An Officer and a Spy

‘I did. It took me nine days.’ He resumes tinkering with his machine.

I take out my notebook and open it to a double page. On one side is the coded text that I copied down from the file in the archive, on the other the solution as written out by Gonse: Captain Dreyfus has been arrested. The Ministry of War has evidence of his dealings with Germany. We have taken all necessary precautions. I offer it to Bazeries. ‘Is this your solution?’

He glances at it. Immediately his jaw tenses with anger. ‘My God, you people don’t give up, do you?’ He pushes back his chair, strides across the office, throws open his door and shouts, ‘Billecocq! Bring me the Panizzardi telegram!’ He turns to me. ‘Once and for all, Colonel, that is not what it says, and wishing it did will not make it otherwise.’

‘Wait,’ I say, holding up my hand to pacify him, ‘there’s obviously some history here that I’m not aware of. Let me be clear: you’re telling me that this is not an accurate transcription of the decoded telegram?’

‘The only reason it took us nine days to arrive at the solution was because your ministry kept refusing to believe the facts!’

A young, nervous-looking man, presumably Billecocq, arrives bearing a folder. Bazeries snatches it off him and flicks it open. ‘Here it is, you see — the original telegram?’ He holds it up for me to see. I recognise the Italian attaché’s handwriting. ‘Panizzardi took it to the telegraph office on the avenue Montaigne at three o’clock in the morning. By ten, thanks to our arrangement with the telegraph service, it was here in our department. By eleven, Colonel Sandherr was standing exactly where you are now demanding we decipher it as a matter of extreme urgency. I told him it was impossible — this particular cipher was one of great complexity, which we’d never before managed to break. He said, “What if I could guarantee you that it contained a particular word?” I told him that would be a different matter. He said that the word was “Dreyfus”.’

‘And how did he know that Panizzardi would mention Dreyfus?’

‘Well, that was very clever, I must concede. Sandherr said that the previous day he had arranged for the name to be leaked to the newspapers as the identity of the man arrested for espionage. He reasoned that whoever was employing Dreyfus would panic and contact their superiors. When Panizzardi was followed to the telegraph office in the middle of the night, naturally Colonel Sandherr was sure his tactic had worked. Unfortunately, when I succeeded in breaking the cipher, the text of the message was not as he wished. You can read it yourself.’

Bazeries shows me the telegram. The solution is written out neatly under the numerals of the encoded text: If Captain Dreyfus has had no dealings with you it would be appropriate to instruct the ambassador to publish an official denial in order to avoid comments by the press.

I read it through twice to make sure I understand the implications. ‘And so what this suggests is that Panizzardi was actually in the dark about Dreyfus — the direct opposite of what Colonel Sandherr believed?’

‘Exactly! Sandherr wouldn’t accept it, though. He insisted we must have got a word wrong somewhere. He took it to the highest levels. He even arranged for one of his agents to feed Panizzardi some fresh information about an unrelated matter, so that he would be obliged to send a second cipher message to Rome incorporating certain technical terms. When we broke that as well, we demonstrated beyond doubt that this was the correct decryption. Nine days this whole procedure took us, from beginning to end. So please, Colonel — don’t let us go over it again.’

I perform the calculation in my head. Nine days from 2 November takes us to 11 November. The court martial began on 19 December. Which means that for over a month before Dreyfus even stood trial, the Statistical Section were aware that the phrase ‘that lowlife D’ could not possibly refer to Dreyfus, because they knew Panizzardi had never even heard of him — unless he was lying to his superiors, and why would he do that?

‘And there is no doubt, is there,’ I ask, ‘that at the end of the whole process you provided the correct version to the Ministry of War?’

‘No doubt at all. I gave it to Billecocq to hand-deliver.’

‘Can you remember who you gave it to?’ I ask Billecocq.

‘Yes, Colonel, I remember it very well, because I gave it to the minister himself. I gave it to General Mercier.’

When I get back to the Statistical Section, I can smell cigarette smoke emanating from my office, and when I open the door, I find General Gonse sitting at my desk. Henry is resting his ample backside against my table.

Gonse says cheerfully, ‘You’ve been out a long time.’