Armgaard Karl Graves

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Armgaard Karl Graves
Graves in a picture published in the Evening Public Ledger February 4 1916 cropped.png
Graves in a picture published in the Evening Public Ledger 4 February 1916
Born7 May 1882
Berlin, German Empire
DiedUnknown
Unknown
Other namesMax Meincke [1]
Espionage activity
Allegiance United Kingdom
 Germany
Service branchUnited Kingdom

Armgaard Karl Graves (born 7 May 1882 in Berlin, probably died in the US) acted as a double agent for the German naval intelligence service and the British MI5 before the start of the First World War. He was fired from the German service and called a "double-dyed rascal."[2]

Life[]

Graves left the German Empire in 1898. Twice he was charged with theft in New South Wales, and in December 1910 he was charged with molesting a woman in Colombo, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka).[1] Around 1911 he returned to Germany under the title "A.K. Graves Dr med." A few months later he was sentenced to six months in prison for fraud in Wiesbaden but fled to Szczecin, where he was arrested.[1]

During the Agadir crisis, Graves was probably recruited directly from the prison for naval intelligence at his Berlin headquarters in the presence of Arthur Tapken, Georg Stammer and Gustav Steinhauer.[1] As' W. Lewis, he was to observe movements of British warships off Scotland, especially in front of the naval bases Rosyth and Cromarty, for which he received £15 (£1,539 in 2021) a month.[1]

In early 1912, he reached Edinburgh and went to Glasgow soon afterwards. By post surveillance of other suspects, he was discovered and under surveillance. His return to Berlin forced the Scottish police to arrest him on 14 April 1912;

Three months later he was sentenced to 8 months in prison. On 18 December he was secretly freed on the grounds of poor health, since he had agreed to work with the British Secret Service (MI5) for £2 (£198 in 2021) a month.[1]

Graves travelled to Berlin to get a list of spies in Britain for MI5 from Admiralty Chief Secretary Stammer. However, instead of returning to the UK he was sent to the United States by German command.

In February and March 1913 he demanded money from MI5 to return from there to the UK, which they did not provide. Instead, Graves presented himself as a "spymaster" in the US press and shared information about his two employers. On the eve of the war, his autobiography, The Secrets of the German War Office was published[3] and sold 100,000 copies.

In 1915, a sequel of his first book was published, The Secrets of the Hohenzollerns,[4][5] and wrote for various newspaper columns on his predictions about WWI.

In November 1916, he tried to extort $3,000 ($76,700 in 2021) by blackmailing the wife of Johann Heinrich von Bernstorff, the German ambassador to Washington, with some letters "alleged to contain matters showing her infirmities and failings."[6] His ghostwriter Edward Lyell Fox had acted as a courier. Bernstorff, however, considered the material worthless and got the US State Department involved and Graves was arrested. The German Reich rejected the testimony of the embassy employee Graf Hatzfeldt-Trachenberg in the process and he was released again.[citation needed]

Graves was arrested in 1917 for being in a restricted zone for foreigners in Kansas City and interned until the end of the war in November 1918.[citation needed] He remained in the USA after the war. He was sentenced to 3 years in prison in 1934 for stealing $1,500 ($29,000 in 2021).

After his release in 1937, he was to be deported, but claimed that Hitler's Germany would certainly kill him, so "a government agency" reportedly intervened and took him off the Germany-bound ship.[citation needed] Graves probably died in the USA.[citation needed]

Confusion with Robert Graves[]

Renown British war poet Robert von Ranke Graves was initially received with intense suspicion when a rumour was started that he was a spy. Jean Moorcroft Wilson, a British academic and writer, best known as a biographer and critic of First World War poets and poetry, stated that "it was unlucky that a notorious German spy caught in England in 1911" had used the name Armgaard Karl Graves, an alias with the same last name as the poet.[7]

See also[]

Published books[]

  • Graves, Armgaard Karl; Fox, Edward Lyell (2015). The Secrets of the German War Office. Creative Media Partners. ISBN 9781340508562. - Total pages: 288
  • Graves, Armgaard Karl (2019). The Secrets of the Hohenzollerns. Creative Media Partners. ISBN 9780530575254. - Total pages: 266

Bibliography[]

Notes

  1. ^ Jump up to: a b c d e f Boghardt 2004, p. 60.
  2. ^ Richelson 1997, p. 14.
  3. ^ Graves & Fox 2015.
  4. ^ Graves 2019.
  5. ^ The New York Times, June 27, 1915, p. 235.
  6. ^ Bisbee Daily Review 1916, p. 1.
  7. ^ Wilson 2018.

References

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