The Anatomy of a Spy by Michael Smith

Author:Michael Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The History Press

Chapter 6

REVENGE

Revenge is one of the most powerful and enduring motives for a traitor. Nothing carries someone across the line between simply thinking that maybe they might pass secrets to the enemy and actual betrayal more reliably than the intense and deep-felt anger created by something unconscionable that they believe – for whatever reason – should never have happened. It is an unrelenting motivation, because each batch of secrets passed to the other side, each individual act of revenge, reminds the avenger of the original crime, ‘keeps his own wounds green’, and reinforces the determination to carry on.

One of the most valuable agents run by the British secret service prior to and during the First World War – indeed right up until shortly before the Second World War – was a German marine engineer who had the run of the German North Sea and Baltic dockyards, and as a result could report in detail on the German Navy’s preparations for war. Karl Kruger was a former German naval officer who had resigned after being court-martialled and demoted for hitting a relative of the Kaiser. His SIS file says that this made him ‘very embittered against his country’ and in November 1914 he approached the British legation in The Hague offering to spy on the Germans. Kruger openly admitted to Richard Tinsley, the British station chief in Rotterdam, that he was intent on wreaking revenge on the Imperial German Navy. After making his initial approach, Kruger seems briefly to have had second thoughts, before being persuaded by Tinsley to go through with the deal. He was designated R16, or TR16, the sixteenth agent run by Tinsley from Rotterdam, and later as H16, the H standing for Holland.

Henry Landau, who worked alongside Tinsley, remembered Kruger being known within the SIS Rotterdam office as ‘the Dane’, possibly a deliberate security measure, since he was in fact German and lived in what is now the Bad Godesberg district of the former German capital, Bonn.

Landau recalled:

Slight of build, fair, with blue eyes, he looked the reserved well-bred Scandinavian of cultured and professional interests. He certainly did not look the arch-spy he was. When I came to know him better, however, I realised why he was so successful. He was a marine engineer of exceptional quality. He was a man without nerve, always cool and collected. Nothing escaped his austerely competent eye and he was possessed of an astounding memory for the minutest detail of marine construction. He covered every shipbuilding yard and every Zeppelin shed in Germany. The key to his success was that he made the Germans believe that he was working for them against us. He was allowed to travel freely to Kiel, Wilhelmshaven, Hamburg, Bremen, Emden, Lübeck, Flensburg and other shipbuilding centres. His popularity with German clients and their trust in his apparently candid nature were unbounded. When in due time he applied for a pass to proceed through Germany to Holland it was readily granted.

Once every few weeks, on a regular

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