(2 of 9)
Merchants & Poets. Rahab the Harlot, whose "house was upon the town wall." concealed the spies sent by Joshua into Jericho; in return, Rahab was protected by the Israelites when the walls came tumbling down. The screen of "merchants" who preceded the Mongol hordes across Asia in the 13th century were the occupational ancestors of the Nazi "businessmen" and "tourists" who infested Europe and Latin America in the 1930s. In China, it is said, military intelligence became such a respected art that rival commanders sometimes parleyed, each with his spies in attendance, and worked out how a pending battle would come out if it were fought. When this was decided, the theoretical winner paid tribute to the theoretical loser, and departed the field without bloodshed.
Europe's national states developed intelligence agencies of increasing complexity. England's first secret service was organized by Sir Francis Walsingham, who kept Elizabeth I informed of the growth of the Spanish Armada, and who infiltrated the Jesuit underground in England with several agents. Walsingham employed a number of minor poets, and perhaps Playwright Christopher Marlowe as well, started English intelligence off on a high literary note that it has never entirely lost. Britain's literarily gifted secret agents have included Daniel Defoe, author of Robinson Crusoe, and Novelist Somerset Maugham.
Petticoats & Plots. Cardinal Richelieu, with the aid of his Grey Eminence, Father Joseph, gave France its first effective espionage apparatus. By the early years of the Napoleonic wars, the French secret service under Joseph Fouche was Europe's best. (In 1809 Fouche's men intercepted a British intelligence report written in invisible ink on an agent's petticoat—a device that was considered highly original when it cropped up again during World War I.) Characteristically, however, it was Prussia that introduced Europe to mass espionage. Wilhelm Stieber, spymaster to Bismarck, boasted that he had some 40,000 agents in France at the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. Stieber was almost surely exaggerating, but his vacuum-cleaner espionage technique did supply the Prussian army not only with military information but with accurate estimates of the finances of leading citizens in occupied French towns.