The Defence of the Realm (9 page)

Some of the mistaken reports of German military espionage in Britain sent to Kell came from apparently very well-informed sources. Among them was Colonel Frederic Trench, a well-known military writer whose appointment as British military attaché in Berlin in 1906 had been enthusiastically received by the Kaiser, who was a personal friend. With the Kaiser's approval, Trench had served in South-West Africa alongside German forces and had numerous friends and contacts in the German army. While in Berlin, Trench became convinced that Germany was planning a surprise attack on Britain: ‘When Germany comes to the conclusion that her navy is strong enough, or the British fleet sufficiently scattered or otherwise occupied, for there to be a reasonable prospect of success . . . the first move will be made without any warning whatever . . .' Trench also believed that preparation of the invasion plans was being assisted by German spies in Britain, and some of his reports were passed to Kell.
²¹

There was, in reality, clearer evidence of British espionage in Germany than of German espionage in Britain. In August 1910 Lieutenant Vivien Brandon of the Admiralty Hydrographic Department and Captain R. M. Trench of the Royal Marines (not to be confused with Colonel Trench) were arrested while on a mission assigned them by British naval intelligence to reconnoitre German North Sea coastal defences at Borkum and elsewhere. Both men showed their inexperience not merely by keeping large amounts of incriminating documents in their possession but also by their behaviour during cross-examination. Counsel for the prosecution acknowledged that it was only as a result of Trench's evidence at the trial that they knew he had entered the Borkum fortifications at all.
²²
On 30 August Kell was summoned to the Admiralty for a meeting with Bethell, the DNI, Sir Graham Greene, Secretary of the Admiralty (its senior civilian official), Cumming and other senior naval officers, and asked if he ‘could get up a “counter-blast” to the Borkum affair' – in other words, expose some German spies at work in Britain. Kell ‘feared not'.
²³

On 5 September, however, Kell received a telegram from Portsmouth, informing him that Lieutenant Siegfried Helm of the 21st Nassau Pioneer Battalion had been arrested for suspected espionage.
²⁴
Helm had travelled to Britain ostensibly to learn English, and had written beforehand to a Miss Wodehouse, the friend of a fellow officer, who helped find him lodgings near her home in the Portsmouth area. Wodehouse discovered that, as well as enjoying the company of a ‘lovely lady friend', Helm was also making sketches of forts and military installations, and reported him to the local barracks.
²⁵
Though the First Lord of the Admiralty, Reginald
McKenna, wanted to avoid pre-trial publicity, Kell thought ‘it was an excellent thing that the arrest should become known as soon as possible as it might have a soothing effect across the water' – that is, help to deter other German spies. News of Helm's arrest was published by the
Daily Express
. No mention of Kell's role in this or any subsequent counterespionage case appeared in the press. On 6 September, having received ‘all necessary evidence and documents', including Helm's pocket book, Kell caught the train to Portsmouth to take charge of the investigation. Miss Wodehouse persuaded Kell that ‘she had deliberately egged Lieut. Helm on to make love to her to gain his confidence as she suspected from the outset that he was spying.'
²⁶

Though described by
The Times
as ‘a soldierly figure' when he appeared in court at the committal hearing on 20 September, Helm seems to have stepped straight from the pages of
Punch
. He had what his defence counsel called ‘a mania for writing things in his pocket book' and a stereotypical Teutonic thoroughness in doing so, noting down exact details of his bedroom furniture and the precise distance between the chest of drawers and his bed. His drawings of forts and military installations were less impressive. Kell's later deputy, Eric Holt-Wilson, dismissed them as ‘rather futile sketches of the obsolete Portsmouth land defences'. Helm said he had made the drawings of the forts not by covert reconnaissance but by looking through a large public telescope on Portsmouth's South Parade. After his arrest he wrote Wodehouse a pained but determinedly cheerful letter: ‘It is a dreadful thing, but they have taken me as a spy! It was all for my own study. The officers here are very kind to me. So comfortable a time I never had!' When Helm discovered that Wodehouse had given evidence against him, he changed his tune: ‘I came as a true friend and you were my enemy. The Holy Bible said right, that a wife is as false as a serpent!!' Though pleading guilty at his trial, Helm was merely bound over and discharged, with a cordial if condescending farewell from Mr Justice Bankes:

I trust that when you leave this country you will leave it with a feeling that, although we may be vigilant, and perhaps, from your point of view, too vigilant, yet . . . we are just and merciful, not only to those who are subjects of this realm, but also to those who, like yourself, seek the hospitality of our shores.
²⁷

In Germany as well as Britain, espionage by serving officers was still regarded as indicating their patriotism and treated with some leniency. The evidence of systematic espionage was much stronger in the case of Brandon's and Trench's reconnaissance of German North Sea coastal defences than in the case of Helm, and both were sentenced to four years'
imprisonment. Their trial ended, however, in a remarkably amicable, almost surreal, atmosphere. According to
The Times
correspondent:

When it was all over, they remained for some minutes chatting with counsel and others and shaking hands with acquaintances such as the Juge d'Instruction who conducted the preliminary hearing . . . They were very gay and perfectly satisfied with the result of the trial.

Brandon and Trench were to serve their sentence in a fortress where they would be ‘allowed to provide their own comforts and to enjoy the society of the officers, students and others, all men of education and good social position, who share the Governor's hospitality in the fortress'. ‘There are no irksome regulations,' concluded
The Times
report, ‘and it will not be difficult for them to obtain leave to make excursions in the town.'
²⁸

Since Helm was a serving army officer, his trial appeared to provide confirmation that Germany was engaged in military as well as naval espionage in Britain. German archives, however, now reveal what Kell could not have known at the time, though he might perhaps have suspected it, that Helm had been acting on his own initiative rather than on instructions.
²⁹
After the trial was over Kell had hoped to discover more about what lay behind Helm's bungling espionage. In the train back to London he sat, unrecognized, in the same compartment as Helm and his father. To Kell's disappointment, they ‘did not speak very much'.
³⁰

Only four days later an apparently promising lead to a more serious espionage case came from Major (later Major General Sir) William Thwaites, head of the German section at the War Office (and later Director of Military Intelligence) and a strong supporter of Kell's Bureau.
³¹
Thwaites reported that for the past month six Germans had been dining regularly at Terriani's restaurant, opposite Harrods: ‘They appeared to be very secretive and it was suggested that they were engaged in S[ecret] S[ervice].' Kell dined in the restaurant with Melville. Also present was Captain Stanley Clarke, an army officer who had returned to Britain after eleven years' service in India and was shortly to become Kell's assistant. ‘But', noted Kell in his diary, ‘no Germans turned up.'
³²
As with most warnings of suspicious Germans over the previous few years, the report was almost certainly a false alarm.
³³

Like Melville, Kell continued to believe that German espionage was linked to German invasion plans. In his second progress report, in October 1910, he envisaged the possibility (never apparently implemented) of ‘the earmarking (and training??) of our own spies in the Coast Counties, to act behind the enemy's lines in case of invasion'.
³⁴
At the first annual review
of the Bureau's work, held in the War Office on 15 November, it was agreed to ask the Foreign Office for the funding for Kell to employ an assistant at a salary of £400 per annum (in addition, it was expected, to an army pension).
³⁵
Kell had already earmarked Stanley Clarke, who formally began work on 1 January 1911.
³⁶
One of Clarke's first tasks was to help Kell move from his Victoria Street office to larger (and less expensive) chambers at 3 Paper Buildings in the Temple, where they had to make their own arrangement for water and electricity supply. Soon after the move (complicated by three-weeks' sick leave by Kell) was complete on 20 February, Clarke embarked on a three-week walking tour of the Essex and Suffolk coast,
³⁷
presumably in a vain attempt to find intelligence leads on espionage related to (non-existent) German invasion plans.

Having investigated a series of leads which, save for the somewhat farcical Helm case, had so far yielded no solid evidence of German espionage, Kell was by now rightly concerned about the low quality of the intelligence reaching him. On 3 March he had ‘a long interview with M[elville] at his office and impressed upon him the necessity of being more energetic in the future': ‘I expected him to think out new schemes for getting hold of intelligence.'
³⁸
In his third report Kell wrote that, though the quality of Melville's work and his tact when making inquiries had been excellent, ‘The work that he has done for me during the last eighteen months has not been of an arduous nature, and is nothing compared to the comprehensive work he was originally intended for when he was first employed.' Because of his age (Melville was now in his sixties)
³⁹
and seniority, he could ‘hardly be expected to perform such work as the shadowing by night and day, a duty which in any case is quite impossible for one man alone'.

Hitherto I have had to depend, to a great extent, on such assistance in detective work as the Metropolitan and County Police have been able to afford me, but the County Police in particular have very few plain-clothes men at their disposal, and moreover some of the Chief Constables themselves have acknowledged that however excellent their men's work may be as regards crime, they have not got all the necessary degree of tact to carry out such delicate enquiries . . .

Mr Melville has on occasions been able to enlist the services of one or two ex-police officers of his acquaintance, but who naturally were not always available when their services were required. Moreover the system of employing odd men for our kind of work is obviously undesirable, besides being very costly. It is very difficult to get private detectives to work for less than a guinea a day, plus all out-of-pocket expenses. I therefore beg to request that sanction may be given for me to engage the services of two detectives.
⁴⁰

A former Met policeman, John Regan, joined Kell's Bureau as assistant to Melville on 7 June, but Kell had to wait over a year for the second detective he had asked for.
⁴¹
He did, however, obtain funding for a ‘marine assistant', Lieutenant (later Commander) B. J. Ohlson RNR,
⁴²
who began work on 19 May with responsibility for ‘the collection of information in ports along the East Coast', beginning in the Port of London.
⁴³
Over the next month Ohlson enlisted the support of skippers of six merchant vessels plying between London and the continent who, Kell reported, ‘are discreet and willing to keep their eyes open and report any useful information that comes to their notice'.
⁴⁴

In August 1911, Stanley Clarke had a remarkable stroke of luck which transformed Kell's investigations of the Nachrichten-Abteilung's British operations. Clarke found himself in the same railway carriage as Francis Holstein, the German-born proprietor of the Peacock Hotel, Trinity, Leith, who was discussing with a friend a letter he had just received from Germany asking for information about British public opinion and preparations for war. Further inquiries revealed that Holstein had received two similar letters in the previous year, both signed, like the latest one, ‘F. Reimers, Brauerstrasse, Potsdam'. ‘Reimers' was discovered to be an alias used by Gustav Steinhauer.
⁴⁵
Extraordinary though the coincidence of the overheard conversation may appear, Steinhauer's insecure habit of sending unsolicited letters requesting information from Germans resident in Britain
⁴⁶
meant that it was only a matter of time before one of the letters was revealed by its recipient. On a number of occasions German agents in Britain complained about the danger that they might be exposed to as a result of poor security, but Steinhauer brushed their complaints aside.
⁴⁷
The German naval attaché in London reported to the DNI in Berlin in 1912 that recruiting Germans living in Britain as agents was ‘much more complicated than imagined in Berlin': ‘The Germans of middle age (only gentlemen between the age of 35 and 50 are suitable, as the younger gentlemen do not have steady jobs and change their employer far too often and without prior notice) loathe this kind of work more and more, it being hostile to England.'
⁴⁸
Like Holstein, a majority of those who received Steinhauer's letters had no intention of responding to his ill-conceived intelligence cold-calling.

Churchill added a major weapon to Kell's armoury by greatly simplifying the interception of suspects' correspondence. Hitherto individual warrants signed by the Home Secretary had been required for every letter opened.