Part 26

The Fifth Section of the Military Intelligence Division, known as M I 5, is charged with the duty of obtaining positive intelligence, that is, of locating direct and indirect sources of information; of supervising military attachés, who, within the limits of their activities, obtain essential information, and of forwarding this information to such sections of the Intelligence Division as may find it of value. Now I am perfectly aware that the army officers who are attached to the American embassies and legations in various foreign countries do not stand particularly high in the estimation of the American people. They are generally regarded as men who have been selected for their wealth and social distinction rather than for their abilities as soldiers; who have had more experience in ballrooms than in bombarded cities, and are more successful in leading cotillions than at leading troops in battle. As a matter of fact, this estimate of our military attachés is bitterly unjust. As showing the type of men who represented the army abroad, I might mention that our military attaché in England during the early years of the Great War was Major-General George S. Squier (then a colonel), chief signal officer of the army and one of the foremost scientists in America, if not, indeed, in the world; our attaché at Paris was Colonel Spencer S. Crosby, one of the most able engineer officers in the army; while at Berlin our military representative was Major-General (then Colonel) Joseph A. Kuhn, who, after organizing, training, and commanding in action the 79th Division, eventually rose to the command of an army corps.

Everything considered, the American military attachés have done more valuable work and received less recognition for it than almost any class of officers that I know. They have been placed in the unenviable position of taking orders from two departments—War and State; they have been forced, by the very nature of their duties, to play the rôle of onlookers while their fellow officers were fighting, and they have repeatedly been accused of being spies. Though the duties of our attachés in the capitals of our allies have been largely ornamental during the war, owing to the fact that they were virtually superseded in their military functions by the various American military missions, their work in the neutral countries of Holland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Spain, and Switzerland was of enormous importance, for they provided Military Intelligence with its most reliable and important source of information. Those officers stationed at The Hague, Copenhagen, and Berne could look across the barbed wire, figuratively speaking, and see for themselves what the enemy was doing. Through all sorts of agents—spies, smugglers, deserters, refugees, business men whose affairs took them into the territory of the Central Powers, and returning travellers—they were able to keep their fingers constantly on the military and economic pulse of the enemy, and to report the information thus obtained to the A. E. F. and to Washington. It goes without saying that this work called for the exercise of the highest degree of patience, resourcefulness, and tact, for they were always surrounded by German agents, and particularly in those countries where German sympathizers predominated, the slightest indiscretion would have resulted in a demand for their recall. No news that came out of Germany was too trivial to escape their attention. Every one who crossed the frontier, from Dutch and Danish bankers to German deserters, was adroitly questioned and cross-questioned by the attachés, certain of the information thus obtained exercising a profound effect on America’s military policy. For example, our attaché at The Hague was dining one evening with a Dutch banker who had just returned from a business trip to Germany. While chatting over the coffee and cigars the Hollander remarked that, though he had been the guest of a German nobleman of great wealth, he had not been quite as comfortable as on previous visits, owing to the absence of his host’s butler.

“What has become of old Franz?” the Hollander had asked his host. “The place isn’t the same without him.”

“He was called to the colors last week,” was the answer.

“But surely he is too old for active service,” the banker protested. “He must be nearer sixty than fifty; he is blind in one eye and he is crippled with rheumatism.”

“Ach, yes,” admitted the German. “But what would you? The Fatherland has need of every man.”

This incident, related quite casually over a dinner-table, though trivial in itself, gave our military attaché—and through him our Military Intelligence—an intimation of the enormous depletion of Germany’s man-power. Taken in conjunction with similar reports from other sources, it convinced him that Germany was fast becoming desperately hard up for men.

The attaché in Switzerland, perusing, as was his custom, the current issues of the German newspapers, had his attention attracted by an advertisement, inserted by a citizen of a south German city, offering to rent a pair of stout leather boots, in good condition, for six weeks for forty marks. When the equivalent of ten dollars is demanded for the use of a pair of boots for six weeks, there is only one conclusion to be drawn. “Germany must be at the last gasp for leather,” argued the attaché, and he so informed Washington. His surmise proved perfectly correct.

Our military representative at The Hague was materially aided in his quest for information by a former sergeant in the American Army, who, upon his discharge, had bought a small truck-farm in southern Holland, within a few rods of the frontier. His dwelling was a recognized rendezvous for smugglers and deserters, the old soldier sending reports of the immensely important information which he obtained from them to the attaché at the capital as regularly as, when stationed at an army post in the Indian country, he turned in his company reports.

All cable messages sent by the military attachés to the Military Intelligence Division habitually ended with the sentence “Pershing informed,” which signified that the information had also been communicated to the Commander-in-Chief of the American Expeditionary Forces. Shortly after the arrival of the former Kaiser at Amerongen, the newspapers carried circumstantial accounts of serious political unrest in Holland. In order to correct the impression thus created, the attaché at The Hague, who was evidently blessed with a sense of humor, sent the following message to Washington:

“_Everything quiet in Holland. The Kaiser is still with us. Pershing informed. God also._”

Outside of Tiflis, in the Caucasus, in whose bazaars eighty languages are commonly spoken, I suppose that the Sixth Section of Military Intelligence, familiarly referred to as M I 6, is the nearest modern equivalent to the Tower of Babel. This section is charged with translating into English books, periodicals, newspapers, pamphlets, posters, proclamations, army orders, war diaries, confidential reports, Heaven only knows what besides, which appear in pretty much every language under the sun. The translators at present employed in the section make translations from the French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Dutch, Dano-Norwegian, Russian, Swedish, Greek, and Icelandic. This comprises only a portion of the section’s work, however, for it also makes translations from Roumanian, Ukrainian, Czecho-Slovak, Serbo-Croatian, Slovenian, Albanian, Bulgarian, Polish, Lithuanian, Lettish, Finnish, Ladino (there’s a strange one!), Hebrew, Yiddish, Turkish, Armenian, Assyrian, Syriac, Arabic, Hindustani, Bengali, Chinese, Japanese, Choctaw, and other North American Indian dialects, Samoan, a dialect of the Philippine Islands, and Esperanto. By an ingenious system of filing and indexing the information thus obtained, the section has become a sort of clearing-house for data gleaned from the foreign press.

M I 8 is the Cable and Telegraph Section of Military Intelligence. A portion of its work consists in sending and receiving telegrams and cables between the division and its intelligence officers on duty outside of Washington, including the military attachés in foreign countries. By means of special wire connections, remarkably fast service has been provided, particularly with the most important centre, Paris, whence messages in plain text have been delivered in Washington four hours earlier by the clock than they were despatched, while code messages have been delivered at approximately the same time by the clock that they were sent. As an illustration of the peculiar tricks played by the change in time, I might mention—though it has nothing on earth to do with the subject of Military Intelligence—that the news of the death of Queen Victoria was received in New York three and a half hours before the time at which she breathed her last!

By far the greater portion of the enormous amount of cable correspondence handled by this office has been in the form of code messages. Since the necessity for security has required that the code words of each message be enciphered to prevent the possibility of the message being intercepted and read by the enemy, it has been necessary to subject each code message to two complete translations. It has also been the duty of this section, in order to insure secrecy and to secure economy in the transmission of messages, to prepare five code-books for publication. Few persons realize, I imagine, that the use of code by the Military Intelligence Division, the Adjutant-General’s Office, and other branches of the War Department, as well as by the American Expeditionary Forces, has resulted in a saving to the government of at least 50 per cent in the cost of telegraphic and cable communications. The use of the Geographical Code has brought about an even greater economy by eliminating the necessity of spelling out foreign place names. Though hundreds of plays, novels, and magazine stories have been based on the work of code and cipher experts in this and other countries, the writers have usually painted in too vivid colors the romantic side of the calling. Though code and cipher work is frequently productive of exciting and dramatic moments, it is usually the intellectual excitement of a chemist who, after weeks of laborious experiments, discovers a new reaction, rather than the physical thrill which a detective experiences when he discovers a clew to a crime.

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Because of the enormous number of foreign-born citizens who were brought into the army by the draft, or who entered it through the National Guard or as volunteers, the work of counter-espionage within the military establishment itself was of vital importance, for a single traitor in the expeditionary forces might well have turned victory into disaster. Had it not been for the vigilance and efficiency of the Third Section of Military Intelligence, which was charged with counter-espionage within the military establishment itself, our hastily recruited and somewhat loosely organized armies would have afforded countless opportunities for the operations of enemy agents. I can give no higher praise to the work of this section than to say that, though numerous enemy agents succeeded in gaining admission to the military service in the United States, they did not succeed in getting overseas, where they might have done irreparable harm. So active were our intelligence officers, so carefully did they investigate the record of every man destined for service in France, that, of the two and a half million men in the A. E. F., not a single one, so far as I am aware, was convicted of espionage.

Every military organization operating independently, from a division down to a quartermaster depot, possessed its own counter-espionage organization, built up within itself for its own protection but operating according to a general plan and reporting directly to the Military Intelligence Division in Washington. During the war there were over 400 intelligence officers reporting to Military Intelligence, either directly or through department intelligence officers. In addition to these, there were special intelligence officers at certain highly important points: New York, Hoboken, Philadelphia, Pittsburg, St. Louis, New Orleans, Seattle, and San Juan, Porto Rico—and twenty-one district intelligence officers stationed in centres of somewhat less importance. The privilege of direct communication, granted by the Secretary of War, enabled the counter-espionage organization throughout the United States to be controlled and co-ordinated without interference by the normal military command, thereby insuring additional secrecy for its operations and eliminating the enormous amount of time and red tape involved in sending communications through the usual military channels. Each intelligence officer corresponded directly and freely with every other intelligence officer, copies of such lateral communications being sent to Military Intelligence, the files of M. I. thus becoming a great central reservoir for intelligence information of every sort. As a result of this organization, the Director of Military Intelligence, sitting at his desk in Washington, was the centre of a vast network of intelligence officers and other agents which covered not only the whole of the United States but, indeed, the greater part of the world.

The ever-present problem presented by counter-espionage work within the army was the determination of the loyalty of officers and men. Experience proved that the pro-German was almost certain to reveal himself sooner or later, or to be reported by some one who had known him, the loyal rank and file themselves constituting the most effective counter-espionage service of all. Investigations of men thus reported frequently showed, however, that, though the suspect might have been pro-German before our entrance into the war, he had been apparently loyal since. If he was an enlisted man it was usually deemed safe to put him with line troops and send him to the front, for, even were he to prove disloyal, his opportunities for acquiring important information were comparatively few, and his opportunities for transmitting such information to the enemy almost infinitesimal. In the case of an officer, however, the question took on a far graver aspect, and only after the most searching investigation was such a man permitted to go overseas.

The activities of the men under investigation assumed many forms. First in importance, of course, though not in numbers, were those enemy agents who had entered the army for the express purpose of acquiring information for transmission to the enemy. These were, in plain language, spies, and had they been caught “with the goods,” they would have been subject to court martial and execution. In order to silence the countless stories and rumors which have been circulated, I will avail myself of this opportunity to state that _not a single American soldier or civilian was executed for espionage during the entire course of the war_. The bulk of the cases which were investigated concerned men who, because of their foreign birth, or antecedents, or sympathies, _might_ have been willing to impart information of military value to enemy agents. The most difficult class to deal with, however, was the man who was spreading stories, with or without thought as to their effect, which would tend to lower the morale of the army. The reports upon which investigations were initiated varied greatly in definiteness, ranging all the way from specific statements as to a man’s utterances or acts to a vague rumor that in such and such a place there was a man, name not given, who should be investigated. It was the policy of the section, however, to pursue any clew, no matter how vague, until the guilt or innocence of the suspect was definitely established. Where the original information was anonymous, that point was always sharply emphasized, so that the suspect’s reputation might not be injured should the allegations prove to be unfounded, for it was found that anonymous charges were very frequently made from motives of spite or revenge or because of some real or fancied injury. In such cases it was the policy of the section to push the investigation only far enough to show their character and then drop them promptly, without burdening the field intelligence officers or other investigating agencies with useless work.

The converse of this policy was followed in cases where the charges appeared to be well grounded, the man then being kept under surveillance until something, no matter what, was picked up which would place him where he could do no harm.

One of the commonest problems was the one presented by the officer of German extraction who had been born and bred amid Teutonic influences, and who was naturally pro-German in sympathy and utterances before the United States entered the war, but who had been guilty of no act or utterance since that date which could be construed as in any degree disloyal, and who, from a military point of view, was extremely efficient. Such cases, in the last analysis, always resolved themselves into the question: “Is he fit to go across?” Each case was, of course, considered on its own merits. While it was obviously impossible to lay down a rule-of-thumb applicable to all, two considerations in the main governed the decision. In the first place, an effort was made to obtain the opinions of the officers serving with the man in question and to learn whether they would be satisfied to go into action against German troops with him. If his fellow officers felt that they could trust him under such circumstances, it was a fair judgment in his favor. The second consideration was to ascertain whether his name, lineage, or appearance would make him unacceptable to our French allies. If such were likely to be the case, international courtesy, if nothing else, made it inadvisable to send him overseas. Surveillance of these men naturally was continued in France, but the Intelligence Division of the A. E. F., in reporting that such a case could be considered closed, frequently said in effect that any taint of disloyalty which might once have existed had been burned away by the fire of battle.

The process of having an officer discharged from the army by authority of Paragraph 9, War Department Bulletin No. 32 (“The President is hereby authorized to discharge any officer from the office held by him under such appointment for any cause which, in the judgment of the President, would promote the public service”), was the easiest and most satisfactory manner of dealing with cases of individuals against whom it was impossible to obtain sufficient evidence for conviction by court martial but whose presence in the army was regarded as constituting a menace to the national safety. This will explain in some measure, perhaps, the curt announcements which appeared from time to time during the course of the war in Army Orders: “Lieutenant (or Captain, or Colonel) So-and-So has been discharged for the good of the Service.” The great drawback, however, to this method of ridding the army of undesirables was that it could not be applied to officers of the regular establishment, as the terms of the Act restricted its application to Reserve officers and those holding commissions for the term of the emergency. The policy pursued by Military Intelligence in the cases of regular officers suspected of disloyalty—for all suspected officers were not confined to the National Army or the Reserve Corps—was to have them assigned to posts where their opportunities for mischief would be reduced to a minimum. An officer ordered to duty in the heart of Alaska, say, was considered about as safe, from the point of view of Military Intelligence, as though he were in a cell at Leavenworth.

Among the nearly 700,000 men swept by the first draft into the cantonments to be fused into a national army were thousands upon thousands of men of alien birth, many of them but recently arrived in this country and all but ignorant of its tongue. It speedily became apparent that the fusing process was failing to produce in many of these men, perhaps in the majority of them, the change necessary to make them into soldiers. Instead of melting and flowing like the rest of the metal from which was forged the weapon which halted the Huns at Château-Thierry and beat them back in the Argonne, these men of alien birth remained a hard, unyielding mass, not only obdurate in itself, but threatening to leave in the finished weapon flaws that would be fatal when it was subjected to the test of battle. By the fall of 1917, therefore, the military authorities had awakened to a realization of the fact that they were confronted by a serious and difficult problem—what to do with the foreign-speaking element of our new armies.

These immigrants, particularly the more recent, tend to congregate in the industrial centres of the country, in New York’s teeming “East Side,” in the mining regions of Pennsylvania, in the manufacturing cities of New England, and in the Pacific Northwest. Here they live in swarming communities, speaking their own languages, reading (if they can) their own newspapers, attending their own churches, their wants ministered to by their own doctors, lawyers, bankers, and tradesmen. From such colonies the drag-net of the draft drew into the army tens of thousands of foreign-speaking men. Here, then, was the first and greatest source of difficulty in transforming these aliens from many lands into American soldiers—ignorance of the English language. Unable to understand the orders which were given them, they were set down as stupid and surly, and through a lack of judgment in the selection of the commissioned and non-commissioned officers put in charge of them, they were frequently the victims of misunderstanding and ill-treatment. Four illustrations are typical of a hundred or more similar incidents in the Depot Brigade at Camp Gordon:

Private Sobolowski, failing to spell his name, was struck in the jaw by his sergeant, so successfully that the jaw was broken and a few teeth were knocked out. The private went to the hospital and the sergeant to the guard-house, pending court-martial proceedings.

Private Pagarzelski replied to his corporal in Polish, which the corporal considered highly abusive. The private was court-martialled and sixty dollars of his pay was forfeited. As a consequence the man was not only unable to help his aged mother but was left without a penny for himself.

Private Sznyder, being on guard duty, misunderstood the orders repeated to him by the corporal of the guard, and naturally did not comply with them. As a result he was arrested and put in the guard-house, fifty-seven dollars being taken from him by a corporal, of which only thirty-five dollars was returned. The corporal took advantage of his ignorance of English to appropriate a part of the money.

A Russian was arrested for evasion of military service. After he had spent six weeks in the guard-house it was discovered (through an interpreter) that the man was arrested before he had received notification of being drafted.

From a counter-espionage point of view such conditions were distinctly dangerous. The foreign-speaking soldiers, if not actually affiliated with the enemy, were, because of their ignorance and credulity, especially susceptible to the advances of enemy agents and propagandists. When herded together in a depot brigade, made surly by the inconsiderate treatment they received and chafing under the compulsion of being set at manual labor in this country when their ambition was to go overseas, they were potentially, if not actually, ripe for mischief.