The Spider of Sarajevo Read online

  Robert Wilton held a variety of posts in the British Government. He was advisor to the Prime Minister of Kosovo in the lead-up to the country’s independence, and is now helping to run an international mission in Albania. Treason’s Tide won the Historical Writers’ Association/Goldsboro Crown for best historical debut; in addition to his novels he writes on international intervention and translates a little poetry. He divides his time between Cornwall and the Balkans.

  Praise for Treason’s Tide:

  ‘Robert Wilton… has discovered a fresh vein of literary gold with this dense, superbly satisfying novel… beautifully written, wonderfully clever, this is another triumph’ Daily Telegraph

  ‘A sparkling gem of a novel; not only a gripping espionage thriller that has the extra thrill of being grounded in genuine history, but a beautiful, lyrical novel alive with the sheer joy of language… Not since Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall has a novel been so drenched in a sense of time and place’ M. C. Scott

  ‘Brilliant invention, the ideal vehicle for a narrative revealing hidden conspiracies behind one of the turning points in British history… a compelling thriller’ The Sunday Times

  ‘This lively, intricate tale will satisfy many, especially those who enjoy riddles and puzzles’ Historical Novel Review

  ‘Robert Wilton’s sensational thriller is set in 1805 as Napoleon’s Grande Armée is about to invade England, but the real pleasure is the detail on London, a city teetering on the edge of revolution… With confidence and sureness of touch, Wilton handles the multiple strands of a narrative that moves inexorably towards denouement as the defunct and dandified British establishment quakes… Bernard Cornwell meets Ken Follett in a Southwark pub and someone gets coshed. That is to say, great, intelligent, fun’ Time Out

  ‘Excellent spy thriller [that] keeps you on the edge of your seat’ www.historicnavalfiction.com

  ‘The strength of the novel is based on this tangled web of spying, treachery and deceit… the novel keeps you guessing right to the end. The overall feel and mood of the book is one that I can imagine giving much pleasure on a long winter evening in front of the fire, a glass of good malt whisky at hand. It is that sort of adventure, thoughtful, complex and politically intriguing’ www.novelsuggestions.com

  Praise for Traitor’s Field:

  ‘Sets a new benchmark for the literary historical thriller. He achieves that Holy Grail of utterly absorbing, edge-of-the-seat thriller with a book of ideas that lays bare the convolutions of the English Civil War with a panache unmatched in modern writing. It’s exhilarating, passionate, inspiring and literate and will garner new readers from lovers of Mantel and Cornwell alike… As a spy story, this is exceptional; clever, literate, thoughtful, life-enhancing. But read it first for the prose, and weep’ M. C. Scott

  ‘A thoroughly satisfying read… it is done so well that one feels no resentment about being tricked’ Historical Novel Review

  ‘Yet again he’s done the seemingly impossible by bringing more documents to the fore and then bringing the time period to life right in front of the reader. The prose is sharp, the storyline even sharper and when added to characters that feel fully realized and believable really generates something special. Finally add to the mix a wonderful sense of mystery that blends danger alongside intrigue all round gives you a book to savour with your favourite tipple’ Falcata Times

  ‘Brilliantly written, Traitor’s Field brings the sense of melancholy and paranoia – as well as a page-turning plot – familiar to fans of classic spy fiction’ Birmingham Post

  ‘A mystery meticulously plotted… what makes Traitor’s Field such an engrossing and riveting novel is not just the excitement of the hunt, the intellectual pleasure of solving a clue or unraveling a thread, or even the chase through dark streets or across marshes, it is the characters… The writing itself is stunning… Traitor’s Field is a thoroughly rewarding and engrossing read. After I finished it, all I wanted was more. Much, much more’ www.forwinternights.wordpress.com

  Also by Robert Wilton

  Treason’s Tide

  Traitor’s Field

  First published in hardback in Great Britain in 2014 by Corvus, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

  Copyright © Robert Wilton, 2014

  The moral right of Robert Wilton to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Hardback ISBN: 978 1 78239 191 3

  E-book ISBN: 978 1 78239 193 7

  Printed in Great Britain.

  Corvus

  An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

  Ormond House

  26–27 Boswell Street

  London

  WC1N 3JZ

  www.corvus-books.co.uk

  To the Albanians in gratitude for unfailing hospitality and the hope that they may escape historical fictions

  Contents

  Introduction

  A Table of Events

  Spring 1914: Blood

  The Old Man

  The Web

  Vienna

  The Spider

  Sarajevo

  Author’s Note

  840. If a person goes to ambush a fellow-villager, taking with him other villagers as accomplices, and he kills that person, both the leader and his accomplices incur blood with the victim’s family.

  The law code of the Albanian Chieftain Lekë Dukagjini

  1. If France is attacked by Germany, or by Italy supported by Germany, Russia shall employ all her available forces to attack Germany. If Russia is attacked by Germany, or by Austria supported by Germany, France shall employ all her available forces to attack Germany.

  The Franco-Russian Alliance Military Convention, 18 August 1892

  Introduction

  MOST URGENT. SERIOUS… AGENTS… NEPTU OLIDATE… ALTEMARK MINOS HARM… ALL MUST REPORT TO EMBASSY.

  This peculiar message, transmitted in June 1914, may have turned the course of the First World War – before it even started.

  The discovery of the secret archive of the Comptrollerate-General for Scrutiny and Survey, under the Ministry of Defence in London, has transformed our understanding of more than one drama in British history. (A garbled version of the research and the continuing revelations reached the press in May 2013.) From Elizabethan manuscript to Edwardian typeface, its pages reveal the darkest aspects of national policy and manoeuvring, at the moments when Britain and her empire were at their most vulnerable. The records from the Napoleonic period, which formed the foundation for Treason’s Tide, showed the desperate gambits attempted when the country was hours from invasion and defeat. Those from the mid-seventeenth century – published in semi-fictional form as Traitor’s Field – show how this extraordinary organization survived and controlled the transition from divine-right monarchy to republic.

  This new episode from the Comptrollerate-General archives focuses on another crisis for Britain and British Intelligence: when Europe waltzed to the edge of the precipice, looked, thought about it, then leaped gleefully over. Most schoolchildren know that the assassination, on
the 28th of June 1914, of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire sparked the First World War. The month that followed, before armed conflict actually began in the first days of August, is one of the most minutely analysed in all historical writing – but also the most predictable. The Great Powers of Europe had spent ten years or more establishing rival defensive alliances. A series of squabbles had cemented those alliances. Each government had justified inflating military budgets by inflating the threat and the cause of national honour. Competing general staffs had wound up their political leaders to the imperatives of pre-emptive action. In the space of a generation, a Europe in which the shared interests of peace were protected by collective diplomacy had been replaced by one in which individual national interests were protected by bravado and defiance. ‘War’ had ceased to be a threat, and become instead a solution.

  Once the Archduke Franz-Ferdinand had been murdered in Sarajevo, by Serbs with links to Military Intelligence in Belgrade, it was surely unavoidable that the Austro-Hungarian Empire, insecure and weakening, should take the opportunity to punish Serbia, the most troublesome threat to imperial stability. After a series of embarrassments, Russia could not but defend Serbia, her one remaining client in a region she wanted to influence. Germany felt the need to prove her international credentials and distract her population, had no reason to stop Austria teaching Serbia a lesson, and knew that if the inevitable war against Russia was to be fought, it was better fought when Russia was also trying to fight Austria. France was obliged to support Russia, and knew that if the inevitable war against Germany was to be fought, it was better fought when Germany was also trying to fight in the east. Great Britain, typically, was looking the other way and trying to deal with her own imperial troubles, but realized that after a decade of defensive posturing she couldn’t afford to let Germany defeat France and dominate western Europe.

  Such was the clockwork of July 1914 – and of innumerable student essays since. Less studied and less known is the background in the months before July, particularly the secret intelligence activity. The papers reproduced in this volume, never before published, reveal that background. In passing, they throw new light on more than one overlooked but significant incident of those mad months, and on one of the most remarkable careers in the history of the British Army and British Intelligence.*

  The most significant developments in the evolution of British Intelligence machinery took place in the decade before the First World War. Alongside the existing Naval and Military Intelligence offices, and the police Special Branch and Criminal Investigation Department, in 1909 the Secret Intelligence Bureau was formed. Its home department would become Military Intelligence (M.I.) 5, today’s Security Service; the Secret Service Bureau was born in the same year, and merged with the S.I.B. in 1911, its foreign department the beginning of M.I.6, the Secret Intelligence Service. But they were still in their infancy in those critical years of European politics, and in many respects behind their counterparts in the other Great Power capitals. What follows in these pages helps to explain how they survived that infancy, and also explains the great coup achieved by British Intelligence at the start of the war, which did so much for the reputations of the institutions involved and for the British war effort.

  The usual debts and caveats apply. The Spider of Sarajevo has benefited from the wise guidance of Angus MacKinnon and Clare Conville, guardians of a greater age of British publishing, and that of Sara O’Keeffe and Anna Hogarty, heralds of a greater future. The strategic framework of events for this account is common knowledge. The detail is drawn directly from the archives of the Comptrollerate-General for Scrutiny and Survey, along with other relevant sources currently available (specific documents are referenced with the SS prefix, or equivalent; references are not given here for the many other documents that have contributed colour and background). The exact play of dialogue and emotion is of course my conjecture, consistent with the data and tending, I hope, to illuminate rather than distort what happened. If my fictionalization of these incidental elements inspires the reader to their own investigation of the facts, so much the better.

  R. J. W., May 2013

  *See also the introduction to Treason’s Tide.

  INDIVIDUALS NAMED IN THIS DOSSIER WHO ARE THE SUBJECT OF SEPARATE FILES/ON OFFICIAL LISTS:

  The agents

  R. Ballentyne

  J. Cade

  D. Duval

  Miss F. Hathaway

  Major V. Knox

  In London

  Col. J. Mayhew, Secret Intelligence Bureau

  Superintendent F. Thomson, Metropolitan Police Special Branch

  W. Palmer, clerk in the Ports & Consulates Office

  Miss E. Durham, Ethnographer

  In Berlin/elsewhere in Germany

  Col. W. Nicolai, Chief of Military Intelligence

  Col. H. Bauer, Military Intelligence

  Maj. K.-H. Immelmann, General Staff

  A. Niemann, writer

  Baroness B. von Suttner, peace activist

  Dr E. Müller, Director of the Frühling Sanatorium

  D. Eckhardt, German Foreign Ministry

  Freiherr G. von Waldeck

  Fraulein G. Waldeck, his daughter

  H. Auerstein

  O. Auerstein, his son

  In Constantinople

  O. Riza, Ministry of Finance

  R. Varujan, Financier

  A. Charkassian, sister to Varujan

  J. Radek, clerk in the Russian Trade Legation

  K. Muhtar, Banker

  H.H. Burley, H.M. Diplomatic Service

  In Paris

  G. Hamel, British aviation pioneer

  Count M. von Cramm (also in Germany), aviator and sometime

  Intelligence operative

  In Saint Petersburg

  G. Lisson, H.M. Diplomatic Service

  R. Frosch, smuggler, and no doubt worse

  “Anna”

  In the Balkans

  “Apis”, Chief of Serbian Military Intelligence

  W. Pickford, resident in Belgrade

  R. Malobabić, conspirator

  Count L. Castoldi, Italian Foreign Ministry (Durrës)

  O. Rossi, Italian Foreign Ministry (Durrës)

  Countess I. di Lascara

  Assorted villagers, unknown to official records

  ESPIONAGE ACTORS OF UNKNOWN OR FLUCTUATING ALLEGIANCE

  Count P. Hildebrandt (alias Henschler)

  Perez, V. (alias Peresa alias de Paresa alias di Bollino alias the Marquis de Valfierno)

  H.-P. Belcredi, anthropologist

  E. Krug

  A Table of Events

  1899–1902

  Second Boer War

  1903

  Erskine Childers publishes The Riddle of the Sands

  1904

  Entente Cordiale signed between Britain and France

  August Niemann publishes The Coming Conquest of England

  1905–6

  Moroccan crisis follows Kaiser’s visit to Tangier

  1906

  Launch of H.M.S. Dreadnought, and a new era of battleships

  1907

  Anglo-Russian Convention completes the Triple Entente

  1908

  Revolution forces Ottoman Sultan to reinstate the constitution and parliament

  Austria–Hungary annexes Bosnia–Hercegovina

  1911

  German provocation at Agadir

  Theft of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa

  1912

  First Balkan War: Balkan states defeat Ottoman Empire

  Declaration of Albanian independence from the Ottoman Empire

  1913

  Second Balkan War: victorious Balkan states fight among themselves

  Coup in Constantinople

  1912–13

  London Conference arbitrates after Balkan wars and delineates Albania

  1914

  7 March

  Wilhelm of Wied arrives in Durrës as King of Albania

  16 March
<
br />   Henriette Caillaux shoots Figaro editor Gaston Calmette

  20 March

  Curragh Mutiny: British Army officers refuse to act against Irish loyalists resisting Home Rule

  24 April

  Larne gun-running delivers arms to Irish loyalists

  17 May

  Protocol of Corfu: Albania grants autonomy to Northern Epirus

  21 May

  Third Reading of Government of Ireland (‘Home Rule’) Bill

  22 May

  Berliner Tageblatt publishes details of British–Russian naval conversations

  23 May

  Gustav Hamel takes off from Paris for London in new Morane-Saulnier aeroplane

  King Wilhelm abandons Durrës temporarily

  26 May

  Kaiser Wilhelm II meets Archduke Franz-Ferdinand, Konopischt

  29 May

  R.M.S. Empress of Ireland sinks in the St Lawrence River

  23 June

  Kiel Regatta of British and German navies begins

  28 June

  Assassination of the Archduke Franz-Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire

  6 July

  Germany guarantees support to Austria–Hungary

  23 July

  Austrian ultimatum to Serbia

  26 July

  Howth gun-running delivers arms to Irish (nationalist) Volunteers

  28 July

  Austria–Hungary declares war on Serbia

  30 July

  Russia begins general mobilization against Austria–Hungary

  1 August

  General mobilization ordered by France and Germany Germany declares war on Russia

  3 August

  Germany declares war on France

  4 August

  Germany invades Belgium British ultimatum to Germany expires; war

  3 September

  King Wilhelm leaves Albania