Intelligence or Espionage?

In 10 short chapters with an introduction and 5 annexes the author describes his experience as a senior member of Austria-Hungary’s military intelligence unit, the Evidenzbureau, in the run-up to World War I and during it. Anecdotes predominate, but there is also some concise background information.

The theme of foiling the Russians runs throughout the book. Heavily outnumbered by Russian spies, the Evidenzbureau’s frustration reaches the first of its low points in 1913, with the discovery that their own second-in- command, Alfred Redl, is spying for Russia. The story ends at an even lower point in 1918 with two eye-witness accounts of untold chaos and desperation in Soviet Russia, brought about in part by the efforts of Austro-Hungarian and German secret services.

A kind of high point in between occurs in the chapter on spying in Switzerland when the author is on duty there in early 1917. It is here that the idea of using Lenin and the Bolsheviks to paralyse the Russian army comes into view. Von Walzel claims to have been the first person with the power to act on it to have spotted this opportunity. As the man who believes he set it in motion, he offers his own account of the chain of events that led to organizing and financing Lenin’s famous train journey that April from Zurich to Petersburg.

Other points scored over Russian counterparts include cracking the code they were using to direct their military operations. This was achieved by one of the interpreters working for the author, and led to a number of battlefield successes. Strenuous efforts and ingenuity were also poured into demoralizing the Russian troops and turning them against their commanding officers. Leaflets distributed in the trenches offered each Russian soldier 7 roubles for his rifle if it was in good working order and he turned it in to the nearest Austro-Hungarian field station. The response was good and recipients were sent back to the front with their 7 roubles and a supply of further leaflets to hand out. The Russians put a stop to this by shooting every man found carrying such material, so the means of distribution was changed to hot-air balloons sent over enemy lines to release bundles of flyers at regular intervals by means of a special slow-burning fuse invented by the author. Other state-of-the-art technologies for spying and wreaking havoc on the enemy are summarized in a short concluding chapter.

Encouraged by the success of giving a helping hand to insurrection in Russia, the author describes a similar plan for setting off a civil war in Italy. His proposal, in this case ignored by his superiors, is set out in Annex 1 as a way to accelerate the peace process. Another of the author’s plans that did not materialize, this one at the beginning of the war, was to block the Suez Canal by filling a merchant ship with cement, sailing it into the Canal under a neutral flag and sinking it there. The failure to seize this opportunity is attributed to their man in Constantinople who was not up to it.

In the chapter on Redl, the author, ever resourceful, outlines a better plan for dealing with the villain than the one that was used. Instead of interrogating him briefly in his hotel room and tactfully leaving him a Browning pistol with which to shoot himself, he would have sent a team to put him in a straitjacket, bundle him into an ambulance and take him to a lunatic asylum, telling the press that the distinguished officer had displayed symptoms of insanity. At the hospital they could have extracted a detailed confession from him at their leisure, and then handed him the pistol.