in the past had been primarily imaginary contributed to the subsequent inflation of the role of the spy despite the failure of espionage to alter in any way the course of that conflict. The experience of total war underscored the cardinal importance and hence the vulnerability of centers behind the front lines as well as imperial resources spread across the globe, all of which had been subject to infiltration or attack by espionage networks during the war. Sabotage, subversion, revolutionary tactics, the sheer number of spies and then the number of their memoirs all projected into the interwar years the perception of the secret agent as a potent force in shaping world events. Later, internationals of all stripes and colors, the ideological clashes of

the thirties, secret-police tactics carried abroad, colonial shakiness, and future-war imagery gave to fifth-column thinking a specificity and coherence unknown in earlier spy panics.

Moreover, if fifth-column imagery was prone to extraordinary flights of fantasy, its essentials never strayed very far from realities. Refugee politics, with their plague of double agents and their tactics of terror and infiltration, familiarized a generation of French citizens to an espionage style that surfaced elsewhere in the form of Comintern subversion or fascist penetration of national populations abroad. The greater scale of networks after the war, their greater system and method, carried fifth-column overtones, as did the new technological opportunities for behind-the-lines infiltration like the radio wars fought over North African airwaves. Out of the thirties came the fabulous tales of the purge trials and the very real terrorist attacks by the Cagoule or, as we shall see, by fascist agents in France. The very nature of the Spanish conflict—ubiquitous, terrorizing—bestowed credibility on the concept that was born with that struggle. Thus in 1940 authorities and populations could envision as real or reasonable the intrigues ascribed to the German fifth column, because fifth-column imagery evolved out of espionage milieus they had known since the Great War. Indeed after the senseless orgy of spy panic in the first days of August 1914, one might have expected greater skepticism in the future, much as Europeans discounted reports of the Holocaust because they had heard similar stories in the previous conflagration. Only the experience of intrigue in the course of that conflict, and then throughout the twenties and thirties, can explain the persistence of these hysterics as another world war began.

Just as the First World War altered the character of espionage, intrigue in the decades that followed reflected historical change more than it did historical continuity. The remainder of this book will examine those changes and the shared relations of espionage and history between the two wars. Subsequent chapters will explore spy literature and the global dimensions to espionage after 1918. They will show how spy tales reflected a particular kind of interwar writing, how themes and style were those of the twenties and thirties, and how there was a complexity of vision to this literature, one where a danger was present but not necessarily overwhelming. They will also show how the far-flung reach of interwar intrigue borrowed from the war, from adventure and travel and a need for romance, from the present-mindedness of these years, and from the realization of an altered relation between the periphery and the center. First, however, one must turn to milieu, and to the richness and representativeness of intrigue in the entre-deux-guerres .

Figure 2.
Taxi of the Don. From W. Chapin Huntington, The Homesick Million.