Читать книгу Secrets of German Espionage - Bernard Newman - Страница 16

Espionage is full of paradoxes. I have insisted that the successful spy is an ordinary person. I know first-class Intelligence agents who have scarcely experienced a thrill in their lives. I also know others who have had adventures which make the wildest fiction appear tame.

In one respect at least fiction has succeeded in getting in advance of fact. A generation ago spy stories invariably centred round an “international gang.” Marvellous organizations were these affairs, the hero of the story was generally an Intelligence Officer or counter-spy, who flitted from country to country, but wherever he went, up popped some sinister member of the gang. At that time such organizations existed only in the over-fertile brains of espionage novelists. To-day they are actual enough; maybe we have to thank the imaginative novelist for their existence!

Three of these gangs attained a wide reputation. One was broken up by the French police four years ago: it contained members of eight different nationalities, including British and American—the latter comprising an amazing newly married couple who apparently had taken up espionage on their honeymoon! Of the other two organizations, one operates from Rotterdam and consists very largely of Germans: the other had the effrontery to make its headquarters at Geneva, home of the League of Nations! Its leaders claimed that this was an excellent centre, as they were able to do good business with the Conference delegates!

The prices they demanded for their secrets were not high; they were far from the fantastic sums of spy novels. You could buy details of a new secret gun for a matter of a couple of hundred pounds. But, of course, the gang would be selling the same secrets to thirty or forty customers, and so would net a tidy sum in all.

Already the gangs have scored some remarkable successes. The technical officers of one great power designed a new tank which was reputed to be able to cross open country at sixty miles an hour—a mighty difficult target to hit, as any gunner would agree. The day came for the official trials of the tank; generals and high officers of state gathered to watch, the whole area cordoned off by police and troops. The tank passed its tests with flying colours, and everybody went home highly delighted. It was naturally impressed on all observers, however high their rank, of the necessity for secrecy. None of them said a word—there was no time; for the day after the tank had been tried out, its plans were on sale in Paris to anyone who cared to buy them. The international gang had merely been waiting for the result of the tests to be known before fixing a price—the plans had been in their possession for some weeks.

On another occasion a new French automatic rifle was stolen in unusual circumstances. After being thoroughly tried out, the original prototype was locked up in the War Office, while an ordnance factory proceeded with the manufacture of the bulk supply. When a quantity were ready for inspection, the technical officers went to get the prototype so as to compare with the mass product. But it had gone—and the French police actually discovered it on sale within a few hundred yards of the Ministry for War!