BLUFFING THE GERMANS.

Hawera Star, Volume XLV, 21 December 1925, Page 8

BLUFFING THE GERMANS.

'WAR. SECRET SERVICE METHODS. “The great mistakes the Germans made during the war was that they never , gave us credit for any intelligence; they never saw our side of the question,” recently said Admiral Sir Reginald Hall, M.P., Chief of the British Naval Intelligence Department during the war. Sir Reginald was described by the late Dr. Walter Hines Page, the American Ambassador to Great Britain during the war, to the President of the United States as “the one genius that the war has developed; neither in faction nor in fact could you find any such man to match him.” Sir Reginald added: Of course our whole object was to prevent the Germans from giving us very much.credit for intelligence. When President Wilson published the famous Zimmerman telegram containing the German overtures to Mexico (this telegram was given to the U.S. by the British Government, who, unknown to Germany, had Germany's secret code). I was very anxious that there should Ibe no suspicion in the German mind that we had anything to do with it. It was then that Daily Mail,, at my request. published a stinging leader passing severe reflections on | the British Intelligence Service. The Daily Mail was of the greatest assistance to us, and even now it would ’not be right for me to'go into the details of how it helped us throughout the war. , The British Admiralty, he explained, knew alb the movements of the famous German submarines Deutschland and .Bremen, and the British Government ’allowed German messages to be sent lover British cables. What the Germans did not know was that the British possessed the German secret code and [deciphered every message as it was !sent across. [ “This one thing shows the difference between the British and German mentality.” he remarked. “I am sure, if the position had been reserved, the British would never have been so stupid as not to have suspected that the messages were being deciphered.” Continuing he said: If I had disclosed the actual wording of the Zimmerman telegram, the Germans would have suspected something at once. I had to wait until we got a cony of the telegram actually sent, which was differently worded from the one from Berlin. Tt was BernstorfF’s telegram that T exposed. The Germans actually thought that there had been a leakage between Bernstorff and Mexico, which was what T. wanted. Right until the end of the war T do not think the Germans suspected that we knew as much as we did of their intelligence service. Dr. Page and I laughed when we read Eckhardt’s message from Mexico to Berlin explaining how it was impossible for the messages to have leaked out from his end. how he kept despatches in a sealed safe in Magnus’s bedroom—the code for opening the safe being known oiilv to Magnus—and how the messages wore afterwards burned to ashes, the ashes being scattered. .11l the time we had complete copies of those very messages.