A Clear Case of Genius E-Book

Admiral Sir Reginald 'Blinker' Hall

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 332

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

In 1933 the Admiralty banned 'Blinker' Hall from publishing his autobiography, but here, for the first time, those chapters that survived are presented in full. See what the renowned spymaster had to say about the British Naval Intelligence – the pinnacle of the world's secret intelligence services. He explores the function of secret intelligence in wartime, censorship, subterfuge, the significance of Churchill in the Dardanelles campaign, the Zimmermann Telegram, the USA's entry to the First World War and more. With supporting text and images by Philip Vickers and a foreword by expert author Nigel West, A Clear Case of Genius provides a unique insight into the thinking of one of Britain's pioneering intelligence leaders.

Leseprobe

A CLEAR CASE OF GENIUS

The phrase ‘a clear case of genius’ is taken from a letter of 17 March 1918 from the American Ambassador in London, Dr Walter Hines Page, to President Woodrow Wilson.

To my parents, Frances Alice and Reginald Henry Vickers, who survived two world wars and introduced me to Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Document, The Cryptogram and Mathias Sandorf, which first generated my interest in secret intelligence.

O voyagers, O seamen,

You who came to port, and you whose bodies

Will suffer the trial and judgement of the sea,

Or whatever event, this is your real destination […]

Not fare well,

But fare forward, voyagers.

T.S. Eliot, ‘The Dry Salvages’, Four Quartets

Frontispiece: Admiral Sir Reginald Hall. (Sketch by Louis Raemaker/T. Stubbs, CAC)

First published in 2017

The History Press

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This ebook edition first published in 2017

All rights reserved

Autobiography © Reginald Hall, 2017

Commentary and supporting text © Philip Vickers, 2017

The right of Reginald Hall and Philip Vickers to be identified as the Authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

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CONTENTS

Foreword by Nigel West

Introduction

Hall’s Chronology

Hall’s Original Autobiography

1 The Nature of Intelligence Work

2 Intelligence in Wartime

3 A Private Censorship

5 The Cruise of the Sayonara

6 A Little ‘Information’ for the Enemy

7 Lord Fisher and Mr Churchill

25 The Zimmermann Telegram and America’s Entry into the War

Commentary on Hall’s Chapters and Gazetteer

Aftermath

Notes on the Maps and ‘Swedish Roundabout’ Route

Maps

1 RN Coaling Stations

2 Major Room 40 Centres Worldwide

3 Major Room 40 Centres Europe

4 BNI Pre-War Secret Intelligence Missions

5a The ‘Swedish Roundabout’ Europe

5b The ‘Swedish Roundabout’ the Americas

Select Bibliography

Acknowledgements

FOREWORD

In a past intelligence world apparently populated almost exclusively by colourful and engaging characters, ‘Blinker’ Hall cut a remarkable figure as an innovator, administrator and politician. He is rightly credited with having supervised some of the most successful clandestine operations of the First World War and, most importantly, of creating and nurturing Britain’s first dedicated cryptographic organisation. His name is immediately associated with the code-breakers of Room 40, the development of the cryptanalytical techniques which cracked the German Foreign Ministry’s diplomatic cypher, and with the foundation of a highly specialised branch of covert warfare.

Much has been written about Hall, in part because of what his division of the Admiralty accomplished on his watch, but when in his retirement he entered politics few outsiders knew very much at all about what his very ‘unnaval’ collection of eccentric academics, playwrights, actors and novelists had achieved equipped with just paper and pencil. The full background of, for example, the decryption of the Zimmermann Telegram, or the interception of the Kaisermarine’s cypher system, would not be disclosed for years in the anticipation that such measures could be required in a future conflict. Understandably, successive British governments sought to impose discretion on the cognoscenti, but that effort was doomed when litigation initiated in the United States, far outside Whitehall’s jurisdictional reach, threatened to reveal the scale of Britain’s investment in eavesdropping.

So many years later, following revelations about the impact of Bletchley Park on the Allies’ successful prosecution of the Second World War, and even more recent indiscretions about the role of its successor organisation, Government Communications Headquarters, Hall’s role acquires a special status among the pantheon of British Intelligence. Now, at last, we can get an insight into what he thought about some of the historic events to which he was witness.

Nigel West 2017

INTRODUCTION

One distinctive figure stands centre stage in any line-up of Intelligence Chiefs, a man with eyes that blinked rapidly. He was Admiral Sir Reginald ‘Blinker’ Hall, Director of Naval Intelligence (DNI) throughout the First World War and chief of Room 40, his headquarters in the Admiralty.

Room 40 has been credited by many as being the most successful intelligence operation of all time, and as Winston Churchill observed of Hall’s worldwide network in The World Crisis, ‘There were others – a brilliant confederacy – whose names even now are better wrapt in mystery’. This comment was true when written in 1923, and remains so today. Several biographies of Hall, and many histories of British secret intelligence agencies, have brought his name before the general public, yet he remains an enigmatic figure. This should not surprise us on two counts.

First, it is in the nature of secret services that much more remains hidden than is available to the wider public. Second, Hall’s autobiography was banned by order of the government and was mostly destroyed. Only seven draft chapters out of the thirty he contemplated and partly completed survive; and they represent a proportion of the opus he began work on in 1926, but was forced to abandon when the Admiralty intervened in August 1933 and ensured the destruction of Chapters 4, 8–17 and 19–24. Chapter 18 is virtually a duplicate of Chapter 7, and of the missing material we know only that two of them, one of which was Chapter 20, were concerned with Naval Intelligence Division (NID) activities in the western Mediterranean.

Numerous writers have quoted from his extant chapters but it is only now, some eighty years later, that they can be published in full, with some editorial support. What emerges is a fascinating, candid account of clandestine operations that throws some light on why the autobiography came to be banned, ostensibly on security grounds. The surviving manuscript offers a unique insight into the man himself and of the work of Room 40. It highlights strengths and weaknesses and demonstrates that although times may change, the fundamental principles of intelligence collection remain relevant to today’s challenges.

Hall presents a particular picture of the First World War era, and tells us much about the ninety-three extraordinary and colourful characters who inhabited, and were involved with, his organisation which routinely handled issues of maritime trade, economics, contraband and, of course, cryptography and covert operations. Many of his subordinates who are today quite unknown or forgotten were, at the time, crucial performers in the secret war. These and other individuals have been researched by the editor so as to begin to answer such important questions as: who is Colyn; what part does ‘the mysterious Graves’ play; what role did the Deutschland play; and why is Colonel Cockerill so important?

Hall wrote his autobiography in collaboration with Ralph Straus, the erudite author, particularly noted for his remarkable book The Unspeakable Curll. Hall was in very good hands here and, once the ban was imposed, Straus suggested to Hall that the book should be rewritten in the form of a novel. Hall rejected this idea but, had it gone ahead, we would know a great deal more. According to Hall’s grandson, Timothy Stubbs, when Straus died ‘a great number of the Admiral’s papers were destroyed’. There is also evidence that Hall himself destroyed much of Room 40’s papers at the time of its closure in 1919.

For one of his chapters Hall consulted Thoroton on BNI activities in the western Mediterranean. In this correspondence Thoroton refers to a smuggling operation by his agent, Juan March, concerning rifles and ammunition, which were secreted in fake Corinthian columns by March, thus obviating risk of investigation by customs’ agents.1

Emphatically, this is not another biography of Admiral Hall, nor is it intended to be a further history of Room 40, but it is in part an explanation of why the government sought to suppress the memoirs of a loyal and efficient intelligence professional. At the time, the authorities gave five ‘security reasons’ why the pages that follow should not be released: concern was expressed about the accurate identification of Hall’s staff and colleagues, and there was a fear that his memoirs would compromise sources and methods. His details of the funding of officers working in foreign countries were potentially indiscreet, and there was a broader anxiety about the political climate of the day – when Adolf Hitler was gaining recognition as a threat to Britain’s future security. Additionally, there is also an internal Room 40 factor to be considered, that of William Russell Clarke, described by Paul Gannon as a ‘barrister, intelligence officer, guardian of the secret’, who had been a Room 40 code-breaker since 1916. In 1933 he held the post of Chief Censor at the Admiralty, and he pointed out that certain chapters, relating to the performance of some naval commanders, would only lead to ‘the row that is certain to be generated’. As Gannon explained in his Inside Room 40 – The Code Breakers of World War I, simple jealousy may have been a motive, as Clarke, who was ‘extremely arrogant and brimming with sarcasm’, was planning to write his own account.

The ban not only affected Hall’s original manuscript, but seems to have extended to a collection of photographs assembled by Colonel Charles Julian Thoroton, a Royal Marines Light Infantry officer who acted as Hall’s Chief of Intelligence in Gibraltar. Thoroton wrote to Hall about their disappearance on 21 November 1932, but without success.

At least two of Hall’s original chapters were devoted to the Iberian Peninsula and Morocco, areas which had come under the ambit of the NID’s Gibraltar Station. Hall’s collaborator, Ralph Straus, referred these to as ‘the Thoroton chapters’, and their loss is a tragedy; matters pertaining to Spain and the Mediterranean were of crucial importance to Room 40. The theatre was of great strategic importance, and must have involved trade issues, which dominate many of the NID reports about neutral countries. The smuggling of contraband and the collection of information to support the imposition of embargoes and the compilation of the dreaded Black Lists were all part of the NID’s wide area of responsibility. Critical materiel included the components for the manufacture of steel and munitions, the transport of foodstuffs, leatherwork and weapons, as well as horses and mules destined for the combat zones in Europe and the Middle East.

Of great strategic significance in the region were the mines of Rio Tinto, which had been exploited originally in 3000 BC. They were acquired by Hugh Matheson in 1873 in a consortium involving Deutsche Bank and a leading railway company. By the outbreak of war they were under the control of the Rothschilds who expanded them to develop the deposits of bauxite for aluminium, iron ore, copper, uranium, coal and diamonds, which were so significant to the war economy. In the struggle for control of these mines the British triumphed over the Germans and in 1915 Hall’s men drew in personnel from the Spanish security agencies to protect the sites from sabotage. One of Hall’s Spanish agents, Juan March, held a major financial holding in the Rio Tinto Company, having been recruited by the Gibraltar Station in competition against their German adversaries. This aspect has been touched on by Patrick Beesly in Room 40 where he gives an account of the Erri Berro, a Brigantine involved in Wolfram-running and the smuggling of anthrax germs.2 The first fully detailed account of March’s collaboration with BNI can be read in Finding Thoroton.

Underlying the importance of the autobiography is the opinion of Admiral Sir William James, who served with Hall in HMS Queen Mary, and whom Hall appointed his deputy in charge of Room 40 in 1917. James recalled, ‘It is evident from the chapter headings of the thirty unwritten chapters that his autobiography would have been a book of historical importance.’ Indeed, in the basement of his home at 53 Cadogan Gardens he held 10,000 diplomatic decrypts, which were destroyed. During the war, Hall also lived at 36 Curzon Street in his family apartment.

As for Hall himself, he was born on 28 June 1870 in Salisbury, Wiltshire. His father was Captain William Henry Hall, the first DNI who built up the department from a standing start. His mother Caroline was the daughter of the Reverend Henry Armfield, the Canon of Salisbury Cathedral. Charles Dickens had died only eleven days before Hall’s birth, and England, in 1870, was in the throes of major educational developments and radical employment reforms.

On the world scene, 1870 saw the Franco-Prussian War break out with Germany achieving unification under Bismarck. The industrial revolution had made Britain ‘the workshop of the world’. The Royal Navy, which Hall was to join in 1883, only one year after the foundation of the Naval Intelligence Division under Admiral Sir George Tryon, was Great Britain’s most prized possession.3

Hall was catapulted from command of the North Sea battlecruiser Queen Mary, after the Battle of Heligoland Bight in August 1914, to become Director of Naval Intelligence. His last Sea Chief, Admiral David Beatty, saw this appointment as a ‘far more important office’ than the one Hall had held under him. The promotion was certainly fortuitous for Hall, as the Queen Mary was sunk at the Battle of Jutland on 31 May 1916 with the loss of 1,266 officers and men.

According to those who knew him, Hall possessed a steely authority combined with solicitous concern for his crew; inflexible standards of achievement, softened by a wealth of human empathy; and the ability to weld a heterogeneous group of brilliantly minded and independent men, and women, into a single working caucus.

For example, in the eastern Mediterranean, Blinker appointed Gertrude Margaret Lothian Bell, who was described as the most intelligent woman in Britain. Hall recruited her in 1915 to work in his Cairo Bureau as ‘Major Miss Bell’, a General Staff officer. The Cairo Bureau was the intelligence centre for Gallipoli. She found old friends there including T.E. Lawrence and Leonard Woolley, who was Intelligence Chief at Port Said, and Hall’s own brother, who was in charge of the railway. It was Bell who briefed Winston Churchill in his Middle East politics at the Cairo Conference and it was she who groomed Lawrence in his role as Lawrence of Arabia.

The American Ambassador, Dr Walter Page, in writing to President Woodrow Wilson, remarked:

Hall is one genius the war has developed. Neither in fiction nor in fact can you find any man to match him. Of the wonderful things I know he has done, there are several that it would take an exciting volume to tell. The man is a genius – a clear case of genius. All other secret service men are amateurs by profession. For Hall can look through you and see the very muscular movements of your immortal soul while he is talking to you.4

And Page wrote much more in the same vein.

As will become clear, Admiral Hall was a lateral thinker well ahead of his time, and therein lies a clue to his success. He was also deeply committed to truth: truth in passing on Room 40’s decrypts so that no ambiguity could arise as to their reliability and at a time when it could do the most good and at the least risk to security. There was no ‘sexing-up’ in those days and ‘spin’ was restricted to offensive propaganda to confuse the enemy and not one’s own nation. This attitude is made explicit in Chapter 6, ‘A Little “Information” for the Enemy’. His lasting reputation, of course, centres on his work in Room 40, credited with bringing the United States into a war that cost 1,150,000 French military deaths, 735,287 British and 116,708 American, but that nonetheless ensured an Allied victory.

Hall himself was a true eccentric, even in his home life, kicking over his wife’s tea table after a frustrating day, an incident passed over lightly by her in explaining this event to her somewhat astonished lady friends. His grandson, Timothy Stubbs, recounted an intimate family example: his grandfather’s favourite breakfast was ‘cold rice pudding followed by cold roast partridge!’

But it is his remarkable reforms on board the navy’s warships where his originality showed: the three-watch system; and his introduction of the first chapel, the first library, the first cinema – all innovations to the horror and alarm of diehard naval officers, but later taken up by the fleet altogether. On top of this were his important naval gunnery developments.

Much of the man’s character is perceptible in his writing. He is clearheaded, accurate and open. He has a sense of humour. He treats all men equally. There is no sign of bluster, vindictiveness or vainglory. His penetrating gaze and highly developed perception is commented on by everyone who knew him. He held great respect for all who worked with and for him, and even for some who were against him. His admiration for Miss Jane Adams, the American pioneer of women’s suffrage, is self-evident. He could even make friends of enemies, as in the case of Franz von Rintelen.

Fortunately, we can gather more personal details of the Admiral through the reminiscence of his grandson, Timothy Stubbs, a naval officer himself. In a letter to the editor, on 11 March 2016, he writes:

Small of stature, with piercing eyes, a staccato way of speaking and a barking laugh; with a profile not unlike Mr Punch. It was thought that the Admiral could hold a piece of toast between the end of his nose and his chin. He sported fabulous dragons, tattooed on either forearm. These are the memories I have of my grandfather, when, as a very small boy, I lived at Dockhead, his house in Beaulieu.

I can recall walking with him in the garden of Dockhead when he always wore a flat cap and a waistcoat from which his monocle used to dangle on a black silk ribbon. He had two particular passions in the garden, a cactus, Dahlia ‘Baby Royal’ of which there were legion and Alpine strawberries which grew profusely on the sides of a small rill that ran down to the Beaulieu view.

As the Admiral was in poor health when I lived at Dockhead, he spent a deal of time, wreathed in smoke from innumerable Turkish cigarettes, closeted in his study, clacking away on an ancient typewriter, firing off letters to a broad spectrum of friends and ex-colleagues. He also wrote at least once a week to his sister, Mary Templar, to whom he was devoted.

Clearly I had no notion of the ‘Admiral’s importance in the field of espionage and only remember him as a mainly benevolent, though somewhat alarming Grandfather. If you behaved yourself and did your best, he was always on your side; if you did not life could be painful.

Earlier, Timothy Stubbs had written other personal memoirs, on 21 April 2014:

The only memorabilia of the Admiral that I have are a pair of ancient ivory-backed hairbrushes and a pair of gold cufflinks decorated with blue enamel anchors. He always wore them. My personal memories are that, for a small boy, he was somewhat alarming, with his piercing blue eyes and a slightly parade ground voice. He was, after all, trained as a gunnery officer. He was very strict and a devil for punctuality; should I (at the age of 7) arrive late for lunch, I would be banished to my bedroom for the rest of the day. He much preferred little girls. My mother was his favourite. Both his sons addressed him as ‘Sir’ until the day he died. I know that this paints an unfair picture, as he was, I know, a compassionate man who was always greatly concerned with the welfare of those that he commanded. He did, however, demand very high standards.

The Admiral had his portrait painted by Sir Gerald Kelly, PRA (‘not very good, I thought,’ writes his grandson). Timothy considers a Louis Raemaker sketch to be his best portrait, an opinion I fully concur with as, more than any photograph, the artist brings the man’s character alive before our very eyes.

Read in its entirety, Hall’s original manuscript gives a better understanding both of the man and of the NID’s worldwide network. One question that seems to have been left unanswered by historians is the number of lives saved by Room 40. There are no commonly agreed statistics to support any particular assessment, but there can be little doubt of the overall impact of naval intelligence on the successful prosecution of the war.

The NID worked closely with its military intelligence counterparts at the War Office, and this liaison led Hall to attribute many of his successes to this mutually beneficial relationship. Take, for example, the British secret agent who is alleged to have attended a Berlin reception during the war, and then submitted a report in which he described the German plan for a forthcoming attack on Verdun, code-named Operation GERICHT. Was this the handiwork of the NID or the Directorate of Military Intelligence?

Louise de Bettignies, ‘Alice Dubois’ of the network code-named RAMBLE and based in the Lille area, had been recruited by Major Walter Kirke in Folkestone to head an eighty-strong organisation behind enemy lines. One of her final messages, before being arrested by the Germans in Froyennes near Tournai in October 1915, disclosed the German plan. The report was forwarded to the French commander at Verdun who refused to believe it, but nevertheless her network is credited with having saved more than 1,000 British lives.

There are other examples where good intelligence was exploited to great advantage. In Haig’s Intelligence: GHQ and the German Army, 1916–1918, Jim Beach attributes intelligence failures during the Battle of the Somme as in some part contributing to the continued slaughter. On the first day of that battle, thirteen divisions of the British 4th Army suffered some 57,470 casualties, the greatest number ever recorded in British military history. This was followed by Passchendaele with over 300,000 British dead or wounded. It may be argued that the collapse of the RAMBLE network was in some measure a cause of the intelligence vacuum that led to such losses.

Elsewhere on the Western Front the painter Paul Maze, a friend of Winston Churchill, was employed at GHQ, from the age of 21, on the retreat from Mons and all through the war – including Flanders, Ypres, Loos, Passchendaele and Cambrai – to portray the German front line and trench dispositions, made with ‘the artist’s power of selective visualisation’. He was not a spy as such (but very nearly shot as a German spy by the British!) but a unique observer. He wrote of the first day on the Somme that:

So many fell within minutes or seconds of their leaving their trenches. I was spared that experience but on the evening I was sent to make a report of what I could discover, as news from units engaged had hardly reached the headquarters which had ordered the offensive. Alas the battle never died down until the next spring and there can be few yards of that country where so many fallen men of all ages gave their lives fighting for their country. So many young men straight from England were thrown into battle without having the slightest conception of what they would be facing. Men’s lives were short lived indeed.5

It may be asked why there is an absence of official information relating to the trade and economic situation prevailing throughout the conflict, and it would seem likely that these topics were also part of Hall’s banned autobiography. Trade, economics and financial interests have long been identified as the driving force behind empire building. Empires require armies, as Niall Ferguson observed in Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World. At that time the British Empire was at its apogee, governing roughly a quarter of the world’s population and the same proportion of the earth’s land surface, as well as nearly all its oceans and seas. The British Empire was the greatest empire ever known, protected by the Royal Navy, a force that literally ruled the waves: 40 miles of British warships were reviewed by King George V at Spithead in 1914.

The Merchant Navy carried more than half of the world’s seaborne trade, and the freedom of the sea routes was an obvious priority for the Admiralty and His Majesty’s government.

In 1914 Americans had been almost totally unaware that war was imminent in Europe. Tens of thousands of American tourists were caught by surprise. Neutrality was the watchword, particularly amongst Americans of Irish, German and Swedish origin, along with certain church leaders and women. Many of the influential, including the automobile manufacturer Henry Ford, were pacifists. News of German atrocities in Belgium and the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915 resulted in a shift of public opinion, which began to see Germany in a rather different light. President Wilson then initiated large-scale loans to Britain and France, and US exports to the belligerent nations rose from $824.8 million in 1913 to $2.5 billion in 1917. Industrial production increased 30 per cent and the US Gross National Product went up by some 20 per cent.

In joining the Allies in April 1917 the Americans not only ensured victory but also saved themselves from the German and Mexican scheme to invade the southern states, thereby preventing great loss of life. Rightly described as the man who brought America into the Great War, the autobiography of ‘Blinker’ Hall remains a unique testimony to the thinking and methodology of one whom Winston Churchill described as being responsible for ‘the most successful intelligence operation of all time’.

1 Thoroton to Hall correspondence, 1926, TFA.

2 This seems to be the only ‘missing’ chapter to have escaped destruction but Room 40 by Beesly provides no provenance.

3 See Map 1.

4 Burton J. Hindrick, The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page (USA, 1923).

5 Letter to the editor, 31 January 1975.

HALL’S CHRONOLOGY

NAVAL CAREER

1870

Born in Salisbury, 28 June

1883

Entered Royal Navy, HMS Britannia, River Dart

1885

At sea, HMS Northampton, North America & West Indian Squadron

1889

Promoted to sub-lieutenant

1890

Lieutenant, HMS Imperieuse, China Station

Junior staff, HMS Excellent, Whale Island

1894

Married, age 24, Ethel de Wiveslie Abbey

1898

Senior staff officer, HMS Australia

1901

Promoted to commander, HMS Magnificent and HMS Cornwallis

1905

Promoted to captain

1907

Captain, HMS Cornwall

1908

First intelligence mission, Kiel Harbour

Captain, HMS Natal

1913

Command of HMS Queen Mary

WARTIME CAREER

1914

Commands the Queen Mary in Heligoland battle

Appointed Director of Naval Intelligence

Initiates postal censorship

Magdeburg cypher key passed by Russians to Room 40

Sayonara sails to Ireland

Vergemere sails to Spain

1915

Battle of the Dogger Bank

Hall initiates a plot to separate Turkey from Germany

Wassmuss’s codebooks captured. Room 40 decoding and reading major German codes (codes 1847, 2310 and 89734) 13040 decyphered

Sinking of the Lusitania

1916

Battle of Jutland

Takes overall charge of Room 40

Attends Dardanelles Commission

1917

Zimmermann Telegram. The US enters First World War

1918

Sortie of the Hochseeflotte (HSF). Mutiny of the HSF

Politics and Retirement

1919

Elected to House of Commons as MP for Liverpool West Derby

1924

Zinoviev Letter

1925

Elected to House of Commons for Eastbourne

1926

Starts work on his autobiography

1929

Retires from Parliament

Moves to the New Forest

Lectures in the USA

1932

His wife, Essie, dies

1933

The Admiralty bans his autobiography

1939

Active in intelligence for Second World War

Joins the Home Guard

1943

In ill health. Dies, age 73, 22 October, in London

HALL’S ORIGINAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY

1

The Nature of Intelligence Work

Almost every week sees the publication in this country of some new novel or volume of reminiscences which purports to deal with the activities of the ‘Secret Services’. Ingenious novelists build up exciting romances, and if some of their stories are almost ludicrously unlike the real thing, who will blame them? Not I. They are giving the public the kind of entertainment for which it may legitimately ask. Moreover, they do sometimes give you a very fair idea of some part of the truth. Somerset Maugham did it in his Ashenden. Temple Thurston did it in his Portrait of a Spy. He came to us for some of his facts. In more than one of his novels, too, A.E.W. Mason was writing of intelligence work from knowledge gained at first hand. And if in the works of less responsible writers mysterious blond ladies too often lure impressionable officers to their doom in the least probable manner, it cannot be denied that women are sometimes employed to obtain information, and officers, not only those of junior rank, have been known to be singularly indiscreet. In the memoirs you naturally find a greater measure of sober fact, but even here it is the half-truth that most often provides the ‘astounding revelations’ so dear to the public. So far, indeed, as intelligence work is concerned I doubt whether one man in ten thousand is ever in a position to be able to tell more than a little piece of the truth. A square, even a dozen squares of the intelligence chessboard, may be as familiar to him as his own reflection in a mirror, but it would require a miracle to enable him to envisage with any accuracy all the sixty-four squares. Nobody, in fact, certainly not myself, is capable of giving anything like a complete picture, however restricted his chosen canvas may be, which is not largely the product of his imagination.

Nevertheless these books continue to be written, and the subject seems to exercise a perennial interest over writers and readers alike. This is hardly surprising. At all times, but particularly during war, those affairs which it is ‘not in the public interest’ to divulge are more often than not of a highly dramatic nature. They may not embrace a major sensation, but at least they are in the sharpest contrast to the ordinary affairs of everyday life. And the agent or spy who may be concerned in them is not unnaturally invested with that glamour which will always surround those whose work, in the view of the man in the street, bears no resemblance to any work he knows by experience.

Now few enough spies will intrude into these pages of mine. Too many books have already been filled with highly coloured accounts of their activities. Here you will find little more than the tale of a single department. Yet we in the ID [Intelligence Department] had our fill of excitements during those four years of war, even though so much of our time was spent in dull tabulation and dreary waiting. There were coincidences which most writers of fiction would regard as wholly unpardonable. There were crashes of surprise as unexpected as any to be found in the last chapter of a detective story, and sometimes, I freely admit, incidents came to our knowledge which in their sheer fantastic improbability differed not at all from those which you find in the most sensational novels.

Where, for instance, are you likely to meet with a crazier affair than the destruction of the German submarine U.28? The official histories have little of any interest to say of U.28: she was merely sunk in an explosion on 2 September 1917. But we had the whole story, which, like so many stories of the kind, could not be told at the time and in later days seemed to be forgotten. In point of actual fact U.28 was sunk by a motor-lorry!

It sounds absurd, a Munchausen yarn, yet it happened. At the time we were sending out considerable quantities of stores and ammunition to Murmansk. One of the ships engaged on this particular job was the SS Olive Branch, and on her last voyage she carried on her upper deck a small fleet of motor-lorries. She was stopped by U.28 off the coast of Norway, and her men were ordered to abandon ship. When they had got safely away the submarine closed on her and put a shell into her after-hold. Unfortunately for them the Germans were ignorant of the fact huge quantities of high explosive had been carefully packed into that hold. The result of the shell-burst was appalling. There came a sudden volcano in angry eruption, the air was full of motor-lorries describing unusual paraboles. And one, the largest of them all, choosing to come down with almost mathematical precision on to the foredeck of the submarine, burst in and drowned her.

This of course is not my story, but it invariably recalls itself to my mind when I am asked whether any of those very tall yarns of the navy, which used to be whispered about, were true. It certainly was the fact that the strangest things were frequently happening, and not only on the high seas: yet I am sometimes inclined to think that perhaps the strangest thing of all was the Intelligence Division itself. For it was like nothing else that had ever existed. It grew, Heaven alone knows just how, from a comparatively minor and purely naval department into an almost worldwide organisation with a multitude of the most diverse activities.1 And as these activities increased, so did its staff. It was the most wonderful that any man could have hoped to gather about him, but it must have been the most heterogeneous staff that ever came together. Men and women of every profession and class joined us, and in many cases they had little but their own good sense to guide them aright. We had few enough precedents to follow, and we had to make our own rules as we went along. We had our successes, but we also had our ignominious failures. And I hope I shall not be misunderstood if I add that we had our comic-opera moments, when it was difficult to realise that we were in the midst of war. But in this respect, I presume, we were not unique.

It is not very easy to know where to begin, but it may be well if I preface these memories of mine with a brief description of the principles underlying the organisation of Intelligence work. There can be no hard and fast rules in the business, but in wartime at any rate there are four cardinal points to be borne in mind. First and foremost there is the acquisition of information about the enemy, and so far as knowing where to look for it is concerned, that is a comparatively simple matter. Then there is the double process of sifting what seems to be the truth from what is probably or demonstrably false, and of knitting together the pieces of information obtained so as to produce a balanced picture: and that is not easy. In the third place, those in authority have to decide how to use the information given them to the best possible advantage, and that is always a troublesome task. Finally there is the necessity for covering up all tracks so that the enemy may remain in ignorance of the fact that any of his secrets have been discovered, and that can be very difficult indeed.

As regards the first point it is a well-known fact now that no nation was so well served by its agents as we were. Before the war some very wonderful results were obtained by men who seldom enough could be adequately rewarded for their long years of patient and unobtrusive and sometimes most dangerous work.2 Many of their exploits have already been related in print: some will never be told. But it did occasionally happen that an amateur was called on to take a hand in the game, and I may perhaps be forgiven if I mention here a personal experience of my own, for it may have had some bearing on my appointment in October 1914 as Director of the Intelligence Division of the Admiralty Staff, a post, by the way, of which my father had been the first holder on its creation in 1882.

Sometime in 1909 while in command of the Cornwall I was directed to take a number of cadets for a six month’s cruise in the Baltic.3 I looked forward to a pleasantly light task, but I was soon undeceived. Vice Admiral Sir Francis Bridgeman sent for me to give me detailed instructions, and I then learnt that I would be expected to do very much more than superintend the sea-studies of fifty or sixty cadets. Information was required by the Admiralty on a number of points connected with harbour fortifications and the like, and to provide it would be part of my duties. The cruise, indeed, was an intelligence move. ‘And if it turns out to be the success that we hope,’ said the Admiral, ‘it will not be the worse for W.R. Hall.’ I left him determined to wing back the information that was required but without any clear idea as to how it was to be obtained.

Now one of the points about which the Admiralty required accurate information was the length of the building slips at the head of Kiel harbour and what was being built there. Various reports had been made to them, but none had been satisfactory. The Germans were taking unusual precautions to guard this naval secret, and so far these had proved effective.

Well, we had arrived at Kiel early one morning in June, a carefully chosen day for it was Regatta week and the German High Seas fleet was ranged in order for it. There had been the usual ceremonial visits, Prince Henry of Prussia, I remember, came aboard and inspected our cadets and everyone was most cordial and friendly. And, to be candid, I felt some reluctance to attempt any intelligence work while accepting their hospitality. But it so happened that I was insulted on my own quarterdeck by no less a person than Grand Admiral von Tirpitz himself, and that was enough to remove any scruples of mine.

There had been a luncheon party on board the Cornwall that day, and it was to be followed by an afternoon dance. Prince and Princess Henry and Fraulein von Tirpitz were among our guests. The dance had begun when we were told that the Grand Admiral was coming. He was received with the guard and band, and I stood at the head of the gangway to welcome him, with Fraulein von Tirpitz standing by me. As he came over the side his daughter stepped forward and spoke to him in English. ‘Oh, Papa, how nice of you to come!’

He replied in French: ‘C’est seulement pour faire une plaisanterie.’

‘No, no, Papa,’ she tried to correct him, ‘you mean to make yourself pleasant.’

But the Admiral knew well enough what he had said. He shrugged his shoulders. ‘As you like, my dear,’ he muttered, and I hid my feelings under a smile.

I must admit, however, that after a preliminary look round I was not very confident of obtaining any results at all. It seemed impossible to get near the slips. There were two cruisers moored to buoys just off them, and a string of boats doing guard duty. A sailing race among ourselves had only resulted in all our boats being turned back.

Then I had an idea. It happened that the Duke of Westminster had brought his yacht Grianaig to Kiel, and he had entered his motorboat Ursula