The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [54]
‘possible that he may have known him by sight and been known to him through visits to “T”’s office in Rotterdam’. Aged about forty at the beginning of the war, TR/16 (Dr Karl Krüger) was a naval engineer who had worked successfully in the German shipbuilding industry. He was a ‘walk-in’, who, apparently fired by a mixture of resentment and greed, had offered his services at the British legation in The Hague in November 1914. At the time he represented himself to Tinsley as a Dane, but it later emerged that he was actually a German, who, while serving in the German navy and having ‘insulted a relative of the Kaiser while at one of the northern sea ports’, had been ‘court-martialled and degraded, thereby becoming very embittered against his country’. As a postwar SIS minute observed, moreover, he worked ‘for very large sums of money, for which he is still always greedy’. But the information he supplied about German submarine and naval construction ‘was always accurate, up to date and of the very greatest possible value’. Over fifty of TR/16’s reports have survived in the Admiralty papers where it is noted that he ‘made complete tours of the German shipyards approximately every month from May 1915 to January 1919. Considerable value was attached to his information.’ There is an accurate sketch he made of the new German battleship Bayern at dock in March 1916. Later the same year he was asked to report on German losses at the Battle of Jutland (31 May 1916), the only engagement between the main British and German fleets during the war. The battle itself was inconclusive, with heavy losses on both sides, and the Admiralty badly needed to know how much damage the German fleet had suffered and how soon it might be able to fight again. On 2 June London told Tinsley in Rotterdam that ‘reliable information’ on the subject was ‘urgently required’. The same day Tinsley passed on the instruction to TR/16. Between 3 and 20 June he visited ten German dockyards, including Kiel, Bremen, Rostock and Danzig and on 27 June delivered a comprehensive five-page report which the Admiralty Director of the Intelligence Division praised as ‘100%’. From the British point of view, the most reassuring aspect of the report was confirmation that the Germans had sustained more serious damage than they had admitted. TR/16 reported, for example, that eight capital ships would be out of service for at least three months.20 The principal result of Jutland, indeed, was that for the rest of the war the German fleet never again ventured out to battle.
Agent TR/16’s March 1916 drawing of the new German battleship Bayern.
In July 1918 London calculated that Tinsley’s operation accounted for ‘70% of the total intelligence obtained by all the Allied armies not only through the Netherlands but also through other neutral states’ and remarked on the ‘rôle unique et merveilleux’ of their work collecting information about enemy movements in the zone immediately behind the front line. Although this statement was undoubtedly intended to boost morale and may have overestimated the position somewhat, by this stage Cumming’s operation was so successful that the British authorities were considering placing all the Dutch-Belgian military intelligence organisations under Tinsley, though the war ended before this could be implemented. 21 But intelligence is only as good as the use to which it is put. Over the early spring of 1918 MI1(c)’s reports (among many others) confirmed that the Germans were preparing for a push on the Western Front. The fact of a German attack was not in doubt; Brigadier Cox at General Headquarters predicted the moment and strength of the enemy quite accurately. But the British high command underestimated its intensity and the Commander-in-Chief, Sir Douglas Haig, remained absurdly over-optimistic. When the offensive came, on 21 March, the Germans advanced forty miles in a few days, and two further waves of the offensive in April and May kept the Allies on the defensive. Once the Germans had run out of steam by the early summer, however, the Allies,