Russian Military Intelligence in the War with Japan, 1904-05

Secret Operations on Land and at Sea

Evgeny Sergeev

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134117635
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Politics & International Relations
• Categoría: Diplomacy & Treaties

Examining Russian military intelligence in the war with Japan of 1904-05, this book, based on newly-accessible documents from the tsarist era military, naval and diplomatic archives, gives an overview of the origins, structure and performance of Russian military intelligence in the Far East at the turn of the twentieth century, investigating developments in strategic and tactical military espionage, as well as combat renaissance. It provides a comprehensive reappraisal of the role of military intelligence in the years immediately preceding the First World War, by comparing the Russian military secret services to those of the other great powers, including Britain, Germany, France and Japan.

1 Russian military intelligence at the start of the twentieth century

An intelligence that is well established in time of peace can alone provide an accurate estimation and correct draft of operations.

Lieutenant Boris Dolivo-Dobrovolskii, Chief of the Foreign Section of the Russian Naval General Staff¹

The structure and personnel of Russian military intelligence

In every period of world history military intelligence (MI) has always been and still is an indispensable assistant of politicians, acting simultaneously as their instrument and their plaything. Despite the fact that it has usually submitted its own interests to political demands and regularities, many leading politicians have very often been swayed by their chiefs of state secret service.

Spying is definitely the second oldest profession of mankind! To pinpoint the actual beginning of espionage is historically almost impossible. To the vast majority of academicians, this statement seems no exaggeration at all. In fact, MI has existed since the primordial caveman peered from behind a boulder to get information of the quantity of clubs his shaggy neighbour could employ to make an attack or rebuff one.² Richard Deacon, the recognized British expert in the history of intelligence, alluded to the maxim by Sir Basil Thomson, the creator of the Special Branch of Scotland Yard, who once remarked that ‘if the Pharaoh Memptah had been given an efficient intelligence service, there would have been no Exodus’.³

Referring to the earliest recorded intelligence report, written on a clay tablet and dated some 2,000 years BC, a commander of a desert patrol near the Euphrates reported to his ‘lord’ of the Benjamite border villagers’ exchanging fire signals, the significance of which could not be determined. The commander recommended that the guards on the city walls of Mari should be incrementally strengthened.⁴ Later, in the fourth century BC, Sun Tzu, the Chinese military expert, reviewed the function of MI in his famous treatise Art of War. He wrote, in particular, about those who knew the enemy as well as they knew themselves, and concluded that they would never suffer defeat. ‘What enables the wise sovereign and good general to strike and conquer, and achieve things beyond the reach of ordinary men’, he continued, ‘is foreknowledge.’⁵ It is not accidental, therefore, that Richard Deacon, the author of serial publications on the history of secret service, called the manuscript by Sun Tzu ‘the earliest known text-book on espionage and the arts of war generally and on the organization of a Secret Service particularly’.⁶

The origins of naval intelligence, at least in Europe, is traced by Richard Deacon in the episode with Alexander the Great, who in the fourth century BC ordered the building of a glass to explore the depths of the sea ‘for obtaining intelligence therein’.⁷

Even though one may present copious examples of spying in ancient times and the Middle Ages, most scholars believe that the idea of the systematically organized espionage service came with the rise of national sovereignty, i.e. in the seventeenth or eighteenth century. Its origin, according to Roger Hilsman, is credited to Frederick the Great and its development to the omnipotent Prussian official Wilhelm Stieber in the second part of the nineteenth century.⁸

The origins of MI in Russia also date back to obscure centuries. The first ever recorded intelligence operation was conducted by the Slavs against Byzantium in AD860.⁹ Scholars have recently identified major strands within the larger skein of narrations on the first Russian spymasters and secret agents in subsequent epochs, while devoting particular attention to the reigns of Peter and Catherine the Great as well as to that of Alexander I and his brother Nicholas I.¹⁰

A series of dramatic reforms under the reign of Alexander II opened quite a new epoch in MI development – a period of nations-at-arms and the introduction of modern technologies.

The period between 1869 and 1880 became a benchmark in the history of the tsarist secret structures. The reforms of the Russian intelligence community promulgated by Count Loris-Melikov, the closest assistant of Alexander II, reshuffled it into four bodies: Department of Police as a prototype of the KGB, secret guarding police (Okhranka) to prevent anti-government actions at the local level, confidential personal guards of the tsar, and, what is of particular significance for our subject, military intelligence within the Main Staff and the Main Naval Staff. At the start of the twentieth century it was conducted by two segments of the Main Staff – the Military Academic Committee (Voenno-Uchenyi Komitet) and the Asian General Element (Aziatskaia Chast’). The scheme of naval intelligence was practically the same; it was administrated through the Naval Military Academic Section of the Main Naval Staff. But what was more important, from that particular time spymasters had embarked on consistently monitoring armed forces of potential foes as well as those of satellite or neutral states.¹¹

To use modern parlance, there emerged a conception of a so-called intelligence cycle with five main steps (see the Introduction) and a number of principles. ¹² The regulations and directives for secret service stipulated that MI should be centrally controlled, objective and timely; its sources should be properly exploited and adequately protected while its aims should be clearly defined. The data collected by the system should always be available for comparison, because the significance of apparently isolated facts may not be appreciated until they are juxtaposed with what is already known or has happened before. Finally, MI administration should have to function under the control of higher command to ensure its usefulness and efficacy.¹³

The subsequent realignment in the central administration of the tsarist army during 1900–3 resulted in the establishment of the First and Second Directorates of the Quartermaster service at the Main Staff. The principal functions of MI were concentrated in the Second Directorate which contained the First Military- Statistical Department. The staff of its Section 7 were charged to analyse the situation in foreign countries, in both Europe and Asia. The Naval Military Academic Section was also transformed into a so-called Naval Strategic Directorate regulating intelligence together with executing other functions. By 1904, the staff of the Russian central intelligence agencies did not exceed 17 staffers for the army and 12 staffers for the navy in total, to say nothing of temporarily attached commissioned and non-commissioned officers. This staff limited in number and finance was responsible for processing data on more than 20 armies and navies abroad!¹⁴

The orders and instructions enacted by the tsar himself regulated major aspects of the intelligence cycle. For example, the instruction of April 1903 by the War Minister for the personnel of Section 7 defined their tasks as ‘collection, study and dissemination of military statistics; exchange of data with both legal and illegal agents (attachés and spies respectively); assignment on secret missions to foreign countries; and scrupulous examination of new ammunitions’. It should be mentioned that this very order also abolished the Asian Department of the Main Staff.¹⁵

The duties charged by the Naval Strategic Directorate looked pretty much the same. The instruction by the Naval Minister demanded from intelligence officers ‘to study means and modes of patrolling cruisers on ocean communications; to analyse statistics for foreign merchant navies, commercial ports and coal stations as well as to know main sea and ocean routes and naval bases worldwide; to dispatch regularly summaries to the Main Naval Staff’.¹⁶

A poor differentiation between analytical and executive levels within higher echelons of MI caused the establishment of two more Sections in the Main Staff. All the daily routine in corresponding with military and naval attachés was carried on by officers who composed special groups at Section 7 of the Main Staff and Strategic Directorate of the Naval Staff. The reshuffle improved but did not eliminate the lack of coordination between Russian land and naval intelligence in time of peace. Later, it discarded their necessary coherence in the Far East too.¹⁷

The situation became even more aggravated with parallelism and duplication in the process of data gathering by a few other central military administrative structures, e.g. the Main Engineer Department, the Main Artillery Department, or the Main Department of Fortresses. Besides, staffers in military districts or battle fleets performed inter alia intelligence functions, particularly in borderlands of the Russian Empire, on the Baltic and Black Seas as well as in the Pacific Ocean. The evident dissipation of resources resulted in low efficiency and poor quality of secret information about adversarial states collected by artillery or engineer officers unprepared for secret service.¹⁸

In a broader sense, one should not also ignore interference of other ministries that guided their own secret structures: the Ministries for Foreign and for Internal Affairs, the Ministries of Finance, of Court, of Commerce and Industry and even the Holy Synod, although their direct duties did not presume persistent and purposeful collection of facts and figures relating to national defence.

Referring to the situation in the Far East before the Russo-Japanese War, i.e. from the capture of Port Arthur by the Russians in 1898 up to the outbreak of war in February 1904, it is necessary to take into account local official groups performing intelligence in addition to their everyday activities. Above all, there existed the Report Section in the Headquarters of the Priamur military district deployed in Khabarovsk on the Amur River. It was designed to play a crucial role in data gathering on Japan, China and Korea before the war. But in practice, this structure failed to supply higher echelons of commanders with adequate data because of staffers’ incompetence and paucity of financing from the War Ministry. Apparently, the Report Section activities boiled down to the assemblage of military statistics together with the compilation of maps and charts, made by younger Cossack officers during their reconnaissance trips across Manchuria and Korea.¹⁹

These topographical surveys served, however, as a base to mapping the region on scales of 1 inch to 1, 2 or 4 versty (approximately 1 inch to 1, 2 or 4km). Interestingly, Japanese military experts highly appreciated them and later disseminated two-verst maps to their active troops in Korea, Manchuria, and, what is even more important, to the forces landing on Sakhalin in July 1905.²⁰

The lease of Port Arthur and the railway concessions on the territory of the Qing Empire, i.e. the Chinese Eastern Railway (CER) and the Southern Manchurian Railways (SMR) entailed the formation of two more headquarters: in Port Arthur to control the Liaodong Peninsula and in Irkutsk to command the Zaamur District of Special Corps of Frontier Guards, the latter responsible for the defence of the CER, albeit formally subordinated to the Ministry of Finance.²¹ Thus, the staff of Zaamur District of Frontier Guards concentrated upon the prevention of sabotage acts in the defence zone of railways committed by so-called chunguses, the Chinese brigands who in 1899–1901 fought the Russians and either Europeans in the course of the Boxer anti-foreign rebellion.²²

The united international expeditionary forces under the command of Lieutenant General Nikolai Linevich (in the fall of 1900 the supreme command was assigned to the German Field Marshal A. Waldersee) suppressed the Boxer mutiny. In the middle of 1900 more than 35,000 expeditionary corps, the core of which consisted of 7,000 Siberian riflemen, took the field against Boxers and regular Chinese forces to raise the blockade of the diplomatic settlement in Peking. On 14 August interventionists captured the capital of the Qing Empire and by the end of the year Manchuria had been completely pacified.²³

By the fall of 1903, St Petersburg announced the establishment of a Viceroy- alty in the Far East and the Committee for this distant outpost of the Russian Empire. The new administrative unit, moulded in St Petersburg as a replica of the Caucasian and Turkistan Viceroyalties,²⁴ was headed by Governor General (or Viceroy) Admiral Evgenii Ivanovich Alekseev, who owing to personal influence on the tsar compelled the resignation of his forerunner, Lieutenant General Dmitrii Subbotich.

In his review of the Russian acquisitions in China, or the so-called ‘Zheltorossiia’ (‘Yellow Russia’ equivalent to ‘White Russia’, or Byelorussia), A. Khvostov, the correspondent of the popular monthly periodical Vestnik Evropy, maintained that

Under the command of General Dmitrii Subbotich, the first Russian Chief of Kwantung Area, staff-officers assembled important nuggets of information to present a true depiction of this region, quite unknown to us before. And it took them only three years to fulfil the task.²⁵

In 1901, after the suppression of the Boxer rebellion, when the territories of three provinces of northern China were occupied by Russian punitive expeditionary troops, Nicholas II sanctioned the institution of provisional Russian Military Commissariats in Heilongjiang, Jilin and Liaonin. The Military Commissars, usually chosen by Viceroy Alekseev himself and approved by the War Minister, Aleksei Nikolaevich Kuropatkin, entered upon duties as plenipotentiary representatives of the Russian military administration and mediators in contacts with local Chinese authorities, governor generals, or jangjunes, and heads of towns, or fudutunes. They were subordinated directly to Viceroy Alekseev and dispatched reports to his staff in Port Arthur. One of them, the General Staff Colonel Mikhail Kvetsinskii, set up a network of spies and scouts recruited from ruined peasants, illegal tradesmen, former deserters from the Chinese army and other local villains, though in some cases he managed to force officials or native intellectuals (teachers, monks) to collect intelligence. In this way, there emerged another branch of HUMINT to expand Russia’s influence upon China (for further details see Chapter 7).²⁶

As to the organization of naval intelligence, it was conducted under the auspices of the staffers subordinated via the Pacific Fleet Commander, Vice Admiral Oskar Stepanovich Stark, to the headquarters of Admiral Alekseev. Russian consuls and trade and financial representatives attached to seaports in Japan, China and Korea – all of them were engaged in monitoring foreign naval vessels, routes they used and cargoes they transported from the continent to the Japanese Islands and vice versa. To achieve this aim, they also used men-of-war stationed in Chefoo, Yinkou and Chemulpo. The innovation of wireless radio transmitting intensified the exchange of coded intelligence between monitors and staffers.²⁷

Light cruisers and destroyers carried out duties of another kind. The marine operations in the course of the Spanish–American War of 1898 revealed that speed and high manoeuvrability were the advantages which should be taken to supply naval bases with fresh nuggets of information. Since that time, light-armed naval vessels had been utilized as auxiliary means of short-range reconnaissance at a distance of approximately 20–30 miles from their coastal bases. In practice, they became a momentous threat to enemy transports in the coastal waters of Port Arthur, Vladivostok or Petropavlovsk.²⁸

The sole talented Russian naval commander at that time, Vice Admiral Stepan Osipovich Makarov, who had thoroughly studied classical treaties by Captains Mahan and Columb, paid an increasing pitch of attention to the development of naval intelligence. In the book Discussion on Problems of Naval Tactic he formulated a conception of the practical application of such technical innovations as wireless transmitting stations and submarines with minimal crew in reconnaissance at sea. Regarding submarines, it should be noted in advance that, despite the minor role they had played in the events of 1904–5, one may commence the record of their history from just that period.²⁹

A key provision for the adequate conduct of MI in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries proved to be the funding of their...

Índice

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Maps
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Selected chronology
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Russian military intelligence at the start of the twentieth century
• 2 Japan’s war capability through Russian eyes
• 3 The Japanese attack against the Pacific Squadron
• 4 Russian military intelligence in the first months of war
• 5 Inside the bastions of Port Arthur
• 6 Russian military intelligence in the Battles of Liaoyang and Shaho
• 7 Realignments in Russian military intelligence before and after the Battle of Mukden
• 8 The debacle in the Strait of Tsushima
• 9 The dilemmas of Portsmouth
• 10 The repercussions of the war: A thorny path of reforms
• Epilogue
• Appendix: The nominal roll of the Russian military intelligence staff in the Manchurian campaign, 1904–5
• Notes
• Selected bibliography