colonel devoted much of his service’s resources to talent-spotting in Germany for informants, each network painstakingly ring-fenced. He set up a payday loan company inside the Reich, targeted at military and civil service clients. Within a year ninety of the bank’s representatives were roaming Germany, most bona fide employees, but some of them intelligence personnel who identified borrowers with access to information, vulnerable to bribery or blackmail. The Czechs also pioneered new technology – microdot photography, ultra-violet rays, secret writing and state-of-the-art wirelesses. Moravec was plentifully funded, a recognition of his role in his nation’s front line, and was thus able to pay a Luftwaffe major named Salm 5,000 Reichsmarks – about £500 – as a retainer, and afterwards the huge sum of a million Czech crowns – £7,500 – for Göring’s air force order of battle. Salm, however, flaunted his new-found wealth, and found himself arrested, tried and beheaded. Meanwhile other people’s spies were not idle in Czechoslovakia: Prague’s security officers arrested 2,900 suspects in 1936 alone, most of them allegedly acting for Germany or Hungary.
Every major nation probed the secrets of others in the same fashion, using both overt and covert means. After Russia’s Marshal Tukhachevksy visited Britain in April 1934, he conveyed personally to Stalin a GRU agent’s description of the RAF’s new Handley Page Hampden bomber, detailing its Bristol and Rolls-Royce engine variants and attaching a sketch showing its armament:
The Abwehr somehow laid hands on the 1935 fixture list of an ICI plant’s football team, which in the course of the season played at most of the company’s other British factories; Berlin thus triumphantly pinpointed several chemical installations the Luftwaffe had hitherto been unaware of. The Australian aviator Sidney Cotton conducted some pioneering aerial photography over Germany at the behest of MI6’s Wing-Commander Fred Winterbotham. The summer roads of Europe teemed with young couples on touring holidays, some of whom were funded by their respective intelligence services, and displayed an unromantic interest in airfields. MI6 sent an RAF officer, designated as Agent 479, together with a secretary to assist his cover, on a three-week spin around Germany, somewhat hampered by the facts that Luftwaffe station perimeters seldom adjoined autobahns, and neither visitor spoke German. The airman had originally planned to take his sister, who was fluent, but her husband refused consent.
In the Nazis’ interests, in August 1935 Dr Hermann Görtz spent some weeks touring Suffolk and Kent on a Zündapp motorbike, pinpointing RAF bases with pretty young Marianne Emig riding in his sidecar. But Emig tired of the assignment, or lost her nerve, and Görtz, a forty-five-year-old lawyer from Lübeck who had learned English from his governess, felt obliged to escort her back to Germany. He then returned to collect a camera and other possessions – including plans of RAF Manston – that the couple had left behind in a rented Broadstairs bungalow. Unluckily for the aspiring masterspy, the police had already secured these incriminating items, following a tip from the spy-conscious landlord. Görtz found himself arrested at Harwich and sentenced to four years’ imprisonment. He was released and deported in February 1939; more will be heard of Hermann Görtz.
For probing neighbours’ secrets, every nation’s skirmishers were its service officers posted to embassies abroad. Prominent among Berlin military attachés was Britain’s Colonel Noel Mason-MacFarlane. ‘Mason-Mac’ was shrewd but bombastic. One day in 1938, he startled an English visitor to his flat by pointing out of the window to the spot where Hitler would next day view the Wehrmacht’s birthday parade. ‘Easy rifle shot,’ said the colonel laconically. ‘I could pick the bastard off from here as easy as winking, and what’s more I’m thinking of doing it … With that lunatic out of the way we might be able to get some sense into things.’ Mason-MacFarlane did nothing of the sort, of course. In his temperate moments he forged close friendships with German officers, and transmitted to London a stream of warnings about Nazi intentions. But the vignette provides an illustration of the role played by fantasy in the lives of intelligence officers, tottering on a tightrope between high purpose and low comedy.
The US government was said by scornful critics to possess no intelligence arm. In a narrow sense, this was so – it did not deploy secret agents abroad. At home, J. Edgar Hoover’s Federal Bureau of Investigation was responsible for America’s internal security. For all the FBI’s trumpeted successes against gangsters and intensive surveillance of the Communist Party of the USA and trades unions, it knew little of the army of Soviet spies roaming America, and did nothing to dissuade hi-tech corporations from booming their achievements. German military attaché Gen. Friedrich von Bötticher observed boisterously about his years of service in Washington: ‘It was so easy, the Americans are so broad-minded, they print everything. You don’t need any intelligence service. You have only to be industrious, to see the newspapers!’ In 1936 Bötticher was able to forward to Berlin detailed reports on US rocket experiments. An American traitor sold the Germans blueprints of one of his country’s most cherished technological achievements, the Norden bombsight. The general urged the Abwehr not to bother to deploy secret agents in the US, to preserve his hosts’ faith in Nazi goodwill.
Intelligence agencies overvalue information gained from spies. One of the many academics conscripted into Britain’s wartime secret service observed disdainfully: ‘[MI6] values information in proportion to its secrecy, not its accuracy. They would attach more value … to a scrap of third-rate and tendentious misinformation smuggled out of Sofia in the fly-buttons of a vagabond Rumanian pimp than to any intelligence deduced from a prudent reading of the foreign press.’ American foreign correspondents and diplomats abroad provided Washington with a vision of the world no less plausible than that generated by Europe’s spies. Major Truman Smith, the long-serving US military attaché in Berlin and a warm admirer of Hitler, formed a more accurate picture of the Wehrmacht’s order of battle than did MI6.
America’s naval attachés focused on Japan, their most likely foe, though they were often reduced to photographing its warships from passing passenger liners and swapping gossip in the Tokyo attachés’ club. As secretary of state in 1929, Henry Stimson had closed down his department’s ‘Black Chamber’ codebreaking operation, reasoning like many of his fellow-countrymen that a nation which faced no external threat could forgo such sordid instruments. Nonetheless both the army and navy, in isolation and fierce competition, sustained small codebreaking teams which exerted themselves mightily. The achievement of William Friedman, born in Russia in 1891 and educated as an agriculturalist, whose army Signals Intelligence Service team led by former mathematics teacher Frank Rowlett replicated the advanced Japanese ‘Purple’ diplomatic cipher machine and broke its key in September 1940, was all the more remarkable because America’s cryptanalysts had shoestring resources. They made little attempt to crack German ciphers, because they lacked means to do so.
The Japanese spied energetically in China, the US and the European South-East Asian empires, which they viewed as prospective booty. Their agents were nothing if not committed: in 1935 when police in Singapore arrested a local Japanese expatriate on suspicion of espionage, such was the man’s anxiety to avoid causing embarrassment to Tokyo that he followed the E. Phillips Oppenheim tradition and swallowed prussic acid in his cell. The Chinese Nationalists headed by Chiang Kai-shek sustained an effective counter-intelligence service to protect his dictatorship from domestic critics, but across Asia Japanese spies were able to gather information almost unhindered. The British were more interested in countering internal communist agitation than in combating prospective foreign invaders. They found it impossible to take seriously ‘the Wops of the East’, as Churchill called the Japanese, or ‘the little yellow dwarf slaves’, in the words of the head of the Foreign Office.
Britain’s diplomats were elaborately careless about protecting their secrets, adhering to the conventions of Victorian gentlemen. Robert Cecil, who was one of them, wrote: ‘An embassy was an ambassador’s house party; it was unthinkable that one of the guests could be spying on the others.’ As early as 1933 the Foreign Office received a wake-up call, albeit unheeded: after one of its staff put his head in
