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This book does not pretend to reveal all there is to know about the German Secret Service. It does not even detail all I know about the subject. These are days when discretion goes far beyond legal requirements; I would add a special request to American readers, asking them to be good enough to recall, as they read, that the book is written by a British author who is anxious for the triumph of the democratic cause.

By exploiting old or new devices, I might have evaded the modern degree of censorship prevailing in Britain in war-time. I have tried to act as my own censor, rejecting stories or arguments which even indirectly may be of some slight help to the enemy. For, as we shall see, espionage is strangely conservative, and some casual phrase may be hailed with delight by some harassed agent. One successful operative, on one occasion, sought me out, and gave me a magnificent dinner—because he had devised an ingenious code from a suggestion in one of my books of spy fiction.

I have seen in my own experience too many cases of inadvertent aid to the enemy—the very freedom of spirit in the democracies tends to discount the necessity of war-time restraints. It might have been tempting to have aimed for notoriety by making “sensational revelations,” but I hope I have avoided that charge. The American journalist who evaded the British censor and got home to his newspaper the story of the damaging of the cruiser Belfast executed a fine journalistic coup—but he rendered a grave disservice to the democratic cause: until the news was announced in New York, the Germans did not even know that the Belfast had been hit, and it was obviously to the Allied advantage that they should never know.

This book is no apologia for espionage, but rather a non-sensational account of some aspects of the activities of German spies. They are widespread enough in all conscience (even before the war, they cost the Nazis over eighteen million pounds a year), but I have confined my outline almost entirely to Europe, which is the part of the world I know best, and where I have for many years been interested in German espionage activity. The work of Nazi spies in the United States of America has already been adequately described, but if only by the very familiarity of the subject, in Europe it has been treated with the proverbial contempt. In Britain to-day there are posters on the hoardings: “Don’t help the enemy! Careless talk may give away vital secrets.”

The warning is badly needed. The British have been accustomed for generations to speaking their minds freely: there is no Gestapo or Ogpu, and authority can be freely criticized, and it generally is! The freedom of discussion and comment is an essential feature of democracy, but in war-time a voluntary discipline is necessary. In spite of all the sensational stories about German spies—or maybe because they are so sensational!—the British public amiably discounts the possibility of Nazi agents at its elbow. Misled by Hollywood, it visualizes a spy as a bearded foreigner or a glamorous blonde, instead of the colourless man sitting in the corner of the railway carriage, listening to the conversation of sailors going on leave. If I can persuade my readers that the official warning should be taken seriously, I shall be well content.

Bernard Newman.

Harrow

January, 1940