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In the years before World War I, plot and counterplot reached a rolling boil in Eastern Europe. In Russia, the famous double spy, Eugene Azeff, paid agent of the czarist secret police, took command of the terrorist branch of the revolutionary underground, and in between the writing of his reports to the police, masterminded the assassination of the Czar's uncle as well as two attempts on the life of the Czar himself. To this day it is not clear which side Azeff was really working for; perhaps Azeff, a great technician of conspiracy, never knew. In Austria-Hungary, Colonel Alfred Redl, director of the empire's intelligence, betrayed his country to the Russians rather than face exposure as a homosexual. During the ten years that passed before he was discovered and driven to suicide, Redl turned over to Russian intelligence some of the Austro-Hungarian empire's most cherished secrets. Among them were detailed plans for campaigns against Serbia, a fact which somewhat handicapped the Austro-Hungarian army when war with Serbia, Russia's ally, finally came in 1914.
Among devotees of espionage, World War I is memorable for its many women agents. Not the best, but the most glamorous female spy was Mata Hari (Eye of the Morning), who claimed to be a half-caste Javanese temple dancer, but who was in fact the daughter of a solid, middle-class Dutch family. Mata Hari, for ten years France's most famed courtesan, was recruited into German intelligence as Agent H.<SUB>21</SUB>. She managed to send information out of wartime Paris through smitten neutral diplomats. In 1917, when a French military court confronted her with evidence that she had received large sums of money from German officials, Mata Hari had a ready explanation: "They were the price of my favors. Thirty thousand marks?* My lovers never offered me less." Unconvinced, the thrifty Frenchmen sent her to the firing squad, which she faced with unbandaged eyes.
The Headmaster. With Rahab, Walsingham, Richelieu, Fouche, Stieber and Mata Hari, Allen Welsh Dulles has little in common except his job. A tall, husky (6 ft., 190 Ibs.) man who wears rimless spectacles and conservative clothes. Allen Dulles is an unmistakable product of that nearly extinct patrician society which dominated New York and New England before World War I. With his booming laugh, bouncy enthusiasm, and love of competitive sports, Dulles is uncannily reminiscent of Teddy Roosevelt. He has the young-old look of a college student made up as Daddy Long Legs in the class play.
In the cheery, manly manner of a New England prep-school headmaster, Dulles operates an intelligence service with resources far beyond those of his historic predecessors. CIA's staff is huge—estimates run from 8,000 to 30,000—and it includes a greater proportion of "super-grade" civil servants ($12,000-$14,000 a year) than any other agency of the U.S. Government. It occupies at least 30 buildings in Washington alone; its headquarters is the wartime OSS building off E Street. CIA's budget, which goes to Congress concealed within the budget requests of other agencies, is never rnade public, but reasonable guesses run as high as $500 million a year.