The Spy Net by Henry Landau Read Free Book Online

and picked up the reports. Once the reports containing the information were deposited at the letter box, it was my responsibility to get them to Holland for transmission to GHQ .
    Duplication and secrecy based on ignorance of the general system was necessary; it was the solid basis of our policy. Our main care was to build up a number of small groups, each isolated from the other, so that if one worker was caught, he could only involve at the most four or five others. Even the bravest patriots could not be relied upon to keep silent in the face of the German third degree methods; and the prisoners were often cruelly beaten until they confessed. Drugs were sometimes administered to break the resistance of the sternest will.
    We had learned our lesson from the Frankignoul disaster, for I found, after investigating his organisation, that he had tied 200 agents in the interior to one solitary channel of communication with the outside: the tram which ran daily across the Belgian frontier to Maastricht. In this tram the reports had been hidden each day in Belgium, to be taken out by Frankignoul’s agents on their arrival in Holland. His method of communication was ideal because it was so direct and simple as to forestall detection for a considerable time; but it had worked so smoothly for months that he had lulled himself into the belief that it would go on working forever. He had made the additional error of allowing the identity of all his agents in Belgium to be known to each other. Hence when the link of communication fell into the hands of the Germans, they had time to seize all the reportsand trace down all the agents, since Frankignoul had no means to warn his men of this danger.
    In the course of my activities I was continually in communication with Colonel Oppenheim at The Hague. He was the exact opposite of T: fairly tall, and somewhat frail, scholarly in appearance, highly strung, and retiring in disposition. One of his functions was to analyse information and telegraph reports, and having nothing to do with the procuring of information or with secret service organisation, I sometimes thought he did not quite realise the difficulties with which we had to contend. He was, however, a brilliant staff officer, as I found out afterwards from his masterly analyses of the reports I sent him. He got every scrap of information there was to glean from them, and in the examination of train-watching reports, he was an expert in gauging the exact volume of each troop movement.
    From Colonel Oppenheim I learned exactly what information was required. It will probably astonish the layman to know that this was chiefly data on the movements of trains! I myself in other times would never have pictured secret service as an organisation devoted to, or even interested in, noting the arrivals and departures of railway units; yet this became a ruling interest of all our lives. The use of the trains by the Germans meant the movement of German troops, and the movement of troops often presaged a mass attack. On our information often depended the Allies’ hope of preparing to defend a position, or to surprise an attacking force. The Germans never did have enough troops to initiate an offensive on both fronts at the same time, and so each offensive was always preceded by a large transfer of troops from one front to the other. Hence Colonel Oppenheim’s emphasison the importance of getting all possible information about every troop movement, and the identity of the units involved. To assist identification of the different German regiments and units, he furnished me with handbooks of the German Army, which made me thoroughly conversant with its organisation and the various uniforms and distinguishing marks. All of this it was necessary to know in order to follow the movements of German troops with definiteness and assurance.
    Urged on by him, we gradually built up a train-watching system which covered every strategic line in Belgium and northeastern