The World That Never Was by Alex Butterworth Page A

that he had made his name. Amply rewarded for his nefarious efforts, he could boast the unique honour of having served concurrently as a leading figure in the political police of both Prussia and Russia and, even as he masterminded the intelligence campaign against France for Bismarck, he remained a senior security adviser to the tsar. The key to his success, in conventional war as in the fight against subversion, lay in a simple truth: that by controlling the flow of information, he could shape reality to his own design. It was a lesson he had learned long before and whose application he had been refining ever since.
    Though Stieber would not have known it, his path and that of the geographer in the balloon had run strangely parallel. Some years the senior of Elisée Reclus, when Stieber was dispatched to London in 1851 by the Prussian police, he already had several notable successes under his belt as a deep-cover agent, first during the bloody suppression of an uprising by Silesian weavers in 1844, then six years later in Paris, when his intrigues at the heart of the Communist League had destroyed the organisation from within. The former escapade had led the police president to dub him a ‘degenerate subject’, but the latter had won him the admiration of the Prussian minister of the interior, Ferdinand von Westphalen, who promptly handpicked him for the delicate mission in England. Its ostensible purpose was the protection of precious objects loaned to the Great Exhibition of that year; the real aim, though, was to discover evidence for the prosecution of Karl Marx, who had married the minister’s own half-sister and dragged her into shameful and penurious exile.
    Posing as Herr Dr Schmidt, journalist and physician, Stieber had quickly inveigled his way into the Marx family’s home in Soho. His reports back to Berlin were full of blood and thunder as they attempted to frame Marx and his colleagues as conspirators in a planned campaign of assassination that would usher in a general European revolution. However, his claim that ‘the murder of princes is formally taught and discussed’ failed to persuade a British government whose distaste for foreign spies outweighed that for their victims. Worse for Stieber, Marx deftly outflanked his campaign of provocation, writing to the Spectator to denounce the attempt to lure him into a conspiracy. ‘We need not add that these persons found no chance of making dupes of us’, he concluded. Determined to have the last word, Stieber would counter that, on the contrary, Marx had fallen for his medical disguise so completely as to ask his trusted guest to treat his haemorrhoids. Subsequent fabrications by Stieber saw the grudge between the two men deepen into a lifelong vendetta.
    Always sailing too close to the wind, Stieber had eventually been dismissed from the Prussian secret police for abuses of power, but the scurrilous charges levelled at him by the press seemed only to excite suitors for his services. Installed as manager of the Kroll restaurant and Opera House in Berlin’s Tiergarten, a sinecure obtained through the good offices of influential friends, Stieber one night received an invitation from the Russian Embassy that would propel him into the secret realm of realpolitik. That it was a pivotal moment in his career is apparent from his excitedly embellished account of his ensuing journey across Berlin,concealed in a laundry basket, to avoid detection by a mob still thirsty for his blood. Having helped unpack him, the young Arthur von Mohrenheim, a consular attaché, hired him on the spot. After only a short time in St Petersburg, his recruit had transformed his basic intelligence-gathering role into one of effective control over Russia’s entire foreign intelligence service. So impressed was the Prussian ambassador there, Otto von Bismarck, that when appointed president in 1863, he took Stieber back with him to Berlin to serve as director of the very police force