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