Читать книгу The Secrets of Spies - Weldon Owen - Страница 64

A NEW TYPE OF WAR

65

PARANOID DELUSIONS?

As intelligence work gained greater priority, various nations likewise increased

their anti-spying efforts. Spies were arrested, imprisoned, and even executed,

sometimes in retaliation for defeats that were blamed on espionage. However,

these anti-espionage efforts often spilled over into paranoia. For example,

shepherds northeast of Paris were arrested by the French authorities for moving

their flocks in patterns thought to be signals for German observers, while artists

were interrogated for daring to sketch the countryside. In England, renowned

Irish artist John Lavery was arrested for painting a naval port, having been

commissioned to do so by the Admiralty as an official war artist!

That said, to misquote Philip K. Dick, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t

mean they’re not after intel. In an innovative move, Dutch windmills were

stopped and started in a seemingly haphazard fashion that concealed Morse

code signals to German forces, while Belgian train engineers opened and

closed their engines‘ fireboxes at night to send light-based Morse code

messages to British agents in the Netherlands. The idea of spy-sheep

wasn’t quite as ridiculous as it might have sounded.

NEW TECHNIQUES, NEW TROUBLES

Radio and telephone messages were deemed vital by all sides in

the conflict for effective command. However, most soldiers and

politicians underestimated the extent to which their messages could

be intercepted and decoded, or disrupted. Telegram and telephone

lines could be severed, and the British broke German undersea cables

at the outbreak of the war, thus forcing messages to go through

networks that could be more easily eavesdropped, such as Britain‘s

own telegram system. Wireless connections afforded by the new radio

technology could also be tapped into. The German “Moritz” apparatus

was a signal amplifier connected to a set of copper terminals. British

soldiers crept into No Man‘s Land under cover of darkness, and

attached the Moritz to telephone or telegram lines leading to directly

to British command centers. Unencrypted radio transmissions could

easily be picked up by simply tuning into the right channel, if one had

a wireless, knew the frequency, and could understand the language

being spoken. Instructions to encode messages were often lost or

not followed due to a lack of understanding of its importance.

Below: Three British

and French soldiers

observe German

positions with

binoculars while a

fourth communicates

with artillery via a

field telephone.

Above: A German soldier talks on a telephone attached to a tree.

HUMAN ERROR

In the first month of the war, the outcome of the Battle of Tannenberg between Russia and Germany was

decided in part by a combination of technological shortfalls and human error. Russian command had

limited supplies of cable to lay down for telephone and telegram communications, and had to rely on radio,

but they were also short on copies of their new codebooks. Messages were sent in the clear, uncoded, with

nothing protecting them but the hope that they would not be picked up. The combined equipment

shortage and poor comms discipline meant that enough Russian messages were intercepted to determine

their troop movements and, ultimately, a German victory. This devastating defeat led to the almost

complete destruction of the Russian Second Army, causing the Russians to retreat from East Prussia.