Family ties in the making of modern intelligence.

  "These are our crowd ... They've been vetted an' we're putting 'em
  through their paces."
  --Rudyard Kipling, 1904

Good intelligence officials know that one of the most important things they can do is recruit competent, reliable, and loyal personnel to staff their agencies. As with foreign service and diplomatic personnel, intelligence workers need to be "known" entities, whose discretion and background can be checked and assured. This process of subjecting prospects to an examination in order to separate likely candidates from unsuitable ones is often known today as "vetting." The word itself is a colloquialism that emerged from the veterinary exam given to animals ready for sale--these animals were given a reputation through a veterinarian's recommendation. Just as thoroughbreds are vetted before a sale, then, prospective secrets workers must also be "put through their paces" and have their bloodlines, readiness, and capabilities assured. In today's high-tech intelligence community, elaborate background and security checks yield mounds of details about a prospect's life and history, but in the formative years of British intelligence, vetting procedures were only just emerging.

This paper explores the cultural practice of vetting in the British intelligence community during its first ten years of official existence from 1909-1919. Not only did vetting of prospective British- and foreign-born personnel take place, but also these examinations had a distinctly class bias. Most of the early secret service officers had elite backgrounds and hailed from wealthy British families with deep government, military, and commercial connections. Being from the right sort of family was often a determining factor in hiring British men for intelligence work, as it had been previously for other sensitive state work in the Foreign Office, Colonial Office and the Diplomatic Service.

Nationality also played a key role in the shaping of British recruitment practices for its secrets industry. While British men could be assessed in part by their occupational history and official positions, foreign nationals hired in large numbers for human intelligence work during the First World War were a different matter. Human intelligence, or the hard work of tapping into a "petty economy of information" at the local level, listening and gathering important information, and then conveying the intelligence to the proper authorities, was a task that often fell to insiders within a country, forcing recruitment of foreigners for this delicate work. (1) Although British intelligence did not hesitate to use information from rascals motivated by greed, they looked for more steady and reliable agents to run their long-term intelligence services. These foreign men and women found themselves subject to additional "checks" and often needed a British citizen to vouch for them before they were even considered for intelligence work. More importantly, however, British officials relied heavily on familial networks of agents, perhaps considering these individuals to be more reliable and loyal since more than their own lives were at stake.

Finally, gender also constituted an important lens for the recruitment structure of early intelligence offices, with certain assumptions about masculine and feminine loyalties and motivations helping to shape the new bureaucracies. British officials considered men to be more patriotic and selflessly loyal, but also vulnerable to the wiles of women. In women, however, British officials saw a significant problem with the mobilization of these secrecy workers. After all, women were barred from voting in national elections and did not serve their country as combat soldiers, thus they did not seem obvious choices for intelligence work. In addition, a woman's very nationality under British law was tied to her marital status, so that when an Englishwoman married a foreigner, she assumed her husband's nationality. After 1870, a woman's marriage to a foreigner was equal "to consent to expatriation," and women were in essence without the right to their own nationality until 1948. (2) More importantly, male officials figured that women had no real patriotism or nationalism since their true and overriding loyalties were familial ones. As Hamil Grant explained in his popular 1915 history of espionage, men and women were motivated by different ideals. He wrote that a woman:

  as a rule fails as a secret service agent. In matters of love or
  revenge, where her deepest feelings are concerned, she is capable of a
  sustained effort calling for the application of whatever analytical
  powers she may possess, but seldom in other cases; for an appeal to
  say, her patriotism leaves her almost invariably cold and
  unenthusiastic, since love of country is a quality which depends too
  largely on an essentially platonic and impersonal principle to attract
  and hold for long her undivided interest and attention ... (3)

With these gendered notions of duty, loyalty, and emotional attachments firmly in place, intelligence officials decided to tie women to the state by exploiting their familial loyalties and connections. A woman might not keep a state secret for reasons of civic or patriotic duty, but she would do so for love of husband, parents, children, and kin. Intelligence officers also decided to "vet" women through their male connections; women who were well connected to men of status, integrity and patriotism, were deemed acceptable security risks.

In short, this article claims that the developing institutions of twentieth-century British intelligence not only depended upon and exploited familial connections in order to gain recommendations for personnel, but more importantly, used the notion of family loyalty to shape the assumptions and realities of such intelligence work. Certainly intelligence workers were not without considerable skills, often in languages, yet other considerations such as class background, family connections, gender, and nationality were the real filters used to vet personnel.

The first permanent intelligence agencies in Britain emerged as a result of the reforms of the early twentieth century that followed the Anglo-Boer War. Not only did the armed services face significant changes in the wake of the war, but many government agencies also found themselves changing age-old practices. This reforming bent led the Committee of Imperial Defence (CID) to create a Secret Service in 1909, with two areas of operation: counterespionage and foreign intelligence. Following the creation of these tiny offices, a new Official Secrets Act was enacted in 1911 that gave the fledgling intelligence bureau much greater power to investigate suspected espionage and to gather surveillance data. In recruiting leaders for what was hoped would be powerful intelligence operations, the CID turned to two seasoned military men: Captain Vernon Kell and Commander Mansfield Smith-Cumming. Both men had credentials that would become standard for many male intelligence officers in these two sections. Each had military educations, Kell at Sandhurst, Cumming at Dartmouth, and the two men had considerable family connections. Kell's mother was the daughter of a Polish aristocrat, Cumming's wife was a Scottish heiress. Kell possessed the better language training and had been an Army interpreter in several languages, but Cumming had skills in French. (4) In addition, both had traveled widely, possessed personal wealth, and had proved loyalty to the Crown through military and governmental service.

In hiring with these qualifications in mind, the CID was in many ways following the pre-war precedent set in other British agencies, such as the Foreign Office and the Diplomatic Service. Like the Secret Service, these two entities dealt with sensitive information and foreign governments, and both had played roles in intelligence gathering and processing in Britain's history. Yet, these were small, elite groups that despite having competitive exams for recruitment, still limited entry to their ranks by birth. To qualify to sit for an exam, men had to be nominated, and as the Ridley Commission found in its 1886-1890 investigations, "it was the weight carried by the position and interest of parents and sponsors, rather than the qualities of candidates themselves, which decided the chance of a nomination." (5) Since nominations came from the Secretary of State, "recruitment continued to be in fact by favour," even though examinations were supposed to provide an element of merit. (6)

Beyond this exclusive nomination process, the Foreign Office and Diplomatic Service required specific skill sets acquired by certain classes in society. Writing ability and language skills were of paramount importance, and the low salaries for junior (and some senior) employees meant that a certain measure of personal wealth was required. In her study of these offices, Zara Steiner found that between 1908-1913 more than half the candidates for the Foreign Office had been at Eton as boys, and the diplomatic services had an even more marked aristocratic bias. (7) Foreign diplomacy throughout Europe and the United States relied on this same group, and many of these men "possessed little more than ample funds, social polish, and good political connections." (8) As Steiner noted, "The diplomats of this [pre-war] period were best at interpreting the world into which they had been born. With a few notable exceptions, they spoke to each other or to those similarly placed 'in society.' They operated in a closed circuit and tended mainly to hear each other's voices." (9) In short, "Diplomacy was a wealthy man's profession." (10)

Age also played a part in the "citadel of privilege" that constituted the Foreign Office and Diplomatic Service. (11) In the nineteenth century, diplomacy was seen as a "family system" tied to the monarch, and after the international charter of rules for European diplomacy emerged from the Congress of Vienna in 1815, age and status hierarchies were central to the structure of the diplomatic establishment. (12) Young men of good families were recruited between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four, then they were encompassed into a diplomatic family to be guided by older, seasoned men through the system. Wives, too, were carefully chosen for their wealth (since salaries were low or nonexistent), their social status (thereby enabling advancement), and their abilities as hostesses (since they were partly responsible for maintaining the familial atmosphere). This "enduring concept of the embassy as a family" was a powerful guiding principle that emphasized the exclusivity of the Foreign Service and its hierarchies by age, status, and gender. (13)

With this example in place along with the Civil Service and Colonial Office (both of which relied at least partly on nominations and patronage), it is unsurprising that the new Secret Service might use similar criteria in assessing potential candidates. In choosing British men for intelligence work, emphasis rested on finding the "right sort" of man for such work. Usually this meant locating men with good social connections, military or governmental track records, language or technical skills, and impeccable family backgrounds. After Kell, some of the earliest recruits to his counterespionage bureau as officers were Walter Moresby, a barrister and son of an admiral; Eric Holt-Wilson, a wealthy sportsman and military engineering instructor at Woolwich Royal Military Academy; Michael Holroyd, an Oxford tutor and son of the Director of the National Gallery; and M. M. Haldane, a cousin of Viscount [R. B.] Haldane of Cloan. (14) Likewise, when the Admiralty established its code-breaking unit, Room 40, in 1914, it turned to men of known background for most of its sensitive work. Although men with training in mathematics were considered useful and German language skills were a necessity, family connections functioned as an important recruitment tool. Some of the personnel included Benjamin Faudel-Phillips whose father had been Lord Mayor of London, composer Ralph Vaughan-Williams, and the Earl of Lytton, just to name a few. Other recruits come from positions at Oxford and Cambridge, from the Foreign Office and Diplomatic Service, and from the legal ranks. (15) Taken as a group, this was an elite gathering.

Like the Foreign Office before it, the new intelligence service recruited personnel who could be depended upon for discretion, and in most official minds, this meant men from good families with high-quality educations. These were the men who often had the necessary skills in languages through public schools or military academies and through universities, foreign travel, or military service, but the men chosen were also known quantities. Their ability to fit into this new secret family was assured because they would already understand many of the assumptions and social expectations of those around them. The problem with this scenario by 1914 was that increasingly there were not enough of such men to go around. Military service claimed many of them, but also the size of all government offices expanded creating competition for talented men of good families. The war in many ways forced the expansion of this recruitment strategy to include women and foreign nationals, but the hiring often seemed "haphazard and [it] lacked system." (16)

When war broke out in 1914, the foundling agencies of British intelligence needed personnel in a variety of areas. Effective intelligence gathering depends on a variety of factors--reliable channels of communication, facilities and personnel for processing and analyzing reports, good record keeping, secrecy legislation, and human intelligence. In particular, officials increasingly had to depend on women to staff the burgeoning bureaucracies of information gathering and assessment because of a shortage of qualified men, and they sought to use their familiar recruitment strategy to do so. The use of women's labor for the state by exploiting their family connections was certainly not new for the British government. Historically its foreign and colonial services had used women's labor for a variety of national causes: diplomacy, espionage, social and political reform. British wives and daughters abroad created a considerable network of unpaid workers for the state, and as Katie Hickman found in her study of diplomatic wives, men "frequently used their wives as unofficial secretaries, and occasionally even as their deputies when they were occupied elsewhere." (17) Again, government officials took for granted that a woman's vocation and loyalty would mirror and support that of her husband or father. It was inconceivable to most leaders that respectable women would betray their families for reasons of national or political ideologies.

These assumptions about women's reliability and emotional natures shaped the new Secret Services from their inception in 1909. The earliest cases of espionage within Britain examined by the newly formed Secret Service Counter-Espionage Bureau (later MI5) included few female spies, but those identified were typically part of "family" spy rings. For example, Patricia Hentschel "worked hard for her husband" (a German spy in England), but also lured others in her family and among her friends to join the game. Although her husband served time for espionage, she was never imprisoned, perhaps because her role was always seen as that of helpmate. She was judged to be working for love, not for money or German patriotism, and her participation in the espionage was consistently downplayed. The MI5 official historian (who was female), writing from the distance of 1919, describes the blindness with which pre-war male officials viewed the case: "MI5 doubted there being a woman in the case; the woman was there the whole time. The case centers round Patricia Hentschel ..." (18) In a similar pre-war spy case, Maud Gould "was arrested while carrying military information" but "released when she claimed not to know what she was carrying for her husband, despite the fact that she had also been caught disposing of scraps of paper after her arrest." Again, officials deemed her motive to be love of husband and loyalty to him, not disloyalty to her country. (19)

In addition to viewing some families as culprits, British intelligence sought families as spy catchers, and MI5 turned to family networks for its personnel prior to the war. The first woman hired as a typist in January 1911 was Miss D. Westmacott, daughter of the male clerk that ran the office. (20) This precedent of hiring women whose families were known and approved helped determine later policies for hiring hundreds of female workers for sensitive secrets work during World War I. Women were recommended either through headmistresses from elite high schools and universities or through family connections, as old girls' networks were put to work. Qualifications included a sense of honor, discretion, reliability, readiness to take responsibility, and tact. Also, recruits could not have alien parentage or be aged over thirty, except in special cases. Mrs. D. B. G. Line was contacted about a job in the counterespionage service by MI5's Lady Superintendent, who was an old friend of her aunt's. As Mrs. Line later recalled, "candidates for these posts were selected by private recommendation and there was never any advertisement." (21) Another candidate for the postal censorship remembered having to find men willing to swear that she was "temperate, honest, and capable of keeping secrets of a 'highly confidential nature.'"(22) Since the major qualification for much of this work was discretion, these assurances from well-placed family and friends were considered vital in the hiring process.

Other War Office and British Army (GHQ) intelligence offices in London, Paris, and the Netherlands also hired female staff for clerical work. Many of these women had close familial relationships with the men employed in intelligence or in high-ranking military positions. One of the GHQ services, operated by Maj. Edmond Wallinger, had an office staff of three in London: a male clerk named Durham, Mrs. Wallinger (who did the accounting), and Mrs. Milne (wife of a British general). (23) In addition, their organizers and agents in occupied territory were also recruited after being vetted through reliable men. The Courtrai agent hired in 1914, Mme. Dufauw, was brought on board as an additional agent because her husband was already working in that capacity for the British. Her mere connection to him by marriage allowed British officials to assume her loyalty was secure, even if they privately worried about her competence since she was female. (24)

Vetting was considered particularly important for women hired in the Admiralty's cryptography bureau, Room 40. This secretive and somewhat eccentric branch of the intelligence establishment used two methods for gaining workers. First, old school and family ties were exploited, and both men and women were recruited through such connections. Second, for female personnel, wives and children of high-placed men were targeted. While men's occupational experience was a key component of their suitability (for example, mathematicians were favored as codebreakers), women's family background was the main factor considered. Among those women hired were the daughters of admirals, a soap magnate, a Bank of England official, and a rich and well-connected landowner. The supervisor of these women, Lady Sybil Hambro, was the wife of a wealthy City of London financier. (25) Most of these women had absolutely no work experience and no clerical or cryptography skills, but they did have the prerequisite connections to unimpeachable families. As one former male employee remembered, "ladies [were] passed under the microscope of every kind of social and political scrutiny" while the "gentlemen [were] of established reputation." (26) Women's reputations, it seemed, depended on their social and political placement rather than on their own accomplishments.

In addition to finding women of good families for the office staffs of the intelligence agencies, officials faced the problem of locating women who would not want to make careers of this work. They particularly sought women as temporary replacements since the prevailing vision of intelligence and indeed, foreign service work, was that it was peculiarly suited to men. Some, like Vernon Kell, thought women lacked the necessary technical knowledge of military affairs to "make good Secret Service agents," while others worried that women were "too sensitive, emotional and inclined to bring romance into the job." (27) More importantly, women's perceived ambitions for home and family made them ineligible for the demanding work of secrecy and diplomacy. Again, their relationship to the state made them problematic. Civil service rules mandated resignation upon marriage for women, and as one Foreign Office official noted, "They are wasteful as recruits; for after they have been trained for some years, they marry and must go out of the Service, for we have not yet found out what to do with the husband of a lady diplomatist, especially if he is a foreigner." (28) So while both British men and women interested in secrets work had to pass under a similar social microscope of class and birth, gendered assumptions added an additional layer for women, whose nationality and loyalties were tied to their marital status, not to personal patriotism.

Perhaps the place where British intelligence sought to use family networks the most, however, was in occupied territories. Certainly in occupied zones there would be people angry at their occupiers and willing to help the British, but officials worried that greed and/or wavering loyalties might sway these possible agents, particularly if they were women. Haphazardly it seems, a strategy developed for putting together strong intelligence networks that would utilize women, who could often move about undetected and escape serious surveillance. Often a single individual would be identified as a potential intelligence agent, then officials would encourage that individual to build a network based on personal ties. There were significant dangers to this approach: for example, capture of one sometimes meant the downfall of a whole group or occasionally personal rivalries could lead to betrayal. However, the advantages outweighed these possible complications. Families were tight-knit groups with deep ties of loyalty and affection who managed to keep their activities quiet and "in the family." Dependence on other relatives and a sense of familial responsibility often meant that individual agents would take personal risks for the good of the group. In fact, these networks had significant success in the war period, and many of them mobilized again in the Second World War.

Typically, an intelligence service in occupied territory would develop with an initial contact or recommendation. Sometimes British officials vetted several possible contacts, usually by questioning refugees or travelers at ports/borders or in neutral countries, before finding one who seemed reliable. For example in Luxembourg, the Secret Service experienced several false leads before luckily happening upon Mme. Rischard, the wife of a physician to the state railways. She had social connections in Switzerland, where she was recruited by the British, and in Luxembourg. She was able to convince her husband and several close friends to join the cause, while her husband built a network of intelligence among railway workers. (29) One contact, then, could spiral out to include family members, extended kin networks, neighbors, friends, and co-workers.

Two examples of the use of family relationships in the development of human intelligence networks demonstrate the ways in which familial loyalties could be mobilized for national service. The first case examines the Aaronsohn family, who operated a British intelligence network in Palestine until it was discovered by the Turks and dismantled in late 1917. This tight-knit Zionist family service, NILI, gathered information and helped channel American funds into Palestine for famine relief and political organization. (30) The Aaronsohns' activities divided the village (Zikhron Ya'akov), as many protested the risks that the spies were bringing to the community. The second case explores the development of an intelligence network that emerged in occupied Belgium during the war. Organized in Liege in the middle of the war, La Dame Blanche (or the White Lady) included men and women from several families of different backgrounds. Like NILI, members of La Dame Blanche gathered information for the British but also involved themselves in other resistance activities including distribution of the underground newspaper, La Libre Belgique, and the hiding of Allied soldiers. A brief comparison of NILI and La Dame Blanche and their service to the British government as spies helps expose the role that family recruitment played in the emergence of modern intelligence gathering during the First World War.

The NILI network was in many ways unusual since one of its founders was an internationally known scientist, while many of its members were under thirty and nominally enemy combatants (Turkish citizens). However, these Jewish settlers in Palestine had embraced Zionism so they saw themselves as a sort of state within a state, especially after it seemed that the Ottoman state would not support their nationalist cause. The nucleus of this spy network as it developed was the Aaronsohn family, led by elder brother Aaron. Aaron had the freedom to move about internationally in his role as lead scientist at the Jewish Agricultural Experimental Station at Athlit. Also, he was a close acquaintance of Djemal Pasha, the commander of the Fourth Army and nominal leader of the whole area of the Levant during the war. Although the network was gathering intelligence as early as 1915, suspicion on the part of the British and lack of safe communication channels made transmission of information to the Secret Service virtually impossible. It was not until early 1917 that useful intelligence made its way on a regular basis from NILI in Palestine to British authorities in Egypt. (31)

In addition to Aaron, the network included Aaron's brother Alexander, who began the war as an Ottoman soldier, and sister Rifka, who spent time organizing funds in the United States. Perhaps the most significant Aaronsohn in the NILI network was its leader during the period of its greatest contribution, February to October 1917, Sarah Aaronsohn. Born in Palestine in 1890, Sarah married a wealthy Bulgarian Jewish merchant and moved to Constantinople in spring 1914. (32) As the war progressed, Sarah gradually became disillusioned with an apparently unhappy marriage and longed for her family and meaningful activity, so she left her husband in November 1915 in order to return to Palestine. On her train journey, she witnessed the suffering of Armenians under Turkish rule. That journey, combined with a sense of Turkish oppression of Jews in Palestine and Syria, led her to a strong anti-Turk stance. Along with her family and several close friends, including Avshalom Feinberg, Youssef Lishansky, and Liova Schneerson, she helped run the intelligence network called NILI to help the British fight the Turks. (33)

Originally, Sarah was supposed to serve as assistant and helper to her elder brother, Aaron, who was not entirely convinced that women belonged in political organizations. However, when Aaron's political activism on behalf of Zionism called him abroad and when their siblings Alex and Rifka left for a fundraising trip in the United States, Sarah, Feinberg (until his death in January 1917), and Lishansky assumed command of the information gathering in Palestine and the transmission of messages to British authorities. She was also running the agricultural station for her brother and funneling American funds into Palestine for Zionist activism, espionage, and famine relief for Jewish families whose crops had been devastated by locusts. Sarah led the NILI network for eight months until her own capture and death in October 1917. She took considerable risks through smuggling messages out to ships in the harbor and by sending carrier pigeons, often handling these matters herself.

After the war a British official paid tribute to the usefulness of this young network of spies and patriots (most were in their twenties and worked without compensation), writing that "It was very largely the daring work of young spies, most of them natives of Palestine, which enabled the brilliant Field-marshal to accomplish his undertaking so effectively. The leader of the spy system was a young Jewess, a Miss Sarah Aaronsohn." (34) Brigadier Walter Gribbon, one of NILI's main contacts, wrote after the war that "NILI intelligence on the Turkish order of battle was considered so reliable by Allenby's Staff that 'we were able to advise, with complete confidence, the withdrawal of reinforcements from Palestine to France.'" (35) However, despite its obvious close-knit attributes and successful operation, the network was betrayed to the Turks in October 1917, and Sarah, her elderly father, and several others were arrested.

At this point the familial metaphor that British intelligence officials used in recruiting breaks down, because Sarah does not act as she should in the interests of family loyalty. One of the first actions the Turks take is to torture her father in front of her in order to force her confession. She refuses even when she is tortured, putting patriotism and all the unrelated members of her network before love for her father and her own self-preservation. Descriptions of her interrogation note that she repeated over and over that "they would get nothing from her; don't think that because she is a woman she will ask her torturers for mercy or beg; she had no partners in her activity." (36) Finally, Sarah managed to trick her captors into allowing her time to find a hidden pistol and commit suicide. Before dying five days later, she is able to get a letter out that describes her motives: "tell them about our martyrdom ... we have died as warriors ... we have striven, we have paved a road of right, and happiness for the Nation...." (37) Recruited as a family of patriots, the Aaronsohns demonstrate both the power of familial recruiting with its tight bonds of loyalty and interlocking networks of agents and its dangers, since once Sarah and Youssef were arrested, all the Aaronsohns and Lishanskys became suspects.

Like the Aaronsohns, many people living in occupied zones or front-line areas felt the need to make themselves useful in the war effort, yet British officials often tried to explain away evidence of patriotic or ideological motives of women. As with the gendered assumptions shaping women's intelligence work at home, female agents in the field also had to endure half-hearted tributes to their work. In the case of NILI, one British official seemed amazed at the evidence of such a successful female-led network, congratulating Aaron on "having such a plucky sister." (38) Even in the case of Gabrielle Petit, who became a household word and a national martyr in Belgium, one British officer noted that Petit "was engaged to Franck [who was] shot at Mons by the Germans," and he assumes that her motive is revenge. (39) While undoubtedly that played a role in her decision to enlist as a secret service agent for the British, she is better known for outspoken Belgian patriotism and her denunciation of the German occupation of her country.

In Belgium, thousands of men and women volunteered for intelligence work for a variety of nations operating spy rings within the occupied territories. La Dame Blanche was one such intelligence organization run by Belgians for the British during 1917-1918. La Dame Blanche originated when an earlier spy network was captured by the Germans and its leader, Dieudonne Lambrecht, was executed in April 1916. Lambrecht's cousin, Walthere Dewe, decided to reconstitute an information network with the help of his friends Herman Chauvin and Father Jean Des Onays. Chauvin also recruited his father-in-law, Alexandre Neujean, who was an excellent contact. Neujean was Chief of the Belgian police in Liege, and he knew most of the German Counter-Espionage officers personally. (40) From this point until the end of the war, La Dame Blanche recruited through family and kin networks. Whole households joined the cause, some formally and other only performing occasional minor tasks.

Among the thousand members of La Dame Blanche were almost three hundred registered women, many of whom held leadership positions. Organized explicitly around close family and neighborhood connections for the sake of safety, most of the recruits were invited to join because of family connections--a man would recruit his brother and sister-in-law, or a widow and her four daughters would join at the invitation of a cousin. In some ways, then, this network fit all the assumptions of British authorities, who felt that familial ties would be the strongest way to bind women (and foreign men, whose loyalty was also suspect) to intelligence organizations. Perhaps that is why British authorities were surprised to find that the network nonetheless demanded both official militarization as auxiliary soldiers (for men as well as women in LDB) and postwar recognition and compensation from the British.

Like the NILI network, complicated interlocking kinship and neighborhood ties welded La Dame Blanche together. In Liege, the daughter of a prison warden and a nun gathered information from prisoners, then stopped at the local bookshop run by the Weimerskirch sisters to leave that information. This "letterbox" at the bookshop was a convenient place then for couriers such as 21-year-old Maria Kesseler to pick up the intelligence. Kesseler would then return to Brussels with the information and pass it to her sister, Germaine, for coding and transmission to British officials in the Netherlands. (41) In short, families and friends had reasons to visit each other, and the "gossip" of women at a bookshop or the kindly spiritual guidance of a nun to female prisoners was often dismissed as harmless.

In other cases, family ties and class came into play in recruiting practices. One special post in the LDB service, Post 49, was composed almost entirely of aristocrats from a couple of families. This group, organized in early 1918, was led by Madame Therese de Radigues de Chenneviere, and it included her daughters, Marguerite (27) and Marie-Antoinette (20), and their friends, the de Villermonts: Anne (24), Francoise (22), Beatrice (21), and their parents. Other local elite families joined the group, which provided intelligence and courier services, and established new intelligence posts. (42)

Although recruited initially for their emotional ties to family members, most LDB soldiers expressed their motivation in terms of patriotism and national or Allied loyalty. Teenager Marie-Therese Collard, part of a whole family recruited to the British cause, could talk only of her patriotic pride, saying "At last that which I have so desired is realized, I am going to work for our nation and as a soldier." (43) LDB soldier Jeanne Delwaide also noted that they had done their duty "as good British soldiers" and with "the assurance that our modest services would not be unnecessary to the great common cause." (44) When Delwaide was later imprisoned, the Belgian LDB chief sent her a coded message to remind her to remain silent. Rather than calling on her familial loyalties, he asked that she "Remember you are a soldier. Remember your oath." (45) Local leaders recognized what British officials refused to see--that despite their initial recruitment as families, many felt a sense of national and patriotic mission through their intelligence work far more than they did a familial obligation. Because of the organization of La Dame Blanche and other intelligence organizations around families, however, the consequences could be severe. The Collard family lost two sons who were executed for their intelligence activities, and a daughter (Marie-Therese quoted above), who died from an illness probably contracted in prison. In eastern Belgium, two of the four members of the Grandprez family who had provided British intelligence were executed by the Germans on the same day. Whole families were sometimes captured and imprisoned for their activities. In prisons such as Siegburg, a German jail near Koln, family groups were held for good portions of the war.

In short, this strategy of recruiting families was not without its dangers. In fact, the very loyalties British officials thought made women particularly safe bets--their emotional ties to men--could endanger a network. For example, the Afchain service in Liege fell apart in summer 1915 and at least seven people were executed after Louise Frenay "gave information to save her husband." (46) In addition, by mobilizing families, British secret service officers sometimes felt compelled to provide financial support for dependent spouses and children of agents who had been shot or imprisoned. (47)

It is true that some people did join the intelligence cause in order to help their families. Some may have been compelled to help, as with children enlisted in train-watching efforts for La Dame Blanche in Belgium. Certainly, it is hard to make the case that a twelve-year-old girl would ever initiate a 24-hour per day train-watching effort without the encouragement and support of her family. Some intelligence agents also confessed to motives of revenge after the arrest or death of a family member. However, this paper has sought to explore the explicit strategies of encouraging family recruitment that British officials pursued in the First World War rather than to examine all personal motives.

To conclude, the important vetting of prospective secrecy workers had to be structured to accommodate class, gender, and nationality assumptions, with women and men going through different approval processes. British officials thought that by using family backgrounds and gender stereotypes, they could create strong, reliable, and loyal espionage networks and intelligence bureaucracies. These strategies appear to be long-lived in the secrecy community, and certainly in the immediate postwar period, vetting continued along the same lines. Although the end of the war nominally ended patronage-based recruitment as ex-servicemen demanded entrance to the civil bureaucracy, the use of personal and family connections still sometimes determined who might join the "club" that constituted the secrets community. Hugh Trevor-Roper described the World War II intelligence recruits as:

  metropolitan young gentlemen whose education had been expensive rather
  than profound and who were recruited at the bars of White's and
  Boodle's by Colonel Dansey, and there were the ex-Indian policemen who
  were recruited, through the Central Intelligence Bureau in New Delhi
  ... Neither class had much use for ideas. (48)

Likewise, the head of the Secret Intelligence Service in 1939 (the renamed foreign intelligence branch that Cumming headed in 1909), Stewart Menzies, had attended Eton, served briefly in the army, and was a sportsman. His mother was a lady-in-waiting to Queen Mary, and he married three times, all women from aristocratic and wealthy families. More dangerous was the continued practice of using the "right sorts" to vet candidates for the Secret Service. In another case from the 1940s, one MI5 official asked Jenifer Fischer Williams, an Oxford graduate with government connections to recommend names for MI5 work. Williams had been a secret member of the Communist Party of Great Britain and a targeted recruit by the Soviets (although she apparently never accepted this role). (49) The assumption that birth, wealth, and position meant loyalty and patriotism could be a harmful strategy for the British intelligence community as was visibly shown with the betrayal by young men from top families such as Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, and Kim Philby in the post-World War II era.

The gendered assumptions about women's participation in intelligence remained intact as well, with most female intelligence workers being dismissed in 1919. These women were lost to public view and replaced by media images of heroic victims motivated by love and female sympathy. The post-war models that became celebrated indeed fit this preconception, and as the world media reified a certain image of women's wartime heroism, intelligence officials quietly encoded these same assumptions into the permanent secrecy establishment. Catharine MacKinnon has explained this urge to celebrate only those women who fit the proper stereotype:

  Contemporary industrial society's version of her is docile, soft,
  passive, nurturant, vulnerable, weak, narcissistic, childlike,
  incompetent, masochistic, and domestic, made for childcare, home care,
  and husband care. Conditioning to these values permeates the
  upbringing of girls and the images for emulation ... women who comply
  or succeed are elevated as models, tokenized if they succeed on male
  terms or portrayed as consenting to their natural place ... (50)

Thus the models of women intelligence workers memorialized in cultural representations following the First World War are also presented within a familial metaphor. Greta Garbo's Mata Hari (1932), unlike her real counterpart, goes to the firing squad to spare her lover pain, sacrificing herself for a man, not for a nation. The spinster-martyr heroine of British war propaganda, Edith Cavell, is memorialized in a statue off Trafalgar Square with a column topped by a maternal-looking nurse cradling an infant. Cavell's supposed maternal nurturance and her role as a weak victim lacking male protection was raised as a model for women, while the true patriotic motivations and personal heroism of women such as Sarah Aaronsohn were forgotten. The exploits and motivations of female intelligence clerks, field agents, and leaders remained hidden from view in the postwar commemoration, shrouded by the rhetoric of familial duty and responsibility and the sense that women were just doing what their men asked of them.

In addition to the use of class and gender assumptions in later years, human intelligence practices behind enemy lines continued to look to kinship as well. The strategy of family recruitment persisted, with many of the Belgian spy networks of the First World War reconstituted in the 1940s. La Dame Blanche itself was revived as a new service, the Clarence network, with Dewe, Chauvin, and Therese de Radigues leading the way. (51) This time many of the patriots lost their lives as the Nazis cracked down on resistance within the occupied zones.

Today, vetting as a practice is alive and well in Britain, albeit in a high-tech and institutionalized form. A major part of M15's work in the twenty-first century is vetting of prospective employees not only in intelligence work, but in civil service, armed services, defense contracting firms, and even communications. The BBC adopted security vetting in 1937, while "positive vetting procedures" for classified government jobs was formally introduced in 1952. (52) With the post-9/11 world of terror alerts and high security, the use of personal vetting, fingerprinting, and surveillance has only heightened, with no end in sight. Because the use of nominations, family connections, and class/gender assumptions was embedded in the very founding of intelligence agencies in Britain, they still linger in the decision-making and recruitment strategies used today, despite the availability of advanced surveillance techniques and stated policies of equal opportunity hiring. (53) Like thoroughbreds being vetted for sale to the highest bidder, bloodlines still matter as much as experience and education as intelligence workers get "put through their paces."

Department of History

Springfield, OH 45501

ENDNOTES

1. C.A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780-1870 (Cambridge, 1996): 18-19.

2. M. Page Baldwin, "Subject to Empire: Married Women and the British Nationality and Status of Aliens Act," Journal of British Studies 40 (October 2001): 522, 525-526.

3. Hamil Grant, Spies and Secret Service: The Story of Espionage, its Main Systems and Chief Exponents (New York, 1915): 25.

4. Christopher Andrew, Her Majesty's Secret Service: The Making of the British Intelligence Community (New York, 1986): 59, 73-75.

5. Zara Steiner, The Foreign Office and Foreign Policy, 1898-1914 (Cambridge, 1969): 17.

6. Frank T. Ashton-Gwatkin, The British Foreign Service (Syracuse, 1949): 13.

7. Steiner, The Foreign Office, 19.

8. Richard Hume Werking, The Master Architects: Building the United States Foreign Service, 1890-1913 (Lexington, 1977): 121.

9. Steiner, The Foreign Office, 210.

10. Zara Steiner, "The Diplomatic Life: Reflections on Selected British Diplomatic Memoirs Written Before and After the Great War," in Political Memoir: Essays on the Politics of Memory, George Egerton, ed. (Portland, 1994): 177.

11. Steiner attributes the phrase "citadel of privilege" to Charles Trevelyan; The Foreign Office, 16.

12. Ashton-Gwatkin, The British Foreign Service, 7-8.

13. Valerie Cromwell, "Married to Affairs of State: Memoirs of the Wives and Daughters of British Diplomats," in Egerton, Political Memoir, 208. See also, Molly M. Wood, "Diplomatic Wives: The Politics of Domesticity and the 'Social Game' in the U.S. Foreign Service 1905-1941," Journal of Women's History 17:2 (2005): 142-165.

14. Andrew, Her Majesty's Secret Service, 59-60; Public Record Office [PRO] KV/1/53 MI5 H.1. Record of Service; Constance Kell, "Secret Well-Kept," 140, Imperial War Museum [IWM] PP/MCR/120 Sir Vernon Kell papers.

15. PRO HW/3/3 W.C. Clarke "History of Room 40 OB," 1915; W. F. Bruford papers, MISC 20 (Bruford) and A. G. Denniston Papers, DENN 1/2, Churchill College, Cambridge [CCAC].

16. Dorothy Evans, Women and the Civil Service (London, 1934).

17. Katie Hickman, Daughters of Britannia: The Lives and Times of Diplomatic Wives (New York, 1999): 55.

18. PRO KV/1/40 MI5 "G" Branch Report.

19. Tammy Proctor, Female Intelligence: Women and Espionage in the First World War (New York, 2003): 46.

20. PRO KV/1/49 MI5 "H" Branch Report.

21. PRO KV/1/54 M15 "H" Branch Report; IWM 92/22/1 Mrs. D. B. G. Dimmock Line, "Reminiscences of World War 1," TS., n.d.

22. Lucy Moorehead, ed., Freya Stark Letters: The Furnace and the Cup, 1914-1930, vol. 1 (Salisbury, UK, 1974): 13.

23. Sir Ivone Kirkpatrick, "The War 1914-1918," unpublished TS, IWM 79/50/1, p. 107. For more information on the GHQ and War Office services, see Michael Occleshaw, Armour Against Fate: British Military Intelligence in the First World War (London, 1989): 147-157.

24. Lt. Col W. Kirke diaries 1914-1917, IWM 82/28/1 (25 November 1914).

25. PRO HW/3/6 "Personnel of Room 40," W.F. Clarke papers.

26. Francis Toye, For What We Have Received (London, 1950), as quoted in William F. Clarke papers, CLKE3, CCAC.

27. IWM PP/MCR/120, SVK/2, Sir Vernon Kell papers; E7., Women Spies 1 Have Known (London, 1939): 226.

28. Ashton-Gwatkin, The British Foreign Service, 34-35.

29. PRO WO/106/45 History of Intelligence (BEF)

30. NILI is an acronym for Netzach Israel lo Ishakare, or the Eternity of Israel will not lie. Anthony Verrier, ed., Agents of Empire: Anglo-Zionist Intelligence Operations 1915-1919, Brigadier Walter Gribbon, Aaron Aaronsohn and the NILI Ring (London, 1995): 320n.1.

31. Eliezer Tauber, "The Capture of the NILI Spies: The Turkish Version," Intelligence and National Security 6:4 (1991): 701, 709n.6

32. Zikhron Ya'akov was one of the colonization experiments in Palestine supported financially by Baron Edmond de Rothschild, and this village was officially founded by Romanian Jews in 1882. Sarah Aaronsohn's father was among the founding pioneers of the village. For more information, see Ran Aaronsohn, Rothschild and Early Jewish Colonization in Palestine (New York, 2000). For information on Sarah's background, see Yair Auron, The Banality of Indifference: Zionism and the Armenian Genocide (New Brunswick/London, 2000): 162, 176-177.

33. H. V. F. Winstone, The Illicit Adventure (London, 1982): 226-229; Verrier, 143-146; and Anita Engle, The NILI Spies (London, 1959): 38, 62, 86, 100-110.

34. Capt. Raymond Savage, Deputy Military Secretary to Field Marshal Lord Allenby, quoted in Engle, The NILI Spies, 101.

35. Gribbon to Brigadier William Van Cutsem, 28 December 1939, as quoted in Verrier, ed., Agents of Empire, 321n.15.

36. Auron, The Banality of Indifference, 180.

37. Verrier, ed., Agents of Empire, 13.

38. Verrier, ed., Agents of Empire, 258.

39. Kirke diaries, IWM 82/28/1 (23 January 1916).

40. Belgian civil authorities continued their duties during the wartime occupation by the Germans. Henry Landau, Secrets of the White Lady (New York, 1935): 24-27; P. Decock, "La Dame Blanche: Un reseau de Renseignements de la Grande Guerre 1916-1918," (PhD Histoire Contemporaire ULB, 1981): 15, 26-31.

41. Archives Generale du Royaume (AGR), P/212 and P/224, records of the Service Patriotique.

42. IWM La Dame Blanche papers Box 1, Folder 8.

43. Quoted in Proctor, Female Intelligence, 92.

44. Quoted in Proctor, Female Intelligence, 95.

45. Quoted in Proctor, Female Intelligence, 94.

46. Kirke diaries, IWM 82/28/1 (14 June 1916).

47. Kirke diaries, IWM 82/28/1 (25 June 1916).

48. Quoted in Andrew, Her Majesty's Secret Service, 461.

49. Andrew, Her Majesty's Secret Service, 343-344, 460.

50. Catharine MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (Cambridge and London, 1989): 109.

51. For information on the Clarence network, see Henri Bernard, Un Geant de la Resistance: Walthere Dewe (n.p.: La Renaissance du Livre, 1971).

52. Ian Linn, Application Refused: Employment Vetting by the State (London, 1990): 10; Mark Hollingsworth and Richard Norton-Taylor, Blacklist: The Inside Story of Political Vetting (London, 1988): 100. See also: Peter Hennessy and Gail Brownfield, "Britain's Cold War Security Purge: The Origins of Positive Vetting," The Historical Journal 25:4 (1982), 965-974.

53. In the July 2004 Butler report on intelligence failures dealing with the Iraq war, the committee found risks in intelligence staffs that analysts see "their own cultures" as universal, and that depend on a kind of "group think" or "prevailing wisdom." Review of Intelligence on Weapons of Mass Destruction (London, 14 July 2004): 15-16.

By Tammy M. Proctor

Wittenberg University