You must seek out enemy agents who have come to spy on you, bribe them and induce them to stay with you, so you can use them as reverse spies. By intelligence thus obtained, you can find local spies and inside spies to employ. By intelligence thus obtained, you can cause the misinformation of dead spies to be conveyed to the enemy. By intelligence thus obtained, you can get living spies to work as planned. —The Art of War, Sun Tzu
Dear Reader,
Austria-Hungary, the last Catholic power, was the target of too many enemies. Anti-Catholic bigotry was rife among European intellectuals and radicals, which made the Habsburgs the target of vitriol and irrational hatred.
And yet in other respects, the Habsburg Empire was the most peaceful of the great powers. Austrian Kaiser Franz Joseph was forced to take the throne at the age of 18, in 1848, due to the Revolutions that year. His uncle, Emperor Ferdinand, was too unwell to cope with the revolutionaries as he suffered from severe epilepsy, and other health problems that meant he was only nominally ruling the country, while the emperor’s brother, Archduke Franz Karl, did not want the responsibility and so relinquished his rights in favor of his son, Franz Joseph. And thus Franz Joseph's reign began and lasted 68 long years, making him the 6th longest reigning monarch in recorded history. Recent works by historians have shown that during his reign, the Imperial and Royal (k.u.k.) Army was the least antisemitic in Europe, with Jewish recruits being welcomed in support and line regiments and as officers. (Importantly, Adolf Hitler hated the Catholic dynasty for its toleration of Jews and other non-Germans. Maximilian and Ernst Habsburg, the orphaned sons of the assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie, were the first Austrians deported to the Dachau concentration camp in 1938.) Many Jews in the empire saw the Habsburgs as their protectors and felt pride in fighting for the dynasty. Franz Joseph needed all the good troops he could get.
He had to contend with the First Italian War of Unification, when the Kingdom of Sardinia-Piedmont tried to take Austria’s territories in Northern Italy. He won that one. But lost the next one in 1859 when France turned on Austria and then was expelled from Germany in 1866. In all these wars, he was the defender, and after losing to Prussia in the 1866 Seven Weeks War, Franz Joseph pursued a policy of peace and international cooperation. It occupied Bosnia-Herzegovina in accordance with the international Congress of Berlin in 1878 to end the Ottoman-Russian conflict. And later Austria-Hungary joined the Eight Nation international coalition (Germany, Japan, Russia, Britain, France, the U.S.A., Italy) to put down the Boxer Rebellion in China in 1900, which, while operating under the banner of international order and Christian civilization, Habsburg involvement was more about affirming great-power status than defending genuine interests in China. Franz Joseph pursued no colonies in Asia or Africa. To China, he sent a small naval contingent and marines from his port at Pola on the Adriatic, and that was that. Except for the Great War, in his 68-year reign, his empire was at war for less than five years. The other great powers were far more expansionist and aggressive than the Habsburgs. And yet, the Austrian state remained the target of Italy and Russia. Especially Russia in the new age of spycraft.
Technology sprinted in the late 19th century, driven by the industrial revolution and a second scientific revolution of electricity and sound. Between the 1840s and the eve of the Great War, a quieter revolution reshaped the nature of espionage, driven by the invention of the telegraph and telephone. This period, which we might call the “telegraphic age of espionage”, saw the beginning of real-time intelligence gathering over long distances. The spread of the electric telegraph allowed governments to transmit and intercept messages across continents, transforming war and diplomacy alike. Conflicts such as the Crimean War (1853–56), the U.S. Civil War (1861-65), and the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71) proved that the telegraph was a strategic asset to be targeted, guarded, and weaponized. Encryption and code-breaking evolved from specialist arts into core instruments of statecraft. In this environment, the first modern intelligence agencies were developed. Among them was the k.u.k. Evidenzbureau, Austria-Hungary’s imperial military intelligence office. Literally the “Imperial and Royal Evidence Bureau,” it gathered intel, monitored foreign threats, and kept tabs on subversion, especially from nationalist movements inside the empire. But with the new tools of communication, spies and spy masters could communicate in code without ever meeting. Now, with a telephone, you could betray your emperor without leaving your desk.
In the last years before Europe tore itself apart, as old empires creaked and wild nationalisms roamed through the streets of Budapest and Belgrade, hidden in hotel rooms, locked offices, and railway compartments, the time of the modern spy had come. Out of these schemes and cabals would come an overconfident and eager Russian push into the Balkans in 1914, one encouraged by a traitor to the Austrian Empire: Colonel Alfred Redl.
Redl’s story is fascinating. He was the head of counterintelligence for the k.u.k. Evidenzbureau, and St. Petersburg's man, a double agent being paid by the Russians, Italians, and we think the French too. From 1907 to 1912, Redl was the man tasked with hunting down traitors, identifying enemy spies, and securing the secrets of the Habsburg Empire. Yet he was their most dangerous traitor in history; he was the enemy spy: he was hunting himself. And of course did not catch himself; instead, he gave up Austrian spies to the Russians, men who were later cynically executed by the Tsarist government. Kaiser Franz Joseph was horrified and made sure their families were cared for because he believed loyalty should be rewarded. Redl didn’t.
Redl was born in 1864 in Lemberg (modern-day Lviv), the child of a modest German-speaking family in the empire’s multiethnic eastern fringe, in what is now Ukraine. Smart and ambitious, he rose quickly through the military ranks, aided by his sharp mind and a keen sense of the political culture of the dual monarchy. He was an example of Habsburg upward mobility, so he was promoted in part to show that Kaiser Franz Joseph’s government would raise up men of talent, that Austria was not the moribund mess its enemies made it out to be. The Habsburgs wanted to reward merit from below. It did not matter to Redl; he wanted the good life, and Russia paid him well. The positions Redl gained in the Habsburg military were not very well paid in part because they had normally gone to aristocrats.
Redl was a homosexual, a gay man in an age when exposure meant disgrace and ruin. He had also contracted a bad strain of syphilis, which affected his health. Some think that this made him susceptible to Russian blackmail, but it looks like the idea that the Russians held this over him and that made him turn traitor may be overblown. He craved the excitement like many double agents before, and the gifts he received from his Russian masters were generous, more an enough to buy the loyalty of someone inclined to that daring life. In exchange for money and maybe silence, Redl began passing intel to Russia and apparently even Italy because although Italy was allied with Austria it remained covetous of the few remaining Italian speaking territories under Habsburg rule, and was already planning to betray the House of Austria. Redl’s treachery started with simple documents and grew to include mobilization schedules, war plans, and sellingout the identities of Austro-Hungarian agents operating abroad. The volume and detail of information he handed over were staggering.
In additional to exposing his comrades to capture and execution, Redl’s greatest betrayal was probably the leaking of Austrian plans for mobilization in case of war with Serbia, and also the contingency positions for deployment against Russia. What he gave them outlined precisely how and where Habsburg forces would deploy; troop locations, supply logistics, and the weak points of the imperial defense structure. The whole game, as they say. This is deadly because in 1914, it made Russia overconfident and Serbia obstinate. The big question of World War One should not be about Germany but Russia. The question is, why did a war between Austria and Serbia expand to include everyone else? Why did Russia rush in? Why did Russia mobilize troops as early as February 1914? The Russians thought they knew the whole Austrian playbook and were eager for a swift victory to seize territory and erase the memory of their humiliation at the hands of the Japanese.
Redl’s treachery didn’t end with espionage; he also gave disinformation to the Habsburgs. He deliberately gave false assessments, underestimating Russian capabilities and downplaying their readiness. The effect of this disinformation was to convince the Austro-Hungarian high command that Russia was slower than it was, that it was inefficient, and would not or could not respond forcefully to Habsburg aggression in the Balkans. The Archduke Franz Ferdinand did not fall for it while others did; he knew that war with Serbia would bring in Russia and doom both empires because the carnage of modern war would likely provoke revolution. But he was the one killed in 1914, and the disinformation emboldened the k.u.k. leadership to push for a confrontation with Serbia under the false assumption that Russia would hesitate to intervene. Was it a trap or a series of misjudgements? Serbia knew of Austria's weakness as Russia passed on Redl’s intel to Belgrade.
The end for Redl was a black comedy. Austrian security followed the money. Ironically, his exposure came from old-fashioned detective work, through the tracking of money envelopes sent to a Vienna post office box, which were suspicious. Security agents followed the money, and a man picked the envelop up but disappeared into a taxi. They waited for the taxi to return, asked where he took his fare, and discovered a trinket in the back seat. They went to the location and saw Redl, whom the reception staff identified as the man in the taxi. As he was a high-ranking officer, the agents hesitated to confront him and simply asked if the trinket was his. He said it was and was caught. His superiors ordered that the agents ensure Redl was dead before dawn.
Spies do not just steal secrets. The most dangerous among them do something far worse: they plant false ones.
By the time the truth came out, it was too late. And the Austrian command botched it because instead of interrogating Redl, using him against the Russians as Sun Tzu would have, they ordered him to be dead by sunrise, meaning to kill him or let him do it himself. No one had a pistol; Habsburg officers did not carry them in Vienna, so they had to go across the city to a depot, retrieve one, and bring it back to the traitor so he could unalive himself as the youth say these days. And so, Redl, commander of the Evidenzbureau, took himself and his secrets to the grave. The Archduke Franz Ferdinand was double horrified: first as a Catholic, that suicide had been encouraged, and second, that Redl was not kept alive for interrogation. The security agents then left his unsearched personal effects to the local authorities, who then put them up for auction, only for more stolen secrets to be discovered by the innocent purchaser and given to the press. Seriously.
Very interesting article and well written!