Captain Henry Landau
| Henry Landau | |
|---|---|
| Allegiance |
Great-Britain  |
| Service |
Royal Field Artillery, SIS (MI6) |
| Active |
1914-1916 Royal Field Artillery, 1916-1920 SIS (MI6) |
| Rank | army captain |
| Operation(s) | World War I |
| Award(s) |
Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, Croix de Guerre, Knight of the Order of the Crown of Belgium. |
|
| |
| Born |
7 March 1892 Bethel, Transvaal,South-Africa |
| Died |
1 May 1968 (aged 75–76) Cocoa Beach, Florida, USA |
| Nationality |
South-African  |
Henry Landau OBE was a South African World War I volunteer who served with the British Army's Royal Field Artillery when he was recruited into what is now known as the SIS (MI6). They needed someone who spoke Dutch to run Belgian resistance networks in German occupied Belgium.
Early Career
Landau was born to an Afrikaner mother and English father who fought on the Boer side in the Boer War. Landau studied at Caius College, Cambridge, graduating with first-class honours in Natural Sciences before the Great War broke out.
World War I
In August 1914 he went to France with a volunteer hospital unit, later gaining a commission with the Royal Field Artillery. After sick leave in London and a dinner date with one of the secretaries of the head of MI6, Royal Navy Captain Mansfield Smith-Cumming, the original C, Landau was recruited and send to the MI6 station in Rotterdam. From there all the British spy networks in Belgium, France and Germany itself were handled under command of Richard B. Tinsley, a former shipping agent who ran the Uranium Steamship Company.
Captain Landau become head of military intelligence at the Rotterdam branche. Landau’s main task was to connect with Belgian resistance groups. His biggest success would be the handling of La Dame Blanche, a group of more than a thousand Belgian and French agents who monitored the movement of German troop trains to and from the Western Front. Named after a mythical White Lady whose appearance was supposed to presage the downfall of the German Imperial House of Hohenzollern, it was arguably the most effective intelligence operation of the First World War and, according to Cumming, produced 70 per cent of all Allied intelligence on the German forces worldwide.
After the War
After the war Landau was send to lead the passport control office in Berlin, in theory a very prestigious post within MI6. Not able to deal with bureaucracy and boredom he quit MI6. Soon after, he got entangled in all sorts of shady business affairs. He returned to South-Africa, but later in his life emigrated to the USA. In 1934 he published his memoirs as a WWI spy master. In the book, All's Fair, he revealed the existence of Karl Krüger, a former officer in the German Imperial Navy, who was one of MI6's most important WWI spies. Although Landau did not reveal Krügers name, as Krüger was still active, MI6 declared Landau persona non grata. His book was published in the U.K. in 1938 as Spreading The Spy Net. The Story of a British Spy Director. After All's Fair became a bestseller, Landau wrote two more books: Secrets of the White Lady (1935) and The Enemy Within. The Inside Story of German Sabotage in America (1937). Henry Landau died in 1968 in Florida.
Bibliography
- Jeffery, Keith. MI6. The History of the Secret Intelligence Service 1909-1949. London: Bloomsbury, 2010.
- Landau, Henry. All's Fair. The Story of the British Secret Service Behind the German Lines. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1934.
- Ruis, Edwin. Spynest. British and German Espionage from Neutral Holland 1914-1915. Briscombe: The History Press, 2016.