carrot and stick: world war one centennial coverage

Mental Floss guest blogger Erik Sass is continuing his excellent and engrossing day-by-day accounts of events one hundred years ago, leading up to the outbreak of the Great War. Sass’ 70th installment recounts the shocking and consequential spy scandal that shook confidence in Austro-Hungary’s intelligence service and may have compromised the Empire’s defensive strategies and offensive contingencies to the Russians and their allies—potentially provocative triggers to know how one’s enemy might react to a given set of circumstances.
The espionage affair centred around Colonel Alfred Redl, chief of the military spy programme, and though one may never know his exact motives or to what extent fretful extortion and blackmail was pressured upon him, and his private life, which would have destroyed his career on its own if he were outed. Industrious and innovative, Redl quickly ingratiated himself up in the ranks of the army, through a series of post usually reserved for aristocrats and titled-elite and plied tools of quite progressive techniques in intelligence-gathering, like wire-tapping, covert photography and hand-writing analysis. Whether simply motivated to kept rather open-secrets subdued or sell real secrets to promote an increasingly extravagant and bold lifestyle, we may never know for certain—and probably nothing at all about this intrigue were it not for the confessions of the woman engaged as Redl’s beard, his alibi, who expressed concerns about his involvement with the Russia military. In apparently a carrot-and-stick approach, Redl was encouraged to sell Austrian and German plans to the Russians, in exchange for large sums money, delivered anonymously by post. Hoisted by his own petard while stationed in Prague, it was one of Redl’s early suggestions of data-mining and triangulation that lead to suspicions of his loyalty and his eventual capture. A search of his apartment and interviews with liaisons uncovered (implicating many others in the army) the lifestyle that he struggled to keep hidden.